Chapter 220: An Imperfect Resurrection

The ring cut into the ground was the whole apparatus, and everything else in that graveyard was a cauldron, a rat and a thing in a blanket, none of which could do anything without the pattern beneath them.

Edward went low behind a headstone, put his wand to the earth, and let the fire out along the ground rather than across it.

It ran the way water runs, finding the grooves because the grooves were the easiest path, and it went round the ring following the lines that had been cut there. Where it passed, the dark green went out of the rune and the char came up, and the pattern stopped being a pattern and became scorched dirt.

Peter came round the stone shouting for his master, and Edward put three flame arrows across his path without looking up, and Peter went back the way he had come.

The scream from the bundle was pure fury. Without Potter's blood the old protection could not be broken, and whatever came out of that cauldron tonight would carry the flaw in it for as long as it lasted; and now the boy who had made that happen was burning up the ring as well, unhurried, from behind a gravestone, as though he were weeding.

"PETER. Finish it. Now, whatever is left of it, now."

Peter dragged a cloth bag out of his robes with his hands shaking so badly he dropped it twice. A yellowed bone came out of it, and a silver knife, and three small stoppered vials.

Edward stood up out of cover and pointed his wand at the cauldron instead of at the man.

"Incendio."

The column of gold-red went across the open ground and struck the stone, and the liquid inside came up in a rolling boil that slopped over the rim and hissed into the earth.

Peter shrieked and threw himself over the bag to shield it and slashed his wand at the flame. "Aguamenti!"

The water reached the fire and stopped being water perhaps a foot short of it, and the steam came back into his own face.

Edward drew the shield in. Instead of holding it wide he brought the whole of it down into a dome barely larger than himself, and the fire in the surface of it stopped flickering and began to move like something molten, and everything above it bent.

Peter's next four spells struck it and were simply not there afterwards.

"Black."

The voice came from the blanket, and it had gone very quiet, which was worse.

"I shall remember this. Not Potter. You. Whatever is done to him, what is done to you will take considerably longer."

Edward said nothing, because he had nothing to say and because saying it would have cost breath he did not have. Behind the dome he was soaked through and his hands had begun to shake, and the reserve he had been drawing on since the maze was very nearly at the bottom of itself.

He watched Peter work and waited for the one moment he needed.

The bone went into the cauldron and the liquid turned a blue so bright it hurt. Peter took the silver knife in his right hand, held his left out over the rim, and took the whole of the hand off at the wrist, and the sound he made went across the whole graveyard. It went in, and the blue turned red and began to seethe.

Then he raised the last vial, and the blood in it was dark and old.

Now.

Edward let the dome go. The fire did not spread outward; it came inward instead, all of it at once, folding into him until the light of it came out through his skin, and for a moment there was something in that graveyard putting out more light than the moon.

Peter froze with his arm still up. The red eyes in the blanket narrowed against it.

The light drew in, and turned, and when it opened again there was a Phoenix standing on the wet grass with its tail trailing streamers of gold and red and its wings half spread.

It put its head back and cried once, and the sound went out over the headstones, and it was not a bird's noise. It was old and it was clean and everything dark in that place flinched from it.

Then the wings came down and it went up.

"Take him! TAKE HIM!"

Peter's chains went out and did not come near. The Phoenix rolled once above the yew trees, went through the low cloud, and was a diminishing line of gold on the horizon, and then it was nothing at all.

The graveyard was left with the sound of the cauldron and a man breathing hard.

After some seconds the voice from the blanket said, "Continue."

Peter emptied the vial into the cauldron with both hands. The liquid went green, thick and slow and wrong, and the steam came off it and gathered and began to take a shape.

It did not go smoothly. Bone and flesh and magic came together as the working demanded, but the working had been written for something it had not been given, and twice the shape came apart and had to close again.

Then the steam thinned and went, and a man was standing beside the cauldron.

He was tall and very thin and white, his face somewhere between a man's and a snake's, the nose flattened to slits and the eyes red from lid to lid, and the skin had the smoothness of something newly shed. Under it, where the light caught, dark lines moved that had no business moving, and when he lifted a hand to look at it the fingers arrived at the top of the movement a half-beat after the arm.

"Power." His voice came out of the new throat like metal drawn over metal. "It has come back to me." The hand closed slowly into a fist and he watched it do so. "Not the whole of it. That woman is still in the way of me, after fourteen years, because tonight I was given everything except the one thing I asked for."

He turned his head and looked at the horizon where the gold had gone.

"Black."

The hatred in it was not the same as the hatred he kept for Potter. That one was old and had worn a groove. This was new, and it had been made in the last twenty minutes, and it was the sharper of the two.

"He put Potter out of my hands. He burned my ring while I watched him do it. And he did the whole of it with that -" the lipless mouth moved "- that ugly, sentimental fire."

Peter went down on both knees in the mud. "Master, I can go after him, I can - "

"Can you catch a Phoenix, Wormtail?" Voldemort did not trouble to look down. Then, more slowly, and with something in it that was worse than the anger: "Although. A fire that does that. In a boy of fifteen, in the shape of that particular bird. I find I want to know how."

He held out his hand for Peter's wand and drew a shape with it, and the shape was the Mark and was not quite the Mark: there was a thread wound through the middle that curled like flame.

"Call them."

Peter fired it into the sky and the skull and its serpent opened green over the graveyard and lit every stone in it.

They came within minutes. The cracks of Apparition went round the edge of the yews one after another, and black robes and white masks came out of the dark and went down on their knees in a widening circle, and the noise they made was half devotion and half terror.

Voldemort let none of them finish.

"There is a boy at Hogwarts named Black." The graveyard went entirely silent. "Tonight he took Potter out of my hands with a fire I have not seen before, and he did it deliberately, and he did it well."

He walked along the front of the kneeling line without hurrying.

"I want him. Alive, and whole enough to answer questions. I intend to learn where that fire comes from, and when I have learned it I intend to spend a great deal of time on him."

He stopped.

"Until further notice you will treat Black as you treat Potter. In one or two respects you will treat him as rather more than Potter, because Potter has never yet cost me anything I could not replace."

He turned away from them and looked north, and the wind took the new robes out behind him.

"The board has changed, Dumbledore," he said, to nobody. "You have found yourself another piece. I shall make it into a knife and I shall put it somewhere you feel it."