Chapter Seventy-Six of IAATB: Morituri Te Salutant
Thanks for the reviews on the last chapter!
Warnings: gore.
The title is Latin, and was the greeting used by Roman gladiators to the Emperor on entering the arena: “They who are about to die salute you.”
Chapter Seventy-Six: Morituri Te Salutant
Harry woke slowly. His brain was fogged, confused. He knew he had taken up the book of summoning spells to study, and to make sure that he could find out how to call Evan Rosier and destroy the last Horcrux now, today. The moment he destroyed it, he could face Voldemort and destroy him, since there would be no Horcruxes to protect him anymore, and then he could take Connor home and heal him. And in that way, he would keep both his promise of love to his brother and his promises of love to other people and his duty to the magical creature species he had yet to free as vates. He did see that, once Draco had explained it. If he had done nothing but sacrifice his life against Voldemort-and it would have been sacrifice, since he could not have killed him without destroying the Hufflepuff Cup-then he would have done nothing but buy Connor a few more moments of life. Oh, he might have died in the name of his principles, but he would not have fulfilled them.
Those thoughts were so strong that for long moments he didn’t notice he wasn’t in his bedroom. Then he wondered if Snape and Draco had come up, administered another dose of Dreamless Sleep, and removed him to a more secure place. He felt a current of indignation. Didn’t they trust him to keep his word about staying in Silver-Mirror, once he was convinced of the necessity?
And then he remembered Henrietta.
He tried to sit up. He reached a halfway position before he jackknifed and fell to the ground again. He coughed and looked weakly from side to side. He knew that having visions of his brother’s suffering forced into his mind had reduced his visual acuity and his perceptiveness, but he should surely have noticed his bonds before now.
And his location, he thought dazedly. He lay on the grass near a pine copse, beneath the open sky, and a faint intimation of light in the east said dawn was coming. Vines bound his limbs, curled around his shoulders and waist, and had just settled into a comfortable position about his neck. Harry shook his head. Vines. Why did she bring me to a patch of vines?
If, of course, it was Henrietta who did this.
He felt almost ready to meet anyone else who could have abducted him, though. For one thing, destroying someone evil would have felt good. And for another, he had endured all the grief and pain and fear that he could for right now. His brain floated in a haze of numbness, and he saw no more visions. He was not sure whether Voldemort had ceased to torture Connor, or whether his magic had shut down the connection.
Why would she have taken me? Why would she have brought me here? Harry was sure he had never been here before, and it was a very long way from any safehouse he knew of. Perhaps it was a place special to Henrietta, but she could have mentioned it to him, and he would have traveled there of his own free will, without her having to abduct him. Of course, that would have had to wait until Connor was rescued and at least partially healed, and perhaps she had not wanted to wait.
But why? No matter how he thought upon it, worked upon it, his perplexity grew. He could remember Henrietta leaning over him now, putting pressure on a nerve in the side of his neck that drove him unconscious, but that got him no nearer to the truth of why she had done it.
Then a rustle sounded to the side, and Harry managed to turn his head against the pull of the vines to regard Henrietta. She wore a thick gown of some dark color-autumn brown, he thought, or deep red. She came close to him and stood over him, looking down with a faint smile.
“Why?” Harry whispered, since no other word occurred to him at the moment.
Henrietta gave him a smile as vast and tender as the sky, and then knelt next to his legs, running a hand over his arm. “Harry,” she breathed. “Did you really think I was a tame Slytherin?”
Harry shook his head, in denial and more confusion. “That doesn’t answer the question of why you brought me here,” he pointed out.
“You would never have lured Evan.” Henrietta rose to her feet and looked to the north, and soft as her voice was, Harry had the impression that she was speaking mostly to herself. “He has no reason to come to you, no reason to bring the Cup if he does. But for me-oh, yes. The hatred will pull him. I told him once what happens to Dark wizards and witches who hate each other as much as we do. He didn’t believe me, but he still has no choice save to act on it.” Her hand smoothed her dress with a small, repetitive, hypnotic motion.
“Does this have something to do with why we couldn’t summon him with that rune circle?” Harry demanded. He could feel his magic building up under his skin, though as yet the numbness prevailed, and he could not bring himself to actually attack Henrietta. “Did you interfere? Meddle with some of the runes so that they wouldn’t do what they were supposed to do?”
Henrietta’s blink was cat-like. “No,” she said. “But I suspected what had happened when you told me of the spell’s response. During my last meeting with Evan, he was different. The shard of Voldemort’s soul has migrated out of the Horcrux, I think, and possessed him. Thus, though his body still walks the world, Evan Rosier as you knew him has ceased to exist.”
“Your meeting with him.” Anger ate quietly at the numbness.
“Yes.” Henrietta inclined her head. “I have been writing to him and meeting with him for some time, in order to get him fascinated enough that he would have no choice but to come to me when I wanted.” She turned and checked the eastern horizon this time, apparently calculating the position of the sun. “And that time is now,” she added, and drew her wand from her pocket. She raised her voice. “Evan!”
“You can’t just take me,” Harry hissed. “Do you know what’s happening right now, what my brother is suffering?”
“Of course I do.” Henrietta tapped her wand against her palm. “And I know, too, that you have no choice of saving him unless you destroy the last Horcrux, and I know that you should have paid more attention to the fifth stanza of the fourth prophecy.” She turned to the north. “Evan!”
It took Harry a moment’s struggle to recall that stanza, and when he did, he felt foolish for not understanding the matter at once.
The fourth, in the old hatred curled
Has found its way to move and end.
Beware, for when you most wish to hide from the world,
You’ll be taken by one who’s a friend.
That said, at least, that he could trust Henrietta’s intentions. Maybe. Harry had more personal experience with the slipperiness of prophecies than anyone he knew.
“What makes you think I won’t break free and prevent your sacrifice for the Horcrux?” he asked. The magic was bubbling to his face now. He could open his mouth and shoot something foul at Henrietta, or simply burst the vines.
“You should have recognized the plants by now, Harry, really.” When Henrietta looked back at him, her face expressed slight disappointment. “Do you like them? I requested the seeds from Indigena’s garden, via Lazuli. She was happy to send them to me.”
Harry strained, and then realized the truth. He had felt the clutch of these vines before, on a Midwinter night more than two years ago, when he confronted Voldemort and Indigena in the graveyard near the Riddle house. These were the vines that Indigena had used to bind his wandless magic.
“I can’t have you interfering,” said Henrietta, in a voice of glacial calm. “But, at the same time, you need to be here after the Horcrux, so that you can swallow the shard of soul and the magic that’s binding it to Evan’s body-or the Cup, if it flees there.” Her smile gave a feral flash. “Strike with all your might, Harry, when I am done. For me.”
She raised her voice again. “Evan!” It struck like thunder through the clearing, and Harry heard behind it the sweet thunder of the prophecy-and, more distantly, the soft, padded footsteps of a huge dog. He would not be surprised to see a black hound step from the copse of pines soon. “Come to me, if you are not a coward!” Henrietta yelled.
“I am here, Henrietta.”
Harry jumped as best he could in the grip of the vines. A cloaked figure strode from the north, around the pines. He held a wand in his hand with more steadiness than Evan Rosier had ever gripped it. Harry snarled softly. It seemed that Henrietta’s guess about the shard of Voldemort’s soul taking Rosier over was correct, and knowing that a piece of the bastard was so near made him want to destroy it now.
He envisioned Rosier’s body decaying, falling apart into the kind of sludge that Voldemort had briefly turned Connor’s arm into.
His magic rose as far as the vines before it slammed back into his body, like a kitten striking a closed door full-force.
“Let me go, Henrietta!” he shouted, thrashing about. The vines curled a little tighter. Harry had no trouble feeling the rage this time.
“No,” said Henrietta simply, and then she smiled, a smile so fierce that Harry lost his breath and recovered from the anger a moment. “This is my free will, vates, and you cannot prevent it. You should never have turned your back on me.” She bowed her head, dipping into a half-curtsey. “You may dislike the title, but you have ever been my Lord. Farewell, Harry. Morituri te salutant,” she added, and then turned and ran merrily away.
“Henrietta!” Harry shouted. “How do you plan to set me free from these vines if you die in the duel?”
She only flipped him a wave with one hand, her attention fixed on her opponent.
Harry went back to digging his heels into the ground. He could not use magic to tear the vines, but perhaps he could rip them by sheer force of physical strength.
Before him, Henrietta danced, in madness and hatred and love. Harry was not even aware when his struggles ebbed and he lay there gaping, content to watch her. There was no way that anyone could not have watched.
It was dawn, and Lady Death watched from the copse, and Henrietta whirled in the midst of a lovers’ waltz.
*
Henrietta felt all other concerns fall away from her as she came forward, and halted, and bowed to Evan.
This was what she had been working towards for months. And now the moment was here, and she had no more elaborate plans to arrange, no letters to write that would fan the sparks of Evan’s madness and keep him rushing towards her, no more commitments of sanity and soul to make that might end up costing her more than she gained. She had put herself at risk every time she wrote a letter, every time she went to meet him, every time she conversed with him as if they were equals.
But if she had not entered into this with her full heart, Evan would have known something was wrong, and he might have managed to pull back in time.
Not this time, not this time, not so, and Henrietta’s heart was high and singing like a lark. She wished one were in flight above them, singing to make the music for their dance, their duel.
Well, I can pretend that one is, and it will be less mad than many things Evan has been convinced of.
When she straightened from the bow, she saw the alien intelligence watching her through amused dark eyes. “And how do you plan to fight in that, my lady?” he asked, gesturing to her heavy robe.
“It is the traditional costume for such a duel,” Henrietta replied, holding out her wand. She was not worried. The shard of the Dark Lord might be in control, yes, but if Evan, her Evan, were not still alive somewhere within that damaged and twisted mind, he would never have come to this summons. The fascination she had encouraged, the poetic madness, was all Evan’s. “And I could ask the same of you.” His robes were dirty and disgusting. It seemed that this last piece of Voldemort’s soul didn’t care any more about wild living or fine clothes than Evan had, or maybe the constant fight for control in his mind reduced his ability to take care of himself.
From above her came skylark song. Henrietta smiled slowly.
“I plan to destroy you,” said that too-calm, too-sane voice. “You have caused me too much trouble.” And he was drawing his wand, but it was Evan’s wand, and Henrietta had faced it in the past and knew what it was capable of.
“Of course I have,” she said, and stamped her foot, and then the whirling pace began.
The spells he fired at her were all offensive, not defensive. Cogo. Crucio. Cremo. Adsulto cordis. Imperio. Avada Kedavra. Spells in languages she had never heard and did not know the names of, but could well imagine the effects of, should they land. He never tried a Shield Charm. His manner said, plainly, that he would worry about that when she managed to land a blow.
Henrietta responded with defensive magic. Protego. Haurio. Incantations that increased the movements of her legs and the strength of her arms and somewhat compensated for the heavy robes. She wondered, distantly, that Evan, or Voldemort, or the mingling of the two that was in control of the body, had not thought she would use such spells. Of course she would. He seemed to have little notion of cheating, unless he was the one doing it.
She was sensitive to the rhythm and the pace behind the movements, and she increased the tempo, beat by beat, circle by circle. She kept trying to strike at an opening in his defenses, but he always closed it quickly and returned to the flowing motion. His incantations were coming faster and faster now, and most of them were nonverbal, odd rests of silence in between the shouted spells. Henrietta knew she had been extremely lucky to escape them so far.
If “luck” could be said to have anything to do with it, when a Dark wizard and Dark witch danced in a fated duel like this.
The pattern was only like that on his side, however, though Henrietta was sure that it was the only side he paid attention to. On her side, she hesitated in blocking the unfamiliar spells, and whirled aside from more and more of them. Then she stumbled, her foot catching in the robe, and he grazed her knee in a thin line, with a spell that should have done much more damage.
“First blood to me,” he announced, sounding pleased about that.
“In this dance, only death counts,” Henrietta snapped back, and returned to her pattern. Now she could see him sensing it, in the way he responded and the spells he chose if nothing else. She faltered every few rings, each time became a little more clumsy, and then a little more. Strong as mountains her resolve might be, but her body was a poor vehicle for it.
So her body said. So her mind would say, on the surface, should he possess the Legilimency of his embodied counterpart. So her full heart said, as she gave herself to this deception just as she had to the flirtation with Evan. The dance had to be perfect.
Down and down and down.
They danced and they danced and they danced, and Henrietta began to murmur under her breath and sing, scraps and fragments of the poetry she knew Evan had some reason to be familiar with, because he had believed the poets’ parents to be Squibs or wizards or witches. Yeats. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. George Meredith. Algernon Charles Swinburne. Arthur Symons. Thomas Lovell Beddoes. All those who had walked sometimes in the strange and dark ways of love and death, Eros and Thanatos, the singers to them and their celebrants.
She watched awareness flare in his eyes, and his movements slow a bit, as her Evan’s consciousness struggled to climb back to the surface. The Voldemort-shard had to stop fighting, sometimes, in order to slow him down. Henrietta did not want that to happen too much, because it would disrupt the pattern she had established, so she ceased to quote the poetry after a time.
Besides, she needed her breath too much for breathing just then.
Sweat ran down her face and dried in the still-cool air. It might be the second day of spring, but the weather did not feel like it. The robe lifted and whirled around her thighs, and heat exploded outwards from her skin. Eyes watched Henrietta from the copse, and from behind her, where Harry lay entangled and enthralled among the vines. Overhead, the skylark sang.
And then came the moment, the point, the time.
Henrietta began her movement in the turning point of the pattern when Evan was just beginning to launch his spell. She turned aside from him, and dropped to one knee, and the will that filled her mind was concerned not with defense or the battle, but love and death.
Ave, domine! Morituri te salutant.
The spell she shot was not a defensive one, but a Severing Curse, cutting the vines and freeing Harry from them.
Evan, caught in the pattern, trapped in it, could not stop his own spell from flying, or change it to a different one.
Henrietta closed her eyes and tipped her head back as a steel arrow went through her heart. The music of the dance sounded in her ears as one great crash of chords and then went still.
Henrietta Bulstrode died laughing.
*
Harry knew the Unassailable Curse was broken. He knew it by the way Lady Death roared from behind him, the hungry cry of an enormous dog starving for meat. He knew it in the way Rosier’s movements slowed for just a moment, as though a defense so much a part of him he hadn’t noticed he was depending on it had fallen away.
He knew it in the way Henrietta sprawled on the ground, life freely given, a steel arrow sprouting from her chest, and the cry that had reached him and echoed in his mind-how? He did not know. Perhaps through the connection they still shared because of the Unbreakable Vows, perhaps only because he knew what she would say as she died.
And he was free.
He rose to his feet, and called a wheel of diamond shards with hardly a thought. Evan Rosier was hurrying forward to kneel beside Henrietta. He picked up her head by her long curls and stared into her face as if he did not understand, then gave her a little experimental shake. He seemed to think the life was in her and would return if he only pulled enough.
Harry sent the revolving wheel straight at his head.
He looked up in the moment before it reached him, and the flying triangles of diamond shared off his jaw, sliced through his face under the nose, continued upwards at an angle and shaved off the top of his skull. His hair went flying. Brains drained like jelly down the sides of his face, and his body sprawled over Henrietta’s, shorn at last of grace and poetry, tricked into death by a woman he may even have believed truly loved him.
Harry had sharp eyes, though, and did not let the momentum of Rosier’s death distract him. He was looking for the small black scrap that flew pitifully away from the back of Rosier’s skull a moment later, shrieking in a high, thin voice that made blood burst from his ears.
Harry roared wordlessly, and opened his absorbere gift. The tunnel scooped up the shard of soul and crushed it utterly, closing around it like a fist. The shrieking rose higher, in fear that Harry enjoyed, and then went silent. Harry tucked and yanked it into him, and the explosion of magic that followed, which probably represented the power the piece of soul had used to bind itself to Rosier’s body.
The moment he finished swallowing, a ragged bay made the copse of pines shake, and the silver dogs-head emblem in Harry’s left palm burned cold as deep sea ice.
Then there was silence, and he sagged to his knees and began to laugh, and to cry. Snot dribbled down his face from his nose, and his eyes were swollen in moments from the tears, and his throat hurt as much from the laughter as it earlier had from the screaming. He tried to recover, but he couldn’t even think until he spat the churning emotions out.
And then he was on his feet, as he realized what the destruction of the last part of Voldemort’s soul meant.
He could free his brother. He could confront Voldemort. He would go back to Silver-Mirror to inform Draco and Snape of what had happened, but then he was on his way to kill the snake-faced bastard.
He reached out to Voldemort, through their link, and said in a voice like a snapping of steel chains, I am ready. Tell me where you are.
The voice that returned his communication was more amused than he had ever heard it, which could only mean, Harry thought, that he hadn’t sensed the destruction of the last piece of his soul. In the place where it began, and the place where it will end. I am sure that you can find it. My heir.
That was all he said, but Harry found, thinking about it carefully, that he did know. Where it began.
Voldemort was under Godric’s Hollow.
With firm steps, Harry crossed to Henrietta’s body, and bent his head to kiss her cold lips. Then he turned and leaped for Silver-Mirror.
Yes, where it began. And where it will end.
I am coming, Voldemort-for my brother’s life, and for your death.