Chapter Thirty-Nine of 'Winged Victory'- Power of the Stars

[lomonaaeren]

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Chapter Thirty-Nine—Power of the Stars

“A pleasure to truly meet you, Mr. Potter.”

“You as well, Professor Sinistra.”

Theo stands off to the side, making sure that everything goes well as Sinistra and Harry eye each other—and as the other students Sinistra’s included in her small resistance group eye Harry. It looks as though Chang has a question, but Smith nudges her sharply, and she falls silent.

That doesn’t keep Irene Selwyn’s face from looking like a thundercloud, but Theo ignores her. He waits, and waits, and Harry’s the one who finally breaks the silence, looking around Sinistra’s office. “This isn’t at all the kind of office I thought a professor like you would have.”

“A professor like me?”

“Someone who’s stern in class.” Harry’s eyes come back to Sinistra. “I thought you were going to throw Seamus off the Tower the other night for whispering to Dean.”

Sinistra laughs and leads Harry to a chair that’s right beside hers. Theo can’t remember who sat there last time. Maybe it was empty. “I do attempt to maintain a certain level of order in class, and Mr. Finnigan often tries my patience.”

“Mine, too,” Harry mutters, sitting down with a shake of his head.

“But not as much as Albus?”

Harry looks up sharply at her. Sinistra just gives him a bland smile and sets about fixing a cup of tea. Theo takes the seat next to Harry and draws his wand to cast charms that will reveal the presence of anything in the tea that shouldn’t be there.

“You don’t trust the professor?” Smith asks, his voice so sharp for a second that Theo feels the need to look at him. Smith then feels the need to look at his boots.

“It’s only common sense,” Sinistra murmurs, lifting her cup to her lips. “I know that none of the professors in this school have reacted as they should to Mr. Potter being in danger. And none of them have the strength to stand openly against Albus. Not even I have that kind of strength,” she adds, turning to face Theo and Harry. “Even with him as distracted as he is right now by Grindelwald’s escape.”

“The escape of his old lover,” Harry says innocently.

Theo works very hard to control his choking laughter at the looks that appear on the faces around them. He and Harry didn’t discuss revealing that information, and perhaps he ought to scold his boyfriend, but he can’t bring himself to.

“Excuse me?” Percy Weasley croaks out, his hand trembling above his own cup. “You can’t—you can mean that literally.”

“Yes, I do.” Harry puts in his own sugar when Theo’s spell tells him the tea is clean, smiling directly into Weasley’s face with the manner of someone who has nothing to hide. And they don’t, Theo reminds himself. At least, nothing that needs the attention of anyone in this room. “I’ve visited Nurmengard. Heard the truth from Grindelwald’s own lips.”

“He could have been lying!”

“Odd that you spring to Dumbledore’s defense so instinctively,” Theo idly remarks in Selwyn’s direction.

Selwyn bristles as she turns towards him. “My family lost a whole branch to Grindelwald,” she snaps. “My father lost his aunt. I just know that Grindelwald is a Dark Lord, and he would do anything to make the man who defeated him look bad.”

“It’s true,” Harry says calmly. “We’ve acquired confirmation from an independent source.”

“Who’s that?”

Harry lifts his cup to his lips while smiling at Selwyn. “Do you think I would tell you when we’ve only just met?”

Selwyn starts to say something sharp, but once again, Theo catches her eye, and she flops backwards with her arms folded. Theo turns to Sinistra and catches her rolling her eyes.

Theo gives her a sympathetic look. It’s rather like the situation with Black, he thinks—and Lupin, when he believed Lupin could still be reached. They’ll use these people because they need the help and these are the best choices they have, but not everyone is actually that intelligence or an associate of choice.

Sinistra smiles impersonally at Theo, manages to make the smile include Selwyn, and turns back to Harry. “Would your associate be content to reveal the information to us?”

“I don’t know if it would make as much impact as we need it to right now. Grindelwald’s escape is distracting Dumbledore for now, but sooner or later he’ll give up on catching his lover and return to the castle. What can we use to distract him then?”

“You want to save this information.”

“Yes.”

Harry’s face is perfectly bland. Theo eyes him suspiciously. Harry has to know that revealing this information to a group of students will make them start trying to confirm it and dying to spread it. Their oaths might prevent them, but they might be able to hint around and get someone to start speculating.

Harry winks at Theo.

Oh. Theo sits back with a satisfied smile of his own. This is part of Harry’s plan. Of course he wants the rumors to start spreading without a clear origin, so that Dumbledore will be all the more distracted and annoyed and finally panicked by them.

“But that can’t be right,” Percy Weasley is saying when Theo pays attention again. “Dumbledore is—he wouldn’t do something like that. He defeated Grindelwald, for Merlin’s sake.”

“And look at how long it took him to do it.” Harry is sitting up straight, his voice gone cool and distant. “He could have confronted Grindelwald the minute the man started spreading chaos, but he didn’t. He sat on his arse while people begged him to intervene.”

“They did?” Weasley looks so startled he doesn’t seem to notice the little puddle of tea spreading on the floor where it’s slopped over his cup.

Harry nods grimly. “People knew Dumbledore was powerful. They questioned why he even shut himself away in a school to teach Transfiguration at all. But as no one else did anything, their cries grew more desperate and pleading. And when you consider how short a time that duel actually took, it’s criminal that Dumbledore didn’t act before that.”

Weasley finally notices the tea and flinches as he draws his wand to clean it up. “I never knew,” he whispered.

“Most people didn’t.” Harry’s voice is strong, his eyes darting around the gathered students and bringing their attention to him. Theo hides a smile behind the rim of his cup. “Dumbledore’s incredibly strong. He could have done something years before that. He could have done something about Voldemort years ago.”

There’s a sound of a cracking cup. Professor Sinistra draws her wand and cleans up the remains of it before Theo can even see who dropped it. “Mr. Potter,” she chides. “I would not enjoy having all the cups in the class broken.”

“One thing Dumbledore told me’s still true, Professor. Fear of a name increases the fear of the thing itself.”

Sinistra and Harry stare at each other. Theo waits, watching, with less tension than the others appear to have in their shoulders and on their faces. He knows that, no matter what, Harry will be fine, so he doesn’t need to intervene.

Sinistra finally laughs a little, softly, and shakes her head. “Very well, but I think you can understand why I still want whole cups in my class.”

“Yes, Professor.”

“Good. Then why do you think that Dumbledore could have ended—You-Know-Who years ago?”

“He taught him,” Harry says, his face shutting down for a moment. Theo suspects he’s remembering what the diary Horcrux showed him. They still haven’t discussed everything about that episode in detail, but they have the rest of their lives, so Theo’s content to wait. “He knew what Tom Riddle was. Even seemed to suspect him for the previous Chamber of Secrets incident. But he didn’t act. And he didn’t let people know the real name of You-Know-Who, either.”

“That Tom Marvolo Riddle nonsense that’s been in the papers?”

Harry nods at Chang, with not a hint of attraction on his face, luckily. “Yes. Riddle’s a half-blood, and you can call Voldemort that if you want to.” This time, people appear to have cups tremble in their hands, but no one’s actually falls. “Why not tell other people that? Dumbledore was maybe the only one who knew, outside of Riddle himself and maybe some of his followers, who of course wouldn’t want to tell. Why didn’t Dumbledore tell someone?”

“Why didn’t he?” Weasley sounds stricken.

“Because he thinks he knows best.” Harry’s voice is thick with contempt. “He wants to hold his secrets to himself and deploy them only when he thinks it’s best. The same way that he only went to defeat Grindelwald when he felt he had no other choice.”

“Why not?”

“Grindelwald was a few weeks, at most, from crossing the British Channel. And it would have looked a lot worse for Dumbledore to only challenge him once Grindelwald was actually in the country.” Theo speaks now.

“That’s just speculation on your part,” Smith says. He’s leaning forwards, but also trying to look as though he’s not really interested in the things Theo’s saying.

“Hardly,” Theo says, and smiles as Smith watches even the way he puts sugar in his cup. Theo doesn’t want an admirer other than Harry, but it might help them to manipulate Smith and spread rumors in Hufflepuff, and that part, he’s all for. “The timing is suspicious, don’t you think? When people had been asking him for years?”

“But I don’t know that they were. That’s the speculation.”

“I can speak to that.”

Theo ends up craning his neck at one of the other Slytherins in the room, one who finished the school last year. She shifts uneasily under the attention. Kleianthe Shafiq never has liked it, that Theo knew of.

Shafiq’s eyes dart around from face to face, and she clears her throat, flushing. “It’s just that—that my parents were among the ones asking Dumbledore to intervene. They were afraid of what would happen if Grindelwald made it all the way to Britain.”

“Even though they’re Shafiqs?”

“Yes, Weasley. Even though we belong to one of those families.”

Weasley turns red and starts to say something else, but Harry interrupts. “So you can see that even the Dark families feared him. He was causing chaos and disruption in Europe, and panic in magical Britain. There’s no reason for Dumbledore to have waited, except…”

“That he wanted fame? That doesn’t seem like him.”

Chang is speaking now, and Harry just looks at her for a long moment, making her flush and stare at her hands. Harry shakes his head. “I don’t think fame was the main motivator. He didn’t want to hurt Grindelwald.”

“You really can’t know that. It would depend on what was in Dumbledore’s head.”

“Why did he just disarm him?” Harry answers. “Why keep him alive and put him in prison at all? There was always the chance that he’d escape, and now look what happened.”

“Such duels as Dumbledore and Grindelwald fought are usually to the death,” Theo interjects casually, although he sees a few people stare at him as if they don’t know why he’s speaking. He ignores them. He’s always going to support Harry, unless their audience would make such support unwise, and this isn’t one of them. “There’s also the fact that Grindelwald didn’t kill Dumbledore, and we know he killed every other single person he fought a duel with.”

“That’s just because he lost.”

“Honestly, Weasley, are you here because you distrust Dumbledore or not? It seems you’re committed to defending him.”

Theo learns that all Weasleys are unattractive when they blush. For some reason, he’d thought it was just the one named Ron. “Of course I think things should be better, that Dumbledore should do better!” Weasley snaps. “But I don’t think we ought to be listening to things that are just rumors.”

“I can contribute one point on that.”

Most of the students turn to look at Sinistra, although, Theo notices happily, it’s not the way they pivot to look at Harry. That’s natural leadership ability, from what Theo can tell. This is only professorial authority.

“Yes, Professor?” Smith asks.

“A new professor a few years ago asked Albus what the hardest battle was that he ever fought,” Sinistra says, and lowers her teacup to the table. “Of course, we expected him to say that it was the duel with Grindelwald. Instead, Albus smiled at all of us and said that that was the easiest, once he had conquered the prior enemy.”

“The prior enemy?”

“But he didn’t duel anyone right before Grindelwald, did he?”

“No, he didn’t, my dears. But I think, after listening to Mr. Nott’s well-founded speculation, that we know what he meant, now.” Sinistra glances at Theo. “The prior enemy would have been his heart.”

Theo hides his satisfied smile behind his teacup.

There’s a few more minutes of discussion that circles around the main topic, as though no one wants Sinistra to make another revelation as disconcerting as the last one. In the end, it’s Harry who speaks up, no surprise when he’s a Gryffindor. “You said that you were going to teach us to wield Hogwarts’s defenses, Professor Sinistra?”

“Yes. I did.”

She puts the teacup down with a little more force than necessary, but Theo can see why she wants to. She looks quietly determined as she draws her wand. Maybe part of her still has to steel herself for this, shedding the mask of a serene Hogwarts professor for something more dangerous.

“You know that your oath binds you,” Sinistra says, meeting pair after pair of eyes. “That you can’t tell anyone outside this room about this?”

“Potter didn’t swear the oath, Professor Sinistra.”

Theo prepares to glare at Selwyn for bringing it up, but Harry draws his wand with an easy smile. “I’m happy to do that if it would make you more comfortable.”

“We were bound by the stars, though, not our wands.”

Theo really is going to have to do something about Selwyn.

Luckily, Shafiq appears to agree with him. “Shut up, Irene,” Shafiq snaps, leaning forwards. “Professor Sinistra would have planned for that.”

Selwyn does shut up, maybe out of sheer surprise. Theo turns and focuses on Sinistra again, doing his best to keep his face polite and calm. “So is Harry going to swear the oath?” He’s going to insist on hearing the terms, if that’s the case.

“He is bound by the stars present above us today.”

Harry waves a hand down at his side, out of sight of almost everyone except Theo. Theo takes a deep breath and leans back. Yes, all right, he can control himself. He just doesn’t like that they didn’t have any warning.

Harry gives him a wry glance and focuses on Sinistra again. “Do you plan to teach us all of the defenses tonight, or over time?”

“Over time, of course. There are plenty of them. But I think we can start with the knights.”

Theo blinks, wondering what she can be referring to. Then he thinks of the suits of armor that stand everywhere in Hogwarts, and feels like a fool.

At least he’s not the only one. “Those suits of armor are knights?” Weasley asks sharply, half-rising out of his chair. “Defenses?”

“Yes, of course, Mr. Weasley. Why else did you think they were there?”

Weasley’s face goes unattractive with his blush again. “I thought they were decorations,” he mutters, and reaches for a small cake on the table in front of him to stuff it into his mouth.

Sinistra is good enough not to laugh, but Theo has to smother his own laughter. Weasley notices and scowls at him. Theo raises an eyebrow before he turns back to Sinistra. Just in case Weasley thinks he’s going to be in charge here, it’s good to remind him that he isn’t.

“The spell to make a suit of armor move isn’t complex,” Sinistra says. “However, it changes slightly each time. Usually, only professors know about it because we’re linked to the wards, and the wards guide our wands when we must cast it.”

“But…” Harry prompts.

Sinistra nods. “I can’t link you to the wards, not exactly. But I have a workaround.”

She reaches her hand into her robe pocket, and Theo becomes irrationally convinced that she’s going to emerge with an orb like the one that he found the chimera in. And she does take out something spherical. But it looks like nothing so much as a crystal ball of the kind that Theo knows people use in Divination, although this one is on an elaborate silver stand that curves around the ball and locks it in place. The inside of the sphere is swirling with a mixture of silver ropes of light and small, sparkling golden ones. Theo blinks and sits back.

Harry glances at him, subtly. Theo shakes his head. He’s never seen anything like this before.

“What’s that, Professor Sinistra?”

The professor smiles at them. “An orb filled with the power of the stars, my dears. Including the ones that you are bound to by the oath you swore.”

“Is Astronomy a lot more powerful than we’ve always thought?”

Sinistra nods at Smith without any appearance of surprise. “I wouldn’t be puzzled if that’s the case, Mr. Smith, although I don’t know how powerful you personally thought it was.”

Smith’s face flushes, and he mumbles something. Theo, meanwhile, is thinking of something else.

“Can that power be used for other things, Professor Sinistra?” he asks, trying to keep his voice casual. “If it can be used to link people to wards they wouldn’t normally be able to touch? Could it be used to empower clairvoyance, for example?”

“Why would you think so, Mr. Nott?”

“Because clairvoyance is a kind of far sight. And we use telescopes in class to give us far sight. And the stars themselves supposedly control fate and can provide future sight when someone calls on them in the right way.”

Sinistra smiles at him as Theo lets the thoughts tumble out of his mouth. It’s a way that no other professor has ever smiled at him. Of course, by the time Theo came to Hogwarts, he’d learned his lesson about trying to impress his father.

“You know, Mr. Nott,” she says softly, “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

Theo breathes out slowly. They’ll find the ring, and destroy it.

And then nothing will stop them from destroying Voldemort.

He catches Harry’s eye and sees his boyfriend smiling in much the soft way that Sinistra did. Theo smiles back.

Nothing.