Chapter 229: Nurmengard

Kreacher waited until Edward had the badge in one hand and the other held out before he asked it. "Where are we going?"

"The Austrian Alps."

The elf's eyes went round. "That is - young master, that is four countries away, and there is nothing there but snow and rock and the barriers they put round - "

He stopped.

"Round Nurmengard," Edward finished for him. "Yes. Take my wrist."

Kreacher took it, because he had been ordered to and because he had already worked out that arguing was going to lose. Then the courtyard folded up and disappeared.

What replaced it was a wind that went through wool as though the wool were not there.

They came down on a shoulder of bare rock above the treeline with the snow going sideways past them and the peaks standing up out of the cloud on three sides, white on white on grey, and the cold in that air was the kind that gets into the teeth within a minute.

Kreacher pulled his rag of a robe around himself and his voice came out in pieces.

"There is nobody here. There is nothing here. Young master, what are we doing on a mountain?"

Edward looked round to get his bearings, found the ridge line he had memorised off a chart in the library, and turned back.

Edward turned back to him and had to raise his voice over the wind. "Wait here, behind that rock and out of the weather, and do not follow me. I will not be long."

"I am not letting you walk off into - "

He did not get to the end of it, because the boy in front of him had begun to burn.

The gold-red came up out of Edward's chest and went outward, and inside it his shape came apart and rebuilt itself: the bones drawing out, the feathers running down the arms as the arms opened into wings, the head narrowing forward. It took perhaps three seconds and Kreacher watched every one of them with his mouth open.

A Phoenix with a six-foot span stood in the snow, and against all that white it was almost too bright to look at directly. The tail feathers moved in the wind and threw colour across the drift. It put its head back and cried once, and the snow came off the branches of the stunted pines lower down the slope.

Then it looked at Kreacher, briefly, and went up.

Kreacher stood in the wind for some time after it had gone.

"Very well," he said eventually, to nobody. "Very well. Listen to the young master." He got himself into the lee of the rock and set his back against it and watched the sky. "But you will come back quickly. Kreacher does not intend to explain this to Master Sirius."

Flying, the mountains went past underneath fast. The wind that had been cutting through robes did nothing to feathers, and the fire held a thin envelope of warm air against the body inside them, and the snow went round it rather than through.

Nurmengard came up out of the cloud twenty minutes later.

It was black, and it was built out of the mountain rather than on it, and it went up in a single tower that had no windows below the top forty feet. Around the head of the tower the barriers stood in layers, silver and slowly turning, laid down over fifty years by the International Confederation and reinforced twice since. Anything with a wand in its hand that came near that would have been taken apart.

The Phoenix went round the tower once, high and unhurried, and looked at it properly.

The weakness was where weaknesses usually are. Near the top, on the north face, a shaft came out of the stone for the air, and the barrier bent round the opening rather than crossing it, because a barrier that seals a vent kills what is inside within a week and the Confederation had wanted Grindelwald alive.

It folded its wings and dropped.

Silver met gold at the mouth of the shaft and neither did anything to the other. There was a pressure, and a sound almost too low to hear, and then the Phoenix was through and inside and the barrier closed behind it as though nothing had passed.

The inside of the tower was cold in a different way. It smelled of wet stone and rust and the flat, chemical staleness of a place where magic has been suppressed for a very long time. There were no guards on the upper levels, because there had never needed to be.

The cell at the top had a door of bars with a barrier standing inside them, faintly visible, like heat over a road.

The room beyond held a bed, a table, and an old man sitting at the table with his back to the door, looking out of the one high window at the mountains.

He turned when he heard the wings.

The prison robe was grey and had been washed until it had no weave left. The hair was white and untidy and rather long. The face had gone right down to the bone with age, and it was still possible to see, underneath all of it, the architecture of somebody who had once been remarkably handsome. The eyes were mismatched, and what was in them was nothing like what Edward had expected. It was not madness. It was the settled, unhurried attention of a man who has had fifty years with nothing to do but think.

Something crossed that face when he saw the bird. It was almost pleasure.

"Albus." The voice came out dry and cracked and quite gentle. "You have come at last."

The Phoenix landed on the flags outside the bars, and the gold came up and went down, and Edward was standing there in silver-grey robes with the Black crest at the breast.

Grindelwald's expression did not collapse. It simply stopped, and then reassembled itself around something else entirely, and he sat back down and looked at the boy the way a man looks at an unexpected column of figures.

"A Phoenix." A fingertip began to tap the table, slowly. "Wearing the raven of the House of Black. That is a combination I would not have predicted, and I have had a great deal of time for predicting." The tapping stopped. "Albus did not send you. Albus would never sanction anything this reckless, which means it is yours. Whose son are you?"

The boy on the other side of the bars did not look away from him. "My name is Edward Black."

He came forward until he was a foot from the barrier, and it woke and rippled all the way up.

"I came for myself. And because of what is happening to the wizarding world this summer."

"The wizarding world." The laugh was low and came mostly out of the chest. "Everybody who has ever got in here has come about the wizarding world. So which are you? One of Tom Riddle's, sent to ask me something clever? Or the next boy Albus has decided to grow?"

"Neither. I am fifteen and I am in my fourth year at Hogwarts and I do not belong to either of them." Edward's voice stayed level. "I came because I want to ask you something that nobody alive can answer except you. What do you do when the greater good runs into the way the world actually is?"

The tapping finger stopped an inch above the wood and stayed there.

Whatever had been settled in that room for fifty years came unsettled all at once. The mismatched eyes came up and there was something behind them now that had not been there thirty seconds earlier, and the thin body straightened out of its slouch, and for a moment it was possible to believe that this man had once had half a continent listening to him.

"You have a great deal of nerve," Grindelwald said softly, "for a child."

He stood, and even in a prison robe he was still a tall man.

"But anybody can say those three words. Boys have been saying them at me through these bars since before your father was born, and every one of them thought he had invented them." His head tilted. "So. Tell me what you think they mean."

Edward had been turning the answer over for a month and gave it without any preamble. "You were not wrong about the problem. Wizards spent a thousand years hiding in the cupboards of a world that would have burned them, and calling it prudence. You were wrong about the answer. You chose conquest, and conquest split us into camps that have not spoken properly since, and frightened the Muggles into coming at us harder than they ever would have otherwise. When it ended, both sides had lost and the people who paid were the ones who had never been asked."

"And Riddle is doing it again, worse, because at least you believed what you said. His blood purity is a lever. What he actually wants is the fear itself - the moment when somebody understands that he decides whether they go on existing."

Grindelwald's finger had gone still on the table.

"So. Your plan."

Edward opened his left hand and let the fire come up out of the palm, and it climbed and arranged itself into three bands standing one above the other: a bright hot layer at the top, a mobile flickering one beneath it, and a broad steady one holding the whole of it up.

He let it stand there between them. "Order. In layers, and labelled honestly."

He touched the top band and it brightened.

"The top is small. It writes law, keeps the old magic, and decides how we deal with the world outside. It is not entered by birth. It is entered by examination: magic at the standard of the people who wrote the books, history across a thousand years and not just the flattering parts, and the judgement to see twenty years out. A pure-blood family with eight centuries of accumulated work behind it produces candidates more often than not, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. And a man who has nothing but a family tree is unfit to hold a door open, let alone a country."

The middle band moved as he pointed at it.