Katharine Malfoy: Vengeance Itself

Katharine Malfoy: Vengeance Itself (pro)

It is the nature of evil to be pursued by evil; it is the nature of spirits who love to cause fear, to have a fear that haunts and never lets go. Voldemort was the most evil and feared wizard of the age, but he had only lived one lifetime; he did not have the length of shadow and hidden deeds left by the centuries of some of the great wizarding houses - the Blacks, the Von Stammenbachs, the Alberico-Cassianos. And no house trailed longer and blacker shadows than the Malfoys; more hate left behind, more violence committed and endured, more treachery, more hereditary vengeance.

More than a century before (a short time, as Malfoy memories go), the house had split into two branches. There never was room in the world for more than one line of ruling Malfoys, and the two branches immediately began to fight. It was a struggle in the dark, unknown to anyone outside, except for its visible results: the unexplained deaths, the ruined houses, the dwindling in numbers, the murderous silences between kinsmen and women. Malfoys died in the street with knives in their back; Malfoys keeled over in their own dining rooms, with poison in their throats; Malfoys were found in the morning without a mark on their bodies, victims of nameless curses. Strange illnesses wiped out whole broods of children; old men were seen to flare up and burn to death and ashes, victims of what Muggles call spontaneous combustion. What the cause of the fighting was, nobody can now say for sure. The two branches each had their account, and the judicial records of the lawsuit over an inheritance, which had started the whole feud, were lost in the burning of the Four Courts in Dublin in 1922. The Malfoys had always had important and ambiguous positions in John Bull's other island.

One story has triumphed; not because it was better based than the other, but because the other had become dangerous to retail. Long before the final massacre, one branch had been clearly losing ground, being driven from ancestral lands and houses. It therefore became known as "the rebel branch". Those who still knew their version of the story, told it in private, or wrote it down in confidential manuscripts for the eyes of their heirs and their closest relatives; it was no longer discussed in wizarding drawing-rooms, for if it became known that you took it seriously, you would be in the bad books of the victorious branch - and that became an increasingly serious matter. Outside the last few Rebel Malfoys, nobody openly told their version of the story any more.

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Severus Snape had brought the news. He always managed to be extraordinarily well informed about anything bad that might be happening, even when it had nothing to do with Death Eaters. And in this case, Snape had no idea that Lucius Malfoy was involved, nor that anything out of the ordinary was taking place; a friend of his in the Ministry had simply passed along the news that flames had been seen coming out of Licinius and Lavinia Malfoy's apartment in Manor Park, East London.

Albus Dumbledore had known so many wizarding deaths to be murder, that as soon as he heard, he suspected the worst. "I have to go. Minerva, you are in charge until I come back."

Snape looked rather blankly at Minerva McGonagall, who looked just as blankly back.

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When Dumbledore Apparated in the burning flat, he quickly realized that this was no magical blaze. The simplest Flame-Freezing Charm allowed him to stride through it, unharmed and untouched. This was simply an ordinary fire, such as consumes Muggle families by accident every week. And walking through the burning flat, he could see everywhere the ease with which such a fire could take hold. The flat had been a firetrap: old and worn-out electrical appliances, exposed cables, cheap foam furniture (he thought with regret of the splendours from which the Rebel Malfoys had declined) that would go up in minutes and unleash poisonous fumes into the closed space in which the unfortunate family slept.

Dumbledore had had dealings with the Rebels. When they had refused to send their eldest daughter Katharine to Hogwarts, he had come down to try and convince them in person; and had been touched, and saddened, by their hunted look, the few and wary words they gave, the constant presence of protective spells. He had shown himself to them in all his power, as he rarely did, trying to reassure them that Katharine would be safe at Hogwarts; but they had not taken his word, and honestly, he could not blame them. Now there they lay in their beds, overcome by fumes in their sleep, dead - probably, he thought, peacefully; they probably never felt the fire or the poison they were breathing in. Dumbledore felt this had a ghastly kind of irony: so well protected against any magical attack, so conscious of every possible magical danger... killed in their sleep by some kind of malfunctioning Muggle appliance they had probably never given a second thought to.

Which just goes to show how well Lucius Malfoy had done his work.

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Long ago, Lucius Malfoy had decided that the family feud had to end. Rich and cruel as he was, with his followers in the Ministry and his friends in twenty conspiracies - it was not wise to mention the Dark Lord now he had vanished, but he had many other secret works going on - he did not like the thought that two Rebel Malfoys, cousins, still lived; that they had married; and that they had children, and, at that, more children than Narcissa and he. Their children might one day threaten his son and heir, Draco.

So Malfoy began to plan. His first step was deceptive peace. Upon becoming the undisputed Laird of Malfoy and marrying Narcissa Black, he publicly announced the end of the feud - a feud whose existence, while it smouldered, nobody had acknowledged. This was a gesture with many meanings. It encouraged the Rebel Malfoys to feel at ease; and it gave him a forgiving image that served him in good stead as he secretly rose in the service of the Dark Lord. He certainly wanted the end of the feud; but on his terms only.

The two surviving Rebel Malfoys had not altogether relaxed their guard; but they had at least come out in the open, eking out a miserable living in a council flat in Manor Park among poor immigrants and victims of Muggle society. They still did not trust Lucius. But they valued any opportunity for peace, however phantasmal: they needed to live out of hiding, to bring up their two-year-old child Katharine and the infant the mother still bore in her womb, to live as human beings and not as hunted beasts any longer. They carried the scars of two generations of murder and persecution, a wild, secretive couple whose eyes constantly darted to and from, looking for the next menace, the next trap. That was why, when Katharine was eleven, they refused to send her to Hogwarts; they wanted her always under their eyes.

Now Lucius decided to strike. The Dark Lord had been gone for ten years, and the commotion that had followed his fall had faded from people's minds. Nobody thought much any more on whether Lucius had been a Death Eater out of choice, or even on whether he had been one at all: he was universally regarded as a proud, somewhat arrogant, but upstanding member of the community. What was more, his heir, Draco, and the heirs of his close friends Crabbe and Goyle (the conceptions and births of the three infants, within a few weeks of each other, had been regarded by all three families as a sure sign for the future) were reaching their eleventh year and would soon be leaving for Hogwarts; it was time, and more than time, that they were initiated into the ways of their dynasties, and how they dealt with their enemies. Lucius would not let Draco go to Hogwarts unless he had tasted blood.

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No detail of the plan that Lucius carried out that night and morning had not been thought through twenty times before. He wanted the certainty, the certainty beyond any doubt, that the end would be total; that this doubt that lingered at the edge of every Malfoy consciousness, this shadow of guilt and hate and shame, would not survive except in the memory - and Lucius was not afraid of memories (or so he believed). He would rejoice, he felt, when his own memories included the spurting of Rebel Malfoy blood, the dismemberment of the enemy, and the sight of his ten-year-old heir and the heirs of Crabbe and Goyle all using spell-bound knives and subtle curses on enemy bodies - learning the ways of Malfoy; he would rejoice in them, revisit them with the same pleasure as he took in the destruction of old enemies in the past, if he knew that the rebel branch was destroyed.

Therefore, when Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy came to Manor Park with Crabbe, Goyle and a dozen lesser followers, they did not come bursting in all at once, to simply overwhelm the Rebel Malfoys with numbers and destroy them in battle. That would have run too great a risk of someone escaping in the melee. They came silently as evening fell. Lucius had already selected a ground floor flat in the miserable housing estate where the remnant Rebels lived. It was filthy and unused except for an unhappy dark-skinned squatter, destroyed by equal doses of ganja, mental illness, and loneliness, who somehow survived there, unnoticed by the local social service department, as a butt for the teen-age gangs that haunted the area and as an object of contempt and pity for the rest.

This forlorn creature lay in the stupor that preluded to sleep, when the outlines of several men and women - and three boys of ten - made themselves present in the space he was used to think of as his own, in so far as he still could think in any way. Startled, he made as if to move... one of the adults spoke, and his limbs froze in place. And he knew, somehow, that they did not kill him only because they did not think he was worth the effort. One thing that his ruined brain was familiar with, after all, was contempt.

Malfoy and his followers, for their part, did not give the lone witness another thought. They had other fish to fry. But the squatter - he still, in his clearer moments, remembered that his name was Winston Napier - understood what he was seeing much better than saner and more educated people would: these were sorcerers led by devils, here to do things he did not want to imagine. And they were: after placing spell after spell on the stinking flat, to make sure that no curious or interested party would even think of poking their noses there - and that, if they did, they would see nothing - they started busying themselves with weaving a magical net of destruction on a flat five floors above them. Spell after spell, gossamer-thin, nearly impossible to perceive, were woven under the guidance of Narcissa Malfoy (who was particularly good at this kind of surreptitious activity) to surround, subvert, corrupt, and destroy the protection spells woven over a decade by the Rebel Malfoys.

It was four o'clock in the morning, and the first streaks of dawn were becoming visible, when Narcissa and Lucius judged that they had done enough; that there was nothing more to stand between the last Rebel Malfoys and a slow and horrible death. They were no longer enemies, but tunny-fishes in the net, sheep at the end of the slaughterhouse run, waiting for the mallet and the knife.

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There would be little more to be said about this, if things had gone as Lucius and Narcissa intended. There would be no need to say much about how the mob of Malfoys and followers broke into the fifth-floor flat, surrounded by dense Silencio spells that made it impossible for anyone outside to hear - however loud the screams; how the Rebel Malfoys, Licinius the husband, Lavinia the wife, twelve-year-old Katharine, nine-year-old Lucille, and six-year-old Licinia, found themselves unable to react, bound by a power that had been working while they slept. There would be no need to describe the things that Draco Malfoy, Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle, each of them not yet eleven, were told to do, and did with glee, upon the bodies of their enemies. When Harry Potter, later that year, met the three and found them detestable, he was not aware that their hands were already used to blood - and the blood of children.

(Not that they would have let him know. Lucius was nothing if not careful. All three children had it drilled into them for years that they must do nothing, nothing whatsoever, to reveal that they had seen death. Do not talk about it. Pretend you cannot see Thestrals. And if anyone asks, say no. Even the dull Crabbe and Goyle understood the point well enough.)

But things did not go as Lucius and Narcissa intended. In their wild isolation, separate from their wizarding kin, the Rebel Malfoys had developed magics of their own, some of which had no real equal even in the known Dark Arts. How they managed to free one of them, in the condition that their captors had reduced them to, was something that Lucius was never to understand; but ragged, red-haired Katharine, who had suffered less than her parents and her sisters, suddenly vanished in a burst of blue light; and a second later, the four remaining prisoners were dead - not of anything that their enemies had done, but from the collective effort to power the magic that had saved one, one alone (or so it seemed) among them.

The three children were disappointed. No more fun, no more screams. Most of the adults were angry and surprised; Narcissa was shaken, her poise lost, as she wondered what, in the weave of spells that she had designed, had failed; but it was Lucius, and Lucius alone, who fully understood what this meant. It was Lucius who knew that he had achieved nothing; that the shadow that hounded the glory of the House of Malfoy (senior branch) was not yet extinguished; that he had not eradicated his fears, nor strengthened his throne. Two adults and two children were dead, and nothing had changed.

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Lucius and Narcissa artistically arranged the bodies and set up the evidence of a fire. It was long, fiddling work, which demanded a great wealth of detail, and a good many of Narcissa's patented super-subtle deception spells, to be convincing. They were not even finished when the sudden sense of a nearby magical power drove them to disappear in a hurry.

From five floors below, they looked in a scrying glass as the mightiest of their enemies inspected the scene of their crime.

But the Malfoys had done their work well. Even Albus Dumbledore perceived nothing strange about the four bodies in the burning council flat. He left as he had come, by Apparation, before the Muggle Fire Brigade arrived and secured the rest of the building.

The few minutes that had passed seemed much longer to him than to Minerva and Severus, who had only chatted about minor school matters over a couple of cups of coffee. "That was quick," said Snape as Dumbledore reappeared among them.

"It did not seem quick to me, Severus, I'm afraid. Licinius, Lavinia, Lucille and Licinia are all dead of smoke inhalation. I couldn't find Katharine, but there is nothing to suggest that this is anything but a tragic accident."

"Are you sure, Headmaster?" said Minerva McGonagall in a doubtful tone.

"Surely it is rather strange that Katharine Malfoy should just vanish like that," added Snape, as if reading her thoughts. "Could you not perceive her anywhere?"

"No, Severus," answered Dumbledore, "but if you had known those Malfoys, it would seem less strange to you. They are - were - like hunted beasts, every one of them. I think Katharine must have woken up and fled - her bed was empty. And if she did, her instinct would be to hide from anyone, including me. And they are - were - all powerful enough to make it very hard to find them; she certainly still is. But, as I said, about the fire I have few doubts. I just walked into it with no effect at all."

"Well... that's it, then," said McGonagall. "Pity about Katharine, apart from the whole tragedy. I fear we will never see her in Hogwarts now."

"No, indeed. She will vanish somewhere where she feels safe and hidden, and there she will grow in her own way... learning Merlin knows what and using her magic Merlin knows what for. Unfortunately, this sort of thing has happened before. The only thing we can really do is notify the Ministry about her as a missing witch and hope someone stumbles over her." And Snape just nodded. "Someone with her potential ought to be found and educated...," Dumbledore added, "but we will have our work cut out finding her now."

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Neither Lucius nor Narcissa had liked to see Dumbledore in the burning flat. This would really test all their magical arrangements and deceptions to destruction. But, as it turned out, Dumbledore was human. If he had bent his whole power to investigate the fire and the dead bodies, he would have seen through the enchantments in short order; but he was already half-disposed to believe his senses, and had no great reason to suspect anything was wrong - beyond the fact that one wizard and three witches were dead. Lucius was particularly delighted to see that he was not altogether immune to his wife's subtle deflection and disattention spells. He would not perhaps risk them in serious conflicts, but there were so many occasions in which little unnoticed lies could be very, very useful.

But as Lucius and Narcissa watched Dumbledore from far away, someone else was watching them.

The last ten hours of Winston Napier's life had been unlike anything he had experienced before, either when he was sane, or when he was mad. Bound and gagged by the magic of the sorcerers who had invaded his dirty, decaying flat, he had been sure, the first clear thought he had had in a decade, that he must soon die at their hand. The fact that they had disappeared, to go he knew not where and do he knew not what, had not changed this conviction, for he knew he was still under their power, unable to speak or move. Violent cramps developed in his frozen limbs, hunger and thirst in his helpless body; and still the power held. If they had to kill him, he wished at least that it were soon.

Then there was a change. He felt a presence in his own limbs - something wounded and bleeding, but young and vigorous. He had forgotten the strength and suppleness of youth, as old men forget; and even in its damaged state, this was something he had not had for twenty years. He could remember clearly the days when he had used to lift heavy goods for a living. And his mind had a clarity it had never, perhaps, achieved, unlike even the memories of his young days.

When the sorcerers reappeared, something inexplicable happened. They stayed there for a while, watching he knew not what; and then... they simply walked out. They went by him, bound and gagged as he was by their power, as if they did not see him; they even showed their faces, to imprint themselves in his memory.

Suddenly he knew what he felt. He felt protected. He felt that there was something around him that was separating him, shielding him, from the power of these monsters, as if he were in a different room - a different place altogether. He felt that they were neglectful of him, not of their own will, but because that power had caught them by surprise, while their minds were on other matters, and had forced them not to recognize the fold in space in which he now lay sheltered.

It was only when he had gone a great distance from the estate in Manor Park, that Lucius Malfoy thought of the black witness to his deeds, and that perhaps he should do something about him; but his mind, obsessed with the thought of the missing Katharine Malfoy, revolted against the notion. Why risk getting back there again and maybe getting noticed? The man's mind was ruined; he could do nothing about us. Katharine of the rebel branch is what you should be thinking about - such were the thoughts in Lucius Malfoy's head, and, had he asked, in his wife's too.

That had been mighty magic. Malfoy and his accomplices had made it easy, being relaxed and careless in Napier's presence, but on the other hand Katharine had had to perform it while tired, wounded and in desperate need of sleep. She could never had done it, had the old man - whom she knew well enough by sight, a familiar if unwelcome presence in the estate - not provided such a wonderful refuge for her body and soul. She simply entered him by the secret arts of her family. Katharine was only twelve, but her magical potential was easily on a par with that of Lucius himself; and, while her parents had refused to send her to Hogwarts, they had done much to educate her themselves, in the old, secretive ways of their hunted family. No witch her age, and few of her seniors, was her peer in Hiding Magic and Mind-Deviation; as Dumbledore had rightly assumed (and Lucius had failed to consider), once she had hidden herself, there would be very few ways to find her.

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Lucius went home discontented and silent. Katharine was in his thoughts, and he knew that she would be in his dreams, a red-haired ghost surrounded by ghosts, threatening vengeance for the death of her blood-line. Her magic had deceived him, as his had deceived Dumbledore; but he knew that he had failed to put an end to his enemies. From now on (though nobody, except his wife, ever knew) Lucius would never go out without elaborate precautions, because he knew that somewhere Katharine Malfoy lived and brooded.

But his situation was even worse than he knew. If they had continued to do what they had been doing to the body of Lavinia Malfoy, they would have found that she had been pregnant; but that no trace of her baby could be found. They would have realized that something more than one twelve-year-old girl had escaped their clutches.

It was perhaps well that they did not do so. Lucius worried enough about the heavily injured, indeed half-dead, pre-teen red-haired ragamuffin who had managed to break from his grip; but she, being a girl, could not claim the title and wealth of the Malfoys, which was entailed in the male line. But Lucius would have deserted the Dark Lord's service, would have ceased all his other activities, would have turned all Britain and lands beyond upside down, would have used every resource in his power to hunt her down to the ends of the earth, if he had known that another Malfoy, yet unborn, of unknown sex and appearance, had also escaped his knife.

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And Katharine slept at last, fleeing the thought of her dead parents, dead little sisters, destroyed life. Always fleeing; hers was a family used to flight. But if a hunted beast can love anyone, she had loved the two little girls, and when she woke, she might well howl with grief.