Chapter 192: What the Ashes Told

He was caught at the edge of the storm as it guttered down, and his hood had come off somewhere in it. The face underneath was not young, and fear had pulled it into a shape it would probably never entirely lose.

His eyes moved like a trapped animal's. He fired Reducto in every direction, into walls and floor and open space, roaring while he did it, and then he stopped trying to get out and came at Edward instead, stumbling, with the magic inside him swelling and going unstable. He had decided to take somebody with him.

"Expelliarmus!"

Sirius got there first. The red took the man across the wrist and his wand went end over end into the dark. Edward's lance had already formed. It went through the thigh with a short wet sound and pinned him to the boards where he stood.

The screaming stopped being words. He came down and stayed down, blood coming steadily from the leg, and the same gold-red web crawled out across the skin around the wound. He would not be walking on that leg again, tonight or afterwards. That was the end of it, and the Shrieking Shack looked like the end of something larger. The table was charcoal, the floor and walls were pitted and scorched in a hundred places, and the air was thick with burnt wood and burnt meat and the sour reek of whatever had been on that dagger. One carbonised shape on the boards. One man unconscious and bleeding beside it. Between them they said everything about the last few minutes that needed saying.

Both of them were breathing hard, streaked with sweat and soot and blood that was mostly their own. The bandage on Edward's left arm had gone through and was dripping off his fingertips. Sirius's shoulder was still seeping into his sleeve and his robes were open in four places, and his face was grey with tiredness, but his eyes had not dimmed.

Sirius crossed to the unconscious man and crouched over him. He did not start with questions. He put two fingers against the temple instead, and a thin silver light rose off them and sank. After a while he frowned, straightened, and his voice came out heavy.

"Imperius, and a strong one. His thinking is not his own. Underneath it there is nothing but noise."

Edward watched him and said nothing. Something complicated went across Sirius's face. He took his time before he spoke.

"He is a puppet on a string. We could let him go." His eyes went away from the charred shape on the floor while he said it. "Killing a poor wretch who was never given a choice does not amount to much."

He had come through a war and had seen a great many people turned into implements by other people, and some part of him had never stopped feeling something for the implements. Edward repeated it without any inflection whatsoever. "Let him go?"

Edward's voice stayed perfectly level, and the room seemed to cool by a degree anyway. His wand had not moved off the man on the floor.

"Uncle Sirius." He turned his head and met Sirius's eyes directly, and there was no anger in his own and no heat either, only a clear cold that went all the way down. "You saw his face when he cast the killing curse. Being on a string does not make his wand less lethal, and it does not make the curse land any further from where he pointed it. We happened to be standing here tonight and we happened to be lucky."

He let that sit for a moment.

"And if tomorrow they point him at Harry, or at somebody with no way to stop him at all, does that not count as killing because his hand was not his own? Will anyone he takes down come back because of it?"

Sirius opened his mouth and found his throat dry, and no answer in it.

"Fighting this sometimes means choosing badly on purpose." Edward's voice did not rise. "We are not killing the harmless. We are cutting off an arm that has already been used once and is going to be used again. And he cannot give us anything, because a man under the Imperius does not know what he was sent for."

He looked down at the unconscious face.

"Keeping him tells them exactly what happened here. That the bell is gone and that we have one of theirs breathing. However they get to him, whether they collect him or silence him, the moment they know it they will move everything and burn the rest. Every risk we took tonight goes out with it."

He turned toward the black window.

"The one lead we actually hold is the man who got away, and it is on his leg. That mark is the only signpost anybody has given us."

The shack went quiet. Somewhere out past the treeline the wind was working through the Forbidden Forest, and that was the whole of the sound in it.

Sirius pressed his lips together, and a muscle moved along his jaw. He knew it was right. He had known it while Edward was still speaking, and he disliked knowing it. Under a sky filling up again the way this one was, mercy handed to the other side is generally paid for by your own.

He shut his eyes, took in a long breath of the scorched air, and when he opened them the argument had gone out of them and left something heavier in its place. He stepped back half a pace and turned himself away from the man on the floor. He did not say anything. He did not need to. Edward did not say anything either. He raised his wand and let the gold-red gather at the tip, steady and narrow.

"Incendio."

The fire came down like something poured rather than thrown, and took both of them, the charred shape and the man beside it. He held the edges of it exactly where he wanted them, and not one of the dry boards around the bodies caught. The unconscious man moved once in it and then stopped. Some minutes later the flames went out on their own and left two small heaps of ash a little darker than the dust around them.

The night wind came in through the broken window, turned in the corner of the room, lifted the ash off the boards and carried it out again, and scattered it somewhere over the Forbidden Forest where nobody was ever going to look for it. They walked out of the shack side by side into air that was clean and cold, and it went into the lungs like water after the smoke.

The night was ink through and the stars were thin. Something in the deep forest was calling on a long falling note, and getting no answer. Away across the fields the castle stood black against the sky with its windows still lit in rows, warm and small at that distance, and looking rather like something set out to guide people home. Sirius's voice had gone hoarse, but the rest of him had come back.

"No prisoner. But the one that got through the net is worth more than a prisoner anyway."

"Then we split it." The sharpness had returned to his eyes. "You take the inside of the school. Anybody who has suddenly decided to wear his robes down to the ankle, anybody whose habits changed this week. I will take Hogsmeade and sit on the shops where that sort drinks. Four went out tonight and three did not come back. Whoever sent them is going to move."

"Do we tell Professor Dumbledore now?"

"Not yet." Sirius thought about it properly before answering. "We have nothing anybody could act on. Go to him now and the man behind this hears about it and goes another layer down. We follow the mark, we take the one who ran, we get something that cannot be argued with, and then we go to Dumbledore. That is when the net closes and not before."

Edward nodded slowly. A hunter who cannot wait is not hunting.

They had spent the whole tournament standing in the light while somebody watched them from outside it. As of tonight, that had turned around, and he found he preferred the new arrangement.

"Come on." Sirius put a hand on his shoulder, carefully, on the side that was whole. "Madam Pomfrey first, and then both of us sleep. It starts again when it gets light."