With the handfasting celebrated both in Russia and Britain, the magical world spent a few days congratulating itself before returning to its habits of developing and unifying.
Corvus chose that moment to deal with Ronald Weasley. Or more to use the boy to demonstrate another sharp edge of the new order.
The venue was especially selected.
A court of noble houses had been invited to the largest settlement to witness the matter. Twelve heads of recognised representatives from the Sacred Twenty Eight lines sat in a raised half circle above the central square, robed in their house colours beneath a canopy warded against wind and sudden rain. The benches below had filled early. Some came from curiosity. Some came because honour cases between houses still drew old instincts out of the blood. Some came because the insult had touched House Black, House Rosier, and House Delacour all at once, which made the matter too large to ignore and too ridiculous not to watch.
The charge, when Amelia Bones read it for the record, was almost embarrassingly simple.
Ronald Bilius Weasley had repeatedly attempted to court and harass the betrothed of Corvus Black after direct warning from faculty, kin, and guards. In doing so, he had sought to tarnish the honour of House Black, House Rosier, and House Delacour. A single warning ignored could be called youthful stupidity. Repeated action after a warning became a wilful insult.
When the Bastion Guards brought him out, the square quieted.
Ron looked worse than the last time anyone had seen him. He had been beaten more than once, and not gently. The bruising across his face had gone through yellow and green into older shades. His clothes hung more loosely than they should have. There was a thinness about him that did not suit his frame. Prison had stripped away a certain swollen defiance and left only fear, sour self-pity, and the sort of late wisdom that arrived when consequences had already closed the door.
Without a veela in sight and with the Bastion Guards ensuring that his days contained no romance and much reflection, he had finally understood what he had done.
That understanding did not comfort him.
His family had been allowed to speak with him before the insulted party declared its decision.
Molly Weasley reached him first and clutched him with such frantic force that for one moment, he almost looked like a child again. The effect lasted only until she drew breath to unleash the first shrill curse against the new order, the Bastion Guards, and the dark families she had spent years blaming for every wound reality handed her.
Arthur stopped her by doing the only effective thing left to him.
He clamped one hand over her mouth.
Molly's outrage shifted toward him at once, but Arthur no longer had the strength or patience to care. His face looked older than it should have. The lines around his eyes had deepened in the last year, and the embarrassment of this day had added something meaner to them.
"Enough," he said through his teeth, still holding her quiet. "For once in your life, enough."
The twins stood a little behind him. Bill had come. Charlie as well. Percy held himself with the rigid discomfort of a man who wanted very badly to be somewhere else and knew that family duty had once again mistaken him for an available victim. Ginny was absent. That, Arthur suspected, was the only mercy the day had offered.
Ron looked from one face to the next, hope dying in small stages.
Arthur finally let Molly go and turned fully on his son.
"You idiot." The words came out tired rather than loud, which made them land harder. "Do you have any idea what you did? Not what you wanted, not what you imagined, not what your poor aching heart told you in those two brainless moments of yours. What you actually did."
Ron opened his mouth.
Arthur cut him off at once.
"No. You will listen. You flirted, chased, and pestered a betrothed lady, warning after direct warning. Not a girl without family. Not some classmate at a dance. The publicly contracted fiancée of a man who is Lord of one house and heir to another. And not only that, you did it while she was the daughter of the French Minister for Magic. You insulted three houses, two ministries, your school, and your family."
Molly tried to interject with a furious noise about boys being boys.
Arthur rounded on her with such open exhaustion that even she stopped.
"He was told," Arthur said. "By his brothers. By his professors. By the guards. By the Headmistress. He was told because everyone around him understood what he was too stupid to understand, or too arrogant to accept. In noble etiquette, to continue pressing attentions on a betrothed lady is to spit on the man she is promised to and the house that shelters her. He did that again and again."
He turned back to Ron.
"And what it cost us is not merely this square and these benches and these people watching us like a travelling disgrace. It cost us what little honour remained attached to this family name in decent company. It cost your mother the last of her excuses. It cost me the right to plead ignorance on behalf of my own son. You have made us look like gutter fools before half the old houses of Britain."
Ron's face had gone white beneath the bruises.
He looked to his brothers then, not to Arthur.
Misery made him shameless.
"I don't want to duel him," he said in a thin voice. "Please. One of you do it for me."
Fred actually stared.
George's mouth opened, then closed again.
Bill gave a slow, disbelieving shake of the head. Charlie looked as if he was seeing a pile of dragon dung and somehow respected the actual pile more.
Percy recovered first.
"You are asking one of us," he said with poisonous calm, "to stand in honour duel against Corvus Black because you harassed his betrothed and could not stop being a moron after being warned not to be one."
Ron swallowed.
Fred laughed once without humour. "Amazing."
George folded his arms. "You truly are mother's favourite."
Their allotted time ended before Ron could find anything worth saying in his own defence.
The square shifted.
The opening between the raised benches widened. Guards moved aside. Corvus Black stepped forward and brought silence with him as naturally as rainy weather brought darkness.
His voice crossed the square without effort.
"I, Corvus Black, Lord of House Rosier, Heir of House Black, call for the pest named Ronald Bilius Weasley to an honour duel."
He looked directly at Ron.
"Come. I am giving you a chance to at least stand as a wizard in front of me."
There was theatre in it, of course. Corvus had chosen a public venue for a reason. The Weasley boy himself was almost incidental by now. What mattered was the lesson.
Ron failed to convince any of his brothers to duel in his place. He stepped forward; he had finally run out of alternatives.
"Professor Black," he muttered, as though this might still be handled by school rules and apology.
Corvus cut him off with open contempt.
"You may choose the wizard who will referee."
Ron's head turned toward the gathered court. Twelve heads of old houses, or near enough to count. Lord Selwyn. Lady Bulstrode. Lord Nott. Lord Abbot. More names than he wanted to see and all of them looking at him as though he had tracked mud into a shrine.
He gulped.
"I choose Lord Abbot." At least he was not a dark wizard like the rest of those snakes.
The chosen lord rose slowly, descended with grave precision, and took position at the edge of the marked duelling circle. He did not waste anyone's time with a florid preamble.
"Begin."
Ron did the only thing left to him.
He cast everything he knew.
The tragedy of it lay not in failure alone but in quality. Prank hexes first, because the twins had taught him those, and he never cared for the new curriculum. A badly aimed colour-changing charm. A leg-locking curse cast late and without conviction. Slugulus Eructo, which was at least offensive in intention if not in dignity. Then Expelliarmus, thrown with all the desperate faith of a boy who had spent years treating one school duel as though it had been the summit of magical combat.
Corvus stood still through most of it.
A hex splashed harmlessly against a shield that did not visibly form. The disarming charm never reached him at all. It simply bent and vanished.
The square watched the performance in growing disbelief.
Several among the noble witnesses were no longer looking at Ron but at Arthur Weasley, as though trying to understand how he had managed to raise a son who could not cast a proper offensive spell.
Somewhere behind the front benches, a witch murmured, with genuine puzzlement, how Altair Black, younger than this idiot, stood as Hogwarts champion while Ronald Weasley flung joke work like a second year trying to impress a first year.
Corvus allowed the shame to continue long enough to become complete.
Then he lifted one hand.
Ron stopped moving.
Psychic force took him cleanly and held him upright in the air.
Panic finally reached his face in full.
Corvus closed his fingers once.
There was a sickening crack.
Ron's hands broke together.
"These," Corvus said coldly, "were the hands that held flowers."
Ron screamed. Molly screamed louder.
Corvus closed his fist a second time, not around bone now, but around the centre of Ron's magic.
The destruction of a magical core was not something anyone present had ever seen.
A wrong inward sound, like glass collapsing under black water.
Ron's body convulsed in the psychic grip. The cry that tore across the square came from Molly Weasley again, because Ron himself had gone beyond clean noise and into the choking agony of a body realising something vital had been torn out of it forever.
"And this," Corvus said, his voice flat as judgment, "is the result of your idiocy. You are hereby ceased to be a wizard."
He turned his head toward the waiting Aurors of Magical Law Enforcement.
"Let his memories of the magical world be taken. He shall never bring shame to it again."
He threw Ron from the psychic grip as carelessly as one might discard spoiled cloth.
The Aurors caught him badly because there was no elegant way to catch a collapsing wreck of a boy whose magic had just been erased. They dragged him toward the DMLE office of the settlement, where his wand would be broken and the last formal stripping of knowledge completed.
Now no different from a Muggle, Ronald Weasley disappeared into bureaucratic mercy.
Corvus turned then to Arthur.
"Consider this, Arthur Weasley, the last mercy for the Black blood in your veins. Even though Cedrella Black was disowned for marrying Septimus Weasley, House Black honours its blood. You and yours have now spent every ounce of that honour. Your next disregard will not end with such mercy."
Arthur was barely upright. Watching his youngest son turn into a Muggle had struck him harder than any public insult could have. The warning, on the other hand, explained something at last. Why did he still hold a Ministry post. Why had his family not already been destroyed outright. Cedrella's blood had been the shield.
He bowed deeply, the motion hard with humiliation.
"Thank you, my lord."
Corvus turned and left.
Behind Arthur, the elder Weasley brothers held Molly back by force while she made the sort of noise that lived halfway between grief and the determination to do something stupider still.
The duel had been staged to appease the honour of the houses.
The real message lay elsewhere.
Corvus had been able to bestow magic on Muggles.
Now the public knew he could take it away from the magicals as well.
He could do more than bind it by ritual or suppress it through wards. He could destroy it.
That was why he had chosen a public square and a court of houses instead of handling Ronald privately in some corridor of the Bastion. The Weasley boy had been an insult. The crowd had been the audience that mattered.
The leash had been shown, and it was received well.
-
Later, in his office aboard the frigate, Corvus sat with the tome open while Elizaveta, now his wife, Elizaveta Black née Volkova, read through the latest reports from the Shadows.
"Resistance among the progressive houses has ceased, my love," she said, lowering one report and lifting the next. "Their last meeting was after you thrashed that red-haired baboon. Three of them dissolved their house alliances entirely. Another four decided to join the Neutrals in the Wizengamot."
Corvus nodded once, though his mind was already elsewhere.
He had achieved nearly everything required to dominate this world.
The world beneath his hand was structured, obedient, and still improving according to design.
That left the next threshold.
It was time to try Dimensional Passage.