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Part Six

Theodore Nott frowned at Potter over the top of his book, then went back to looking down at the pages as Potter glanced in his direction. But when he thought enough time had gone past that he could probably look up again without encountering that intense gaze, he peeked—

And found Potter looking straight at him.

Potter half-shook his head, and then stood up and told his friends something Theodore couldn’t hear at this distance. Potter walked into the aisle of shelves closest to his library table, while catching Theodore’s eye once more.

Theodore waited nearly a minute, to make it look natural, although none of Potter’s friends were looking at him anyway, and no one except perhaps Granger would be alert enough to notice if they had. Then he stood and went after Potter.

The other boy was waiting for him two shelves down, head tilted back as if he was studying the tomes on curses. He turned around when he heard Theodore coming, and Theodore slammed to a halt at once.

Here, back in the dim but not impenetrable gloom of the shelves, Potter was different. His usual quiet, modest expression was nowhere in evidence, and his eyes examined Theodore in a way that Theodore had never been examined in his life, with a thoroughness that—impressed Theodore. And promised pain if he was crossed.

“Why were you looking at me?” Potter demanded.

Theodore sucked at his lip for a minute, but his intuition, which he trusted, warned him this wasn’t the time to make a sharp reply like he would have if another of his Housemates had asked him that.

And in a way, it was a fair question. Potter had ignored him, along with almost everyone else in their year, since they’d started at Hogwarts, and they’d ignored Potter. Why break through what had worked so well now?

Potter gave an impatient little shift, and Theodore abruptly received the impression that one of the most dangerous things he could ever do would be to bore him or disappoint him. Or lie to him.

Nothing for it, then.

“I saw you practicing Fiendfyre in that classroom not far from the common room,” Theodore said. “You didn’t ward the door all the way, and I only saw a glimpse, but I know what it was. It’s one of my father’s favorite spells. Why in the world is someone who just seems to like studying and avoiding his fame practicing such a Dark spell?”

Potter stared at him, then closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead, muttering to himself. Theodore listened attentively, but could only make out, “fucking wards.” At least that reassured Theodore that the partially-warded door hadn’t been a trap of some kind to bait him into exposing himself.

Then Potter’s eyes opened, and Theodore learned what it was like to have your belly turned to ice water.

“What do you want?” Potter demanded softly. “I know how to make sure you never tell anyone about this, but you could have spread the word already if that was what you wanted. Why wait to approach me?”

I know how to make sure you never tell anyone about this.

Theodore licked his lips and decided to ignore those words, and the threat behind them, for now. “Because I think that you’re a lot more powerful than I ever knew,” he said bluntly. “The only reason my father can control Fiendfyre so well is that he’s practiced with it extensively. You can’t possibly have that many years of practice—” he ignored Potter’s mutter of “you’d be surprised”—“but you can control it. And you’re much more comfortable with Dark Arts than your public reputation suggests, Slytherin Sorting or no. I think you could be the best choice. The best fit.”

“The best fit for what?”

“For someone to follow.”

“Oh, come the fuck on, Nott.” Potter was keeping his voice low, which Theodore was grateful for, since it made it much less likely that someone would come and interrupt them, but Theodore could still hear the contempt in it. “Have you ever heard of the virtues of thinking for yourself? Not mindlessly casting around for someone to follow?”

Theodore laughed sharply, and saw Potter staring at him with a frown. Theodore shook his head. “That shows you really are the same kind of person as my father—”

“Do not compare me to a Death Eater, Nott.”

Theodore shut up. There were shadows on either side of him, along the library shelves, that had suddenly turned and were looking at him. Theodore clenched his hands and didn’t tremble, but it was a near thing. He found it hard to breathe.

And then the pressure eased and he could breathe without stress, but it was only more evidence for his theory.

“I didn’t mean that you’re like him morally,” Theodore said, although he had to wonder how much Potter was if he cast Dark spells with ease and didn’t mind permanently shutting up a fifteen-year-old. “I meant that you’re so powerful magically you don’t see what it’s like for the rest of us, weak or average wizards.”

Potter’s eyebrows went up. “Go on,” he said after a long moment.

“We have to find people to protect us because the powerful ones can take whatever they want.” Theodore heard the bitterness creep into his voice, and normally he would have worked to keep it out since it was a weakness, but this time he ignored it. Oddly enough, he thought it might endear him to Potter. “Our society’s set up that way. No one would have vilified the Dark Lord if he’d won, not after a generation. The history books would be rewritten, and people would have worshiped him and followed him. The way they worship you and follow you now. Or would have if you’d done anything noteworthy since your first defeat of him.”

“You think it was a first defeat.”

“I did grow up with a Death Eater father,” Theodore said evenly. “Someone who could have been a Dark Lord in his own right, but who chose to bind himself to follow a still stronger wizard instead. Then he thought he would never be tossed aside and made to fend for himself in a world colder than he could handle. He said the Dark Lord was immortal, and I believe him.”

“And yet, you don’t want to follow him.”

“My father won’t protect me. He thinks I should stand or fall on my own, and that will prove me worthy of the Dark Lord’s protection.” Theodore tucked his hands into his sleeves and shook his head. “So, I have to make sure that I can shelter under the shadow of someone else. Someone who might protect me just because. Someone who is as powerful as the Dark Lord but is better than he is morally.”

Potter studied him for a long moment. Then he sighed and asked, “Why do you think I haven’t spent a lot of time around you or the other Slytherins in our year?”

“Because we do have Death Eaters as parents, most of us,” Theodore said promptly. “You didn’t know if you could trust us.”

“That, and I didn’t want to become friends with you and then hesitate to kill your parents in battle.”

Theodore swallowed. It still hurt, somewhere far down inside himself, to think about his father dying. He remembered being held close, escorted through the Ministry as if in the shadow of a dragon, read to at night—before his mother had died, and all those things had ceased.

But he had made his choice. And his father had made it beyond clear that Theodore couldn’t count on him for protection unless he demonstrated magical power that Theodore knew he didn’t possess, and certainly wasn’t about to sacrifice his soul or sanity in a ritual for.

“You don’t have to worry about that with me, Potter.”

“All right,” Potter said, his eyes on Theodore as draining and piercing as Theodore had thought they would be. “I’ll hold you to that.”

And when he had Theodore draw his wand for an oath, the only thing Theodore felt was relief.

*

Luna Lovegood wasn’t blind. She knew that Harry Potter was avoiding her.

Oh, she was welcome to study at his table in the library that was otherwise reserved for his friends, Weasley and Granger and Longbottom and Susan Bones and others. But Harry would smile at her, and then his eyes would slide away. He would nod when she talked, but not respond. And while he never made fun of her, he also didn’t pay close attention.

It hurt, although Luna wasn’t sure why. She had plenty of other company, what with the nargles and the Snorkacks and Daddy’s letters about all of his expeditions.

She had tried asking Harry’s other friends about it, but none of them seemed to notice or care. Granger had said it was because Harry didn’t want to hear about imaginary creatures, but that couldn’t be it, because all the creatures Luna talked about were real. Weasley looked red and uncomfortable, and Luna knew he was closer to Harry than anyone else, but he probably couldn’t tell her because it was a secret.

Finally, one day, when Harry was walking ahead of her on his way to the Slytherin common room and Luna was coming out of Charms, Luna decided to ask him.

“Harry!” she called, and ignored the way that other people turned to stare at her. If they didn’t want to hear her talk to Harry, then they didn’t have to listen.

Harry’s smile was faint when he turned around. “Hi, Luna. What is it?”

“Why don’t you talk to me the way you talk to your other friends?”

Luna had thought it was a simple question, but Harry’s face grew long, the way her mother’s sometimes looked in Luna’s dreams. He glanced around, then ducked down a side corridor, motioning her to follow him. Luna did, and was delighted to find that there was a tapestry with daisies there that she had never seen before.

But she could talk to the daisies later. Right now, she was intent on getting an answer. “Why?” she asked again, as she saw Harry putting up a Silencing Bubble. She was probably going to get a real answer, if this was about the secret that Luna knew Weasley was keeping for him.

“I’m going to tell you something I haven’t told anyone else,” Harry said quietly, solemnly. “And then I’m going to ask you a question. And if you answer it the right way, we can be friends.”

Luna clasped her hands together and beamed at him. “I’m very good at riddles. I never have a problem getting into the Tower.”

Harry looked pained for a second. Then he said, “I know that you miss your mother so much you’ve thought of becoming a necromancer to raise her.”

Luna started back. “How did you know that?” she whispered. “I didn’t even tell the nargles that.”

She shivered as she thought of the ways that Harry could have gained access to her mind, and stared at him. “Are you part of the Rotfang Conspiracy?” It was the worst accusation she had ever made about anyone, but she had to make it. Her father would never forgive her for not standing up for the right thing.

Harry closed his eyes and shook his head for a minute. Luna didn’t know whether he looked more pained or amused. “No. I know things that no one else can know. And I’ve only shared bits and pieces of what I know with anyone.”

“Why can’t anyone have the whole picture?”

“Someone can. I do.”

“Oh, that makes sense.” Luna nodded, but then her mind went back to the fact that she didn’t know Harry wasn’t part of the Rotfang Conspiracy. She had his denial, but nothing more than that. “But why do you think it’s bad if I become a necromancer? Would you take to the Webs of Light to fight me?”

Harry mouthed the words “Webs of Light” to himself, but went on before Luna could explain. “How long do you think it would take to become a necromancer who’s truly capable of raising the dead? Not Inferi, but truly raising them, as they were?”

“It would take a long time,” Luna said uncertainly. It was one reason she hadn’t given much thought to becoming one, even though she would like her mum back. “Decades? Centuries?”

“Right.” Harry clenched his hands for a second. “Do you know what a Horcrux is?”

“No.”

“It’s a means that some people use to try and be immortal.” Harry half-bowed his head to stare her in the eye. “You would have to murder someone, and the murder would split your soul and attach that shard of your soul to an object. It’ll keep you immortal, but it’ll drive you insane.”

“And you think I would do that so I could stay alive and do all the research I need to bring my mother back as she truly was.”

“I know you could.” Harry drew his wand, and his hands were very tight on it. “Would you be willing to swear an oath that you would never make a Horcrux, Luna? No matter what the temptation was?”

Luna nibbled her lips. “What about becoming a necromancer?”

“I’ll take that as an oath, too, if I can get it. But the oath about not making a Horcrux is the most important one.”

Luna watched him. Harry was tense, she thought, and he would jump like a startled sweethorn if she tried to do anything other than give him the oath he was asking. Or maybe he would Memory Charm her, or walk away and never talk to her again.

Luna was sure the last one would be the worst. She didn’t want Harry to jump.

She nodded and held out her hands in front of her. She knew he wouldn’t want her to swear a wand oath, not when they didn’t have a binder. An oath with hands would be the best one, and show that she meant him no harm. She didn’t know what he would do if she drew her wand right now.

Harry stared at her with his lips slightly parted, as if he had expected he would need to do one of the other things after all, and then he lowered his wand and tucked it away. His hands were shaking with eagerness as they seized hers. Luna smiled at him.

“We’re going to be great friends, you’ll see,” she said.

“You’re right, Luna. More people should say that to you more often.”

“Well, now someone will.”

*

Draco shivered and gripped the letter that his mother had written to him. It sounded almost as it always did, talking about the sweets in the box she had owled him and which ones were new, how she couldn’t wait to see him over the spring holidays, how she was planning a trip to France to get her hair done...

Almost.

But he could see from the way that she didn’t mention anybody visiting and the blots of ink on the page that something was wrong.

But who could he talk to about it? His mother had shed many of the friendships and contacts that his father had cultivated after Lucius’s death. Draco didn’t himself know any of the people she called friends, and he didn’t trust them to be subtle enough in inquiring about her. And the people around him…

Draco curled his lip with a sneer. His father had praised Severus Snape to him when Lucius was still alive as a clever man, one who knew exactly what to do and how much everything cost, but Draco doubted that. Just look at how quiet the man had become in the last few years, not even baiting the Gryffindors the way he had in Draco’s first and second year! And he refused to engage with Potter, even though Draco had thought Snape hated him. No, Snape was no source of help or comfort.

And his fellow Slytherins? Crabbe and Goyle were so stupid they needed someone to do their thinking for them. Theodore wasn’t, but he had subtly aligned himself with Potter, and Draco wouldn’t go to someone on Dumbledore’s side. Trying to get Blaise to care about anything but his own amusement was a fool’s exercise.

Pansy depended on Draco to be her strength in the way that Crabbe and Goyle depended on him to be their brain. Millicent was almost as detached as Blaise, obsessed with numbers the way she was, and Daphne Greengrass was still bitter that Draco had expressed interest in her younger sister instead of her. Tracey was a half-blood and thus not someone a pureblood could explain being in trouble to.

The older Slytherins would use anything he confided to them for gossip, and while he could get the younger years to shut up with threats, it wasn’t like they would be helpful, either.

“Something wrong, Malfoy?”

Draco started badly, and turned around to glare at Potter, who was standing behind him with his eyebrows raised, waiting, as if they talked to each other on a regular basis and Draco hadn’t kept an appointment with him or something. Draco mustered a sneer. “Go the fuck away, Potter. I wasn’t talking to you.”

“You weren’t talking at all, Malfoy. You were gripping that letter as if you wanted to rip it apart.”

Potter’s eyes flickered down to the letter, and Draco promptly hid it under the pillow, scowling at him. And at himself. Why did he have to show such weakness in the face of a boy who would undoubtedly take advantage of it?

“Did you want something?” Draco snapped. They were the only ones in their bedroom at the moment, but that could change any second. And he didn’t know why Potter had come up here in the first place instead of spending most of the day in the library with his motley collection of misfits the way he usually did.

“I wanted to help you, if I can.”

Draco promptly straightened his back. “I would never accept help from someone with a Mudblood mother, Potter.”

He thought there was probably going to be a duel then, which he was looking forward to. Everyone knew what Potter did to people who said that word.

But although Potter breathed out noisily, he didn’t draw his wand. He only shook his head and looked weary. “The fact that you base everything on blood status makes me think you’re stupid, Malfoy. But I see that you have a good enough brain in your classwork. I have no idea why you’re such an idiot about this.”

Draco glared at him. “Why are you watching me?”

“You make such a spectacle of yourself it’s hard not to.”

Draco gripped his wand in his pocket, but the way Potter stood kept him from drawing it. No one had ever actually told Draco about seeing Potter in a duel, but there had to be a reason for Theodore’s sudden shift of allegiance from the pure values that Slytherin House represented and which his father had always stood for. Power was probably it. “How can you prove that pure blood isn’t a good thing, Potter?”

Potter laughed at him, the sound scraping along Draco’s bones, and held out his hand.

Fire sparked and danced in his palm, a dark, oily flame that came from nowhere and led to nowhere. Draco stared at it, and then up at Potter, whose eyes shone in a way that made it seem as if the fire cast shadows instead of reflections.

“I’m a half-blood,” Potter said, clenching his hand. The fire went out. “And I can do that. Can you?”

Draco scowled. “No, but the Dark Lord could.”

“Your precious Dark Lord’s a half-blood, too.”

Draco leaped to his feet, stung beyond endurance. “Take that back, Potter!” he barked, and aimed his wand at him.

Potter raised his eyebrows, and didn’t even aim his hands at Draco to command the force that pulled him back onto his bed and spread-eagled him, snatching his wand from his hand. Draco howled, despite himself, with fear, and was silenced by a thick invisible gag pressing into his mouth.

The only sound louder than Draco’s heartbeats in his ears was the calm, deliberate noise of Potter’s footsteps.

He walked over to the edge of the bed and knelt there with one knee, looming over Draco in his bound position. The smile on his face was one Draco had never seen before. He would never have dared challenge Potter if he had.

“Listen to me,” Potter breathed out. “Because I’ll only say this once, and after that, it’s up to you what you do with it.”

Draco nodded hastily, or as best as he could nod with the force constricting his throat. He wanted Potter to let him go and go away. This was worse than Potter reading the letter or knowing for sure that Draco was worried about his mother.

“Voldemort—oh, stop flinching, for the love of Merlin—is the son of a Muggle named Tom Riddle and a woman named Merope Gaunt. Yes, he’s a descendant of Slytherin. But the last descendants of Slytherin were a bunch of inbred semi-Squibs by then.” Potter smiled a little. “Ask your mother about the Gaunt family, and see what she says.

“He grew up in the Muggle world.” Potter’s voice grew quiet and meditative. “And he had reason to fear and hate the world war that was happening at the time. But he channeled that into hatred of Muggleborns, too, and decided to claim that he was a pureblood even though he wasn’t. He killed a girl with a basilisk and only stopped releasing it from the Chamber of Secrets once it became obvious that Hogwarts would be shut down if the attacks continued and he would be sent back to the Muggle world. It was never grand ideals, all just personal selfishness.

“He made up his own name out of the one he bore that he hated so much. He was named after his Muggle father, you see.” Potter flicked his fingers.

Above Draco’s face, fiery letters came into being, glowing. TOM MARVLO RIDDLE.

I AM LORD VOLDEMORT, they said a moment later, after Potter had rearranged them with a flick of his fingers.

Draco stared at them, and felt doubt tremble down deep inside him, the first time he’d felt that since his father’s death.

“Yes, that’s what he is,” Potter said. “At heart. A sulky teenage boy who made up his own pseudonym out of an anagram. You can follow him if you want to, but I hope you’ll use your brain and be smarter than that.”

He clenched his hands in Draco’s sight, and all the bonds were gone at once. Draco rolled over to his side, gasping out with force as he was finally able to breathe freely and speak again.

“Feel free to spread that knowledge all you like,” Potter said indifferently. “Maybe it can convince some people even if it can’t convince you.”

He was leaving when Draco rolled back over, but Draco had to get the last word, had to do something to avenge his own humiliation. “Potter! Why don’t you tell people this nonsense about the Dark Lord’s real identity, if you believe it?”

Potter looked back at him and blinked once. Then he said, “I suppose I have to downgrade my estimate of your powers of observation. I’ve been spreading it through Slytherin for the last two years, Draco.”

And out he went.

Draco lay there for long moments before he finally picked up his mother’s letter and the broken pieces of his life again.

*

“I don’t like the expression on your face, Harry.”

Sirius felt his unease grow when Harry didn’t answer, just bowing his head a little and tapping his wand on the piece of parchment in front of him that he was working on. It had a series of circles and numbers that was at least the equivalent of the Arithmancy Sirius remembered doing when he and the others put the Marauder’s Map together. But when he had tried to look at it, it had made no sense to him. The equations had the wrong answers. The circles blended together and overlapped the way they would never be able to do in Arithmancy.

“I don’t like it,” Sirius repeated firmly. “Tell me what’s going on, Harry.”

“I already told you I couldn’t do that.”

Harry’s voice was so soft and firm that it made a chill go down Sirius’s spine. It sounded the way Harry had sounded when he first came to Azkaban and freed Sirius, not the way it had when Harry had initially forbidden Sirius to go with him after the cursed ring. He wouldn’t be yielding this time.

“Harry, I’m your godfather,” Sirius tried.

“My recently declared innocent godfather who spent nine years in prison.” Harry’s head snapped up, and he stared at Sirius. “Don’t you think I know how easily I could have lost you? How much I want to protect you?”

Sirius swallowed. “You shouldn’t have to do the protecting. I’m the adult around here.”

“Sirius, you know very well that I can protect myself. And no, I’m not going to tell you why.”

Sirius clutched his hair for a second. It would have been so much easier if he knew why Harry was like this. He thought he’d proved by now, over and over again, that Harry could trust Sirius to keep his secrets.

But on this one, it seemed he wouldn’t budge. He ignored Sirius now, and turned another page of parchment over, and drew another series of overlapping circles. Sirius studied them in hopes of some clues, but all that he saw was wrong in the realms of Arithmancy and Runes.

“You’re doing something dangerous,” Sirius tried.

Harry nodded, without looking up.

“Why?”

Harry paused for a long second, tapping his quill against the table while he seemed to consider something. Sirius held his breath. This was the most consideration Harry had given to anything Sirius had said since he’d returned home for the summer after his OWL year. Maybe he would actually answer this time.

“I’ll tell you,” Harry finally said, looking up. “But you’re going to have to swear an oath not to tell Remus.”

“Why not?” Sirius was a little flabbergasted. It was true that he and Harry hadn’t told Remus things like Harry getting Sirius out of prison early or about when they went after the cursed ring or how powerful Harry was or…

Well, okay, they hadn’t told Remus a hell of a lot, really.

“Because he would feel like he had to go straight to Dumbledore,” Harry said, and raised a hand against Sirius’s automatic protest. “I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing. There are a lot of circumstances where it would be the right thing to do. But in this case, Dumbledore would either decide he had to interfere and handle everything himself, which would be disastrous, or he would decide I had to die.”

“What?” Sirius croaked.

“You heard me.”

“I don’t understand,” Sirius tried, desperately.

“You will once I tell you the secret. Which I won’t, unless you swear that you won’t tell Remus.”

Harry’s eyes were merciless, and Sirius doubted they would get less so if he delayed. Reluctantly, he drew his wand, and Harry guided him through the wording. It seemed to apply only to this secret, at least, so if Sirius was someday able to tell Remus more of the truth, there would only be a small hole in the rest of what he was saying.

“The night Voldemort attacked Mum and Dad,” Harry said, his voice shrinking a little the way it always did when he talked about James and Lily, “he left a Horcrux in me.”

Sirius recoiled so hard that the couch rocked on its legs, and Harry nodded at him with a small, sad smile. “Yeah, I know. I didn’t want to believe it at first, either. But it’s true. And the ring we destroyed—”

“A Horcrux,” Sirius breathed. “He was insane, making two.”

“He made six, Sirius.”

The whole house seemed to rock and reel this time, although with Sirius’s nausea, not because his magic was flaring out of control or the like. He stared desperately at Harry, who just looked calmly back at him, as if he hadn’t said something—well, it wasn’t just criminal. It was beyond Dark. Sirius wasn’t sure he had the words for it.

“How?” Sirius whispered. “How do you know?”

Harry shook his head. “That’s part of what I still can’t tell you. But I gathered the four other Horcruxes and destroyed them before the ring. I knew more about where they were and what kinds of defenses they had in place. That’s why I had to become Bellatrix’s heir when I was in Azkaban. She had one in her vault. That was the only way I could think of to go in and retrieve it without having the whole goblin nation after me.”

“Of course, one must think of not starting a goblin rebellion,” Sirius said, but faintly. His heart wasn’t in it.

Harry leaned over and squeezed Sirius’s hand. “Believe me, Sirius, I am doing my absolute best to get the one in me out of me.”

“How, though?” Sirius demanded. “I’ve never even heard of a living Horcrux, and my parents told me all kinds of horrible things when I was young. That’s how I even know about them in the first place.”

“Divination.”

Sirius leaped to his feet. That was why the circles and the equations didn’t make sense! They weren’t meant to be Arithmantic circles or equations at all! Harry was doing something that—

But there Sirius ran out of knowledge, and stared down at the circles. “I don’t know anything about this method of predicting the future,” he admitted. “I’m surprised you didn’t take Divination, if you were so interested in it.”

“Trelawney’s a true Seer, but she’s a prophet, and that’s not the kind of thing you can teach someone to do,” Harry said calmly. “I wanted to take Arithmancy and Ancient Runes because I’d never taken them before.”

“You never took Divination before, either.”

Harry gave him a funny little smile. “Well, I feel like I did, from hearing other people describe it,” he said, and went back to his circles.

Sirius sat back and tried to let Harry work, but he was fidgeting soon enough, and Harry kept giving him amused look after amused look, which wasn’t good for his concentration either. After he did it for the fourth time, Sirius finally broke. “How can Divination help you get rid of a Horcrux shard from you?”

“That’s one of the things I can’t tell you.”

“Harrrrrrry.”

“No, Sirius.”

Sirius flinched. That last word had been like the slam of an iron door, and the air turned cold and heavy around him in a way he had learned to recognize. Harry was on the edge of deep anger.

Harry glanced at him and sighed, and the feeling vanished. He reached over with his free hand—the right one was still drawing circles—and squeezed Sirius’s hand.

“I share more with you than anyone else,” he said. “Please don’t resent what I can’t share with you, Sirius. I promise, everything concerning you—the fact that you’re free from Azkaban and acquitted, and you can live here with me, and you’re friends with Remus again—is the best thing in my life.”

Sirius licked his lips. “Can you tell me why you can’t tell me?”

“I won’t tell anyone anything about Horcruxes that I haven’t already said,” Harry murmured. “The knowledge—if it spreads, it isn’t actually that hard for people to connect the dots and figure out how to do it.”

“Oh.” Sirius considered that, and even though he wanted to say he would never make a Horcrux, at least he knew he wasn’t the only person included in Harry’s information ban, which was a small comfort. “I suppose it would be hard to deal with a whole bunch of people with Horcruxes, even if they only made one each, right? Or if they made living ones?”

Harry’s hand closed down on his with the strength of stone, and Sirius winced. Harry let go at once, and patted his hand, but kept his face averted.

“Something like that,” he agreed in a taut voice, and Sirius knew better than to push him.