Chapter 219: The Graveyard

Cold air with wet earth in it, and something else underneath that was sweet and thin and metallic.

Edward hit the ground and rolled through it, and came up on one knee with his wand already out and the gold-red running along the gloves.

Headstones. Rows of them, tilted, most of them older than the castle, throwing long shadows under a moon with nothing kind about it. In the open ground at the middle stood a stone cauldron the height of a man with steam coming off it, and beneath the cauldron burned a fire that was blue at the heart and black at the edges. Cut into the earth all round it was a ring of runes still glowing dark green, the same as the ones over the maze but wound tighter and deeper.

The whole of it arrived in his mind at once and took perhaps a second. The maze was never a task. The runes were never a trap. They were a funnel and then a doorway, and the doorway had been built to open onto this, and somebody had gone to a year's trouble to be certain that he and Harry came through it together.

"Potter." A voice came out of the dark by the cauldron, high and wheedling and pleased with itself. "And the Black brat with him."

Peter Pettigrew stood hunched in a robe several sizes too large, and cradled against his chest, wrapped in black cloth, was a thing about the size of a young child.

It was not a child. The skin on it was the colour of something kept in a jar and thin enough to show the dark tracery of what ran beneath. It had no proper limbs to speak of. And its eyes were open, and they were red, and slit like a snake's, and what was in them had been kept burning for thirteen years without anything to feed it.

Harry had stopped where he stood. He had gone the colour of the marble around him and the wand in his hand was shaking, and his mouth was open and nothing was coming out of it.

"Master, look." Peter's smile arrived without improving his face. "They have walked into it themselves. Potter's blood for the ritual, and the Black boy as well - that strange fire of his will feed the working better than anything we had prepared."

The red eyes went to Harry first, and the hatred in them was almost a physical pressure. Then they moved, unhurried, and settled on Edward, and went over him the way a man goes over a horse he is thinking of buying.

"Black." The voice was low and it scraped. "The whelp of the traitor Regulus. Tonight we finish that account, and you will see what your father's choice was worth."

Edward did not let him get to the end of it.

"Fire Lance."

The line came off his wand thin and white-hearted and went for Peter's face, because the ritual was the only thing that mattered here and Peter was the only pair of hands available to perform it.

Peter threw himself sideways. The lance took him along the forearm that held the bundle and the sleeve went to carbon, and what showed underneath was not healthy. He shrieked, and the thing in his arms let out a noise like a hinge tearing.

"Potter! I want his blood, take Potter!"

Peter cast without any order to it after that, red and green together, Cruciatus and the Killing Curse thrown in a spray that had nothing but volume behind it. Edward went between the headstones and let the stone take what it could, throwing fire up to block and out to distract and never twice from the same place.

He was watching Harry the whole time, and Harry had not moved.

The whole of this was built on Harry's blood. Every hour of preparation, the year of work, the four boys held under a curse since Christmas - all of it came down to one vial that had to be filled from one person. Take that away and whatever came out of that cauldron would come out wrong, and would stay wrong.

So he let his shoulders drop and let his next step arrive short, and made the fire on his left hand gutter as though there were nothing left behind it.

Peter took it. He came out from the cauldron and put everything he had into one full Killing Curse at Edward's chest.

Edward turned inside it. The gold-red went off him in a sheet, not as a weapon but as a flare, and for a second and a half nobody at that cauldron could see anything. His left hand was already inside his robes and out again with the silver pendant Sirius had made in the Slytherin common room in February.

He threw it.

"Harry. Take it."

The shout went across the graveyard over the noise of stone breaking. "It goes to the Shack. Get to Sirius, get to Dumbledore, tell them everything. I can go up as a Phoenix and there is not one thing here that can follow me into the air."

Harry caught it against his chest and stood there with his knuckles white round it, and his face was terrible. "I am not leaving you here."

"You are not being asked." Edward drove Peter back off the line with a wall of fire and let the shape of a Phoenix come up burning around his own body, because it was true and because Harry needed to see that it was true. "You are the only one who can bring anybody. Every second you stand there is a second he gets closer to what he wants. Go."

Peter saw it and understood it and lunged his wand round. "Incarcerous!"

The chains went for Harry's ankles and Edward's flame blades met them halfway and cut them apart, and the wall of fire went up again between them.

Harry closed his hand on the pendant.

The silver came up around him, and the last of the graveyard he saw was Edward standing alone between the cauldron and the fire with Peter on one side of him and the thing in the black cloth screaming on the other, and the gold-red burning in the middle of all that wet stone like the only lit thing for miles.

Then the Portkey took him and he was gone.

The noise that came out of the bundle in Peter's arms did not sound like it had been made by a throat.

"NO. My blood - he has taken my blood out of my hands -"

Peter came through the fire wall with his robes smouldering and his face wild, and there was nothing left in him but the knowledge of what happened to servants who failed.

"You let him go. You let him go, and the Master will not - "

He stopped talking and simply cast, everything he had, one spell on top of another with no thought behind any of it.

Edward went back through the headstones and did not answer a single one of them. He was counting. He had two things left to do here and one of them was to get out alive, and the other one he had already decided on the moment he saw the ring cut into the ground.