The training session had run long.
The Room of Requirement — configured today as the usual open practice space, lit and warm, smelling of exertion and the lingering residue of small-scale hexes — had emptied out gradually. A few students lingered at the edges, talking in pairs. Harry moved through them in his usual post-session round, checking in, answering questions, the quiet work of someone who has discovered he is better at this than he expected.
Cedric had stayed.
"You're in next week's match," he said, falling in beside Harry as he made the last circuit.
"When am I not?"
"This is my last year." Cedric smiled, but there was something genuine underneath it — not quite wistful, just present in the way things are when you've started counting them. "I want that House Cup properly. Not handed to me."
"I'm not going to hand you anything."
"Good." He clapped Harry on the shoulder. "See you on the pitch."
Cho Chang had appeared at the Room's entrance, presumably to collect Cedric for whatever Ravenclaw business required him. She glanced between them — easy, comfortable with the group dynamic that had developed over a year of shared sessions.
Harry, half on instinct, half from the habit of turning over every possible stone: "Either of you know anything about the Hufflepuff Cup? Or Ravenclaw's Diadem? Old house legends, anything like that?"
It was a long shot. He knew it was a long shot.
Cho frowned, thinking. "The Diadem — there are stories, but no one living has ever seen it. It went missing a long time ago."
"Same with the Cup," Cedric said. "I've heard it ended up with some collector. After that, nothing."
"Alright. Worth asking."
They left. The Room was nearly empty now.
"You're looking for Ravenclaw's tiara."
Harry spun.
Luna Lovegood was sitting in a corner he would have sworn was unoccupied thirty seconds ago. She had her head tilted and her eyes at the particular angle they took on when she was thinking about something at a right angle to whatever everyone else was thinking about.
"How long have you been there?"
"I walked in while Cedric was talking." She considered. "Harry — have you asked the Grey Lady?"
"The — Ravenclaw Tower ghost?"
"She's been at Hogwarts longer than anyone. If anyone knows where something belonging to Ravenclaw went, it would be her."
Harry stared at her. It was, he realised, an obvious idea that had not occurred to him, and it had not occurred to him because it required thinking of the ghosts not as scenery but as actual people with actual histories.
"Luna, you're—"
"I fed the Night Elves in the Forbidden Forest the other day," she said conversationally, getting to her feet and brushing off her robes. "I saw very large footprints. Much larger than a centaur's."
Harry opened his mouth. Closed it. Considered the footprints and what they implied about Hagrid's current living situation.
"I'll look into the Grey Lady," he said carefully.
In a chamber beneath Malfoy Manor that appeared on no architectural plan, the Death Eaters who remained were very quiet.
Voldemort said nothing for a long time.
He had been saying nothing for long enough that several of the less experienced Death Eaters had begun to wonder if staying very still was preventing something or simply delaying it.
The ring was gone. Nagini was gone. The diary had been lost three years ago to Lucius Malfoy's spectacular misjudgement. The locket had been gone — he now accepted — for some time before he'd admitted it.
Four Horcruxes.
He turned the number over.
Dumbledore and Kevin together were a problem that did not have a straightforward solution. He had tried politics — Fudge had turned. He had tried cursed artefacts — Kevin identified them. He had tried Dementors, Death Eaters in Muggle neighbourhoods, ambushes at the Ministry. Each attempt had returned some variation of the same result: Kevin and Dumbledore, intact, and several of his people not.
There was a third option. It had been sitting at the back of his mind since before Christmas, avoided because it was the kind of option you only reached for when the other options were exhausted.
He needed an ally.
Someone who could match Dumbledore on equal terms. Someone whose power operated on a comparable scale to Dumbledore and Kevin combined. Someone who, for the right price or the right argument, might be persuaded to act.
He knew exactly who.
The conversation would be difficult. The man in question was proud, had his own agenda, and could not be controlled. He could potentially be directed — but only if the direction aligned with something he already wanted.
It was a last resort.
He had, Voldemort reflected, run out of everything else.
Kevin set the containment case on Dumbledore's desk and stepped back.
Dumbledore looked at it, then at Kevin. He had been occupied with what appeared to be a collection of very old documents — parchment mixed with what might have been fabric, the whole pile covered in script that might not have been an alphabet — and had moved it aside quickly when Kevin knocked.
"You've finished studying the curse."
"Finished and solved." Kevin dropped into the chair. He felt, for the first time in weeks, like a person who had put down something heavy and could now breathe properly. "The solution is ready."
Dumbledore's expression was the warm, precise thing it became when he was genuinely pleased rather than performing pleasantness. "Tell me."
Kevin laid it out.
The cure for Voldemort's curse on Draco — and, by extension, on all three Malfoys — was not a counter-curse. Conventional counter-curses operated by identifying and neutralising a curse's active mechanism. Voldemort's work was too sophisticated for that; the curse was multi-layered, the layers interdependent, the whole structure designed to resist exactly that kind of intervention.
So Kevin had inverted the approach. He'd built a curse that targeted other curses — a predatory construct, designed to lie dormant within its host until an external curse activated, at which point it woke, identified the invader, and consumed it. Painful in the process, profoundly uncomfortable in its passive state, but functional. Permanent, if maintained.
Side effects were manageable: increased metabolic demand, the need for more food, more rest, more of everything the body used to sustain itself. Not debilitating. Liveable.
The limitation: all three Malfoys had to be dosed within the same half-day window. If Voldemort activated the existing curse on one of them before the counter-curse was fully established in all three, he would feel the resistance. He would understand what had been done. And his response to understanding would be immediate and aimed at the other two.
"Which means," Kevin said, "I need to get to Lucius and Narcissa before we move on Draco. And they're at Malfoy Manor."
Dumbledore was nodding slowly. "You need Voldemort out of the building."
"I need him occupied and far away, long enough for me to get in and out." Kevin paused. "The locket. He doesn't know it's been swapped. If someone appeared to retrieve it from the coastal cave — appeared to be setting up an attack on it—"
"He would come." Dumbledore's eyes were sharp. "Yes. He'd want to see it for himself, at minimum. And if he suspected we were finally making a move on the cave—"
"He'd arrive expecting a trap and spend time checking for one before he acted. That buys time."
"It buys time," Dumbledore agreed. He stood, moving to the window, and his voice took on the quality of a man working through logistics with the pleasure of someone who genuinely enjoys problems. "We have one opportunity to make this work. If he doesn't take the bait, or if the timing slips—"
"It won't." Kevin said it with the particular confidence of someone who has run the plan many times in his head and stopped finding holes.
Dumbledore looked at him.
"One shot," Kevin confirmed. "I'll be ready."
Dumbledore opened his mouth to say something else, and a letter appeared from nowhere — no owl, no fire, simply a sealed envelope settling onto the desk as though it had always been there. Dumbledore reached for it, and Kevin saw the look that moved across his face when he read the name on the front.
It was there for only a moment before it was contained behind the usual serenity.
"Something wrong?" Kevin asked.
"Old news," Dumbledore said. He slid the letter into a drawer. "Nothing that concerns us right now."
Kevin let it go. Dumbledore's private correspondence was Dumbledore's. There were things the old man carried that he carried alone.