Chapter 189: The Old Oak

The night went deeper, and out beyond the greenhouses the owls in the Forbidden Forest had started up, which did nothing to make the grounds feel less like somewhere one should not be.

Edward went down through the castle by a route that kept him well clear of Filch and Madam Norris, and left by a gap in the bushes along the west wall that almost nobody used. The path beyond it ran out to the near edge of the forest, in the belt of thin trees before the old growth began.

He had chosen it deliberately. It was close enough to the castle that any magic he spent there would be felt by whatever was watching, and shallow enough that he would not be swallowed by the deep forest with no way back to open ground.

The smell reached him before the trees did, damp green and turned soil and a season of leaves rotting down underneath. Moonlight came through the canopy in broken pieces and lay across the ground in patches, and every patch had a black one beside it.

Edward slowed his pace and let a thin thread of unsteady magic escape him, the way a tired thing gives itself away without meaning to. It was an invitation, and it was meant to look like an accident.

He walked on along the path with the leaves going over under his boots, and the sound of them was very loud in a wood that had otherwise stopped making any noise.

After perhaps a quarter of an hour he stopped beneath an old oak. The trunk was broad and the crown heavy, and the shade underneath would have hidden several men comfortably. It was a good place to stand and see from, and an easy place to be surrounded in, and he had picked it for the second reason as much as the first.

Three obscure presences had already fixed on him. He could feel them the way one feels a draught, cold and narrow and entirely without hesitation, coming from three points that did not move.

Edward looked around himself without hurrying, and the corner of his mouth went up.

"Who is there?"

The shadows answered by coming apart. Four figures in black hooded cloaks came out of the dark almost together, hoods drawn so low that there was nothing to see of any face but a pale line of jaw, and they spread into a fan around him with their wands already up. Nobody said anything. They simply closed off every direction he might have run in.

Four. His pupils contracted. He had expected three, and the fourth changed the arithmetic of the whole night.

He did not reach for the pendant. His fingers found his wand instead, and the gold-red came up around him in a rush, because he had not walked out here to learn nothing.

"Expelliarmus!"

"Reducto!"

"Stupefy!"

The three spells came almost as one sound, red and white and blue braiding into a net that arrived with a rising whistle. Edward pushed off and went into flame, and the flame went through the gaps between the beams the way an arrow goes off a string, and his wand came round as he moved.

"Incendio!"

Fire climbed into a wall on his left and took the weight of what was coming from that side. He turned inside it, drew the fire down into a single column, and drove it out ahead of him.

The figure in front was thrown back a pace and the ring around him opened. It did not stay open. The one behind him filled the gap without any signal being given.

"Incarcerous!"

Silver chains came at him with runes crawling along the links, and in the same breath the shadow on his right raised a wand and said one word, and red light reached for his back.

"Crucio!"

Edward's flame body drew in tight and went along the ground as a running line of fire. The chains passed through the space where his shoulders had been. The red light struck the earth and left a crater in it, scorched black and smoking at the lip.

He came up out of the roll already turning, and the whip of gold-red went out from his wand and closed around a wrist. The scream came a half second after the smell did, and a wand went spinning away into the leaves.

The other three were on him again before he had recovered the ground, and the spells came down like weather.

Edward noticed something while he moved. They were holding back. They were this close to the castle and they were not reaching for the heavy work, which told him they cared about being noticed, which told him they meant to be here again.

He picked the weakest of them out while he dodged, the one who had not spoken and whose feet kept arriving a beat late.

The moment came when they shifted the ring. Edward let the fire around him surge, broke straight out through the seam in the spellwork, and brought his wand to bear on the figure at the centre of the four.

"Soul Ash!"

Gold-red fire went out with something pitch-black threaded through the middle of it, and the beam went in at the chest and came out the other side. The curse cut the soul loose from the body, and the flame took the soul as it came free and burned it down to nothing. The figure stood upright for half a second afterwards, as if nobody had told it yet. Then it went straight down, and a thin wisp of sparks came up out of the collar and was gone.

The remaining three did not stop to look at it. What came next came out of pure rage.

"Crucio!"

"Avada Kedavra!"

Green and crimson went up together and wrapped around him, and while they did the third of them pulled a small bronze bell out of the cloak and rang it once.

The sound was clean and short and it went straight through him. The magic in his body stopped moving. The fire went out of his skin and the shape he had been holding fell away, and he was standing there as a boy in the leaves with a wand in his hand.

The killing curse went past his shoulder close enough to pull at the cloth, and the trunk behind him withered and turned black in the space of a breath. The Cruciatus took him square across the left arm, and the pain arrived like steel needles driven the length of the bone. He heard the sound he made and did not recognise it.

Edward got his right hand inside his collar and closed it on the pendant and poured everything he could still reach into it.

"Stop him!"

A shadow threw the rune-cut chains low, at his ankles.

The silver went off first. It came up around him in a blaze that shoved the chains sideways and put the runes out where they lay, and Edward's outline began to come apart inside the light. He looked at the three of them for a moment before it took him.

"Until next time."

They reached the spot a second after he had gone, and found a body, a smell of scorched wood, and the last of a fire magic that was already thinning out of the clearing. One of them turned and drove a boot into the oak. Another crouched and put a hand flat to the ground where the silver had been.

The answer came flat, without any particular feeling in it. "The pull was weak, so he has not gone far. Clear this and follow."

Inside the Shrieking Shack the room split silver, and Edward came out of it badly and went down onto the boards, with the blood from his left arm already through the sleeve of his robes.

Sirius reached him before he had stopped moving, potions out of the pouch and stopper off the first one.

He had the stopper off the first bottle before he was fully down beside him. "How bad, and where."

Edward stayed where he was on one knee, and though his face had gone the colour of the floor, his eyes had not lost anything at all. "It is not much. Four of them, not three. One is down, Soul Ash. Hooded the whole time, and not one of them spoke above an incantation. They had a bell that shut my magic off, and they were willing to use Unforgivables inside sight of the school. They worked together like a hand closing."

Sirius got him up onto a crate and turned the burned arm toward the light to look at it properly.

"A bell for the magic and Avada Kedavra for the rest," he said. "They have stopped pretending this is anything else."

"They were there for me," Edward said. He was looking at the wound rather than at Sirius. "There is somebody standing behind them giving the orders. And whoever it is has taken the trouble to learn how I fight."

The moon came through the broken window and laid a long pale panel across the two of them, and neither said anything for a while, because the thing that was coming had already started and both of them knew it.