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Chapter Thirty—Snake

“But, Malfoy,” Granger said, her voice so weary that Draco knew she was about to begin the insults at any moment, “what you’re saying doesn’t make any sense.”

Draco winked at her and paced around the table in the library where the Elder Wand lay again. It kept turning so that one end was always pointed at him. Draco smiled at it in pity. Yes, it could do that, but it wouldn’t be very long before it couldn’t do anything else, ever again.

“Look at it this way, Granger,” he said. “The Elder Wand has passed from hand to hand more than any other of the Deathly Hallows. I know that you’ll have read all the legends about them by now, so you tell me why that is.”

Granger sighed in the way she did when she knew someone else was acting stupid enough to suffocate themselves, but didn’t want to say so. “Because it wants a new owner who can conquer its old one,” she said. “It wants to belong to the most powerful wizard in the world. And it slips from hand to hand when someone defeats its old owners. It may even arrange the duels so that it can belong to a conqueror. But,” she added, with a righteous sniff, “that part of the legend had less evidence than other parts did.”

Draco eyed the Elder Wand sideways. It had stopped spinning and held still now, but the sensation of a single evil eye on him, perhaps located in the end of the Wand, was still there. Draco smiled thinly.

“Oh, it’s certainly intelligent and strong enough to arrange something like that,” he said. “I think you can believe that part of the legend as much as you believe all the others.”

“I don’t believe them,” Granger began, and then seemed to realize how ridiculous that made her sound with one of the Deathly Hallows lying right in front of her. She folded her arms and shook her head. “Where were you going with this, Malfoy? What does the Elder Wand passing from hand to hand have to do with the bond between you and it?”

“The bond between us must always be flexible,” Draco said softly, “with a weak place in it. If the Wand bonded itself strongly to every owner, how would it manage to leave that owner when someone new and more alluring came along? We’ve been going about this the wrong way and looking in the wrong sorts of books because we assumed that the Wand was like other intelligent magical objects—like the Sword of Gryffindor, for example. The Sword is bonded to the whole House of Gryffindor and those who display its qualities, and it isn’t suddenly going to go off and attach itself to Slytherin House just because. But the Wand has no permanent allegiance. It could bond itself to you if you defeated me—and it would.” He looked at Granger and waited patiently for her to figure it out.

Granger was at least not stupid, even if she was rather shortsighted and pigheaded. She gasped softly, her face brilliant. “So we don’t need to break a deep-rooted bond,” she whispered, “which was what we were trying to figure out how to do. We just need to find the weak place in the bond and exploit it.”

The Elder Wand buzzed like a hiveful of angry bees and rose above the table, hovering there as it confronted Draco.

Granger gasped again and fumbled for her own wand, but Draco knew that would be next to no use. He moved sedately forwards to confront the Wand instead, raising an eyebrow. The buzzing grew louder.

“You can’t stand the thought of someone rejecting you,” Draco said. He spoke softly, but then, he hardly needed to speak loudly for the Wand to hear him. It would hear him across oceans, as long as it had that bond attaching its essence and his soul. “They should always need you to win battles. They should always fall into their dependence. You should be the first thing they reach for in the mornings, before their lovers.”

The buzzing soared to a pitch that Draco suspected would bring Professor Snape or his mother at any moment. He needed to stop it before then. He reached up and clenched the handle of the Wand, and endured the intense blast of magic that traveled through the elder wood and into him, making him stagger.

The Wand offered him power, But Draco was no longer tempted by any power that did not also involve the sight of Harry’s head on the pillow, the green eyes opening sleepily to regard him, the lips parting in a gentle smile.

“You can bond me to you,” he told the Wand. “You cannot make me love you.”

The Wand buzzed again, and Draco’s head filled with constantly changing visions of conquest. Here he wore a crown and stood next to a giant stone chair, looking out over a crowd of bowing and kneeling people. Here he looked like the Dark Lord and stroked a snake larger and more poisonous than Nagini. Here he made Harry kneel to him, wash his feet, and swear that he would only look at Draco for the rest of his days.

Draco tore himself away from that last vision with an effort. Yes, it was tempting to think that he could make Harry his, without the least competition from anyone ever again, including his best friends. The Elder Wand had been in the business of tempting people for centuries, and it knew Draco well enough by now to realize what would compel his attention and what wouldn’t.

But he would not yield to the vision. In the end, what he loved about Harry was the way he defied everything and everybody—fate, the Dark Lord, the smothering concern of those who would keep him away from battles altogether, the conventions that would have kept him and Draco apart—and to make him kneel would extinguish that spark in him.

“No,” he told the Wand, which was screaming shrilly by now. Granger was on the other side of the room, wand in her hand and eyes wide. Draco took note of her and then ignored her. This was his contest, and he intended to win it. “I don’t care how many times you’ve won. You’re not going to win with me. I don’t want power as much as I want love.”

He wondered for one moment how Granger would take that soppy declaration, and was glad that his mother was not in the room—

And in that moment, the Wand struck.

A wedge drove into Draco’s soul, tearing downwards through his mind and heart. Draco flinched and tried to scream, but the feeling was so far beyond pain that it paralyzed him and he couldn’t make a sound. He stood there, swaying, instead, and the Wand dug deeper and deeper, seeking something in the dark depths of his subconscious that it could drag to the surface like a demon and use to rule and ride him.

But Draco had faced his demons for years. He hadn’t simply walked into a love relationship with Harry, and he hadn’t simply walked away from his father, and he hadn’t simply walked into the war.

He brought his own strength up in answer.

The Wand wailed as Draco pushed it back out of his soul, a steady shove that cornered and cramped its power and shut up in a tiny portion, no more than that, of Draco’s being. It showed him visions again, but Draco no longer associated those visions with anything except the Wand’s duplicity. He responded with a blast of pure, natural force, and the Wand’s will bent before his. It was still bonded to him. It still served him in lieu of a better master, and that meant he could threaten it with the loss of even the prestige of his hand.

And as he pushed, Draco suddenly located it. The weakness in the bond between them, the break that the Wand would exploit when it wanted to drop away from him and fly to the hand of his conqueror.

Draco laughed aloud and pushed down on the break. The Wand screamed like a tortured thing. It writhed and wriggled in his grasp, and Draco could feel it fighting to change shape and confront him again.

But it did not break free, even though Draco knew it could have. It would rather have a rebellious owner who hated it than no owner at all. That would probably shatter it, to be without someone who needed its power.

Draco flowed around the weak place, sensing it in the same incomprehensible way that he sensed another person’s pain with Legilimency, and made sure he would know how to find it again. Then he smiled and ripped himself half out of the bond, leaving the Wand to wail behind him.

When he opened his eyes, the Elder Wand lay limply on the table, and anyone but Draco would have thought it was an ordinary stick of wood, without any special properties at all; it had dimmed the sense of its magic. Draco winked at it, and received a single sullen buzz before he turned to look at Granger, who was sheltering behind a Shield Charm. Draco was grateful to note that at least she had some sense. Weasley or Harry would probably have tried to intervene in the battle.

“I understand the bond between us now,” he said quietly. “I understand how I am going to switch my spirit and Harry’s during the battle with the Dark Lord, so that the Horcrux in Harry will lose its grip on his soul and become easy to destroy, without requiring his death.”

*

Harry hesitated. No matter how long he spent pondering a plan to draw Voldemort to him, he kept thinking that his best bet would be simply to appear in public and start taunting him. That would bring him along, eager to defend his reputation and instill fear in anyone who might follow Harry’s example.

But there were all sorts of problems with that plan, not least that it wasn’t guaranteed to let him get close to Nagini.

Harry shut his eyes and leaned back in the chair with a little groan, rubbing at his forehead. Though his Occlumency was good enough by now that he never suffered a vision, his scar burned constantly, a low-grade irritation that let him know Voldemort was always engaged in planning and general evil.

“Problems, pup?”

Harry opened his eyes and smiled at Sirius. He stood in the door of the library, his twisted hand tucked out of sight behind him, his head curiously cocked. “Just trying to think of a way to kill Voldemort’s snake and get near him,” he said with a sigh.

“Ah. Of course.” Sirius came a little closer, and now he was grinning like a devil, in the way that made Harry worry, because it usually meant that he was planning a prank on Snape. “But when you come up with that plan, and the way to execute it, then you have to take me with you. Do you know why?”

Harry shook his head curiously, and Sirius produced his hand from behind his back like someone doing a conjuring trick. Harry gaped when he realized that the fingers were straight again, the bones uncramped.

“Madam Pomfrey finally managed to heal it all the way. She had to work with the Dark magic and understand the spells Voldemort had used from the inside first.” Sirius admired his hand with a bright gaze, then dropped it and stared at Harry challengingly. “And now, you can’t claim that I’m too inept to help you anymore.”

“You were never inept,” Harry muttered, jumping up and hugging him. “I just want you around to tease for a lot more time, that’s all.”

Sirius stroked his back gently, then stepped back with a wistful little sigh. “It’s too bad that none of my pranks will work on He-Who-Has-No-Nose,” he said. “I’d like to show him what for, if only for James.” Sirius shook his head, and his eyes darkened. “And I’d like to do something to Peter, too.”

Harry nodded, but he made a mental note to watch Sirius closely if he showed any signs of getting too interested in killing Pettigrew. Harry didn’t want someone at his side whose main goal wasn’t destroying the Horcruxes and killing Voldemort. He loved Sirius, but when he thought of the risks Sirius had taken in his third year, going after Pettigrew blindly to the exclusion of all else, he winced.

Then he paused. Something he’d just thought was plaguing him, but he couldn’t tell what. Once they got on the battlefield, he could at least worry that Sirius would care more about protecting him than about killing Pettigrew.

And then he caught his breath. “I’ll have to talk to Snape about that,” he muttered.

“About what?” Sirius sounded only a little sulky as he took a book about defensive charms from the shelf and sat down in the chair next to Harry’s. “Some exploding potion that you can throw at the Dark Duffer’s minions?”

Harry smiled and shook his head. “No, but that would be useful. I think I’ll mention it. Later,” he added, because Sirius was pouting now, and it had been too long since Harry got to spend any extensive time with him. He sat down and reached for the book he’d spent some time studying in the last few days, on curses that exploited preexisting physical weaknesses in an enemy’s body, such as heart conditions.

Sirius beamed. Harry smiled back and turned the book’s pages to reach the point where he’d stopped before. It really doesn’t take much to make people happy, if you only notice what they need and take a little time to appreciate them.

Then he shifted and winced as his shoulder came into contact with the back of the chair. Draco had bitten him sharply enough earlier to leave an enormous bruise and cause him a little difficulty moving around. Harry would have healed it already, but Draco had hinted that the bruise had better be there tonight, or else.

And sometimes you need more than a little time and attention to soothe someone. Particularly when he doesn’t like you exposing yourself to danger, and you argue, and then he flings you on the bed and…does something about it.

*

Severus raised his eyebrows and gave the beautiful bird that had just flown into the lab his full attention. Of course they had warded the Black house tighter than ever after the Dark Lord had delivered Creevey’s heart to Harry, but if there were wards that could stop a phoenix, Severus didn’t know them.

“What do you have for me?” he asked.

Fawkes trilled at him and settled on the edge of the lab table, carefully distant from any equipment or vials. Severus nodded at him and strode over to undo the message attached to his leg. Fawkes had, on one previous occasion, got into his private lab at Hogwarts, and the way Severus had railed over the damage had taught the blasted bird a lesson that he had never managed to teach Dumbledore.

The letter bore the seal of Hogwarts on it, indicating that Dumbledore had acted in his official capacity as Headmaster in sending it. Severus opened it quietly, and told himself that his fingers were not shaking; he was merely reluctant to see what was in the envelope because he was wondering if Dumbledore had meant it for Harry instead.

Dear Severus,

There have been multiple attacks on the school now, and I recognize high-ranking Death Eaters in each charge. Worse, the children of pure-blood families inside Hogwarts have begun attacks on halfblood and Muggleborn children. Harry’s friend Dean Thomas was badly wounded the other day.

Voldemort has been in communication with me several times, if sending up the Dark Mark over the body of another victim and calling in his demands can be called communication. He says each time that he will stop if we release Harry Potter to him. He seems to believe that we are hiding him within the school. I do not know what has given him this idea. I swear that it was not a plan the Order promoted.

I have so far refused to comply with the demands, and neither would I under any circumstances.

Severus breathed a little more easily. It seemed that there was still some of his mentor left in the frightened old man Dumbledore had become.

But some students do believe the tale, and are searching the school for Harry. Worse, some of the school’s governors and parents believe it, and are contacting me with frightened, shrill owls saying that Harry must be turned over for the safety of all their children. I wish to maintain the pretense for a time so that I may give aid to Harry and prevent Voldemort from searching out his real location, but I must choose soon between helping Harry in this way and telling the truth so that Hogwarts will not tear itself apart at the seams.

Tell Harry it would be best if he defeated Voldemort soon.

Albus Dumbledore, Headmaster of Hogwarts.

Severus snorted gently as he lowered the letter. He understood now why Dumbledore had not contacted Harry directly, as might have seemed logical. The boy would view it—and so would Severus, and so would Draco—at an attempt to use Harry’s guilt complex to manipulate him. This way, Dumbledore let them know of the danger whilst leaving it up to Severus to decide what to say to Harry.

It was a cannier move than he had made in some time, and Severus hoped that by destroying the Resurrection Stone, some of the obsession it had exerted on Dumbledore might be lessened.

And that left him only the dilemma of deciding how to break the news. Harry would never forgive him if he hid this information, of course, but neither did Severus want him to take the news of the attacks on the school to heart and carry it around as one more unwarranted burden, clouding his mind with raw emotion.

As he hesitated, someone knocked on the lab door. “Professor Snape?” Harry’s voice called a moment later. “Can I come in?”

Fate is determined to make me face the decision early, it seems. Severus set the letter aside and stared at Fawkes, who gave a single yank at his tail and then settled in for a long preening session. Severus rolled his eyes. “Enter,” he said.

Harry stumbled to a stop at the sight of the phoenix, his eyes wide. “What’s Fawkes doing here?”

“He brought a letter from Professor Dumbledore,” Severus said. “Containing news of attacks on the school. Dumbledore is trying to hold the Death Eaters back, and to keep the pure-bloods from inflicting damage on halfbloods and Muggleborns. He does not know if he can.” He hesitated, but Harry’s face was open and yearning, and Severus had to finish his speech. “For some reason, the Dark Lord thinks you are hiding in the school.” He held the letter slightly behind his back as he finished. He saw no need to let Harry read it, unless he insisted.

Harry nodded, his eyes brilliant with determination. “Then it’s just as well I’ve come up with a plan to lure Voldemort that I think will work,” he said. “I need to know how binding life-debts are.”

Severus blinked at the odd question. “It varies,” he said. “The one I owed your father was extremely binding, as he saved my life when he need not have and as the result of a conscious decision, not a split-second changing of his mind. But the accidental saving of a life is less binding, though the surviving wizard may still owe his magic to the other one.” He broke off with a frown when he saw that Harry had a faint half-smile on his face, and did not seem to be listening fully. “What is so amusing?”

“You sound like you’re lecturing about Potions no matter what the subject is,” Harry said, and then moved on before Severus could react to that potentially insolent comment. If it was insolent. He could not decide. “What about the life-debt that Pettigrew incurred when you saved his life?”

Severus blinked again, thrown, and then tried to rearrange his face in a sterner expression. It was not well that Harry should know how frequently he kept surprising him. Severus was supposed to be his guiding figure, the mentor to him that Dumbledore had once been to Severus. “I never saved Pettigrew’s life.”

“Yes, you did,” Harry said quietly. “When Sirius pursued him in the school. You forced Sirius to change back to human form in the Gryffindor boys’ bedroom, remember? Sirius told me later. He was all indignant about it. The spell forced Pettigrew to change, too, because you hadn’t known he was a rat Animagus. But then you captured Sirius and prevented him from chasing Pettigrew when he changed into a rat again and ran off. He owes you his life, because I know Sirius would have killed him if he caught him.”

Severus leaned slowly against the lab table, causing Fawkes to wag a claw at him and shrill warningly; he had come close to upsetting several vials. Severus glared. “Stupid bird,” he said, but without spite. Fawkes began preening again, smugness in every movement.

“Could it work?” Harry insisted, taking a step closer, and then hesitated. “I reckon it would depend how much Pettigrew knows about life-debts.”

“He came from a family who did not have the time or money to spend on advanced training,” Severus said absently, calling up memories from years ago. He had never thought he would be glad to remember so much of the Marauders’ life histories. “I think it unlikely that they would have mentioned all the subtleties of the theory to him. Not even Lucius would have explained it to Draco. It is not a subject widely-known, partially because it is intricate and partially because most wizards don’t foresee having a need for that branch of magic.”

Harry nodded. “So we could convince Pettigrew?”

“Perhaps,” Severus said. “I would not want us to rely on this as our only plan, particularly in light of how venomous Nagini is.”

Harry smiled. “Draco isn’t ready with the Switching Charms that he thinks he’ll need, either, and Hermione wants to modify the Fiendfyre incantation—God knows why, I can’t follow her on the theory. I thought we’d wait a short time, so you can work on antivenin as well as contact Pettigrew.”

And yes, Severus knew how to do that. It seemed that his skill as a spy and liar were finally going to come into good use for the first time since they had stolen the tiara Horcrux from Hogwarts. He smiled back at Harry, who departed from the lab whistling. Severus would have promised something much more difficult for a sight of that smile.

It was only when he began to make notes on what he knew of Nagini’s venom that he realized Fawkes had disappeared.

*

Harry hesitated. The moment he had left Snape’s lab, he’d heard a shuffle and rustle down the corridor, as if someone was there. But then he saw the edge of a gown-like robe, and he wondered if he shouldn’t keep walking instead of stopping.

He should have, but he couldn’t. He turned and looked into the small alcove the rustling had come from.

Narcissa Malfoy stood there and watched him with no expression on her face at all. That face was whiter than usual, though Harry didn’t think her pale robes helped matters. She had her hands folded around something small, with a frame on it. Harry couldn’t see the face, but he thought it was probably a portrait of Lucius.

She’s mourning, too. And maybe she mourns more because Draco flung himself into research instead of spending time grieving.

And maybe he should leave her there, yes. She’d never been friendly to him, and she would probably hate him for acknowledging that he saw her suffering.

But, on the other hand, she was suffering. And it really didn’t matter what kind of person she was. It mattered what kind of person Harry was.

So he walked up, gave her a short bow—he knew trying to touch her would be out of the question—and said in the most calm and mannered voice he possessed, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Narcissa stared at him. Harry turned around again and walked down the corridor.

A moment later, there was a brush of warmth against his neck from shining tail feathers, and Fawkes cooed in his ear. Harry caught his breath as the phoenix briefly settled on his shoulder and sang a few notes. The music sent a surge of health and strength through him. He smiled before he knew what he was doing.

Then Fawkes nestled his beak below Harry’s ear, shook one leg so that something fell into his palm, and took flight again, swooping in a flash of light up the corridor.

Harry looked down at the thing in his hand, blinking. It was a clear glass vial, and though he wasn’t sure, he was relatively sure that the slimy green liquid within it would turn out to be basilisk venom.

All you need, he thought in wonder, is a little time and attention to figure out what most people will need, and prevent suffering.

Chapter 30.3.