Chapter 235: Blackstone

The wind on the Highland coast came at them sideways off the sea with grit in it, and it was cold in a way that August had no business being.

They came down on open ground a quarter of a mile short of the castle, on heather burnt brown, with the cliff running away to the left and nothing whatever in any direction but rock and wind.

Blackstone stood at the edge of it. It was low and heavy and the stone of it was near black, and something had been grown up the walls that was not ivy: a dark purple creeper that put out a faint shine of its own even in daylight. The whole building had been made deliberately unpleasant to look at, which was a thing Edward had noticed about certain old families and had never understood.

He had one hand closed round Kreacher's wrist. He got no further than turning his head toward the castle. The ground went off underneath them.

There was no explosion and no light worth speaking of, only a sensation like a sheet of glass drawn upward between his arm and the elf's, and then a pale violet line running through the space where they both stood and dividing it into two spaces. Kreacher's hand went out of his.

"Young - "

The rest of it did not arrive, because a second working came up under the elf on its own and there was a hard flat crack and a wash of white, and where Kreacher had been standing there was heather and nothing else. Gone: not killed, because Edward would have felt that, but taken up and thrown a hundred miles or two hundred, wherever they had aimed it.

And in the same second, the entire moor lit up.

Black runes came up out of the ground and the rock and the space between them, hundreds of them, in rings inside rings to the limit of what he could see, and the pressure arrived a half-beat behind the light like being put under water. Edward tried to Apparate on reflex.

There was nothing to move into. Space had gone solid all around him; it was like putting a shoulder against a wall and finding that the wall extended in every direction including the ones that had been open a second earlier. Half a mile of moor, sealed at every edge, with him standing in the middle of it.

Laughter came from behind a spur of rock about thirty yards off, and it did not sound as though the man had been waiting long.

Four figures came out and spread as they came, one to each quarter, and they did it in the unhurried way of men executing something they had rehearsed twice that morning.

The one in front had a heavy face and a grey moustache and had been in Azkaban twice, and Edward knew him from a picture in a Ministry file that Sirius had not meant to leave lying about. Antonin Dolohov did the killing that other people were too squeamish for, and had done it for twenty years.

His wand came up, and his eyes went over Edward, and what happened to his face after that was worth watching. There was recognition first, and then something that was almost embarrassment, and then a great deal of rage arriving on top of both.

"You."

"Dolohov." Edward's wand was in his hand and his hand was entirely steady. "It has been a while."

"A while." The man's grin opened and something began to hiss at his wand-tip. "I have spent all summer wondering which clever little Auror went crawling round the Riddle house. And it is you. At the meeting last winter I took one look at the crest on your robes and I thought, here is a Black boy come to sign on with the Dark Lord like his family always does, and I told Fenrir to leave you alone." The grin got worse. "I have been reproaching myself about that since June."

"You should have been."

The scream came from the left before Dolohov could answer it, and it came out at a pitch that hurt. Peter Pettigrew came round the rock with his whole body shaking and his eyes red at the rims.

"It is HIM. Black. It is him, Antonin, it is him - "

He got closer than any careful man would have, and the words came out of him in a flood, four years of them, held in and turned over and gone bad.

"You and Potter had me out of a bed I had slept in for twelve years! Twelve years I was safe and you two put my name in the Prophet and every Auror in Britain on my back! In Albania you nearly finished the whole thing before it started! And the graveyard - the graveyard - we had Potter, we had him standing there, one cut and the Master would have come back whole, and you threw the boy a Portkey!" His voice tore. "Do you know what he did to me afterwards? A whole night. A whole night on the floor of that cave, and I could not stand up the next day, and it was because of you."

"Yes," Edward said. "That was rather the point of it."

Peter made a noise that was not a word.

"Today you die. Today I get to watch it and I get to give what is left of you to the Master, and it will not be quick - "

"You people talk a very great deal." Edward's mouth moved into something with no warmth anywhere in it. He had already counted the four of them, and the ground, and the distances, and had spent most of Pettigrew's speech doing it. "Four wands, a sealed moor, a fortnight of preparation, and you have used all of it to arrive at a conversation. Was that the plan, or is that simply what happens?"

Dolohov stopped grinning.

"Crucio!"

The silver-green came out with a sound like a saw going into wet wood, straight at the middle of Edward's chest.

And at the same moment the two on the flanks moved, and they were not students. The heavy man on the right was Crabbe's father and the heavier one on the left was Goyle's, and both of them had been doing this since before their sons were born.

"Reducto!"

"Depulso!"

Two dark beams came in from either side with enough behind them to take a wall out, sealing the ground left and right.

And Peter, who had circled while he was screaming, put his wand out from under his sleeve at Edward's back and used something thin and green that was meant to open a throat.

Three sides and no gap. It is what Death Eaters do to a lone target and it is why lone targets do not survive them, and a competent Auror caught in the middle of it would have been dead or finished inside two seconds. Edward moved once.

He put his left toe against the turf and went three feet sideways without a word spoken and without lifting his wand to do it, and the Cruciatus went through the space where his sternum had been and struck the heather forty yards behind him, and the heather went black. He landed already turning, and his wand drew three short flat arcs, and he did not raise his voice.

"Expelliarmus. Expelliarmus. Expelliarmus."

They went out so close together that they sounded like one spell.

Three wands came out of three hands at once and went up and over, turning end for end, and came down thirty feet away in the scree with a clatter that carried across the whole moor.

Crabbe went down on one knee with his wrist clamped in his other hand, swearing. Goyle simply stared at his own empty fingers. And Peter sat down hard in the heather with his mouth open and no sound coming out of it, and everything that had been in his face a minute ago drained out of it and left the rat behind.

In one exchange, three of the four had nothing to fight with. Dolohov's expression had come apart entirely.

"That is not possible. You are fifteen years old and that is not - nobody casts three of those at three targets - "

"You are asking a great many questions for a man who came here to do a job." Edward brought his wand across and let the fire come up out of it, and it did not go outward. It went down. "Flame Whip."

The gold-red hit the ground and ran along it like something with an intention, split in two, and went for the men who had lost their wands.

The lashes came up around Crabbe's ankles and Goyle's together and hauled, and both of them were dragged four yards and put hard against a standing boulder, and the fire went round them twice more and set. It burned the robes where it touched and it did not burn through. It held them there against the rock with their arms pinned, and the smell that came off it was wool and singed hair and a good deal of shouting.

Edward did not look at them again.

He turned the whole of his attention on the one man out there who still had a wand, and let the gold-red climb around his own body until the light of it was moving on the black wall of the castle a quarter of a mile away.

Antonin Dolohov had killed a great many people and had never once been looked at the way the boy in front of him was looking at him now, which was with attention and no particular concern. Something went in him.

"Avada Kedavra!"

The green came off his wand and crossed the ground at the speed such things cross it, which is to say that there is no dodging it once it has been cast, only before.

Edward had gone before it. A non-verbal levitation took his weight backwards and down, and the green passed over his chest by a hand's breadth and struck the boulder behind him, and the rock did not break: it went grey all through in the space of a second, the way a plant goes when it has been dead a week.