Chapter 223: What the Minister Would Not Hear

The Headmaster's office had a crystal sphere hanging in the air above the walnut desk, and inside it Cornelius Fudge's face was going a colour that his navy blue uniform did nothing for.

The voice came out of the glass with a whine cutting through it. "Nonsense, Dumbledore, complete and irresponsible nonsense. Tom Riddle has been dead for thirteen years and was finished by a fifteen-month-old child, and you propose to tell me he has been put back together in a graveyard because two boys came out of a maze frightened half out of their wits."

Dumbledore's voice was perfectly level, and underneath it he sounded older than he had a week ago. "I assure you as Headmaster of this school that I am telling you what happened, and that both boys were present throughout it. Peter Pettigrew, who has as you are aware been dead for thirteen years himself, prepared the materials and performed the working. He has returned, Cornelius. The body is flawed because he did not get what he needed from Harry, but it is not a flaw you can build a policy on. The Auror Office must be told tonight."

Fudge's voice climbed most of an octave. "Told what, exactly? Am I to stand up in front of the wizarding public and announce that You-Know-Who is walking about, on the word of two schoolboys, and then watch what follows? You have been fixed on this for years and it has finally run away with you."

He was talking himself further in as he went, the way frightened men do.

"And consider your witnesses. The Black boy - the Blacks, Dumbledore, who have produced more dark wizards than any house in Britain. And Potter has been the Boy Who Lived since he could walk, and it would not be the first time a child in that position invented something to stay interesting."

Edward stood at the side of the desk with his hands closed and his nails into his palms, and had not noticed doing either. It was not the insult, which was ordinary enough and which he had read a version of in the Prophet in February. It was watching a man decide in front of him that the truth was inconvenient and could therefore be put down. Voldemort with a new body was a danger; this was worse, because this was the machinery built to answer the danger, and it had gone out like a lamp.

Dumbledore drew breath to say something further and Fudge waved a hand across the connection and was gone. The sphere went white and murky and hung there.

Nobody said anything for a while. The fire moved in the grate.

Dumbledore took the spectacles off and pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose. "He will not believe it, and it is not that he cannot. Cornelius is not a stupid man; he is a frightened one, and a frightened administrator will always prefer a comfortable falsehood he can act upon to a true thing he cannot. They dread panic and they dread disorder, and it never occurs to them that the most dangerous thing in any room is the danger everybody has agreed not to look at."

He put the spectacles back on. "So the Ministry will do nothing, and this castle will have to become something it was never designed to be."

Edward nodded. It was what he had expected walking up the stairs, which had not made watching it happen any easier.

The Slytherin common room was warmer than the office and full when he came down.

They had all waited up: Draco, Theodore, Zabini, Pansy Parkinson, Daphne Greengrass, and Astoria behind her sister with her hands folded.

The inner circle of the Flame Serpent Alliance sat round a fire in a room that still had the tournament banners up, and every face in it had worked out that something was wrong long before he came through the wall.

Draco was on his feet before the wall had finished closing. "Well? Did the Ministry listen, or did Fudge do what Fudge does?"

Edward went to the hearth and turned round so that he could see all of them.

He let the room settle before he gave it to them. "No, and he is not going to. Voldemort has a body. Harry and I were taken out of the maze by a working built into the floor of it and put down in a graveyard where the ritual was already prepared. He needed Harry's blood for it. I got Harry out before he could take it and burned most of the ring while it was running, so what he has now is not what he intended to have. He knows exactly whose fault that is."

Pansy's fists closed. Theodore removed his glasses, while Zabini lost his usual amusement. Edward kept his voice level for the part that mattered to them. "Most of your fathers took his mark once. He will be calling those men back in, and the first thing a man like that does is find out who stayed loyal while he was gone. You are all known to be close to me, and I am now the name he wants most after Potter. That makes your families a category he will want to sort through early."

Draco came a step forward and his voice was not entirely steady, which he plainly hated. "We know. Do you imagine we have not thought about it? We built this with you, knowing exactly whose sons we were. If it is going to be dangerous it is dangerous for all of us, and we are not sitting in this room while you go out and get killed on our behalf."

Zabini had stopped pretending to be amused about anything. "My father wore it and regretted it inside a year, and he has told me so more than once, and he is not a sentimental man. Whatever we are building here is worth more than the thing he signed up to, and I am not walking away because it has turned frightening."

Pansy had her arms folded and her chin up and had evidently decided this some hours ago. "My mother told me that pure-blood honour has nothing whatever to do with obedience. I will talk to my father myself, and if he cannot be moved I will put some distance between us and let him think about it."

Daphne said it as though reporting, which was how she said most things. "I have already opened lines into Ravenclaw, and there are eight or nine of them who agree with us on the substance and would come."

"And we are not children who have to be put somewhere safe." Astoria's voice was quiet and did not waver. "We have all got better this year. We can be useful."

Edward looked at the six of them, raised a hand, and waited for silence.

He kept his voice down and it carried perfectly well anyway. "I know, and I am telling you no, and I want you to hear why, because it is not that I doubt any of you. What we have been building takes years. It takes numbers, and standing, and people in the right places, and it cannot be done by a dozen fourth- and fifth-years walking into a war in the summer of their fifteenth year. Everything we have put together since second year gets spent in a fortnight if we do that, and it buys nothing."

"He has just come back with something to prove, which makes him both at his most dangerous and at his least careful. You are not ready for that, and saying so is not an insult, since I am not ready either and am going anyway because he has made that decision for me. For the rest of you, holding your families' line in public and staying alive is neither cowardice nor betrayal; it is the only thing that leaves us anything to use later."

Theodore had his glasses back on and there was an edge in his voice that was not usually there. "You cannot go at him alone. He has Pettigrew, he has whoever answered that mark, and there is no version of the arithmetic in which you come out of it."

Edward met him and did not look away. "I am not going alone. Harry is in it whether either of us likes it and he is the one thing in the world that man cannot simply step over, Dumbledore is in it, and Sirius and Lupin are staying near the school. Four of us standing where he can see us is what keeps his attention off everybody else, which is worth doing on its own."

He turned to Draco, and his tone changed enough that Draco straightened before he had said anything.

"Which is why the Alliance is yours from tonight, the whole of it: who comes in and who does not, the training, the lines into the other houses, and everything that can be learned about who answered his call and where they are. I am going to be busy being looked at, and somebody has to do the work that matters. I would not hand it to anybody else in this castle."

Draco stood there and, for the first time Edward could remember, had nothing ready to say. When it came, his voice was rougher than he intended.

"I will not make a mess of it. When you need us we will be worth having."

Edward looked round the room and gave them the shape of it. "We are not going to beat him this year and we are not going to try. We grow quietly, we get better, we learn everything about him that can be learned, and we are standing ready on the day something finally goes wrong for him. He will give us one, because men like that always do: they cannot imagine being opposed by anybody they have not already counted."

The room settled into resolve. "Then we do it quietly," Zabini said.

Draco was already moving, and the drawl had gone out of him entirely. "Pansy, take the girls in our house and in Hufflepuff, and be certain of everyone you put forward. Daphne, Astoria, Ravenclaw is yours, since they will listen to you and would not listen to me. Theodore, you have theory, defensive work, and building something we can actually train people on."

"Right," said Theodore, and the rest of them said something close enough to it.

The fire went on burning and the silver-green light lay across six faces that had stopped looking like children some time in the last twenty minutes. Nobody was shouting and nobody made any kind of declaration.

Edward stood with his back to the hearth and watched them start, and thought that whatever was coming for the wizarding world had begun tonight in a room under the lake, quietly, with a boy dividing up tasks.