Chapter Thirty-Six of 'I Give You a Wondrous Mirror'- The Second Betrayal
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Chapter Thirty-Six-The Second Betrayal
Harry cursed softly when he glanced at the map and saw the shard of dragon’s eggshell pointing south. Most of the time, it pointed northeast, but he and Draco consistently Apparated too far in that direction to avoid Muggle areas, and then had to turn and go cautiously back south and west.
Draco leaned heavily on his arm for a moment. Harry glanced at him, realized from the twisting of his lover’s lips that he was feeling much the same frustration as Harry was, and blew out his breath, forcing himself to relax.
He wasn’t alone. There was that to be grateful for, no matter what else happened. And just because they hadn’t found Teddy and Andromeda yet didn’t mean they would never find them.
He faced the south and took Draco’s arm. They were Apparating each other every other jump, which would allow one person to concentrate on the magic whilst the other watched for danger.
“We’ll find them, Harry,” Draco said.
He spoke mildly, and with no particular belief of his own. Harry found the words comforting anyway. He let his hand holding the map brush briefly over the side of Draco’s face.
“Eventually, yes,” he said, and then focused on getting safely back to the south and west without Apparating straight into the middle of the small Muggle town that sat between them and the area they’d come from.
*
Draco had spent most of the quest, whenever he didn’t need to concentrate on their location or on reassuring Harry, worrying himself with the mystery of why the Masked Lady might have burned the Tonks house a second time. She might have been aware that they could discover something. But what? What could have survived the first blast of dragonfire, not been significant enough to attract the attention of Granger’s people, and then been destroyed in the second inferno?
Maybe the eggshells? She could have realized that a shard could be used to track her, and wanted to avoid giving us the opportunity.
Which would mean that she knew they were coming.
Draco grimaced and tightened his grip on his wand, then had to picture the small copse of trees they’d just come from to Apparate safely. Once there, he paced in a small circle as Harry checked the map, worry racing through his mind like wildfire.
If we arrive and she goes after Harry first-she must hate him more, since I was just the focus of one plan and she seemed to think Marian could handle me-what should I do? How should I protect him?
He couldn’t answer the question yet, because he had no idea what kind of traps the Masked Lady might have laid. And all his concern was based on speculation. The eggshell might lead them nowhere. It might guide them to a house where Draco’s aunt and cousin had been, but weren’t now. Or he might find that the Dark curses he already knew were perfectly able to guard Harry.
He hadn’t ever had to worry about this kind of thing before. Scorpius was so young that his stay inside the Manor’s wards was more or less guaranteed. He knew well enough that his mother could protect herself. And he hadn’t cared for Marian enough to make an extra effort, even if they had braved this kind of danger together.
Harry’s fingers tangled with his and squeezed.
Draco caught his breath and met his lover’s gaze. Harry’s eyes were tender, his face utterly open, in that way Draco thought Gryffindors must learn at birth. He cupped Draco’s chin, the touch sending sparks through Draco for a moment. He reckoned that Harry must have felt no desire, though-just as he hadn’t when he gave Draco the earlier kisses-but only tenderness and the desire to reassure. Otherwise, his marriage vows would have sprung to life.
“I won’t die on you,” Harry said calmly. “That’s a promise.”
“The kind of promise you can’t keep, and which you’re only giving to make me feel better,” Draco snapped.
“And don’t you want to feel better?” Harry laughed at him gently, his eyes half-open, and stroked the side of Draco’s neck before he lifted the map. “No point in panicking before the battle arrives.”
“We must be dysfunctional,” Draco muttered, even as he took Harry’s arm for a longer jump. Evening was drawing on, and Harry was becoming impatient with their slow pace. Hell, so was Draco. “When I become worried, you’re stronger and calmer, and vice versa.”
“What’s dysfunctional about a balance?” Harry tilted his head to the side and gave Draco that incomprehensibly mature and wise look he’d had in the earliest days of their partnership, before desire and life-debts and marriage vows had become such a concern to them. It reminded Draco that friendship had developed between them first, and it was the best friend who spoke now. “We’ve proven we’re balanced during two battles already. We can do it again. I promise, Draco, I won’t let you go into this alone, or come out of it alone either.”
Draco ruminated on that for a moment, chewing his lip harder than he liked, and then nodded.
If he let himself lean a little more heavily on Harry’s shoulder than normal just before they Apparated-well, there was no one to notice. Except himself, practiced in Malfoy secrecy, and Harry, who would never make fun of him for being a little weak.
*
Harry tried to restrain a snarl of triumph as they arrived on the edge of a long stretch of moor. It was difficult, though. The shard of shell now pointed straight north, instead of northeast, and the country ahead of them shimmered under a veil of magic that told Harry no Muggles had lived here for a long time. He and Draco could Apparate in a line forwards for as far as they could see.
That meant they were nearer to their enemies, of course. But that was comforting rather than otherwise.
Harry tightened his grip on his wand. If Teddy has suffered, if Andromeda has suffered, I will repay their suffering threefold. At least. The Masked Lady had no idea what she was doing when she took them. She only saw me enraged once. I-
Draco’s hand fell on his shoulder and squeezed in warning. “Remember what happened when you attacked her without looking out for her dragon’s tail first?” he whispered. “Interesting as the life-debts are to accumulate, I don’t fancy having you take such a mad risk again in order to secure our eleventh.”
Harry took several deep breaths and then nodded. The Masked Lady had only seen him enraged once because bad things happened when he let his rage control his actions. He clasped Draco’s hand so tightly the other man winced, and then took his arm to Apparate them across the moor.
Draco sneezed when they landed near a brackish pond surrounded by clumps of heather. Harry eyed him. “Allergic to something?” Perhaps this was the first sign of a trap the Masked Lady had set up. Harry wouldn’t put it past her to have a garden of poisonous flowers that killed by scent.
“Not allergic,” Draco said. “Sensitive. Someone used powerful Dark magic here, and not long ago.”
Harry felt his palms tingle. He scanned the area of the pond quickly, but couldn’t see anything.
At least, not anything at first. A second scan, conducted this time with the patience that his Blood Reparations work had taught him, revealed a blackened patch on the pond’s far bank. Harry loped around the water, with Draco covering his flanks and darting cautious looks behind them and to the sides.
Harry knelt down, using magic to bend back the plants and clumpy soil where they wouldn’t give to his hands. He uncovered a patch of ground that still shimmered with heat, rather like the earth around the Tonks house. Holding a palm flat above it, he could feel his skin warm. He shook his head grimly and waved his wand, mouthing a silent incantation. The bank shivered and then rose into a small whirlwind, so that Harry could study the individual grains of dirt without touching them and burning himself.
If a flare of dragonfire had escaped here, it had been extremely small, and easy to conceal afterwards. Harry wondered if he should be worried about that or not.
Was it big enough to annihilate a ten-year-old boy where he stood?
“That’s what the Dark magic is,” Draco said, so suddenly that Harry jumped. “It’s meant to contain magical fire.”
Harry tilted his head up to frown at him. “And a spell like that is Dark?”
Draco’s eyes glinted for a moment. “No one ever said the Ministry was consistent. Or intelligent, for that matter, your friend Granger notwithstanding. But in this case, the power of Honeycomb’s Wall-that’s the spell-is great enough to stop anything. Dragonfire, rain, a falling star. The Ministry didn’t want it taught, in case their enemies got ideas about stopping charging Aurors.”
Harry snorted. “That makes sense.” He studied the patch of dirt again. “But why conceal it?”
“Several reasons, I think.” Draco knelt down beside him, expertly swishing his robes about to avoid dropping them in the pond or letting them drag in mud. “Whoever this is may simply not want someone else to know she used Dark magic. Or she might have lost control of her dragon briefly. I imagine revealing that to her followers wouldn’t make them very happy.” He met Harry’s eyes. “Or she might have used this to distract attention from something else. A grave, perhaps.”
*
Draco hated saying it, given the stricken look that immediately appeared on Harry’s face, but he found himself all too able to imagine Teddy Lupin buried here, in this lonely ground with too much sky and too much barren emptiness. And it motivated Harry to begin scooping out a hole next to the pond, giving him yet another distraction from vengeance.
Draco moved away, quartering the area as Harry dug feverishly, casting detection spells that would alert him to the presence of bones, other humans, or cooked flesh. The more powerful of the incantations could tell him whether those things had existed on this spot in the past twenty-four hours, even if they had since been slagged to nothing more than glass and melted stone.
There had been a single human here-female, the spell said. She had remained long enough to create a slight impression that Draco could call up. It rose, cloudy and violent as an afterimage produced from staring at the sun too long, and formed into the silhouette of a woman with a long, cowled robe. She was leaning on something that the spell didn’t render visible, but Draco would have been willing to wager the Manor that it was a dragon. Her cowl faced south, and she had stood there for perhaps half-an-hour before she lifted abruptly from the ground and the spell lost track of her.
Draco called quietly. Harry surged up out of the hole he’d created and trotted towards him. And Draco received yet another confirmation that he was in love, because, even manky with water and thick, clinging mud, Harry still looked good to him.
“What?” Harry asked.
Draco repeated the spell, and let Harry gaze as long as the magic would permit at the female figure. By the time she went out like a spent firework, his lover’s mouth was set and grim.
“I don’t like the way she waited,” he said, when Draco asked what was wrong. “Almost as though she expected to be followed.”
“That would suggest that she knew she could be tracked by the eggshell,” Draco completed quietly. “And that we’re walking into a trap.”
Harry nodded, and pulled the parchment from his robe pocket. The shard still pointed steadily north. “But we’re not there yet. And what other choice do we have than to go on, really?”
Draco shot a glance at the sky without saying anything. The sun had already vanished, and thick banks of cloud backlit by orange and red were creeping across the horizon. Draco could feel the wind picking up. He wondered idly if there would be a storm. He would prefer to be back in the Manor if it came, and listen to the rain pounding on the walls and gates-and beyond the wards.
“I know that I said I would go back when it got dark,” Harry began, and his voice was mulish. Draco could imagine the expression he wore without looking at him. “But-Draco, we could be only an hour or so away from Teddy and Andromeda. Or even just ten minutes.”
“We could,” Draco agreed softly, turning around to take Harry’s hands into his own. “But we could also be ten minutes from a battle to get them back, which will take place mostly in the darkness. Possibly against dragons. And if the Masked Lady is holding them captive in a house, she’s had all the time in the world to fortify that with wards and other defensive spells. You know that we can’t count on rescuing them tonight, not even if we find them.”
Harry tugged to get his hands free, but Draco didn’t feel like letting them go. He stared at Harry steadily instead, wanting to get it through that thick Gryffindor skull that there was still danger for someone who was heroically determined to rescue someone else. And if Harry didn’t care that much about his own life, he needed to remember Draco’s, and the lives of their children, and Narcissa, and his friends, and all the other people who would be devastated to lose him. And he ought to remember, too, that risking his neck in a stupid bid for rescue would prevent him from doing a good job of it later, if only by warning the Masked Lady that he was there.
Draco didn’t want to speak the words aloud; Harry was likely to argue against them and convince himself to go into a trap that way. Instead, he just stood there, readjusting his hold on Harry’s fingers and wrists as necessary, and let the truth seep through his lover’s brain.
Harry scowled at him. He scowled at his feet. He scowled at the sky. He scowled at the ground he’d torn up on the off chance that it might be Teddy Lupin’s grave, and under which he’d found nothing. He glared hardest of all at the patch of heather that Draco’s spell had showed the Masked Lady standing on, as if, by hurting the ghost, he could also hurt the real woman.
Finally, he said, “We search. For ten more minutes. And no matter what we find, I promise I will go home at the end of it.”
Draco nodded and let his fingers brush the back of Harry’s hands gently as he withdrew them. “Thank you.”
*
Five minutes later, the shard of eggshell in the middle of the map began to spin randomly around and then cracked into pieces, and they came upon the dragon’s corpse.
A mature Hungarian Horntail, she lay like a wall across their path, her neck stretched out to its full length, her tail curled around her belly as though she’d been trying to shield it from attacks in her last moments. Some of her scales still smoked. When Harry walked around her head to check on her eyes and make sure she was dead, he saw them staring ahead with what seemed like a terrible expression of surprise.
Someone she trusted turned on her, he thought, and then scolded himself for being ridiculous. He didn’t know if dragons had emotions like humans.
But it did seem that this dragon had been taken by surprise, since she hadn’t made more than a token effort to defend herself. Her jaws were slightly parted, but the ground around her wasn’t scorched with the marks of fire. Harry could find only one trough in the heather that her tail might have plowed, and that seemed likely to have been created as she fell. Her scales had been cracked like dry ground by the impact of some spell that Harry didn’t know and Draco couldn’t identify.
With the shattering of the eggshell, though, Harry knew they had reached their goal. The powerful creature this shard of shell had let them track was the dragon herself.
And now she lay dead, and there was no sign of the woman who had ridden her.
Harry tested the edges of his promise to Draco by stubbornly searching around the dragon’s corpse for longer than ten minutes, flipping over random divots of earth, casting various detection spells, and now and then staring at the scales as if the dragon would soundlessly communicate to him how she had died. Draco did much the same thing, but spent more time watching the edges of the moor visible from their position-the dragon lay on what had been a small hummock-narrowly. And finally he came up beside Harry and stood there in silence, waiting to be acknowledged.
“I know,” Harry whispered. “But I really thought we would find something. Why bring us here?”
“Because she knew she was being tracked,” Draco said gently. Harry wished he had the ability to fight against that gentleness. Instead, it seemed to drain his strength and bring him back around to common sense, no matter how he struggled not to get there. “She was willing to kill her own dragon to escape from us.”
“It still doesn’t make sense,” Harry insisted. “Fully-trained dragons like this have to be valuable. Why did she kill it?”
“That, I can’t answer.” Draco’s hand was warm in the middle of his back. “But I’ve already cast the spells that I used near the pond, and I can confirm for you that neither Teddy nor Andromeda died here.”
“She might have given them to someone else,” Harry muttered. “Perhaps they were taken in the opposite direction by one of her minions.” He closed his eyes and barely prevented himself from leaning on the dragon’s crooked leg as immense weariness overcame him. “There’s no way to tell.”
“No, there isn’t.”
Harry sighed and ran a hand through his hair. Yes, he could struggle and shout, but that wouldn’t do any good. He knew as well as Draco did that there was nothing more for them to do here. Perhaps Hermione and the Blood Reparations experts she had working under her-experts in Potions and defensive magic-would be better able to search the area and find something of use. Harry would send his Patronus to her before they left the moor and tell her what they’d found.
The Masked Lady knew she was being tracked. She probably didn’t plan on it, but she realized later what could have happened, and she was willing to sacrifice one of her dragons to keep us from closing in.
What else has she done that we don’t know about?
Harry shook his head as he focused on the memory of Draco making love to him in the dream-world and conjured the stag Patronus to fly to Hermione. For now, it was better to return home and comfort his children.
He would find Teddy. He wouldn’t give up the search until he had proof of his godson’s death or he’d held Teddy safely in his arms. That kind of certainty would have to be enough for now.
*
Draco sighed as he walked into the entrance hall of the Manor. He knew it was probably an illusory safety, but he could relax much more easily when he was behind the shimmering wards that cloaked the walls and gates of his home. He took off his cloak and whistled for a house-elf. He wanted his clothes taken away, a bath drawn, and a sight of Scorpius before he scrubbed himself free of sweat and mud and the other unfortunate things he’d picked up on the moor.
No house-elf appeared. Instead, a witch clad in dark robes and wearing a mask covered with black-and-purple abstract designs stepped through the far door into the entrance hall. She was carrying a wand of dark wood openly in her right hand.
The left arm cradled Harry’s son Al, and the wand made a harsh dimple in the flesh of his throat. Silent tears rolled down his cheeks, and even though his eyes widened when he saw his father, he didn’t cry out.
Harry stumbled a step forwards, and then stopped, his hands clenching into fists. Draco could hear him panting, small sounds of intense misery. He shut his eyes, and opened them again. His body was so tense that Draco knew he would explode into motion immediately if given the chance.
If he could only be sure that any sudden motion he made wouldn’t cause the Masked Lady to harm his son.
Draco himself stood utterly still, his eyes on the woman’s face, searching for some identifying marker. He couldn’t find it. The mask was broad and flat, reaching out to the corners of her jaw and cheeks, even curling around her ears. Her hands were gloved, and her sleeves were long and almost overlapped the gloves. Draco would have taken that as a weakness, a sign that they might get in her way when she tried to move her wand quickly, but he knew better than to suspect this enemy wouldn’t have seen and taken care of such an obvious flaw. If she didn’t have shorter sleeves, it was because she didn’t need to.
He was much more interested in knowing how she had got past the wards, who was here with her, and what harm they had already done to the children and his mother.
The witch gave a small nod when they both remained still. “So you have learned something since our first battle,” she said, in a voice as deep as a man’s. A voice distortion charm, Draco suspected almost immediately. “Good. That means you’re likely to listen to me when I tell you how things will be.
“I do not intend to harm any of your children if you cooperate with me.” She flicked a glance at Draco. “You ought to be particularly pleased with the treatment of your son, Mr. Malfoy. His mother is looking after him.”
Draco concentrated on making the breath he drew in and then exhaled flow smoothly, so that it wouldn’t seem to stutter, and so that the motion would express nothing of his intense anger with Marian. Was she how they had passed the wards? Probably. Draco had been sure he had sealed the house against her, but then again, he’d already had proof that she knew more about him than he had realized, and that she was more than willing to pass that information on to his enemies.
“You will be separated, and your wands taken,” said the Masked Lady casually. Several people appeared behind her as she spoke, clad in the dark robes and emerald-green masks of the Salazar’s Snakes. “I am sure you can understand why I’m doing that. And what happens after that? Why, it depends on your good behavior, of course.”
Draco had the time to exchange a single glance with Harry. The mingled despair and rage in Harry’s eyes told him that his partner had no plans for now, and no means to avoid the net that had closed in around them.
He let the Salazar’s Snakes take his wand. He let them search him for further weapons. He let them draw him away from Harry and down one of the corridors that led off the entrance hall, further into the Manor.
He wasn’t particularly surprised when they led him towards the cellars.
Draco closed his eyes for a moment. He knew they would lock him into a small dark place, alone this time.
For the moment, his first and foremost duty was to see how well he had learned the lessons Harry had tried to teach him about how to survive that.
*
Harry remained still, hating. He hated the Masked Lady at that moment more than he had ever hated Voldemort, he thought. Sirius and Cedric and the other people Voldemort had killed were years dead, but this woman was in front of him right now, and she was threatening his children.
The Masked Lady clucked her tongue. Another guard appeared and took Al from her. Since that man’s wand was immediately trained on his son, Harry didn’t move. His wand had been taken from him, anyway.
He did catch Al’s eye and try to give him a reassuring smile. Al blinked and gulped. His tears continued to fall, utterly silent.
The guard took Al out of the room. The Masked Lady stood there, watching him. Harry wondered idly when she would begin the physical torture. He was already in a great deal of pain.
The Masked Lady sighed. Then she said, “Perhaps it is silly, but I have done many silly things in my life. And I do feel I owe you an explanation. You have always been an exception to my general way of dealing with people. You can be an exception one more time.”
She tapped her throat with her wand, presumably ending the voice distortion charm, and then revealed her face, shaking back her hair as it caught on the edges of the mask.
Harry felt a sharp, sudden, blinding white flash of pain, as though he had just broken a bone.
He was looking into the face of Andromeda Black Tonks.
Chapter 37.