Chapter 234: The Bait

Edward had been wrong about one thing at Little Hangleton, and it was the thing that mattered.

There had not been one man left in that house. There had been two, and the second had spent the entire afternoon lying flat in the dust of the attic floor above the boarded windows, holding his breath under a Disillusionment Charm laid on by somebody a great deal better at it than he was, and had watched a boy in a grey cloak walk the perimeter, crouch over a grave, and draw something invisible into a phial.

He had watched him wipe his own traces on the way out, too, which was the detail he made sure to include.

An hour after the crack of Apparition had gone off the hill, he had a mirror out of his robes with a twisted mark cut into the frame of it, and his knuckles had gone white round the handle. In a cave under the fells of northern England the Dark Arts lay so thick that they left a taste.

Voldemort was on a heap of stone and bone that somebody had arranged into the shape of a chair, and he had his fingers in the scales along Nagini's back, moving them slowly and without any particular attention. The snake lay across his feet in a long coil with her head up.

Peter Pettigrew came across the floor at a half-run with the mirror held out in front of him like something hot.

"Master. The man at the Riddle house - three days ago somebody came onto the hill and went over the graveyard. He says the work was careful. He says whoever it was wiped his own residue behind him before he left." His voice had gone up at the end of every phrase. "It was not an Auror, Master. Aurors do not clean up after themselves."

The red eyes came up and the whole cave tightened. Somewhere at the back of it a fall of small stones came down the wall.

He had no intention of going north himself. Little Hangleton had been finished with in June and the sentries had been left there for precisely one purpose, which was to tell him if anybody came looking. Somebody had come looking, and had thereby saved him the trouble of going out to find them.

"So." The voice came out unhurried, and there was something almost pleased in it. "Somebody who could find that house, and get past a watcher, and think to sweep the ground behind himself on the way out." He tapped one finger on the arm of the chair. "Which means ability. And it means he has been thinking about where I have been. At some length."

He stood, and took up the yew wand, and touched it once to the floor.

A shape came up out of the stone in ghost-green and turned there, resolving into a black-walled castle standing on a cliff edge with the Highlands running away behind it.

"Then we will give him a road to walk down."

He turned his head.

"Wormtail. Knockturn Alley, tonight and tomorrow and the night after. The brokers, the fences, the ones who drink where the Ministry does not go. You will let it slip that I am at Blackstone Castle in the Highlands, that my strength has not come back to me as it should have, and that what I have around me there is thin." His voice did not change. "You will do it badly. Drunkenly. Like a man who has said one word more than he was paid to say. If it looks arranged, he will not come."

"Dolohov." The three figures standing at the edge of the light had not moved since he began. "Take the men off the Riddle house and go north tonight. I want the ground round that castle prepared properly. Spatial partitioning first, so that anything he brings with him is separated from him the instant he arrives. Forced translocation to put whatever that is a hundred miles away. And then the anti-Apparition work over the whole of it - my design, not the Ministry's - so that when he understands what has happened to him there is no floor under him."

"Split him off. Seal him in. Then kill him at leisure."

Peter went down on both knees with his forehead nearly touching the stone.

"It will be done exactly as you say, Master. We will have him and we will bring him to you."

"Yes." Voldemort was looking at the turning green shape of the castle rather than at anybody in the room. "I find I would like to see him. Whoever has taken it upon himself to go digging in my past."

The image went out. At the other end of the country, Edward was doing the one thing everybody in his life had told him not to.

Grimmauld Place had begun to feel like a lid. Sirius was going between the house and Hogwarts and sleeping in neither, and coming back greyer each time. The Prophet had run three pieces in nine days, one of them under the headline The Senile Delusions of Albus Dumbledore, and another about Harry Potter and the friends who help him frighten the country. And of Voldemort himself there was still nothing - no attack, no mark, no name, week after week, like a stone gone into a lake and not one ripple coming back.

Waiting was losing, and it was losing slowly enough that nobody had to admit to it, which made it worse rather than better.

So he went to Knockturn Alley alone, with the crest on his robes hidden and a Confundus laid over the shape of his own magic so that anything sensitive enough to notice him would decide he was somebody unremarkable, and he sat in the corner of a tavern with a butterbeer he did not drink and listened for two hours.

It came to him in the third hour, from a table eight feet away, at precisely the volume that carries across a room without appearing to try.

"- and I am telling you it came out of the middle of it. Blackstone. That castle up on the Highland coast."

"Rubbish. The Ministry says he never came back."

"The Ministry says. He is up there and he is not right yet, is what I heard. Whatever they did to put him back together, they did it wrong, and there is not above a dozen of them keeping the place. There are men round here already talking about what a thing like that would be worth to the right buyer."

"There are men round here who want to die badly and have found a way."

Edward's hand closed round the handle of the mug and did not move.

It was too good. That was the whole of it. He had spent a month getting nowhere and had spent three days at Little Hangleton finding out only where Voldemort had been, and here, four days later, in the one place in Britain where a boy in a cloak could go to hear things, was a complete answer: a location, a weakness, and a garrison strength, delivered at conversational volume by somebody who wanted to be overheard.

Every part of it was bait and he could see the hook from where he was sitting. He also had nothing else and was not going to get anything else, and a trap laid for you is still a trap laid by somebody - which means men sent out to build it, and materials, and a place that somebody thought was worth using.

He put four sickles on the table and went out without finishing the drink. Kreacher was in the hall when he came back, and had evidently been in the hall for some hours.

"Young master." The ears were shaking. "You went out. You went out alone, and you did not say - "

"Knockturn Alley, and nobody saw my face." Edward pulled the cloak off and put it over the banister. "We are going to the Scottish Highlands. There is a place on the north coast called Blackstone Castle and I have just been told, very carefully, that Voldemort is sitting in it and that he is weak."

The elf went absolutely still. "That is a trap."

"Yes. It is a very good one."

"Then the young master will not go." It came out flatly, which was new. "Kreacher has said yes to everything. Kreacher went to the mountain and stood in the snow for two hours and said nothing to Master Sirius afterwards. Kreacher will not take you to a place the Dark Lord has told you to come to."

Edward crouched down, which he had learned did more than argument.

"It is a trap and I am going to go and look at it, and I want you to understand why." He kept his voice level. "Somebody built it. That means people were sent north to build it, and that means they are standing in a specific place tonight instead of wherever they have been hiding for four months. I do not need to walk into the castle. I need to see what is around it and who is minding it, and then I need to be gone."

"And that is where you come in, because you are the way out. Not Apparition, not a Portkey, you. Whatever they have laid down for wizards, elf magic goes round it, and there is not a man in that company who will have given you a thought."

Kreacher's fingers worked in the front of his robe for a long moment.

"You will hold on to Kreacher," he said at last. "From the moment we arrive. And when Kreacher says the word, you will not argue with him."

"Agreed."

"Then Kreacher will take you." He put out a hand, and his jaw had set. "And if they touch you, Kreacher will do things the young master has not seen a house-elf do."