Summon the Lambs to Slaughter

Chapter Fifty

Dolores Umbridge stumped down the corridor toward the doors of Hogwarts and the broad, brown expanse of the castle green, clipboard clamped beneath one jiggling bicep. Her jowls quivered with rage and indignation, and her stubby, bejeweled fingers rose to pat compulsively at imaginary wisps of stray hair. Several students craned their necks in idle curiosity as she passed, and for once, she could not muster a smile.

Thanks to Albus Dumbledore, the meddlesome old fool. And McGonagall, of course. Gipetto and his puppet. Not a syllable emerged from the idealistic codger's mouth that wasn't fawned over and parroted by the priggish, frigid spinster in tartan robes, and Dolores wondered if there weren't more to their relationship than that of Headmaster and Deputy Headmistress. Word was that they had known each other for more than fifty years, and it wouldn't surprise her in the least to discover that their "staff meetings" went well beyond a bit of brandy in the Headmaster's office and a chat about a toiletry shortage. The Ministry was rife with those sort of tawdry goings-on despite her best efforts to stamp them out.

Like that woman-what was her name? The one who was spending valuable Ministry time in the supply cabinet with her knickers around her knees and her quim full of pimply-faced post boy. Eunice? No. Agnes. Yes, that was it. Agnes Mulgrew. Little hussy. Broke more blasted quills with her obscene gyrations. Sent the budget through the roof. And was she sacked when I alerted the Minister? Of course not. The little tart wasn't even demoted. In fact, she got moved up to the Minister's office. Fancy that.

She shouldn't have been surprised. Minister Fudge was a well-intended man, but he had more bluster than backbone and was too busy fretting over the fickle whims of his constituents to effect actual reform. Time and time again, she and others of like and sensible mind had pressed him for endorsement of proposals and legislation, only to be told that the public mood would not stand for it. He was too entrenched, too fond of his role as arbiter of the status quo, and his affinity for the prestigious title of Minister had made him a coward.

Not that circumspection wasn't needed. Indeed, it could be one's finest weapon. Guile was a sweeter poison than brute force, and a smile and nod had gained her more than saber rattling ever had. Her face was her mask, and from behind her rampart of matronly jollity, she had brought many foes low, a long-toothed wolf in the guise of a lamb. She had turned the condescension and chauvinism of her male peers to her advantage, and while they were busy pounding the pulpits and causing ears to ring with their pomposity and bombast, she sat quietly in the shadows and smiled, her ear to the ground and her lips pressed to the ears of her superiors.

Some would say you have them pressed to other, more ignominious places.

She sniffed. The business of politics was rarely pleasant. Some sacrifice was inevitable, and pride was easily expended in the pursuit of power; if her lips tasted of sanctimony and derriere, at least she could say without question that she had never compromised her convictions in the name of appeasement. Each handshake wasted on a fool, each demure acquiescence to the better-positioned foe carried the weight of purpose. The crippling blow need not be delivered with a howl.

Something Fudge would do well to learn. The idiot was currently ensconced in Dumbledore's office, having his ear bent by Shacklebolt regarding the incident with the loathsome little Stanhope child and tilting ineffectually at this latest windmill so artfully presented by the Headmaster and his cronies. No doubt they were wailing and rending their oft-patched sackcloths over this egregious breach of investigatory protocol, and the Minister, bumbling tit that he was, would entertain their ravings. Never mind that all sense of propriety had fallen by the wayside the moment Snape had been remanded to his rooms rather than a cell in Azkaban or the Ministry interrogation office.

She thought she could lay that at Albus Dumbledore's feet, too. The crafty iconoclast had a well of debt as fathomless as the ages, so it was said, and she did not doubt it. Even in her school days, when he had still been a Transfigurations teacher and Head of House Gryffindor, he had been setting the shackles, binding others to him with his largesse. To the students under his thrall, he had been Father Christmas and Peter Pan, wise as their stodgy fathers, but possessed of a young boy's sly hubris. He had asked for their confidence in the name of counsel, and he had turned it into currency for his ends, the finest bit of Transfiguration he had ever managed. Trust into cold, inescapable obligation.

One by one, the traps had snapped closed around the unsuspecting consciences and hearts of the innocent. They had entered his lair with the unfettered buoyancy of the young, and when they had emerged, their steps were lumbering and graceless, encumbered by the weight of promissory servitude. Sometimes the knowledge of what they had done was in their eyes, too, a glazed, disbelieving torpor, as though he had struck them a blow to the head. And now that she thought on it a bit, perhaps he had.

An image arose in her mind of Dumbledore, seated in the office he would one day bestow upon his lackey, fingers tented beneath his nose as he stared at the pupil standing before him over the rims of his spectacles. The beard was not so full yet, nor was it painted with the veneration of advancing years. Just auburn and grey back then. Fire and smoke. The face behind the hands was grave, but the eyes were twinkling.

Mr. Hubert. Genial, yet full of authoritarian gravitas. The gaze leveled at the boy neither softened nor wavered.

The boy shuffled his feet and peered at Dumbledore from behind an untidy blond fringe. Yes, Professor. Muffled, indistinct, and-dare she say it-fearful.

He knows, she thought giddily, and pressed her face against the cool, slick face of the looking glass of cherished fancy. He knows the truth. He sees it. Good boy. Don't be caught by his enticements. Stay away!

But there was only one way this could ever end, the only way it ever had. Dumbledore was too wise, as Slytherin as he was Gryffindor, and the boy wrought of gossamer and imagination was too callow to resist the lure of easy succor. Even the power of her indomitable will could not change that.

What is it that you need, Mr. Hubert?

The boy's eyes were wide and feverish in his pinched face. It was an effort to look at the man behind the desk. It was much easier to let his gaze drift to the hearth rug or the toes of his boots.

Help, sir, he said meekly. I need help.

A thoughtful grunt from Dumbledore's throat. Mm. Do you, indeed? You understand the price, do you not? His long index finger tapped pursed lips.

The boy nodded.

Ah, I'm afraid I can't hear you, Mr. Hubert.

The boy swallowed with an audible click, and his Adam's apple bobbed. Yes, sir.

That serene gaze sharpened until it became hard as rivets, and when Dumbledore spoke again, it was almost an invocation. Are you prepared to pay it?

The boy hesitated. Not for long, but enough. Dumbledore's hand darted out and cuffed the boy on the temple, a stinging slap that sent him reeling. The boy gaped at him in wounded incredulity, and then realization came, slowly as the spread of pooling blood. The nature of his bargain revealed at the last.

You know now, boy. I see it in your face. Knowledge is a terrible thing, the defiler of innocence. It is not Father Christmas that stands before you, but Mephistopheles, and deals with the devil never end well. You cannot go back. If you refuse, he will steal your memory and extract his pound of flesh all the same.

Dumbledore stared at the boy, who stood with his hand clapped to the side of his head. Are you prepared? he repeated.

The boy nodded and cowered beneath the pitiless scrutiny.

Dumbledore considered him for a moment and then stretched forth his hand. So let it be.

Her own laughter startled her from her reverie. How long had it been since she had indulged in that rancid daydream? She couldn't remember. She had been a slip of a girl when she had conceived it, young and fresh and feral as a badger, not yet tortured by life's vagaries and bloated by too many consolatory sweets eaten to ease the bitter sting of dashed expectation. It had been her talisman against the lemon sherbet lure of the man who would be king, and it had pleased her to know that though she was a Ravenclaw, steeped in calculation and reason and the pursuit of knowledge, the breath of imagination breathed in her still. With the passage of years, she would learn the folly of such thinking, but then such a notion still had the power to make her glad. How she envied her long spent youth.

The vision, tantalizing as it was, was sheer pap. Dumbledore of the Lofty Notions would no more have struck a student than he would display proper humility to his superiors. It simply wasn't in him to rule by the right of might. No, he bound his prey to him beneath the yoke of kindness unbidden, ensnared them with their own compassion, and he sealed his life debts with the exchange of a hard lump of yellow confectioner's sugar, a sweet that cut more deeply than the cruelest slave driver's knout.

She had known this from the time she was a child, and yet her schoolmates had gone to him one after the other, a parade of tin toy soldiers marching to their own candyland perdition. Even those who should have known better, fellow Ravenclaws like Amelia Bones, had joined the starry-eyed retinue that thronged to his office, swept up in the tide of bumbling, oafish Hufflepuffs and tweedy, vainglorious Gryffindors.

Oh, there were a few who had resisted, and she was proud to count herself among them, but it had always troubled her that so many of her fellow holdouts had lived in the cool, dark den of House Slytherin. It had given her more than a few sleepless nights in the Ravenclaw Common Room, in fact, to know that the dregs and reprobates of the school shared her unreasoning antipathy, but in the end, she had decided that they shunned him because they saw him for what he truly was.

An asp as poisonous and withering as the water of the river Styx. He was a far greater manipulator of men than even their great founder, Salazar Slytherin, could have ever hoped to be. For all his cunning, there was a glimmer of honesty in his words, a seed of nobility in his cause, but in Dumbledore...

Oh, he was the consummate chess master, the bishop and the king rolled into one, and he moved the pawns with the ruthless precision of long practice. The parents adored him, and so did the children, and through his tireless accrual of favors owed, he made his bid to become master of the castle keep. If anyone had asked you or the wary Slytherins coiled in their lair, you could have told them, but nobody had ever asked straitlaced, ugly Dolores anything, not even whether or not she would like the whipped potatoes, please, and the Slytherins were easily brushed aside. So you never told them about the asp in lion's clothing, and when Headmaster Dippet tottered off into the twilight fog of senility, Albus Dumbledore, beloved Transfigurations professor, ascended to the throne.

A shudder rippled up her spine, and the nape of her neck prickled and knotted into hard nubs of gooseflesh. If she had only been blessed with the gift of foresight, if only she had known the diseased notions he would propagate, the assault he would wage on their world in the name of progress and his own bid for power. She would have screamed the truth until her voice forsook her, sounded the clarion call of dire warning from the highest peak, but her belated realization had come too late, and she could only watch as his cancerous coils twined around every facet of wizarding society and remolded it in his image.

You always saw. Even as a child, you could sense the disease in others, smell the rot beneath their skin. Your parents never understood why you recoiled from strangers on the street or refused the happily offered sweets from family friends. They rebuked you when you cried and shied into your mother's robes, and sometimes, your wariness earned you a spanking. It wasn't polite to embarrass them at their gay tea parties with your reticence. You were well-mannered above all else, and appearance was paramount. You tried to please them, tried to smile and stretch forth your hands to touch those blighted, noisome hands, but the smile felt like a rictus, and no soap could ever rid you of the taint, and soon, you endured the rebukes and the dour faces and the swats, because the thought of letting one of them touch you turned sugar to gall and bile in your stomach.

Well, what more could I have expected from the likes of them? she thought furiously, and her heels clacked against the stone with the crisp, echoing report of snapping kindling. Idealists, both. Mother, with her slender dancer's frame and grace born of ice and wonder. Mother, who always lamented her frumpy, bullish daughter and wondered why no suitors came to call.

Put on some rouge, why don't you, Dolores? No lady ever leaves the house without looking her best. And put on some more flattering robes. You look so dour, chirped the voice of her mother, and in her mind's eye, she could see her perched on a stool in front of her vanity, silver compact balanced in the palm of one hand as she deftly powdered her nose with a delicate sniff.

You always wanted to ask her if she was still a lady at night when the lights were out and the sounds came from behind their closed bedroom door. Did a lady really give voice to such whispers as seeped from beneath their chamber door and nestled in the shell of your ear like a dirty secret? Did a lady scream and whimper and utter words Father only muttered beneath his breath? You very much doubted it, but you never asked, though the curiosity burned your tongue. Your feet might not have grasped the arabesques and pirouettes your mother tried to teach them, but you understood the language of consequence very well, indeed. A gift from your father.

You resented him for a great many unwanted legacies-his jowls and drooping eyelids and the propensity of his muscles to run to fat-but for that bequest you were forever grateful. He taught you the value of forethought, of weighing the scales before committing yourself. He taught you the importance of prudence in your alliances and of solidifying your position before a strike.

Only he didn't teach by example. Rather, he taught by being the antithesis of all that was wise and good. He had political ambitions-oh, they were grand-but he had neither focus nor discipline, and his dreams of being Minister of Magic proved as illusive and unattainable as smoke in a mirror. He never made it farther than post page at the Derbyshire council hall. He blundered from one scheme to another, grasping at straw and spidersilk, and all of them came to nothing in turn.

You remember those dinner parties? How deadly dull they were. The shabby, if respectable lower middle-class dining room, the wedding china taken from the armoire by your mother. It was yeomen china, thick and ugly, and no matter how often your mother washed it in the hours before the party, there was always grit on the plate. Still, your mother predicted woe and misery unending should a piece be chipped.

Appearances, Dolores, she would trill in her nauseating falsetto, and you would fight not to clap her hands over your ears. Your mother would wag one perfectly manicured fingernail at you. Respectable families don't eat off chipped china. It's gauche.

So there you would sit in your itchy, uncomfortable pinafore, and secretly, you thought it made you look like a chiffon and lace seal, or perhaps a piglet someone had rouged as a joke. Not that it mattered. The adults paid you never mind. They wittered on about Quidditch and current events and the incompetence of the Ministerial offices, and the wine flowed into cheap brass goblets in a sweet, stupefying stream. When your father had communed at length with the great lord, Bacchus, he would rise and rail against the bureaucracy for which he worked, listing his qualifications for the job, which seemed paltry even to your tender ears. His friends, blinded by spirits and drunken joie de vivre, raised their goblets and pounded the table in raucous approbation, and you stabbed your peas with the whipped potato-slick tines of your fork and prayed for the blessed hour when you would be excused and allowed to retreat to the comfort of your bed.

Later, when you had been Sorted and you came to the table with the Ravenclaw scarf draped around your neck like a hero's medal, the adults patted you on the head and smiled their condescending smiles and brushed aside your achievement.

Ravenclaw, eh? Not bad. Gryffindor's where you really want to be. Still, at least it wasn't Hufflepuff. Lot of duffers, they are, they said. Pass the peas.

And you hated them for it. You wanted to stand up on your chair and shout, rail at them the way your father ranted against those who so blithely trod upon his dreams. You wanted to wave your arms and stamp your feet and froth, wave the scarf beneath their arrogant, dismissive noses and rub their faces in the glorious mark of your potential. But you never did, because it wasn't respectable, and only Daddy was allowed to be mad.

Then, when you were thirteen, you met the werewolf, and you knew. You smelled the corruption on his breath and saw the depravity in his eyes, and you found your purpose in it. Your parents were passive gainsayers, content to prate about respectability and the expectations of one's station, but loath to exert more than the meager force of their gums in pursuit of the ideal. You would do what they would not. You would find all that was wrong and festering and evil in your world, and you would root it out. You would not cozen the reprobates and derelicts to curry fleeting favorite. You would heal the world. You would make it respectable.

She smiled at the recollection, not the lupine, saccharine grimace of the facia politic, but a genuine, sunny smile that lit her doughy face and melted away the lines left by the passage of unkind years. What an epiphany that had been! For the first time in her life, she had been more than the lumpy sum of her parts, the ungainly progeny of a former dancer gone to seed and manic frippery and an aspiring politician with not the faintest hope of realizing his dream.

You were on the divan in drawing room when they came in. Well, what your mother optimistically dubbed the drawing room, at any rate, that shabby room full of must and stale cigar smoke and moldering leather. You were curled there with a book, for once not required to smile and curtsey before the jester and his folly's court. The Frog Prince, it was, and the gilted gold of the pages' edges flaked onto the pads of your fingers like fairy dust. You were happy, lost in girlish dreams of your own Prince Charming and transforming your callused, broad feet into ones fragile and dainty enough to fit inside a glass slipper. Feet much like your mother's.

And then she glided into the room, trailed by the smell of lavender and a man in a shabby coat with patches at the elbows. The princess and the pauper. She held the folds of her skirt in her tiny fingers as she came, and her small, rounded chin jutted forward in haughty defiance of her shabby surroundings. You stared at her feet as she advanced. They were soft and white as lilies, and you wondered that they could bear her up at all. You tucked your shoes beneath the hem of your robes so she would not see them.

Ah, Dolores, dear! I'd wondered where you'd got to. What are you doing in here? You should be out mingling with our guests. Subtle, ominous emphasis on that last, as if the boors and drunkards stumbling through the parlor and slouching around your father's table were exotic fauna rather than wobbling ne'er-do-wells.

Yes, Mummy, you said, and your eyes drifted to the sterile whiteness of the page. Anything was better than gazing into that imperious face and seeing the disappointment there.

I've brought you a guest. Isn't that fine? She gestured to the hollow-eyed man behind her and favored him with a gracious, red-lipped smile, and for an instant, it looked as though her gums were bleeding. Then you blinked, and it was only Mum again.

You didn't think it was fine at all. He looked thin and haggard, and beneath the cloying odor of too much lavender was the smell of unwashed wool and the piquant stench of sour sweat. You wanted him to go away, but you were only thirteen, and the right of refusal had not been bestowed upon you. That was four years and another reality away, and so you did what was proper and bowed your head.

Delightful, Mummy. Oh, faithless mouth.

This is Mr. Caddington. He's here to discuss the possibility of Lycanthrope rights with your father.

The man stepped forward, hand extended, and the displaced air from the motion carried with it the rank whiff of crushing destitution-sweat and urine and onion-peel soup-and when your hand touched his, the flesh of his palm was feverish and grimy and rough as sloughed snake skin. It was like touching a diseased corpse, and the bile rose in your throat.

Pleasure, sir, you murmured, though the words were strangled and clumsy on your tongue. It was not the first lie to ever cross your mind. No, you had committed the sin of bearing false witness a thousand times in the secret halls of your shamed, bitter heart, but it was the first time you had ever given them life, and you exulted even as you waited for your mother to discover the deception. How could she not when those keen, brown eyes caught each slouch, each rounded shoulder?

Dolores. Gone was the songbird sweetness of the hostess, and in its place was the ruthless, sibilant hiss of the executioner's blade.

Yes, Mummy? On the periphery of your vision were the man's shoes, scuffed and cracked and in dire need of a polish, and the threadbare hem of his trouser legs peeking from beneath his robes.

Aren't you forgetting something? She peered down the slope of her short, puggish nose, and prim disapproval radiated from her like sickly fever heat. She folded her arms across her breasts and waited.

Yes, Mummy, you murmured dutifully, but you made no move rise from the divan. You knew what she wanted. Your fingers curled around the edges of the book as if to anchor you to a pleasanter place.

Well?

She wasn't going to leave until you paid obeisance to the man in the ragged robes and the social protocol that ruled her life with merciless iron fetters. Leper or lycanthrope, she would see you scrape and bow in the name of propriety. No matter that he was a beast born of tainted blood and slavering jaws in the moonlight. No matter that in a few days, he would be prowling the fetid alleys and heathered moors and baying in the moonlight with saliva glistening from his canines. That he harbored the simmering, illicit urge to tear out innocent, unwary throats and lap the gushing blood. Never mind that he... Most people thought there was naught worse than being touched by a werewolf's caress, but oh, you could think of a few-things that had nothing to do with pulsing exposed throats and everything to do with darker, moister places.

Your feet felt like cement when you unfurled them from beneath your robes and set them on the floor, and the ground yawed precariously as you rose. You wanted to throw yourself at your mother's glass-slippered feet and beg for reprieve, but you knew it would not come. She could not see. And so you bunched your robes in your hands, crossed your too-thick ankles, and bent your knees to dip low in a perfect curtsey.

Don't let the mask slip, you thought feverishly. You mustn't! He'll see. He'll smell. They can smell fear as easily as they can the coppery, salt tang of blood. Quiet, Dolores, quiet.

She made you hold that curtsey until your planted foot throbbed and burned with exertion, and all the while, you could feel the werewolf's gaze lingering on the crown of your head, malignant and leering, and when she finally released you with a clipped nod, you sagged onto the divan and covered your feet again. You pulled the book onto your lap. He might have eyes the better to see you with, my dear, but you were determined that he should see as little as possible.

I thought I'd raised you better, your mother sniffed coolly, and you knew that retribution for this social breach would come swift and hard, but you hardly cared. Pleasantries thus dispensed with, she would sweep from the room on a noxious billow of lavender and take her foul companion with her.

Then, she said, Mr. Caddington, would you care for a drink? Wine? Champagne? Whiskey and rye? We've tea if you've a mind for something more prudent. She smiled and pressed her fingertips to her throat in a bizarre gesture of feminine fragility.

You fought the urge to cackle, blissfully unaware that thirty years hence, it would join the arsenal of sly coquetry deployed against blustering, officious men in tweed suits and lambs' wool robes.

Mr. Caddington stuffed his hands into the pockets of his trousers and offered her an affable, yellow-toothed grin. I'd like that very much. Tea with a touch of brandy if you don't mind. It's a bit chill tonight. He scuffed the brittle toe of his shoes over the carpet, icy wind escaping dying lungs.

That it is. I tell you, the weather gets worse every year. Wouldn't be surprised if it were the fault of Muggles and their nefarious contraptions. They've a right to get on with the business of living, I suppose, the feckless dears, but they are an oblivious lot. She smoothed her gown with a fluttering hand. Oh, listen to me, prattling on so. Do forgive me. I'll just see to that drink.

She glided through the door, and you willed Mr. Caddington to follow and leave you to collect your scattered thoughts, but he didn't. He remained where he was, slump-shouldered and rumpled, looking at you from behind his lank fringe. The mask did slip then, and you were no longer Dolores Umbridge, thirteen and poised on the cusp of womanhood. You were a five-year-old Gretel, lost in a dark and terrible wood, and it took all of your resolve no to bolt from the divan and bury your flushed face and bulging eyes in the voluminous folds of her rapidly receding skirts.

It was not enough to stifle the mewl that escaped your lips, the single bleat of childish dread. Mu-

Her spine stiffened in reproach, but no more, and in a few steps she was swallowed by the flitting, revenant shadows of milling guests and the sussurating murmur of earnest conversation. There was no trail of breadcrumbs to lead you home. You were alone with the bogeyman.

You stared at him. You didn't want to look; indeed, you would have liked nothing better than to lower your gaze to the book gripped in your trembling hands, but you didn't dare not look. You stared and clutched the book and waited to see if the face would change, if it would sink in upon itself like rotten, runnelled fruit and sprout hair like perverse peach fuzz. You waited to see gums shrink from teeth until the canines became dirty, poisonous daggers. You held your breath and listened for the wet, gelid sound of rippling flesh and the clandestine pop of shifting joints. You concentrated until your eyes stung and watered and your vision blurred. Surely a creature so craven as him could not carry on the pretense of civility or even humanity forever?

Nothing happened. There was no ravening transformation or tearing of fabric as clothing tore at the seams. He merely regarded you in contemplative silence as he rocked on his heels with the mournful creak of leather.

There was a watchful, awkward silence. So, I hear you attend Hogwarts, he ventured diffidently. A hand emerged from the pocket of his trousers, and a grimy, rough-nailed fingertip brushed the hank of fringe from his forehead.

Yes. No sir, not for the likes of him, and your mother was not here to demand it. You tucked your chin to your chest to suppress the smirk that tingled on your lips like the memory of a kiss.

Another protracted silence, and you could feel his desperation as he cast about for a suitable topic of conversation. Your mother tells me you're a Ravenclaw. He harrowed his fingers through his hair and offered you a wan smile.

Yes. A proud declaration, that. Third year.

He cocked a thin, brown eyebrow in surprise. Only a third year? I never would have believed it, Miss Umbridge. You carry yourself with the grace and dignity of someone much older.

I d-, you nearly blurted, but then you stopped yourself. After all, sputtering in incoherent incredulity was hardly dignified. Or proper. It was childish. Your rounded shoulders straightened, and pride filled your belly like warm treacle. If only you had known. You should have known, given what he was, but pride goeth before a fall. The Muggles got that much right at least. Thank you.

Another odd, Mona Lisa smile from Mr. Caddigton, and he loped toward the bookshelves that lined the walls. Do you like it? He reached out to trace the cracked spine of a book with his index finger.

Yes. You shifted on the divan to keep him in view.

Mmm. Must be a lovely old school, he murmured wistfully as his eyes roved the ranks of fading and forgotten titles. He craned to examine the contents of the uppermost shelf, and you saw the ring of grit and dead skin caked around his scrawny, wattled neck and the collar of his robes.

You swallowed a greasy lump of revulsion. Of course it is. Surely you must remember?

He laughed, a raw, bitter wheeze in the back of his throat, and when he turned his attention to you, his eyes were full of hatred and despair and wretched, aching longing. There was something else, too, something far less noble and pitiable. A glittering, lascivious covetousness. He spun on his heel and strolled toward the divan, chin tucked to his chest and fringe obscuring his eyes in an oily curtain. His stride was languid and loose-jointed, and you watched him come in hypnotized fascination.

My dear, he said when he had come to a stop less than three paces from where you sat clutching a book of fairy tales in a vain attempt to anchor yourself to the disintegrating land of rationality, I never attended Hogwarts. He cocked his head to jolt the unruly fringe into place again and spared you a feral, toothy grin that turned your stomach to water.

You did not want to talk anymore. You did not want to be proper. You cast a desperate, wild-eyed glance at the door. Fifteen paces separated you from the threshold and an end to this waking nightmare, and you wondered if you could gain the door before those infectious canines sank into the back of your throat or the bony crest of your shoulderblade or those disease-riddled claws hidden beneath his filthy nail beds shot out to unzip your flesh and spill your entrails onto the carpet like macabre crepe paper. You willed your mother to appear with the tea and take the monster away, but the doorway gave no glimpse of robes and salvation, and for a lunatic moment, you pondered the notion that she had left you alone with the monster wearing Mr. Caddington's skin for some wrong that you had done and then forgotten.

I do not want to follow this old and cancerous memory any further, Umbridge thought as she stalked down the corridor. I refuse to indulge in this pointless daydreaming. It was long ago, and it has nothing to do with Dumbledore or McGonagall or that blasphemous Stanhope child. Leave the bones lie. Sweat beaded on her upper lip despite the winter chill, and her armpits prickled beneath her robes.

Oh, but it does, you see, sneered the voice. That dusty parlor with the rotting books and the threadbare carpet was where you learned that everything you had ever feared was true, and that there were no princesses in ivory towers and no faraway enchanted lands with crystal castles in the sky. The devil was real, and he smelled like wet dog and unwashed wool. It was where you learned to look for the mark of the Beast. You found it that night, and you've never forgotten it.

He won in the end, sent you screaming from the room with your ugly hands clapped over your even uglier face, snot on your upper lip and the sound of shattering china in your wake. Your fear of contagion was stronger than your love of staid gentility, and so you ran with the devil at your heels. You locked yourself in the lavatory and vomited until black spots danced before your eyes and the bile was steel wool in your throat, and when your spasming stomach had purged itself, you wobbled to the sink and scrubbed your hands until your fingers bled and the soap sizzled against raw flesh. You had to rid yourself of the blight, wash it from your skin. You washed until no soap remained, an entire bar reduced to a slippery wafer, and you still felt unclean.

They wept beneath the linens that night, your hands, but you could find no mercy for them. After all, they had exposed you to his sickness with their cowardice, and so you took a perverse relish in driving your nails into raw palm and letting the blood ooze down your wrist in lazy rivulets. When you awoke the next morning, coated in sweat and with your mouth dry as cotton batting, the sheets were stippled with blood, innocence lost under the pitiless watch of the night.

The pain kept you awake, kept you from the eager arms of Morpheus. You couldn't sleep, not with that stinking saliva drying on your ear and unpleasant possibility creeping beneath your skin. You fingered the shell of your ear until it was as scoured and sensitive as your fingertips, searching for the damnation of dimpled and broken flesh. You traced and prodded until your ear throbbed in protest, and you cursed your mother for insisting that good English girls pierced their ears. It only needed one drop. One drop to get inside and ruin everything.

So you lay in your bed and clutched the covers to a chest that had not yet blossomed and waited for the infection to take root. You waited for the spit to curdle to brine in your mouth and the moonlight to sear your eyes like the light of a thousand suns. You trembled and waited for bones to warp and shift as they remade themselves in the image of a Roman god with snapping jaws and silver eyes, Romulus, murderer, not of brother Remus, but of Dolores. You trembled and waited for the drugged simmer of bloodlust in your veins, and even as you swallowed the screams that massed inside your chest like the onset of pleurisy, a part of you longed to feel your canines lengthen inside your mouth. You could set the world to rights with teeth like those.

But nothing happened. When morning came, you were still Dolores, daughter of dreamers, and who inhabited a body running to fat in all the wrong places, still burdened with the responsibility of balancing your parents' madness on your shoulders. You were not cursed, but neither were you free, and it always gave you a small frisson of satisfaction when your mad, spinster aunt tied your ankle to the bedpost with a strand of golden thread. To keep the changeling faeries at bay, she said, but as her dry, old-lady lips brushed your cheek like rotting lace, you remembered hot, meaty breath, and you wondered if you might not awaken to find yourself clicking stealthily through the corridors on furred and padded feet.

She was nearly running now, her steps faltering and graceless. No, not running. Merely walking briskly, efficiently. Yes. Ministerial time was not to be frittered away, as that trollop, Agnes, had so ruefully discovered. Besides, it wasn't proper for a lady to run. She smoothed her hair with her hand and turned her gaze askance so as not to see her trembling fingers. She would not be deterred from her duties as a high-ranking Ministry official by a childhood bogey long dispatched to penniless destitution and death by rotgut whiskey. Even if he had managed to survive grinding poverty and the silver daggers of ruthless werewolf hunters, he was likely ancient and feeble and black-toothed, tottering through the cobbled, twisting streets of some Albanian village and begging alms from the few peasants who had any to spare. He was no threat to her now.

No, but Dumbledore is, with his political clout and his dangerous, radical ideas. He would let them all in, the beasts and the degenerates and the unnameable things that pollute the darkness with their very breath. He would give them homes and jobs and the right to mingle with respectable citizenry, and he would give them a voice. Those who can speak can rise up, and that cannot be allowed. Not in any sane world. He must be stopped.

"He wears the Mark of the Beast," she muttered as she shouldered past a seventh-year who was flirting shamelessly with a Hufflepuff two years his junior.

Of course he does. He and his lot, disguising their wanton lust for power and corruption beneath the veneer of reform. You saw what he was long before he lent credence to the crackpot movements to grant lycanthropes greater freedoms and give the Beasts a voice in Wizarding affairs. He threatens all that is decent and proper, and it surprised you not at all when rumors began to circulate that he had given sanctuary to Death Eater filth. He had already opened his arms to werewolves and half-breed giants, and the difference between the Mark of the Beast and the Dark Mark is only semantics. The cunning bastard would bugger the devil to gain his ends.

The boy looked up as she passed. "Did you say something, Miss Umbridge?" he asked, and grinned.

Do you mock me, boy? she thought furiously, and then scoffed at her own paranoia.

Of course he wasn't. He was brownnosing, like as not, hoping to curry future favor with attentive solicitude. She found it both repulsive and admirable. She had never been above the practice herself when the situation called for it.

"No, but thank you for paying mind," she answered.

The boy's affable grin faded, and he peered at her more closely. "Are you all right, ma'am? You look a bit peaked."

"I'm perfectly well," she snapped, and then recovered. "It's been a most trying day. I thank you for your concern, however." She managed what she hoped was a sunny smile, but it felt like a screaming rictus, impossibly wide and lunatic on her face.

The boy opened his mouth to respond, but she turned away and continued down the corridor on legs as nerveless and ungainly as gum rubber. If she opened her mouth again, it would be to scream and howl and gibber, and after the fracas with that leering, misbegotten fetch known as Stanhope, she could afford no more emotional outbursts. If she lost herself again, the Headmaster and his faithful would chivvy her off to the closed ward of St. Mungo's, and she would be left to rot among the human refuse.

The memory of that loathsome child's clammy flesh beneath her clutching fingers sickened her, and she shuddered. She hadn't meant to touch the girl, much less shake her until her teeth rattled inside her thin skull, but that knowing, mocking leer had enraged her, made the blood boil in her veins. That such a mangled, ugly, insolent thing should have the audacity to look at her with such open ridicule was an indignity she would not abide. She was an adult of considerable prominence, and she refused to be intimidated by a willful child.

But you are intimidated. She offends. Her very existence offends. She wears a human face, but nothing else is as it ought to be. There is no rosy, youth-kissed bloom in her cheeks. Her hands are twisted and blue-nailed, and they move with the ponderous slowness of anesthetized spiders. She is a porcelain doll fashioned by a madman, and yet there is no humility in that slouch, no apology for her inveterate wrongness. She simply sits there and fixes you with that wobble-necked gaze, unrepentant as sin and just as proud. You look into that bony face and wonder what lies beneath.

Just like the werewolf, she thought suddenly, and the realization was so horrifying that she stumbled and had to steady herself with a palm pressed to the wall. That same feral, sardonic smile.

She tried to chuckle, but it emerged as a reedy squawk. The string of pearls that had once belonged to her mother tightened around her throat, and her hand closed convulsively around them.

That was what angered you. That smile, spreading slow as arsenic molasses over that pointed face. You'd seen it before, on the face of that mongrel werewolf in the parlor. So smug, so full of fermenting rage and black-blooded contempt. It was the same smile Mr. Caddington gave you when he told you he never attended Hogwarts, and the same one he wore when he leaned close enough so that you could smell meat and blood on his breath and the stink of his disease in the threads of his clothing. It was sly and weighted with a terrible promise.

The words echoed in her ears and heart, the rolling, vibrato creak of crypt doors thrown wide to revealing moonlight. They wouldn't let me go because they were afraid I'd gobble up the young girls. A throaty, rusty chuckle brushed the burning shell of her ear, a memory she could not quelch. Hot, sour breath. And I did.

She clenched her teeth. She was running now, appearances be damned. She did not know why she was reliving these sordid memories, but she would escape them, escape and regain her prized equilibrium. They could not follow her to the Ministry. They never had. The solid, modern walls, unburdened by a thousand years of history, kept them at bay, as did the efficient clangor of Ministry business. The sound of official documents being signed and stamped and the hum and pneumatic hiss of lift doors opening and closing would blot out the memories that rose from the recesses of her mind like peat-blackened bones from a primeval bog.

It would also afford her the opportunity to read the Ministry file on Rebecca Stanhope. For all Dumbledore's twinkling secrecy, there were still immigration policies that even he could not overlook, and the Ministry had received her medical dossier and psychological profile in the weeks before her arrival by Portkey. Fudge himself had read it and signed off on her entry forms, but she was willing to bet he had done little more than skim it while quaffing tea with one of his wealthy constituents. Not one for the minutiae, was Fudge. Perhaps there was something valuable to be gleaned from the pages.

She was so intent upon escaping the increasingly claustrophobic walls of the castle that her surrounding environs had faded to an indistinct blur, and the students through which she threaded were nothing more than darting gnats in her field of vision, points of light and color that buzzed and flitted around her. Only the door mattered now, and it stood in painful relief against the drab fog of grey wall.

Her fingers curled around the heavy iron door handle, and she was already imagining the crisp, lungful of air that awaited her, fresh and cold and unsullied by rancid memories of a life she told herself she had long forgotten. The Scottish fall wind would cleanse her soul and clear her head, and by the time she reached the comforting confines of the Ministry, the sour cramp of unease coiled in her gut would be gone. The prospect of her clean Ministerial office and a cup of hot tea was almost enough to make her smile as she pulled open the enormous door.

But what struck her in the face as she crossed the threshold was not a bracing blast of arctic wind, but thick wool and rosewater and the spicy scent of human sweat. She stumbled back with an unladylike splutter, and her arms pinioned wildly in a losing bid to maintain her balance, but there had been too many afternoon teas and too many tea cakes, and she sat down hard on the unyielding floor with a thump, her robes bunched between her knees. Her clipboard slipped from beneath her armpit and skidded across the floor. It came to rest against the spit-polished toe of a patent leather boot.

"Mind where you tread, you insipid cow," snarled a clipped voice from above her, and the patent leather boot drew back as if to deliver a kick. "-my new waistcoat."

How dare anyone speak to her with such cavalier disregard for her station and official office! She drew herself up and opened her mouth to remonstrate. Then her eyes reached the speaker's face, and the string of intended invective and wounded outrage died in her throat.

Instead, she swallowed an unbecoming squawk of surprise, and said, "Oh! Mr. Malfoy! A thousand apologies. I was in rather a hurry, I'm afraid, and grew a bit careless."

She mustered an ingratiating smile and offered her hand in the hopes that he would help her to her feet and spare here the ignominy of having to struggle to her feet like a wounded wildebeest.

Lucius Malfoy stared down his tasteful, patrician nose at her. "So I see," he replied curtly. He ignored both her smile and her proffered hand.

Her lips puckered in a moue of dismay. This did not bode well at all. The House of Malfoy was the crème of British wizarding society, a shining example of refinement and good breeding. Rumor had it that they could trace their lineage to the time of the Norman conquest, and some said that it could be delineated further still, to the time before written language or even speech, when man had communicated through grunts and gestures and crude pictographs carved into stone. Looking into the Malfoy patriarch's half-lidded, appraising grey eyes, she could well believe it. There wasn't one of them who hadn't married well and increased the family fortune, and in one hundred generations, not one of them had failed to produce an heir.

Whatever the truth of the family tapestry, there was one truth of which she was absolutely certain. Those foolish enough to earn the displeasure of a Malfoy lived to rue it. For a while, anyway. Eventually, they came to an unfortunate and mysterious end, and if she didn't find a way to mend this breach of social etiquette, she would soon find herself picking through the rubbish bins behind the Ministry instead of working within it.

Damn that child, she seethed. If she hadn't been so preoccupied with the mangled changeling of Gryffindor Tower, this would never have happened. The child inspired calamity at every turn.

She smoothed her robes and tried another tack. "I'm a bit disconcerted, Mr. Malfoy. Could you perchance help a lady to her feet?"

Malfoy's lip curled in a barely perceptible sneer, and she saw a flicker of contempt in his eyes. He extended one hand, but rather than grasp her fingers, he flexed the fingers of his dragonhide gloves, sniffed disdainfully at the creak of well-oiled dragonhide, and curled his fingers around the gleaming shaft of his walking stick again.

"I've business with the Headmaster," he murmured, and skirted her outstretched hand.

He kicked her clipboard with a nonchalant flick of his ankle. He lifted his boot and inspected the sole for signs that ink had marred it. A long, elegant finger brushed away a piece of microscopic detritus, and then he put down his foot and strode in the direction of the gargoyle that guarded the passage to the Headmaster's office.

"Wh-, why I- Mr.," she sputtered in flustered incredulity. She had expected better from the scion of the House of Malfoy.

While chivalry is clearly dead, now is not the time to mourn its passing, snapped the ruthless voice of self-preservation inside her head. If he reaches Fudge with tales of how your bumbling mussed his coat and offended his keen aesthetic sensibilities, your job prospects will be all the slimmer. And if Lucius Malfoy has deigned to set foot on Hogwarts' hallowed grounds, it can only mean that portentous doings are afoot, and it would behoove you to find out what they are.

She scrambled to her feet and hurried after the rapidly retreating figure. "Mr. Malfoy," she wheezed as she lumbered in his wake, and she smoothed her robes with clumsy impatient hands. "Mr. Malfoy, perhaps I may be of assistance."

Lucius Malfoy neither slowed nor turned his head in acknowledgement of her existence.

Discomfited, she tried again. "Mr. Malfoy I'm Dolores U-,"

"I know who you are." Bland. Cool. An unmistakable dismissal. His shoes tapped a haughty staccato against the stone.

"Then surely you understand-" she began. There was a note of bleating desperation in her voice now, and she loathed herself for it.

"You forgot your clipboard, Miss Umbridge. I suggest you retrieve it."

For his part, Lucius Malfoy was in no mood to waste his breath on inane banter with one of Fudge's incompetent lackeys. The Umbridges had been unapologetic social climbers for years, drab, inauspicious moths fluttering around the Ministry torches in the hopes that fire would scorch away all impurities and leave magnificent monarch butterflies in its wake. His father and his father before him had endured the scourge of boorish, doughy faces and weak-willed claptrap, and after three generations of relentless glad-handing and toadying, they were still poised on the bottom rung of the social ladder, a fact which testified more eloquently to their worth than any lofty palaver. Stupid and transparent, the lot of them, obvious as Gryffindors in their avarice and unsubtle as Hufflepuffs in their pursuit of it.

His skin crawled beneath the heavy wool of his robes, and he struggled to keep his features impassive. The mouth-breather was still at his heels, tenacious as the onset of malaise, and he could feel the ill health and wheedling degeneracy radiating from her in nauseating waves, a curdled perfume on her wattled neck and bloated wrists. He fought the urge to clamp his handkerchief over his nose and mouth.

To be fair, she's hardly the only contributor. The entire school is rapidly becoming a cesspool. Even the Slytherin dormitories are no longer guaranteed sanctuaries against the encroaching Mudblood filth.

He could deny neither assertion. Everywhere he looked, there was more evidence of corruption, more proof of the impending collapse of his world. A Hufflepuff stood chatting idly with a group of his fellows, one scrawny digit not so surreptitiously foraging in his nostril, a blind, eager earthworm wriggling on the end of one grubby, broad-palmed hand. Lucius swallowed his offended gorge with a concentrated effort. That his son should be forced to commingle with such crude rabble infuriated him.

You puling brat, he snarled. Draco was broken of that barbarous habit before he could walk. I placed a drop of concentrated lemon juice on the ends of his fingers, and the next time he took it into his mind to excavate his nasal passages, he learned a lasting and painful lesson. His nose bled from the irritation, and Narcissa shrieked like a deranged harpy when she saw the scarlet rivulets oozing from his raw nostrils like communion wine, but he never picked his nose again.

His hand tingled with the desire to snatch the boy's finger from his nose and bend it back until it snapped with the satisfying, wet grind of broken bone, but he kept it coiled around his walking stick and marched onward. There would come a time when the old order and respect for the ancient bloodlines would be restored. The corridors would be purged and sanctified once more, and the arcane secrets and intoxicating power of the magical arts would be entrusted to their proper and worthy guardians. Until then, however, he would simply have to grit his teeth and wait.

Umbridge was still trailing him, her reedy breath loud in his ears and sour on his cheek, and he lengthened his stride in an effort to escape. Not too much. A Malfoy seldom ran, and never in these corridors, where his family had walked as lords for generations untold, and where curious eyes still marked his passage with wary reverence. Whatever the starry-eyed do-gooders of the Dumbledore faction might have thought in the privacy of their cloistered offices-no matter their seething envy or their blind, flailing hatred of all he espoused-the unassailable fact remained that the Malfoys were still gods among men and always would be. The knowledge filled him with immeasurable satisfaction.

He willfully ignored the sight of a Slytherin boy tugging vigorously on the crotch of his trousers as he chatted up a slovenly, slack-jawed Ravenclaw with drooping jowls and misaligned eyes, and approached the gargoyle that brooded before the entrance to the Headmaster's eyrie in a posture of eternal truculence and dull-fanged vigilance.

He made a mental note to ask Draco about the boy later and turned to utter the password to the swirling staircase, only to realize that he had no idea what it was. Knowing the old fool, it was something unutterably asinine, a wizarding sweet or ludicrous Muggle toffee of which he had never heard. He opened his mouth to venture a guess, then closed it again. If he were wrong and nothing happened, he would look the fool in front of the goggling student body, and while he gave not a fig for their opinion, the idea of the Malfoy air of omniscience and invulnerability being tarnished for even a moment affronted him. Not to mention the private, obscene glee Umbridge would glean from his befuddlement.

Perhaps she had her uses, after all. He shifted his walking stick from one hand to the other and turned to Umbridge, who was watching him with almost licentious anticipation.

She knows. She's positively triumphant.

"It's been quite some time since I've been a guest of our venerable Headmaster, and I'm afraid I've forgotten the password." He offered her a tight-lipped smile, fragile as porcelain on his face. "I don't suppose you would be privy to it?" He arched one delicate eyebrow.

Umbridge wrung her hands in delight. "But of course, Mr. Malfoy," she breathed, and the grotesque eroticism of the reply made him flinch.

There was a predatory, calculating flicker in her eyes, and he could see her pondering how best to turn this to her advantage. You need me, it said, and there will be a price. Were he not in such a hurry, he could almost have admired it. As it was, he merely gazed back at her with bland implacability.

"Well?" Still polite, but brittle now, fraying threads caught betwixt Atropos' gleaming shears. He absently brushed a forelock of hair from his forehead.

She made no reply. Instead, she continued to regard him in thoughtful, reptilian silence. Her fingers intertwined with logy grace. How much is it worth?

Not as much as you think.

He sighed. "Clearly, my initial assessment of your dubious mental acuity was correct." He turned and scanned the gaggle of pupils clustered around the first-floor landing in abysmal attempt at covert surveillance. "Boy," he called imperiously, "what is the password to the Headmaster's office?"

The boy, a Gryffindor, gaped at him in bug-eyed incomprehension.

Lucius trapped a sigh of frustration behind his clenched teeth. "Promptitude is a virtue," he muttered, and quashed the corollary of you dribbling lackwit by the slimmest of margins.

The boy opened his mouth, and Lucius could see the long-disused cogs of his intellect grind as he dredged through the quagmire of lewd fancies and boorish bum humor in search of a suitable response. He settled in for a very long wait.

A hand brushed his wrist, unnaturally dry and far too heavy, and he retreated from the unpleasant touch with a grimace and turned to see Umbridge gazing at him with unsettling eagerness. Her hand reached for his wrist again.

"I am a very busy man, Miss Umbridge." He tucked his near hand behind his back and out of her reach.

"Of course, of course," she simpered, and the oily avarice in her voice was almost enough to coax disbelieving laughter from his throat. "I've only just recalled the password."

He regarded her in expectant silence. Umbridge obviously expected to be lavished with praise for the miraculous recovery of her higher cognitive functions, but he was not in the habit of praising his underlings for their every trifling achievement, or indeed, even their greatest, and he was not about to start now. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and adjusted his grip on his walking stick.

Her smile faltered, and petulance flickered across her face like shadow. It occurred to him as he stood there, carved from alabaster and infinite patience, that she bore a striking resemblance to the leering gargoyle that hunkered before him on its imperturbable haunches. The thought surprised him; such flights of family were for children and wives who flitted from room to room like restless spirits and suffered from fainting vapors. The trek through Hogsmeade must have unsettled him more than he cared to admit. He shook himself and tugged on the thin wrist of his glove.

Umbridge turned to the gargoyle, straightened her shoulders, and said, "Bertie Botts!"

He sniffed. It was as ludicrous as he had feared. The gargoyle smirked at him a moment longer, and then it swung open with the sepulchral scrape of stone and ancient grit. The eternally spiraling staircase beckoned with a sinuous, silent finger.

"There now," murmured Umbridge. The smile had reasserted itself. "Shall we?" She offered him one flabby arm and nodded in the direction of Dumbledore's ivory tower.

He ignored the proffered arm and stepped onto the sliding riser. There were simply certain indignities he was unwilling to suffer even for the Cause. A breathless, glottal sputter from behind him, and then Umbridge followed his ascent.

There were voices coming from behind the Headmaster's door when he arrived at the landing, and from the sound of them, urgent and harried and furious, things were not going at all well. A shout, coarse and brimming with strangled outrage. Fudge, most likely. Much as he despised Albus Dumbledore, he had never heard him raise his voice in anger.

Of course not. He might be old and full of addle-brained notions of equality and a wizarding republic of liberty and justice for all, but he isn't a fool, no matter how much your idiot son brays to the contrary. One hundred and thirty years of relentless politicking have made him canny to the unwritten rules of bureaucratic gamesmanship, molded him into a consummate showman, and he is not so foolhardy as to tip his hand to Cornelius Fudge.

Another bellow. A thump and the subsequent, mellifluous tingle of wobbling glassware. The good Minister was warming up for quite a row by all appearances. His lips curled in sardonic amusement. The muffled buzz of the Headmaster's reply, and even through ten inches of English oak, the provocative taunt still reached his ears, jovial bonhomie laced with heavy-lidded contempt.

Fudge was in full apoplectic bluster when Lucius opened the door, mottled and bug-eyed and sweating profusely above the collar of his robes. The rim of his offensive, lime green bowler hat was clutched in one white-knuckled hand, and the felt bulged through the gaps in his fingers like a timorous vole. The other hand was raised in a gesture of righteous defiance, one finger pointing stiffly heavenward.

"-told me you would have this matter resolved," Fudge bellowed, and flecks of spittle flew from his lips. "I weary of your games, Dumbledore. I won't be made the fool any longer, do you hear?"

Too late for that, he thought wryly, but he remained silent.

"No, no, this won't do at all," Fudge continued. "I told you to appoint an interim Head of House for Slytherin by Monday. Well, that time has come and gone, and I have yet to be informed of a replacement. It is quite clear that you've no respect for my edicts. As such, I have no choice but to appoint one for you." Fudge stopped and glared at his adversary in malevolent, gleeful triumph.

If Dumbledore were perturbed by the declaration, he gave no sign. Indeed, he reached into the pocket of his robes, pulled out a lemon sherbet, and slipped it into his mouth without comment.

"I thought we had settled the matter most satisfactorily, Cornelius," he said at length.

Fudge's jaw unhinged with an audible creak, and for a moment, Lucius was sure he was going to perform a histrionic jig of fury on the carpet.

"What are you talking about?" he hissed.

Dumbledore gave the lemon sherbet in his mouth a thoughtful suck. "I do believe I mentioned Professor Sinistra would be looking in on things from time to time.

Fudge did stomp his foot then. "'Looking in on things' is not the same as the close, intensive guidance provided by a Head of House, and well you know it. Semantic sleight of hand will not avail you now." Fudge kneaded the rim of his bowler hat between his fingers.

"If by 'intensive guidance', you mean ensuring that the thicker ones don't hex each other blind, then I suppose you have a point, Minister," McGonagall said drily.

Lucius started a little at the sound of her voice. He had been so focused on the posturing between Fudge and Dumbledore that he had not noticed her lurking there, tucked unobtrusively between the Headmaster's chair and the bookshelf. He should have known, however; she was never far behind when there was trouble afoot in Dumbledore's fiefdom.

Fudge rounded on her with a snap of starched robe. "I don't recall asking for your opinion, thank you," he snarled.

"I don't give a fig what you asked for. As Deputy Headmistress and Head of House Gryffindor, I'm bloody well going to give it to you," she snapped, and came to stand before Fudge, hands fisted on her hips and her eyes blazing.

Fudge mouthed stupidly for a moment before regaining his customary dubious aplomb. "Now see-," he began.

"I've been Head of Gryffindor for thirty-four years, and while I grant you that I've had to break up my share of rows in the Common Room over the years and dispense career counseling and biscuits from behind my desk, I have never felt the need to hold the hands and caress the brows of every Gryffindor in my care as they sallied forth into the land of Nod," she went on, and ignored his feeble interjection.

"Yes, well, you're hardly the picture of maternal sentiment, are you?" Fudge sneered, and Dumbledore coughed behind his loosely fisted hand to hide his cry of surprised pique.

McGonagall's lips disappeared into her blanched face. "And in any case, the Slytherins are notoriously more self-reliant than the other Houses," she said stiffly.

"Precisely my point," Fudge countered. "Their rampant hooliganism has been allowed to continue for far too long, and it's time they were taken in hand."

"Rampant hooliganism?" Lucius repeated. Really, Fudge. Your sweeping denigration of my esteemed House wounds me."

Fudge, who had opened his mouth to continue his tirade, turned his head with an audible creak of tendon, his mouth hanging in a boneless and unbecoming gape, a windup toy that had run down in mid-sentence. McGonagall, too, turned to stare, though he saw her eyes dart toward the Headmaster for the briefest instant.

All the ire promptly left the Minister of Magic in a visible ebb, replaced by obsequious jollity. "Mr. Malfoy! What a welcome and pleasant surprise! To what do I owe the pleasure?"

"On the contrary, I find the Slytherin mindset of independence and resilience a refreshing change from the usual indolent passivity displayed by the populace. Ambition and ingenuity are not always peccadilloes when properly molded. Take my son, for example."

There was a suspicious huff from McGonagall.

"Of course," Fudge conceded eagerly. "Your son is an outstanding example of what can be achieved through attentive parenting. One of young wizardry's brightest."

"The advantages of proper breeding."

Lucius crossed the threshold with a curt nod to the Headmaster and McGonagall, who was tracking his progress with bellicose curiosity, and made his way to the brandy decanter tucked on the table behind the Headmaster's desk. He picked it up, arched an eyebrow in mute inquiry, and then poured himself a tumbler without waiting for an answer.

"Naturally," Fudge was saying now, "but you must concede, sir, that at times it goes to extremes. One must have respect for authority." He massaged the rim of his bowler hat in convulsive circles with the ball of his thumb.

Lucius gave a noncommittal grunt. "If the authority is worthy of it, yes." He took an experimental sip of the brandy and grimaced.

Cheap swill. Age bringeth not wisdom. Muggle sweets and bathtub gin.

Fudge looked momentarily flummoxed, but said nothing.

Dumbledore surveyed him over the rims of his spectacles. "While the Minister and I are currently at loggerheads over a matter unrelated to your son, I find it altogether fitting that I echo his earlier query. What brings you to Hogwarts, Mr. Malfoy?"

Lucius paused, the tumbler halfway to his mouth, and fixed him with a look of polite incredulity. "I should think that would be rather obvious. Given what's happened to Potter-,"

"Who told you about that?" Fudge snapped. Then, as he realized to whom he was speaking, "Erm, well, that is, we wouldn't want to cause panic."

Lucius swallowed a mouthful of the bitter brandy with relish. "I received a letter from Draco with all the relevant details. No doubt other parents have received similar messages from their likewise diligent offspring. Keeping one's parents abreast of important happenings is, after all, good manners, and Draco and I have enjoyed a long and fruitful correspondence."

"I see," muttered Fudge, and Lucius could see the prospect of all those letters filling him with nascent panic.

"I daresay the news of Potter's collapse has spread throughout the Slytherin families, and the histrionic headlines in the Daily Prophet are imminent. I shudder to think what The Quibbler will have to say. I'm sure it will be a gaudy sensation, whatever that lunatic dreams up. Think of the bedlam." He swallowed the rest of his brandy with a flourish.

Fudge was now the color of rancid whey, and Dumbledore was gazing at him with an expression of pointed dismay. He tipped his tumbler in a jaunty toast and set it on the Headmaster's desk.

"If I'm not mistaken, Mr. Malfoy, you seem jubilant about the entire affair," Dumbledore said quietly. He had ceased sucking on the lemon sherbet, and the sweet bulged in his cheek, the beginning of a tumor.

"Not at all. I simply thought it best to apprise you of the situation."

"How thoughtful. Will there be anything else? As you have so clearly pointed out, I have a great deal with which to contend and very little time."

Lucius opened his mouth to reply, but Fudge was faster.

"Your unbridled insolence toward me is one thing, Dumbledore, but I will not stand for your rank condescension toward Mr. Malfoy. He has been a generous contributor to the school coffers, and I will remind you that he holds a chair on the Board of Governors. I will therefore thank you to keep a civil tongue."

McGonagall adjusted the clasp of her cloak. "Held a chair, Minister. Unless he has regained the position?" she inquired mildly.

Fudge went from rancid whey to mottled eggplant with alarming speed. "I know bl-,"

Lucius held up a gloved hand to stem the flood of indignation on his behalf. He was rapidly running out of time and patience. "I'm moved by your concern, Minister, but I'm afraid there was another reason for my visit. Altruism has never been my strong suit."

"Balderdash," Fudge snorted.

"I had hoped to see my son, to be sure that he wasn't unduly traumatized by recent events."

The lemon sherbet in Dumbledore's mouth drifted to the other cheek. "I'm sure a visit in the Slytherin Common Room can be arranged."

"Most generous of you, Headmaster, but in truth, I thought I might stay a few days to ensure that the environment to which he is being exposed during this trying time is a wholesome one. I haven't spent fifteen years grooming him to be an upstanding citizen just to see him despoiled by a cack-handed former schoolmate."

There was a phlegmatic cackle from Fudge, and Dumbledore's inscrutable countenance darkened.

"I have always found Professor Snape to be a brilliant teacher and an unsurpassed Potions Master," Dumbledore said coolly. "As for an extended stay in the Slytherin Common Room, I'm afraid that would be impossible. Hogwarts' facilities are already overtaxed by the Aurors currently residing on the grounds, and having a parent in their midst would only upset the students' routines still further. I would, however, raise no objection should you elect to take him on holiday."

"How truly noble of you. And I suppose your largesse has nothing to do with the fact your objection would be wholly irrelevant? As his father, I can remove him from the premises whenever I choose."

Dumbledore inclined his head in concession of the point, but McGonagall was glaring at him, disdain etched into every line of her narrow, craggy face.

"That's rich coming from you," sputtered Fudge. "A man with a criminal sequestered in the dungeons telling a father he cannot stay with his child."

Lucius froze in the act of adjusting his gloves. "Professor Snape is still at Hogwarts?" he said sharply, and though his expression betrayed nothing, his mind was racing. "Why isn't he in a holding cell in Azkaban with the rest of the murderous wretches and filthy vagabonds?"

There was a long, uncomfortable silence as each man took measure of the other. McGonagall sidled closer to Dumbledore, and the fabric of her robes twitched as her hand groped among the voluminous folds in search of her wand, and from behind him came the sound of wet, eager breathing. Umbridge still lingered in the doorway, a bloodthirsty voyeur perched on the edge of her seat in anticipation of bloodletting and the roar of the killing lion.

"Precisely my thoughts, Mr. Malfoy. Why let a dangerous predator lurk in the bowels of the castle? It's folly, and-,"

"Shut up, Fudge," Lucius said coldly, each word delivered with clipped precision.

Fudge lapsed into immediate and prudent silence.

Finally, Dumbledore said, "Innocent until proven guilty, Mr. Malfoy."

A wry smile. "I see." And he did.

For fifteen years, the subject of Severus' loyalty has been debated in sussurating whispers and over goblets of wine at lavish fetes. Every word and gesture dissected and analyzed in a search for the barest whiff of treachery, the first signs of cancerous doubt. We have watched and waited and wondered. When he no longer partook of the pleasures offered by struggling, shrieking Muggles or consorting Mudbloods, when he refused to slake his bloodlust at the point of a wand, the speculation rippled through our ranks like a soughing wind. Had you poisoned him against us?

I was not unsettled by his lack of enthusiasm for the spoils of a raid. I had never lowered myself to plundering the parted thighs of trembling blood-slick wenches. No rapture in the world was worth the taint such ill-gotten gains left behind, nor was I alarmed when he lost his taste for the snapping of bone or the hot, velvet slide of dagger through tendon. Even death loses its allure for those who live ever in its shadow. I dismissed the rumblings as rumor and petty jealousy that Severus Snape, a Slytherin once too weak to defend himself from the juvenile predations of four obnoxious, uncultured Gryffindor louts, had risen to join the inner circle.

No, it wasn't his shunning of the Dionysian carnival in which he had once so thoroughly delighted that worried me. Severus had always valued mortification over gluttony. It was the sudden reticence he displayed on those rare occasions when he did indulge in the simple, crude pleasures of his heart. The blade was no longer so swift and sure in his hand, and hesitation replaced rabid, unthinking lust when he knelt between conquered legs. Black eyes no longer lingered over bared and bite-marked breasts and slithered over the flat plane of exposed belly like hot tar over a ravaged landscape. Instead, he closed his eyes and turned his head, and even when he merely watched the revelry of his brethren, shame and abhorrence warred with lurid triumph on his face. The hatred that drove him to claw through the ranks with ruthless efficiency and wrung every drop of mercy from his bones had been diluted.

Even when the Dark Lord began to doubt, I was not sure. For all His charisma and power, He has made mistakes and questionable decisions before. That sniveling waste of flesh, Peter Pettigrew, crouches and whimpers at his feet like a beaten cur, and he has already proven his disloyalty. He betrayed the men who called him friend, and he will be an albatross ere the end. And the truth was, I didn't want him to be a traitor. He was my first disciple and my most avid, and I did not want to admit an error in my trusted judgment. He was mine after a fashion, and I surrender what is mine neither easily nor well.

But now I know. You who sent Hagrid to Azkaban under the flimsiest of pretenses from the Ministry would protect Severus neither so fiercely nor so well if he were not yours beyond doubt. You have expended better men for less. You sent your sainted James Potter to die in a funeral pyre of thatch and stone for the faint hope that his squalling infant would one day topple your nemesis, and you loved him as a son. The prodigal son has turned away, and he will not come home again.

"I have every intention of visiting my son." He smoothed his robes. "Perhaps we can reach an agreement."

Dumbledore stiffened, and the sweet in his mouth crunched with an audible grind of teeth, bones in the crushing jaws of a powerful predator. "I think not, Mr. Malfoy." Unyielding as tempered steel.

Fudge drew himself up. "As Minister of Magic, I'm overriding your decision, Headmaster, and granting Mr. Malfoy permission to remain on the Hogwarts grounds for as long as he sees fit until this crisis is resolved," he declared, and jammed the misshapen bowler hat onto his head as though that settled that matter.

"You've no right!" McGonagall thundered.

"Either Mr. Malfoy remains, or Snape goes to Azkaban, life debt be damned." It was almost a whisper, but Fudge's face was a florid mask of deadly resolve.

Lucius saw the conflict raging behind the Headmaster's carefully sculpted artifice, and in the moment before he replied and the battle of wills was decided, he had epiphany. Albus Dumbledore, virtuous Gryffindor, Father Christmas with malice toward none, despised Cornelius Fudge. Those long, nurturing fingers that had planted seeds of wonder in the fertile minds of generations of pupils longed to crush the life out of one of them. That he was capable of the basest of human emotions filled Lucius with satisfaction and a perverse sense of relief.

What's this? The golden lion with paws of clay?

After an interminable pause, Dumbledore spoke. "Very well. If you can find nowhere else, I'm sure Hagrid will have room to spare."

McGonagall erupted into an inexplicable coughing fit.

I would sooner sleep at the bottom of the lake than share lodgings with that thundering oaf. No telling what vermin nest in that unkempt hair and beard of his. If worse comes to worst, I'll claim Draco's bed and exile him to the hearth rug. Might do him good to experience barbarous privation.

"Splendid." He turned to Fudge, who was still basking in the afterglow of his all-too-rare victory over Dumbledore. "I can lay claim to modest influence over the other prominent Slytherin families. Perhaps I can persuade them to forebear on passing the announcement of Potter's misfortune to the press for the time being."

Pathetic relief flooded Fudge's face. "I would be forever in your debt, Mr. Malfoy," he gabbled, and Lucius was tempted to point out that he was already in his debt countless times over.

"I quite understand, Minister." He extended his hand. "I can make no promises; contrary to popular opinion, we Slytherins do not share a hive mind."

Fudge gripped his proffered hand in sweaty, clutching fingers and laughed too heartily and too long, a loud, braying guffaw that made his ears ring. "Indeed, Mr. Malfoy. Your assistance is most appreciated."

He extracted his hand from Fudge with a grimace disguised as a polite smile. "Headmaster. McGonagall."

He crossed the room and paused in the threshold of the doorway to gaze at Dumbledore one more time, one hand on the doorknob.

I know, old man, and sooner or later, I will depose you and claim your throne. You may have experience, but I have the advantage of youth, and even you must eventually wither. If you still draw breath when I take what is rightfully mine, each stripe I earned in Azkaban will become yours, and I will watch you grovel at my feet.

Then he was gone, in search of his son and eager to have a word with his informant before supper.