13th January 1996, the North Sea, night
Azkaban rose out of the black water like a tombstone.
The sea threw itself against the rock in long grey explosions, and the wind off it cut like wire, and on a shelf of stone above the landing, Barty Crouch Junior stood with his face turned up to the fortress and an expression on it of pure, rapturous homecoming.
"Look at it," he breathed. The tip of his tongue flicked at the corner of his mouth, the old mad tic. "Fourteen years they kept me in that stone. Fed me to the cold an inch a day."
His eyes were shining. "And now I've come back with the keys."
Behind him, half a dozen figures waited in the dark — the new recruits, foreign wands gathered on the tour abroad, hard-faced men and women who watched the fortress with professional calculation and their new lieutenant with something more careful.
And to one side, hunched as far from the water's edge as the shelf allowed, Peter Pettigrew cowered.
It was not the sea that Wormtail watched. It was the shapes above the fortress — the tall gliding rags of darkness circling the towers in a slow gyre, dozens upon dozens of them, the garrison the Dark Lord had turned. The Dementors had not attacked the prison.
They had simply, on an appointed night, stopped working — drifted up off their posts like smoke off a doused fire, and waited.
They were waiting now.
The cold coming off them reached even here, even over the sea-wind, and it found every wretched thing in Peter Pettigrew and stroked it.
'Why me,' he thought, for the hundredth time, hating the whine in his own head and unable to stop it.
'Mordred gets America. Mordred gets to walk beside the Dark Lord through MACUSA's back garden, all clean work and clever words — and I get the North Sea, and the frogs—' he flinched as a Dementor banked low overhead '...and HIM.'
He looked at Crouch's upturned, ecstatic face, and shuddered.
There were things Peter Pettigrew feared more than his master. Not many. But the man on the rock was one, and the creatures above it were the rest, and tonight he had been given both.
Crouch raised his wand to the sky.
"Morsmordre."
The Dark Mark bloomed over Azkaban — vast, green, the serpent crawling from the skull's mouth — and its light fell on the black water for a mile in every direction, and inside the fortress, distantly, an alarm began to scream.
"Begin," said Barty Crouch Junior, pleasantly, and walked toward the gates.
It was swift, after that, and it was ugly.
The wardens were brave men left holding an impossible post — a garrison built around Dementors that had deserted, human guards stretched thin across a fortress designed to need none. They were caught between the recruits coming up from the landing and Crouch coming through the gate like a blade, and they fought — genuinely fought, barricading stairwells, holding the west passage for whole minutes — and it was in vain, and it did not take long.
At the end of it, one warden ran.
A young one, bleeding from the scalp, breaking from a side door and sprinting flat-out for the emergency Portkey point — a clean shot for any wand on the rock, and every wand on the rock looked to Crouch, and Crouch watched the running man with his head cocked, and did nothing at all.
The crack of the Portkey came, and the warden was gone.
Wormtail sidled up, wringing his silver hand. "You... let him go." It came out half a question, all cringe. "Barty. You let him. You're not — I know you're not careless, you're never careless, so why—"
Crouch turned and looked at him, smiled, and said nothing whatsoever yet the smile said everything.
Let him run. Let him arrive gibbering in the Ministry Atrium with Azkaban's fall on his lips before the Prophet can be told what to print. Let them hear it raw. The message was the mercy. The war is close now. The war is at your door.
Wormtail looked away first.
On the far side of the fortress, the west wall came down.
It came down in a long roar of parting stone, and out through the breach, into the Mark's green light, walked ten figures in prison grey — gaunt, wild-haired, blinking, fourteen years of the cold falling off them in rags.
Some of them laughed at the sky, wildly, at the beautiful burning skull; some only stood and swayed, dazed, touching their own faces as though checking the fit.
And ahead of them all came a woman.
Bellatrix Lestrange walked out of Azkaban laughing — a high, cracked, carrying laugh, her head thrown back, her ruined face alight — and her hollow eyes went at once, hungrily, across the rock, searching, searching, for one figure, the only figure, the tall cold shape her whole broken devotion had waited fourteen years to kneel before—
—and found a smirking Barty Crouch Junior, and a cowering Peter Pettigrew, and hired foreign wands.
The laugh died. Her face fell in on itself like a house.
"Where," said Bellatrix Lestrange, in a voice gone suddenly small and terrible, "is my Lord? Where is he? He came for us — he sent for us — where—"
"Abroad," said Crouch, and let her twist on it a half-second, savouring, they had never liked each other, the maniac and the fanatic, two flames jealous of one lamp before he gave her the rest.
"Finishing what matters. But he is coming, Bella. Home to England. Soon."
The smirk widened into something almost kind. "And when he comes — then it begins. All of it. Everything they owe us."
He looked past her, at the nine swaying shadows, and raised his voice like a toast. "Fourteen years, my friends. Now comes the revenge."
And Bellatrix Lestrange's grief caught, and turned over, and reignited into joy — and her laughter rose again over the wreck of Azkaban, higher and madder than before, and the Dementors wheeled above the Mark, and the sea beat on and on against the rock.
14th January 1996, the Great Hall, morning
Breakfast, four hundred miles south, began in blessed ignorance.
Harry sat in the thick of his own crowd — Luna beside him, deep in one of the ritual-magic texts Ethan had given her, absently eating toast with her wand hand while she turned pages with the other; Ron and Lavender opposite; Hermione and Viktor; Neville; Draco with Astoria and Daphne
The morning's entertainment was Ron, in full flow.
"—so Angelina's had him in remedial team spirit," Ron was saying, with relish.
"Every practice. Extra sessions. She stands about this far off his shoulder and every time he opens his mouth to explain someone else's job to them, she just says his name. That's all. 'Cormac.' Like that." Ron did the voice — low, gritted, freighted with menace — and half the table was already going.
"First two days, he held out. Full McLaggen. Chin up, hair perfect, 'I merely feel the Chasers would benefit—''CORMAC.' By day three—" Ron composed his features into a haunted, hollow-eyed thousand-yard stare, the face of a man who has seen things, and jumped theatrically at nothing "—'yes Angelina. Sorry Angelina. Staying in my hoops, Angelina.' I swear he flinches at ginger hair now. All ginger hair. He flinched at me on Tuesday."
The table dissolved. Hermione choked on her pumpkin juice mid-laugh, and Viktor, without pausing his own laughter, thumped her helpfully between the shoulder blades.
"Is good coaching," he offered, over her spluttering. "Truly. I have seen it done to internationals. The pride must break before the player can be built. Your Angelina —" he nodded with professional respect "— she vould do vell in Bulgaria."
"And that's not even the news," Ron went on, puffing up. "Ginny's made the team. Reserve, only — but you should see her in practice, she's flying rings round half the starters. Chaser, Seeker, she can do the lot. All-rounder. Angelina says—"
He stopped.
Because the sound of the Hall had changed.
It started at the Ravenclaw table and moved outward like a stain — a gasp here, a sudden whispering knot there, students snatching at newspapers, heads bending together, someone's goblet going over unheeded. The morning's easy noise died table by table, and what replaced it was the low, urgent, sickened murmur of very bad news travelling fast.
Draco's cup stopped halfway to his mouth. Daphne had gone still, reading faces down the Hall the way other people read print.
"Something's happened," she said quietly.
Almost nobody in their group took the Prophet any more — most had cancelled in disgust months ago; only Harry, Luna, Draco, and Daphne kept subscriptions, on the old intelligence principle of know what the enemy is printing, and none of them had opened today's.
Even as Harry looked round for a copy, a white shape swept in high over the tables — Hedwig, with the morning delivery, dropping the rolled Prophet neatly by his plate.
Harry unrolled it. Went still.
"Read it," said Draco, low.
Harry read it out, quietly, for the group.
MASS BREAKOUT FROM AZKABAN. The west wall breached. The Dementors — the paper danced around this with visible desperation — "failed to prevent" the escape. Ten of the most dangerous prisoners in Britain, free.
The paper did what it could with the framing: it splashed Barty Crouch Junior and Peter Pettigrew across the front — known fugitives, believed responsible and dwelt lavishly on the Dementor question, and buried the ten names in column six, and nowhere, not once, in the entire report, did it print the two words every reader supplied for themselves.
It didn't matter.
Everyone knew.
You could watch the whole Hall knowing it, table by table. The Prophet could dress the corpse however it liked: Azkaban had fallen in a night, to a coordinated assault, in service of one man — and the Minister who had spent six months parading the international response and the tightening net was this morning wearing the ugliest headline of his life.
Harry read the ten names.
The table took them in silence, and the silence had different weights in it. Lavender had begun, very quietly, to shake, and Ron's arm went round her and stayed there. Hermione's hand had found Viktor's on the tabletop, both their knuckles white, their eyes locked on the paper. Astoria drew closer in against Draco's side, and Draco's arm came round her automatically, his face pale and set — because his aunt's name was third on the list, and everyone at the table knew it, and no one said it.
It was Neville that Harry watched.
Neville had gone very still at Lestrange, Bellatrix, and stayed still — lips pressed white, fists closing slowly on the table's edge until the tendons stood up and there was nothing of the old flinching in it, nothing of the boy who had once gone grey at the woman's photograph.
This was different.
This was iron coming to temper. His parents were home, and healing, and travelling the country making up fourteen stolen years — and the woman who had stolen them had just walked out of her cage. Harry caught his eye and held it, steady, and after a moment Neville breathed out, once, and his fists eased, and he nodded — I'm all right — did not entirely mean it, and both of them let that be enough for now.
Luna had shifted closer against Harry's side, warm and quiet.
He glanced down at her — and caught it: the flicker across her grey eyes, there and gone, a shadow blue at its edges. Her lesser Sight, stirring at something on the road ahead.
"Luna?"
"It's begun properly now," she said, very softly, to the middle distance. "The next part."
And then she blinked, and was Luna again, and took another piece of toast.
Buried in column eight, below the fold, beneath an advertisement for cauldron polish, a small item noted the death of one Broderick Bode, 49, an unfortunate accident during his convalescence at St Mungo's — strangled in his hospital bed by a potted Devil's Snare that had been delivered, mislabelled, as a gift. Ministry employee, the item said. Department unspecified. Regrettable lapse in gift-screening procedures.
Harry's eye passed over it, snagged for half a heartbeat on Ministry employee — and then Ron said something, and the page turned, and it was gone.
Around the Hall, four hundred students were reading the same paper, and it is doubtful whether five of them noticed Broderick Bode at all.
At the Slytherin table, one knot of students was not sombre.
Theodore Nott held court amid his crew, the Prophet spread before them, and they were — Harry watched it with a cold settling in his stomach — giggling. Making jokes, low and delighted, glancing about to see who saw them. Ten of the Dark Lord's faithful free in a night, and the children of their old comrades laughing over breakfast, not even troubling to hide it any more.
'They're not gloating about the past,' Harry thought, watching Theodore's bright, fuse-lit face. 'They're gloating about what's coming.'
The doors of the Great Hall banged open.
Dolores Umbridge came up the aisle at speed — and she looked, beneath the pink, genuinely haggard, powder over sleeplessness, the smile screwed on crooked and she went down the tables with her wand out, and began, absurdly, magnificently, to confiscate the newspapers.
Every copy, summoned out of hands mid-read, snapping through the air into a growing stack behind her. "Hem, hem — students' attention at breakfast should be on nourishment and preparation for lessons, current events of a... distressing nature are a distraction the curriculum cannot accommodate—"
She got the lot, turned, and went out at a brisk trot with four hundred stares on her back, and the doors boomed shut behind her.
There was a beat of pure silence.
"She does know," said Daphne, into it, dry as sand, "that we'd all already read it."
"It's not for us," Draco murmured.
His eyes had followed Umbridge out, and then travelled, deliberately, to where the exchange students sat in a bewildered cluster — Rolf Scamander among them, still blinking at the space where his newspaper had been.
"It's for them. Four foreign students write home this week. She's been assigned to make sure the letters say the tour is going splendidly." His mouth twisted. "Azkaban fell last night, and the Ministry's answer, this morning, in this school, is to hide the newspapers from the tourists."
Nobody laughed. It was too exactly true.
The day declined from there.
By afternoon a new frame had gone up on the noticeboard — Educational Decree Number Twenty-Six, freshly signed: teachers are henceforth forbidden from giving students any information not strictly related to the subjects they are paid to teach and hard on its heels came the news that made sense of it: Hagrid had been placed on probation.
Probation. Temporary — the notice was careful to say temporary — pending review of instructional standards.
But everyone understood the grammar of it.
The Decree was the muzzle; the probation was the leash; and both had gone on the half-giant the morning after ten Death Eaters walked free, so that the one teacher who might tell students what actually stalked the world outside could be dismissed the moment he tried.
Ron and Hermione were, jointly, incandescent.
"—she waits until today," Hermione raged, up the corridor, "the one morning the whole school needs someone to tell them the truth, and she gags the staff — I'm going to Ethan, he can — he outranks her, he can do the thing with the — the midnight thing—"
"We'll go now," Ron agreed hotly, "he'll sort it, he sorted the Decrees before—"
"He can't." It was Draco who stepped into their path, and his voice was flat and sensible and hateful to hear.
"Think. She's still High Inquisitor — that office is real, Fudge signed it, and this morning Fudge is bleeding and frightened, which makes her leash longer, not shorter, because the Ministry needs its grip on this school more than ever today."
He held Hermione's furious eyes, steady. "Ethan's hold over her is a knife at her throat, not a hand on her wand. Knives at throats work exactly as long as you don't wave them about. He spends it on this — on probation, on a Decree and he's spent it, and the next thing she does will be worse and he'll have nothing left to stop it with."
"Hagrid's only on probation," Harry added, quieter, a hand on Ron's shoulder. "He's still teaching. Still here. It's an insult, not a wound — and Dad will know about it before dinner, I promise you, and he'll choose the ground. Not her."
He waited until some of the blaze had banked in both of them. "We keep our heads. That's how we've beaten her every time so far."
Hermione let out a long, shaking, furious breath, and unclenched, one finger at a time. "...Fine. Fine. But I'm writing it all down. Dates and everything. For after."
"I'd expect nothing less," said Harry, and got, at last, the ghost of a smile out of her.
Occlumency that evening was the worst yet.
Snape, whatever else he was, read the news too, and the lesson had an edge on it that had not been there before — the probes harder, faster, less telegraphed, the barbs crueller.
"The Dark Lord's servants are loose, Potter; do you imagine BELLATRIX LESTRANGE will count to three?" — and the ocean held, and cracked, and held, and cracked, and by the end Harry had kept him out of everything that mattered at the price of everything he had.
He came up out of the dungeons wrung grey, his shirt soaked through, wanting exactly one thing in the world: the kitchens, a word with the elves, and a pot of the calming tea Ethan had taught him to ask for.
He was two corridors from the pear portrait when he saw them.
Luna and Rolf, at the junction ahead, parting ways — Luna turning up the stair toward Ravenclaw Tower with a wave, a book of Ethan's under her arm; Rolf lifting a hand after her, then turning down the kitchen corridor himself.
Harry stopped.
He was tired, the day had been long and dark, and every disciplined, trained, reasonable structure in him was thoroughly off-duty — and the thing that rose up in its place, hot and unreasonable and vast, was the other thing.
The green-eyed thing.
'After a day like this. He's been with her after a day like THIS—' His eyes narrowed on Rolf Scamander down the length of the corridor, flat and cold, with a focus that had made older and darker things than a exchange student check their step.
Rolf noticed him.
And — under Harry's total amazement — did not find urgent business elsewhere, did not wilt, did not develop the hunted look of a boy who had spent a term being glared at by the Boy Who Lived.
Instead his face opened into its easy, friendly smile, and he changed course, and came walking straight up the corridor toward Harry with the unhurried confidence of someone arriving at a conversation he'd been meaning to have for a while.
"Harry," said Rolf Scamander pleasantly, stopping a comfortable arm's length away. "Good — I hoped I'd catch you alone, actually. Have you got a minute? I've been wanting a word."