Chapter 227: The Rules of the House of Black

Mrs Weasley took his hand in both of hers, and hers were warm and dry and did not let go immediately.

She looked at him the way she looked at every one of them, as though he were rather younger than he was and had been out in the cold too long. "You poor boy. Fifteen years old, and that is what they have asked of you. Well. There is an Order now, and there are a great many of us, and not one of them is getting near you. You will eat something before I leave this house."

Mr Weasley had drifted along the wall and was running his fingertips an inch below one of the glowing lines of ward-work with an expression of open delight.

"Sirius, this is really rather beautiful. Is this an anti-detection layer over the top of the concealment? Because I have never managed to get the two to sit together - every time I try it, the concealment starts damping everything inside the building as well, and then you cannot cast in your own kitchen. How on earth are you keeping the internal flow clean?"

Sirius laughed, and for a second the whole of the last month came off him. "Arthur. Fourteen years, and the first thing out of your mouth is a technical question. Come through and I will show you the join. It is a trick my grandmother used and it is very slightly illegal."

Kreacher came in with a tray, put it down harder than the tray deserved, and slopped tea into two of the saucers. His eyes went across the Weasleys, stopped on Arthur for a moment, and then went to Hermione and stayed there.

"Muggle-lovers," he said, to the wall, in a voice pitched exactly loud enough. "And a Mudblood, standing on the hearthstone of the House of Black. My poor mistress. If she could see what her house is used for - "

"Kreacher."

The word came out of Edward flat and hard, and the elf stopped as though he had been struck.

He hunched, and would not look up, and could not stop himself either. "But young master. They are friends of Muggles. She is - the rules of the house are clear, they have always been clear, it is not for Kreacher to - "

Edward waited, and when nothing further came he said it quietly. "Look at me."

Kreacher looked up. His eyes were wet and yellow and full of an obstinacy that had been fed for sixty years.

"You will not use that word in this house again. Not to her, not about her, and not to the wall when you think nobody is listening. These people are my friends and they are guests here, and you will be civil to every one of them or you will be somewhere else while they are in the building."

He crouched down so that they were level, which he had never done before, and when he went on his voice had come down.

"And you will hear the rest of it, because you have earned better than an order. The rules of this house were never about blood. They were about protecting what is worth protecting and standing by your own. Every person in this room walked into a house with a price on its owner's head tonight because they were worried about me. My father died going against the man they are all afraid of. That woman you will not name went into a maze last month knowing what was in it." He held the elf's eyes. "There are pure-blood families in this country who will be kneeling in a field within the month to keep their vaults. Tell me which of them is keeping the rules of the House of Black better than the people standing in this room."

Kreacher's hands worked in the front of his robe.

Whatever went across that ruined old face took some time about it, and there was real pain in the middle of it, because he was being asked to set down the only thing he had held onto through years in which nobody of the family had spoken to him.

"Yes," he said at last. "Young master. Kreacher will be - civil."

Edward stood up and let it go at that. "Thank you. Now bring the good ones and not whatever is at the back of the pantry, and no surprises in them."

"No surprises." Kreacher shuffled off toward the kitchen. He got in one filthy look at Ron on the way past, but a good deal of the poison had gone out of it, and he was mostly just tired.

Hermione had gone rather pink.

She had gone rather pink about it. "I am sorry. We have made things difficult for you inside your own house."

Edward shook his head at her. "You have made this the only evening since June that I have enjoyed. The place is very quiet, and I have been the only person in it under forty."

Ron had already taken a biscuit and was speaking around most of it. "Well, you are welcome. Another week cooped up at the Burrow with Percy being Percy and I would have walked here."

"Ronald."

"Sorry, Mum."

"Actually - " Hermione had turned back to Edward and her whole face had changed, the way it did. "I have been meaning to write to you all summer and Mum would not let me use the owl until we knew where you were. I found a copy of Analysis of Ancient Fire Magic in the second-hand shop at the back of Diagon Alley for four Sickles. Edward, there is a section on fire as a counter to the Dark Arts that reads like somebody watching you work. And there are three advanced applications in the last chapter that I think are exactly what you have been stuck on."

"Control and duration." He was already leaning in. "I can do almost anything with it for ninety seconds and then the precision goes and I am just throwing heat about. If the book has anything on holding a shaped flame past two minutes - "

"It has a whole method. It is written by a Portuguese witch in about 1700 and the notation is appalling but the theory is sound - "

They went at it for the better part of an hour. Ron made one attempt to steer the conversation toward the Chudley Cannons, failed to interest anybody, and went off to join his father and Sirius, who were by then lying on the floor of the hall looking up at the ceiling.

Mrs Weasley tidied things that did not need tidying. Fred and George had their heads together in the corner over a piece of paper that Edward decided he would rather not see. Ginny found a book and read it with her feet up, looking round at intervals with the calm of somebody who had spent her whole life in a house this loud.

Kreacher brought the second tray and then stood in the corner with his back half turned. He did not say anything else. Twice, when Mrs Weasley reached for something out of range, he came forward and handed it to her, stiffly, without being asked.

It was full dark outside when the front door opened again.

Moody came through it first with his wand still out, then Kingsley, then Tonks with her hair having gone an unplanned brown, and between them Harry Potter, grey with tiredness and with a shallow cut healing badly across one eyebrow.

"Harry!"

Ron got to him first and knocked most of the wind out of him. Hermione arrived a second later and was more careful about it and not much.

Harry was laughing and being crushed at the same time and doing neither well. "I am all right, honestly. There was a bit of a scene on the way out. Two of them waiting at the end of Privet Drive, and Professor Moody dealt with the pair of them in about nine seconds, and I got clipped by one spell that went wide."

Moody's eye was already going round the hall counting people in it. "Watchers, not fighters. Sent to sit and report. They were not expecting three of us and they will not be reporting anything for a while. But they were there, which tells you what we needed to know about that street."

Harry got clear of Ron and found Edward across the room, and stopped.

He said it quietly, under the noise of everybody else. "Dumbledore told me what happened after I went. You knew you were going to be alone in that graveyard when you threw me the Portkey, and you knew it before you threw it."

"You were the only one of us who could get help, and you were the only one of us he needed." Edward put a hand out. "It was arithmetic. Do not make it into anything else."

Harry took his hand and did not look convinced by a single word of it.

Sirius had come through from the hall, and his whole face had opened up in a way Edward had not seen since before the third task. "Harry. Welcome to Grimmauld Place. It is a miserable old building and my mother screams at everybody from a painting on the first landing, and from tonight it is your home. The safest one in Britain."

Mrs Weasley had Harry in a chair and was doing something to his eyebrow before he had finished answering, and complaining about his aunt while she did it. Hermione was interrogating him about the journey in case he was leaving anything out, which he was. Fred and George arrived to enrol him in a renovation project that had acquired a written schedule in the last hour, and Harry started laughing and could not entirely stop.

The lamps in the drawing room of a house that had been dark for a decade burned up bright, and for a couple of hours the war was somewhere else.