Corvus had expected a reaction to the latest additions to his power palette, but he had not expected this.
The Dementors, embodiments of despair, death, and famine of the soul, had crowded around him with the earnest devotion of creatures who had finally found something familiar enough to trust. They drifted close, brushing at the edges of his aura, trying to remain near him even after the first curiosity had been satisfied. The effect would have been absurd if it had not involved some of the most feared beings in the magical world.
He let them linger for a while.
There was value in that.
He observed how they reacted to the residue of the Shroud, how they leaned toward the death-soaked layers around his tendrils, how they recoiled from nothing in him. If anything, they seemed calmer the closer they came. That was useful information.
When the time came to return to the frigate, a handful of them followed.
Corvus turned in the air, above the water and looked at the nearest cluster. Their ragged forms drifted in the northern wind, empty hoods facing him with the patience of creatures that did not understand haste.
"Not today," he conveyed to them.
The Dementors hovered in place.
Corvus added a faint promise of another visit. Enough to keep them cooperative without making the shipyard uninhabitable.
That settled them.
Reluctantly.
He had no desire to test how long Bastion Guards, dragon riders, enchanters, and operators of the Frigate would tolerate a ring of Dementors hanging outside their barracks like devoted hounds waiting.
He floated back toward the frigate.
As he approached the vessel, he folded the Shadow Tendrils back. The vast black wings collapsed without flourish, each strand slipping into his aura until nothing remained behind him except the memory of what had been there.
The group still waited where he had left them.
Arcturus stood with his hands behind his back, chin slightly lifted, as though he had decided that astonishment was an indulgence for lesser men. Vinda's face was composed, showing none of her thoughts. Elizaveta looked calm enough to be mistaken for bored, though Corvus knew the difference.
The Delacours had less practice at disguise.
Apolline held herself together on skill alone. Fleur watched him with a mixture of wonder and troubled fascination. Gabrielle looked as if someone had told her nightmares could be trained like garden birds, and she had accepted this as excellent news.
Minister Delacour looked the worst.
He was making the sort of face men made when they had already signed a parchment and only afterwards learned the full scale of what they had agreed to tie their house into.
The shipyard had done its job. The carriers, the frigates, the destroyers, the submarines, the dragon forces, the warded platforms, the disciplined workers, all of it declared force with no attempt to make force look gentle.
But the shipyard was not what truly disturbed him.
Corvus was.
The vessels could be counted. The dragons could be counted. Even nuclear warheads, if one were determined and catastrophically unlucky, could be counted.
Corvus could not.
That was the real issue.
Minister Delacour had turned to the shipyard and seen a fleet large enough to cow nations. Then he had looked up and seen his future son-in-law call Dementors to heel with nothing more than presence and intent.
Corvus stepped onto the deck and faced him directly.
"You seem troubled, Minister Delacour." His tone remained level, almost courteous, though the slight glow in his eyes gave the line enough edge. "Was the tour of the shipyard not to your liking?"
Minister Delacour swallowed.
"No," he said too quickly, then corrected himself before the sentence did damage. "No. This place is magnificent. I see no force on this planet that could stand against the might of the Alliance, Lord Rosier."
He paused there, as though considering whether honesty was courage or stupidity.
"Yet I do not understand why one would build such power when there is no enemy worthy of even half of it."
The question was genuine.
Corvus nodded slowly.
"For now," he said, "we do not have an enemy. Let us hope it stays that way."
Minister Delacour understood enough from the answer to know there would be no second answer. He gave a small nod and wisely kept the rest of his thoughts private.
Inside, however, his imagination had already begun working against him.
He could see the future in only two forms, and neither comforted him. One version was the world under such careful control that even thinking about rebellion would need permission. The other was ash.
He found himself praying, quite sincerely, that Mother Magic would guide the young man standing before him, because if guidance failed, no earthly structure would stop him.
Manard returned to the shipyard with visible relief. He belonged among engines, wards, armour plating, and the holy argument between "enough guns" and "more guns." Social diplomacy was useful only until he could return to making something larger and more dangerous than the thing he had finished yesterday.
Corvus turned from the rails.
"We should return to the drawing room," he said.
The group followed him below deck.
The interior of the frigate had changed almost as much as the exterior. Corridors were broader. Bulkheads carried layered sigils under polished metal. Lighting crystals ran along the ceiling in lines of pale gold. Crew quarters had indeed been expanded, though Manard had clearly done so with the bitterness of a man sacrificing artillery space in the name of practical bodies.
They descended to one of the drawing rooms designed for distinguished guests.
The room held the same strange balance as the rest of the frigate. Soft chairs, polished tables, a drinks cabinet, thick carpets fixed against the deck by unseen charms, and all of it surrounded by enough concealed warding and armoured reinforcement to survive an argument with a coastal lighthouse.
House elves appeared with drinks and small dishes. The Delacours accepted them more readily now that the immediate threat of Dementors had been reduced to memory.
The return journey to London was handled in silence and motion. The frigate lifted, shifted, and moved with grace. Fleur noticed it first, the absence of the expected jolt. The ship did not struggle with the sky. It claimed it.
--
While the Alliance refined its power in the north, something else was boiling in Denmark.
The chamber of the Folketing held the sort of tension that always came before an idea escaped the room and infected a continent.
Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen sat with the Social Democrats, face set in the patient expression of a man who knew today's agenda had been hijacked by a subject no government had prepared to own properly.
Across from him, the liberal and conservative benches sat more alert than usual. The far smaller parties smelled opportunity. The Danish People's Party smelled panic and intended to use it. The Radical Left looked uneasy. The Socialists looked morally offended in advance.
At the centre right benches, Conservative leader Per Stig Møller rose with a stack of papers and the confidence of a man who knew half the room had already heard his proposal in private.
He was not alone in that confidence.
Behind a few familiar faces sat men and women who had changed more in the last year than their colleagues understood. Shadows of the Black Spire wore their lives now. Legilimency behind parliamentary eyes. They had been seeded carefully, not in open power, but in advisory chains, committee channels, speech preparation circles, and the private conversations that decided what would later be called spontaneous national concern.
Møller adjusted his glasses and began.
"Madam Speaker, colleagues, Denmark is not facing a temporary legal inconvenience. We are facing a structural transformation in what law itself means."
A few heads lifted at once.
Good opening.
He went on.
"We now share our territory with a class of people able to perform acts that no civil code was built to regulate. They can alter matter, vanish from custody, circumvent infrastructure, and in many cases provide for themselves independently of normal monetary conditions. This is not fantasy any longer. This is administration."
A Social Democrat muttered something about alarmism. Møller did not look at him.
"Let us ask a simple question," he continued. "What happens when a Mana user becomes a criminal? Can an ordinary police force reliably detain someone who can simply disappear? Can a standard prison hold someone who can rewrite a lock, change a wall, or remove the floor from under his own feet?"
That created the first true silence.
The silence did not come from elegance in the argument, but from its brutal practicality.
Practical arguments survived where moral outrage burned itself out.
Rasmussen leaned back in his seat, not interrupting. He was listening now.
Møller placed both hands on the lectern.
"We have reached the point where pretending Mana users can simply be folded into ordinary legal jurisdiction is not realistic. It is negligence."
A member of Venstre rose halfway as if to interject, then sat again when the Speaker called for order.
Møller pressed on.
"I therefore propose that Denmark begin formal negotiations on a separate territorial and legal structure for Mana users within the Kingdom. Greenland and the Faroe Islands offer the necessary space, the necessary strategic distance, and the constitutional flexibility to begin such work without immediate collapse of domestic order."
That detonated the chamber.
Voices rose at once.
A Socialist member came to his feet. "You are proposing segregation."
Møller turned slightly. "I am proposing reality."
Another voice cut in from the Social Liberals. "You would carve out regions of the Kingdom and hand them over."
"Not hand them over," Møller replied. "Recognise them properly. Their own internal government. Their own security structures. Their own jurisdiction over magical crime and magical commerce. In exchange, the Kingdom retains diplomatic compact, external defence coordination, and structured treaty obligations."
The Speaker called for order again.
This time, Rasmussen stood.
His voice carried the tired authority of a sitting prime minister who had no interest in letting the room turn into a theatre.
"Mr Møller," he said, "do I understand correctly that you are suggesting we create autonomous Mana jurisdictions inside the Danish realm because existing law cannot contain them?"
Møller met his gaze.
"Yes."
Rasmussen's expression did not shift. "And if tomorrow they decide they are not satisfied with Greenland and the Faroes?"
That was the right question.
Several heads turned.
Even some of Møller's allies did not like how directly it named the fear.
Møller answered anyway. "Then we will at least be negotiating from a framework rather than from collapse."
A murmur ran through the chamber.
From the back benches, one of the newer members of a regional committee asked permission to speak. He had not held his seat long. He had, however, become unusually influential in the last few months.
A Shadow.
No one in the room knew it except another two Shadows and the man whose policies lay behind the entire design.
The member rose and spoke with careful calm.
"This proposal is not a surrender. It is risk management. We cannot enslave Mana users, nor can we sensibly pretend they remain subject in every instance to laws written for people who cannot alter reality. Separate legal status is not an insult if it is built on mutual recognition."
That line mattered.
Mutual recognition sounded better than concession.
Another member, older, with a military background, central right, picked up the argument at once.
"We have already seen in continental Europe what happens when states fail to establish clear terms. Private militias rise. Foreign actors intervene. Local forces become decorative."
Decorative.
That word travelled.
It landed badly with the chamber because too many people knew it might be true.
Rasmussen drummed his fingers once against the desk, then stopped. "And the people in Greenland and the Faroes?"
Møller spread one hand. "Protected by treaty, compensated where needed, relocated where necessary, and represented in the transition. We are not discussing expulsion. We are discussing orderly coexistence through separation."
On paper.
That was how such movements always began.
On paper.
By the end of the session, no vote had been taken.
That was not the point.
The point was that the idea now existed in the public record.
It had been spoken under parliamentary protection. It had entered the newspapers. It would be discussed on television. Business figures would support it for the promise of stability. Military voices would support it for the logic of the chain of command. Social figures would support it because the word coexistence sounded gentle enough to repeat over coffee.
From Denmark, it would spread.
The idea would spread from Denmark to Norway, Sweden, Germany, and the Low Countries, with each version adapted to local law, local fears, and local political ambitions.
The argument forming across Europe was simple and dangerous at the same time. Mana users, the reasoning went, required their own lands, their own government, their own internal security forces, and their own legal structure, because subjecting people who could alter reality to laws written for ordinary citizens was impossible to enforce. The movement would present itself as humane, modern, and practical, which made it far easier to sell to voters who preferred stability over philosophical consistency.
Behind it stood Corvus, arranging a safe and secure world for magicals without formally enslaving Muggles.
At least not openly.