Chapter 195: The Raven Returns to the Nest

It was late by the time he came down to the dungeons, and the common room had thinned to a handful of fifth-years still arguing quietly over an essay. They dropped their voices further when they saw who had come in. Since the first task, the heir of the House of Black had become something the younger years preferred to discuss when he was not in the room.

Edward went through them without stopping and shut his dormitory door behind him, and the cold of the place came up to meet him the way it always did.

He took the two-way mirror out of the false bottom of his trunk. It sat in his palm easily, and the thorned crest of the House of Black was cut around the edge of it. Sirius had pressed it on him before he went, on the understanding that neither of them would use it for anything that could wait until morning.

He tapped the glass three times and said the phrase they had agreed on.

"The raven returns to the nest."

A silver-grey light came up out of the surface, and when it cleared Sirius was looking back at him. He had the appearance of a man who had been sleeping in his clothes for some days, and there was grey under his eyes and his hair had given up entirely, but the eyes themselves had lost nothing.

He did not waste any part of the connection on greeting. "Tell me you have something."

Edward kept his voice down out of habit, though there was nobody within two doors of him. "I have him. The man with the burn on his leg is Karkaroff."

The frown arrived before the name had finished, and Sirius's knuckles went white where they gripped the frame of the glass.

He said it the way a man says a word he has been keeping by him for years. "Karkaroff. That grovelling little coward. The Ministry had him for a Death Eater and he bought his way back out by handing over a dozen of his own. I always knew what he was. I did not think he had the spine to plan anything."

Edward laid it out plainly, watching the face in the glass while he did. "There was a fight by the lake with the Durmstrang champions, and he tried to put a jinx into me from a yard away without saying a word. I turned it back with a shield and he went into the water. When he came out the robes were soaked through and I could see the whole line of his right calf. Gold-red at the edges, three inches of it. There is no version of that scar that came from anywhere but my fire."

Sirius said nothing for several seconds, and something went across his face that had very little to do with surprise.

"I have been sitting in the Hog's Head most of this week," he said at last. "No Karkaroff. Two or three faces I did not care for, and nothing I could put a name to yet. But yesterday I took an afternoon and went down to Knockturn Alley, and I walked into Borgin and Burkes and asked the old man directly."

There was no satisfaction anywhere in the way he told it. "He wanted to be clever about it, and he stopped wanting to be clever when I put my wand under his chin. And what came out was not what I went in expecting. He has never had a Stilling Bell in that shop. He has never handled one, never brokered one, and there has never been one in the family collection. He said there are almost none left anywhere, and I believed him, because he was too frightened to be inventing anything that specific."

Something went down through Edward and settled somewhere below the ribs. "Then the bell was never theirs. So where did a thing that rare come from?"

Sirius leaned closer until the glass had nothing in it but his face. "That is the question worth having. Think about the one we took alive, under an Imperius strong enough to hollow him out, and then set it beside this. Karkaroff did not source that bell and he is nowhere near clever enough to have built that ambush, which means he was handed both. He is the hand, and somebody else is the arm."

His expression closed further.

He let that stand a moment before he went on. "And there is still no sign of Pettigrew, and no sign of Barty Crouch. Peter I can account for, more or less, because Peter has spent his whole life finding somewhere small to be. Barty is another matter. Barty was the most devoted of the lot of them and he has been out of Azkaban for months now, and men like that do not go to ground and stay there. They go to ground and they build."

Edward had been arriving at the same place from the other direction all week. "That fits. Karkaroff frightens easily. Whoever put four wands and a piece of lost alchemy in a wood outside this school did not."

Sirius's tone changed then, and it stopped being a conversation between equals. "Here is what you do. You go to Dumbledore first thing and you tell him all of it, and in the meantime you do not go near Karkaroff and you do not let him catch you looking. We cannot prove a thing yet. On parchment he is a headmaster, he sits with the International Confederation, and he is judging this tournament. Move on him without evidence and the only thing that happens is that the man behind him goes another layer down."

He was already working out the division of it as he spoke. "Dumbledore has done this before and he will know what it is worth. You stay inside the castle and you watch who Karkaroff talks to, and where he goes when he thinks the hour is late enough. I will keep to the outside. Peter and Barty first, then Knockturn Alley and the village, and if there is a third man buying old alchemy anywhere in the country I will find who sold it to him."

Edward held the mirror a moment longer than he needed to. "Understood. Be careful out there."

Sirius produced something that was almost a grin, and none of it got anywhere near his eyes. "I came out of Azkaban. Hogsmeade in February is not going to finish me. Call me the moment anything moves."

The silver went out of the glass by degrees until it was an ordinary mirror again, with nothing in it but a boy holding it up in a cold room.

Edward stood where he was for a long while afterwards. Karkaroff was the hand and not the arm, the bell had come from somewhere nobody could name, and while Pettigrew sat under a floorboard somewhere Barty Crouch was out building something. All of it was drawing in around a castle full of children whose largest current worry was an examination.

He did not go to bed. He sat at the desk instead with the mirror face down beside him and looked out at the grounds, where the lake lay flat and black under a thin moon, and turned the same three questions over until they had worn smooth.

Who was standing behind Karkaroff. What that person actually wanted. And whether the answer to the second question was the school, or the tournament, or him.