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Chapter Fifty-Six—Begin

“Come along, Tarquinius.”

Tarquinius lets his smile widen across his face, lets his head bob as he follows Lyassa. The stupid bitch has no idea. No idea that he’s been slipping the leash of her will for months now, and he can feel it light and coiled around him.

A sleeping snake. Not a waking one.

He will end this tonight. He will end her control. He’s decided. They haven’t left the house together since she captured him. So this is something unusual, and that is more likely to mean that Lyassa is distracted, and so, in return, he is more likely to be able to wrench himself free and then turn on her.

But not kill her, Tarquinius counsels himself as they come to the Apparition point and Lyassa commands him to Apparate them to Hogsmeade. That would take more time and magic than he would be able to accomplish, even if she’s surprised. No, he must only wound her so much that she can’t follow and can’t regain control of him, and then escape and hide himself.

And come to that, as much as he hates her, Lyssa will not be the primary target of his vengeance when he is finally free. That will be his traitorous son, followed by Harry Potter.

I will have it. I will have my vengeance.

When Lyassa commands him to walk up the main road of Hogsmeade and towards the school, Tarquinius does feel a mild curiosity. But it blooms into wonder when she orders him through the gates.

She is taking him to his son and Potter. Tarquinius will have the chance to not only slip free but to snatch them and take them with him, to where he can destroy them at his leisure.

Truly, there are gods, and they have favored him.

*

“Why do you have ink on your fingers?’

Harry turns his head and smiles at him, and part of Theo wants to cower away. Of course he can’t be sure, with so many of his memories burning embers in the depth of a burning abyss, but he doesn’t think he has ever seen Harry smile like that before.

It makes him look wild and fey. His dark hair curls around his ears, and his eyes shine like gems, like the giant emerald that Theo knows he’s secured for the ritual. When he moves his hands, little sparks of silver magic seem to trail his fingers.

“Are you all right, Harry?”

“If you knew.”

Harry’s voice is quiet, but it still seems to echo through the common room. Theo glances around nervously. Most of the other Slytherins aren’t watching them, seeming to have got used to Harry and Theo having private conversation like this, but Blaise is staring at them with narrowed eyes. Pansy might have been, too, but her mother urgently called her home for some reason.

Draco is watching, though, leaning against the fireplace mantel and frowning.

“If we knew what?”

“Not all of them. Just you.”

Theo couldn’t help the frisson of warmth that ran through him, even though he also suspected that Harry should probably be telling more people than just Theo about this. “All right. What don’t I know?”

Harry smiles and holds out a hand. Theo doesn’t expect him to do anything, just thinks he’s making a gesture, until a large green spark charges from between Harry’s fingers and blows apart on impact with the floor. Theo jumps and swears before he can stop himself.

“At the moment, the power of the ritual fills me up.” Harry tilts his head back, and a wind that Theo can’t sense makes his hair blow and spiral around his face. “I have to do something to release it soon.”

“How can that be happening, my lord? The ritual hasn’t begun yet.”

“No. But the potential for its beginning fills the castle, Like the storm before the lightning.”

Theo swallows. He’s never heard of a ritual that can do that, and thanks to Father, his education in rituals is unfortunately complete. He tries to wrap his mind around the power that will be unleashed when they finally begin, and can’t.

Harry smiles and then stands. “We need to go to the room where the ritual will be held, Theo. It’s time.”

As Theo follows Harry, he waves a hand at Draco and mouths I’ll see you soon at Blaise. He doesn’t know if he will see Blaise soon, but it’s the only kind of farewell that he can envision himself leaving his friend with.

It occurs to Theo only afterwards—long afterwards—that Harry neatly deflected Theo’s question about why he had ink on his hands.

*

“Everyone is coming. Everyone is here.”

Harry smiles a little as he looks around the dungeon room where the intricate circles lie on the floor. He’s restored the illusion that protects the last two. He can’t show those to Severus or Lyassa before the ritual starts. Both of them are clever enough to figure out what they do. “Not everyone. And one person is here who shouldn’t be.”

“Who?”

Harry turns and gently lifts Lion from his shoulder, watching for a moment as his pet’s wings flutter. “You. You have to go.”

“You left me outside when you had the bad woman in her office, and look what happened!”

Harry laughs a little. Trust Lion to remember that. “I know, but this time, I’ll have plenty of people with me, to protect me if something bad starts happening. And the ritual could affect you, because you’re a snake and Lyassa and Voldemort will both be here. Anyone who speaks Parseltongue in the room will be vulnerable.” Not the whole reason, but the one that makes Lion’s head droop in acceptance. “I’ll come and get you as soon as the ritual is done, I promise.”

“But what if you die?”

“I won’t.”

Truth, not that anyone else in the room can understand Parseltongue, since Lyassa hasn’t arrived yet. Theo is leaning against the far wall, and Severus is watching him with carefully cool eyes, and Sirius is pacing back and forth near the circle that Harry has already told him is his.

Lion coils around Harry’s wrist for a moment, forming a bracelet shape with his head resting over his tail, and squeezes hard. Then he drops to the floor and slithers out of the room.

At the same moment, Lyassa enters, with Tarquinius behind her. Harry turns with a smile to welcome them.

“You are smiling wide enough to look like a crazy human,” Lyassa promptly tells him.

Harry laughs, and notes the way that Tarquinius flinches. Interesting. He didn’t know Lyassa gave him enough freedom to do that. Maybe she’s only doing it now because they have an audience who don’t all know that Tarquinius is under her control. “I promise that I’m not,” he says.

“How are you going to summon the Dark Lord?”

Severus cuts in, his voice cool and distant, as if he thinks that he needs to make people pay attention to the proper procedure. Harry turns around. “I don’t think that will be a problem,” he says, and draws an athame from his robe pocket.

People shift and focus on him. When Harry asks her to, Lyassa directs Tarquinius to step into his circle, and takes her own place, swaying back and forth in silence. Sirius and Severus move into their circles, and Theo. Harry turns to face the binding circle that will contain Voldemort’s spirit.

It’s only a distant disappointment that he can’t use this ritual to destroy Voldemort. But Harry knows that the sacrifice has to have a connection to Theo, and for all that Voldemort caused the ruin of Theo’s mind, he didn’t impact him that much.

Harry raises the knife and slashes it across the scar on his forehead.

More than one person in the room cries out in horror. Or just surprise. Harry squeezes, and the drops of blood from the athame run down onto his hand, thicker than they should be, and touched with black.

Of course, that’s what happens when he cuts himself with an athame enchanted to slice down to the Horcrux.

Harry waves his wand and enchants his blood so that it will fly through the air and land in the binding circle. The circle immediately flares with a wild ecstasy of power, red and black lancing through each other, and making the Sowilo runes at the various corners shine.

Harry will have to tell Ron that he did a good job with researching the circle.

“Come, Voldemort, who was Tom Marvolo Riddle, Jr.,, called the Dark Lord and You-Know-Who and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named,” Harry hisses. True names are one of the most powerful means to bind someone in a ritual. He thinks that might be one reason, among many, that Voldemort changed his name.

But Harry did ask Severus if Voldemort went by any other names, and he couldn’t think of any. Harry is fairly confident that he got them all.

A house of power begins to build up from the binding circle, although from the way everyone else is string, they’re confused by the intricate patterns of it. Harry isn’t. He can see the repeated runes he spent time carving into the stone, and at the top, the Sowilo rune that will act like nothing so much as a giant butterfly net.

The net does its work, and scoops up the wandering spirit who can’t have got too far from Harry as it is, because they share a connection at the soul. The net then dumps the spirit into the middle of the binding circle.

Voldemort screams, a high sound that makes Sirius clap his hands over his ears, and bangs around the inside of the runes, trying to escape. Harry smiles. Everyone in the room is concentrating on the spectacle.

Absolutely everyone.

They won’t notice when he bends over and feeds some of his power into the emerald sparking smugly in the center of the pattern. And if they do, they’ll assume it’s because controlling Voldemort is tiring him out.

Harry smiles wider.

*

The boy has impressive power.

Tarquinius has to admit that. It’s not everyone who would be able to design a spirit-trap of this complexity, one that won’t permit the Dark Lord to escape even if he manages to possess someone.

But then, Tarquinius always knew Potter had power. It’s the reason he extended the hand of friendship to him in the first place.

And look how Potter repaid him.

Tarquinius readies himself to move. Lyassa is distracted by the screaming, but not enough for him to risk it, not yet. And he can’t keep his gaze from turning to Theodore, who stands in a circle meant to protect him from the ritual and the magic cascading through it, not from another participant in the ritual.

If I can break free and grab him…

But if he cannot, if he cannot take and torment Theodore the way he deserves, or capture Potter, then Tarquinius will settle for killing his son.

That will torment Potter enough, in the end, considering everything he has sacrificed to bring this ritual together. He’s already bending over, feeding his magic into the emerald in the center of the circles, obviously weaker than Tarquinius thought.

Tarquinius settles, and waits.

*

Sirius tries to keep from bouncing on his toes. He knows what he has to do to save Harry, but he’s not sure when the best moment to interfere would be.

At the beginning of the ritual, when Harry might be most distracted? Or nearer the end, when he’ll be exhausted from channeling the magic?

It makes Sirius feel disloyal to be thinking this way. But his first loyalty has to be to his godson’s survival, not his godson’s insane ideas.

*

Severus waits with his hands loosely folded in front of him. Harry has raised the protections around Voldemort’s circle, so that they can see the spirit circling back and forth in its cage, but not hear its screaming any longer.

A good thing. The sound was distracting Severus.

He knows exactly when he will intervene. Harry will be lost, soon, in the sacrifice, and he will doubtless kill himself with the same athame that he used to cut into his Horcrux (an athame that Severus will be looking into how he acquired). There would be no reason to bring a second powerful artifact into the circle when one would be enough.

Severus will allow him one, shallow cut, so that everyone else will think Harry is about to succeed in killing himself. And then he will enter the game.

He does not smile, but anticipation rushes through him the way it does when he is on the verge of brewing a potion for the first time. He feels cool and ready.

*

Theo can feel the magic rising like a shrieking, wailing wind, far stronger than Voldemort’s screaming. What astonishes him is that no one else appears to react to it.

Well, no. Harry is reacting to it, tossing back his head and uttering a quiet laugh that makes the air seem to vibrate and ring with a new note.

The magic makes Theo’s teeth hurt as it builds and builds. The grooves that form the circles in the stone, his own and his father’s and Lyassa’s and Black’s and Professor Snape’s, begin to shimmer with white fire. No such fire surrounds Voldemort’s circle, but the shadows of the flames do.

Theo glances back at Harry. He thinks Harry is going to take the athame and plunge it into Tarquinius’s chest.

He doesn’t expect, not at all, for Harry to step back and wave his wand, casting off an illusion that covered a portion of the room’s floor near the far wall.

“What?” Theo asks, helplessly, as he stares at two more circles. One is probably for Harry, and the other—what? Is Harry going to drag Father into the other one and sacrifice him there?

It seems risky, disruptive of the pattern of the ritual, for Harry to move Tarquinius for no reason after he’s been assigned a circle. Unless the memory of that kind of thing, and what would be right and wrong for such rituals, is yet another one that’s vanished through the cracks in Theo’s mind.

Or unless Tarquinius is not the sacrifice.

Harry gives him a wild, deep smile, and then he darts a hand into his robe pocket. When it emerges, it’s holding—what looks like scraps of parchment? Theo blinks and shakes his head.

“Harry!” Professor Snape and Black roar at the same time. They seem to fear, as Theo did, that Harry is going to kill himself.

But Harry smiles at them, and the magic howls around him, filling the room with wind like a winter storm, and Theo—

Theo knows. Because this much power wouldn’t be needed to drag Tarquinius into the far circle or to bring Voldemort there, either, not when his spirit is already bound. There is only one sacrifice Harry would need this much power to hold.

Theo laughs in delight as Harry cries out, “Come before me, creature of shadows!”

The storm roars through the room, and there is a scream that, again, only Theo seems to notice. Then the shadow leopard forms in the circle next to Harry, flowing in and out of its shape, doing its best to resist the pull.

It can’t. Harry’s eyes are alight and he’s laughing, and the leopard is bound, and it’s the most inspiring sight Theo has ever seen in his life.

“Theo.”

Theo immediately turns to face his lord. “Harry,” he murmurs. He understands, now, why Harry wanted to emphasize the part that Theo had to play in the ritual. Theo will have to absorb the shadow creature’s strength, and because the ritual needed someone connected to Theo himself, he’s sure he knows how he’ll have to do that.

Harry meets his eyes, and his own gaze softens. He raises the hand that clutches the scraps of parchment. “You already know, don’t you?”

“Yes, my lord.”

Harry doesn’t flinch at the name, only smiles. He turns to face the leopard, which is surrounded by an outline of brilliant white flames, making it visible to the others gaping in their circles. “The time has come for you to end.”

You will die! All of you will die!

Theo flinches as the voice tolls like a great bell through his mind, but Harry doesn’t. He holds up his scraps of parchment. “Do you know what these are?”

Part of your death!

Harry laughs in a way that makes it sound like the baying of a stag. “No. The thing that you told me about, but never thought I would do.”

You cannot hold me here without a sacrifice of your own! Your death!

That causes more than one reaction in the circles around them. Theo turns his head and watches people bounce off walls they didn’t even seem to see before this. It makes him want to laugh, so he does. They don’t think that Harry would have planned for this?

“I value something more than my life.”

There’s a huge sigh of breath that seems to travel through the room, and Harry tilts his handful of parchment scraps at the leopard.

“My capacity to just act as a friend and nothing else.”

Theo blinks, thrown, but then a wind that he can’t feel snatches the scraps out of Harry’s hands and whirls them up into the air. They glow as they attach to the walls and the floor and around the carved lines of the binding circles, and Theo catches a glimpse of Harry’s handwriting on the one nearest to him.

I am not willing to be a lord.

The next second, that one catches on fire.

All around the room, the ring of flames spreads, and creates yet another circle around them all. Theo’s breath catches. He thought the number of circles odd, because there were six, which isn’t a powerful magical number. When Harry revealed the two hidden ones that now hold him and the leopard, he thought Voldemort’s didn’t count and now Harry had seven.

But instead, Harry has done something else with that strongest outer circle, created a ninth, and now there are three times three. Three is also a powerful magical number, and Theo can feel the circles grabbing hold of the magic surging back and forth, wrestling it into a controlled and orderly flow.

Granted, more like a flow of lava than a river. But it doesn’t matter.

Harry thrusts a hand out. Green power pours of the emerald in the center of the ritual, and Theo grunts as it slams into him. He can feel the uncanny sensation of threads streaking back and forth inside his head, tying his thoughts together.

He almost cries as his memories clash back into place. He’s himself again, and he turns and stares at the one who made this possible, his lord, whom he will gladly serve all his life.

Harry smiles quietly and tilts his head at the leopard. “I can’t hold together your memories,” he tells Theo. Already sweat is pouring down his face. “Outside the context of this ritual, no one could. You have to take the enormous strength you need and use it to heal yourself.”

And Theo understands. He feels a rush of gladness, that there is something he can do to help his friend, his lord, the one who did the impossible.

He spins to face the shadow leopard. It’s gone silent, staring at him with its tail flicking. Theo crouches and transforms.

Color gushes out of the world. Smells of stone and dust and smoke and fear wake around him. And his circle goes porous as Harry flexes the magic around its boundaries, just for Theo.

The walls drop. Theo springs. The circle around the shadow leopard doesn’t go porous, but the flames part for him.

And then Theo crashes into the leopard, and it takes him deep into the dream-jungle it haunts, and the true battle begins.