Chapter 228: The Silver Raven

The lamps in the drawing room were still burning orange when the Order began taking itself apart for the night.

Moody went round the whole ground floor a third time with Kingsley and Tonks trailing him, and stopped in front of Edward on his way out with the blue eye going round.

"Stay behind the wards, boy. Tom's people know this street exists even if they cannot find the door on it, and men have been taken off doorsteps before now."

Snape had already gone, leaving nothing behind but a thin smell of wormwood that did not suit the house.

The Weasleys went last and took twenty minutes about it. Mrs Weasley held Edward's hand and gave him a list of instructions that included eating properly. Mr Weasley was still arguing about concealment layers with Sirius halfway down the front steps. Fred and George put a bulging paper bag into Edward's hands on their way past and lowered their voices without lowering them very much.

"Emergency fireworks. Light one and you get three minutes of complete confusion in about a forty-foot radius, and nobody in it will be able to agree afterwards on what they saw."

Harry stopped last of all.

"Anything you need. Anything. Write to me."

"And you." Edward meant it. "Keep your head down at the Burrow and tell me the moment anything looks wrong."

Then the door shut and the house went entirely quiet, in the particular way that houses do when they have just been full.

Sirius put a hand on his shoulder while he was pulling his coat on.

"Diagon Alley, then two or three people who owe me conversations. It may take a couple of days. Kreacher will feed you and I have left the wards keyed to you both." He stopped at the door and said the rest more heavily. "You do not go past the thorn. Not for anything. Say it back to me."

"I do not go past the thorn."

Sirius went out through the courtyard and the black of his coat went into the black of the hedge and was gone.

Which left a house with eleven bedrooms in it and two occupants, one of whom was a house-elf who had begun, over the last week, to bring Edward tea he had not asked for.

Edward went upstairs and started work.

He cleared the middle of the bedroom floor and marked out ten feet square, and spent the first evening on Apparition. The theory was straightforward and the practice was not: the whole business is a controlled tearing and a controlled putting-back, and everything depends on not putting more into the tear than the space will forgive.

The first hour was mostly dizziness. He came down eighteen inches off his mark, then two feet, then hard enough into the bookcase to open a cut over his eyebrow.

He kept at it. What eventually worked was borrowing from somewhere else entirely: there was a set of anchoring runes in one of the older books downstairs, meant for fixing wards to a foundation, and he found that if he held the shape of one at the back of his mind while he went, the landing tightened up considerably. By the end of the second day he could put himself through the gap between two bookcases three times running and finish each one within an inch of where he had intended.

Then he went after the other thing.

There was a technique in the Slytherin material he had been picking through since second year - flight without a broom and without anything else, the sort of thing that is mentioned twice in a thousand years and then not explained. It has nothing to do with charm-work on an object. It is magic turned into a field that pushes against the ground, and held in place by nothing but concentration.

He sat on the carpet for most of an afternoon getting nowhere. The field kept forming unevenly, so that he would rise half a foot, hang there for eight or nine seconds while it went lopsided under him, and then come down on his back hard enough to knock the wind out.

What made the difference was the fire.

The notes talked about a resonance between magic and the mind, and Edward had spent four years learning that his fire answered to attention better than to force. When he stopped trying to build the field out of raw output and instead let the flame magic run through it - hot, steady, the same slow feed he used to hold a shield - the whole thing settled and stayed settled.

He rose off the floor as though there were a stair under him that was not there. Then he moved. Then, on the fourth evening, he went the length of the upstairs corridor at something close to running speed with his feet six inches clear of the boards, turned at the end without touching either wall, and came up through the trapdoor into the attic in one movement.

Three days after that he could chain the whole thing together: Apparate, arrive already lifting, and be moving before his weight had settled. In a corridor it made him extremely difficult to hit.

He stopped there, because he had what he needed, and what he needed it for was the thing he had not yet said out loud to anybody.

Getting to Nurmengard was a problem he could solve. Getting back was not, and he was not going to walk into the most heavily bound building in Europe without a way out of it that did not depend on his own magic still working.

The library of the house went up two storeys and had not been dusted since before he was born. He spent an hour in the section on spatial work and came out with a black-bound thing with the boards worn through at the corners: The Making and Use of Portkeys, with three dried bay leaves pressed flat somewhere around the middle.

The principle turned out to be simpler than he had assumed. You bind an object to the magical signature of a place, permanently, and you open the binding with your own magic and a little of your own blood. The hard parts were both about precision. First, the signature has to be exact, because every magical space rings at its own frequency and a near miss does not take you somewhere near; it takes you somewhere between. Second, the object has to be able to hold the charge without coming apart while it is working.

He chose a silver badge out of one of the cabinets downstairs, a family thing with the Black raven on it with its wings spread, made of silver around a mithril spine. It was hard, it was old, and it had been holding magic of one kind or another for two hundred years.

He set it on the oak table, opened his fingertip with the point of his wand, and let three drops fall onto the face of it while he worked the incantation and cut the runes in over the top of them.

The blood met the rune-work and went dark red and stayed lit. He held the signature of the house in his mind - the deep anchor point at the base of the stair that Sirius had shown him in his first week, the one the whole building is tied to - and pressed it into the metal until the two things were the same thing.

"Portus."

Blue came up through the silver and moved along the runes like something breathing, and the badge began to pull very gently against his palm, and he could feel the house on the other end of it the way one feels a rope go taut.

He let go and the light went out and it was a badge again, with nothing on it but a raven and a hairline shimmer along the edge.

He came out of the library and met Kreacher coming up with a tray.

"I need to leave the house tomorrow."

The tray came down onto the side table faster than it should have and the old face went grey.

"No. No, young master. Master Sirius said, and there are men outside who have been offered a title for you, an actual title, and Kreacher heard what the other one said he would do - "

"I have this." Edward held up the badge. "It goes back to the anchor at the foot of the stair from anywhere. If it goes wrong I am standing in this hall a second later."

Kreacher stopped mid-sentence and stared at it, and something quite different came over his face.

"You made a Portkey. Yourself," he said almost reverently, and then remembered himself and set his jaw. "It changes nothing. You cannot go alone. You will wait for Master Sirius."

"It cannot wait for Sirius." Edward crouched to be level with him, which he had learned did more than any amount of arguing. "You are worried and you are right to be. So come with me. If it goes badly I would rather there were two of us."

Kreacher looked at him for a long moment with his mouth working.

"Kreacher will come," he said at last. "Kreacher is a house-elf of the House of Black, and the blood of the house will not be lost while Kreacher is standing next to it."

They tested it three times before they went anywhere: once to the far side of the thorn, once to a wood outside London, once to a bare valley in Scotland with the wind coming down it sideways. Each time the badge put them back at the foot of the stair within a foot of the same spot.

 

Kreacher was sick after the second one and refused to discuss it.