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Chapter Forty-Five—A Delicate Dance

“We do not like what you are doing.”

Harry smiles, a little touched that Lyassa is telling him that with flat eyes and a lashing tail, but not actually seizing him with magic to try and force him to stop it. “I know. And I appreciate the Speakers’ tolerance.”

“Why are you doing it?”

“Because I healed Theo halfway, but not completely. And no one who follows me is going to suffer for it.”

Lyassa studies him as if he’s said something new. Harry doesn’t think so. It’s only the same kind of thing that he’s been saying for years and months and weeks and days. No one should have to bear the brunt of the wounds that Theo has. Maybe he hasn’t stated it so explicitly in terms that Lyassa understood before, though.

“There are other ways to heal him,” she says at last.

“But you didn’t know of them. And you only cared that I wouldn’t corrupt my magic as a Parselmouth who connects you to this world. You don’t particularly care about Theo dying.”

Lyassa grimaces. “Only for the impact it would make on you,” she admits. “Well, no, I am sorry that the child is suffering under the Soul-Breaker. That is an agony no one deserves except our dearest enemies. But you should not sacrifice yourself and all the potential that you have in our alliance for his sake.”

“I will do as I please.”

Lyassa gives a long sigh, and her tail lashes hard enough to make the floorboards of Severus’s quarters vibrate. Then she says, “From what you have told me, there is indeed another way. Take up the stone that your old Headmaster sent you.”

“I don’t know what the price would be. He could have imbued it with compulsions that would make me act a certain way, and I wouldn’t have a chance to resist them like the Imperius because I would have absorbed the stone into my own magic.”

“How did you learn all this?”

“It’s amazing how hard one can study when properly motivated.”

Lyassa remains silent for one moment more, and then nods. “I know no other method that can help you, but we will not oppose you.”

“Thank you,” Harry says, and if he doesn’t count on help from the Speakers, at least he can count on no envenomed fangs striking him in the back.

*

“I thought we’d try something different today.”

Hermione looks up from her book on Horcruxes. She hasn’t paid that much attention to what Harry and the others are doing in the study group, because she considers her mission more urgent. But there’s a sharp note in Harry’s voice that worries her.

Theo shifts beside her. He’s been different since Harry did whatever he did to cure him, quieter, more intense, and more forgetful. But now he’s watching Harry with a narrow-eyed look that reminds Hermione of the way he was before Wormtail got to him.

“What is it?” she whispers. “Do you know?”

“Harry didn’t tell me.”

“That doesn’t mean you don’t—”

“Expecto Patronum!”

Harry’s stag prances out of his wand and into the middle of the Room of Requirement. Hermione feels herself relaxing without meaning to. Being around a Patronus is always like that. And at least it doesn’t seem to be anything Dark that Harry and the rest of the group are going to be working on.

“You know this spell, of course,” Harry says, and strokes his stag’s muzzle for a second before he takes a step back. “But did you know what happens when you look at it like this?”

He raises his hands. Blue-black flames sprout along his arms, and Hermione’s not the only one who lets out a startled little scream. Harry smiles at them and whirls one hand up, which makes the flames break away from him and begin to dance around the stag in a circle.

Hermione looks at the Patronus through the lens of the fire and feels her stomach drop. It’s a huge, glittering black animal like this, with ivory-colored tusks projecting out of the sides of its mouth and antlers that are the color of blood-stained bone.

And its eyes are as red as Voldemort’s.

Before Hermione can get too alarmed, Harry snaps his hand down, and the flames vanish. He turns and seems to meet the eyes of every person in the room. Hermione is sure that at least he looks at her.

“I have the Potter family Gift,” Harry says simply. “It reveals the Dark or death-like nature of anything that I look at through the flames.”

Hermione narrows her eyes. She’s sure that isn’t the whole of it. For one thing, that sounds like a pretty limited Gift, although she supposes it could be useful if someone wanted to become a Curse-Breaker or something.

“And you can teach us to do it?” Pansy Parkinson is standing up across the room, her hands gripping the sides of her robes as though she needs to use them to beat out the flames. “Or just reveal secrets to us?”

“I can teach you to make a Patronus that looks like my stag through the fires.”

Hermione starts and glances instinctively to Theo. But Theo shakes his head, eyes locked on Harry. Harry didn’t teach Theo or anyone else in Slytherin that spell, then (because Hermione knows that he would have taught Theo first, before Blaise or Malfoy or anyone).

“And is it still a Patronus, then?”

Harry’s smile twists across his face. He takes a step back and summons his Patronus again. While the stag is still standing in the middle of the room, a shimmering creature of light and goodness, Harry casts the flames again, but this time they swam across the space between him and the stag and sink into its body.

Hermione gasps as she watches the silvery fur twist into black. When the stag stands up after the flames have swept over him, he’s even bigger than he was in the vision Harry conjured for them, and his eyes glitter orange-red and fanatical. He raises his head and bugles in silence, his tail swishing back and forth for a moment.

Harry conjures a target against the far wall, a wooden figure shaped like a Dementor. The stag lowers his antlers and charges.

Hermione watches as the antlers hit the wooden figure. For a moment, she thinks she sees blue flames dancing around them, too, and then the figure—

Ceases to exist. Suddenly it’s not there. And Hermione is losing even the memory of what it looked like. She would suspect the stag of somehow Memory Charming her if she didn’t know that was impossible.

Then again, it seems like most of what the stag is doing is impossible. A Patronus shouldn’t be able to affect physical things that aren’t actually Dementors, and its hooves shouldn’t clang like iron shoes on the floor as it prances back over to Harry and lowers its head to nuzzle his brow.

Over the Horcrux scar, Hermione can’t help noticing.

“See?” Harry murmurs, his hand smoothing up and down the stag’s heavy dark neck. The Patronus tosses his head, showing no sign of fading. “I can teach you to conjure the flames for yourself. It’s a Gift that can be shared, taught. You just have to have someone who inherited it teach you first.”

“And then our Patronuses will become like that?”

“And your Transfigurations, if you’re making animals out of objects. It’s clear to me that they have to live first, for my Gift to affect them.”

“Because your Gift is part of death?”

Hermione didn’t mean to speak like that. Her words ring out and die into a silence that’s sharper and colder than it was just a little while ago. But Harry smiles at her, and even if his eyes are as bright as the stag’s, Hermione is sure that it’s her best friend smiling at her.

“Yes,” he says. “That’s exactly why.” And he takes a step back and looks around. “Who wants to learn first?”

*

Severus sinks down into the chair that stands opposite the door into his office and calls out, “Come in,” when Harry knocks crisply on it.

Harry strides in, and then stops and stares at Severus. Severus leans a little forwards. It wouldn’t surprise him if Harry does sense something different about him. Severus knows that only this afternoon, he was full of despair and not hiding it.

“You know something,” Harry says.

“A way to fully cure Mr. Nott.”

“So do I.”

Severus swallows. “You do?” He wonders if Harry could somehow know about Bellatrix, but he doubts it. There would be no reason for him to look in that direction, or think Sirius would release her.

“Yes.” Harry sits down in the chair in front of Severus and stares at him. Blue-black flames seem to burn in his eyes, but Severus turns his own head to the side and they’re gone. “A ritual sacrifice.”

Severus closes his eyes.

“What?”

“Sirius fears that you may sacrifice yourself. He learned of the ritual from Bellatrix when we released her and compelled her to tell the truth with a potion. The ritual requires a powerful sacrifice, and—”

“I wouldn’t do that to you.”

Harry’s voice is so soft that Severus allows himself to just sit there for a long moment and make sure he heard the words. Then he opens his eyes and looks at Harry. “Truly?” he whispers.

Harry nods. Then he stands up from the chair where he was sitting and comes up to put a hand on Severus’s shoulder. The world seems to spin around Severus, and for a moment, he thinks that he resembles the child and Harry the—father.

That’s not supposed to be the way it is. Severus opens his mouth to correct the imbalance, to put it back together the way it should be, but Harry squeezes his shoulder and sends the thoughts fleeing.

“I know you need me too much,” Harry whispers. “That you care about me too much. And so do Theo and Ron and Hermione and Blaise and—lots of people who are my friends and some who aren’t even my friends but are depending on me to keep them safe from Voldemort.” He’s still for a long moment, thumb rubbing bracing circles on Severus’s shoulder, and then he swallows and asks, “Will you stand by my side and help me set up the ritual?”

“You need not ask.”

“I always want to ask. I didn’t ask enough about what Theo’s transformation would cost him, or his determination to follow me. I’m trying harder to ask, now.”

Severus stands and lets Harry’s hand slip down until he’s holding it tightly. “I know that Mr. Nott does not resent you for—”

“I know he doesn’t. I know. But because he doesn’t resent me, that makes the price he paid even heavier. The price I want to avoid having him pay if at all possible. Do you see?”

Severus nods slowly. He thinks it’s the mark of a good leader to care so deeply about the people who serve him. It’s not something he saw with Albus, and of course never with Voldemort, but they are hardly good examples.

“And you think you will be able to avoid having anyone else pay the price?”

“Yes.”

“Whom do you intend to use as sacrifice, then?”

Harry smiles fiercely. It makes his eyes glow with a flame that reminds Severus more of the way that Lily used to look than the blue-black flames that were illuminating Harry’s eyes before.

“Theo’s father.”

*

“Do you think you will be able to pass your Charms OWL with the current rate of practice you’re doing, Mr. Potter?”

Harry turns around, blinking a little. His thoughts were so far away, on the preparations he needs to make and the delicate dance of information and misinformation he’s doing with the shadow leopard, that what Flitwick’s saying seems impossibly remote.

Then he understands what Flitwick is saying. He shakes his head. “No, sir.”

“No? Then don’t you think you should practice more?”

“I don’t think that OWLS are that important, sir. Not compared to what’s coming.”

Flitwick stares at him in silence, eyes sharp and focused entirely on him. Harry sighs and waves a hand at his friends to leave the classroom and let him talk to the professor. It seems like he’s been doing that a lot lately.

From the look in Theo’s eyes, he doesn’t like it even if he doesn’t have any memories of why, but he lets Blaise and Draco herd him out.

“Can you tell me why one of my students doesn’t care about the first important exam of his life, Mr. Potter?’

“Because I have to fight Voldemort,” Harry says, noting absently that Flitwick frowns at the name but doesn’t flinch. “And because I have to prevent any more curse damage from occurring to my friend Theo. Those have to be my most important concerns.”

Not to mention finding a way to deal with the Horcruxes, and keep his bargain with the Speakers, and ensure that Severus can help him without interfering with the ritual. But they can come second.

“The burden the wizarding world has placed on you is unfair, Mr. Potter, but…”

“Yes, sir?”

“That’s all the more reason to have a normal time in school, and a normal future, so that you can plan for more than just a battle that you’ll fight someday.”

Harry laughs softly and shakes his head a little. Flitwick blinks. “Sir, I know that people can take their OWLS later in life if they need to. A lot of people did it after the first war because their families went into hiding with their teenage children or they were too scared to go do it at the Ministry. I’ll do that if I need to.”

“If you need to?”

“Well, I might be dead. So then I wouldn’t need to.”

Flitwick rocks in place. Harry cocks his head. Has his Charms professor not thought about what will happen if Harry has to face Voldemort and he’s unprepared? That’s funny. Harry really thought that most of his professors had, the way Severus and Headmistress McGonagall have. And either they want to help him or they made their peace with it.

He thought.

“All right, Mr. Potter,” Flitwick whispers, sounding exhausted. “If you think that you need to concentrate on things other than your Charms OWL, I can certainly understand that.”

Harry nods to him, and walks out of the classroom. Theo and Blaise are both waiting for him, along with Daphne. Draco stands at an uncomfortable distance, but still cranes his neck around when Harry comes out of the classroom.

“What did he want?” Blaise asks.

“To remind me that this is my OWL year and I should think about things other than the defeat of Voldemort.”

“So he’s volunteering to fight him in your place?”

Harry laughs and walks down the corridor with his friends behind him. He’s aware of Theo’s wary, watchful eyes, of Daphne’s cool scrutiny, and Draco trailing after them as if he’s not sure he’ll be welcome.

It’s good to be reminded that there are people around him who know what’s really important.