Chapter Twenty-Five of 'The Same Species as Shakespeare'- Valiant and So Cunning

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Chapter Twenty-Five—Valiant and So Cunning

Draco kept alert as they Apparated in short, shaky jumps, his body limp and unresisting, as if the pain curses that the imposter had cast on him had taken all the fight out of him. It was all he could do for now, at least until they came to a place he recognized.

They didn’t. For one moment they were on downs, with a stream of clouds blowing over them, southwest into a brilliant sky; then they were in a green meadow dominated by an orchard of apple trees; then they were in a shimmering flat land honeycombed with lanes and ditches. Draco knew that the constant Apparitions would throw off pursuit. There were spells that could sometimes track the presence of a single person’s blood or wand, but they needed some time to work uninterrupted by yet another leap. The main reason that this technique wasn’t used more often to evade that kind of pursuit was simply that most wizards didn’t have the magical strength to use it and keep using it.

But he does.

Letting his head slump sideways so that the stranger had to take some more of his weight, Draco let his gaze linger on the other’s face. A perfect copy of his own, the way he had seen it so often in mirrors and Daily Prophet photographs announcing the construction of some new house. The relaxed, contemplative mouth, the shining, restless eyes, and the way the blond hair curled around the edges of his forehead, over his ears, down almost to his cheek.

He’s taken all that I treasure about myself and made it into his own. I hate the idea of that.

But Draco paused when they reached another Apparition landing spot, this one hotter than the rest—so hot that Draco wondered for a moment if the man hadn’t Apparated them out of Britain altogether—and sweat formed along that perfect brow. The stranger snarled a little and cast a spell that wiped away the sweat.

As they leaped again, whirling into darkness, Draco frowned slightly. Yes, that was a spell he would have cast on himself, though generally before he arrived at a party or interview and had to deal with it marring his forehead. But the attacker had reacted as though he thought the existence of sweat an imposition.

As if he had really believed the façade that Draco tried to present to the world, the idea that he never sweated.

Slim as the evidence was to base such a far-ranging conclusion on, Draco absolutely and utterly believed what he thought of in the next moment.

He isn’t really imitating me. He’s not imitating the way I behave in private moments—and that’s one reason it’s taken him so long to perfect the imitation. He’s basing his copy on the picture I present to the world, the perfection that he probably lost his heart to.

Draco could not really blame anyone for losing their heart to the image he tried to cultivate, though he could have wished the loss would manifest in slavish devotion like Harry’s original obsession and not lunacy that insisted on replacing him.

But that means I have weaknesses and flaws and—and strengths, maybe, too—that he doesn’t know about. It required a heroic effort for Draco to decide that something he’d tried to hide was a strength, because if it had been surely he would have displayed it to others, but maybe it could be true if he looked at it critically. I still might be able to surprise him.

If only because this meant that his enemy wouldn’t have such a hopelessly great advantage over him after all, Draco found himself in favor of this insight. And determined not to show it, as time passed and they leaped rapidly from spot to spot, rapidly enough to make him seasick.

*

Lucius took a deep breath and released the metal spiral that balanced on one of its ends in the middle of a red mist conjured from his blood. If he had mastered the spell that he needed to find Draco and the imposter, the spiral would balance without prompting and rotate, stirring the mist up into a boiling steam.

The metal shuddered and pivoted twice—and then fell over. The mist at once scattered, the way that the house-elves did when they knew Lucius was in a mood.

Lucius took a deep breath and clenched his fist, opening the shallow slash that ran across his palm. Of course, he took care that the blood he shed that way should fall into the flat dish he had ready for it. No sense in wasting perfectly good blood.

You knew this would be difficult, he reminded himself. And though you know Draco better than he knows himself, you don’t know him perfectly. Still less do you know the man whose mind you’re trying to comprehend absolutely. Add those difficulties to the problem of trying to shed your own sense of self, and it’s remarkable that you’ve got as far as you have.

He half-shook his head, then took up his wand and began to conjure. The red blood-mist crept again out of the dish. The blood would provide the connection between him and Draco, and, theoretically, if he could master the spell, it would enable him to hone in on two nearly identical minds—Draco and the imposter—but then determine that one of them was not his son, due to the blood connection, so he could focus on the other. Once he knew that second man perfectly, mind and impulses and emotions and ideas, then he could find him.

But he must suppress his own sense of self in exactly the right moment, so that he could seek the pair out—for which he would need his intellect, the sense of Lucius, to interpret the blood magic—and yet locate the man—by becoming him.

If Lucius had not been confident he knew his son and that the imposter was just a variation on him, he never would have tried this.

He sighed, and began again.

*

If I had not used the hair from Pettigrew, this might be a good use for it.

But Severus did not listen to his own thoughts as his fingers flew over ladle and stirring rod, star-shaped crystal and scrapings from the hoof of a white stag, crushed powder from purple iris and white iris, feathers from a black swan and a blackbird.

These were the tools of his trade, and he fancied that he wielded them every bit as effectively as an Auror wielded his wand. And more effectively, if that Auror was Potter.

He was creating a potion that he would have ruined if he had stopped and hesitated, if he had thought about it. Instead, he tossed the ingredients in, and when he might have forgotten what came next, his muscles remembered. So many things tossed into the potion, so many bubbles conquered and sent back into the liquid, so many explosions averted, so many moments passing winged and then leaping over his head and losing their wings as they fell into the abyss.

(Lily would have said something like that. Maybe he had adopted the image from her, never knowing it. Maybe he had heard the image from a poem she read him, during those days when they had lain with their heads together on the grass in the sunshine, and Lily had a book on her lap—she always had a book, it was the only way in which she and Granger were alike—and read in a dreamy voice, whilst Severus dozed with his eyes shut).

Moments and moments and moments, and then came the moment when the potion thudded in its cauldron like a living heart and the magic paused and looked at Severus expectantly, because this was the addition to the potion that must be made by human heart and will, and the part where it fell apart for so many brewers.

Severus closed his eyes.

And to him there came the moment when he crouched above the remains of the Potters’ house and realized that the Dark Lord had not kept his word, had not spared Lily in his hunt for vengeance on the child who was marked to defeat him.

(You were a fool to think that he would. What was a promise to someone such as him? No, do not call him someone. He was not a person by the end, everything that made him human eaten by one snake or another, ambition or pride or greed or vanity or hate).

He had seen her, waving red hair as dark as the spilled blood in the moonlight—for though the Dark Lord might have killed her without a mark, she had been hit and her arm partially crushed in the backlash of the rebounded Killing Curse, and so the blood flowed from a wound high on her shoulder. But it could not hurt her, Severus knew that. She had been dead by the time the wound was inflicted.

So he told himself, and so he had gone on telling himself down the years, so that he would not have to live with the nightmare of thinking she had suffered before she died.

But now he forced himself to remember that pain, and to dwell on the anguish that Lily must have suffered when she stood before her baby, trying to fend off the Dark Lord with the power of a sacrifice that she could not have known would work, not for certain. Lily had always wanted other people to think she was certain, but she doubted often; it was a great flaw in her character, to lie and pretend to absolute assurance when she was in an agony of doubt.

Severus thought, and he thought of the woman who was not alive any longer, and he thought of the part he had played in making that come true, and he bound it up with the bitter regret and hatred that had come from his killing of his greatest mentor and the fact that even that had not been enough to earn him the high place in the world he had always craved, and he flung all that emotion together into the potion waiting for him in the cauldron, joining potential and reality.

The liquid roared, and Severus was lifted from his feet by the force of the explosion. He expected it, this time, and made no effort to dodge as he was flung into the wall. By the pressure of heat and air against his face and chest, he knew how strong the potion would be.

It was mighty. He almost lost consciousness, and when he looked again, the potion was perfect, the shade of a ripe tomato, settled back into a ball of shining liquid that looked almost solid. Severus felt his lips move in a smile, and his fingers feathered through his hair, gathering the blood, whilst his tongue collected blood off his lips in turn.

There were few Potions masters who could boast that they had created a perfect Curse Potion. Either they didn’t have the right sort of wild abandon during the creation process, or they couldn’t summon the violent hatred needed to power it.

But Severus had never doubted his ability. This was one thing, he thought as he floated the cooled ball of potion out of the cauldron and then surrounded it with a large, circular glass vial that he kept for such purposes, that leading a life of self-loathing was good for.

The Curse Potion would cause a fate exactly as bitter for the person it struck as the emotion that Severus had invested it with.

Severus thought that a fitting fate for the man who had dared to harm Draco, who had wounded Potter, and who, if he succeeded in killing one or the other, would ensure Severus was subjected to the endless wailing lamentations of the other for all eternity.

Of course, he needed to be close to the target to use the Curse Potion. And that meant he needed to go and find Lucius, who would doubtless be preparing some heroic measure to locate Draco and his follower.

Severus preferred to leave the heroics to others.

(Do you? asked Lily’s voice in his memory. But you wanted others to honor you for being a hero so badly.)

I know better now, Severus answered.

(But you wanted to be a hero for me.)

And you are dead.

*

Harry and Ron had no trouble gaining access to the Manor. Neither Lucius Malfoy nor Snape were there to stop them, as if they didn’t care that anyone else entered now that the imposter had broken the wards for the last time and taken Draco, and so the Aurors were swarming all over Draco’s bedroom, casting spells that would identify the magic last used there, discussing different tracking strategies, and standing in knots and whispering to each other.

Of course they are, Harry thought, bitterly, crouching so that he could put one hand on the edge of the bed. There was still an indentation in the pillows and blankets; he had known that Draco slept in the same place every night, but he had never realized that it would mark the place so permanently. Now that it’s too late.

And then he shook his head and shook out bitterness with it, because that wouldn’t help him track Draco, and everything that wouldn’t was useless right now. He turned to Ron. “Has anyone discovered anything?”

“Nothing,” Ron admitted reluctantly. “They still have no idea how he got through the wards; he seems to have walked straight through, and so they can’t identify any magic that way.” He spun his wand in his hands and stared at the conjured bed Harry had slept in as if his carelessness seemed more real to him, now that he was at the scene of the abduction. Harry hoped it did, allowed himself to entertain that vicious hope for one moment, and then thrust it as viciously away, so that he had a chance to concentrate on what really mattered. “Harry—there’s a good chance that we’ll never see him again. Even the tracking spells are failing. They think the imposter must have taken him through multiple Apparitions.”

“He’s strong enough to do that, yes,” Harry said, distracted. His mind had returned to the night that he confronted the imposter on the Manor’s grounds. His breathing slowed as he contemplated it. Almost, almost, the man had perfectly imitated Draco. Harry might even have succumbed to his seduction, because the image that faced him was so much like what he wanted from Draco.

But he had known the difference. And how?

The same way I knew the difference when the imposter was committing lesser crimes.

He spun to face the bed and strode up to it. Some of the Aurors fell back in shock, startled by his decisive motions, and then two of them recognized him and scowled. Harry heard more than one person ask, “What’s he doing here?” Doubtless they felt that Draco’s former conquest shouldn’t be the one tracking him.

But who did the saving didn’t matter nearly as much as the saving itself. Harry took a deep breath and let his hands rest in the indentation Draco’s body had created again. He had never done this before, and he was no expert in magical theory, not like Hermione. He didn’t have the ideas to support or explain what he was doing, only a vague hope.

But he had always been able to sense the wood of Draco’s wand, and use it to differentiate him from the imposter. No one had said so far that they’d found Draco’s wand in the bedroom or anywhere else. The imposter had probably seized it, confident that he’d make the deception faultless by using it after he killed Draco.

It remained to be seen if Harry could track it.

Eyes closed, he cast one of the tracking spells that was supposed to trace an Apparition and concentrated as hard as he could on the silent song of the hawthorn wand whilst he did so. Remember what it feels like. See that pattern of vibrations in your mind. See the wood gleaming. You know what it looks like. You know what it sounds like. You know the small notch near the bottom that makes it press unevenly into your palm. You know it as well as that imposter knows Draco. Come on!

But the spell reached out uncertainly and then faltered, and Harry received no impressions back from it. He heard someone laugh. He gritted his teeth and concentrated, this time, on the feel of the wand alone. He had never tried to find it at a distance, no, but there was no reason he couldn’t. Ollivander had been vague when he identified the connection between the woods of wands to Harry; it was less understood than the Priori Incantatem effect that had made his wand and Voldemort’s brothers, being rarer. It might be capable of nothing, or anything. Harry chose to believe the latter.

You handled this wand. You know it. And it bonded to you, it was familiar to you, it was the wand you battled Voldemort with. You can find it anywhere, across distances, the way you always knew when Draco had entered a room just from the reactions of the other people in it, just from the prickle of hair along your skin. You know the imposter took it. You remember the song. You—

And there it was, the faintest prickling from a direction that made no sense until Harry found he had opened his eyes and whirled around to face it, pointing unhesitatingly with one finger at the far wall. South and west, was the direction of his finger, and south and west, the vibrations of the wand beat and sang faintly in his head.

The other Aurors watched him, some of them raising their eyebrows, but for the moment no one was trying to interrupt him. Harry took a few steps forwards, his nostrils quivering, his body following the pull of his finger. He waited a moment to see if the direction would change; if the imposter was undergoing multiple Apparitions, then Harry’s finger might only indicate his present location.

But the finger stayed firm for a minute, and so did the sense of the hawthorn wand’s song. Harry took a deep breath and let it out again, his hand dropping and his fist clenching. That’s it, then. I know I can follow it, though I’ll have to use multiple Apparitions myself.

But it meant that he would have to give up his plan for Ron to accompany him, because he wasn’t strong enough to make that many leaps and take someone along.

“I have to go,” he told Ron. “Will you tell Kingsley that he should go southwest if he doesn’t hear from me in a few hours? I’ll try to rescue Draco and bring him back as soon as possible, but you know what that imposter’s like as a fighter. I—“

“Are you mad?” Ron’s face was so pale that the freckles stood out on it like blood on snow. “Hermione and Kingsley would both never forgive me if I let you put yourself in danger like that! I’ll come with you, Harry. And we should wait at least some time for Kingsley to be appraised of the situation—“

Harry shook his head stubbornly. “I can’t wait for anyone,” he said. “The longer we wait, the more likely that he’ll be hurt.” Ron still hesitated, and Harry’s voice welled towards a shout, though he hadn’t meant to do so. But someone who stood in the way of his rescuing Draco, even if innocently in the way, had to be dealt with. “Ron, I have to. I’m the only one who has enough magic and cares enough for Draco to rescue him—“

“Harry—“

“You are wrong, Potter.”

Harry snapped around. Snape stood in the doorway, his arms folded and his robes flaring dramatically about him as always. This time, Harry was certain it had to be a spell, because he was standing still. Behind him, Lucius Malfoy stood, his lips set in a thin line that made Harry think he knew what the real source of the difference between him and his son was, for all that they had such similar faces. Draco would never let anyone see him looking like that. He was more controlled than his father, though Lucius had had a longer lifetime of practice.

“Why are you here?” Ron snapped at Snape. Harry didn’t think he wanted to know so much as he was happy to have someone to blame for a problem. “How did you know that Harry had indentified a way to find the prat?”

“I felt the magic go through the wards.” Snape’s eyes sought Harry’s, and Harry could no more look away from them than he could during those times when he hadn’t finished his homework in Potions. “You can find him? Draco?”

Harry nodded. “But I was telling Ron that I’d have to go alone, because it’ll be multiple leaps, and—“

“And by the time you get there, you’ll be too tired to fight.” Lucius pushed his way into the room. Behind him was what looked like a large glass ball filled with red liquid. Harry blinked at it, and then forgot about it as he looked at Lucius’s face. All notion that he could deny the man a chance to go with them withered and died when he saw the pinched edges of his expression. “I know the country around Wiltshire. I know what lies to the southwest. I can give you Apparition coordinates along that path, and we will go together.” The motion of his hand included Snape, himself, Harry, and, surprisingly enough, Ron. “No other will I trust,” he added, and flung a scornful glance at the room full of Aurors.

One of them tried to intervene, but Ron spoke sharply to him and made him shut up. Harry, his eyes fastened to Lucius’s, said, “And what happens if it turns out that one of those Apparition points lies out of the main path we need to follow?”

“Then you’ll feel it, won’t you?” Lucius’s head came down like a wolf’s; his smile was a wolf’s, too. “And you’ll be able to tell us to correct our course.”

Harry didn’t pause before he nodded. Yes, this was better than he had hoped for. And it only made sense to take allies along, and to conserve his strength for the moment when he faced the imposter, because he was sure he would be the one who needed to use his magic to defeat the genius madman.

He had to use a lot of common sense, though, to subdue the part of himself that would have liked to be Draco’s sole rescuer, charging heroically into the evil Dark Lord’s lair and drawing him back to his feet, and saying—

And then he remembered that he was in a room full of arguing Aurors who would probably try to stop him if they knew what he was thinking, and his best friend watching him expectantly, and a man who was concerned for his son.

And a man who watched him mockingly, even now, with his Legilimency telling him exactly what Harry was thinking.

Coughing, Harry turned to Lucius and lowered his voice. “Can you lower the wards to let us Apparate out and then raise them again to cage these fools? I don’t want to take an army. He’ll hear us coming.”

“For many reasons,” Lucius murmured, “I would prefer not to take an army. Come, Mr. Potter, Mr. Weasley, Severus.” And he leaned close to whisper a description of the first set of Apparition coordinates.

Only later, after they had Apparated twice across Wiltshire, did Harry start thinking about why Lucius and Snape might not want to bring an army.

And to start looking suspiciously at the glass ball of red liquid that hovered behind Snape’s shoulder.

And at Snape’s narrow smile.

Chapter 26.

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