Summon the Lambs to Slaughter

Chapter Forty-Four

While Rebecca was dozing and trying unsuccessfully to dodge the cruel whims of nightscape dreams, Dumbledore was seated behind his desk, her letter in his hands. On the other side of the desk sat Professor Faustus Vector, elbows upon his knees, and a roll of antacid tablets in his hand. Across the room, Kingsley Shacklebolt lounged in his by now habitual seat, legs crossed and one foot bobbing to the beat of unheard music.

"What do you make of this, Faustus?" Dumbledore pushed the parchment across the desk with the tips of his fingers and leaned back in his chair.

Vector peeled a thin strip of foil from the roll of tablets and popped one into his mouth in obdurate persistence. Then, he brushed his fingers on the lap of his robes and picked up the letter. "I think," he said slowly and between muffled crunches of antacid, "that there is no way in Hades she should be capable of this type of Arithmancy. She's too young, for one thing, and for another, I'm not altogether certain what it is." He squinted at a scrawled line near the bottom of the page, winced, and tossed it onto the desk again.

"What do you mean?" Dumbledore reached for his steaming cup of tea.

Vector moved as if to stow the dwindling roll of antacid inside his robes, then thought better of it. "Well, Headmaster, it is Arithmancy, but it's not any discipline I've ever encountered, and, as you know, I'm well-versed in several. It's a mishmash of known theories and ideas that, insofar as I know, no rational mind has ever contemplated, or at least never discussed publicly. Hoodoo magic, to be crude." He sighed.

Dumbledore adjusted his spectacles and peered at the parchment. "I must confess its relation to Arithmancy escapes me. The Runic implications, on the other hand, are quite clear."

"The calculations in basic Arithmancy aren't as important as they seem at first glance. They're a focal point designed to clear the mind of extraneous information while the person works. The beginning practitioners need them, but the more adept can circumvent them if they wish. Most, however, prefer to keep them, as they are useful in defining the boundaries of a given search. Once the parameters have been established, it boils down to plain old statistical probabilities. Hard numbers. From the looks of this-," he tapped the parchment with a callused forefinger, "-Miss Stanhope has dispensed with all formality and proceeded straight to exigent extrapolation based on hypothetical data."

Dumbledore took a sip of tea and swirled it over his tongue, savoring the tart, smooth warmth. Then he replaced his cup on his saucer with a dainty clink. "Alas, Faustus, though I can use Arithmancy in certain metallurgical and alchemical equations, these theories are beyond my ken."

"They're on the barest periphery of mine," he conceded, and plucked another tablet from the roll in his hand. "Not the first part, mind; statistical probabilities are the core of Arithmancy, and I'll wear naught but a gunnysack and a smile if I can't fathom that, but exigent extrapolations are another kettle of fish entirely. Dangerous. Mixing emotions and personal experience with precise mathematical calculations is a volatile business, indeed. Emotions require irrational input, unstable input not governed by the strictures of bloodless, impartial numbers. Once the process is destabilized, everything is up for grabs."

"What do you suppose she was doing?"

Vector straightened and shifted in his chair with a grimace. "In a nutshell? She broke the cardinal rule of Arithmancy-she looked at the threads of time in her hands. Once you look, objectivity is a dream. She had the power of the world in her hands, and it pulled her in." He grunted. "Mind if I have a spot of tea, Headmaster? These blasted Muggle remedies taste like talc. Bloody useless, too." He stabbed one of the chalky discs into his mouth and chewed it with vengeful asperity.

"Certainly." Dumbledore reached for the silver tea set on the corner of his desk and poured a cup of tea. "Why do you continue to take them?" he asked as he passed him the cup.

A dismissive, careless shrug. "Force of habit. A placebo so that I can tell myself I'm doing something to stop the relentless erosion of my stomach. Rubbish, of course, but it passes the time, and I don't know a man alive that doesn't have at least one lie he tells himself in order to stay the course." He laughed, a rusty chuckle that spoke of sparing use.

Dumbledore said nothing, merely passed the sugar and serving tongs over the desk. He was well acquainted with the sibilant, siren language of the necessary lie. They had been his sordid bedfellows through fifty years of war and wary vigilance. Just one more life, one more painful sacrifice, he had consoled himself times without measure, and yet there had always been another, and another, and still one more, each a bloody brick in his private wall of shame. Long after the false, anesthetizing comfort had waned and left behind only an addict's gnawing, desperate need, he had clung to it, until it was a threadbare tatter in his tremulous hands.

Here he was again, playing the same old games, swaddling himself in the same moldering delusions. The platitudes he was so quick to offer Severus in the chilled fetor of the dungeons rang hollow in the deceptive warmth of his office. He was not at all certain that Severus would survive this Ministry inquiry; in fact, the pragmatic part of him, the part that had allowed him to send enthusiastic, fresh-faced youth to die in the unceasing grist mill of war while he barricaded himself inside his impregnable ivory tower of lofty, impossible ideals and told himself that it was for the best because they would need his wisdom and experience in the more grueling battles to come, understood that his Potions Master was likely going to die beneath the gelid lips of a Dementor. But that was a truth he was unwilling to face, a failure he could not accept, and so he permitted himself the luxury that things would be all right.

"If a reduction of your lesson load would help in that regard, it can be arranged," he offered, knowing full well that Vector would be flayed by inches before he delegated his teaching duties to anyone else. He was dedicated, as fiercely protective of his piece of academe as Severus.

"With respect, Headmaster, you can stuff that suggestion in the legendary circular file," came the inevitable retort, and Vector straightened in his chair. "It's not the lessons. It's-," his hands groped for the mot juste that eluded his working mouth, "-it's just-just life!" he hissed, and threw up his hands.

He did not need elaboration. More loquacious wizards had tried, with their eloquent wittering and gaudy verbiage, to express the helpless frustration of a world locked in a struggle for survival against itself, but none of their high-handed ostentation explained it so clearly as that single bewildered exclamation. It carried with it bitterness and fury and fraying defiance, and it buoyed him even as it broke his heart.

The war against Voldemort had never truly ended, just as the struggle against Grindewald had never had a definite end. One flowed into the other, a rancid tributary wending into the polluted mouth of a mighty river. Oh, there had been celebrations, unfettered joy, unbridled revelry, and hopeful reconstruction, but they had always been looking over wary shoulders with bated breath, dimly, painfully aware that the peace they had gathered from the smoldering ashes of their lives would not last, that in the stead of one toppled foe would rise another. Men slept in their beds and made love to their wives with wands stowed beneath the pillows, waiting for the next call to arms even as they prayed never to hear it.

Hadn't he known as much when he had ordered Hagrid to retrieve Harry from the wreckage of his parents' house and bring him to the doorstep of Muggle relatives who would despise him and begrudge him the very air he breathed? As the world had been deliriously proclaiming a child's improbable victory, he had been delivering the infant into eleven years of drudgery and abuse because he had known that one day Fortuna's capricious wheel would turn again to the abyss. While his countrymen and his fellow wizards throughout Europe had been singing hosannas to the hope for tranquility eternal, he had been preparing for the ugly eventuality of another war.

The intervening years between Voldemort's unexpected fall and his perverse resurrection had been a nightmare for those who could see beyond the halcyon present into the bilious future, and Faustus Vector, like the rest of the Hogwarts staff, had paid a price for his vigilance. Time and constant fretting had eroded the lining of his stomach and carved cruel grooves into the formerly smooth flesh of his face. He was forty-seven going on one hundred and twenty, and every day, another line took its place upon his face, stripe from the castigating lash. He was twice divorced, both unions uncounted victims of a war not yet waged and that would never end.

When the first faint stirrings of Voldemort's presence had reached listening ears, he had been among the first to accept the truth, had vowed to protect the students in his charge with his life, and though he had not yet been faced with making the most terrible of sacrifices and sealing the oath he had taken with his blood, he had proven as good as his word. He had not been initiated into the Order, but he often patrolled the school corridors in the dead hours between the witching hour and the bloodshot eye of dawn, woolen nightclothes flapping as he crept along with his wand at the ready, and when Severus was too weak from his unspeakable dealings with Voldemort, he often shouldered his nightly patrols as well without a word of complaint. In short, Faustus Vector was as qualified to bemoan the sorry state of wizarding affairs as anyone.

Dumbledore drowned his empathy in a swallow of rapidly cooling tea and said, "Would this disregard for the fundamental laws of Arithmancy explain her alarming state when Kingsley found her?"

Vector sought solace in another cooling tablet and exhaled sharply through his nose. "It might, but as I said, there is more than just Arithmancy here. That poem at the end of it, for example, sounds like Runes, and yet she assigned no discernible or known rune to anything. It would help if I could read it, but looking at that untidy scrawl for too long makes my eyes throb. Why didn't she use a Dicta-Quill?"

Dumbledore steepled his fingers beneath his chin. "Perhaps she did not want to disturb young Harry." His eyes shifted to Kingsley, who spared him a knowing glance before returning to studious contemplation of the blank parchment on his lap.

Vector gave a noncommittal grunt. "I don't suppose you got anything useful out of Longbottom, eh, Mr. Shacklebolt?" He peered wearily at the Auror through half-lidded eyes.

"Regrettably, no. He was so intent on getting me to the owlery that all he gabbled about was how I must hurry because she was bleeding."

Dumbledore frowned. "It was bad, then?"

Shacklebolt thought for a moment. "Well, it did give me a nasty turn when I first saw her sprawled facedown in the dirty straw. There was a lot of blood, but then, the nose can produce a lot of blood with very little damage. I suspect Mr. Longbottom was just frightened out of his wits."

"Perhaps I'll have a word with both of them in the morning." He scribbled a reminder a piece of blank parchment in front of him.

Shacklebolt's foot ceased its drumming. "I would advise caution when you decide to speak to Stanhope. Umbridge is keen to interview her as well. Has to stick her nose into every pudding within reach, and if she even suspects your visit to be anything but teacherly worry for an injured student, she and Dawlish will descend upon the girl like a pair of black flies. Not only that, but she'll whisper more poisoned nothings in Minister Fudge's ear about surreptitious mind control or the foment of revolt against the government." He drummed his long, supple fingers against the arm of his chair, gentle and thoughtful as a misting rain.

"Balderdash!" snorted Vector with unexpected vehemence, and Fawkes gave an indignant trill. "They're the ones bent on controlling every thought that enters a pupil's head, what, with their bleating about the dangers of exposing students to practical application of Defense Against the Dark Arts. You remember, Headmaster. They spent months trying to cajole the school Governors into restricting the teaching of Defense to theory only. They said it was too dangerous to allow the students access to such knowledge before they came of age." His lip curled into a disbelieving sneer. "As if learning to defend themselves would lead them to the Dark. Based on the messes Pomfrey cleans up in the corridors and the infirmary after a duel, I'd say they were doing well long before we came along."

"I do, indeed." Dumbledore placed his empty teacup upon its saucer. "Fortunately, they were unsuccessful."

Vector smoothed his robes, popped the last of his antacid tablets into his mouth, and pocketed the empty foil. "Rumor had that it was a close vote, decided by one," he murmured. "We spent weeks in the staff room trying to figure who had cast the deciding vote against the measure, but none of us could figure who it had been, not even Quirrell, and aside from his stutter, he was sharp as a rapier. Of course, that might have due to...extenuating circumstances," he finished lamely.

"Lord Voldemort's face protruding from the back of his skull?" Dumbledore supplied mildly, and reached for a sherbet lemon.

Vector tried to cover the instinctive flinch at the sound of their nemesis' name by running his fingers through his graying hair, but it was a poor job of it. He, Dumbledore, had seen it too often to be fooled by such contrivances. It was always the same, the brusque, convulsive rippling of goose-pimpled flesh and the grimacing retraction of lips from teeth that transformed them for a moment into snarling vampires. Fifteen years had not diluted the name's power.

"Yes, that," Vector said bitterly. "I've been over it a thousand times in my mind on the nights when sleep won't come, and I still don't see how we could have missed it. He was right there. We ate next to it, and we never noticed. He shuddered. "We should have."

"What's done is done, and you did the best you could. If anyone should have seen, it was I. You are not to blame."

Vector grunted, but he did not refuse the proffered absolution.

Despite his words, furious, helpless shame welled in the pit of his stomach. Vector was right. They should have seen. He should have. He was the regarded as the most powerful wizard of the century, a title he had accepted with few qualms and come to consider an entitlement of his office and his years, and yet the living, tumorous darkness had crept into the castle unremarked, stolen in and feasted on his bread, slept in the linens he had provided, and he had been oblivious. There had been no tremor of realization, no icy fingers tickling the base of his aged spine in dire warning. Had things not gone as they ultimately had, it was probable that Quirrell would still be flitting about the castle, harboring their greatest enemy beneath his unwieldy turban.

Hardly a ringing endorsement of his competence, especially when the scalding clarity of hindsight afforded him so many undeniable clues. Quirrell had steadfastly refused to remove the purple turban from his head, even when temperature in the staff room soared to the nineties, and Severus, in a rare concession to human frailty, unbuttoned his billowing robes to let the warm, stultifying air dry the sticky sweat that plastered his linen shirt to his thin chest. In retrospect, it should have been a dead giveaway, but he had blithely chalked it up to sartorial idiosyncrasy. After all, he had a plethora of fashion quirks to call his own. His naiveté had been staggering. And inexcusable.

"You know, I'm not as surprised as I should be about this." Vector gave a mirthless chuckle and rested his elbows on his knees again.

Something in the professor's tone commanded his attention. "What do you mean"" he demanded, and sat forward so abruptly that his chair gave a strident creak of alarm.

Vector shrugged. "There's more to her than loose bones and blue-veined skin. I can feel it coming off her skin in waves, perfume that's gone sour. Venom and bile and curdled, bull-headed stubbornness. She's polite as I could want, and I've never had to reprimand her, but I don't trust her. She'd hurt me if she could, sink her teeth into my throat with a smile."

"I see."

Vector coughed into a loose fist. "If there is nothing else with which I can assist you, Headmaster, I need to return to my office. I've parchments to mark before supper."

"Of course," he murmured. He was still mulling the forthright assessment of Rebecca Stanhope's character. "I need not remind you that this matter is not to be discussed outside this office?" He peered over the tops of his half-moon spectacles.

Vector rose with a pained grimace, one hand groping fruitlessly inside the pockets of his robes for antacid tablets. "No, you don't, sir. The less that lot knows, the better." He shot Kingsley an apologetic scowl. "No offense."

Kingsley inclined his head in acknowledgement. "None taken."

Vector trudged to the door. "And they had the brass to call Moody a raving nutter," he grumbled, and then, with a surly wrench of the door handle, he was gone.

When the door had closed behind him, Kingsley rose from his seat to take up the one vacated by the departing Arithmancy professor. He crossed his legs with languid grace, folded his hands, and rested his chin on their smooth backs.

"Are you all right, Headmaster?" he prodded when he made no move to resume the conversation. "You seem tired and troubled." His voice was the throaty rumble of a contented lion.

"I am tired, Kingsley," he conceded. "More tired than I have ever been." He removed his spectacles and tossed them onto the desk with uncharacteristic carelessness. They skidded over the polished surface and came to rest against a jumbled pile of school supply re-order forms on one corner. He scoured his face with the palms of his hands.

Kingsley, Circe bless him, said nothing for several minutes. Instead, he studied the immaculate cuticles of his nails and the fine embroidery of the hearthrug. When he did speak, there was no rebuke in his voice, only infinite patience.

"You have doubts."

He brushed the question aside. "Do you have any further information about the incident with Miss Stanhope this morning?"

Surprise flickered across Kingsley's features for the briefest instant, and perhaps hurt at the shunning of his proffered solace, but then it was gone, replaced by bland aplomb. "There was one observation of note," he said.

Guilt crept into his joints like the nascent stirrings of crippling rheumatism. Kingsley was only trying to help, ease the crushing burden others and his own lofty expectation had foisted upon him, but he could not accept it. It was one thing to admit weakness and uncertainty to himself in the privacy of his office, but it was another to claim it in the presence of a comrade who, in the deepest places of his heart thought him invincible, unbreakable. Aside from Harry, he was the ultimate symbol of Light, the bedrock that held the fragmented splinters of their world together, and he could not rob them of that feeble, misplaced hope.

An old man's vanity, spat the voice of recrimination inside his head. Your refusal to cede to your mortal frailty has nothing to do with an altruistic desire to preserve the fraying fabric of your world and everything to do with the fact that you've grown sated and complacent in your position. The praise and dewy-eyed adulation, that unreasoning faith, is as expected as your next breath, and you're afraid that if you let your carefully crafted mask slip, if you let him see, he'll raise the cry; the old god is weak and dying. The fall from grace is hard and swift, and you know you would not survive it.

Why do you hold fast to these ridiculous illusions? You're old, and your steps are faltering. You doubt, and Shacklebolt sees through your flimsy silence. He's too astute. He might not know that your bladder is weak or that your eyes are failing, but he knows when you lie, and so do I.

"Oh?" He groped for his spectacles.

"Yes, sir. When I found her, she still had a quill beneath one hand, as if she had been writing something, but when I looked round the owlery, there was nothing."

"Are you certain?"

"Yes, sir. I went back after I took her to the infirmary, just to be sure. I even got on my hands and knees and sifted through the straw and the muck. It wouldn't have done for other, less friendly Aurors to see something they oughtn't, but there wasn't a single scrap of parchment to be found." Kingsley scratched a slender eyebrow.

"Longbottom, then?"

Kingsley nodded slowly. "That's what I thought as well. If he had anything, though, he made no mention of it."

"No," Dumbledore murmured thoughtfully, "I don't expect he would." He tapped his bottom lip.

Kingsley's elegant brow furrowed. "Headmaster? With respect, sir, Longbottom is a good chap, but not the most cunning or forward-thinking."

"He isn't, no. Miss Stanhope, however, is, and I've little doubt that she took the necessary precautions."

There's that word again-doubt. Ever will it plague you.

"Is there any possibility he would give it to the wrong hands?"

"Of all the shortcomings possible to lay at his feet, cowardice and disloyalty are not among them, Kingsley. Rest assured, the parchment is in good hands. Rebecca does not place her trust lightly," Dumbledore said calmly, and a wry smile tickled the drawn corners of his mouth.

Kingsley snorted. "If at all. She and Severus are two sides of the same coin in that regard."

So you've noticed? Dumbledore thought, but he remained silent, one long-fingered hand toying idly with the handle of his sterling silver teaspoon.

Kingsley rolled up the parchment in his lap and tucked it into the pocket of his robes. "Shall I round up Longbottom, then?" He rose from his chair.

Dumbledore shook his head. "No, no, I'll see about him. If you were meant to have it, he would have told you, hysterical with worry or not, and I suspect that an Auror is the last person in whom he would place his trust. Just see to it that the delightful Madam Umbridge is still none the wiser about Mr. Dawlish."

Kingsley smirked and touched two fingers to the brim of his hat. "With pleasure Headmaster. Will there be a staff meeting this evening?"

"No. I've moved it to Tuesday."

"Yes, Headmaster. Good day to you, then."

"Good day, Kingsley."

When the Auror had departed, leaving only silence and the lingering odor of his musky cologne, Dumbledore sighed and pulled Rebecca's letter toward himself again. It remained unchanged. The same spiky lines hoarded the same tantalizing riddles against a thin, parchment breast. There was no revelatory thunderclap, no flash of divine inspiration. Putting on his spectacles only served to bring to bring the blotchy pigment of the ink into sharp relief. He drew a finger over the words, as though to coax their secrets from them with loving caresses, but they remained as enigmatic and indecipherable as before.

Here and there, his eyes alighted upon the wavering shadow of a word, a fragment of the human tongue snared from the morass of cryptic, agonized scrawls. Jackson, a name that might have been Dinks, and Story, which, for some inexplicable reason, had been capitalized. There were other names, too, though he knew them to be such solely because they were capitalized. Everything else was unreadable. Each time he thought he had latched onto another piece of the puzzle, the letters shifted, tiny dunes of volcanic sand, until his eyes watered and stung, and he was forced to blink and turn his head.

He folded the parchment and tucked it inside his robes. This bit of arcana was beyond him. Fluent as he was in the myriad tongues of the world, this was a language he could not speak, a language meant only for the ears of God and the keeper of Rebecca Stanhope's secrets. He could stare at it all night; if he were persistent enough, he could separate the words from the random dribbles of ink and order them, and he would still be none the wiser because he knew nothing of the meanings beneath them, the subtle insinuations and allusions unique to every soul.

Severus would know. He might not be fluent in Rebecca, but he's picked up more than most by virtue of constant close proximity. He watched her even before unkind circumstance and stiff-necked pride threw them together, and she watched him. I doubt more than a thousand civil words have passed between them, and yet, they understand one another. They've begun to learn the language never spoken-the curl of lip, the narrowing of eyes, the affronted snap of starched wool. They could never utter a word and have an entire conversation. Ask him. See what he knows.

He rose from his chair. Yes, it was time to intrude upon a private conversation, one that frightened and fascinated him by turns. Severus would not divulge his secrets willingly or with good grace, and he would wound to protect his battered and cratered emotional territory. Whatever duel he was waging with young Miss Stanhope, it was a private affair, and his interference, however well-intended, would rankle.

Of course it would. His discourse with her is all that remains to him, the only thing that is left solely to his provenance. And just like everything else, you will wrest it from him in the name of the greater good. What will you tell him? That it is in his best interest? He's heard that before, and it's a rare occasion that it works to his benefit. On the contrary, the invocation of that pithy phrase guarantees him an evening of humiliation and agony at Voldemort's feet. And yours. And it's still not enough. Will it ever be?

Unwelcome images rose in his mind of Severus, twenty years old and shivering on the floor of his office, weeping and spitting the drying blood from his teeth, gore-slick hands matted in the nap of the heavy Persian rug. He had never seen so much blood on another person. Slathered over his chin, soaking the greasy tips of his hair in a perverse dye. The stench had been incredible, a slaughterhouse in high summer, and beneath that, the wet moss smell of fear and shame.

He came to you that night for help, for absolution, and you gave it to him, but not without price. Never charity for its own sake, despite what the world thinks as it gazes into your beatific face. Means to end, so long as you put a noble face on it. He confessed everything between bouts of mortified retching, and in return for his unflinching honesty, you bound him to you in lifelong servitude, and then, oh, and then...

Bile rose in his throat. He did not have time to stand here like a doddering fool, reminiscing over old sins and badly healed wounds. He cleared his throat in a futile attempt to dislodge the sour knot of remorse there; it refused to leave, as did the ugly spate of memories that had spawned it. He pressed his palm into the smooth mahogany of the desk, cool where his flesh was hot, and willed himself not to sink to his knees.

He should never have done it. It was unconscionable, but he had been in the midst of war, and he had told himself that he had to be sure, had to know that it wasn't a ruse to cut him down. Even now, he tried to justify it, though the dull cramp in the pit of his stomach belied the truth. While Severus had been rocking and heaving, one crimson-gloved hand curling around the toes of his boots, he had reached into his mind, raped it.

There was no other word for it. He had simply pillaged the contents of Severus' tortured soul, pawed through black and festering memories of a hideous childhood and furious, lonely youth. Nothing passed through his scouring, self-righteous fingers unscrutinized. He saw it all, felt it all-the hours hiding in the wardrobe to escape the haunting sound of flesh on flesh that echoed throughout a silent house, the sizzling throb of overworked wrist tendons and the merciless press of a quill shaft against sweating fingers, the illicit heat of palm on tender flesh, the struggle to stifle his cheated, frustrated cries so his sniggering, sexually blessed Housemates would not hear. Desire and swooning shame and brimstone vengeance as he took that which had never been freely given.

And Severus, prostrate on the rug, had been powerless to stop him. He could only watch, eyes glittering with impotent fury and deep mortification, as his deepest humiliations were lain bare for a Headmaster that had once traded his dignity for the sake of keeping the peace, watch and give voice to a guttural whine, a mortally wounded animal struggling against a throttling, slicing snare. He had fought the intrusion for the briefest instant; his body arched and his eyes closed in fierce concentration, but he was too weak, too tired, and his groping Headmaster's fingers had crushed his feeble defenses like wet rice paper.

And even then, you felt the first shivering tendrils of shame. Yes, he did a terrible, perverse, monstrous thing; that will never be in doubt. You saw it, and it sickened you. Had it not been for your celebrated composure and grievously inflated sense of Headmasterly dignity, you would have joined him in retching. But you saw things never meant for your eyes, things between him and his God. You handled them as though they were mere trinkets, insignificant baubles for your careless perusal. You extinguished your pangs of conscience by telling yourself that you were looking for evidence of trickery and Voldemort's ruthless designs, but you knew it for a lie. After all, what did a lonely sixteen-year-old boy granting himself empty pleasures in the middle of the night have to do with the world, with the balance of the war? Nothing. Any more than the tears of an eight-year-old held the key to stopping the endless bloodshed. You looked for no other reason than you could.

Which is why, after you had plundered his mind, you knelt beside him and cast a Memory Charm. You didn't want him to know the price you had exacted for your magnanimous forgiveness. His eyes glazed, and he went still, and after a moment, the feral growl of agony, which had begun to subside into exhausted whimpers, flared anew, because for him, the horror was new. He gave you a second confession as hysterical as the first, and when it was over, you held him like a child, felt his hot breath in your beard and his tears and mucus on your shoulder, and you never told him, nor did you purge his secrets. You looked him in the eye every morning after, knowing each scar and sore behind that stoic façade, and you held them as collateral should he stray from the path you have set before him.

How history repeats itself.

He stiffened and straightened. Poring over his past sins would achieve nothing. He had done far too much of that in recent years, huddled before the fire, hoping that the dancing flames would warm aching bones chilled by more than biting winter frost and the inevitable erosion of age, a dotard clinging to the glories and hurts of yesteryear. He wondered, sometimes, if he were succumbing to the cataract haze of senile dementia, but that thought was a dangerous one, and so he did not ponder it for long. War loomed, and he would need to trust his instincts if there was to be any hope of survival. Harry would need to trust them. As would Severus.

Ah, but you don't, crooned the voice in a mocking, jaunty singsong as he left his office and gave himself over to the grating, sliding darkness of the rotating staircase. You haven't since the Tri-Wizard Tournament, when you saw the man who had been Alastor Moody become Bartemius Crouch, Jr. at your feet. Your faith was shaken then, shaken badly, and even now, you find yourself casting sidelong glances down the staff table, watching Moody sniff and prod his food as though it were a slumbering beast rather than mutton chops and asking yourself, Is that truly my old friend, or have I been deceived again?

Try as you might, the doubt creeps in. You question whether it was wise to place Severus' fate in the hands of an untested fifteen-year-old girl who you cannot define. You sense light in her, but there is also fathomless, remorseless darkness. Each time you're certain you know which way the moral compass swings, the ground trembles beneath your feet, and sometimes you ponder whether she possesses a compass at all, and my, isn't that a terrifying thought? A person without compass is a person without leash.

He blinked against the sudden flood of light as the stone gargoyle swung open to let him pass into the first-floor corridor. It was deserted at this hour; most of the students were in afternoon lessons or barricaded in their Common Rooms, deep in study for O.W.L.S. or N.E.W.T.S. The portraits that lined the walls murmured or inclined their heads in respectful greeting as he passed, and he returned their courtesy with an absent, upward curve of lip. The gleaming suits of armor straightened to attention and saluted, the heavy, reverberating clang of their dropping visors resounding throughout the empty corridor. There was a sussurating shuffle of feet from the Auror posted at the entrance to the dungeons, dry and brittle as the turning of old pages.

Normally, he found such silence soothing, but now he wished for ruckus and clangor, for giggling first-years to scurry underfoot like eager, daring mice or careen around the corner with joyous abandon, for Peeves to unleash pandemonium with a well-placed Dung Bomb or water balloon, but the corridors remained silent and unoccupied, and Peeves, who paid heed to no one but the Bloody Baron, did not put in an appearance.

He strode by the imperious Auror guarding the door, and his distracted mind dismissed the ill-concealed sneer of contempt on the young man's face. Let him seethe all he liked. This was still his castle, and it would be until he left it with hammertoes pointed heavenward. A satisfied smile stole over his face at the thought, and he was humming when he reached the door to Severus' chambers.

Snape was sitting on the couch when he heard the somnolent click of the tumbler, and for one paralyzing moment, he was sure that it was Fudge and his coterie of sharp-fingered lackeys, come to subject him to another round of invasive humiliation. His body went rigid, and his wand hand groped compulsively for what it would not find. His outraged sphincter clenched with old and painful memory, and his lips pulled from his teeth in a furious snarl. If they thought they were going to subject him to that atrocity again, they were going to have to render him insensate first. His hands curled into fists.

"Severus?" came the voice from behind the opening door, and the bunched muscles of his shoulders relaxed with an audible creak.

"Headmaster."

Dumbledore's face peered around the door. "Ah! His eyes twinkled with pleased astonishment. "Merlin, you're looking much better than when I saw you last! Oh, indeed." He closed the door behind him and came to stand before the sofa.

"Once again, your penchant for gross hyperbole comes to the fore. I did nothing more than shower, shave, and eat," he muttered. Then, when the old man continued to gawp at him in frank appraisal, "Please, Headmaster, do sit down. It will give you a better vantage point from which to simultaneously gawk and pat yourself on the back in nauseating self-congratulation."

"Congratulation for what?" the Headmaster replied, just a trifle too coyly for his tastes, and sat in the chair opposite him.

"Don't be coy, Headmaster. Judging from the dewy eyes and obscene good cheer radiating from your pores like body odor, it is quite clear you think that last night's visit from that infuriating chit, Stanhope, is responsible for my improvement. I assure you, you are very mistaken. My apparent serenity of countenance stems from the fact that she is no longer here to dog my heels," he snarled, and tugged on the knees of his robes.

Cotton wisp eyebrows rose in unison. "I don't believe I made any mention whatsoever of young Miss Stanhope," he countered innocently, and removed his spectacles and began to polish them on the sleeve of his robes.

Snape scowled and smothered a spate of obscenities by gritting his teeth. Damn that man and his smug, sagacious countenance. And curse his own fool's tongue for giving the game away. Days cooped up in his chambers with naught to do but pace and stare at the walls and eat the food brought by his faithful house elf, Nibby, had made him careless. He shuddered to think of the consequences had it been anyone but Albus in that chair. Fudge, for instance.

At the thought of his sanctimonious tormentor, anger bubbled in his chest and pulled his narrow shoulders into an unforgiving, rigid line. If it was his last act of defiance in this world, he would see Cornelius Fudge suffer. One hour for every minute, and a week for every hour he had spent locked in a sanctuary that had been perverted to the devices of his enemies. Only fools thought vengeance should be commensurate with the misdeed, and Slytherins served their vengeance very cold indeed.

Fools and Albus Dumbledore, he amended as he watched the Headmaster stroke the tip of his beard with supple, thoughtful fingers. According to Albus, there is no need for vengeance at all.

He snorted. Typical Gryffindor philosophy. Turn the other cheek and let your enemies slap it raw. Vengeance was petty and gauche, far beneath the dizzying heights of Gryffindor nobility. Well, he would slither in the cooling mud of retribution like the serpent he was, sod what the rest of the world thought. He had allowed his cheek to be turned aside too often in this life, first by the stinging, disciplinary hand of his father, and then by his allegiance to the man watching him with dancing blue eyes. Not this time. If it took until the end of his days, he would see Fudge fall, and laugh in his face.

The end of your days may be very soon, pointed out the morbid voice of nihilism inside his head. It sounded perversely gleeful.

His fingers tightened over the pliant fabric of his robes. If he had to wrest himself from the granite-fisted grips of the Aurors leading him to his execution and sink his teeth into Fudge's unsuspecting throat, then he would do it. If wouldn't be the first time he had tasted the rich, lush warmth of blood on his tongue, and, truth be told, it was not altogether unpleasant.

"However," said Dumbledore as he perched his spectacles on the bridge of his nose again, "I must confess that I did come to speak with you about her."

"My powers of prescience exceed those of Trelawney," he murmured.

"There was an incident in the owlery this morning."

The amusement curdled on his lips. "An incident?"

The Headmaster nodded. "She and Longbottom went to the owlery to conduct an unknown ritual, and she collapsed. She is resting in the infirmary."

An image rose in his mind of the insufferable Stanhope child writhing and twitching in the squalid straw, flecks of spittle on her chin, suffocating beneath the crushing grip of uncontrollable muscle spasms. Her thin, blue-tinged fingers scrabbled in the filth, bits of befouled straw beneath her nails. Blue eyes rolled in their sockets, seeking respite that would not come.

"Is she all right?" he said with more urgency than he had intended. Then, "Idiot child. What was she thinking, taking Longbottom, master of calamitous happenings? I didn't think her a fool."

"I do not know; she was unconscious and bloody when Kingsley carried her from the infirmary. I will see to her in the morning. If her condition were grave, Madam Pomfrey would have informed me at once."

His body temperature plummeted, and his skin prickled with frozen nubs of gooseflesh. His mouth was parched, and he was suddenly profoundly grateful that he was already seated. Collapsing indecorously would have been another stinging blow to his battered pride. He forced the rigid, uncooperative muscles of his jaw to open.

"Unconscious and bloody? Ritual? What are you on about? For Merlin's sake, what have you let her do?"

The Headmaster smiled ruefully. "Alas, Severus, as ever, I fear you give me far more credit than I deserve. I have not let her do anything. Indeed, I was unaware of her intentions until Kingsley told me what had happened."

"Bollocks," he snarled. "You're doing what you've always done-turning a blind eye to youthful depravity. Permission by omission of prohibition. You never gave her explicit consent, no, but you knew bloody well that she was stiff-necked enough to take such lunatic risks. Quite convenient. Succeed, and it was your dazzling Gryffindor brilliance; fail, and you can chalk it up to unquenchable juvenile hubris and absolve yourself of guilt. You've done it with me, you've done it with Potter-," he spat the name as though it were an obscenity, "-and now you're doing it with Stanhope, waving me aloft as though I were a righteous cause worthy of a crusade."

"That will do, Severus." Though the Headmaster's voice was gentle, even casual, there was a hint of steel behind it. I will tolerate no more dissent, no more hot-blooded histrionics.

Sod you, Albus, he thought venomously, and blood pounded in his temples and the tips of his fingers.

He was delirious with a languid, dizzying fury. His hands itched and quivered with the maddening desire to throttle, to strike. He longed for the comforting heft of his wand against his trembling palm. He wanted to hex and curse, to hear the tinkling shriek of shattering glass and the dull thud of splintering wood, a wet melon dropped on pavement. He wanted to pour his vitriol into Dark magic and watch it explode in a hail of visible hatred, red and green, purple and sunburst yellow, a beautiful and lethal rainbow.

He was accustomed to being a pawn, had chosen it as the term of his penance, atonement for sins for which there was no absolution and never would be. He had known or at least guessed at the burden he would be asked to bear, and he had been well above the age of reason when he had made the decision. It was a fair exchange; his worthless, sullied life for the one scrap of information that would bring the madness and the bloodshed to an end.

This, however, was unconscionable, crass manipulation beyond even the Headmaster's previous heights of appalling hubris. Stanhope was fifteen years old and fragile as thistle silk, for all her stymieing impertinence, and unlike Potter, her fate was not guided by a prophecy set down years ago by a half-mad Seer. The Headmaster was using her to his own ends, manipulating her inexplicable affinity for him and her inveterate thirst for another challenge to overcome in order to buy him a few precious weeks or months of life, another chance to listen to the whisperings and plottings of a madman and feel his own urine cooling on his legs. It was lunacy. It was revolting. It was absolutely Slytherin, and watching the venerable old Gryffindor beam beatifically in the darkness of the dungeons and speak of plausible deniability made him want to laugh and vomit at the same time.

"I will not allow this, Headmaster. I cannot. I demand that you order her to stop immediately and turn her attentions to whatever meaningless drivel would normally occupy her days," he hissed, and rose from the couch.

The Headmaster blinked, unperturbed by his outburst. "I'm afraid that isn't possible," he answered matter-of-factly.

Snape rounded on him. "Then make it possible," he spat. "Dammit, Albus, exercise some of that legendary power that has placed you upon your gilded ivory throne. You've toppled one Dark wizard and bested another for nearly twenty years. Surely it isn't beyond you to tame the will of a pubescent girl?" He paced, heels clicking in the stone floor.

The Headmaster's face hardened. "Enough, Severus." The serrated, warning tickle of a rapier against his ears.

A frustrated, furious growl rumbled deep in his throat. It was not enough. He had to make him understand. He had been responsible for dozens of deaths, had washed his hands in untold rivers of blood, and a thousand more lives could be lain at his feet. Guilt by association, and for seventeen years he had lived with that, even flourished in a twisted fashion. He had not found peace, but his will to live and his pervasive, infectious guilt had reached an uneasy armistice. He could not be responsible for another. Not one more.

Not her, whispered the unassailable voice of truth. It's not death to which you object, but this death. If it were anyone else, save, perhaps, the man sitting across from you, you would bat nary an eye. In the seventeen years since you fled His service, you have seen a hundred deaths-Muggles and wizard-and though your stomach churned, you never voiced any protest, never felt this rising tide of appalled outrage. They were just another writhing body, and you found their plaintive, agonized gibbering irritating. It stirred no pity in your breast. So, let us be very clear. A thousand deaths more could you stomach if it came to it; your need to cling to this life you have made for yourself is an addiction stronger than honor or obligation. But not hers.

He snorted. Maudlin palaver, that. There was nothing special about that infuriating, malformed sibyl. He simply did not wish to live the rest of his days with the galling awareness that he was forever indebted to a student...a Gryffindor student. He would not be her pity project, and he would not be hoisted as fodder for fruitless martyrdom. She could die all she pleased, just not in his name.

Self-delusion does not become you.

"I will say what I please; as you made so clear, I am no longer a professor under your auspices."

"But you remain here at my leisure."

"Ah," he purred, "the famed Gryffindor charity rears its head."

Dumbledore sighed. "I am tired, Severus. I expressed myself badly. Forgive me." He removed his pointed hat and ran his fingers through his hair.

"A maladroit tongue has never been numbered among your failings. How convenient that it has manifested itself now," he murmured, and sat down again with a flourish of robe.

"All that I meant was that, though you may not hold the title, you still have my respect and trust."

"Then put an end to this foolishness," he snapped. I cannot, cannot abide that miserable stripling's death on my already overburdened conscience." He stopped, horrified at the plaintive note in his voice. Then, softer than the rustle of moldering silk, "I am not worth it."

The Headmaster froze in the act of plucking a stray thread from his robes and gazed dispassionately at him. "Worth?" he repeated blankly. "Is that what this comes to?" His face softened, and he smiled wistfully. "Oh, dear boy, I fear that is not for you to determine. Miss Stanhope disagrees. As do I."

"You're both barking." He shifted on the sofa. "I won't endanger her, Albus. She is my student."

"That, too, is beyond your control," the Headmaster said prosaically. "She has made up her mind, and it is not easily swayed."

"Intractable chit," he snarled.

"Indeed." He reached into his robes. "Enlightening though your character assessment is, I came to ask if you could make sense of this." He pulled out the folded piece of parchment.

Snape plucked it from the Headmaster's outstretched fingers and opened it with an irritated snap of his wrist. "Stanhope." He squinted at the familiar scrawl.

The Headmaster nodded. "She wrote it in the infirmary. Tonks delivered it to me a short while ago."

He tore his gaze from the untidy, headache-inducing landscape of wobbles and squiggles. "She's conscious, then?" An invisible weight rolled off his chest.

A curt nod. "Awake and tight-lipped, according to young Nymphadora."

"In other words, perfectly recovered," he retorted drily. Despite the congenital biting sarcasm, he was light-headed with relief.

"So it would appear." The faintest hint of amusement crept into the Headmaster's voice, a fleeting glimpse of his customary jollity. "Since the two of you were on relatively intimate-,"

He scoffed. "Intimate terms? Merlin, Headmaster, she's an obdurate, willful pupil and an unwanted ally. I am hardly conducting illicit liaisons down here, despite Minerva's most fervid, scandalized imaginings. We hardly speak."

The Headmaster was silent for a long moment. "Words are not always necessary for understanding," he said quietly.

"No," he conceded, but said no more. There was nothing more to say.

Dumbledore pointed to the parchment. "Now then, the parchment?"

He narrowed his eyes, thin lips pursed in concentration as he pried words and sentences from the splatters of ink. They were well-practiced in the art of deciphering Rebecca's slanted, erratic script, and though there were still long stretches of incomprehensible text, he could read far more than he had expected. Interpreting it was a different matter. It was as much an enigma as the mind that had conceived it.

"What is it? Arithmancy? Has Vector looked at this?" He tapped the poem with the ball of his thumb.

The Headmaster nodded. "Yes. According to him, it is a hodgepodge Arithmancy, Runes, and Cryptology. However, either in her haste or in her desire for secrecy, Miss Stanhope failed to assign specific Runes to the entities and events mentioned in the letter. I had hoped you might be of some help in that regard."

"I am not privy to the inner workings of Miss Stanhope's febrile little mind," he said, but he was already reading the poem again, searching for possible connections. "Some of these are obvious-the serpent, for instance, and I can surmise that she fancies herself as the mongoose. My brave defender." He snorted. "The princeling is Harry. The wolves are most likely Aurors. As to the rest, I cannot say. 'The pall that covers all' could be the Dark Lord, but she has no reason to refer to him. Fudge, maybe." A brusque, one-shouldered shrug.

"I find the last line most interesting." The Headmaster took the parchment and adjusted his spectacles. "'The Messenger, harbinger of calamity,'" he read, and his voice filled the room. "A harbinger, she called it. Quite a specific word. Unless she was prone to using it in everyday discourse?" He cast a speculative glance over the top of his spectacles.

"She never uttered it in my presence."

Dumbledore steepled his fingers beneath his chin. "I thought not." There was a long, contemplative silence, and then he said, "Was there any warning, Severus, any at all?"

"I have never had an accident in seventeen years," he snapped. "I am not reckless with my pupils, and as much as I would love to wrap my fingers around Potter's neck until he turned a delectable shade of overripe pomegranate, I would never have given him a tainted or suspect draught. I have sacrificed too much for this position to throw it away by poisoning that facile little ingrate. I want the satisfaction of hearing the bones pop."

Dumbledore nodded and patted his forearm. "I expected no other answer, but it would have been remiss of me not to ask."

Snape gave a noncommittal grunt. He was too tired and beaten down to care about tact or Headmasterly obligation. The question stung, salt rubbed into an open wound.

"Any ideas as to the identity of the 'dark dauphin'?" Dumbledore reached into his robes in search of the ubiquitous sherbet lemon.

"None. The girl speaks in riddles and tongues." He reached up to knead his temples. Looking at her scrawl had sown the seeds for a monstrous migraine.

"Well, if her words are indecipherable to you, then we have little fear from the Aurors inspecting the post. Clever girl."

"I'm well aware that she is a Gryffindor, Headmaster," he muttered peevishly. "Though I begin to wonder if the placement was truly merited, or if it was wishful thinking."

"Oh?'

He turned his head at that. There was far less surprise at that pronouncement than there should have been. He had sounded disappointed, as though he had just received confirmation of a dreadful suspicion.

"Headmaster?"

"You are not the first to voice such suspicions, Severus." The sound of carob and sugar scraping tooth enamel. "Where does she belong? You see far more of her than I."

"Not in Gryffindor."

"Mmm." You know more than you wish to tell.

"I have suspicions." There. That was all he was getting.

Oh, yes, you do. You've turned it over in your mind for months, and each day the certainty grew, blossomed like poisoned honeysuckle. You saw evidence in her bland, inscrutable face and the flat, reptilian gaze she cast at McGonagall whenever the woman drew breath in her presence. She eschews Potter and all that goes with him, and the very concept of Gryffindor altruism pulls her lips into a mocking sneer. She is not them, not a lion cub by half. She is one of yours.

True as the statement rang in his internal ears, he denied it. He was proud of his House, but he was also aware that it led its denizens down the left-hand path. So long had it been associated with darkness and nefarious deeds that black myth had become blacker reality. The name Slytherin had become an epithet as surely as Gryffindor had become a mark of honor, a happenstance happily abetted by the innumerable cries of, "I was Slytherin; I couldn't help it," voiced by the puling wretches that had neither the fortitude nor the honor to accept personal responsibility for their actions. Being a member of Slytherin had become a crutch upon which they leaned, and because the public had come to expect it, they simply clucked and nodded sagely and never stopped to consider the thousands of Slytherins content to live and die without so much as a ripple in the societal fabric. A hundred condemned a thousand, and if Stanhope belonged beneath the banner of the serpent, her fate was already sealed.

Cunning as the asp and tenacious as the badger. What else could she be? You see yourself in that wan, narrow face, and the Sorting Hat shrieked the name of Slytherin with an almost orgasmic surety when McGonagall placed it upon your head. Only Draco Malfoy had faster placement. She's your twisted little fetch. The same bitterness, the same suppurating resentment, the same innate mistrust of everyone but herself. Full of bile and venom and the tightly controlled longing to punish.

She is not one of mine. She is not Pureblood! he thought furiously, but that argument was fragile as straw in his grasping hand, crushed beneath the vivid memory of her in these very chambers last evening, frightened and dangerous as a cornered animal.

You would do well to keep that in mind. That was a Slytherin face, the face of someone willing to shed any blood necessary to protect herself and what and who she considers dear. You know as well as I do that had you not ordered her to drop her wand, she would have blasted Shacklebolt to bloody ribbons, consequences be damned. She wanted to do it, and not all of her reasons were noble.

What about her honor, her determination to clear your name? Hardly Slytherin qualities. Most would have left you to your fate. There is no profit in championing a former Death Eater, after all.

He pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers in a futile attempt to stave off the encroaching, pulsating throb of his migraine. For every thing he knew about her, there were a hundred he did not, and what he could see disturbed him just as much as what he could not. She was neither Darkness nor Light, but an unrepentant, unreadable grey, and when she finally found her place among one side or the other, one man's great ally would become another's formidable foe.

The same thought must have drifted through the Headmaster's mind, because he whispered, "What path does she walk, Severus?"

His ears picked up the real question. Can I control her? He answered without hesitation. "I don't know." His prudent lips closed over the second half of the response. I don't think so. A perverse part of him hoped he couldn't. Being bound to someone, even beneath the yoke of kindness, stole part of an individual's intrinsic humanity, leached the colors from their life and left in their wake the dull, leaden grey of psychological indentured servitude, manacled every decision made thereafter to a hated promise.

The Headmaster rose. "Thank you, Severus. I hope to know more once I have a word with young Mr. Longbottom. In the meantime, rest assured that you are not forgotten. I shall, of course, keep you abreast of any new developments, as well as Miss Stanhope's condition."

Snape's brow furrowed. "Longbottom?"

"Yes. Kingsley found a quill in Rebecca's hand in the owlery, but no parchment. Whatever she wrote, we assume she gave it to Longbottom for safe-keeping."

A rusty, derisive bark of laughter. "Longbottom? Foolish girl. That boy would misplace his own genitalia during a bout of autoeroticism were in not firmly attached."

"Thank you, Severus, for that profoundly disturbing visual," Dumbledore said drily. "I'm off to see Filius about a Memory Charm." He crossed to the door and opened it a fraction. "You're quite right, though. Who would ever think to search poor, befuddled Mr. Longbottom for sensitive and potentially seditious documents?" He drifted out with a final curt nod and closed the door behind him.

Snape could only sit on his sofa, dumbstruck. "Audacious chit," he managed at length, but beneath the seething affront were burgeoning tendrils of amazed admiration. "Audacious chit." He snorted. Merlin in a girdle.

While Snape and Dumbledore were picking fruitlessly at the threads that bound Rebecca's secrets, a letter addressed to Malfoy Manor departed the castle, clutched in the talons of a tawny barn owl. It read simply:

Lucius;

I have found something that may prove of great interest to a person of mutual acquaintance. Its proper use could be quite profitable in future joint ventures. Come to Hogwarts at your earliest convenience, as you must see it for yourself.