16th July 1995, the basement of Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, afternoon
"Defence first," Harry said. "Always defence first."
The eight of them had reassembled after lunch — those who'd dared hope the morning was the whole of it disabused by Harry's parting smile — and Harry stood again at the head of the room, the holly wand loose in his hand, more sure of himself now than he'd been at dawn.
"The single most useful thing any of you can learn," he went on, "isn't a way to hurt someone. It's a way to not be hurt. You can win every duel you ever fight and it doesn't matter a Knut if you're dead in the first. So. The Shield Charm. Protego. We start here, and we don't leave here until it's in your bones."
He demonstrated the movement for Neville and Ginny — the two who'd never managed it — slow and exact, the small sharp upward flick, the way the wrist locked at the end. "Sensation, movement, intent. Feel the wall you want. Make the shape. Mean it." He cast, and the faint silver-blue dome shimmered into being before his palm. "Protego."
Those who could already cast it — Hermione, Draco, the twins, Ron — he set a harder task. "Hold it. Not a flash, not a flicker — hold it, and while you're holding it, talk to me. Tell me what you had for breakfast. The whole point is to stop pouring all your attention into the shield. In a real fight you won't have a spare second to concentrate on staying alive — it has to run underneath everything else, the way breathing does."
Hermione had it inside two minutes, of course — her shield steady and even as she recited, with some asperity, the precise composition of Molly's breakfast and her views on its cholesterol content. Draco matched her a breath later, his shield narrower and harder-edged, the work of someone who'd been raised with a wand in his hand. The twins came second, naturally in concert, each holding a shield while keeping up a running commentary on the other's technique. Ron got there fourth, red-faced and triumphant, his shield wobbling like a soap-bubble but holding.
"Good," Harry said, and meant it. Then, while they were pleased with themselves: "Now. A word about doing this quietly."
He paced as he talked, the way Ethan paced, and the words came more easily than he'd have believed that morning.
"Nonverbal casting. Everyone thinks it's a party trick — casting without saying the word. It isn't. It's the whole game." He stopped. "Here's the thing my dad taught me. The development of language is fundamental to the development of thought. The more words you have that genuinely mean something to you, the more your mind can actually do — even with the words you never say out loud. Literacy makes you cleverer. And casting a spell is a mental task like any other."
Hermione's quill had stopped moving entirely; she was staring at him.
"So when you've truly learned a spell — when you understand it down to the principles, not just the syllables — the intent becomes second nature. That's all nonverbal magic is. Not memorising the noise. Grasping the thing underneath the noise, so well that you don't need the noise any more." He turned to the room. "And the fastest way to learn that — " a small smile " — is to put you somewhere you don't have time to say the word."
He nodded to Luna.
Luna stepped forward, and without any ceremony at all began firing.
Not hard — but fast, and relentless, a steady stream of weak Stinging Hexes and harmless red bolts at Neville and Ginny, one after another after another, giving neither of them the half-second their mouths needed for an incantation. "Protego," Harry called over it, "but don't say it — there's no time to say it — just make the wall, make it, make it, make it—"
Hermione and Draco watched, riveted. This was not how Hogwarts taught anything. This was something else — pressure as pedagogy, the spell wrung out of the student by simple necessity.
Neville was the slowest. His first dozen attempts collapsed; he took the bolts on his arms and chest and flinched and tried again. But Harry, watching, found his own patience holding steady — and found, too, something in Neville that surprised him. The boy did not quit. Every hex that got through, Neville set his jaw and lifted his wand again, dogged past all reason, and there was a determination in his round face that Harry had not known was in him.
'He'd have liked you,' Harry thought, unbidden, of the Neville who'd hugged his restored parents three nights ago. 'Whoever you're becoming — he'd be proud.'
Then Harry took over the firing himself, and turned the heat on Ginny and Neville both, and the twins ramped their volley up beside him for good measure — and it was Ron, of all of them, who got there first.
His method was, to put it generously, brave. Rather than fret over the wandwork, Ron simply waded into the storm, taking hex after hex full-on, his shield snapping up too slow and breaking too soon — and then, on perhaps the twentieth attempt, with a yelp and a wince and absolutely no incantation at all, a clumsy silver dome banged into existence in front of him and held, swallowing three bolts in a row.
"HA!" Ron threw both fists up. "Did you see — did you see that—"
A stray bolt he'd entirely forgotten about caught him square in the backside.
The shield collapsed. Ron yelped. And the whole room — Hermione and Draco shaking their heads in identical despair, the twins howling — dissolved into laughter at the sight of Ron Weasley hopping and rubbing himself with an expression of profound betrayal and a grin he couldn't quite suppress.
"Lesson," Harry said, fighting his own laugh, "two: never stop watching the rest of the room."
By the time the light from the high grimy window had gone amber, every one of them had managed it at least once, and every one of them was utterly spent — flat on the cool flagstones, chests heaving, wands gone limp in slack hands.
Harry and Luna were barely damp.
Ron lifted his head off the floor to glare at the two of them. "How. How are you not dead. I can't feel my arms."
"Magic reserves," Harry said, dropping down cross-legged among them. "It's the last thing for today. You've each got a — a well, sort of, of magic to draw on. Right now yours are small, because you're young, and they'd grow a bit on their own as you got older anyway." He spread his hands. "But this — being run completely dry, the way you all are now — that's what makes the well bigger. Faster than time would. Keep doing this, keep emptying yourselves out, and in a few weeks you'll wonder how today nearly killed you."
"That," Draco said, from the floor, with feeling, "had better be true, Potter."
"Dad's never wrong about magic. Annoyingly."
The basement door opened at the top of the stairs and Molly's voice came down, taking in the sight of eight collapsed children with a shake of the head that did nothing to hide her fondness. "Look at the state of you. Baths, the lot of you, and then there's... well, supper now, you've been down here half the day. Up you get."
"We will, Molly, thank you," Harry called, smiling up at her, all sweetness — and waited until she'd gone before he turned back to the room, and the smile changed shape into something the exhausted children recognised with dawning horror.
"Right," said Harry pleasantly. "Eat. Rest. Because we're doing this again first thing tomorrow."
The groan that rose from the basement floor was magnificent.
17th July 1995, the kitchen of Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, morning
Breakfast brought news.
"The trial's today," Tonks announced through a mouthful of toast, dropping into a chair. "Those dark wizards your lot collected at the maze — the ones Mordred left behind when he legged it. Amelia Bones is running it. Head of Magical Law Enforcement, takes the big ones herself." She grinned. "She's good, Harry. Properly good. Doesn't bluster, doesn't perform — she just gets to the truth and pins it to the wall. Half the Wizengamot's terrified of her and the other half wishes they were her."
"It's open," Percy added, rubbing his eyes — he'd come through the Floo at dawn and looked it. "That's the strange part. Public gallery, anyone may attend. Which is not how these things are usually done."
He set down his cup with the controlled disgust of a man delivering bad news about his own employer. "Because Fudge ordered it open."
Sirius made a noise.
"He wants a show," Percy went on. "His reasoning, as I understand it: parade these men in front of the public, prove Voldemort's threat is enormous — that one man could turn so many — and then position himself as the steady hand managing the crisis. He's announced he'll attend personally. Front and centre." He pinched the bridge of his nose. "It's not justice. It's the two factions taking the field where everyone can watch."
"Good," said Sirius, and clapped Percy on the shoulder with open approval. "Let them watch, then. Amelia'll make him look a fool."
But Lupin's face had gone grim. "It's not so simple. If Fudge owns the framing — if the story that comes out of that courtroom is the Ministry has it well in hand — then it's the Order that loses. Every recruit we hoped to draw with the truth, every fence-sitter we needed frightened into action, watches the Minister wave it all away." He shook his head. "This could set our work back months."
"Amelia'll have seen that coming." Moody's magical eye spun. "She's not a fool either, and she's been doing this longer than Cornelius has had his hat. If she's let it go open, she's got a measure for it. We'll see what." He took a pull from his flask. "Constant vigilance."
Harry set down his fork. "Can we go?"
The table went quiet.
"It's open to all," Harry pressed, before the obvious objection could form. "And I was there. In the graveyard. I watched these kind of men kneel to him. If anyone's earned the right to see them answer for it—"
"Harry." Molly's face had crumpled with worry. "Sweetheart, after everything... reliving it, in a public courtroom, with Fudge and his lot watching for any chance to call you—"
"I'll be all right," Harry said, gently and firmly, and there was enough of Ethan's steadiness in it that Molly faltered. "I've done the hard part of remembering already. I'd rather see it through."
"He's tougher than the pack of us put together," Sirius said, "and he's got a right to it. Let him go."
"I'd want him watched," Moody growled — "but aye. Better he sees the machinery of it than imagines worse."
And then Ron was in "if Harry's going, I'm going", and Hermione "someone sensible ought to be there", and Draco with a quiet nod, and the twins as a matter of principle, and — to everyone's mild surprise — Neville, jaw set, who said only, "I'd like to see them sentenced," and no one argued with that.
Luna and Ginny, however, exchanged a look and declined. "Courtrooms are full of grudge-wisps," Luna explained serenely, "and besides, Jasper's been moping and Osian's eaten one of Sirius's cushions and someone ought to keep them out of trouble." Ginny, who simply wanted a day of the Snidget and the Re'em without a single mention of the Ministry, agreed with enormous sincerity.
Arthur and Sirius took them in.
The journey itself was half the wonder of it — a clattering rush through the London Underground, Arthur delighting in every poster and turnstile, and then a battered red telephone box on a forgotten street, into which Arthur crammed the lot of them and dialled a sequence on the rotary face, and the floor sank away beneath them into the earth.
The Atrium of the Ministry of Magic opened up around them like a cathedral built by people who'd never been told no. A long hall of dark polished wood, a ceiling of peacock-blue set with shifting golden symbols, fireplaces flaring green down both walls as witches and wizards stepped out of them mid-stride — and at the centre, an enormous golden fountain, a wizard and witch and centaur and goblin and house-elf gathered in gleaming statuary around a spray of water. Harry, Ron, and the twins, who had never seen it, simply stopped and stared.
"Bit much, isn't it," Sirius murmured. "Notice who's looking up at whom, in that fountain. Tells you everything about the people who built it."
They rode the lift — a lurching, plummeting, sideways-swinging contraption that loosed a flutter of memo-aeroplanes every time the grille opened — down to the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, where they found Kingsley in low conversation with a square-jawed witch in a monocle, her grey hair cropped short, her whole bearing that of someone who had never once in her life been intimidated by a room. She gave the children one swift, assessing look — lingering, just perceptibly, on Harry — gave Kingsley a final word, and swept off toward the courts.
"Madam Bones," Arthur said, watching her go with respect. "Right. There's time yet — come and see where the real work happens."
Arthur's office was a cramped, cosy burrow at the end of the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts corridor, every surface heaped with confiscated Muggle objects in various states of dangerous enchantment — and the rare chance to show his children and their friends what he actually did all day turned Arthur Weasley positively luminous. He demonstrated a biting kettle and a set of regurgitating toilet seats with the pride of a man unveiling the Crown Jewels, and the children, to his visible delight, were a genuinely appreciative audience — even Draco, who examined a self-stirring Muggle teapot with frank, surprised interest.
Harry, drifting to Arthur's elbow, asked quietly about the Department of Mysteries.
Arthur blinked — and then something passed over his face as he looked at the boy, some read of what lay behind the question, and he answered far more freely than Harry had expected. The Unspeakables, he said, low; the locked rooms below; the things they studied that no one else was permitted to know — time, thought, death, love, the great forces. Things off the official books entirely. "Sam'd know it best, of course," Arthur said, "it's his shop — but there are corridors down there even he steps carefully in." Harry listened, and filed it away, and did not say why.
The door banged open. Perkins, Arthur's stooped old colleague, stuck his head in, breathless. "Arthur — it's starting — Courtroom Ten, they've moved it down to Ten—"
"Ten?" Arthur was already up. "That's — they've not used Ten for a full trial in years. Come on, all of you, quickly — the lift won't go that deep, we'll have to take the stairs—"
And they ran — down and down, the air going colder and the torches sparser, until they spilled out at last into a dim stone passage deep beneath the Ministry, where Sam was waiting outside a heavy iron-studded door, arms folded, his face unreadable.
"Cutting it fine," Sam said. He looked at Harry a moment, and something gentled in him. "You sure, kiddo?"
Harry nodded.
Sam held the door.
Courtroom Ten was a vast, sunken, dungeon-like chamber of dark stone, tiered benches rising on every side, every one of them filled. At the centre, chained chairs held the accused; high at the front, the Wizengamot sat in plum-coloured robes — and among them, unmissable, the lime-green bowler hat of Cornelius Fudge, who had arranged himself dead centre with the air of a man at his own coronation.
Amelia Bones ran it.
Her voice, when it came, was cold and clear and entirely without theatre, and it cut the murmuring chamber to silence. She took the prisoners one at a time, and she was relentless — not cruel, but exact, peeling at each man's account with question after patient question, driving always at the same two targets: what did they know of Voldemort's plans, his numbers, his aims — and, for the watching public, the steady, hammering establishment of the sheer scale of what had come to Hogwarts that night. How many of you came. Who commanded you. Who summoned you. Whose name did you serve. She was building something in that cold room, brick by brick: the size of the threat, laid out where the whole of the wizarding world could see it.
And again and again, a high, false, sweetly girlish voice cut across her.
"Hem, hem."
She sat near Fudge — a squat, toad-like little witch in fussy pink, a black velvet bow perched in her short curls, a smile fixed on her wide face that never once reached her cold eyes. And every time Amelia Bones built her threat a course higher, the pink witch chipped at its foundation. Surely, she simpered, the Wizengamot oughtn't to frighten the good public. Surely these were merely the dupes of three dangerous criminals — Mordred Slythra, the rat Pettigrew, the lunatic Crouch — and those removed, why, this so-called Dark Lord was a lone man, hunted across the world, hardly the stuff of panic. The Ministry had everything well in hand. The Minister had everything well in hand.
Harry's skin crawled at the sound of her.
"Who," Ron muttered, with naked disgust, "is that."
"Dolores Umbridge," Arthur murmured back, and there was a bitterness in it Harry rarely heard from him. "Senior Undersecretary to the Minister. I've watched that woman work for years. Don't be fooled by the pink." His mouth thinned. "She is the cruellest thing in this building, and she does it all with a smile and a hem, hem."
Sam leaned in, his voice very low. "She's the one who drafted the anti-werewolf legislation. Two years back." His dark eyes were steady on the pink witch. "Would have stripped them of work, of housing, of the right to a wand — made beasts of them by law. It was her. Ethan, me and Remus broke it — quietly, before it ever reached the floor. Cost us a great deal to do it." A pause. "If it had passed, Remus would have lost everything. His livelihood. His freedom to walk in daylight as a man. There are people in this country who'd have died of that law, slowly, and she drafted it over tea and thought it tidy."
The children's faces, one by one, went dark.
Hermione had gone rigid with fury, and Ron beside her looked ready to climb over the bench — and it was Draco, of all people, who set a hand on each of their arms and held them still, his own face pale and cold. And Harry — Harry looked at Dolores Umbridge's small fixed smile and felt something settle in his chest, hard and quiet, colder than rage.
He thought of Lupin, who filed paperwork and chose runners and laughed at Sirius's tours and carried a curse in his blood through no fault of his own. He thought of how nearly a woman with a velvet bow had unmade that gentle man's whole life with a form.
'I'll remember you,' Harry thought, watching her simper. 'Whoever you are. I'll remember.'
The trial ground on. Amelia drove for the truth; Umbridge blunted it; Fudge presided over the whole performance wearing the expression of a man certain he was winning. In the end the dark wizards were convicted — every one of them sentenced to Azkaban, the chains carrying them off one by one — and on that, at least, both factions could agree.
But the larger battle, the one fought over the watching public's fear, ended exactly where Moody had warned it might: with no victor. Amelia Bones had shown them a monster; Dolores Umbridge had smiled and called it a manageable inconvenience; and the gallery filed out divided, each carrying away the version that frightened them least.
As they climbed back toward the daylight, Harry was very quiet.
"You all right?" Sirius asked him, low.
"Yeah." Harry watched the torches brighten as they rose. "Just — adding a name to a list." He glanced back, once, toward the cold stone deep below. "That's all."