24th June 1995, the graveyard at Little Hangleton, 10:01 PM
"Your other arm, Wormtail."
Pettigrew flinched. The new silver hand gleamed cruelly in the firelight of the brazier, but it was his remaining flesh-and-blood arm that Voldemort wanted now. The little man pushed back his sleeve, baring the livid black tattoo burned into the skin of his forearm — the skull, the serpent — and Voldemort pressed one long white finger to it.
Harry, bound to the headstone, felt his scar split with fresh fire.
The Mark beneath Voldemort's finger turned from red to black to a searing, vivid black, and a sound seemed to pass out from it across the night — a summons that needed no words. Voldemort lifted his finger and stepped back, surveying the empty graveyard with the patience of a man who had waited thirteen years and could spare another minute.
"They will come," he said softly, almost to himself. "And we shall see how many."
He turned, then, to the boy on the headstone, and there was something almost conversational in the way he settled himself — a teacher beginning a lesson.
"You are wondering, perhaps, how I came to be." The high cold voice was unhurried. "My father was a Muggle, Harry Potter. A handsome, wealthy Muggle who married my mother because she fed him a love potion, and who abandoned her the moment he learned what she was. A witch. He left her with child and went back to his fine house and his fine family, and my mother — who could have saved herself with magic — chose instead to die. To give birth in a Muggle orphanage and die there, leaving me to be raised among Muggle children."
His red eyes glittered.
"I found him, years later. My father. In his fine house. And I gave him what he had given my mother." The thin mouth curved. "Nothing."
Harry, through the lingering tremors of the Cruciatus still wracking his muscles, pushing the blue-moon stillness of his Cogitation up against the damage like a hand pressed to a wound, forced his jaw to work.
"So you—" his voice came out cracked and hoarse, "—hate Muggles. For what one Muggle did. And you hate Muggle-borns. And half-bloods. Even though — even though you're a half-blood yourself."
The words landed in the silence of the graveyard like a dropped stone.
For a moment Voldemort said nothing.
Then he laughed — that high, cold, delighted laugh — and Harry's skin crawled.
"Hypocrisy," Voldemort said, savouring the word. "You name it well. And under the Cruciatus, no less. Your mind is extraordinary, boy. Most men cannot string two words together for an hour after my wand has touched them. You have done it in minutes." The red eyes narrowed with interest. "This Seer of yours taught you well. I should very much like to meet him."
Harry shut his mouth at once. He fixed his fierce green eyes on Voldemort's red ones and said nothing — pulled the stillness up around his thoughts, the blue moon, the calm water, the walls Ethan had built—
It did him no good.
He felt the cold slide of the Legilimency behind his eyes, found the image of the moon, and Voldemort, almost lazily, flicked his wand.
"Crucio."
The blue moon shattered. The pain took him whole, white and total, and he writhed against the marble bindings until the curse lifted and left him gasping, his cheek pressed to the cold stone, his whole body singing with the after-burn.
"Your Seer is taking his time," Voldemort observed pleasantly. "One would almost think he was not coming at all."
Harry said nothing. 'He'll come,' he thought, holding to it the way Luna three hundred miles away was holding to he is alive.'He'll come.'
And then, with a series of soft cracks like a string of firecrackers, the Death Eaters began to arrive.
They Apparated one and two at a time, dark-cloaked and masked, into the firelit circle, and formed a ring around their master, and one by one fell to their knees and crawled forward to kiss the hem of his robes. Harry, fighting the haze, fixed every face he could glimpse beneath a slipping mask into his memory, hard, the way Ethan had taught him to hold a thing he could not write down.
Voldemort surveyed them, and his voice when it came was very soft, and very terrible.
"Thirteen years," he said. "Thirteen years, and not one of you tried to find me. Not one." He walked the inside of the circle slowly. "You knew I had not died — you, who took the Mark, you knew better than any what I had done to keep myself from death. And yet you did not look for me. You returned to your comfortable houses. Your Ministry posts. Your wives and your children. You told the world you had been bewitched, that you had never truly served me." He stopped. "You feared, perhaps, a power greater than mine. Old Dumbledore, in his castle. Hiding behind a wizard who plays at being kind."
No one dared answer.
He moved on down the line, and named them as he passed — a roll-call of the kneeling. Harry caught the names through the ringing in his ears. Nott. Crabbe. Goyle. Macnair.
And then: "Lucius. My slippery friend."
Harry's heart clenched.
Lucius Malfoy knelt and kissed the hem and rose, his pale aristocratic face composed beneath the lifted mask, murmuring something about always having hoped, always having waited for a sign. Voldemort regarded him with cold amusement.
'Draco,' Harry thought, with a lurch of dread that cut clean through the pain. 'Oh, Draco.' He searched the circle desperately for any other name he knew, any other House — and found, with a small fierce relief that he clung to, that he heard no Greengrass. Not Daphne's father. Not Astoria's. Whatever else this night held, the Greengrasses were not in this ring.
Voldemort returned to the centre.
"You wish to know where I have been," he said, and it was not a question. "Very well. Hear it, and remember that I tell you only because none of you will leave this place able to repeat it carelessly."
And he told it — the Albanian forest, thirteen years of being less than the meanest ghost, surviving by possessing the small animals of the wood, waiting. Quirrell, who had come seeking and been found instead, who had carried him on the back of his own skull into Hogwarts and failed him over the Stone. The flight back to Albania, and the long despair of a thing that had begun to believe it would never hold a wand again.
"And then," Voldemort said, "two of my servants found me."
He gestured, almost fondly, at the weeping Pettigrew — and beyond him, at the empty dark where, Harry understood, someone else had stood not long ago.
"A rat, and a Seer. Wormtail, fleeing his own exposure, heard from the lesser rats of the forest that a spirit dwelt there. And another — a clever, resourceful man, gifted with the Sight — read the same truth in his own way, and came. Between them they brought me a gift on the road. Bertha Jorkins." The red eyes gleamed. "A foolish woman with a Ministry memory-charm laid over a very interesting secret. I broke the charm. I broke her. And out of her spilled two priceless things: the Triwizard Tournament — and the knowledge that one of my most faithful servants was alive, and placed, exactly where I would have wished him."
Harry's pupils contracted.
'A servant. At Hogwarts. All year.'
The ominous feeling he had carried since the night his name rose from the Goblet — the one he had pushed to the back of his mind a hundred times, blaming the Tournament, the chaos, the sheer impossibility of it — rose up now and would not be pushed back.
"My servant at the castle," Voldemort went on, "ensured your name went into the Goblet. Ensured you survived each Task — not for your sake, boy, but for mine. Ensured that tonight, of all nights, you would reach the centre of the maze and lay your hand upon a Cup that would bring you here, to me. He has served me faithfully, under the noses of Dumbledore and his Seer both, for an entire year."
The names spun through Harry's mind, fast and useless. Karkaroff — Bagman — Snape—Moody—someone else— who—
He cut the thought off.
Because Voldemort was talking. Fervently. Pacing his circle of kneeling servants, drinking in their fear and their worship, his back half-turned, his attention spread thin across a dozen grovelling men.
This was the moment Harry had been waiting for.
He let the names go. He let everything go but a single clear shape held at the very front of his mind — the abstract Rune that Ethan had burned into his palm one week ago in the Room of Requirement.
Wand.
The Re'em wand precipitated into his bound right hand out of nowhere.
It was already moving as his fingers closed around it. 'Now.'
The marble angel that bound him — Harry threw his will at it through the wand, Reanimate, release, MOVE — and the carved stone shuddered, its grip cracking open, its arms grinding back. He dropped free of the headstone, hit the cold grass in a roll, and came up with the wand levelled at the stunned circle.
"Expulso!"
He had aimed at the ground at the Death Eaters' feet — meant only to throw up dirt, a screen of churned earth and smoke to cover his scramble for his lost holly wand and the nearest cover.
The graveyard erupted.
The blast tore a crater in the earth, hurled a great fountain of soil and shattered stone into the air, and the shockwave — far beyond anything Harry had braced for — picked up three of the nearest Death Eaters and flung them bodily backward into the gravestones. Smoke and dirt rained down across the whole circle.
Harry, scrambling low through the chaos toward the gleam of his holly wand in the grass, felt the thing in his hand sing.
He had known the Re'em wand was a power-amplifier. He had been told. He had used it sparingly, carefully, under Ethan's eye. He had still, somehow, underestimated it. The wand did not merely add to his magic — it took the shape of his intent and made it enormous. And under his fingers it felt — he could not help the wry, exhausted half-smile that pulled at his mouth even now — it felt right. More right than any wand had ever felt in his hand.
He snatched up the holly wand, dived behind a leaning granite cross, and pressed his back to the cold stone, chest heaving, a wand in each hand.
Across the smoking crater, Lord Voldemort had not moved.
He stood exactly where he had stood, the dirt settling around him, untouched — and his red eyes were fixed on the cross behind which Harry crouched, and they were shining with a cold and genuine delight.
"Now that," Voldemort breathed, "is interesting."
He tilted his head.
"A second wand. Summoned wandlessly, wordlessly, while bound... That... is the Seer's work — his little gift, left in your keeping." The red eyes narrowed, fascinated. "And what a magnificent wand it is. I felt that blast in my teeth, boy." A pause, almost hungry. "What is the core? What in Merlin's name did your Seer put inside it?"
Harry, behind the stone, said nothing, and held both wands, and waited, and prayed.
24th June 1995, the centre of the burning maze, 10:01 PM
Luna and Cedric reached the heart of the maze at a dead run.
The fire had spread here — flame ran in bright sheets up the inner hedges, and the heat rolled off them in waves, and yet, impossibly, the great structure had not collapsed into ash. The magical plants resisted the burning, blackening and curling but holding their shape, so that the whole centre of the maze stood wreathed in fire and still recognisably itself.
"They built it to last," Cedric panted, awed despite everything. "Even on fire—" He spotted the dull gleam of gold near the scorched plinth. "There. The Cup—"
He started forward.
"Down!"
Luna's hand shot out and shoved him sideways, throwing herself the other way — and a jet of livid purple light tore through the space they had both occupied a half-second before, splitting the air where Cedric's chest had been.
A stray dark wizard, separated from the main fight, his mask cracked, his wand already swinging back toward them for a second cast—
A blur of dark coat hit him from the side and put him face-down in the scorched grass.
Ethan Esther straightened, his grim face lit orange by the flames, Jasper clinging to his shoulder, and behind him came the great fur-shouldered bulk of Osian, the Re'em's horns gleaming, his hooves tearing the burning turf — and Verrona, and a handful of Atid Stella employees fanning out with wands raised.
Ethan's grim face softened the instant he turned to the two children on the ground.
"Luna. Cedric. Are you hurt?"
"Teacher!" Luna scrambled up. The cold sharpness she had worn all evening cracked, just for a moment, into pure relief — and then she pointed urgently at the Cup. "Harry — the portkey — it went—"
"I know, little owl." Ethan's hand settled briefly on her hair and the calm in his amber eyes steadied her the way nothing else that night had. "I know where he is. You have done enough. More than enough."
Cedric, on the grass, was staring past Ethan at Osian — at the enormous ox-like creature with its impossible horns, half-certain of what he was seeing, his mouth opening on the word Re'em—
Verrona seized them both by the collars.
"Up. Now. Back from the fire." She hauled them bodily away toward safety, and behind her the Atid Stella employees closed in on the downed dark wizard and bound him fast.
Ethan crossed to the Cup and took it up in both hands.
His amber eyes filled with starlight.
The Sight came clearer than it had all night — the Cup, freshly used, still humming with the signature of its destination, gave him what fragments alone could not. A graveyard. A yew tree. A marble angel. A great cold ritual-altar carved with old, ugly Runes — an altar that blocked, he saw now, an altar of anti-divination and anti-Apparition, keyed to admit only those it deemed permitted, the very thing that had kept his Sight foggy and his reach short all night.
His eyes hardened.
He knew the place now. He knew the obstacle.
He moved fast. From inside his coat he drew the small device that looked like a Billywig-Camera and fixed it to Jasper's leg; the little Snidget chirped once, sharp and ready. He drew a fine silver strand of memory — the images he had just Seen, the graveyard entire — and pressed it to the broad fur of Osian's brow, between the great horns. And then he laid his hand flat against the Re'em's neck, and reached, through the deep blood-and-horn bond that ran between Osian, and the wand, and his son who held it three hundred miles away—
—and the three of them — man, Re'em, and Snidget — turned on the spot and were gone.
The moment they vanished, the cold altar in the distant graveyard cracked from base to crown and fell to pieces.
And on the Hogwarts grounds, hidden behind the thinning ranks of his men, Mordred Slythra staggered and coughed a bright spray of blood into his palm.
He fumbled a healing potion to his lips with a shaking hand, his composed face for once stripped bare.
'The Seer,' he thought, and a thread of true fear ran through him. 'He's broken the altar. He's reaching the boy.'
In that instant Mordred raised the Seer, finally and fully, above every other threat in his careful reckoning — above even the old man he had been measuring himself against all evening. He turned his head to look.
Albus Dumbledore stood in the open ground before the burning maze, and he was duelling eight dark wizards at once, and he was winning — driving them back step by step with an ease that was terrible to watch, more of them already crumpled unmoving at his feet. Of the thirty-odd dark and wild wizards Mordred had brought through the portkeys, less than half still stood.
Mordred shivered, and could not quite stop himself.
Then he swallowed his blood and his fear both, and arranged his face back into its sneer, and stepped forward where they could all see him.
"My work here is done," he announced, and his voice carried over the dying battle. "The plan has succeeded. I'm afraid this is where I bid you all farewell."
Dumbledore, Sirius, Lupin, Sam, Kingsley, and the pink-haired Tonks turned as one, and six pairs of eyes narrowed.
"You're going nowhere," Kingsley said.
But already the dark wizards still standing were dragging their fallen comrades up by the arms, fumbling touch-portkeys from their robes—
"Stop them!" Dumbledore's voice cracked across the grounds. "Do not let them—"
The defenders surged. The dark wizards, forced to choose, abandoned a dozen of their unconscious to save themselves, and one by one winked out of the firelight in swirls of portkey-light. Mordred stood amidst the vanishings, unhurried, that thin sneer fixed in place, daring them.
"MORDRED!" Sirius hurled himself forward.
And from the side — from nowhere — a wand cracked, and a curse smashed into Sirius and threw him backward off his feet, straight into Lupin's catching arms.
The attacker limped forward to stand at Mordred's side. The thump of a wooden leg. A grizzled face. A rolling magical eye.
Moody.
Dumbledore's surprise lasted only a heartbeat. Then his blue eyes went very cold, very still.
"So," he said quietly. "It was you. All year. You put Harry's name in the Goblet. You shepherded him through every Task to this end." His voice did not rise, and was the more frightening for it. "Who are you, truly? And what do you want?"
The false Moody threw back his grizzled head and laughed — a wild, cracked, gleeful sound that was nothing like the gruff growl of the man whose face he wore.
"Sharp," he wheezed, delighted. "Sharp as ever, Dumbledore. Right to the end." The magical eye spun. "But you don't know, do you? You really don't know who's been pouring your students' pumpkin juice all year." And his tongue flicked out, snake-quick, across his lips — a darting, obscene little gesture that did not belong on Alastor Moody's face at all.
Dumbledore's eyes widened.
For one moment the most powerful wizard in Britain stood utterly still.
Then he breathed a name, cold as the grave, into the firelit dark.
"Barty Crouch." A pause. "Junior."
A ripple went through the watching defenders.
Sam moved fastest, his mind snapping the pieces together in the space of a breath. Crouch Senior, wandering and broken and raving of his son. Moody, attacked the night before term — and then walking the castle hale and whole. The man who searched Snape's office. The man who was always, always first on every scene.
"He's been alive," Sam said, his voice hollow with the horror of it. "All these years. They kept him alive — and someone's been brewing Polyjuice from him for a year—"
"Clever, clever Unspeakable," Crouch Junior crooned, and even as he spoke his stolen features began to bubble and run — the grizzled Moody-face melting away to reveal beneath it a younger man, straw-haired, feverish, with a long pale face and a mad bright light in his eyes. He swept them all a low, mocking bow. "It has been a pleasure wearing the old paranoid's face. Do give him my regards — what's left of him." He laid one hand on Mordred's sleeve and the other on the portkey in his palm. "And do remember, all of you, when you tell the tale—"
His mad eyes blazed.
"—the Dark Lord has returned."
"NO—" Sirius tore free of Lupin and flung himself across the grass, wand outstretched, a curse already on his lips—
Too late.
The portkey caught, the light swirled, and Mordred Slythra and Barty Crouch Junior were gone — leaving Sirius Black skidding to his knees in the scorched, empty grass where they had stood, hurling curses and oaths into the smoke at nothing at all.