Chapter 231: The Silence

Mornings at Grimmauld Place never entirely arrived. The velvet at the windows was heavy enough to hold the daylight out of the room altogether, so that the only light came from the lamps in the corners, and it never got as far as the ceiling.

Edward was at the oak table in the library with The Origins of the Ancient Dark Arts open in front of him, running a fingertip down a column of rune-work that lit faintly as he touched it. He had spent the morning checking the anchor points on the Portkey badge and had got as far as writing down what he had come back from Nurmengard with, when the front door of the house came open hard enough to be heard two floors up.

Footsteps followed it, and they were not patient ones.

He closed the book and went down.

Sirius was standing in the middle of the drawing room in robes marked with road dust and rain. Whatever he had gone looking for, he had not found it. He threw his wand onto the low table, dropped into the sofa, and put the heels of both hands against his eyes, and did not so much as look at the cabinet where the firewhisky lived.

Kreacher came out of the kitchen with tea, took one look at the state of the man on the sofa, and put the cup down within reach rather than in front of him. Then he retreated to the corner and began polishing silver that had been clean for a week, without once taking his eyes off either of them.

Edward sat down at the other end of the sofa and let him have a moment before he asked. "Nothing, then."

It was the wrong thing to say only in the sense that it worked. Sirius's head came up and his fist came down on the arm of the sofa hard enough to make the frame complain.

"Nothing. Not one thing. Three weeks and I have less than I started with, which I would not have believed was possible." He got a breath in and it did not help as much as he had hoped. "Kingsley and Tonks and I have been through Diagon Alley and most of Knockturn, and into four houses that belong to families I would rather not name out loud, and Moody has had that eye of his down every hole in London with anything magical at the bottom of it. We have found no Death Eaters. We have found no trace of where he is. We have not found so much as a rumour worth chasing."

He sat forward with his forearms on his knees.

"And that is the part that frightens me, because it is not how he works. The last time, he came back into the open the moment he could and he made certain everybody knew it - villages, Aurors, marks in the sky over people's houses. Terror was the whole of the method, and he was good at it. This time there has been nothing since the graveyard. No attack anywhere, no Aurors touched, not one public move against the Order, not even a broken shopfront to remind us he exists."

"Which is deliberate," Edward said quietly, because he had reached the same place from a different direction some days earlier. "He does not need to frighten anybody this year. The Ministry is doing his frightening for him, and doing it in the wrong direction."

"Exactly that, and it is the cleverest thing he has ever done." The anger went out of Sirius's voice and something colder came in behind it. "Fudge cannot admit he is back without admitting he was wrong for a year, so every week that passes with nothing happening is another week of evidence that Dumbledore invented the whole business to make a grab at the Ministry. And Harry is a boy who liked being famous and started telling stories when it wore off. That is what the Prophet has been printing since June and it will get worse, and every day of quiet out there makes it easier to print."

He looked up.

"And you are in that too, and you should hear it from me rather than from a newspaper. Skeeter's pieces from the tournament are still going round. Ambitious, obsessed with the Dark Arts, blood-supremacist, twisted young, certain to be the next Dark Lord - all of it, in print, with your name on it. If the Ministry decides it wants a second liar to stand next to Harry, they will not have to write anything new. They will simply reprint her and let people remember what they already half believe."

Edward considered that for a moment and found that it moved him less than it should have. "Then they will reprint her. She had nothing when she wrote it and she has nothing now, and the people whose opinion is worth anything to me can read. What the Ministry is doing is politics, and politics is loud, and it does not last past the first thing that actually happens to somebody."

He let a corner of his mouth go up, which did not reach the rest of his face.

"And in any case it is the wrong thing to worry about, because they are going to do considerably more damage with Harry than with me. I have been called an ambitious pure-blood since I was eleven and I have had four years to get used to the sound of it. Harry was raised in a cupboard by people who told him he was nothing, and he has spent four years being told by everybody else that he is the only one who matters, and neither of those left him anywhere solid to stand. Being called a liar by the entire country will land on him differently than it lands on me. Somebody should be with him this summer, and it should not be a letter."

Sirius looked at him for a while without saying anything.

He was aware that the boy on the other end of his sofa was fifteen years old. He was aware that the same boy had just spent ten minutes analysing a national campaign to destroy his own name with roughly the interest of a man reading a weather report, and had then set it aside as the less important of the two problems in the room. That ought to have been reassuring, and Sirius could not make it be.

"I will go to the Burrow this week," he said eventually. "You are right about him." He rubbed his face. "You are usually right, and I have started to find it unnerving."

The gloom came back down over the room and settled.

Edward watched him sit in it for a minute or two, and then stood up.

"Come out into the middle of the floor. There is something I want to show you, and you are going to feel better afterwards."

Sirius looked up without much hope. "What sort of something?"

"The Apparition you taught me. And one or two things out of the family collection that you did not."