Amelia Bones became Minister for Magic on the fourteenth of July.
Fudge's resignation statement had been published on the morning of the twenty-fifth of June, as required — not at nine o'clock, but at seven forty-three, which suggested that someone in his office had worked through the night to produce it in the specific form that minimised the damage to the individuals around Fudge while not obscuring the essential admissions. It was the version of the truth that was compatible with political survival for some of the people adjacent to the decisions. Ron had read it with the flat assessment of someone who had not expected the complete version and had received something sufficient.
The trials ran through July. He watched them from the Wulfhall — through the Prophet, through Amelia's brief letters, through the specific quality of information arriving over several weeks as the legal process did the work that legal processes did when they were being conducted by people who intended to do them correctly.
Lucius Malfoy: the question of the trial was complicated by the question of the death at Azkaban, which the legal process resolved in the specific way that it resolved deaths in the line of official magical duty — documented, examined, and classified without prosecution. The remaining Malfoy estate was significantly reduced. Narcissa and Draco retained the Manor. The specific liquid assets and political influence that had been the foundation of the family's power for three generations were distributed, by order of the Wizengamot, to the reparations fund that Amelia had established in the first week of her tenure.
Crabbe Senior: the same classification. Gregory Crabbe was not tried. He was, Ron understood from Amelia's letter, in the custody of his mother, who had the quality of someone who had received a great deal of information about her son's recent choices and was addressing them with the particular thoroughness of a woman who had nothing left to protect.
The Death Eaters who had escaped Azkaban and been captured in the Ministry on the twenty-fourth: tried, convicted, sentenced with the specific efficiency of a Wizengamot that had been reorganised under Amelia's tenure to remove the specific procedural delays that had made the first-war trials as long and as painful as they had been.
The wealth reduction was systematic. Not punitive beyond what was proportional — Amelia was not conducting a purge, she was conducting accountability — but real, and significant, and the specific effect of it on the dark faction's ability to operate was, as Ron calculated in the dark-covered notebook, the effect of removing the financial infrastructure that had made the faction possible. You could rebuild ideology. You could not quickly rebuild three generations of accumulated wizarding wealth that had been redistributed by legal order.
The dark faction would be crippled for two decades. Possibly three. That was enough.
He wrote in the notebook: enough time to build something better.