Chapter 230: Three Difficulties

The middle band moved under his fingers as he spoke. "Half-bloods and the best of the Muggle-born. They have our magic and the other world's habit of asking why, which is worth a great deal more than anybody here will admit. Research, teaching, healing, the arts. Supervised, because a thing that useful goes wrong in ways we would not see coming."

"And the bottom carries everybody else, wizards and creatures both, with a floor under them that nobody is allowed to go through - and a route upward that is real, and published, and used often enough that people believe in it."

Grindelwald said it almost fondly, which was somehow worse than mockery. "Albus would put his head in his hands. He has spent sixty years arguing that blood decides nothing."

"He argued that blood should not decide rank. He never argued that a wizard who can manage a Levitation Charm should sit in the same room as somebody who reads lost script and rebuilds working magic out of it, and be given an equal say in what happens to all of us. That is not equality. It is a way of pretending competence does not exist." Edward did not blink. "And in what I am describing, a Muggle-born who is better than the pure-bloods walks straight into the top of it, and nobody may say a word about where she came from. That is the whole point of examining people."

Grindelwald let a moment go by. Then he raised one finger.

"First difficulty. Your top layer rots. It always rots. I believed in merit too, when I was your age and considerably less careful about saying so, and I watched what happens: the people who pass the examination write the next examination, and within two generations it selects for their children. Look at the Ministry you have now. Fudge got there by never being a threat to anybody. What in your system survives greed?"

Edward answered immediately, and fine points of light broke out across the top band as he did. "Re-examination, and a way to remove people. Tested annually, reviewed in public every third year, and judged on whether the things they decided actually worked. Fail twice and you are out and you do not come back. And an oversight body drawn from all three layers, outside the structure, with a single veto that ends anybody's career the day corruption is demonstrated. Including its own members."

The second finger went up.

"Second difficulty. The people underneath will not accept being underneath, whatever you call it. You will face a rising, and it will not come from Muggles; it will come from your own, which is a great deal harder to answer. And every agitator in the country will describe your layers as a tyranny with better manners, and a fair number of them will be sincere."

The bands began to move, and threads of light ran between the lower two of them. "Which is why it cannot be imposed in a year. It starts at Hogwarts, with teaching by ability instead of by age, so that everybody watches a Muggle-born third-year go into an advanced class and understands that the route up is not decorative. Once people can see somebody climbing it, most of the argument dies." He paused. "And the ones still shouting that all talent is equal get treated as what they are, because that particular lie takes the floor out from under everybody."

The third finger.

"Third difficulty, and it is the one that will actually stop you." The old voice had gone almost kind. "The old families will never submit to an examination. They will take Riddle's version instead, because his requires nothing of them but a name. Yours would require them to be good at something. Do you understand that you have designed a system whose first casualty is exactly the class you were born into?"

And Edward smiled.

It was the first time he had done it in that room, and there was nothing warm anywhere in it.

"Yes. That is what the war is for."

The wind moved against the high window.

"Voldemort will do that part for us. The families with nothing but a vault and a tapestry will go to him, because he asks nothing, and he will spend them. He always spends the useless ones first; he did it in the last war and none of them noticed. By the end of it the ones still standing will be the ones who were actually good, and they will have learned what the difference is worth. Then there is ground to build on." He let his hand close and the flame went out. "There is no version of this that works while those families are intact and comfortable. So I am not going to pretend to be sorry about what is going to happen to them."

Nothing at all was said for some time.

Grindelwald sat back down, slowly, and looked at him with an expression that took a while to settle.

When he spoke it was slowly, and he chose the words. "You are more realistic than either of us ever was. Albus believed people are good underneath and that love gets to the bottom of things. I believed people are shapeable and that force does the shaping. You have looked at what people are actually like - frightened, and self-interested, and quite good at both - and you have designed a machine that runs on it." He tilted his head. "And then you have called the machine the greater good, and I do not think you have noticed that you did that."

"Is that a criticism?"

"It is a description, and you should sit with it rather longer than you are about to." The mismatched eyes did not move. "But here is the mistake that will actually break you, and it is not the war and it is not the families. You believe order can hold everything. It cannot. Magic is not orderly. It comes out of temper and accident and people doing the thing they were told could not be done, and every structure fine enough to catch all of that also strangles it. Build your three layers well enough and you will get a wizarding world with no wild in it, and that is not a garden. That is a very tidy grave."

The three bands of fire above Edward's palm shook, and the light went out of the top one for a second.

He did not answer straight away, which Grindelwald noticed.

He said it more slowly than anything he had said in that room. "Then the top layer has to be made of people who understand that. Not administrators. Practitioners, who know that the thing they are governing is alive. And the order is built with gaps left in it on purpose - the way this school of mine has passages nobody has mapped and a forest nobody is allowed into and both of those have produced more than the curriculum ever has. You leave room for the accident. You write the room in."

The old man looked at him for a long moment and then produced something that was, unmistakably, a real smile. There was a great deal of tiredness in it.

"Interesting," he said quietly. "You are having the same argument he and I had, sixty years ago, in a garden in Godric's Hollow, under an apple tree - and you are trying to settle it with a constitution. We never got that far. We got as far as deciding that one of us was going to have to be wrong, and then we found out what that costs."

He turned his head toward the window and the white beyond it.

"I will not help you against Albus. That is a vow, and it is also the only useful thing I have left to do with what remains of me." He was quiet for a moment. "But if this order of yours ever gets as far as being written down - send me the draft. I will tell you which clauses will start a rebellion and which ones will quietly grow a new Dark Arts inside themselves within thirty years. Nobody alive is better placed to tell you that."

Edward bowed, properly and from the waist, which he had not done for anybody in some years.

He took the second silver badge out of his robes and set it on the flags at the foot of the barrier, where a long arm could reach it.

He put a folded newspaper down beside it. "That goes to my house and nowhere else, and it will answer to nobody but you. And this is this week's. I will keep sending them, because you should not have to hear about the world from your guards."

Grindelwald did not pick either of them up. He inclined his head very slightly, and his eyes had already gone back to the mountains.

Edward let the fire take him and went out through the shaft, and the barrier closed behind him without a sound.

He looked back once, on the turn, through the high window.

An old man at a table in a grey robe, with one hand out, moving a fingertip slowly along the folded edge of a newspaper.

Kreacher came out from behind the rock the moment the gold appeared over the ridge, and was talking before Edward had finished being a person again.

"Two hours. Two hours, young master, in a place like this, and Kreacher standing here counting - "

"I know. Thank you for waiting." Edward brushed the snow off his shoulders and held out his wrist. "Take hold. We are going home."

The mountain folded away and the wind stopped as though a door had been shut on it, and the courtyard of Grimmauld Place came up around them with the lamps warm in the windows.

"You will not do that again. Master Sirius will have my ears."

"He is not going to hear about it from either of us." Edward put a hand briefly on the elf's shoulder. "Go in. It is cold."

Upstairs, he sat at the desk with the snow melting out of his hair and looked at the dark garden without seeing it.

He had gone for a weapon and had not been given one. What he had come back with was an old man's three objections, all of which were better than any objection anybody at Grimmauld Place had raised, and one sentence about tidy graves that he could not put down.

And a standing offer, from the only person alive who had built what he was proposing to build and watched it come apart in his hands.

He found that he was pleased about that, and he was aware, distantly, of how little he wanted to examine why.