Chapter 232: The Bone of the Father

Edward went to the middle of the drawing room and stood there with his hands loose at his sides.

There was no incantation, and there was almost nothing to see. The space over by the hearth thickened for perhaps a quarter of a second, something in the room made a low sound like a struck glass, and he was no longer standing where he had been. He was in front of the fireplace, upright, entirely steady, and his feet had come down inside a finger's width of the crack between two flagstones he had chosen before he went.

Sirius sat up.

"That is better than I can do on a bad day. In a fortnight." He was frowning, and it was the good sort of frowning. "How close are you holding the landing?"

Instead of answering, Edward went three times in succession: bookcase to sofa to the fourth stair and back, threading between the low table and a stack of books nobody had moved in a month, and he did not touch a single thing on the way.

"Closer than that."

"All right." Sirius was properly interested now. "That is not a fortnight's work, that is - "

"And then there is this."

Edward brought his hands up slowly and let the fire come down through him and out at the soles of his feet, and a thin gold-red layer built itself under his boots, no thicker than a plate and perfectly even.

He rose off the floor.

He came up until he was level with the back of the sofa and stopped there, holding it without any visible effort, the gold moving under him like something poured across glass.

Sirius was on his feet before he knew he had stood.

"That is flight. Without a broom and without a charm on anything." He came two steps closer and stared. "There are four pages on that in the library upstairs and every one of them says it has not been done since the fifteenth century. Where did you - "

"Salazar's material, mostly. There is a section on it nobody has bothered to translate properly because they assumed it was metaphorical." Edward moved forward through the air, went up over the low table, turned in a space too small to turn in, and came down without a sound. "It is not a levitation charm. It is a field, and it holds because the fire holds. Anything else I have tried it with comes apart inside ten seconds."

He let the magic go and stood there breathing normally.

Sirius walked round him once, which was faintly ridiculous, and did not appear to notice he was doing it.

"You are fifteen years old."

"So people keep telling me."

"No, listen to me for a moment." Something had come into Sirius's face that had not been there since he came in off the road. "I have watched a great many people learn magic and I have never watched anybody learn like this. Whatever else is true about that woman's articles, she got one thing right by accident, and I am going to say it once and then not embarrass either of us again. There is going to be a place near the top of this world with your name on it, if you live to reach it. Family behind you, more raw ability than the year above you has between them, a form of magic nobody else possesses, and a head on you that frightens grown men. That is not flattery. That is a list."

"I am doing what there is to do," Edward said, and let it go at that.

The gloom had come most of the way off Sirius by then. He glanced at the window, found the light going, and picked his wand up off the table, and the Order member came back into his posture.

"I cannot stay. Dumbledore needs to hear what we did not find, and then somebody has to decide what we do about Fudge."

He stopped in front of Edward on his way to the door and his voice changed completely.

"Listen. I know what you are. You are steady, and you are stronger than anybody in this house is comfortable admitting, and you are not going to sit in a chair for eight weeks because you were asked to. I have given up pretending otherwise. So I am not going to tell you to do nothing. I am going to tell you that whatever you decide to do, the first thing you settle is how you get out of it."

"He is lying still and that means he is building something, and when it comes it will come at this house and at you before it comes at anybody else. You are the last of that family besides me and I have exactly two relatives left in the world." He put a hand out. "If you go anywhere, you take Kreacher. He is worth three grown wizards in a corner and he can take you out of one whether you agree with him or not."

"I will take him," Edward said. "And I will not gamble."

Kreacher came forward from where he had been not-polishing the same fork for a quarter of an hour, and drew himself up to the whole of his four feet.

"Kreacher goes where the young master goes, and Kreacher will not come back without him. The blood of the House of Black does not end while Kreacher is standing next to it."

Sirius looked at the elf for a moment with an expression that was very difficult to read, gripped Edward's shoulder once, and went out.

The house closed up behind him and got quiet again.

Edward went to the window and pulled an inch of the curtain aside and stood there looking at a sky the colour of dishwater.

He did not know where Voldemort had come back, and nobody who had been in that graveyard had thought to look at the headstones. But he knew four things about the working itself, and one of them had been said out loud in front of him while Pettigrew was shaking too badly to hold a knife.

Bone of the father.

He went into the library and turned the key in the door.

The candle on the corner of the table came up when he touched it, and he laid three books out flat and started at the beginning.

The man had spent his whole life on blood, and half of his own was Muggle, and he had never once been able to leave it alone. That was not a detail. That was the shape of him. And a resurrection needs the father's bone, which means the father's grave, which means a place with a name attached.

Riddle. He found it in the third book, in a genealogy of Muggle families that the house had kept for the purpose of knowing which of them not to marry: Tom Riddle, gentleman, of Little Hangleton, dead along with both his parents on a single night some fifty years ago, no cause ever established, no charge ever brought.

Edward sat back.

A village in the north with no wizards in it, a mansion nobody had lived in for half a century, and a family plot with three Riddles in it. Remote enough that a dozen people could Apparate in at midnight and nobody would report it. Muggle enough that anything strange afterwards would be filed by Muggles as weather.

And for a man like that, standing in his father's graveyard to take his father's bones out of the ground and come back alive out of them - Dumbledore had used the word arrogant about him more than once, and it fitted. It was not merely convenient. It was the point.

He went further back into the stacks and came out with something better: a chart of the magical disturbances recorded across Britain over the last century, the kind of thing the old families kept and the Ministry pretended not to want. He fed magic into the parchment and the marks came up.

London, repeatedly. The Gaunt place, faint and old and refusing to fade. And Little Hangleton, burning bright, dated 1943.

Edward looked at that for a long time.

Fifty years ago something had been done in that village heavy enough to leave a scar on the country that had not healed since, and there was really only one thing that leaves a mark of that kind, and a boy of sixteen had been at school not far away.

A resurrection needs more than ingredients. It needs somewhere with the right weight already in the ground.

He closed the chart, and went to find the elf.