​

What goes under the hill comes back changed, or it doesn't come back at all.

✿ ✿ ✿ ✿ ✿

An old Somerset saying · 1871

♫ Listen along

The trouble with the rooftops of Knockturn Alley, Harry reflected as a slate gave way beneath his left boot, was that they had been built by wizards who did not believe in right angles, load-bearing walls or, as far as he could tell, gravity.

He caught himself on a chimney pot. The chimney pot hissed at him.

"Left!" came a shout from somewhere below and behind. "He's going left, Potter — your other left —"

"I know which way left is!"

"The evidence suggests otherwise."

Harry dragged himself upright, spat out a mouthful of soot and something he chose to believe was moss, and spotted Sidney Throop scrambling along the ridge of Borgin and Burkes three roofs away, a carpetbag clutched to his chest like a newborn. It was raining: the thin, grubby drizzle London produced every September, which didn't so much fall as loiter. Every tile in the Alley was greased with it.

"Stupefy!"

The spell went wide and glanced off a weathervane shaped like a hanged man, which shrieked in protest. Throop ducked, slithered, recovered and kept going.

Draco Malfoy dropped onto the roof beside Harry with the neat, infuriating economy of someone who had been taught to dismount a horse correctly before he could read. He flicked wet hair out of his eyes and said, "If we'd had the Sneakoscope, we'd have known Wilkins was lying about the back door."

"We'd have had the Sneakoscope if you'd brought it."

"It was your turn."

"I brought it on Tuesday."

"Tuesday was a stakeout. Stakeouts are on a separate rota." Draco set off along the ridge at a lope. "It's on the chart."

"Nobody reads the chart, Malfoy."

"I made the chart," said Draco, sounding genuinely wounded, and then they were both running.

Five years. Harry sometimes turned the number over in his head the way you'd press your tongue against a tooth to see if it still hurt. Five years since Draco Malfoy had walked into the Auror training hall with his probation papers in one hand, a letter of recommendation from the Minister for Magic in the other, and his chin at the angle of a man who would rather be fed to the giant squid. Five years since Gawain Robards had looked round the room and asked who'd be willing to partner the trainee, and the silence had stretched on so long that Harry had said "I will" mostly to make it stop.

Everyone had assumed it would last a month. There had been a pool.

The pool was still running. Proudfoot kept the book. Last Harry had heard, it stood at four hundred and twelve Galleons, and the only person who had ever bet on never was Ginny, who had declined to explain her reasoning.

Throop reached the last roof in the row — a derelict apothecary, its gutters sagging over the drop into a fishmonger's yard — and there he stopped. He didn't jump. He didn't turn to fight. He looked at his watch.

On the parapet in front of him sat a dented copper kettle.

It was Draco who got there first. Harry saw it happen: the quick, bright, horribly pleased look that crossed Draco's face whenever a problem came apart in his hands.

"He's not running from us," Draco said. "He's running to something. Potter, it's the kettle —"

Harry checked his own watch. Thirteen minutes past nine, and the second hand sweeping up towards the twelve.

Throop lunged.

"Accio kettle!"

The kettle leapt off the parapet as if it had been waiting its whole life to be asked, sailed across the gap between the roofs, and smacked into Draco's outstretched palm. In the space of a single second his face went through surprise, triumph, and a dawning, appalled comprehension.

"Oh, bollocks," said Draco, and vanished.

There was a small, wet pop. The rain closed over the space where he'd been standing.

Sidney Throop, who had been fully prepared to vanish himself, stood on the parapet with his hands cupped around nothing, staring at the empty air with the expression of a man who has just watched his train leave with somebody else on it.

Harry Stunned him. It seemed the kindest thing to do.

Then he stood alone on the roof of a derelict apothecary, in the rain, with an unconscious smuggler at his feet and a carpetbag full of Merlin knew what, and said to nobody in particular, "Well. That's one of us."

​

Draco came back through the international Floo at twenty to midnight, smelling of chip fat.

The Auror Office was mostly dark at that hour: a scatter of desk lamps, the night shift, somebody's abandoned tea quietly growing a skin. Proudfoot glanced up as the fireplace in the corner coughed out a tall, rumpled, murderous figure, and said pleasantly, "Evening, Mrs Potter. Nice holiday?"

The nickname was Proudfoot's too, three years old now and apparently immortal. It had started as the Potters and degraded from there, because the pair of them had, in Proudfoot's words, "been bickering over who left the milk out since the Ministry was rebuilt, and the only thing you two are missing is a joint Gringotts vault." Harry had given up minding. Ginny thought it was the funniest thing that had ever happened and referred to Draco exclusively as your other wife. Draco minded tremendously, and in total silence, which Harry suspected was the point.

Draco didn't break stride. "Bruges," he said, addressing Harry as though Proudfoot were a coat stand, and dropped into the chair across the desk.

"I gathered. The Belgian Ministry sent an owl."

"Did the Belgian Ministry mention that I arrived in a canal?"

"There was something about a canal."

"A tourist canal. There was a boat on it. There were Americans on the boat, Potter, and one of them took a photograph." He set a paper cone down on Harry's blotter with enormous dignity. It was full of chips, and the chips were drowning in mayonnaise. "After which, because the Belgian Ministry is staffed exclusively by sadists, I waited three hours for Floo authorisation in an office with no chairs, and the only thing open for a mile was a stall selling these." He regarded the chips with loathing. "Mayonnaise. On chips. As if the last war taught nobody anything."

"You bought them, though."

"I was starving." Draco ate one. "They're excellent. I'm furious about it." He wiped his fingers fastidiously on a Ministry memo and nodded at the carpetbag on Harry's desk. "Well? Was I sacrificed to something worthwhile?"

Harry pushed the bag across.

That had been the point of the chase, in the end: not Throop himself, who was a small, damp man with a small, damp business, but what he carried. For three years Sidney Throop had run the only illegal Portkey service out of Britain that anyone bothered with — anyone, specifically, whose surname appeared on the Ministry's Register of Outstanding Obligations. It was a long, sober name for a short list: the families of convicted Death Eaters, whose applications for international travel had been quietly and permanently mislaid since 1998. So they went to Throop. A kettle on a roof, an old boot in a hedge, a teapot left on a park bench at a quarter past four. Calais. Bruges. Rotterdam. No questions, no paperwork, a hundred Galleons a head.

And Throop, being a professional, kept a ledger.

Draco read it the way he read everything, fast and all the way through, lips pressed thin. Harry watched him turn the pages. A Travers. Two Yaxley cousins. A Carrow aunt. Draco's own mother's second cousin, which made his mouth twitch. The Burkes, as a family, apparently in bulk.

Then Draco stopped eating.

"What?" said Harry.

"They're not in it." Draco flipped back, then forward again, more slowly. "Cassia Selwyn. Tobias Rowle. Hector Mulciber. None of them."

Harry didn't need the names explained. They had been sitting on his desk, or at least in the back of his head, for a fortnight.

Cassia Selwyn, twenty-four, had left her flat above the Hogsmeade post office six weeks ago to walk to work at Scrivenshaft's and had never arrived. She was Pansy Parkinson's cousin on her mother's side, and Pansy had been owling Draco about her twice a week in a tone that grew steadily less polite. Tobias Rowle, twenty-two, a nephew of the Rowle who was currently enjoying Azkaban's sea views, had gone to bed one night four weeks ago and not been at breakfast. Both reports had been taken at the front desk, filed, and then left to go quietly stale, the way reports did when nobody in particular cared how they ended.

Hector Mulciber, twenty-six, had disappeared ten days ago, and his report had come to Draco, because his mother had sat on the bench outside the Auror Office for four hours while people walked past her, and when Draco finally came by she had stood up and said, "You're Narcissa's boy," as though it were a password. He had taken her report because nobody else was going to.

Harry had been in the room for part of it. Mrs Mulciber had looked at him the way you might look at something you'd trodden in.

"Throop's the only route," Draco said. "Everyone on the Register uses Throop. My mother's cousin used Throop, and she's never used anything in her life she couldn't complain about afterwards. If Hector Mulciber ran, he ran through this ledger." He set it down. "He didn't run."

"Maybe he found another way out."

"Then Throop would know about it. Throop would be livid about it."

Throop, when he came round in a holding room at half past midnight with a headache and a pressing need to talk to a solicitor, turned out to be livid about a great many things, but not that.

"Mulciber?" He laughed, and wiped his nose on his sleeve. "The Selwyn girl? Not mine, Auror, and more's the pity. Selwyns pay double." He sniffed. "Nobody's used my route in months, bar the old ones. The old ones have got gold squirrelled away in Zurich and a villa in Nice. They can afford to run. The young ones don't." Something moved across his wet little face, gone before Harry could name it. "Where'd they go? They got nowhere to go, and nobody who'd have 'em when they got there."

​

Gawain Robards had been Head of the Auror Office for twelve years, and it showed. He had the grey, shop-worn look of a man who'd spent most of a decade trying to rebuild a department out of whoever survived a war, and the rest of it signing forms about the rebuilding. He listened to all of it without interrupting — Throop, the ledger, the three names — with his chin propped on his fist and his eyes on Harry. Then he said:

"I'm closing the Mulciber file."

Beside Harry, Draco went very still. It was a particular kind of stillness, and Harry had learned to watch for it: the stillness of a boy who had once been taught, in a drawing room full of Death Eaters, that the safest thing to do with a feeling was to put it somewhere nobody could see.

"Sir —" Harry began.

"Those families flee to the Continent all the time, Harry. You know that. And the Restitution hearings start next month. Half of them are packing their bags before the bailiffs knock."

"Hector Mulciber," said Draco, very evenly, "works nights on the counter of an apothecary in Knockturn Alley and rents a bedsit above a launderette in Bethnal Green, because no wizarding landlord in London would take him. He owns one wand, three sets of robes, and a share in a cat that actually belongs to his landlady. There is nothing to seize, sir. So what, exactly, is he running from?"

Robards looked at him for a long moment.

"His name," he said. "People run from their names, Malfoy. You of all people —"

He stopped, and had the grace to look briefly ashamed of himself. The silence that followed was long enough for Harry to notice the file.

It was sitting at Robards's elbow, and on top of it was a closure form. Harry could read upside down; it was one of the more useful things the Dursleys had taught him. He read the date, and read it again.

"This is dated Friday."

Robards didn't look down. "Is it?"

"Draco filed a supplementary report on Mulciber yesterday afternoon. You closed the case before he'd finished writing it." Harry leaned closer. At the bottom of the form was a seal in violet wax — not the Auror Office's — and a line of neat, clerkly script. Reviewed under Restitution Protocol. No further action. "Office of the Senior Undersecretary," Harry read. "Since when does the Undersecretary's office sign off on missing persons?"

"Since nine o'clock this morning," said Robards, "when the Wizengamot passed the Restitution Act." He pulled a copy of the Daily Prophet from under a stack of paperwork and tossed it onto the desk between them. "Any open case touching a family on the Register now goes to the Office of Remembrance for review before we act. It's the law, Harry. It's not my law. I don't like it any more than you do."

"Then —"

"Then nothing." Robards looked up, and there was something in his face Harry hadn't expected. It wasn't guilt, and it wasn't contempt. It looked, if anything, like fear. "Take the Diagon Alley counterfeiting case. It's a good case. It's a safe case." He held Harry's eyes. "Leave this one alone. And that isn't advice."

​

The Atrium was loud with the morning crush, hundreds of witches and wizards spilling out of the fireplaces in a green roar and hurrying for the lifts, and at the centre of it all stood the Fountain of Remembrance.

It had replaced the golden Fountain of Magical Brethren that Harry had first seen at fifteen, and the hideous Magic is Might statue that had replaced that in turn. It was a simpler thing: a broad, shallow basin of black stone, and rising from its centre a single smooth slab on which were carved the names of everyone who had died in the war. Water ran down the slab in an unbroken sheet, day and night, so that the names always looked wet — as though the stone had been weeping for ten years without stopping. It had been Edmund Grieve's idea. Harry thought it was the only honest thing in the building.

He passed it every morning, and every morning, out of some private superstition he'd never told anyone about, he found a name. This morning it was Fred Weasley, a third of the way down on the left, the letters gleaming.

He had never once seen Draco look at the fountain. It had taken him a couple of years to notice that.

"There," Draco said, and Harry looked up.

The crowd was parting for the Minister for Magic. Kingsley Shacklebolt came through the Atrium the way he always did, tall and unhurried, with two aides trotting at his elbow and a hush spreading ahead of him like a bow wave. Harry lifted a hand.

"Minister —"

Kingsley turned his head. His gaze rested on Harry for a beat too long — long enough that Harry had time to feel it, the peculiar sensation of being looked at by someone matching a face to a file.

"Auror Potter," said Kingsley. He nodded once and walked on.

Harry stood where he was. It took him a moment to work out what else was wrong, and then he had it. For as long as he'd known him, Kingsley had worn a single gold hoop in his left ear. Harry had asked about it once, years ago, over a very late drink after a very bad day, and Kingsley had laughed his slow, deep laugh and told him it had been his grandmother's, and that he'd take it out when he was dead.

His ear was bare.

"Did Shacklebolt just call you Auror Potter?" said Draco.

"Yeah."

"He calls me Auror Malfoy. He has called you Harry since — well, since forever. It's the single most irritating feature of my working life." Draco sounded more unsettled than irritated. "And he's just — stopped?"

Harry didn't answer. He'd taken the Prophet from Robards's desk on the way out, and now he unfolded it. WIZENGAMOT PASSES RESTITUTION ACT, said the headline, above a photograph of Kingsley at the lectern, and underneath, in the smaller, deadlier type: ...estates of families holding outstanding war obligations to be held in trust by the Ministry pending hearings, with reparations to be administered by the Office of Remembrance and Restitution under Senior Undersecretary Edmund Grieve...

Draco read it over his shoulder. Harry felt the moment he reached the relevant line.

"Well," said Draco lightly. "That's the Manor."

Narcissa lived there alone now. Lucius was eight years into a life sentence in Azkaban, and Narcissa had stayed on in that enormous house with the peacocks and the portraits, keeping it, as far as Harry could tell, out of sheer spite.

"Mother will be thrilled," Draco went on. "She's always wanted to see the inside of a Wizengamot hearing room from the defendant's side. Father got to have all the fun."

"Kingsley stood up in front of the whole Wizengamot the week after the war," Harry said slowly, "and said that no child in this country would answer for what their parents did. Not while he was Minister. I was there."

"So was I," said Draco. "In chains, admittedly. It's one of my favourite memories." He folded the paper along its crease, very precisely, and handed it back. "Shall we go and see the Undersecretary, then? Or would you rather stand here and look betrayed? I'm happy either way. I've nowhere to be. Apparently I've been reassigned to counterfeiting."

​

The Office of Remembrance and Restitution was on Level One, down the corridor from the Minister's own suite, and it was full of the dead.

That was Harry's first thought as they stepped inside, and it didn't go away. Every wall, floor to ceiling, was covered in photographs: hundreds of them, possibly thousands, framed in plain dark wood and hung so close together that the frames touched. And all of them moved. Witches and wizards waved and laughed and squinted into the sun; children blew out birthday candles; a young man in Auror robes saluted and then ruined it by grinning. Harry saw Colin Creevey holding up his camera. He saw Tonks, with her hair a violent shade of bubblegum pink, mid-sneeze. He saw Remus Lupin looking up from a book with a small, surprised smile, as if someone he loved had just walked into the room.

He saw Fred.

He had to look away.

"Auror Potter." A man was rising from behind the desk at the far end of the room: sixty-odd, silver-haired, with a close-trimmed white beard and a grey cardigan under his Ministry robes. There was a small red enamel poppy on his lapel, although it was six weeks too early for poppies. Harry had never seen him without it. "And Auror Malfoy. Come in, come in. Mind that chair, it wobbles. Tea? I'll make it myself. I never let the clerks. It's the only thing in this building I'm still allowed to do with my own two hands."

Edmund Grieve made tea the way some people prayed: slowly, attentively, with total absorption. He warmed the pot. He asked how they took it and didn't need telling twice. Harry had met him perhaps a dozen times over the years, always at memorials and anniversaries, and at every single one Grieve had known the names — not just of the dead, but of their mothers, their sisters, the dog they'd had as children. People said he had written to every bereaved family in Britain after the war. People said he'd written to some of them every year since.

Harry set the closure form down on the desk.

Grieve put on a pair of reading glasses that hung from a chain around his neck, read the form, and sighed.

"Ah. Yes. I'm sorry." He took the glasses off again. "This will be the first of many, I'm afraid, and none of them will be pleasant. Under the Act, my office reviews every open matter concerning a family on the Register. It's meant to keep things consistent — so that one department isn't seizing a house while another is investigating a burglary at it, that sort of nonsense."

"It's dated three days before the Act passed," said Harry.

"Is it?" Grieve glanced down again, then smiled, a little ruefully. "Then my clerks are more efficient than I deserve. We've had the draft since August, and I'm afraid they've been preparing the registers in anticipation. I'll have a word. It was presumptuous of them."

"Hector Mulciber didn't run," said Harry, and told him about Throop.

Grieve listened. That was the disarming thing about him; he actually listened, leaning forward with his tea going cold in his hands and his eyes on Harry's face. When Harry had finished, he was quiet for a moment.

"Auror Potter," he said, "may I tell you something I've learned in ten years of sitting in this room?" He gestured, very slightly, at the walls. "Grief takes all sorts of shapes. So does shame. These young people have grown up with their fathers' names hung round their necks like millstones. Next month, because of an Act I helped to write, some of them will have to stand up in front of the Wizengamot and be looked at. Some of them would rather disappear than bear that. Some of them, I think, would rather disappear than bear anything at all." He set his cup down. "I don't admire it. But I understand it. Shame is a kind of grief."

"And if they didn't disappear?" said Draco quietly. "If somebody disappeared them?"

Grieve turned to look at him. It was, Harry thought, the first time since they'd come in that anyone had looked at Draco directly, and Grieve did it without any of the small flinches Harry had grown used to seeing in people's faces over the years: no tightening round the mouth, no involuntary glance at Draco's left forearm.

"Then you'll find them," said Grieve simply. "I'm sure of it. But I'd hate to see two of our finest officers wear themselves out chasing ghosts."

There was a photograph on the desk, the only one in the room that wasn't on a wall. Harry's eyes had drifted to it more than once. A girl of sixteen or seventeen, round-faced and freckled, wind whipping her brown hair across her eyes, a yellow-and-black scarf wound three times round her neck. She was laughing at somebody just out of the frame and trying, without much success, to keep her hair out of her mouth.

Grieve saw him looking.

"My Imogen," he said. He reached out and turned the frame, very gently, a quarter of an inch towards himself. "She was in your army, you know. Longbottom's version, that last year. She was so proud of it. Slept with that silly coin under her pillow." He was quiet for a moment. "She'd have turned twenty-seven in March."

"I'm sorry," said Harry, because there was nothing else to say, and because he was.

Draco had got to his feet and was looking at the walls. Harry watched him move slowly along the nearest row, and then the next, and understood a moment too late what he was doing.

"Vincent Crabbe isn't on your wall," Draco said.

Grieve didn't answer straight away.

"No," he said at last, gently. "I'm sorry, Mr Malfoy. I know he was your friend. But the wall is for those who fell defending something."

"He was seventeen."

"So was my daughter."

The silence that followed was very long, and very quiet, and full of the dead waving soundlessly from their frames. Then Grieve closed his eyes briefly, rose, and came round the desk.

"Forgive me," he said. "That was unkind, and you didn't deserve it. It's been a long week, and I'm an old man, and I'm not always the person I'd like to be." He held out his hand. "I knew your grandfather, you know. Abraxas. A dreadful man." He waited. After a moment Draco took the hand, and Grieve held onto it for a second longer than was necessary. "You're nothing like him, I think."

​

"His hand was freezing," Draco said in the lift.

"It's a cold office."

"It isn't. There was a fire going." Draco was flexing his fingers and frowning at them. "It was like shaking hands with something from the bottom of a river."

The lift rattled downwards. A flock of violet paper memos circled lazily over their heads. Draco watched them for a while.

"That," he said finally, "is the first person in this building who's shaken my hand in five years."

"That can't be right."

"It is. I keep count."

"I've —" Harry began, and stopped, because he was going back through five years of memory and coming up empty. Arrests, raids, stakeouts, hospital wings, one extremely bad night in a flooded crypt in Norfolk. A hundred thousand arguments. Not one handshake.

"No," agreed Draco, reading his face. "You haven't. You refused mine, if you'll recall."

"We were eleven."

"I have an excellent memory and a great capacity for grievance."

Harry held out his hand.

Draco looked down at it the way he might have looked at a Blast-Ended Skrewt that had offered to carry his shopping.

"Absolutely not," he said. "Not in a lift. People will talk. Proudfoot already calls me Mrs Potter." The lift juddered to a halt at Level Two, and the grilles slid back. "You'll have to earn it."

"Earn it how?"

"I'll let you know." Draco stepped out. "He also told me my dead friend didn't count, so on balance I think this morning's come out even."

Harry caught up with him in the corridor. "We're not dropping it."

"Obviously we're not dropping it," said Draco, not slowing down. "I just wanted to hear you say something reckless first, so I can blame you when we're both sacked. Bethnal Green. Tonight. You're doing the unlocking charms. I've got six weeks left on probation and a spotless record, and every spell I cast goes into a little book that Robards reads on the first of every month with a digestive biscuit. I'd like the last few pages to stay boring."

​

♫ Listen along

The launderette was shut for the night, its windows fogged, a single dryer still turning in the dark behind the glass like a slow, patient eye. Hector Mulciber's bedsit was up a flight of narrow stairs at the back, and halfway up them sat a fat ginger cat, washing its paw.

It stopped washing as they came up. It watched them pass with flat green eyes, and it did not follow them to the top.

"Alohomora," said Harry, and the door swung open.

The room beyond was very small and very tidy, in the way of someone who owned too little to make a mess with. A single bed, made. A wardrobe. A kettle on a gas ring. A table by the window with one chair drawn up to it, and on the table a cup of tea, stone cold, a crust of milk dried round the rim. Next to the cup was a letter, unfinished, the quill lying across it where it had been set down.

And next to the letter was a wand.

Harry and Draco looked at it for a long moment without speaking.

"Nobody leaves their wand, Potter," said Draco at last, very quietly. "You'd sooner leave your trousers."

Harry bent over the letter without touching it. The handwriting was small and cramped, the hand of someone who had learned to take up as little space as possible.

It stopped there. The last letter trailed off into a thin, wavering line, as though the quill had been lifted away mid-stroke.

"It's cold in here," said Draco.

It was. Harry hadn't noticed until Draco said it, but now that he had, he couldn't stop noticing. It was a mild evening outside, damp and close, and the little room should have been stuffy; instead his breath was faintly visible. He turned to the window.

The glass was furred with frost. Not on the outside, where the drizzle was running down it, but on the inside: delicate, fern-like whorls of white spreading from the corners of the frame towards the centre. He reached out and laid his fingertips against it.

It didn't melt.

"Potter." Draco was crouched by the door, at about knee height, holding something up to the light of his wand. "What's white with a red tip?"

Harry came over. Caught in a splinter of the doorframe was a single hair, stiff and coarse, three inches long. It was white along most of its length and then, abruptly, at the very end, a deep clotted red, as though it had been dipped in something.

"A Fwooper?"

"Fwoopers are pink. Or orange. Or that nauseating green." Draco turned it between finger and thumb. "Too coarse, anyway. It's fur. It's a dog."

"Did the Mulcibers have a dog?"

"Mulcibers don't have dogs. Mulcibers have grudges." Draco drew a small glass evidence vial from his pocket, dropped the hair into it and corked it. He was very pale, which was a feat given his usual countenance. "Selwyn. Rowle. Mulciber," he said. "Do you know what they have in common?"

"Their fathers."

"Well, yes, fine, that. But apart from that." He straightened up. "Nobody's looking for them, Potter. Nobody at all. Their families are in Azkaban, or abroad, or the kind of people the front desk makes wait on a bench for four hours. They're the ones nobody looks for." He said it perfectly calmly, and Harry knew him far too well by now to believe the calm for a second. "If I went missing tomorrow, the Prophet would run it on page nine, under the horoscopes, and the headline would be Good Riddance."

"I'd look," said Harry.

"Yes. You would." Draco put the vial away very carefully. "You and my mother. That's the entire search party."

Harry raised an eyebrow at him.

"Fine," said Draco. "And Theo, and Pansy, and Blaise. But it was a much better line without them." He looked round the tiny, freezing room, at the cold tea and the unfinished letter and the wand lying on the table like something dropped. "Hector was two years below me. He used to follow Crabbe and Goyle round the common room hoping they'd let him carry something. I don't think I said ten words to him in my life."

The frost on the window crept another half-inch towards the middle of the glass. Neither of them looked at it.

"Come on," said Harry. "Before whatever that is decides it likes us."

​

Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place had changed a great deal in ten years, and not at all.

The portrait of Walburga Black was gone at last — it had taken Bill and two curse-breakers from Gringotts a week of failed spells, and then Arthur Weasley twenty minutes with a Muggle hammer drill he'd been waiting years for an excuse to use, and she had been screaming right up until the moment Arthur tipped the last piece of frame into a Ministry-certified Fiendfyre skip, which came with six pages of safety instructions he ignored on the grounds that he had already read the Muggle ones. The hall was painted a warm, stubborn yellow that Ginny had chosen specifically because it was the colour most likely to annoy the house. The house-elf heads were gone from the stairwell. There were Harpies posters in the kitchen, and a Weasley clock over the stove that Molly had insisted on, which currently showed Harry at Home and Ginny at Home and, for reasons nobody had ever satisfactorily explained, a small third hand labelled Kreacher that pointed permanently at Mortal Peril.

Ginny was at the kitchen table in her dressing gown, eating cold roast potatoes out of the tin with her fingers. There was a bruise on her left cheekbone the exact size and shape of a Bludger.

"Wigtown," she said, before he could ask. "We won. Don't look at me like that. You should see the Beater."

"What happened to the Beater?"

"I happened to the Beater." She held out a potato. He took it and sat down opposite her, and she studied his face in the lamplight, the way she did — the way she'd been doing since she was eleven, frankly, though it had taken him until he was sixteen to notice. "How's your other wife?"

"In Bruges."

Ginny paused with a potato halfway to her mouth. "Why is he in Bruges?"

"He was, briefly. He's back now. There was a kettle."

"You're going to have to tell me about the kettle."

So he told her about the kettle, and she laughed hard enough that the chair nearly went over backwards. Then he told her about the ledger and Robards, and she stopped laughing. He told her about Kingsley's bare ear, and the Act, and the office full of the dead, and the frost on the inside of Hector Mulciber's window, and by the end of it she had pushed the potatoes away.

"Grieve," she said. "Edmund Grieve?"

"You know him?"

"I knew his daughter. Immy Grieve. She was in my year — Hufflepuff. She was one of ours, that last year, when you three were off living in a tent. She was brilliant. She used to bring me her spare scarves, because I kept losing mine to Slytherins in the corridors." Ginny was looking at nothing. "In the Battle, she held the fourth-floor corridor with two third-years behind her who'd snuck back when they were meant to be evacuated. She wouldn't leave them. The third-years both lived." A pause. "Her dad came to the funeral in his Ministry robes, and he didn't cry, not once, the whole time. I remember thinking it was the worst thing I'd ever seen."

Kreacher came in with the cocoa. He was older and more stooped than ever, his ears drooping like wilted cabbage leaves, and he set the mugs down in front of them with the stern ceremony of an elf who had decided some years ago that Ginny Weasley was acceptable, largely because she frightened him. He was on his way back to the stove when Harry said, without thinking, "— Malfoy's convinced Mulciber didn't leave voluntarily —"

Kreacher stopped.

Harry shut his eyes. He'd done it again.

"Young Master Draco," Kreacher croaked, turning round with the terrible slowness of an elf who had been waiting all evening for exactly this opening. "Master Harry speaks of Young Master Draco. Mistress Narcissa's son."

"Kreacher —"

"Five years Master Harry has worked beside him," said Kreacher. "Five years, and every evening Master Harry comes home and speaks his name at this table, and every evening Kreacher asks, and every evening Master Harry says no." His enormous eyes swam. "Mistress Narcissa was a Black, before she married. Young Master is a Black by his mother's blood. And in all these years, Kreacher has never once been permitted to meet him."

"And you're still not going to be," said Harry. "Goodnight, Kreacher."

Kreacher departed, radiating grievance and muttering darkly about blood traitors who kept young masters from their ancestral homes. It was, by Ginny's count, the three hundred and twenty-sixth time. She watched him go with her eyebrows up.

"Oh, you have to bring him round," she said, as she said every time. "Just once. I want to see it."

"Absolutely not."

"You're going to do something stupid about this," she said, and it wasn't a question.

"I'm going to do something thorough."

"Harry." She reached across the table and put her hand over his, her thumb resting on his wedding ring. "If you're going to do something thorough, you tell me first. Before, not after. I don't care if Robards says it's classified, I don't care if Kingsley's lost his earring, I don't care if it's the Unspeakables themselves. You tell me. That's the deal."

"That's the deal," he said.

She held his eyes for a moment longer, to make sure he meant it. Then she let go and stole his cocoa, because hers had a skin on it.

​

He kept the coin on the bedside table, in a chipped saucer, next to his glasses. He'd never really asked himself why. It had lived in a pocket for most of one year and in a drawer for most of the next ten, and at some point it had migrated to the saucer, and there it stayed: a fake Galleon, slightly tarnished, one of Hermione's cleverest and most dangerous pieces of magic, lying beside his glasses like any other object on any other night.

At seven minutes past three in the morning, it began to burn.

Harry woke to a sound he didn't recognise: a thin, bright ticking, like a cooling kettle. It was the saucer, cracking gently in the heat. The coin was glowing a dull, furious gold, and on the other side of the room Ginny's kit bag was glowing too, light leaking through the canvas in a small, fierce square where the inside pocket was. She had never admitted to keeping hers there, and he had never mentioned it.

Ginny sat bolt upright. "Harry —"

He picked up the coin. It was hot enough to hurt, and he didn't let go.

The numbers round the rim were spinning, the way they always had when Hermione's charm carried a message, and then — the way they never had, not once, not even in the war — they stopped, and blurred, and ran together, and letters burned across the face of the coin instead, small and clear and unmistakable.

​​​​​​​​

HE IS GATHERING
WHAT THE WAR
LEFT BEHIND.

DON'T LET HIM
BRING ME BACK.

XXXI

​

In his rooms above Greenhouse Three at Hogwarts, Neville Longbottom woke with a hand clamped over his trouser pocket and no memory of having fallen asleep in his trousers. He read the coin by its own light, twice. Then he sat on the edge of the bed in the dark with the thing cooling in his palm and thought — for no reason he could have named if you'd asked him — of the fourth-floor corridor.

At the Leaky Cauldron, where she'd been up late doing the accounts, Hannah Longbottom dropped her quill and stared down at the gold light seeping through her apron.

In a flat in Kilburn, Seamus Finnigan fell off his sofa and swore, inventively and at length, in two languages. Two doors down, Dean Thomas was already reaching for his wand. In Edinburgh, Parvati Patil sat very still in the dark, did not wake the man sleeping beside her, and reached, out of pure habit, for the cold dregs of her bedtime tea to read the leaves. And all across the country — in a farmhouse in the Yorkshire Dales, on a houseboat on the Norfolk Broads, in a Muggle hospital in Leeds where a Healer was moonlighting on the night shift — coins that had not been touched in years lit up in drawers and pockets and jewellery boxes, and the people who owned them woke, and read, and went cold.

Outside a felt tent on the Mongolian steppe, where it was ten o'clock on a bright, windy morning, Luna Lovegood took off her left boot, shook out a coin that was glowing like a small sun, and read it with great interest. Then she looked up. The grass was moving all around her in long silver waves, and there was nobody there at all.

"Oh," said Luna politely, to the wind. "Hello. I didn't know you could do that."

In the flat above Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes, Ron was still staring at his coin when the fireplace flared and George's head appeared in the flames, hair on end, eyes wide.

"Ronnie," said George. "Tell me that was you."

"It wasn't."

"Right," said George.

He didn't leave. His face hung there in the green fire, and for a moment Ron saw something in it he hadn't seen for years — something raw and terrible and hopeful all at once — and then George closed his eyes and it was gone.

"Right," he said again, and the fire went out.

And in the Department of Mysteries, far beneath the Atrium, Hermione Granger was working late in a room she was not permitted to describe, even — technically, under the terms of her oath — to herself. The coin in her pocket began to burn, and she took it out and read the message, then read it a second time, then a third, with the particular stillness of a woman who had invented something and was only now discovering that she didn't know everything it could do.

At the end of the corridor, behind a black door to which Hermione held one of only four keys, something that did not have a mouth said a name.

She was too far away to hear whose.

​

By four o'clock the fireplace at Grimmauld Place had become, in Ginny's words, a sort of horrible bouquet. Ron's head. Neville's, grey-faced. Seamus's, still swearing. Hannah's. Dean's. Ernie Macmillan's, in a hairnet, which nobody felt able to mention. Hermione's, last of all, still in her Unspeakable's robes, looking as though she hadn't blinked in an hour.

"It wasn't me," she said. "Harry, it wasn't me, and I don't know who it was, and I made the things." She pressed her lips together, hard. "I need to check something. I can't tell you what. I'll come to you. Tomorrow. Don't do anything until I do."

"Hermione —"

But the fire had already gone out.

Ginny was sitting on the stairs in her dressing gown with her coin held in both hands, as though it were a small animal that might bolt. Harry sat down on the step below her. Her knees pressed into his back. Neither of them said anything for a long time.

By five, they had accounted for every living member of Dumbledore's Army.

Nobody had sent it.

​

♫ Listen along

Draco Malfoy was not asleep. He rarely was at three in the morning; he'd given up pretending otherwise years ago. He was sitting in the armchair by the window of his flat in Holland Park, which the Restitution Act would probably take off him by Christmas, with a glass of something expensive and a report on counterfeit Sickles he had no intention of reading. Behind him the bookcase rose to the ceiling, orderly and alphabetised and immaculate, except for the top shelf. On the top shelf sat a row of old, slim, much-handled volumes, turned with their spines to the wall, so that nobody who came into the flat — not that anybody ever did — could read the titles.

At seven minutes past three, he heard dogs.

Far off at first. A long, falling, belling cry, the sound of a hunt in full voice across open country, and it was coming from somewhere in the middle of west London, where there was no open country at all. Then it came again, nearer. And again, nearer still, a whole pack giving tongue together, and underneath it something that might have been a horn.

Draco put his glass down very slowly.

Frost was spreading across the inside of his window. It crept in from the corners of the frame in delicate, fern-like whorls, white and silent and perfectly beautiful, exactly the way it had in a small room above a launderette in Bethnal Green, and it did not melt when the lamplight touched it.

The baying rose, and rose, until it seemed to be coming from the street directly below, from the square, from just the other side of the glass — and then it stopped. All at once. The way a hound stops, Draco thought, with a coldness spreading through him that had nothing to do with the room, when it has found the scent it was looking for.