Chapter 225: The First Meeting

The house became a training floor, because there was nothing else to do with it and because Sirius could not sit still.

He taught everything he had. Duelling as it is actually done rather than as it is taught in a classroom, which is to say untidily and at close range. Defence against the sort of magic nobody demonstrates at school. Where to stand in a room with two doors. How to fall.

Edward went at it the way a man goes at something when he has been told he is a liability.

Apparition came first and came badly: a fortnight of splinched fingertips and arriving four feet from where he had aimed, and one memorable afternoon of being sick on the stairs.

By the third week he could put himself across a room accurately, and then twice in succession, and then out of the path of something moving. The Shield Charm went from a pane of glass to something that took two Blasting Curses from Sirius without breaking, and Side-Along, Finite Incantatem, the thorn-cage and the Body-Bind were all drilled until his arm ached.

What changed was not the power. He had never been short of power. What changed was that he stopped being a boy who solved every problem by setting fire to it, and became somebody who could also block, and move, and stop an opponent without burning him.

It did not make him feel better. Whatever was being assembled out there was being assembled faster than this.

Half a month after he arrived, the Order of the Phoenix met in the drawing room of Grimmauld Place for the first time in thirteen years.

Somebody had turned the lamps up. Dumbledore had the chair at the head of the table. Remus Lupin sat to his left in a grey jumper gone through at one elbow, greyer in the face than he had been at the tournament. Kingsley Shacklebolt was in a black suit that fitted him properly and had not stopped watching the door since he came through it. Moody stood rather than sat, and the pale blue eye went round and round taking in the ceiling, the corners, and twice the back of Snape's head.

Tonks had put herself beside Lupin with her hair a pink that hurt in that light, and was working a fold of her sleeve between two fingers without knowing she was doing it. Arthur Weasley sat grave with his thumb moving along the handle of his wand. Molly beside him had her hands locked together hard enough to show the bone. Professor McGonagall had come down from the school and sat very upright.

And Snape stood in the far corner where the lamplight did not reach, and said nothing whatever, and looked as though he had been brought there under protest by somebody stronger than himself.

Edward stood at Sirius's shoulder and kept quiet.

"Thank you for coming, all of you, at short notice and at some risk." Dumbledore did not raise his voice. "There are two matters. The first is what we intend to do about Tom Riddle. The second is the safety of Harry Potter and Edward Black, who are at present the two people he most wants, and whose safety is therefore not a private matter but a strategic one."

Moody got in first, as he was always going to. "Then we go at him. He came back three weeks ago in a body that does not fit him. His magic is unsteady, half his people have not reported in yet, and he has no ground he can call his own. That is the whole of the window we are ever going to get. Find where he is sleeping and put everything we have through the door."

Molly Weasley's voice went up and she did not care who heard it. "No. We do not know where he is. We do not know how many of them there are, or who they are, or what he can do in that state, and you propose to walk into it. Those two boys are what he wants, Alastor, and the answer to that is to put them somewhere he cannot reach and keep them there. Not to gamble everybody in this room on a guess."

Lupin said it gently, which did not make it any less of a correction. "Molly is right about the order of things. We defend first. What Tom needs is to remove Harry and Edward, and a great deal of what he intends to do afterwards depends on having done it. Keep them alive and his timetable does not survive contact with the year."

Kingsley leaned forward with both forearms on the table. "Intelligence is the difficulty, and a worse one than any of you are allowing for. The Ministry will not admit he is back. Fudge is telling anybody who will listen that Dumbledore has lost his grip, so we get no cooperation, no records, and active obstruction from the Auror Office if we are noticed. And the men we want to find are not hiding in caves. They are sitting on committees and running businesses and attending the same dinners as the Minister. My view is that we grow. More people, more eyes, more places we can safely go."

Snape spoke from the corner, and the single word came out at a temperature of its own. "Grow. With whom, precisely. The Ministry has already decided that this man is a lunatic frightening children. The general public goes white at the mention of the name and has done for twenty years. You are proposing to recruit for an organisation the Ministry will shortly declare illegal, in order to fight an enemy the Ministry says does not exist. I should be interested to hear the advertisement."

Nobody answered him. That was the trouble with Snape; the unpleasantness was usually a delivery problem rather than a content problem.

Dumbledore let the silence do a little work before he answered it. "Severus is not wrong, and we are not without hope. There are a great many people who will not lie down for this, and what they lack is not willingness but a door to knock on. We will build the door. But not tonight, because tonight there is something that will not wait."

He put both hands flat on the table.

"Harry is still in Surrey. Lily's protection holds until he is of age and it has never been unconditional, and with Tom in a body again its deterrent value is a good deal less than it was in June. There are already people watching that house. He must be brought here within the week."

Sirius was out of his chair before Dumbledore had finished. "His room is ready, next to Edward's, same wards and same everything. He can walk in and be inside the protection the moment he crosses the step."

Tonks had her hand half up and did not wait to be asked. "I will fetch him. I can be four different people between Surrey and here and I can Apparate out of a bad situation faster than anybody at this table. Nobody would follow what they cannot recognise."

Moody's eye came round and stopped on her and stayed there. "You will not go alone. If they have put watchers on that house they have put an ambush behind the watchers, because that is what I would have done. One person is a gift. I will command it, and we will go heavy."

Dumbledore's tone allowed no amendment to any part of it. "Alastor will lead, with Nymphadora and Kingsley. Avoid engagement. If you are met, you disengage and you come home without him rather than lose people over it, and we will try again by another route. Do you all understand me? Harry is more use to us alive in Surrey than dead on a road in Berkshire."

Edward had been quiet for fifty minutes and he stopped being quiet.

He said it evenly, into a room full of adults, and did not look at Sirius while he said it. "I would like to go with them. I can Apparate accurately now, I can hold a shield through two Blasting Curses, and I can take a spell off somebody at thirty feet. And if it does go wrong out there, what is on the road is fire, which is the one thing none of them will have planned for."

"No," Dumbledore said kindly, and it landed like a door. "Edward, consider what you are proposing. There is a standing price on you tonight in two forms, and the moment you step past that gate you become the most valuable object in England. You would not be a fourth wand on that road. You would be a reason for them to commit everything they have to it, and the person who would pay for that is Harry."

It came out harder than he had meant it to. "I do not want to spend a war being carried."

"No, and I would think less of you if you did." Sirius put a hand on the back of his neck, briefly. "But listen to what he is telling you. Your fire may turn out to be the one thing that actually works on him - nobody has ever seen anything take hold of the Dark Arts the way it did in that graveyard, and we do not yet know why. That makes you something we cannot afford to spend on a Tuesday in Surrey. Stay here, get better, and there will be more work than you want soon enough."

Edward looked round the table at eight people who all believed the same thing, and let it go.

"Then be careful," he said. "All three of you."