Chapter 226: What Dumbledore Would Not Allow

They went out the way people go out of a room they expect to be watched.

Snape put his hood up, said good night to nobody, and was gone off the front step before the door had properly closed behind him. Moody walked the whole ground floor twice more and then the cellar, testing every ward with the flat of his hand and grunting at three of them, before he would leave with Kingsley and Tonks. Professor McGonagall stopped in the hall long enough to tell Edward to keep practising and to stay behind the walls, and then went back to a school that still had a fortnight of end-of-year paperwork in it.

That left three people and a fire that had burned down to almost nothing.

Edward stood in the middle of the drawing room and worked out how to begin, and then decided there was no way to begin that would improve it.

"Professor. There is something I want to ask for, and you are not going to like it."

Dumbledore turned from the window with mild interest. "Then you had better say it before either of us has time to prepare."

"I want to see Gellert Grindelwald."

Sirius came off the arm of the chair.

Sirius got to his feet on the second syllable of the name. "Have you gone completely out of your mind? The man murdered his way across a continent. He is at the bottom of Nurmengard behind more restriction than anybody living, and there is a reason for every layer of it. What could you possibly want from him?"

Edward did not raise his voice and did not look away from either of them while he answered. "The only thing he has. Voldemort is stronger than we have been assuming, his people are returning to him faster than we can count them, and we have nothing whatever."

"Grindelwald is the one man alive who has already done what Tom is doing. They may well have had dealings, and if they did not, he will still understand how such a man thinks, where he would put a stronghold, and how he would organise people who cannot be permitted to know one another's names. Any one of those is worth more than everything the Order currently holds."

Sirius had his hand out as though physically stopping something. "And every word of it would be a lie. That is his entire method. He would tell you something plausible and half true and let you spend four months and six people finding out which half. He would enjoy it. He would enjoy it more because of who your family is."

Edward's hands had closed without his noticing. "I know he cannot be trusted, and I am not proposing to trust him or to make any sort of alliance with him. I want to take information off him under conditions he cannot control. Behind barriers. Bound and silenced except to answer, if it comes to it. With you standing there, Professor, since you are the one person he would want to talk to and the one person who would know the moment he started."

Dumbledore had not moved from the window while any of that was said.

When he did speak his voice had gone quieter rather than louder, which in him was the worse sign.

When he did speak, it was more slowly than usual. "No, Edward. I cannot allow it. And I intend to give you the real reasons rather than the comfortable ones, because you have earned that much of me."

"The first is that you have badly underestimated him, and so does everybody who has only read about him. Gellert's gift was never duelling. It was that he could find the thing a person most wanted and describe it back to them more beautifully than they had ever managed themselves. He did not recruit an army by frightening people. He recruited it by making decent men believe that what he intended was what they had always privately wanted." He paused. "You have a great deal of power, a family history you have spent four years refusing, and a war you have been told you are too young to fight in. He would have the measure of all three inside ten minutes, and he would not need to lie to you once."

Edward opened his mouth and found that the objection he had ready did not survive being looked at.

"The second is that he and I are not two strangers who might have a conversation. There is a great deal between us, and none of it is finished, and a meeting arranged around me would be dangerous in ways I could not fully predict and would not be able to stop."

"And the third is the one that matters." Dumbledore came away from the window. "We can get what we need by other means. Slowly and at cost, but we can get it. Which means the whole of what you are proposing is a shortcut, and the currency you are proposing to pay in is the thing itself."

It came out of Edward harder than he had intended it to. "We do not have time for slowly. Every week we spend being careful is a week he spends building. People are going to die in that gap, Professor, and we will know afterwards exactly which weeks they died in."

"Yes," Dumbledore said without any softening whatever. "They will. And I am telling you that this is still not the way, and I want you to understand that it is not fear that stops me."

He stopped in front of Edward.

"There is a very old error in this, and it has a particular shape. You borrow the strength of one dark thing to break another, and it works, and it works again, and each time it works you find the borrowing slightly less remarkable than you did before. Nobody ever arrives at the end of that road by deciding to. They arrive by having taken every individual step for a good reason. I have watched it happen to somebody I loved, and I do not intend to watch it happen to you at fifteen because we were in a hurry."

The fire moved in the grate. Edward looked down and opened his hands and found the nails had left four marks in each palm.

"I understand," he said. "I had not thought it through."

"You had thought it through extremely well." Dumbledore put a hand briefly on his shoulder. "That is precisely what worries me. A year ago you would have wanted to go and fight him. Tonight you have looked at the board and identified the single asset that would most change the position, and you were entirely right about what it would be worth. That is not a schoolboy's thinking."

He let go.

"Keep doing it. Bring me the next one, and the one after that, and I will tell you honestly which of them we can afford. That is a better arrangement than you making the judgement alone in a house full of wards at two in the morning. Only understand that fighting this particular darkness has a floor under it, and that if we go through the floor there is no version of winning left that is worth having."

Sirius let his breath out through his teeth. "Well. I have been arguing that with him for twenty years and I have never once managed to put it that well."

Then somebody knocked at the front door of the house, and all three of them turned round.

Kreacher got to the door before anybody else could and opened it with the expression of an elf being asked to swallow something, muttering the whole way.

"Visitors. At this hour. Tramping through the noble House of Black as though it were a public road, and Kreacher must open the door to them, Kreacher must fetch and carry - "

Then the hall filled up.

Arthur and Molly Weasley came in first with the rest coming through behind them in a body: Fred and George shoulder to shoulder, Ginny, Ron, and Hermione last with her hair full of the wind off the street. All of them had the crumpled look of people who had left in a hurry and travelled awkwardly to get there.

"Edward." Hermione was across the hall before her mother-in-law of a friend could stop her, and she looked him over from collar to boots twice before she said anything else. "Professor Dumbledore told us about the graveyard. All of it. We have been sitting in that house for a week not knowing whether you were - "

"I am entirely intact." He found he was smiling for the first time in a fortnight. "You may check again if it helps."

George had gone straight past both of them and was standing at the bottom of the stairwell looking up it. "The place has possibilities."

Fred had come to stand beside him and was assessing the banisters. "Structurally sound. Historically significant. Frankly it makes the Burrow look modern. We could have this looking a great deal better by August, and we would work strictly around the protective spells."

"You would work strictly through the protective spells," said Ron, "and then we would all be murdered." He turned to Edward and the humour went out of him. "Mum said this place is the safest building in the country now. It is a bit mad to think about, honestly. You stood in front of him and wrecked whatever he was doing. Actually stood there."

Ginny said it plainly, from beside her brother, and did not make a performance of it. "Everyone at home is proud of you."

Something in Edward's chest that had been clenched since the platform came loose.

"Sirius has made this house into a fortress and I have not been allowed past the gate in three weeks," he said. "You are the first thing that has happened here that was not a duelling lesson."