Chapter 224: The Price on His Head

The stone of the castle had gone grey in the failing light, and the ivy along the lower walls had lost the last of its green and hung there curled and scorched, shivering whenever the wind came round the corner of the tower.

The end of the fourth year arrived the way it always did, in trunk wheels rattling over flagstones and owls going up in twos and threes and four hundred people shouting goodbye at once. It did not sound the way it usually sounded. Underneath all of it sat the thing nobody on that platform was saying aloud, and it made the whole afternoon feel like something being packed away rather than something finishing.

Edward stood beside the Hogwarts Express with the hem of his robes snapping, and Draco came through the crowd toward him with none of the usual arrangement in his face.

The drawl had gone thin on him. "You are certain about this? You will not even come as far as King's Cross? We could at least be four in a compartment as far as London."

Edward shook his head and took an envelope out of his robes. It was sealed with black wax and carried no name, only the Flame Serpent Alliance mark pressed into it, and along the edge of the seal ran a faint sheen where he had put a charm that would ruin the contents for anybody whose hand was not Lucius Malfoy's.

He put it into Draco's hand and held on a second longer than he needed to. "Give it to your father yourself, into his study and into his hand. Not left on a table, and not carried there by an elf."

Draco tested the thickness through the paper and did not ask what was in it, which was one of the more useful things about him.

"It goes in the bottom drawer of his desk and nowhere else." He leaned in and dropped his voice. "And the Alliance is running. Theodore's training notes went out to the inner circle on Thursday. The Ravenclaw line is open and Hufflepuff is nearly there, and nobody has asked a single awkward question."

Edward's eyes went past him to where Harry stood in a knot of red hair, laughing at something one of the twins had said. "I know, and that is why it is yours. Look after yourself this summer. If the Death Eaters move, or if anything comes into your house that should not be in it, you use the mirror the same hour. Not the next morning."

Draco nodded and went up the steps. At the window Pansy and Theodore and Zabini put their heads out and waved, and none of them looked as though they were going on holiday.

Edward stayed where he was while the whistle went and the steam came down along the platform and the train pulled out, and he did not turn away until it had gone round the curve at the far end of the line.

King's Cross on the other side of the barrier was full of Muggles pushing luggage, sixty feet and one wall away from all of it and entirely untroubled by any of it.

Kreacher was waiting in the corner by the arch.

He was in the old robe that had been washed to no colour whatever and patched three times at the hem, and his face had drawn in on itself. What was different was the silence. There was no muttering about the traitor son and no running commentary on the failings of everybody in the station. He bowed, and his voice came out like something being dragged.

He bowed lower than he needed to. "Young master. It is time to go home."

He did not wait for an answer. The dry hand came round Edward's wrist and closed hard enough to hurt, the station bent sideways, and they came down together on cold stone.

The courtyard of Grimmauld Place had gone dark early. Thorn had grown up along the whole boundary in a thicket eight feet through, tangled and black, with the spines catching what light there was. The stone was furred with moss. Behind the windows there was nothing, not a candle anywhere, so that the front of the house looked less like a building and more like something crouched.

It was not the house he remembered. That house had been shabby and unwelcoming and alive. This one had been made ready.

"This way, young master." Kreacher went for the oak door without pausing, and he moved quickly, and he kept looking at the gate.

The hinges came open with a noise like a hurt animal. Inside, half a dozen wall-lamps were burning low and the hall was mostly shadow, and Sirius was standing in the middle of the drawing room in a black leather coat with nothing whatever left of his usual manner. Something went across his face when he saw who it was, and something heavier came down over it immediately afterwards.

"Good. You are inside."

He did not let Edward speak. His wand was already up.

"Protego."

Silver went across the whole room and hung there. Then he turned on his heel and put three layers of barrier over the walls and the door and every window, one inside the next; then a concealment that took the outline of the house and let it slide back into the dark until it was difficult to look at directly; then a ward across the courtyard that shut down anything arriving or leaving by Apparition; and last a working that folded the magic of the whole building inward until there was nothing left on the outside for an instrument to find.

The air in the room went thick with it. Edward stood in the middle of five layers of somebody else's fear and felt every one of them settle.

Edward waited until the last of it had settled before he asked. "How bad is it?"

Sirius put the wand away and got both hands on his shoulders. When he spoke it came up out of his chest rather than his mouth.

His jaw worked before he got to the end of it. "Worse than we sat here guessing last week. Tom has called in every man who answered that mark and a good many who did not, and he has put a price on you." "Alive, and the payment is a pure-blood title and as much dragonhide as a family can carry - and there is no dragonhide to be had in Britain at any price, which is exactly why he chose it. Dead, and brought back entire, ten crates of high-grade potion ingredients. Either of those would turn the head of half the people I grew up with."

"He has said it in front of witnesses. That he will do the work on you himself, and that he intends to take apart everything the House of Black still owns when he is finished, this house included."

Edward found he was looking at his own hands.

The arithmetic assembled itself while he stood there and none of it came out well. Voldemort had a body that did not work properly and he had, against that, thirty years of men embedded in every part of the wizarding world who knew where the levers were. On the other side there was Dumbledore, who was believed by nobody in authority; an Order that did not yet exist; and a Ministry that had decided the whole thing was a story told by two frightened boys.

"You do not leave this house this summer," Sirius said flatly. "Not once and not for an hour. Dumbledore and I have talked it through twice and we are restarting the Order of the Phoenix, and this house is where it will meet. He came here himself and put the old protections back into the stone, the deep ones, and everything I laid tonight sits on top of that. If they find the street they will still not find the door, and if they find the door they will not get through it."

Edward turned the name over, having heard it perhaps four times in his life and always from adults who stopped talking the moment they noticed him listening. "The Order of the Phoenix."

"To go at Tom you need everybody, and nobody has had everybody since the last war." Something came back into Sirius's face for the first time that evening. "Dumbledore has been writing letters for a fortnight. People who fought the first one will come. And if the protection on Harry's aunt's house starts to thin, he comes here as well, and then the two of you are behind the same walls and I can sleep."

Edward said that he understood, and he did.

He also understood, standing in a dark room inside five layers of ward with a price on his head, that being kept safe was going to be the whole of his summer, and that he had spent four years learning to be the person who did not need it.