Kevin did not go to Hagrid's hut with the others.
He let Harry, Ron, and Hermione get ahead of him, watched them disappear down the slope toward the gamekeeper's cottage, and then turned and walked the other way.
There was something he needed to clarify. He had been putting it off because the question was delicate, and delicate questions had a way of going sideways when pressed too directly. But after reading Narcissa's letter in the carriage — after sitting with Snape's quiet certainty that Kevin would be the one to handle Draco, and the unspoken acknowledgement that Snape himself occupied some complicated middle ground Kevin hadn't fully mapped — he had decided that putting it off longer was its own kind of risk.
He knocked on the Headmaster's office door. It opened before his knuckles had finished.
Dumbledore looked up from his desk with an expression of mild, genuine curiosity. "I thought you'd go to Hagrid first."
"I'll get there." Kevin came in, sat down in the chair across the desk without being invited. "I need to ask you something directly."
"I appreciate directness."
"Did you send Professor Snape to spy on Voldemort?"
Dumbledore's head tilted slightly to one side. The quality of his attention changed — becoming more careful, more considered. "Did Severus tell you something?"
Kevin processed that response. He had come in with a theory. Dumbledore's answer — not no, not what are you talking about, but did Severus tell you — was as good as a confirmation. "You actually did have that plan."
"We had the outline of one," Dumbledore said, after a moment. He settled back, his hands folded, his gaze drifting briefly somewhere else. "The circumstances you're describing — Severus going undercover within Voldemort's circle — were something we discussed. It seemed, at the time, like the most viable way of maintaining intelligence about his movements."
Kevin waited.
"The plan was set aside." Dumbledore looked at him directly. "Because of you."
"Me."
"You developed faster than I had any right to anticipate. Several contingencies I'd been holding in reserve became unnecessary rather quickly." A pause that contained, Kevin suspected, a considerable amount of diplomatic compression. "You'll remember that when Voldemort returned last year — when he recalled his Death Eaters via their Dark Marks — Karkaroff ran. He'd given up too many names, had too much to answer for, and his nerve broke completely."
Kevin nodded.
"Severus came to me. Asked whether he should answer the call. Present himself, renew his loyalty, begin the operation." Dumbledore's voice was even, but the evenness was the careful kind. "I told him no. Given where things stood — given you — the calculus had changed."
So without Kevin, Snape would have walked back into Voldemort's orbit that night. Would have spent the next year and a half feeding intelligence from the inside, at enormous personal cost, building toward an endgame that Kevin's existence had already substantially altered.
Instead, Snape was marked — in Voldemort's accounting — as a Death Eater who had refused the recall. A traitor. Which meant Voldemort still had no idea what Snape was. Simply a former ally who'd chosen Dumbledore's side, presumably for motives Voldemort had written off as weakness or misplaced loyalty.
It was, Kevin realised, actually a cleaner position.
Dumbledore was looking at him with the particular expression he wore when he suspected Kevin had just arrived at the same destination he had. "I heard about Draco's situation from your earlier reports. Go forward with whatever you've been planning, Kevin. Don't carry regret about the things you could have done earlier. The important thing is what you do now."
Kevin stayed with that for a moment. Then he nodded, stood, and headed for the door.
"Kevin."
He stopped.
"Give Hagrid my regards. He'll be glad you came."
"Kevin! Perfect timing!"
Harry's face appeared at Hagrid's window before Kevin had reached the path. The relief in it was so immediate and specific that Kevin understood the situation before Harry got to the next sentence.
"Have you got any healing potions? The strong ones?"
Kevin already had his bag open.
Hagrid had giant blood. Standard Healing Potions scaled to a human's physiology — they'd have roughly the effect of a plaster on someone Hagrid's size. Kevin's Dragon-Blood Healing Draught was another proposition entirely. He'd developed the formula in second year, originally as an academic exercise, and had since refined it to the point where a single dose would regenerate tissue damage that would normally take a week and two Skele-Gro treatments to address.
He pulled a flask of it from deep in the bag, the contents a dark, arterial red, and carried it inside.
Hagrid was at his table, pressing a slab of dragon steak against the gouged mess of his face. The wounds were deep enough that Kevin could count at least three separate impact sites. He took in the rest of it — the bruising across the jaw, the way Hagrid was favouring his left side, the bandaging that showed under his rolled sleeve — and kept his expression easy.
"Long time no see, Uncle Hagrid." Kevin set the flask on the table. "You're looking distinguished."
"Ha!" Hagrid grabbed the flask with the hand not holding the dragon steak. He examined it for half a second — long enough to note the colour and the faint warmth it put off — and then tilted it back and drank the whole thing.
A standard person would have been unconscious inside thirty seconds. Hagrid blinked twice, set the flask down, and said: "Bit tingly."
Kevin watched the wounds on his face begin closing. Not slowly, the way normal healing worked, but with a visible, continuous knitting-together that was almost uncomfortable to watch in its speed.
Harry and the others had been filling Kevin in on the main points as he'd walked in. Now Hermione picked up the thread more carefully: Dumbledore had sent Hagrid and Olympe Maxime to the continent in September, with the goal of making contact with the giant clans. The mission had been an attempt to keep the giants neutral in the coming conflict, or ideally to bring them into alliance with the Order. It had failed. Death Eaters had arrived first, with better offers and fewer conditions, and the chief had made his choice.
"Half of this," Hagrid said, gesturing vaguely at his face, "was from a couple giants who weren't happy about the conversation we was trying to have."
He stopped there. Something closed in his expression — not evasion, exactly, more like someone trying to figure out which version of the truth they can actually say out loud.
Kevin thought about Grawp. He thought about the footprints Luna had reportedly seen in the Forbidden Forest. He thought about the very specific kind of weight in Hagrid's eyes when Kevin had offered, in the carriage months ago, to help with whatever needed helping with.
"Uncle Hagrid," he said, keeping his voice entirely casual. "If there's something in the forest you need a hand with — something complicated — you can just say so."
Hagrid went still.
His brain was visibly working through the options. Did Kevin know? Was Kevin guessing? Had Dumbledore sent him specifically? Kevin's offer had been general enough to plausibly mean anything, and specific enough that only one interpretation actually fit.
He looked at Kevin for a long moment. Then he nodded, slowly.
"Yeah," he said. "Actually, yeah. I could do with a hand."
Kevin glanced at Harry and the others. You heard that. No backing out now.
"Better if you all know," Hagrid confirmed, settling his massive hands on his knees. "So you don't go wandering into that part of the forest by accident and get yourselves killed."
He stood, picked up his crossbow on instinct, looked at it, set it back down, and started moving toward the door.
They looked at each other. Then they followed.