Summon the Lambs to Slaughter

To Chrisiant, who keeps this wounded old soldier moving toward home, and to Bentley Little, who knows how to weave a story.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Hogwarts, for all its life and vitality beneath the benevolent reign of the sun, was a very different place in the dark, interminable hours after midnight, the hours when even the stars have winked out. Like the fragile creatures within its walls, it slumbered, dreamed. It never divulged its dreams, for they were its own and not for human eyes to see, but one could feel the evidence of them all around. It was beneath their feet and above their heads. The very walls were redolent with them, and if one listened closely enough, carefully enough, it was said that you could hear the castle breathe.

The infirmary was generally the quietest place of all, a place of reverential silence, a place void of the remotest sounds of human habitation. No rustling of bedclothes, no harsh exhalation or murmurings of sleep-mad minds. No patter of sticky feet as they fumbled in the dark for the lavatory. Nothing. Wind against the windows, fleeting as misting rain and the gentle shift of a curtain. It was the complete and utter silence of an empty room.

But now there was a sound, an incongruous sound for such a place. It was a small, sharp, rhythmic clicking that resonated throughout the room, carried to all corners. It was a haunting, forlorn sound, like dried chicken bones cast upon the fire, and yet the shadowy figure sitting in a chair beside one of the beds found it comforting, had for most of her eighty years.

Professor McGonagall sat beside the inert, lifeless form of Harry Potter, and knitted. She knit without purpose, letting her hands do as they would. The slender, silver needles clacked on, creating from old memory whatever pattern they fancied. Over. Under. Around. Through. The familiar waltz they had danced a thousand times. In the end, she might find a sweater dangling from their gleaming tips, or perhaps a pair of socks. It didn't matter as long as there was something there, something where there had been nothing.

She had been knitting for as long as she could remember. Her Aunt Hestia had taught her, showing her the technique with age-brittle fingers. Later she had come to think of them as teacher's fingers. Aunt Hestia, long dead, had been ancient even when she, Minerva, had been a child, and watching her wrinkled, leathery hands as they fashioned all manner of sweaters and afghans had been like watching the Fates weave the universe.

Hold the needles just there, Minerva. That's right. Now, loop the yarn; underneath you go. Good, good. Ah, a bit too much. Better.

Aunt Hestia's gravelly, age-worn voice whispered in her ear, and she was startled to feel the hot prickle of tears at the corners of her eyes. She put down her knitting and reached for the box of tissues on the night table beside Potter's bed. It was silly of her to be weeping; Aunt Hestia had been dead for more than fifty years, and the boy beside her was not yet lost, but she couldn't help it. For the first time in her life, she was unsure of what to do.

Well, crying isn't it, she told herself sternly, yanking off her spectacles and dabbing roughly at her eyes, as though rogue tear ducts were to blame for this uncharacteristic outburst of emotion.

She could remember to the day the last time she had cried. It wasn't something she did often. It had been the day she'd learned of Peter Pettigrew's supposed heroic death at the hands of Sirius Black. She'd absorbed the news with a heady, swooning horror, the newsprint of the Daily Prophet swimming before her disbelieving eyes. She'd nearly fainted, just managing to stagger to a chair and collapse into it. The tears had come then, in a steady, leaking torrent, scalding her eyes and cheeks with the gentle bitterness of self-recrimination.

Knowing what she knew now, she felt like a fool. She had believed the lie, bought into the myth of his martyrdom. It was little consolation to know that she had not been the only one. Albus had believed, too. Poor Albus, white as chalk and tottering in his seat at the memorial service. It had been one of the rare times when she had seen him vulnerable, and she hated Pettigrew all the more for it.

I even indulged in a bit of maudlin reverie at the Three Broomsticks on his behalf. Pitying his pathetic memory.

Her lip curled in undisguised contempt at the recollection of sitting at a table with Hagrid and Cornelius Fudge in misty-eyed reminiscence and belated canonization of Gryffindor Lost, innocent, stupid, blindly courageous Peter, who had spent his life in the strangling shadow of his three best friends, and had escaped it by killing one and sending another to the hell of Azkaban in his place.

And we all thought he was so noble.

Of course they had. He had benefited from his long and fruitful association with the beloved Potters and their retinue and with the Order. People as good and decent as the Potters certainly wouldn't have anything to do with the darkness, with the malignant evil that had infested the world like voracious parasites. They would have known, smelled the sickly sweet rot of corruption on his skin. They had loved him, and that had been good enough.

Let's be perfectly frank, Minerva. That wasn't the only reason, was it?

She sighed and picked up her knitting again. That was true enough. Being a Gryffindor had counted for much. Maybe too much. Gryffindor was a name, an affiliation that could be trusted. Those who carried it were heralded as the brightest and the best, the most suited for great and valorous deeds. Distinction was expected of them. None had been more purely Gryffindor than James and Lily, and because Peter was their friend, it was assumed he was much the same. They had paid dearly for their blithe presumptuousness.

So has Harry, Circe bless him.

The thought of his name brought her attention to the bed and the still figure that lay upon it, and her throat constricted with another spasm of grief. All night he had lain there, a testament to their failure. It was horrible to see him that way, and part of her was still trying to deny the truth. Several times during her vigil, she had tried to tell herself that it wasn't really him. It wasn't hard to almost believe it. The Harry she knew exuded life and quiet vitality. The thing on the bed was a wax effigy, and a poor one at that.

It was odd, though, that in his tainted sleep, he looked peaceful, almost cherubic. Years had fallen away from his face, and he looked like a boy again rather than an old man stuffed into a gangly boy body. The frown lines around his mouth had been erased, and the constant crease in his forehead, the one that had been there since the middle of his first year, was gone. His brow was smooth and untroubled, as any young boy's should be.

It's the spectacles. He hasn't got them on. That's why he looks so young.

Bollocks it is. It's not like you to sugarcoat things. You know better. It's no secret why he looks the way he does. It's a wonder he doesn't look worse, what, with the burden he carries.

She jabbed a needle beneath a loop harder than was necessary and pricked the ball of her thumb, drawing blood. She grimaced and brought the wounded digit to her lips, licking the bright bead of blood that had formed. A disgusting habit, but not one that bothered her enough to break it. The salty tang grazed her tongue, and her face contorted into a moue of disgust.

A vampire and a witch. How novel. A tissue would have done nicely. Though having blood on your hands is quite fitting given what you were just pondering.

Her eyes returned to Harry's face, and her heart ached when she saw the closed lids. She wished they would open and reveal those luminous green eyes, even if it were only for a fleeting instant. Lily's eyes, people said, and they were right. They and his temper were the only things he had inherited from his mother; everything else belonged to James.

He was the living legacy of his parents, and a constant reminder to the old guard of what they had lost, what their complacent ignorance had torn away from them. Sometimes looking at him was physically painful. The first time he had set foot in the Great Hall, she had nearly fainted from the shock. He was the Mirror of Erised made flesh, an amalgam of the best of his parents. It was as though the past had doubled back upon the present, and both she and Albus had been exceptionally solemn in the staff meeting that night, wandering the well-traveled paths of bitter memory.

Albus especially blamed himself for what had happened fifteen years ago. Even after all these years, she could still remember what he had told her a few days after the Potters had been murdered and their house blown to pieces. I should have known. How could I not? How could... He had broken off then, overcome, and his hands had been shaking so badly that the tumbler of brandy he'd been sipping in a vain attempt to settle his nerves had sloshed onto his desk, soaking the Daily Prophet he had been reading. She had had no answer for him, and she still didn't.

Though her stubborn Scottish pride had never allowed her to admit it, she had shared his feeling of gross inadequacy, of staggering failure. To this day, she asked herself why she hadn't seen the warning signs, had never seen it coming. They had always been so careful, so scrupulous, but somehow, in all their vigilance, they had missed the direst threat of all.

We underestimated Peter. We underestimated him, and in the morning, James and Lily were dead, another pair of corpses in He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's charnel house.

James and Lily made the same mistake.

Of course they bloody well did. They were his friends. Albus and I, we had no such excuse. It was our job to be vigilant, to investigate every conceivable possibility, no matter how implausible. But we didn't. We were so convinced that black was black and white was white. We never considered that there might be grays, or that even the most pristine things can be sullied over time. We should have sent someone to check on them, to help ward off an attack.

All of this chest-beating and hair-tearing is utterly useless. All the could haves and should haves in the world can't undo the past. Let it go.

Maybe so, but it was hard to surrender the past when it walked about and stared you in the face. James and Lily had gone and left Harry behind, and the orphaned child that had liberated the wizarding world had needled her uneasy conscience. He had begun his life owed a monumental debt, a debt that could never be repaid, and it only continued to grow, accruing interest beyond calculation each time he beat back the darkness.

What was it the Bible said? And the sins of the father shall be visited upon the sons, even unto the seventh generation. That Muggle religious text was usually full of muddle-headed, pedantic, unrealistic balderdash, but she thought it was right about that. She saw evidence of its veracity with her own world-weary eyes. Not just in Harry, though he was certainly the most glaring example, but in poor Neville Longbottom. He had lost his parents just as surely as Harry had, and anyone who would argue differently was a plain fool. They breathed and voided, but they were dead all the same. It had taken a single visit to St. Mungo's to drive that ugly truth home.

She did what she could to ease their burdens. Severus could howl all he liked about favoritism; she had bent the age restriction on Quidditch and the prohibition on first-years owning brooms for Potter because she considered it miniscule reparations for all that he had been denied and would be denied in the future. Their failure to stop the Dark Lord had put him in this position. He deserved pleasure, no matter how inconsequential it might be.

The unchanging inertia of the boy frightened her. She had never seen anyone in a true coma before, and she thought it was an uncanny mimicry of death. She had seen dead bodies in her time, more than she wished to remember. She had seen them arranged in quiet dignity at wakes and memorial services and heaped in bleeding, shifting dunes on war-ravaged battlefields. She had been saddened and often disgusted by such sights, but none of them disturbed her as much as seeing Harry like this, trapped between two worlds, alive yet not living.

She wondered if he was cold. The coverlet was tucked beneath his chin, and he was not shivering, but she couldn't shake the idea that he must be frozen. After all, what was life if not warmth? She put down her knitting and reached out a tentative hand, stopping just short of touching his cheek. It hovered in the darkness, trembling, and she had a fleeting image of Atropos' gleaming scissors poised triumphantly above the fraying thread of his life. She pulled her hand back, her heart hammering in her chest.

That's absolutely mad. You're no more Atropos than Albus is Charon. It's perfectly all right to touch him.

Still, she hesitated. She had never been of a maternal bent, and touching students was not something she usually did. Touching one while he was unconscious struck her as lewd and invasive.

Afraid he'll awaken and think you're trying to violate him? Really. You're not Severus.

Disgusted by her unwarranted reticence, she lunged forward, grazing three fingers of her hand roughly along his jawline. The touch was not as gentle as she had hoped, and his flesh dimpled beneath the pressure. An unconscious sigh of relief escaped her when she discovered that it was neither feverish nor chilled and clammy. It was flush with only the warmth from a sleeping child, still soft and pliable. She let her hand linger a moment, drawing feeble assurance from its deceiving solidity. Then she drew away and groped for her knitting.

How could such a thing have happened, been allowed to happen again? And to Potter, no less? It was always the Potters. The entire clan was cursed. It was as though the Fates, weary of granting them unfettered prosperity, had decided to exact their long-delayed price. The portentous Bible verse floated through her mind again, and she shifted uneasily in her seat, pushing her spectacles back onto the bridge of her nose.

Superstitious poppycock, her rational mind blustered, trying to banish the unsettling thought.

The Muggles think witches and wizards are superstitious poppycock, too, but we exist as surely as the sun. And we most assuredly have curses and hexes. You've seen firsthand the damage they can do.

She tutted softly. She wished she knew what was wrong with him. If she knew that, then something could be done, a course of action could be taken. She hated doing nothing. It was averse to her nature, to the nature of most Gryffindors, come to think of it. They were practical, action-oriented. The proof was in the performance. Preparation and contemplation were the stuff of Ravenclaws.

And that devil-may-care attitude has gotten Harry into a pickle more than once.

A wistful smile flickered across her mouth. It certainly had, but until now, he had always come out of it by the skin of his teeth. Battered and bruised, but essentially whole. Privately, she thought him the avatar of Gryffindor virtue, that to which all the rest of her charges should aspire. She never said so, of course; frankly, most of her children lacked the talent and sheer bravado that came so naturally to him, and she would be damned if they started sending pupils home in wreath-bedecked boxes because they had foolishly, fatally, grasped for dreams beyond their means.

Madam Pomfrey had been working doggedly all night to answer the riddle of his illness, but so far it had proven a fruitless search. Preliminary scans had picked up traces of a strange chemical, but it had yet to be identified. They would likely need Severus' expertise for that. In the meantime, Pomfrey had been doing her best with what little information she had, taking scans with her wand every hour on the hour and making meticulous notations in a ledger, fussing over his sheets, and fretting over him in an endearingly mother hen fashion.

She was not surprised at any of it. It was quintessential Pomfrey, quintessential Hufflepuff, and she was doing her House proud. She had never been more grateful for its stalwart, tireless earnestness. Pomfrey wouldn't rest until the mystery was solved and Potter was on his feet again. Anything less than a complete recovery would be a personal affront. She had gone to bed a few hours ago, hollow-eyed but determined, and watching her stagger wearily to her bedchamber, McGonagall had sent a blessing after her.

It was unfortunate that they were dependent on Severus to get to the bottom of things. If only Pomfrey's knowledge were more extensive. The idea of Severus being involved in the investigation made her head spin. If nothing else, it was an enormous, unforgivable conflict of interest. The man had most likely poisoned Harry. No sane man would allow him anywhere near the inquiry. Albus should know better.

He does know. But he also knows that there is no one else on staff capable of isolating and identifying the toxin, and he'll be bound to a skiff and set ablaze before he sends for the Ministry.

He should set his prejudice aside. Harry's life is at stake.

You seem quite content to nurse your grudge against Severus.

She bristled, her needle missing a loop. That wasn't fair. What she felt wasn't a grudge-it was incontrovertible fact. Harry had fallen into this deplorable state while under his care. He had access to both the ability and the opportunity to harm the boy, and he had made it quite plain over the years that he loathed him. Any reasonable person would have drawn the same conclusion. Personal dislike had nothing to do with it.

House affiliation has no influence, then?

None. She would have been equally suspicious of him had he been Head of Ravenclaw or Hufflepuff. Severus, no matter his place or his pedigree was simply bad. What was worse, he was unrepentantly so. He reveled in his malice the way others reveled in kindness and joy. He would never change his ways. The Light would kill him, scorch his skin. Everyone could see it. Everyone except Albus.

Albus was the keeper of lost souls, the shepherd through the dark. He attracted the wayward and the cast aside. They came to him and loved him, and he nourished them with his faithfulness. That was the way it usually turned out, but there had been exceptions. Like Tom Riddle, who had taken the kindness shown him and perverted it to his own insidious ends. Severus was treading the same blighted path, and with his treacherous hands, he had brought the hope of their world to its lowest ebb.

It could have been an accident.

The man had never made a Potions mistake in seventeen years, twenty-four if you counted his school days. The likelihood that he would commit his first error on Harry Potter by pure coincidence was utterly preposterous. If what had happened to Harry had been wrought by his hand, then it had been done with full and willful cognizance. And if that were true, then it was her fervent wish that the Dementors killed him slowly and with ghoulish relish.

If he really was responsible, he'll never make it that far. Sirius will kill him with his bare hands and consider it a worthy accomplishment.

So would she for that matter. Hogwarts had already lost so many of its best in this senseless war of subterfuge against the Dark Lord. Poor Cedric Diggory had been the most public casualty, but he was far from the first. Over the past twenty years, pupils from the most outspoken families who opposed Voldemort had disappeared, simply boarded the train at the end of a term and never come back. Some of the disappearances could no doubt be attributed to the benign circumstances of withdrawal or transfer, but no such papers had ever crossed her desk. They were simply gone with no explanation.

About some of the pupils, there could be no doubt, even if the Ministry claimed otherwise. You could find answers if you knew where to look. They weren't pleasant answers, mind, only true. They were in the seedy, pernicious gossip of the dilapidated pubs frequented by harlots, tosspots, and other beaten down chaff of society, and in the less reputable publications like The Quibbler, an outlandish tabloid to which she and the other professors had been secretly subscribed for years. It was filled with various and sundry drek, but in the morass of nonsense articles about Horned Grindypunks and One-Eyed Hooverhumps that went on a rampage and laid waste to entire isolated villages never named, there could be found rancid kernels of sad truth. Like the story of Herakles Duquesne.

It wasn't a story you could find readily; the Daily Prophet had refused to cover it. Too monstrous for their readership, too evocative of the days when the Death Eaters had walked the streets freely espousing their loyalty to Voldemort and promising death and fearful retribution to those strong or brave enough to stand against them. Those were memories the people wished to forget, and so the fate of young Herakles was swept under the rug, left for the more salacious, less prestigious, lesser circulated papers, the bare pickings of carrion left behind after the lions had their fill. Not many people knew the story, not many, but enough.

Herakles had been a sturdy, earnest boy with an open, bovine face when he entered his first year at Hogwarts ten years ago. In quieter, more thoughtful reflection, she often thought he had been a bit touched in the head, but whatever he was, he had been a sweet boy, always willing to help and eager to complete his lessons. Unsurprisingly, he had been Sorted into Hufflepuff. Pomona Sprout had taken quite a liking to the boy, and for two happy years, he had flourished.

At the beginning of what should have been his third year, he had failed to step off the school train. As was the custom, a letter of inquiry had been owled to his parents asking if anything were amiss. Two weeks went by, then three, and they received no word from the Duquesnes, which was strange because they were much like their son, open, honest, salt-of-the-earth souls who had never left school correspondence unanswered. The alarm bells had begun to sound, then, muffled but terribly insistent. Most of the professors had known then that he was gone, but they had clung to the guttering embers all the same, especially Pomona, who retreated each day to her greenhouses and offered up prayers and incense to Demeter for his safe return.

When, after six weeks, nothing had been heard, the Ministry was contacted. Fudge, in his usual supercilious fashion, pooh-poohed their uneasiness, but at Albus' insistence, they were referred to the Magical Law Enforcement's Missing Wizards Division. Two patrol wizards were dispatched to the Duquesne house, where they found the door ajar and flapping forlornly in the late fall breeze. There was no sign of the Duquesnes. Their clothes were hung neatly in their wardrobes, and there were still dishes in the sink, winking in the sunlight streaming through the half-open window. Nothing else was out of place. No overturned chairs, no broken glass, no signs of struggle. With nothing else to go on, Fudge deemed the matter out of Ministry hands and let it drop.

In January, five months after Herakles vanished, a washerwoman ran to a pub in Ottery St. Catchpole, incoherent and gibbering, drying spittle on her chin. After much soothing and a liberal application of Ogden's Old Firewhiskey, most of the tale was got out of her. She had been walking from her cottage to the market, she told her rapt audience, when she was overcome with the urge to go to the bathroom. The journey from where she lived to the market was a long one, particularly for a woman of nearly ninety, and she was certain she would never make it to either destination.

She had continued on for a while, reluctant to have to go hunting for a secluded spot. Eventually, though, the strident demands of her bladder overrode her sense of propriety and the throbbing protests of her arthritic knees, and she had hobbled off the rutted path in search of a suitable hillock. It was then that she saw it.

It had taken several more shots for her to say what "it" was, but between her strangled sobs and dark mutterings, it became clear that "it" was a body. She told them it was lying in the tall, rank weeds, moldering and festering. It was mostly a skeleton, she said, a pile of bones wrapped in rotting robes. Then she fainted dead away and had to be carried to the storeroom until a Mediwizard arrived through the Floo network.

Some of the lurid details of the shocking revelation had undoubtedly been liberally garnished by the paper, but the bare bones, if the pun could be excused, were beyond dispute. Once the Mediwizard had arrived and taken charge of the hysterical woman, a small group of intrepid, adventurous wizards set off to prove her story. They were gone roughly an hour, and when they returned, they were considerably quieter than when they departed. The younger wizards lurched silently toward the bar and promptly ordered double Fizzing Firewaters, which they quaffed without a word. Their older counterparts, no less shocked but better prepared, fumbled in their robes for trusty hip flasks.

It was much as the old woman had said, or so the men told the officials from the Magical Law Enforcement Squad. Two of the sturdier fellows led them to the find, and the body was taken to the Ministry for closer examination. Through the back entrance, of course, away from prying eyes. It was taken to the Department of Mysteries and to the morgue ensconced within its winding, secretive walls.

After an examination, the body was identified as that of Herakles Duquesne, a pronouncement that surprised no one. Pomona was devastated, and for three days afterward, her normally sweet disposition had been doleful and irritable. The cause of death was listed as indeterminate, though the attendant Mediwizard conceded that death by murder was a more than probable possibility. Herakles was buried in a pauper's grave upon completion of the enquiry, and the Ministry deemed the investigation closed.

That was the end of the official explanation, but such mysterious stories tended to acquire a life of their own, and feverish, salacious details of the gruesome discovery circulated through the noisome, lush grapevine of rundown gin mills and flophouses. Some of the men in the party that had discovered the body were only too eager to recount what they had seen, particularly if plied with liquor and a few well-placed Galleons.

Most of the things they said and which the papers printed verbatim were little more than drunken ravings, but amid the whiskey-soaked dross were bits of actual fact. She knew this because whether Cornelius Fudge liked it or not, Albus could get the information he wanted. He had gone to the Ministry one morning and returned with a dossier the breadth of his arm, a dossier marked Duquesne. He had also, she remembered now as she worked her needles into the yarn, been wearing an expression of sedate achievement.

The file had been horrible in its detached description of what had become of the quiet, sweet-natured boy that had once been Herakles Duquesne. Several times during the reading, she had to get up and leave, unable to cope with the bloodless catalogue of the atrocities performed upon an innocent. There had been acts of cold depravity perpetrated upon his small form, but they had been wrought with such malevolent sanity that she had shuddered, wrapped her arms about her chest and shuddered, her teeth chattering in spite of the roaring fire. The bastards, whoever they had been, had stooped to the despicable low of actually using Muggle weapons on him. There was no greater barbarity.

The death of Herakles Duquesne had been eight years ago. Why she was thinking about it now, in the expansive darkness of the infirmary she could not say. She supposed it was because Harry's illness had been just as sudden and just as strange, a reminder that bad things were still possible, even in a safe place like Hogwarts. Maybe it was because he, too, had been felled when they least expected it.

It's because you know in your heart what happened to him, who happened. The Ministry can deny it all they wish, but it is a sure bet that Death Eaters tore that boy apart. There were signs even then that they were reorganizing, reforming their ranks, winnowing further and deeper into the daily fabric of this world. Everyone knew it, but we refusde to acknowledge it, turned our faces from the looming, coiling shadows and bid them depart, leave in peace the skies that had so recently seen the return of the sun. We knew and did nothing, and now our inertia has come home to roost.

Severus is no longer a Death Eater. He hasn't been in seventeen years.

That was only a theory. Albus could prate all he liked about Severus changing his ways and embracing the righteous path, but he had no signs of actually doing so, not that she could see. He still attended those abominable meetings, still made obeisance to those cursed feet, and try as she might, she simply could not believe that his loyalty was mere lip service. It had been ingrained in him for too long, and he loved cruelty too much.

For all I know, he could have had something to do with young Herakles' demise.

In truth, she had wondered about that for a very long time. Over the years she had suppressed the thought as traitorous to Albus, but now, alone in the dark with no one to censure her, she let it breathe. Severus certainly had the knowledge, opportunity, and motive. He knew who opposed the Dark Lord and who supported him. Herakles' murder had occurred just before the start of term, and even if it hadn't, he still had ample time to be about at night on supposed Order business. And he had admitted on several occasions that he had little aversion to killing.

Do you truly think Albus would harbor a man who murdered one of his students?

She wished with all her heart that it was not so, but she had known him for sixty years, seen him wage his calculated, crushing campaign against Grindewald, and she knew that he would if he thought the ends justified the means. Sacrifice one life to spare ten thousand more. And she suspected that were Severus standing before him in blood-drenched robes, Albus would cling to his blindness, swaddle himself in it. He would never admit that his greatest pet project could not be saved.

He had had a habit of such projects. Most of them were harmless. Hagrid, for all his fearsome appearance, was as docile as a lamb. Then there was Sybil Trelawney, the unfortunate, impotent descendant of the most celebrated Seer of their time; the dithering wretch couldn't predict what she'd have for breakfast even if it were sitting in front of her, and yet Albus kept her on out of sentiment. He also claimed that she'd made an accurate prediction a time or two, though McGonagall was of the opinion that a hallucinating monkey could have the same luck.

But Severus was different. He had been one of them, one of the black-hearted, soulless monsters that had infected their once peaceful world with a stomach-knotting dread that brought acrid bile to every throat. He had skulked in the abetting darkness and stolen children from their beds, stained his careful, immaculate hands with innocent blood, wrested life and love from a thousand shattered hearts. What redemption was there for him? He could not breathe life into the dead, could not refashion the glimmering, fractured shards of hearts long-stilled. The only reparation for the things he had done was the forfeiture of his own misspent life. He was not a cheerful, bumbling inept like Hagrid, nor a cantankerous belligerent like Alastor Moody, who, in spite of his faults and his taciturn disposition, had spent each and every one of his years doing what was right. He was as sleek and dangerous as a cobra, and whatever notions Albus might hold to the contrary, venom still coursed through his needlepoint fangs.

Maybe that was part of the challenge for him, to tame the savage beast, force the serpent to lick sugar from the palm of his outstretched hand with its forked tongue. If he turned Severus to the Light, he could hold him forth as the ultimate victory, taunt Voldemort with irrefutable proof that his hold of the souls of men was neither absolute nor eternal. He would have plucked a life from beneath his very nose and escaped unscathed.

Pride goeth before a fall. That Muggle religious book was full of pithy aphorisms like that, and it was another in which she firmly believed. Not that it was easy to accuse Albus of pride; his arrogance was of a humbler ilk. He never flouted his power or his authority, but he was always keenly aware of them. His self-confidence was an accent to, not a centerpiece of, his personality. She had never seen him succumb to it, but Severus was the closest she had ever seen him come. Where he was concerned, she feared for his judgment.

His judgment is far from perfect of late. An impostor Moody fooled him for an entire year.

He had a great deal on his mind-The Tri-wizard Tournament, practicing honey diplomacy with Karkaroff and that elitist French blowhard Madame Maxime, safeguarding against sabotage...

And we saw how well that went. He and Moody have been friends for at least fifty years. He should have known. Ten years ago, he would have.

Well, what was there to be done for it? He was old; there was no getting around it. Things were bound to slip when you were well into the twilight past one hundred and fifty. Most people his age were lucky to recognize their morning porridge. That he was still up and vital and the critical component in the fight against Voldemort was nothing short of miraculous. She had trusted him this far, and she would simply have to trust him now.

What if your blind trust leads you all to ruin? Blind trust. Isn't that what Voldemort requires?

She cursed softly as the needle sank into the pad of her thumb again. Fat, glistening droplets of blood dripped onto the mass of knitted yarn bunched on her lap. She must be tired if she was equating Albus to Voldemort. The two were nothing alike. She really ought to get some sleep. It wouldn't do for her to be nodding off during lessons. Longbottom could put someone's eye out with his wand if she weren't watching. There was nothing more she could do here tonight. She stood, and the wad of shapeless yarn fell to the floor. She stared at it through blurring eyes, then slowly bent and picked it up, wadding it into a rumpled lump. She would throw it away when she got to her chambers. It was useless now. She couldn't give it to anyone. Things onto which uneasy blood had been shed were cursed. She left the room on brittle knees, stooped and shambling from her long sit. The trip to her chambers took twice as long as usual, and when she climbed beneath her woolen coverlet, it did nothing to keep out the cutting chill. She shivered and did not sleep.

While his colleague tossed and turned in her bed, the Headmaster sat in his office, his feet extended before him. The jaunty pink ears of the bunny slippers that shod them flopped roguishly, but try as he might, he could draw no mirth from them. Not even the memory of his late wife, who had given them to him as a playful present sixty years ago could warm him now. The chill that dampened his bones had little to do with the temperature in the room. Even if it had, the grate of the office's fireplace was currently occupied with the wan, sleep-puffed face of Arthur Weasley.

"When?" Arthur asked, absently pushing the tail of his sleeping cap out of his face. His voice was gravelly and dazed.

"During his Potions lesson this afternoon. Professor Snape gave him the Advanced Sleeping Draught Harry had brewed the week before. A moment later, he collapsed. He has yet to regain consciousness."

Arthur absorbed this in disbelieving silence, his normally pale face paler still, and then he said softly, "Any idea what has happened?"

"Professor Snape came to me earlier this evening and informed me that cyanide from his toxins stores was missing, but we are not yet certain it was the culprit. Confirmation will have to wait until morning."

Arthur pulled off his sleeping cap and ran his fingers through the short wisps of his rapidly thinning hair. "Tomorrow? Why not tonight? Harry needs help now," he exclaimed.

Dumbledore understood his agitation all too well. Harry was like another son to him and Molly, and he, Dumbledore had always been grateful for their instant and whole-hearted inclusion of Harry into their family. It had given him a feeling of stability and belonging, something that had been severely lacking in the boy's life. The Weasleys had become his de facto family.

The horrendous lack of stability was entirely your fault, if I recall.

Yes, it was. But at the time, I thought it more important to protect his physical safety. His psychological growth was of secondary concern.

A sentiment I'm sure young Harry would appreciate.

The list of his mistakes was long, and in the past twelve hours it had grown longer still, but now was not the time to enumerate them all. He raised a placatory hand. "I understand your worry, Arthur, Merlin knows I do, but we must remain calm. I ordered Madam Pomfrey to bed; erroneous information in this case would be far worse than no information at all."

Arthur sighed, and his fidgeting fingers harrowed his hair again. "You're right, Headmaster. As usual. It's just-," He gestured helplessly with one arm.

"It's Harry," Dumbledore finished for him.

After a pause, Arthur nodded. "Yes." He sounded almost ashamed. There was a contemplative silence, and then, "Who could have done it?" Plaintive.

"Professor Snape is at a loss. He assures me that no one could have tampered with those stores without his knowledge."

Arthur's jaw tightened, and Dumbledore sensed he wanted to ask a question, the question, but after a moment's hesitation, he simply said, "What would you like me to do?"

Dumbledore's shoulders sagged. Thank Merlin for the Weasley tact. If Arthur had asked the other question, he would not have been able to answer it, not without a great deal of reservation. "Call the Order for a meeting tomorrow night. They have a right to know. Seven o' clock. The usual place."

"Right." Arthur scratched the bridge of his nose, suddenly uncomfortable. "Headmaster," he said slowly, "is everyone to be included? Even Sirius Black?"

Dumbledore started. Circe in a girdle! In his exhaustion, he had forgotten about Sirius. That would have been a pretty thing. Even in the best of circumstances, Severus and Sirius loathed one another; if he suspected Severus of poisoning his godson, he would tear him apart with his bare hands and perhaps even his teeth, Dumbledore, propriety, and the greater cause be damned. Arthur's quick thinking had averted disaster.

You should have gone to sleep.

Maybe it's more than lack of sleep that is clouding your mind.

That thought had occurred to him with alarming frequency over the last few years, and with Harry lying comatose beneath his feet, it suddenly had a terrible piquancy. He shook himself from the melancholy it imbued in him and forced himself to speak with an authority he did not feel. "No, I don't think that would be wise. Get the Arcanus Room ready."

"Right. An awkward pause. "I'll see you tonight, then, sir."

Dumbledore nodded curtly, and Arthur's head vanished, leaving only the faint afterimage of green flame. Then that, too, was gone, and he was alone with a dozing Fawkes and his troubled thoughts. Slowly, painfully, he rose from his chair and headed for the Hospital Wing to filch some Medi-Chocolate and Pepper-up Potion. He was going to need much of both to get through this day.