lomonaaeren

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Chapter Thirty-Two—Silver Runes

“So what do you want me to do, Riddle?”

Black was nervous and trying to hide it with bluster. But that was less annoying than it once would have been, when Tom didn’t understand the man as well. He nodded to Secrets of the Damned, spread out on the table in his office. “There’s a piece of folded parchment hidden inside one of the pages. I tried to cut open the page and fetch it out, but my power keeps curling back from it no matter how fine I make the tendril, and I don’t want to force more magic into the book in case I damage it. I think it probably needs someone of Black blood to pull it out, or you wouldn’t have been your mother’s first choice to tell about it.”

Black snarled. “Has it occurred to you that this kind of secret could be damaging, and that might explain why she was so eager to tell you?”

It had occurred to Tom, but he was confident his power could protect him against any traps that Walburga Black might have left in the book. He half-shrugged. “I’ll be the one facing up to the brunt of it, not you, Black.”

The man grumbled a moment longer, but then sighed. “What page is it trapped inside?”

Tom flipped to the right one and held it up by the edges of his fingers, using his magic to shine through the parchment and light it up. Black’s eyes widened. “I never would have seen it.”

Obviously, Tom wanted to say, but bit back on his instinctual response. “Can you get it out?’

“If your magic can reach into the space.”

Tom closed his eyes and dug the very finest threads of his magic into the page, both lighting it up and spreading out the dimensional space within the page. It was such intense, delicate work that he didn’t hear the first question Black asked.

“Riddle!”

Tom opened his eyes with a gasp, wondering whether he had applied too much power and lit the book on fire or something like that. But no, it was fine. Tom darted an irritated look at Black, who blinked but held his gaze. “What?”

“I just—just wanted to know when you want me to reach in.” Black gestured at the book.

Tom looked himself, and blinked. The page was a shining, fluttering mass of white motes of light, floating apart from each other with hazy spaces in between. Tom realized he was holding apart the molecules of the parchment, and checked his own surprise. He hadn’t planned to do it, mostly because he hadn’t known he could.

“Now,” Tom said quietly. The crushing weight of his own delicacy abruptly began to tell on him, and he wasn’t sure that he could keep doing it now that he knew what he was doing.

Black took a swallow of air and reached out with a hand that hummed with his own magic. It slipped between the hovering molecules and into the center of the page. Tom watched, breath pulsing in his lungs, as Black drew the folded parchment out.

Tom let his magic go.

The page rushed back together, and a small, sharp explosion sounded. Tom studied the book. It appeared to have several scorched pages, but otherwise, was none the worse for wear. He closed it and tucked it away, turning towards the parchment in Black’s hand.

“It’s a sacrificial ritual.” Black sounded more than a little sick.

“Who do you need to sacrifice?”

“A child.”

Tom frowned a little as he studied the ritual on the page. After a moment, he began to smile. “That’s not what it says, Black.”

“Oh? Are you already thinking of sacrificing Harry, then? He’s a teenage, so he’s not technically a child.”

Tom looked up and let himself visibly roll his eyes before he turned back to the parchment. “This is a ritual based in alchemy. Many alchemical ingredients have different names and meanings that link them to other branches of magic, such as Astronomy. It’s talking about sacrificing the sun’s child, not a human child.”

“That could still mean a human. Maybe a blond one. You’re not going after Malfoy’s son, are you?”

Tom didn’t say all the many things he wanted to say. He simply shook his head and murmured, “I wouldn’t do that, Black. Thank you for your help. You may go now,” he added, when Black seemed inclined to linger.

“If you sacrifice Malfoy’s son, I’ll tell Harry,” Black muttered rebelliously, but finally shut the office door behind him.

And Harry wonders why we still call each other by our last names.

*

“I’ll tell you when to duck.”

George grinned as he and Fred bent further down behind the table that Carol had placed across the far wall of her lab. It sparkled with wards and protections that they’d been studying in their classes, but they were still far away from managing to catch up on casting them.

On the other hand, their Potions work was coming along splendidly.

George listened intently as the glass flask broke on the stone floor, and exchanged another grin with Fred. Then they inched their faces up to the level of the table, and watched in glee as the bright green mist spread through the room. Loud bangs and cries accompanied it, the kind of thing that could utterly disorient an enemy in battle.

“Duck!”

They ducked again, beneath the level of the table, as a loud noise like a piece of metal breaking rang through the lab. Carol must have been casting wordlessly; George could see the shadow of her wand flicking on the floor between the table’s legs, but couldn’t hear anything.

Of course, the screams coming from the mist were loud enough that he might have missed something.

“Raise your heads again,” Carol said at last. “We were closer than last time, but it didn’t work the way we expected.”

George raised his head, and grimaced at the look of the air around Carol. The green mist seethed there, held barely away from her lips by the spells she must have cast to stabilize the air in the circle. Carol was regarding the mist with a wrinkle to her lips that said she didn’t know what had gone wrong, either.

“It started to asphyxiate you again?” Fred asked. He and George exchanged a dark look. Their battle potion was hardly going to work if it attacked everyone on the field, not just their enemies.

“Yes. But it lasted longer as an ordinary distraction factor this time before becoming so.” Carol glanced at them. “I believe that we may need to stew the pinecones for seven minutes instead of thirteen.”

George nodded. They’d been working with various magically significant numbers in their brewing, and thirteen had been the latest try, but there was no reason to assume it would be the final one. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Fred writing that down.

And at two, we’ll go to work on our map with Mr. Moony.

George grinned again. The Marauders’ Map had been an incredible thing, but they’d just used it like the original Marauders most of the time, to plan pranks and sneak around the school. When they finished their map of the Ministry, on the other hand…

Suffice it to say that Malfoy and his regime would be wishing for pranks by the time Fred and George and Mr. Moony were done.

*

Harry muttered under his breath as he considered the runes he’d drawn on the parchment. Yes, they were accurate to his dreams, as far as he could tell, but so far, they’d done nothing, and evinced no sign of magical strength, when he drew them. It probably came down to the way that he needed to arrange them, as with many ordinary runic arrays, but Harry hadn’t drawn them in the right sequence yet.

He closed his eyes and tried to remember his dream. Had the rune that looked like a modified Sowilo been above or below the others?

“Harry.”

Harry blinked and glanced over. “Hi, Dean.” The other boy didn’t visit often, given that he wasn’t in Gryphon House, but he was good enough friends with Harry that Harry wasn’t surprised to see him. Still, though, he didn’t usually see him with a greyish face and leaning over as if he was about to be sick. “Are you all right?” Harry added, getting to his feet.

Dean swallowed. “I—I did something.”

“Yeah?” Dean had turned out to be talented in art, and that was what he’d mainly pursued. Sometimes he drew art for the propaganda Theo wrote.

Dean took a deep breath and turned, waving at something behind him.

Harry heard nothing, and frowned curiously. He opened his mouth to ask what was going on, then closed it again when he saw what had come to stand beside Dean.

“What—how did you do that?” Harry breathed, staring at what seemed to be an enormous, perfect, totally real tiger crouched at Dean’s side.

“I was drawing it,” Dean whispered. “And I infused a little magic into my paintbrush, more than usual. And it came to life.”

“You didn’t cast any spells on it?” Harry asked, eyes never leaving the tiger. It stared back at him, eyes blazing green and impassively blank. But it also didn’t make any move to attack, or any motion at all other than its tail waving slightly.

“How could I have done that? It’s not like I want to point my wand at a tiger that is—somehow friendly to me.” Dean reached out gingerly and rested his hand on the tiger’s back. The tiger rumbled, a sound that might have been a growl, but still didn’t attack, and lay down, paws stretched out in front of it.

“Well, yeah. That’s true.” Harry blinked and stared. He hadn’t read anything about this, even in Disaster’s book, which had a pretty good record predicting odd magical phenomena. “Are you sure you didn’t do anything different when you were painting than you’ve done all the other times you’ve painted something?”

“Well, I was thinking about the revolution and wishing I had a talent that lent itself better to battle. You think that could have done it?”

Harry grinned. “I think you need to go and tell Professor Riddle right away.”

Dean shot him a sidelong glance. “Do you really believe that he’ll let me keep her?”

“Why wouldn’t he? As long as she doesn’t attack anyone else, she could be dead useful in fighting. Ha, dead useful, get it?”

“You’re hilarious, Harry,” Dean muttered, but he was smiling, and no longer looked as sick. “Right. Well, I suppose I’ll go tell him, and maybe if he won’t let me keep her, then I can draw something else that’ll still be deadly to our enemies but not as hazardous to our side.”

Harry laughed, and watched as Dean left with the tiger prowling beside him. Then he shook his head. It seemed Dean didn’t know Professor Riddle as well as Harry did.

Of course, Professor Riddle would want to verify that the tiger wasn’t going to attack anyone out of hand, but if he could confirm that? Why wouldn’t he let Dean keep her? And why wouldn’t he encourage Dean to use his talent to draw other things that could benefit their sides? Weapons. Traps. Creatures. Maybe even Galleons…

Harry loved being a war wizard, but he did have to admit that he envied Dean that talent. For a moment.

Then he sighed, and reminded himself that everyone would do what they could for the war, and they would have been much easier to defeat if their magic was all the same, and went back to wrestling with the stupid runes.

*

“Professor McGonagall? Can I talk to you?”

Minerva turned around, working hard to keep a pleasant expression on her face. It shouldn’t be this hard, not with one of Arthur and Molly’s children, but Ron Weasley had been consistently—different ever since he’d been Sorted into Slytherin. And he had asked her odd questions before in a way that made her think about his friendship with Draco Malfoy and regard him warily.

But it would have looked stranger not to answer the questions of a pureblood Slytherin boy who was best friends with Minister Malfoy’s son, so Minerva simply nodded and said, “Of course, Mr. Weasley. What did you want to know?”

Ron studied her with narrowed eyes. Minerva made sure to keep her gaze vague and somewhere in the middle of his forehead. It was extremely unlikely that he knew Legilimency, but “unlikely” wasn’t the same as “impossible,” as she had cause to understand.

“Did you like my brothers better than me?”

“I feel as if I understood them better, since they were Sorted into Gryffindor and under my care for multiple years,” said Minerva, fighting hard to hold onto her vague look. “But I wouldn’t say like better, no. The mischief they caused often disrupted my class.” The twins had been good at Transfiguration, but inclined to employ it only in the limited ways that interested them, and Percy had tackled it with the stiff competence that they did everything else. Minerva didn’t think she’d had a Weasley student who enjoyed the subject for its own sake since Charlie.

“Percy caused mischief?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Weasley. I thought we were talking about Fred and George only.”

“I wasn’t.”

“All right, Mr. Weasley. Then I would say the same thing for your brother Percy, as far as my understanding him better. But while he was good at Transfiguration, he wasn’t a fan of it for its own sake, and only did exactly as well as he needed to on the OWL and NEWT, no more than that.”

Ron blinked at her. Minerva blinked back, and waited for the next question. After all, she was a half-blood. It wasn’t her place to question a pureblood or try to get them to speak before they were ready.

“Mum always says that I need to be more like Percy.”

Duty-driven instead of friendship-driven. It might keep you safer. At least, that was the only way that Minerva knew to interpret those words. She gave Ron a small smile. “You should be like yourself, Mr. Weasley. Consider the words and facts in front of you and divine the correct action that way.”

“Is that what you do?”

“Remember my blood status,” Minerva murmured. She hated the words she spoke, but she had to be able to speak them and survive. There were larger factors than her own pride at play. “I cannot question what’s in front of me too closely, lest I stumble through over a question that a pureblood would intuitively understand. But I can give encouragement to those with superior intellects to question.”

“Because we can make a change?”

“Exactly, Mr. Weasley.”

Ron frowned at her one more time and left the classroom. Minerva didn’t let herself exhale in relief, because of who might be around to hear. She simply shut the classroom door and went about getting ready for the fifth-year Ravenclaws and Gryffindors, who would be arriving any moment now.

*

Ron stared at the closed door of the Transfiguration classroom, and then walked slowly up the corridor in the direction of Charms, his next class. There would be less fuss about a pureblood arriving late than a half-blood, so he took his time, and his mind worked at what McGonagall had said.

Nothing openly treasonous. Nothing that suggested she had let his brothers escape.

On the other hand, maybe she had been too neutral when talking about students who had been part of her House and who she said she had liked and understood, unlike him.

Ron sighed and rubbed his forehead. He wished that he could see to the bottom of everyone’s politics the way Draco and Mr. Malfoy could. Seeing clearly sounded a lot better than doubting and wondering and worrying.

*

“Minister Malfoy, you need to see this right away.”

Lucius sighed and turned around from the latest stack of parchment that estimated the Muggle world’s readiness for attack. He supposed it would be good to clear his mind briefly. So far, he hadn’t imagined anything that would compensate for the Muggles’ overwhelming numbers. “Yes, Goyle, what is it?”

Alicia Goyle, whom he had added to his research team looking into Peverell because she had published a book exploring the origins of some ancient magical legends last year, solemnly held out what Lucius recognized as an account ledger. He picked it up and flicked through it with a frown, only relaxing when he saw the Ministry seal on the front page. He had been about to ask what it was doing out of Gringotts.

On the other hand, the ordinary pages filled with ordinary numbers didn’t tell him why Alicia had thought he should see it. He shot her a questioning look.

“The first column on the fifty-first page, Minister Malfoy. I believe you will find it enlightening.”

Lucius grunted at the way she was presenting this, but he had been the one to train his staff to do that. He would rather see the data for himself and contemplate it, drawing the conclusions out like crystals growing in his own brain, rather than having someone else’s report prejudice what he was seeing.

He flipped to page 51 and glanced down the first column. Then he glanced up at the top, and then back down towards the bottom again. “These expenses seem reasonable for this second-rate school,” he said. “What did you want me to see, Alicia?”

“Reasonable for a second-rate school that presumably admits the Muggleborns who would have gone to Hogwarts, and most of the half-bloods as well?”

Lucius started to say that most of those children would have been harvested, but he had to pause as he thought about that. The Hunts had been more restricted in the last few years, of necessity. He didn’t dare widely advertise that his harvesting ability was gone, which meant he couldn’t lead them, and thus couldn’t benefit from the magic they gathered. “You think Riddle’s been lying about the expenses?”

“I think that he’s been taking in too many students for those to be the real numbers, Minister.”
\
Alicia was a simpler soul than many of those in his service, but sometimes it took a simple soul to spot the obvious, Lucius thought. He tapped his fingers for a moment on the page, then nodded to her. “All right. You want me to authorize an investigation of the school and its funding?”

“Yes, Minister.” Alicia clapped her hands once and beamed at him. “A surprise inspection, so he won’t have any chance to get up to nasty half-blood tricks.”

The more Lucius thought about it, the more reasonable it seemed. He couldn’t even remember the last inspection of Fortius. Before he’d become Minister, certainly. The school took so small a proportion of Ministry funding that it hadn’t been deemed necessary. And it was a convenient dumping place for Mudbloods and half-bloods it might have proven less worth the trouble to harvest.

It might be a convenient hunting ground, now.

“All right. Gather your forces, Alicia, and write the justification. But take as much time as you need. They don’t know that we’ve seen them, and they aren’t running anywhere.”

Alicia smiled at him and turned away to practically run out of the office. Lucius regarded the column of numbers again.

What have you been doing, I wonder, Tom Riddle? Holding your own harvests? Or your own leechings, which wouldn’t be as noticeable to Muggle parents?

Lucius smiled a little and set the ledger aside. He did enjoy foiling the hopes of other people who might have tried to pursue their own power growth at the expense of his own. There was room for only one great power in magical Britain.

And his name was Grindelwald.

*

Tom sat back and considered the alchemical ritual with a small, grin smile on his face. Yes, it was hideously complicated, and although the instructions looked straightforward at first, they were anything but.

First, they were written in the poetic language of High Alchemy, which Tom thought Dumbledore might have been the last British practitioner of. Tom knew some of it—knew, for example, that quicksilver was referred to as “the moon’s half-quick child”—but he didn’t know some of the other phrases. Was gold the sun’s child, or was it topaz, or was it something else? Did the Astronomical references mean the ritual had to be completed only at certain phases of the moon and certain alignments of the sun and the like, or was that only more poeticism and it could be done anytime?

And there were no measurements or proportions anywhere. Tom knew he needed quicksilver, but not how much.

Tom sighed and glanced at the ritual instructions once again. There was a gap in the circle that it showed, one that would be drawn with powdered silver—but how big the circle and how much powdered silver was necessary for each link of it, the page didn’t say. The ritual said unhelpfully that a “sacred rune” should be placed there.

It had led Tom, during his spare time over the past few weeks, through increasingly rarer runic alphabets and books, trying to locate any runes that might have been referred to that way. He had discovered that virtually every set of runes had been described that way at some point or another, by someone or another.

And he had to work on the alchemy and the runes involved in gaps between his talks with the goblins, his Defense classes, his private lessons with Harry, his meetings with other allies, and his spying on Lucius. Along with plans to try and fetch the Elder Wand and Grindelwald from behind Malfoy Manor’s wards.

“I do not have time for this,” Tom muttered. It was literally the truth.

The parchment simply lay there, as it had since Black had pulled it from the book, and sparkled with its secrets. Tom made a disgusted noise and pushed it away from him, standing up to slide it into a hidden drawer concealed near the top of the desk. He paused when someone knocked on the office door.

“Come in,” he called.

Harry entered with a parchment in his hands. It was large enough to look like a map, Tom thought, studying it, although he couldn’t see any of the front of it from the way Harry was holding it. Or one of the parchments that Jacob gave his students to work on their runic arrays.

Tom was out of patience with runes for the moment, no matter what intriguing interaction Harry might have demonstrated they had with war wizard magic. He made his face as patient and welcoming as he could. “Harry, if you’ll excuse me—”

“I have to show you this.”

Harry’s face was determined in a way that he usually only showed when he’d been practicing some new war wizard spell and got it to work. Tom narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. He would much rather Harry show him such a spell before unleashing it too much on his own. “All right. Show me.”

Harry thrust the parchment towards him. Tom considered it. There was a runic array there, but not any of the patterns that he was familiar with. In fact, the runes seemed scattered in a random pattern across the parchment, the only possible link between them being a rough half-circle. And even then, there were runes above and below the invisible line that Tom thought he had traced.

“What is this?”

Harry was silent. Tom looked up, and found Harry smiling at him.

“I can’t tell you too much about it,” Harry murmured. “But you haven’t noticed the particular runes, have you?”

It was true that Tom had paid attention to the array and not the individual runes, because the array was more likely to tell him what Harry was talking about. But now he looked back at them, and—

He stared. “Where did you get these?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t say.”

Tom glared at him. “Harry, if it was out of that section of library books that I told you not to touch—”

“I promise it wasn’t. These runes—” For an instant, Harry’s tongue tangled around his teeth in a way that made Tom wonder if someone had cast a spell on Harry to bind him to silence. He would find out who it was and tear them apart. But before he could get too far into his plans for revenge, Harry took a deep breath, straightened out his tongue, and said, “These are connected to my war wizard powers. I just can’t tell you how.”

Tom was about to snap that of course Harry could tell him how. Then he remembered Disaster’s book and sighed. “Something connected to advice that you got from a certain book, perhaps?”

Harry’s return gaze was relieved. “Yeah. I just want you to take a look at these and see if you can use them. Or if you know what I should be able to use them for. I think I have them in the right array, but I don’t know what they would do, exactly. Please, sir,” he added a second later, as if remembering that Tom was still his professor.

Tom studied the array in silence. But although hope tugged at him—perhaps these runes were the ones that were missing from the alchemical ritual—he couldn’t see anything immediately familiar or useful about them.

“I will have to spend some more time with them,” he said quietly, and laid the parchment down across his desk. “Do you mind if I borrow it?”

“Of course not, sir. I’m glad that they look as if they might be useful.”

“They will, I’m sure.”

Harry smiled at him and turned away, but halted with his hand on the doorknob. Tom had started to bend his head to study the runes again, but he looked up when Harry hesitated instead of leaving. “Yes?”

“When did you want to start the war, sir?”

“I had no particular timeline in mind,” Tom said quietly. This was an important conversation, he was sure, although he didn’t know for sure why. “I hoped it would be when more of our students grew strong enough to defend themselves, but I always knew it might be before then. Malfoy’s summoning of Grindelwald has advanced the timeline considerably. Why?”

“I think—I think it might be coming soon.” Harry glanced at him, and Tom caught his breath at the way Harry’s eyes were glazed with an odd white sheen. “I think—I can sense it.”

Because he is a war wizard whose powers might be used in war? But Tom doubted Harry would be able to answer the question with any clarity. He inclined his head. “Thank you for the warning.”

“You’re welcome, sir.” Harry’s eyes were normal again before he slipped out of the room.

Tom gazed down at the runes for a long moment. He hoped he would have time to complete the alchemy ritual, if these were the right runes, before the war began.

But then, nothing by and of itself was key to winning the war. Tom had always known he would have to give up even the secrecy about Fortius when the time came. He need not fear that not completing this alchemy ritual would lose them the war. It would probably only provide them some advantage.

But every advantage was to be seized, nonetheless.

Tom bent down and focused once again on the odd runes, trying to grasp all the differences as well as the similarities he could find between them and the ordinary runes that most witches and wizards were taught to handle.