Chapter Text

Chapter Twenty-two — Where They Aren’t 

Saturday mornings were one of Severus Snape's few reliable pleasures.

Not because Saturday was pleasant in itself. Hogwarts remained full of children, the corridors remained loud, and somewhere above the dungeons hundreds of students were presumably finding creative ways to waste a perfectly serviceable morning. But they were not in his classroom, and that improved the day considerably.

He stood in the doorway for a moment and surveyed the room with quiet satisfaction. The long worktables had been scrubbed clean after yesterday's lessons, their dark surfaces free of knife marks and the mysterious sticky residue that appeared whenever second-years were left alone with syrup for more than thirty seconds. The brass scales were back on their shelves, the cauldrons hung from their hooks along the far wall, and every stool was pushed beneath its table at precisely the same angle. The room was dim despite the hour, lit by greenish lamps along the stone walls and whatever weak grey light managed to reach the narrow windows near the ceiling. Snape preferred it that way. Sunlight had an irritating habit of making people cheerful.

He closed the door behind him, and the silence settled at once.

Perfect.

At his desk he set down his notes and hung his outer robe over the back of the chair rather than on the hook by the door. There were no students present to interpret this as evidence that he possessed habits beyond appearing suddenly behind them and deducting points. He rolled his sleeves back once, then again, and picked up a narrow strip of parchment covered in his own handwriting, considerably neater than anything he received from students. He read through the ingredient list despite having no need to.

He had been refining this potion for nearly four months. There was no urgency to it: no hospital waiting for a batch, no Headmaster requesting something inconvenient, no student having produced a medical emergency through a combination of arrogance and poor wand control. He was making it because he wanted to, and the thought alone improved his mood.

It was an old restorative base he had encountered years ago in a continental text, designed to ease magical fatigue after prolonged spellwork. The original formula was functional but crude, relying far too heavily on powdered moonstone and leaving a residue that made storage irritating. Snape had already corrected that. Today's work concerned the final binding stage, where he suspected a reduced ratio of hellebore and a slower introduction of salamander blood might stabilise the mixture without costing any potency.

It was not dramatic work, which was precisely why he liked it. Potions, when performed correctly, behaved. Ingredients never complained that an essay had been difficult, and cauldrons never insisted they had definitely followed the instructions while visibly smoking.

He carried a clean cauldron to the central table, set it over the unlit burner and ran one finger around the inside of the rim. Clean. A rare example of competence had evidently visited the classroom overnight. He laid out the silver knife, the mortar and pestle, a fine strainer and a narrow-necked flask for the finished concentrate, each within reach of his hand without needing to look. The whole morning was already arranged in his mind: heat the base, prepare the roots while the first infusion settled, add the moonstone slowly. No Longbottom would melt anything, no Finnigan would explode anything, and no Potter would stare at him with that mixture of suspicion and defiance that had somehow grown more pronounced this year.

His mouth tightened briefly. At least he wouldn't have to deal with Gryffindors until Monday, and the thought restored the morning.

He took the parchment and crossed to the door beside his desk, which led to his personal ingredient store. The public student cupboard held the ordinary materials for lessons, and it was organised well enough despite repeated assaults by adolescents apparently incapable of returning a jar to the shelf it came from. His personal store was different. It held ingredients acquired over years, some expensive, some difficult to replace, a few dangerous enough that unrestricted access for children would qualify as attempted murder. More importantly, it was organised.

He opened the door and stopped.

For several seconds his mind refused to accept what his eyes were reporting. The room was not destroyed, which would almost have been easier. There was no broken glass, no stains, no smoke or melted shelving. Instead, someone had taken a perfectly ordered storeroom and devoted what must have been an extraordinary amount of time to making it wrong.

A jar of powdered asphodel sat on the shelf reserved for preserved beetle eyes. Bundles of dried knotgrass had been moved to the narrow shelf by the door and arranged upright in an empty copper measuring cup. Three containers of crushed bicorn horn occupied spaces on three different walls. And the labels had not been removed but changed: a bottle of powdered moonstone announced itself as FLUXWEED, the jar beside it, which actually held fluxweed, claimed to be DRIED NEWT SPLEENS, and the newt spleens sat in a container labelled PEPPERMINT.

Snape's eyelid twitched.

He stepped inside, very carefully. A row of small bottles had been arranged by colour rather than contents. A bundle of shrivelfig had acquired a handwritten tag reading DEFINITELY NOT SHRIVELFIG, and he picked it up, looked at the tag, then at the shrivelfig, and discovered that there were moments in every man's life when language became inadequate. On the highest shelf, seven jars had been turned backwards so that only their blank sides faced outward. A box of bezoars had been replaced by a neat row of empty phials, and his measuring spoons had been stacked into a small tower in the corner.

Nothing was damaged, spilled or even dirty, which was somehow worse. Destruction could be accidental. This had required planning, and a certain amount of malice.

Snape stood very still in the middle of the storeroom. When his voice came, it was quiet.

"Potter."

The name settled into the room like a curse.

There was no evidence whatsoever, but Severus Snape did not require evidence. James Potter's son had been stealing ingredients from under his nose since the age of twelve, possessed an almost supernatural talent for involving himself in things that did not concern him, and had recently grown confident enough to become inventive. No other student in the school would find this particular arrangement funny in quite the same infuriating way. He looked again at the tag.

"Potter," he said, slightly louder, and put the bundle down with enormous care.

Monday morning, he decided. Potter would arrive at breakfast believing himself safe, eat toast, perhaps laugh with Weasley, and look irritatingly pleased with existence. Then Snape would appear behind him. No shouting, since that would spoil it. He would simply say, "Potter. With me," and make the boy walk the entire distance from the Great Hall to the dungeons wondering, and then he would open this door.

Potter would restore every jar by hand, without magic, while Snape sat nearby marking essays. Incorrectly placed bottle? Start the shelf again. Complaining? Another shelf. Weasley attempting to help? Detention for Weasley as well. Granger arriving with an argument about proportional punishment? Snape considered that for some time. No. There were limits even to revenge.

He exhaled slowly and reached for the first jar. If he meant to brew anything today, the storeroom would have to be restored first, which temporarily damaged the fantasy.

He began with the easiest shelves. The original arrangement existed in his memory with perfect clarity: powdered ingredients along the eastern wall, grouped by stability and then frequency of use, preserved organic components on the cooler shelves at the back, dried plants kept well away from anything likely to contaminate them. Whoever had done this had understood enough not to ruin anything, which meant they had been careful, and Snape found that almost offensive.

Twenty minutes passed, then forty, and the room slowly returned to order. His irritation did not. Every few minutes he found another small insult waiting for him. A jar of lacewing flies sat precisely where the Polyjuice ingredients belonged, and he stared at it for a long moment.

"Subtle," he murmured.

Potter had used those too, in second year. Snape had never proved it, and had also never required proof.

He found he was rather hoping the boy would deny it. He could already see the wide green eyes behind those ridiculous glasses and hear the Wasn't me, Professor, and, worse, the dry remarks Greengrass seemed to encourage. "You will regret that wit on Monday, Potter," he told a bottle of newt spleens, which offered no objection.

By the time he reached the back cabinet, Potter had acquired approximately four months of detention in his imagination, each session beginning at six thirty in the morning, because Snape had considered seven and found it too generous. Then he reached for a narrow jar on the second shelf and his hand stopped. There should have been another one beside it.

The gap itself was unremarkable; with everything rearranged, gaps existed everywhere. But this one bothered him. He checked the worktable behind him and the shelves he had already restored, and found nothing. The missing ingredient wasn't particularly rare, and certainly nothing compared with several of the substances sitting untouched nearby. Three shelves later he found another absence, then another, and Snape stopped reorganising.

For the first time that morning the vision of Potter scrubbing cauldrons disappeared. He went back to the beginning, and this time he wasn't looking for disorder but taking inventory. The acromantula venom was present, as was the erumpent fluid, and both bottles of exceptionally expensive runespoor bile. The thief had ignored them all.

The gaps began among the ordinary shelves: basic stabilisers, preserving agents, dried dittany, two common antidotal components, a jar of powdered silver useful in nearly a dozen restorative and defensive preparations, a few general-purpose binding compounds, and three sealed vials of finished Blood-Replenishing Potion. Not much of any one thing. Enough.

Snape stood with one hand on the edge of the shelf. A student stealing for profit would have taken the expensive ingredients. A student experimenting would have taken something interesting. A student with a particular potion in mind would have left a recognisable recipe behind in the absences. This was none of those. The missing items didn't make a potion; they made options: treating injuries, maintaining brews over time, correcting mistakes, preparing antidotes. A compact working stock.

His eyes narrowed. "Planning something, Potter?"

The empty storeroom did not answer.

Potter had been strange recently, though not dramatically, and nothing obvious enough to justify concern. Quieter in some classes, more focused in others, reading beyond the curriculum and spending absurd amounts of time with Greengrass. Snape had assumed the last two were connected in the ordinary adolescent sense, and had absolutely no intention of considering that subject any further than necessary. The boy had also grown annoyingly competent. Not brilliant; Snape refused to indulge nonsense. But more deliberate, less inclined to throw the first spell that entered his head and hope enthusiasm would compensate for thought. Greengrass's influence, presumably.

Perhaps they were preparing some elaborate project. Perhaps Potter had decided that destroying one professor's sanity was insufficient and intended to poison half of Gryffindor Tower, with Greengrass's encouragement. That would at least explain the organisation. Snape found the idea strangely plausible, and his mouth thinned. Whatever Potter was planning, he would know by Monday.

The next hour passed more slowly, because now he counted everything. Each missing item went onto a piece of parchment. The list was irritating and certainly suspicious, but it contained no restricted poisons and no volatile compounds, nothing to suggest Potter intended anything spectacularly lethal. Useful things. That remained the strange part.

By noon the storeroom was almost entirely restored. His potion had not been started, his pleasant Saturday morning was ruined, and Harry Potter had accumulated enough imaginary detention to last until Christmas. Snape stood in the doorway for a final survey. Order had returned; the missing spaces remained. One jar stood perhaps half an inch farther forward than the others, and he corrected it. Then he folded the inventory once and slipped it into his pocket. Monday would be soon enough.

He returned to the central table and regarded the untouched cauldron. The restorative would have to wait until tomorrow, since Potter had already taken enough of his Saturday. He extinguished the lamps one by one and collected his robe, and at the classroom door he paused, picturing Monday again: Potter at breakfast, completely unaware. His mood improved. Slightly.

"Six thirty," he murmured.

Then he swept from the classroom, black robes trailing behind him, already composing the detention notice in his head.

* * *

Sunday breakfast in the Great Hall was always quieter than the rest of the week. Half the school slept through it, and the other half picked at toast with the glazed expression of people who had put off an essay until the last possible moment. By that standard, Tracey Davis and Astoria Greengrass looked perfectly normal. They sat in their usual spot at the Slytherin table, a little apart from the others, and barely spoke.

That was the unusual part. Astoria could normally be relied upon to steal food from three different plates, comment on every table in the hall and share her opinion of Blaise's hair whether or not it had been requested. Today she was working through a single piece of toast with enormous concentration. Tracey, who held a theory about everyone and offered all of them freely, had spent ten minutes stirring a cup of tea that had stopped steaming some time ago. Two seats down, Blaise looked from one to the other as though he suspected he had missed a funeral, then shrugged and returned to his eggs.

Tracey broke first. She waited until a pair of fourth-years had finished passing behind them, then lowered her voice and said, without looking up from the tea, "Did you get one too?"

Astoria's hand stopped halfway to her cup. For a moment her face did nothing at all. Then she nodded and smiled, and it wasn't the smirk she used on teachers or the polished, polite curve she wore at home. It was small and unguarded and a little shiny around the eyes, and for a second it made her look exactly her age.

"This morning," she said quietly. "It was on my nightstand when I woke up. I knew it was coming, I just didn't know it would be a Sunday."

"Same." Tracey was smiling too, which felt faintly ridiculous at a breakfast table, so she hid it behind her cup. "I read mine four times. I'm fairly certain I read the part about me becoming an excellent healer despite everyone in my way about eleven times."

"Did you cry?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

Astoria's smile widened. "That's what I said."

* * *

It had started, for both of them, a few hours earlier.

Tracey woke at half past six, an hour she considered a form of aggression, and lay still for a moment trying to work out what had pulled her out of sleep. Nothing in the dormitory had changed. The curtains were drawn around the other beds, somebody was snoring faintly, and the bed opposite her own was still neatly made, its covers undisturbed for the second morning in a row.

She had noticed that on Saturday too, and had drawn the most obvious conclusion available to her, which she had then spent the day delivering to Blaise in a series of increasingly smug remarks. It had been a convincing performance, partly for Blaise's benefit and partly for her own, because there was another conclusion available and she had been very carefully not looking at it. Daphne would have an explanation. It would be irritatingly sensible. Daphne's explanations always were.

Then she saw the envelope on her nightstand.

It hadn't been there when she went to sleep. It was cream-coloured and unmarked except for a single word, Tracey, in handwriting she would have recognised anywhere. She sat up, drew the bed curtains closed around her, lit her wand and opened it.

Tracey,

By the time Dobby gives you this, Harry and I will have left Hogwarts. We are safe, everything went according to plan, and for the moment we're going north.

I know you are going to have questions. Unfortunately, most of them will have to wait.

Please don't make yourself miserable trying to protect us. You don't know where we're going, and that is deliberate. If someone asks you directly, you do not need to lie for me. Keep what you can to yourself, certainly, but don't get yourself into trouble or spend the next week suffering over what you are supposed to say. Harry and I planned for people to ask questions.

And before you decide otherwise, no, this does not change the offer. If one day you decide you want out, for a month or forever, you write to us. There will always be a place for you.

Though I suspect you'll stay exactly where you are, complain constantly, and become an excellent healer despite everyone unfortunate enough to stand between you and it.

You can write to us through Gringotts. We will write back. I expect regular letters complaining about schoolwork, professors, and whatever Astoria has done to irritate you that week. I can't promise many details for a while, but I can promise stories, and knowing Harry, there will probably be far too many of them.

I will miss you.

Daphne

Your first vacation will be paid by Daph!

— Harry

She read it once quickly, the way one reads bad news, searching for the catch. Then she read it again, slowly. By the third time the words had stopped swimming, and she realised she was sitting very straight on the edge of her bed with one hand pressed over her mouth.

They had done it. She had known it was coming, not when or where, only that one day the bed opposite hers would simply stay empty, and she had spent months telling herself she was ready for it. Somewhere beyond the dungeon walls Daphne and Harry were free of all of this: the name, the expectations, the long polite pressure of being Daphne Greengrass. Tracey had spent years watching her friend move through Hogwarts like someone following a script she had never been asked to approve. She had expected to feel abandoned. What she felt, to her considerable irritation, was proud.

The last line undid her. She laughed out loud, a short, helpless sound, and had to bury it in her pillow when someone in the next bed muttered and turned over.

"Sorry," she whispered. "Bad dream."

She folded the letter along its creases and held it against her chest for a while. Her first thought, once she could think properly, was of Astoria, and whether it was kinder to go and find her or to let her read in peace. If Daphne had written to her at all, and Tracey was certain she had, Astoria deserved to read it alone.

She would see her at breakfast.

Astoria Greengrass woke, as she did most mornings, with the immediate conviction that the world was about to inconvenience her.

The envelope on her nightstand did nothing to change her mind. She regarded it for a long moment, then prodded it with her wand to check for hexes, because Daphne had raised her well. It did nothing. She found that suspicious in itself, but she opened it anyway.

Tori,

By the time you have this, Harry and I will be gone from Hogwarts. We are safe, the plan worked, and for now we're travelling north.

Before you panic: no, I am not telling you where we're going next. That is partly because I love you and partly because you are terrible at looking innocent when you know something interesting.

If Mother and Father start asking questions, you do not need to lie for us. You genuinely don't know where we are going. Tell them that. Do not let them make this your responsibility, either. You are not me. You did not make my decision, and you do not have to defend it for me.

Be strong with them, Tori. Not cruel, and not for the sake of fighting, but don't let them decide that because I left, you now have to become everything they expected from me. Do as much as you want to do. No more.

And if one day what you want changes, our offer still stands. There will always be room for you with us. A bed, food, probably far too many books, and Harry attempting to convince you that whatever ridiculous thing he has built is perfectly safe.

Write to us through Gringotts. Often.

I expect detailed reports concerning how unbearable Tracey is being, what Mother and Father are doing, and exactly how many essays you are currently pretending do not exist.

I love you.

Daphne

P.S. The Map is yours now. Please try to use it with slightly more sense than Harry did.

P.P.S. He is objecting to that sentence.

"I am not panicking," Astoria informed the dormitory, which was still asleep.

It was true, which was the strange part. She had known that this day would come, not when or where, only that one morning her sister would simply be gone, and she had spent a good deal of that time quietly making plans of her own. She read the paragraph about her parents twice, not because she needed to, but because she wanted to see how Daphne had put it. Daphne had known exactly what would land on Astoria once she was gone: the questions, the expectations, the Greengrass name carried by one daughter instead of two. Astoria had known it too. What surprised her, now that it was written down, was how much she was looking forward to it.

Mother and Father were about to discover that they had one daughter who had left and one who had stayed, and that the second had been taking notes the whole time. Astoria could already picture the questions, and exactly how she would answer them: with perfect, innocent, devastating honesty. I genuinely don't know. It was, she reflected, the one weapon her parents would never think to prepare for. And do as much as you want to do, no more was not a warning. It was an invitation, and she intended to treat it as a challenge.

Astoria had not cried since she was nine, and she was not going to start in a room with three sleeping Slytherin girls. She cried exactly once, briefly and with great dignity, and it had nothing to do with sadness. It was closer to the feeling of watching someone finally cross a finish line you had been cheering at for years.

When she wiped her face and lifted the letter, something slid out from behind it and landed on the floor with a papery whisper. It was a folded square of very old parchment, brown at the edges and soft with age. There was a second, thinner envelope too, which she nearly missed. She unfolded the parchment first, turned it over, then held it up to her lamp. It was completely blank.

"Marvellous," she told it. "A very old, very empty piece of paper."

The second envelope was addressed in a messier hand, with Little Agent of Chaos scrawled across the front. Astoria stopped breathing for half a second, and then she opened it.

Little Agent of Chaos,

The Map is yours.

Tap it with your wand and say:

"I solemnly swear that I am up to no good."

That opens it.

When you're finished, tap it again and say:

"Mischief managed."

That makes it blank. Always make it blank, Tori. Don't leave it open on your bed, don't show it to anyone you don't trust, and especially don't let a professor confiscate it. I would rather not explain to McGonagall why her name moves around on a piece of parchment.

Please be safe with it.

Also, since you now possess one of the greatest tools for causing trouble Hogwarts has ever produced, I expect you to create at least a little chaos on my behalf. Nothing dangerous. Preferably something funny.

I expect the Map back in a couple of years when you come visit us, or when you decide to come live with us.

Dobby says you can have his room and he'll put a smaller bed beside his for you.

Take care of yourself, Little Agent of Chaos.

Harry

Astoria laughed. It was a short, startled sound, quickly smothered with her hand, and it turned into something wobblier before she got it under control. Little Agent of Chaos. She turned the name over in her head as though checking it for flaws and found, to her annoyance, that she liked it. Somewhere in a house she had never seen, Dobby had almost certainly already chosen the blanket.

She did not tap the parchment with her wand. Not yet. There were three other girls in the room, and she had learned young that one never opens a new toy in front of witnesses. Instead she slid it inside her Charms textbook, moved it to her pillowcase, moved it back to the textbook, and eventually settled on her coat pocket, where she could keep one hand on it.

Preferably something funny.

A slow, dangerous smile began to spread across her face.

* * *

"You're doing the thing with your face," Tracey said.

Astoria blinked. They were back at the Slytherin table, the toast long cold. "What thing?"

"The one where you try to look innocent and fail completely." Tracey leaned closer. "Daphne was right about that, you know. You are terrible at it. Is there something you're not telling me?"

"A great deal," Astoria said serenely. "It's a family trait."

Tracey narrowed her eyes, but let it go. She turned her cup a quarter-turn on its saucer. "She said north."

"She said for the moment north." Astoria stirred her tea, which she hadn't touched. "Daphne hates the cold. She once refused to attend a Quidditch match in November on principle."

"Don't."

"I'm only observing."

"Observe quietly," Tracey said, "and preferably not within earshot of anyone who might ask you about it later. She said we don't need to protect them. The easiest way to do that is to not know."

Astoria sighed with the long-suffering air of a girl who had been given excellent advice and resented it. "Fine. I don't know anything. I'm a model of ignorance."

"You are many things," Tracey said. "That isn't one of them."

Blaise leaned over from two seats down, wearing the weary expression of a man who had spent a full day pretending not to listen. "Do either of you know where Potter and your sister are? I need to ask Daphne about the Arithmancy essay, and I'd rather not do it under the sort of circumstances that involve being glared at."

Tracey and Astoria exchanged a glance.

"Out," Tracey said, which was perfectly true.

"They'll be back when they're back," Astoria added, which was probably true, depending on how one defined back.

Blaise looked between them, plainly decided that whatever was going on was exactly the sort of romantic nonsense he preferred to avoid, and returned to his eggs with a sigh.

The seats across from them stayed empty. Nobody had thought to take them, and a first-year who wandered over was stopped by Tracey saying "Taken" before she had even decided to speak. The enchanted plates had filled themselves out of habit: toast and sausages in front of Harry's usual place, a small bowl of berries in front of Daphne's that she would have pretended not to want.

For a while neither of them said anything. Tracey looked at the empty seats, and then at Astoria, and found that she was smiling again.

Astoria reached across the table, picked the sausage off Harry's plate and bit into it with great deliberation.

"Harry would call that an act of war," Tracey said.

"Then he can come back and declare it." Astoria chewed thoughtfully.

Tracey took one of the pieces of toast and ate half of it. "Daphne would have taken the other half."

"Daphne," said Astoria, "would have taken it while he wasn't looking."

They both looked at the empty space across the table, and for a moment the smiles were not quite steady. Then the morning post swept in through the high windows in a great rush of wings, somebody at the Gryffindor table shouted about a missing essay, and the noise of the Great Hall rose around them as if nothing at all had changed.

It hadn't, for anyone else. And for the two of them, who had every reason to be sad, life simply carried on, a little emptier at one end of the table and a good deal lighter at the other.

* * *

The forest was quiet in the way Padfoot liked best, the kind of quiet that came from leaves doing most of the talking.

He padded along a deer track with his nose low and his tail swinging, half tracking a rabbit he had no real intention of catching and half simply enjoying being a dog, which was something he had never quite stopped enjoying, however many years it had been. The light came down green and broken through the canopy, and somewhere ahead a stream was running over stones.

He was still thinking about nothing in particular when he realised he was being watched.

An owl sat on a low branch directly ahead of him, brown and unremarkable and perfectly still. It was not looking at the rabbit's burrow, or at the stream, or at the trees. It was looking at him, with the flat, patient stare of a bird that had flown a very long way to find one specific dog and was not about to be distracted by a second-rate imitation of a squirrel.

Padfoot stopped. The owl lifted one leg, and a small roll of parchment was tied to it.

He looked at the letter for a long moment. Then the dog was gone, and Sirius Black stood in the middle of the track, a little out of breath and entirely human, with a face that was trying very hard not to hope.

“Hello,” he said to the owl, since there seemed to be no better opening. “You're looking for me, I take it.”

The owl clicked its beak.

Sirius stepped forward, untied the roll with fingers that were not quite steady and then patted his pockets with an apologetic wince. “I'm afraid I've nothing on me for you. No treats, no water, not so much as a biscuit. Terrible host.”

The owl gave him a look that suggested this was exactly what it had expected of him. Then it spread its wings, dropped from the branch and was away through the trees without a backward glance, leaving Sirius alone with a piece of parchment and a heart that was beating rather faster than he would have admitted.

He unrolled it. The first line was written in a messy, hurried scrawl he would have known anywhere, because he had spent years learning to read it.

We are alive.

— Harry

That was all. Sirius stared at it, and the breath he had not known he was holding came out of him in something between a laugh and a sob. Alive. Two words, and he read them three times, and every one of them was better than the last.

Beneath it, in a very different hand, was a second line. This one was small and upright and tidy enough that it might have been printed.

Harry is an idiot. We are fine. Everything is going to plan, and we changed a few things thanks to your advice. We are short on details for now, for safety, but all is good.

— Daphne

Sirius grinned, and then he was grinning so widely that it hurt. He could practically hear her saying it, calm and dry and faintly exasperated, in the voice of a girl who had clearly been the one holding the quill steady for both of them.

Under that, the scrawl returned, noticeably more pleased with itself.

Will write again in three months.

And immediately below, in the tidy hand, with the pen pressed hard enough to dent the parchment:

No we will not!

— Daphne

Then the scrawl, wounded and unrepentant, and underlined twice:

She hit me! Come save me, Padfoot!

— Harry

Sirius laughed. He laughed properly, with his head back and the sound bouncing off the trees, until a pigeon somewhere in the canopy decided it had better be elsewhere. When he finally stopped, he had to wipe his eyes with the back of one hand.

“Save you,” he told the empty clearing. “Not a chance, pup. Sounds to me as though you're being managed perfectly well.”

He read the letter once more, slowly, and then folded it with great care and tucked it inside his coat, close to his chest. Three months was a long time. He suspected he would be reading it a great many times before the next one came.

A moment later there was a dog on the track again, trotting off through the green light with his tail held high, and anyone watching might have said he looked, for the first time in a very long while, entirely happy.

* * *

Monday began with an empty chair.

Minerva McGonagall noticed it before she had finished calling attendance. She noticed most things in her classroom: a missing quill, a student attempting to finish an essay beneath the desk, the faint look of guilt that preceded almost every unauthorised use of a Switching Spell. Harry Potter's absence required considerably less observational talent.

“Mr Potter?”

Nobody answered. A few Gryffindors glanced toward the empty place out of habit, and Minerva lowered the register by an inch. Potter was occasionally late. Over the years he had accumulated a remarkable collection of reasons for arriving somewhere after he was expected, several of which had involved mortal danger and made ordinary disciplinary standards difficult to apply consistently. Still, he was not normally late to Transfiguration. Not anymore.

Her eyes moved farther along the room. “Miss Greengrass?”

Another empty chair, and that made her pause. The fourth-year Gryffindors and Slytherins shared the Monday morning period, and Daphne Greengrass was almost never absent. She was the sort of student who arrived with the correct book already open, her homework finished and her quill sharpened, wearing the expression of someone who considered waiting for everyone else to organise themselves a personal inconvenience. Now two seats stood empty beside one another, as they had increasingly done for weeks.

Minerva looked toward Hermione Granger. “Miss Granger, have you seen Mr Potter this morning?”

Hermione's expression changed at once. “No, Professor.”

She did not say that he was probably on his way, or that he had been at breakfast. Minerva took note of that, and turned her attention to the Slytherin side of the room.

“Mr Zabini? Do you know where Miss Greengrass is?”

Blaise Zabini glanced briefly at Daphne's empty chair before he answered. “Not today, Professor. I haven't seen her.”

“Was she in her dormitory last night?”

That question earned more attention than the others. Several Slytherins exchanged looks, and Tracey Davis, who sat two places behind Daphne's usual position, became deeply interested in the edge of her parchment. Minerva noticed, naturally, but Tracey looked more unhappy than guilty, and Minerva filed the distinction away for later.

“I couldn't say, Professor,” Zabini said. “I didn't see her.”

Minerva's mouth tightened. “Miss Davis?”

Tracey looked up, and for half a second something crossed her face before she smoothed it away. “I didn't see her this morning,” she said carefully.

It was not quite the question Minerva had asked. She regarded the girl for a long moment, and Tracey held her gaze, not defiantly, but with the uncomfortable stillness of someone who knew she was standing near the edge of a conversation she very much did not want to have. Minerva could have pressed her. She decided, for the moment, that she would not.

She closed the register. “Very well. Page two hundred and sixteen. Today we continue with partial transformations, and I would strongly recommend that anyone who found last week's homework optional revise that opinion before attempting the exercise.”

Books opened around the room. Minerva turned to the board and began writing the day's instructions, listening to the rustle of parchment and the scrape of chairs behind her. But twice during the lesson her eyes drifted back to the empty seats, and neither student came through the door.

* * *

Albus Dumbledore was eating a sherbet lemon when Minerva entered his office. She knew because the wrapper was still between his fingers, and because he wore the faintly guilty look of a man caught doing something he had no intention whatsoever of apologising for.

“Minerva.”

“Albus.”

He gestured toward the chair opposite his desk. She remained standing, and the amusement left his face.

“What has happened?”

“Potter and Greengrass were both absent from Transfiguration this morning. Neither was at breakfast either. I have already been to the hospital wing, and Poppy has not seen them. Madam Pince says neither has set foot in the library today.”

Albus folded the wrapper once between his fingers. “Then perhaps they have found a particularly comfortable corner of the castle.”

Minerva stared at him, and the corners of his eyes creased.

“I am not suggesting anything improper, Minerva. I only mean that Harry has become rather skilled at finding places in this castle where he cannot easily be found.”

“That is not as reassuring as you appear to think it is.”

“No,” Albus admitted. “Perhaps not.” He set the folded wrapper beside a stack of correspondence and leaned back in his chair. “The wards have shown nothing unusual. There has been no unauthorised Portkey activation, no breach of the outer protections and no forced passage through the gates. Nothing to suggest that either of them left the grounds by magical means.”

“They could have gone to Hogsmeade.”

“Possibly.”

“Without permission.”

“Harry has been known to regard permission as a flexible concept.” He smiled faintly at the look she gave him. “They are fourteen, Minerva. Whatever they are doing, I doubt they have vanished from the country between Friday afternoon and Monday morning.”

“I did not say they had vanished from the country.”

“No, but you are looking at me as though I ought to summon the Auror Office.”

“I am looking at you as though two students have been unaccounted for since breakfast.”

“Since we noticed at breakfast,” Albus said gently, and Minerva went still. “That distinction matters.”

She knew what he meant. That nobody had seen Harry and Daphne this morning did not mean they had been missing since this morning. They might have spent Sunday somewhere inside the castle, or in Hogsmeade, or asleep in some hidden room after deciding, in the maddening way adolescents sometimes did, that Monday was optional. None of these possibilities pleased her particularly, but they were possibilities.

“I would still like them found.”

“And they shall be.” Albus reached for another sherbet lemon, and Minerva's expression stopped his hand halfway to the dish. He sighed and withdrew it. “I will examine the wards more carefully, and you might ask their Heads of House whether either of them returned to their dormitories last night. And Minerva, try not to worry just yet.”

“That is rarely useful advice.”

“No,” Albus said. “But occasionally it is accurate.”

She left unconvinced.

* * *

By lunch, her concern had acquired edges.

Harry had missed Charms, and Daphne had missed History of Magic. Neither had appeared in the library or the hospital wing, and neither was at lunch now, and nobody seemed able to say with any confidence when either had last been seen. Minerva stood beside the staff table watching the Great Hall fill. The Gryffindor benches held their usual noise, arguments, unfinished homework and people stealing food from one another's plates, and Potter's place sat conspicuously empty among them. Across the room, so did Greengrass's.

Tracey Davis was sitting beside Astoria Greengrass, and the younger girl was eating, which should have been reassuring. It wasn't. She was eating too carefully. Minerva had known enough children over enough decades to recognise deliberate normality when she saw it. Astoria said something to Tracey, and Tracey answered, and both of them laughed, but a moment later neither looked the least bit amused.

Minerva turned away. Albus had been speaking quietly with Filius Flitwick, and when that conversation ended she crossed to him and sat down beside him without waiting to be invited. The gesture was unusual enough that Pomona Sprout glanced toward them before politely becoming absorbed in her soup.

“They have now missed every class they were expected to attend,” Minerva said. “Neither came to breakfast, and neither is here for lunch. And Mr Potter did not sleep in Gryffindor Tower last night.”

That produced the first visible change in Albus's face. It was small, but it was real. “You have confirmed that?”

“Neville Longbottom says Harry's bed was untouched when he woke yesterday and again today. Ronald Weasley assumed Potter had stayed elsewhere and thought nothing of it.”

Albus looked toward the Gryffindor table. “And Miss Greengrass?”

“Severus is teaching at present, so I have not yet spoken to him. But her dormitory companions are being remarkably imprecise.” Minerva followed his gaze to where Tracey and Astoria still sat together. “I believe Miss Davis knows more than she has volunteered. What that means, I cannot yet say.”

“And the sister?”

Minerva hesitated. “She is worried.”

“Which is not the same as knowing.”

“No, it is not.”

He considered this, and Minerva lowered her voice. “Albus, I am concerned for their safety.”

He turned back to her, not annoyed or dismissive, only patient. “Harry has been under extraordinary pressure for a long time, and Miss Greengrass has become important to him. If they decided they wanted some distance from the castle for a day or two, I would not find the impulse particularly mysterious.”

“Without telling anyone?”

“They may have believed that telling someone would result in being stopped.”

Her lips thinned. “That is hardly a comforting interpretation either.”

“No.”

The noise of the Great Hall carried on around them. A spoon clattered somewhere near the Ravenclaw table, someone laughed loudly enough to earn a glare from Professor Vector, and the owls shifted in the rafters overhead. Minerva watched the doors, which remained closed.

“The wards still show nothing, so I assume you remain convinced they are here.”

“I remain convinced,” Albus said slowly, “that we have no evidence they left by any route the castle would recognise.”

Minerva heard the difference. He had not said that they were here. He had said there was no evidence they had left, and she looked at him until he gave a small sigh.

“You are right to be concerned, Minerva.”

That was better. “I would like the grounds searched.”

“I will speak with the house-elves first. They move through more of the castle than any professor, and they notice far more than anyone gives them credit for.”

“Then ask whether they have seen Dobby. He has become a near-permanent fixture around Harry, and if Harry is hiding somewhere inside the castle, Dobby will very likely know where.”

Albus looked at her for a moment, then nodded. “A sensible thought.”

“I occasionally have them.”

“I have always suspected so.”

She ignored that. “The elves can search the kitchens, the unused rooms and the service corridors, and we should walk the grounds ourselves. If we find nothing by dinner, we widen the search.”

“To Hogsmeade,” Albus agreed.

Minerva looked toward Harry's empty place once more. She disliked how much easier the plan made her feel, but plans implied that a problem had edges, and this one still did. For the moment.

* * *

By evening, the edges had begun to move.

Severus Snape entered the Headmaster's office without knocking. Minerva looked up from the chair beside Albus's desk, and Snape stopped dead, his eyes travelling from her to Dumbledore and back again.

“Of course.”

Her eyebrows rose. “Good evening to you as well, Severus.”

“I had hoped to speak to the Headmaster privately.”

“And I had hoped Potter would appear at breakfast this morning. We are both suffering disappointments.”

Snape's expression sharpened. “Potter.”

Albus raised one hand before either of them could properly begin. “Severus, what has happened?”

Snape stepped farther into the office, his robes sweeping behind him in the particular manner that always suggested the fabric itself had developed contempt for whoever he was approaching. “Greengrass is missing. Her dormitory was not occupied last night.”

Minerva sat straighter. Albus did not move.

“Since when?” he asked.

Minerva closed her eyes briefly, and Snape caught it at once. “You knew.”

“I knew that Potter was also absent.”

Something deeply unpleasant settled across Snape's face. He said the name again, and there was enough hatred packed into it that several of the silver instruments on Dumbledore's desk might reasonably have taken offence. “Potter.”

“Do not start, Severus.”

“Start?” he said softly. “Two students disappear at the same time, one of whom happens to be Potter and the other a fourteen-year-old girl he has spent the better part of two months attaching himself to, and you would prefer that I ignore the obvious?”

“And what, precisely, is the obvious?”

“That Potter has dragged Greengrass into whatever idiotic catastrophe he has manufactured this time.”

Minerva stood. “Dragged?”

“Yes, Minerva, dragged. Kidnapped, coerced, persuaded through some spectacular combination of recklessness and adolescent stupidity. Select whichever wording troubles you least.”

“Daphne Greengrass is not a parcel Potter tucked under his arm on his way out of the door.”

“I never said she was.”

“You implied precisely that.”

“I implied that Potter possesses an almost supernatural capacity for placing himself in danger and encouraging everyone nearby to follow him into it.”

“Miss Greengrass has demonstrated more than enough intelligence to make her own poor decisions.”

Snape's mouth tightened. “That is hardly the defence you appear to believe it is.”

“Enough,” Albus said.

He did not raise his voice, and he did not need to. The portraits had already begun waking around the walls, and Phineas Nigellus had one eye open and looked delighted at the prospect of an argument. Snape turned toward the desk, and Minerva remained standing a moment longer before she sat down again.

Albus folded his hands. “Severus, tell me exactly what you have learned.”

Snape's face suggested he would have preferred to go on blaming Potter for several more minutes, but he did not. “Greengrass's bed has not been slept in since Friday.”

The room went quiet.

“Friday?” Minerva said.

“One of her dormitory mates believes she saw her after dinner on Thursday, and another remembers seeing her on Friday morning. Davis claims not to know when Greengrass came back to the dormitory on Friday night.”

“Because she didn't,” Minerva said. When Snape looked at her, she went on. “Potter's bed was untouched on Friday night as well.”

That landed differently. Albus sat very still, and Minerva watched him, because for the first time all day his calm did not look effortless.

“So,” she said, “they have been gone since Friday. Together, almost certainly.”

Snape let out a humourless breath. “How romantic.”

“Severus.”

“I am overwhelmed.”

Albus ignored them both. “Was anything taken from Miss Greengrass's dormitory?”

“That is difficult to determine.” Snape's expression shifted slightly. “Unlike Potter, Greengrass keeps her possessions so well ordered that nobody else knows precisely what she owns. Some clothing is missing, along with several books and a few personal effects. Nothing dramatic enough for her dormmates to have noticed straight away.”

Minerva's concern deepened. It had not been a spontaneous absence, then. Someone had packed, and she saw the same conclusion arrive behind Albus's eyes.

“And there is another matter,” Snape went on, and his jaw tightened. “My personal storeroom.”

Albus blinked. Minerva did not. There were certain sentences involving Severus Snape and Harry Potter that required no context at all.

“What did he do?”

Snape turned his head slowly toward her. “I appreciate how little hesitation that question required.”

“Severus.”

“Someone entered my private stores before Saturday morning. Every shelf was rearranged, the labels were exchanged and the ingredients moved about. Nothing was broken.”

Albus's eyebrows rose. “Nothing?”

“Nothing.” There was something in Snape's tone that suggested he would have preferred fire.

“And you believe Harry did this?”

“I do not merely believe it. I know it.”

“Have you proof?”

Snape stared at her, and Minerva stared back. “No,” he said at last, with extraordinary dignity.

“Then you believe it.”

“It was Potter.”

“That remains a name, Severus, not evidence.”

“It remains sufficient.”

Albus covered his mouth with one hand. Minerva looked at him, and he lowered it. “I apologise.”

“You do not.”

“No,” he agreed.

Snape's expression could have curdled milk. “This was not merely a prank,” he said, and the room changed again. Minerva's amusement vanished. “At first I assumed that was exactly what it was: irritating, elaborate, and entirely consistent with Potter's inability to leave anything undisturbed. But when I restored the room, I found ingredients missing.”

Albus leaned forward. “Dangerous ones?”

“No. Some were moderately valuable, but nothing I would consider a target if theft had been the purpose.” Snape reached into his robes, drew out a folded piece of parchment and set it on the desk. “I made an inventory.”

Of course he had. Albus unfolded the parchment and ran his eyes down the list, and Snape spoke before he could ask. “Stabilisers and preserving agents. Common antidotal components, dittany, powdered silver, several binding compounds, and ingredients for replenishing blood. Enough material for a number of basic restorative preparations.”

Minerva looked from the list to Snape. “That sounds—”

“Practical,” Snape said, and there was no satisfaction in it. “No single potion explains the selection, and no experiment would require it. Whoever took these chose materials useful across a wide range of treatments.”

Albus looked down at the parchment again. “A travelling stock.”

“Yes.”

Minerva felt something cold settle beneath her ribs. The packed belongings, the missing students, the untouched beds and now potion supplies chosen for use rather than value all pointed the same way. “This was planned.”

Nobody contradicted her. For a while the only sound in the office was the faint ticking of one of Dumbledore's instruments, until Snape said quietly, “Then Potter has kidnapped a Slytherin student with premeditation.”

Minerva rounded on him. “Oh, for heaven's sake. Do you have no more charitable reading?”

“Do you have a better one?”

“Yes. Two students planned to leave together.”

“Potter planned to leave. Greengrass—”

“Severus.” This time it was Albus. Snape stopped. Albus looked tired now, not frightened, not yet, but the easy certainty of that morning had gone out of him. “Whatever has happened, we gain nothing by deciding which child is responsible before we have found either of them.”

Snape's mouth tightened, and Minerva nodded once. Albus rose to his feet, and that, more than anything else, told her that Monday had changed.

“We search the castle properly tonight. Every floor, every empty classroom and unused passage, the storerooms, the towers, the dungeons, the grounds and the edge of the Forest. Filius and Pomona can take sections alongside us.”

“The house-elves found nothing?” Minerva asked.

“No elf has seen Harry or Miss Greengrass since Friday afternoon.”

Snape frowned. “Nothing at all?”

“Nothing.”

“And Dobby?” Minerva asked.

There was a pause. “No one has seen him since the weekend.”

Snape's eyes narrowed. The cold thing beneath Minerva's ribs tightened, and Albus continued before either of them could speak. “We will ask the ghosts to help as well. They can cover places we cannot and move through the castle far faster than we can. Sir Nicholas will assist willingly, and the Bloody Baron can speak to the Slytherins.”

Snape looked profoundly unimpressed by the prospect of involving ghosts.

“And the students?” Minerva said.

“Quietly, tonight. We do not need rumours spreading before we know what has happened. Ask their friends when they last saw them, what was said, and whether either of them mentioned going anywhere.”

“Granger,” Snape said. “Potter tells Granger everything.”

The certainty in his voice made Minerva hesitate. That had perhaps been true once, but now she was not sure. “Miss Davis as well,” she said.

Snape's expression darkened. “And the Greengrass girl.”

“Astoria.”

“I am aware of her name.”

“Then use it.”

His eyes narrowed, and Albus sighed. “Both of you.” They stopped. “For tonight, we assume that Harry and Daphne are somewhere in or near Hogwarts until evidence tells us otherwise.”

Minerva looked toward the dark window behind him. “And if we find nothing?”

Albus followed her gaze. Beyond the glass the grounds had disappeared into blackness. “Then tomorrow,” he said quietly, “we look farther.”

Snape glanced down at the list of missing ingredients on the desk, and Minerva thought of two untouched beds. For the first time that day, none of them believed that Harry and Daphne would simply turn up for the next meal.

* * *

Marrowgrim had been studying the same ledger for an hour, and he was enjoying it enormously.

It was older than his grandfather, bound in a leather that had long ago given up any pretence of being a particular colour, and its pages were filled with the cramped, brutal handwriting of a goblin who had believed in compound interest the way wizards believed in destiny. The Monday night vaults were quiet, the torches burned low, and somewhere far below him a cart rattled along its track like an old man clearing his throat. It was, in short, perfect.

The knock was therefore unwelcome.

A junior clerk stood in the doorway holding a single envelope in both hands, as though it might bite him. This was strange in itself. Letters came to Gringotts by the sackful, but they came through the owlery, were sorted by three separate departments and reached a Senior Manager's desk only after surviving an ordeal of stamps and signatures. Nobody walked a letter to a Senior Manager at this hour.

“Sir. It was left at the night desk. No owl, no courier, and nobody saw who brought it.” The clerk swallowed. “It's addressed to you personally.”

“Then you have delivered it. Go.”

The clerk went with visible relief. Marrowgrim sighed, set aside his ledger with the reluctance of a goblin parting from an old friend, and turned the envelope over to examine the seal.

He stopped.

The wax was dark green, pressed with a stag, a lily and a crest he had seen on a thousand documents, and his eyes, already sharp, began to shine in a way that his staff would have found alarming. House Potter. Not a trustee's office, nor a solicitor's agent, but the House itself, writing to him directly.

He slit the seal with one long fingernail and unfolded the parchment.

Dear Master Marrowgrim,

Hope you're well, and that the vaults are still in one piece. I know this is a bit unusual, so I'll keep it short.

We've left Britain. We're not completely sure where we're heading yet, since we're mostly following the weather and our noses, but we're fine and in one piece, and I wanted Gringotts to hear that from me before anyone else started telling stories.

And there will be stories. I'd put money on it, and since you're the one who keeps my money, that's practically a joke. By the end of the week I expect to be a kidnapper, a dark lord, a runaway or possibly all three, depending on who's talking. None of it is true, but I thought you should have the real version.

Please carry on managing the accounts as usual. I'll write again when I know more, and I'll try not to blow up anything of yours in the meantime.

Yours, with thanks,
Harry Potter

P.S. Sorry for the upcoming river of people asking for me.

Marrowgrim read it twice, because a goblin of his rank always read things twice. Beneath the signature, in a very different hand, small and upright and utterly unhurried, a second note had been added.

Master Marrowgrim,

I wanted it on record, in writing, that I am perfectly safe and have not been kidnapped, coerced, enchanted, bewitched or otherwise misplaced. I left of my own free will, with my own luggage, and with a far better plan than anyone will credit me for.

I also have a little money put aside, so there is no need for concern on that front. Should my parents come to you with questions, as I expect they will, you may tell them exactly what I have told you: I am safe, and I am well.

As for everyone else who has opinions on the matter, they are welcome to take them somewhere quiet and suck on a lemon. A sour one, preferably. 

With every courtesy,
D. Greengrass

Marrowgrim lowered the parchment.

For a moment his face did nothing at all. Then something in his chest gave way, and he laughed, a harsh, rattling, wholehearted sound that bounced off the stone walls and startled a clerk somewhere down the corridor into dropping an inkwell. He laughed until he had to put a hand on the desk, and then he laughed again at the thought of what the sort of people who wrote to Gringotts in outraged capital letters were going to say once they heard.

When he finally recovered, he wiped one eye with a knuckle and carefully refolded the letter. Then he opened the oldest drawer in his desk, the one reserved for documents of genuine importance, and set it inside.

The ledger could wait. It had waited longer than anyone's grandfather already.

*  *  *

Greengrass House woke slowly. It always had.

The oldest parts of the estate had been built in an age when mornings were expected to arrive with dignity, and several generations of renovations had done very little to change that opinion. Fires came alive before their owners did, curtains opened themselves by degrees rather than all at once, and the lamps along the lower corridors brightened from a sleepy amber to something suitable for breakfast only after the clocks had agreed that respectable people might reasonably be awake. At half past five on Monday morning, most of the house remained dark.

Hobey preferred it that way.

The old house-elf moved through the morning rooms without a sound, collecting the remains of last night's glasses and straightening the things humans had somehow left slightly out of place despite having spent the previous evening doing almost nothing. He had served the Greengrass family longer than either of the present daughters had been alive, and he had developed firm opinions about where everything belonged. Lord Greengrass's newspapers should be folded beside his chair, not left open on the table. Lady Greengrass's correspondence tray should hold correspondence, and not, as it currently did, a silver hairpin and a chocolate wrapper. Hobey removed both offenders with a long-suffering sigh.

The first fire had only just taken properly in the small morning room when something tapped against the eastern delivery window.

His ears lifted. A second tap followed, and it was not the furious hammering of a school owl that had flown through rain and decided the recipient was personally responsible. It was two deliberate knocks, polite and unhurried, and Hobey crossed the room and pulled aside the curtain.

An owl waited on the stone ledge outside. It was an ordinary brown bird of medium size, and completely unfamiliar. Its feathers were dry despite the damp morning, and it showed none of the exhausted droop Hobey associated with a long flight. It simply watched him through the glass with the patient look of a creature that had finished its job and would prefer everyone involved to proceed efficiently. A single cream envelope was tied to its leg.

Hobey opened the window, and the owl stepped inside and extended its leg.

“No breakfast?” he asked.

The owl clicked its beak, which Hobey took for a refusal. He untied the envelope, and the bird gave one sharp shake of its feathers, hopped back onto the ledge and launched itself into the grey morning before he could offer it so much as a drop of water. That was unusual. It was not alarming, but it was unusual, and Hobey closed the window and looked down at what he held.

There was no family seal on it, and no Hogwarts crest or Ministry mark. Only two words were written across the front, in a hand he knew at once.

He had watched that hand develop, from enormous childish letters pressed into the parchment with far too much force to the elegant, controlled script Miss Daphne now used for nearly everything. He had cleaned ink from her fingers when she was six and carried away stacks of practice parchment when she was eight. He had once endured an entire summer in which she insisted on submitting every household request in writing, because Lady Greengrass had told her that a proper heiress should learn to be precise. He turned the envelope over, and the back bore only plain dark wax, pressed flat with no mark at all.

His ears lowered. Letters from Miss Daphne arrived often, but they did not arrive like this.

With a soft crack, he was gone.

* * *

Ophelia Greengrass woke because someone was saying her name. It was not said loudly, since Hobey had served the family long enough to know that waking Lady Greengrass loudly before sunrise carried risks.

“Mistress Ophelia.”

She opened one eye. The bedroom was dark except for the faint glow of the grate, and beside her, her husband slept on with one arm thrown over the sheet, in the complete confidence of a man who expected the world to wait until he was conscious. At the foot of the bed stood Hobey, holding an envelope in both hands.

She closed her eye again. “If Astoria has broken something, it can stay broken for another hour.”

“Hobey does not think Miss Astoria has broken anything.”

That was enough to bring both eyes open. She pushed herself upright, silver-blonde hair falling loose around her shoulders. “What is it?”

“An owl came to the east window, Mistress. Hobey does not know the owl. It gave him this and left at once.”

Ophelia took the envelope, and for perhaps two seconds it seemed unremarkable. Then she saw the handwriting, and the last of her sleep left her.

“Daphne.”

Hobey nodded, and Ophelia glanced toward the window, though the heavy curtains hid everything beyond them. “Was the bird tired?”

“No, Mistress. Dry feathers and a strong flight, and it did not want food.”

She filed the details away automatically, because years of managing an old family had taught her to collect everything first and decide afterwards what mattered. Her thumb moved across the two words on the front. There was no Dear, and no formal title for her husband of the kind Daphne sometimes used to tease him. Just Mother and Father.

“Did anyone else see it?”

“No, Mistress.”

“Then let us keep it that way for the moment.”

Hobey bowed and vanished, and the room settled into quiet again. Ophelia sat with the envelope in her lap for several seconds before she opened it. There were very few reasons for her eldest daughter to send a private letter before dawn on a Monday, and none of the possibilities she produced were pleasant. She broke the wax and unfolded the parchment.

Mother, Father,

By the time you receive this, Harry and I will have left Hogwarts.

We are both safe. Nobody has taken me anywhere, nobody has forced me to do anything, and Harry did not persuade me into this. I am leaving because I decided to leave.

We have everything we need and somewhere safe to stay. For now we intend to travel for a while and see where that takes us. Please do not try to find me immediately. I know that asking will probably accomplish very little, but I am asking anyway.

I am not returning to Hogwarts.

I know this will hurt you, and that is not why I am doing it. I know you both love me, and I know that everything you planned for me was meant to give me a good life. I am not leaving because I think you are terrible people or because I have suddenly come to hate the family. I simply do not want the life that was being prepared for me.

I do not want to spend the next several years becoming the correct wife for a man I did not choose. I do not want every decision about my future to begin with what is best for the family and end with how much freedom can be negotiated for me inside it. I want to study what interests me. I want to choose where I live. If I marry one day, I want that to be my decision too. Please do not blame Harry for these thoughts. He did not put them in my head.

As for Astoria: if I am no longer going to be the heir, and if Tori wants the position, then let her take my place. She would be good at it in her own way. But ask her. Do not decide that because I left, she now has to become me. She does not know where we are, and she did not know when we were leaving. She could not tell you even if she wanted to, so please do not punish her or make her life miserable trying to get answers she does not have.

And Father, if you make her suffer because I left, I will come back for her.

I still love you both, and I hope you can believe that even if you are furious with me. When Harry and I have settled somewhere properly, I want to see you again, and I hope we can reach a point where that is possible without anyone trying to drag me home. Please give me some time first.

Daphne

Ophelia read the first lines and stopped, and her eyes went back to the beginning and travelled over them again. No. She made herself continue, and her fingers tightened around the parchment as the words became strangely difficult to take in. Beside her, her husband made a sleepy sound, turned slightly and settled again. She barely noticed.

Daphne had complained about Hogwarts before, of course. Every child complained about school. Daphne had complained about professors, about curriculum choices, about political stupidity among her classmates, and once, at considerable length, about the library's refusal to acquire a particular French Arithmancy journal. But she had never written anything remotely like this.

It was the line about the life being prepared for her that Ophelia could not let go of. It was worse than the first, because it was not anger. It was a quiet, considered verdict, and she read it twice before she realised the room had grown too warm.

There had been letters, naturally, and rumours as well. A few amused remarks from other parents whose children had seen Harry Potter and Daphne Greengrass together far more often than coincidence could account for. A photograph in a school newsletter in which Daphne stood beside him with a hand through his arm and an expression Ophelia had noticed immediately. She had asked about it, and Daphne had replied that yes, they were seeing one another, followed in characteristic fashion by two paragraphs explaining why this required no maternal intervention. Ophelia had laughed, and her husband had rolled his eyes and wondered whether Potter's talent for trouble was contagious. Neither of them had thought much more about it. Why would they? Daphne had gone on writing home. Less than two weeks ago she had sent three pages of comments on an inheritance clause and corrected a numerical error that one of the family solicitors had somehow missed.

Nothing had changed. Except apparently everything had.

Ophelia could remember the last contract revision almost word for word, because she had been pleased with it. It had gone out to Daphne on Wednesday, and Daphne had answered on Thursday evening, approving the revised financial protections, questioning one provision about residence after marriage and suggesting an alternative that Ophelia herself had thought better. Barely a day later, her daughter had walked out of Hogwarts.

“That makes no sense,” she murmured.

What troubled her most was the plan beneath it. Daphne was not impulsive. She had spent fourteen years understanding exactly what was expected of her, and she did not throw away responsibilities because they had become unpleasant. Yet Harry Potter had entered her life properly only a few months ago, and now she was gone. Ophelia did not like where that thought led, and she liked even less that Daphne had so clearly foreseen it. Please do not blame Harry. That sentence had not been written by accident. Her daughter had known what conclusion her parents would reach, which meant she had thought about this long enough to prepare for their reaction, and somehow that was worse than anything else in the letter.

She folded the parchment along its crease, then unfolded it again. Despite the hour and the sick weight settling behind her ribs, there was one line she kept returning to, and she nearly laughed at it. It was not funny. It was simply so extraordinarily Daphne, with no theatrical declaration and no vague threat, only a plain statement of intended action. She could hear her daughter's voice in it perfectly.

Beside her, her husband finally opened his eyes. He looked at her, still halfway between sleep and waking, and frowned.

“Ophelia?”

She did not answer at once, and for one irrational moment she considered letting him sleep. Once he read it, there would be no returning to the morning they had expected. Breakfast would no longer be breakfast, the correspondence waiting downstairs would cease to matter, and the contract she had spent months improving would belong to a world Daphne had quietly decided she no longer intended to inhabit.

He pushed himself onto one elbow. “What is it?”

There were a dozen ways to begin, and every one of them sounded wrong. Your daughter has run away. Daphne has left Hogwarts. Something has happened. In the end Ophelia simply held out the letter.

“Daphne wrote to us.”

The sleep left his face almost at once. He sat up and took the parchment. “What about?”

She looked at him for a long moment, and when she answered, it was very quietly.

“You need to read it yourself.”

Lord Greengrass read the first paragraph twice, and then he sat very still.

Ophelia watched his face rather than the letter. Her husband was not an expressive man when something truly mattered. Irritation showed easily enough, and so did amusement when he forgot himself, but serious problems made him quieter. He reached the end of the page and went straight back to the beginning.

“How did this arrive?”

“Hobey found an unfamiliar owl at the east window. It left as soon as he took the envelope. A plain brown bird, dry and not at all tired, and it would not even take food.”

His eyes lifted briefly at that, then returned to the parchment. “And the seal?”

“Plain wax, no mark.”

He turned the letter over, examined the broken seal and tilted the page toward the bedside lamp. Ophelia let him. After nearly twenty years of marriage she knew better than to interrupt while he was arranging facts.

“This is her hand,” he said at last. “The pressure is right, and she still curls the lower stroke of her capital G when she writes quickly.”

Ophelia looked at him in surprise. “You noticed that?”

“I have signed enough documents beside her.” He read on for a few more lines. “It is not dictated either, not unless whoever dictated it knows exactly how Daphne sounds when she is being reasonable about something unreasonable.”

Despite everything, Ophelia almost smiled. “That would narrow the suspects considerably.”

His mouth moved faintly, but the humour was gone almost at once. He had reached the paragraph about Astoria, and his expression hardened as he read the warning and then the closing lines. He turned the page over once more, as though another explanation might be hiding on the back. There was none.

“She planned this,” he said.

It was the first thing either of them had said that felt like an admission rather than an observation. Ophelia drew the blankets closer, suddenly aware of how cold the room had become. “Yes.”

“For how long?”

“I don't know.”

“You write to her more often than I do.”

“About estate matters, as you do. Neither of us has been writing to her about this.” She looked toward the fire. “She answered the last contract revision on Thursday, if you recall. She questioned the residence clause and offered a better arrangement, and I remember thinking how well she had understood the whole thing.”

“And now she claims she had already decided to walk away from it entirely.”

“She doesn't say when she decided.”

“No,” he said. “Conveniently.” There was no real accusation in it yet, only frustration, and he lifted the letter again. “Potter.”

He did not sound angry when he said the name, and that concerned Ophelia more than anger would have.

“We knew about him,” she said.

“We knew about a school romance. A few months of letters and walks and whatever else fourteen-year-olds imagine is permanent. She kept up her studies and her training, and she kept discussing the contract. Nothing suggested she meant to abandon all of it.” He tapped one finger against the parchment. “And now, having become attached to Harry Potter, she has left school, rejected the succession and decided she no longer wants the life she has been preparing for since childhood.”

“She says he did not persuade her.”

“She believes he did not.”

Ophelia's head turned sharply. That was the real shape of it, then. It was not kidnapping or enchantment, but something quieter and harder to argue with. “You think he put the idea in her head.”

“I think people change one another.”

“That is not the same thing.”

“No,” he said, meeting her eyes. “It is not.”

For a moment neither of them spoke. Then Ophelia held out her hand, and he gave the letter back. She found the line she had already read too many times and touched it with one finger.

“She knew what we would think. Please do not blame Harry for these thoughts. She wrote that because she expected us to say exactly what you have just said.”

“That does not make us wrong.”

“No.” Ophelia leaned back against the headboard. “But it does not make us right, either.”

Something shifted in his face, though he did not answer, and she went on more quietly.

“Think about her objections over these last months. Requests for delay, questions about whether the agreement was necessary yet, concerns that were rather broader than the usual haggling over terms. I took them all for bargaining, because bargaining is what Greengrasses do. I assumed Daphne would marry and that the only question was on what conditions.” She paused. “I am no longer certain she was ever asking the same question.”

He had followed her thoughts, and he did not like where they led. “She never refused. She never once asked us to end the negotiations. We cannot be expected to have known she meant to leave the country over them.”

“The letter doesn't say she left the country.”

He stopped.

It was the first useful thing either of them had said in several minutes, and his attention sharpened at once. “No,” he said slowly. “It does not.”

He took the parchment from her and read it again, differently this time. He was no longer a father reading a daughter's letter. He was Lord Greengrass, looking for what had been left out. We have everything we need and somewhere safe to stay. For now we intend to travel for a while. There was no destination in it, no country and no date, and no method of travel. The letter named only Harry.

He swung his legs out of bed, and Ophelia watched the change take hold of him. The shock was still there, and so was the hurt, but beneath both something far more familiar had returned.

“Get dressed,” he said, reaching for his robe. “We need to establish what we actually know before we decide what any of this means.”

Ophelia folded Daphne's letter with care. For the first time since Hobey had woken her, she felt she had been given something she could do.

* * *

By seven, the Greengrass study was fully awake.

Lord Greengrass sat behind his desk, dressed and shaved, with Daphne's letter open beside his left hand. Ophelia took the chair opposite, a cup of tea cooling untouched at her elbow. The curtains had been drawn back to admit a pale strip of winter morning that did very little to improve the room, and Hobey waited by the fireplace for his instructions.

“Start from when you heard the owl,” Lord Greengrass said.

“Hobey was in the morning room, Master. The owl tapped twice on the east window. Hobey opened it, took the letter and offered food, but the owl did not want any.”

“How long did it stay?”

“Less than one minute.”

“Was it carrying anything else? An anklet, a courier mark, anything that might identify it?”

“Nothing, Master.”

Lord Greengrass glanced at Ophelia, and she knew what he was thinking because she was thinking it too. Someone had gone to some trouble to make sure the bird could not easily be traced.

“Did it seem tired?” she asked. “Could it have flown through the night?”

Hobey considered the question seriously. “The owl was healthy, Mistress, with clean feathers and steady breathing. It could have flown all night. Hobey cannot know.”

It was the correct answer, and it was one of the reasons they trusted him. Lord Greengrass thanked him and told him to stay nearby, and Hobey bowed and vanished.

For a moment the room was quiet. “She expected us to examine the delivery,” Ophelia said.

“She expected me to examine everything.” There was something almost proud in the complaint, and Ophelia decided not to mention it. She looked at the letter instead.

“We did know about Potter. We were not oblivious.”

“Apparently not attentive enough.”

She thought back through the last few months. Daphne had never actually announced the relationship, which would have been far too straightforward. The first sign had been a note from another mother, mentioning with barely concealed amusement that Daphne Greengrass seemed to have acquired Harry Potter as a near-permanent companion. Ophelia had waited three days before asking, and Daphne's reply had arrived on a Thursday. Yes, Mother, Harry and I are seeing one another. It was followed by a paragraph explaining that Harry was perfectly capable of behaving in public, another explaining that Ophelia did not need to write to Professor Snape, and a final sentence warning that any list of suitable courtship gifts arriving by return owl would be burned unopened. Ophelia had kept the letter, mostly because it was funny.

“She sounded happy,” she said.

“She sounded fourteen.”

“You were fourteen once.”

“I try not to think about it.” That almost earned him a smile. “I assumed Potter would last until summer. Christmas next year, perhaps, if she was feeling particularly stubborn.”

“You do realise she inherited that from you.”

“I am aware.” He turned the parchment slightly. “What bothers me is not really Potter. It is that nothing else changed.”

Ophelia understood. Daphne had gone on answering every letter and her marks had stayed excellent. She still asked for reading on estate management and family investments, and when Ophelia sent the revised marriage agreement, Daphne returned it covered in precise comments. She had not withdrawn from anything. If anything, she had become more engaged, and that was precisely what made it so unsettling.

Lord Greengrass drew a sheaf of pages from one of the folders on his desk. “Thursday evening's reply on the residence provision.” Ophelia recognised the handwriting. Daphne had challenged the clause limiting where she could establish a household after marriage, proposed new wording and attached two pages of reasoning. It was hardly the behaviour of someone planning to vanish the next day, unless the behaviour itself had been deliberate.

“She didn't want us to know,” Ophelia said slowly, “and she knew exactly how to make sure we wouldn't.”

“That is the less pleasant possibility.”

She looked through the comments again. There was no strain in them and no hidden message she could suddenly see now that she knew what had followed. It was just Daphne, competent and thoughtful and occasionally cutting. “Perhaps she hadn't decided yet.”

“She had.”

“You don't know that. The letter says that leaving was planned, but it does not say when the decision became final.”

He considered this and nodded once. It was how they had always worked, less through agreement than through adjustment. He reached for another folder. “Her accounts. I asked for the records while you were dressing.”

Of course he had. Ophelia read the page and frowned. Daphne's allowance account showed ordinary spending through the summer and early autumn and then very little, with no unusual withdrawals, no large purchases and nothing in recent weeks that suggested preparation for leaving school. “When was the last withdrawal?”

“Late August.”

“Months ago. That makes no sense. A girl planning to leave home needs money, and Daphne would never have forgotten that.”

“She may have taken cash earlier, but not enough to matter. All the other family accounts are untouched.”

“Then Potter.”

He said nothing, and he did not need to. The exact scale of the Potter estate was another question, but the family was old and had never been poor. If Daphne had left with him, she would have no need to touch Greengrass funds at all. Ophelia disliked how neatly that fitted, and her husband disliked it for a different reason.

“Daphne has never depended on anyone outside this family. She has never needed to.”

“She is fourteen.”

“That is not my point.” It did not need to be, because Ophelia understood. Dependence created leverage, and the thought of his daughter willingly placing herself where Harry Potter controlled her shelter, her food and her means of travel offended nearly everything he had spent fourteen years teaching her.

“She trusts him, and that does not mean he is taking advantage of her.”

“I did not say that he was.”

“You were about to think it very loudly.”

That finally drew a faint, humourless smile. “I am entitled to a few private thoughts before breakfast.”

“You lost that privilege when you married me.”

He leaned back and rubbed a hand over his jaw, and for a moment they were simply husband and wife rather than Lord and Lady Greengrass managing a crisis. Then he looked at the letter again. “Whatever Potter's role, she has access to resources through him, which explains the accounts.”

“It explains them,” Ophelia said. “It does not prove anything.” He heard the distinction and let it stand.

She glanced at the blank parchment on the desk. “We should answer her, and carefully.”

“Yes.”

“No threats.”

He looked mildly offended. “I was not going to threaten her.”

“You were going to order her home.”

“That is not a threat.”

“It will sound like one.”

He stared at the empty page, and Ophelia left him to it. After a while he began to write, slowly, because Daphne had inherited that from him too: when words mattered, speed was the enemy. When he finished, he turned the page toward her.

Daphne,

We have received your letter.

Whatever disagreement exists between us, our first concern is that you are safe. You say that you are, and for the moment we will accept that, but we need to hear it from you directly.

Come home if you are willing. If you are not, then write to us and arrange a way for us to speak. Nothing concerning Astoria or your position in the family will be decided without discussion.

We are angry. We are also your parents, and those two things are not mutually exclusive.

You do not need to defend Harry Potter to us in order to speak with us. We will listen to what you have to say.

Please answer.

Father

Ophelia stopped at the last word and read it twice. He had not signed it with his title, or even his name. “That is good,” she said, and slid it back. “Send it.”

He folded it himself, and Hobey appeared when called. “An ordinary owl,” Lord Greengrass told him. “Address it to Miss Daphne Greengrass, nothing more, and do not attach any tracking charm.”

Ophelia looked at him, and he met her eyes. “If Daphne checks it, I would prefer that her first conclusion not be that I ignored everything she wrote.”

It surprised her, though not by much. Just enough.

* * *

They spent the next two hours working, which was easier than waiting.

Lord Greengrass checked the family properties first and found no ward activations, no unexpected Floo arrivals and no elves reporting visitors. Ophelia went through recent correspondence for names Daphne had mentioned more than once, and most of them led nowhere: school friends, professors, booksellers. And Harry, again and again. She disliked how often his name appeared now that she was looking for it. It was not suspicious, which would have been easier, because he was simply present. Harry thinks. Harry found. Harry and I tried. She had read those small references without concern, because Daphne had sounded content.

By nine, she had collected enough of them to understand something she wished she had noticed sooner. “We underestimated it,” she said.

Her husband did not ask what she meant. “Potter.”

“I thought it was infatuation.”

“So did I.”

“She wrote about him constantly.”

“Not constantly.” Ophelia gave him a look. “Frequently,” he amended.

“And neither of us thought it mattered, because she kept doing everything else. That is the uncomfortable part. She never made us choose between the daughter we knew and the girl dating Harry Potter. She was both.”

“Which leaves us with the same question.”

“What changed?”

Neither of them had an answer, and a soft crack interrupted them. Hobey stood beside the door with an owl on his arm, the owl Hobey had sent. Ophelia rose, and so did her husband. The bird looked entirely untroubled, and there was no envelope on its leg.

“When did it return?” Lord Greengrass asked.

“Just now, Master.”

He glanced at the clock and then at the owl. “That was quick.” Ophelia came closer. The bird's feathers were slightly ruffled, but its breathing was steady, and it did not look as though it had crossed half the country and back. Lord Greengrass held out a hand, and the owl stepped onto it with visible reluctance. He checked the leg himself and found no message, no returned envelope and no sign of a failed delivery.

“She received it.”

“Or someone accepted it on her behalf,” Ophelia said. “An owl might deliver to a household.”

“If she were staying there.”

“Which would still mean someone received it for her.”

He nodded, but the important fact stood. The letter had not come back undelivered, and the owl had returned far too quickly for its destination to be remote. “There is no exact calculation,” he said. “Owls take shortcuts we do not understand, and weather matters, and so does the bird. But not Scotland.”

“Probably not.”

“Certainly not the Continent.”

Ophelia was less sure of certainly, but she followed his reasoning. The bird had left after seven and was back before ten. Even allowing for magic and an unusually efficient route, that did not look like international travel. Her husband handed the owl back to Hobey with instructions to feed it and keep it close, and returned to the desk with something changed in him. He was not relaxed, but focused.

“We know more than we did three hours ago. Daphne has not used Greengrass money, and Potter has. She can receive correspondence, and she is close enough that an owl made the journey and returned before midmorning.”

“Don't turn an inference into a fact,” Ophelia said.

His expression softened by a fraction. “I married you to prevent exactly that.”

“No, you didn't.”

“It has become one of the benefits.”

She ignored him. “So what do you think?”

He looked down at the letter and the account records beside it. “When children run away, they go somewhere they believe is safe. Potter has money and almost certainly property, Daphne trusts him enough to leave Hogwarts with him, and neither of them appears to need anything from us. They are not wandering the countryside. They have somewhere to stay, and unless our owl has developed an enthusiasm for impossible distances, it is not particularly far away.”

“London?” Ophelia said. “A Potter property?”

His eyes settled on hers. “That would be my first guess.”

It was a good guess, and a sensible one. For the first time that morning, both of them felt as though the problem had become smaller.

* * *

By Monday afternoon, Lord Greengrass had stopped expecting Daphne to answer quickly. He had not yet stopped expecting her to answer at all, and that distinction mattered.

The study had accumulated parchment over the course of the morning, not enough to become untidy but enough that Ophelia could read the shape of the investigation simply by looking across her husband's desk. Daphne's account records lay open beside the family property register, and a second sheet held the names of several people Lord Greengrass trusted to make discreet enquiries without turning them into dinner conversation by evening. So far, nothing had come of it. No Greengrass property had received an unexpected visitor, none of the family Floos had been used, and Daphne's accounts remained untouched. One contact from the Ministry's transportation office had found no Portkey registered in her name, and another had found no booking at any magical inn where the family was known well enough for the proprietor to remember her.

It was not a great deal of information, and Lord Greengrass treated it accordingly. “No conclusions from absences,” he said, reading the latest reply.

Ophelia looked up from Daphne's correspondence. “That sounds suspiciously like something I would say to you.”

“It was useful advice.”

“You argued with me for ten minutes when I said it.”

“I have since improved it.” He set the report aside. “There is still no reason to involve the Ministry. Hogwarts, however...”

That was the question that had sat between them for most of the afternoon. Daphne had said she had left Hogwarts, but not when, and not whether the school knew. Ophelia could imagine several possibilities, and none of them helped. “We could ask directly. But if the school already knows, all we accomplish is announcing that we know less than they do. And if it doesn't, we create exactly the alarm Daphne asked us not to create before we understand what happened.”

Her husband leaned back, and she knew what else he was weighing. No marriage agreement had been completed, but enough families were involved that news of Daphne Greengrass vanishing from Hogwarts with Harry Potter would spread very quickly if it were handled badly, and once that happened it could not be returned to private correspondence.

“We wait until tomorrow,” she said. “We have a letter in Daphne's hand saying she is safe, and our reply was apparently delivered. We have no sign that she is hurt or being held against her will.”

“You are relying heavily on that owl.”

“I am relying on what we have.”

He considered it, then nodded. “Tomorrow.”

That was how the decision was made, and it was not because either of them was unconcerned. It was because panic was not information.

* * *

By Tuesday morning, Daphne still had not answered, and at half past eight Lord and Lady Greengrass arrived at Hogwarts.

They came through the Floo rather than by carriage, both dressed as though for a formal appointment, not an unannounced visit to a school. Ophelia's expression was calm, and her husband's was calmer. Minerva McGonagall took one look at them and knew that something had gone wrong somewhere beyond Hogwarts.

“Lord Greengrass, Lady Greengrass.”

“Professor. We need to speak with Professor Dumbledore regarding our daughter.”

There was no social preamble, and Minerva's face changed, only slightly, but Ophelia saw it. “So you do know.”

Minerva hesitated, which was answer enough. “Please come with me.”

The walk to Dumbledore's office took several minutes and held almost no conversation, and by the time they reached the stone gargoyle, Lord Greengrass's anger had become extremely quiet. Dumbledore was waiting for them. Snape stood near one of the windows, and Minerva took the chair beside the desk rather than leaving, which told Ophelia this was already more serious than they had hoped.

“Lord Greengrass, Lady Greengrass,” Dumbledore said, rising. “I wish we were meeting under better circumstances.”

Her husband remained standing. “When did you discover that Daphne was absent?”

Dumbledore did not try to soften it. “Yesterday morning.”

Lord Greengrass looked at him for several seconds. “Yesterday.”

“We first grew concerned when Daphne and Harry Potter both failed to attend their morning classes. By lunch neither had appeared anywhere we expected, and we began a more thorough search of the castle and grounds afterward.”

“And when did anyone last see my daughter?”

Dumbledore glanced at Snape, who answered. “We have no reliable last sighting.”

That was worse. Lord Greengrass did not raise his voice. “So you cannot tell me whether she left on Sunday. Or Saturday. Or Friday.”

Snape's expression tightened. “No.”

The room became very still, and Ophelia spoke before her husband could. “Then you do not know when she left Hogwarts.”

“No,” Dumbledore said, folding his hands.

“My fourteen-year-old daughter leaves your school at some unknown point,” Lord Greengrass said, “and the first anyone notices is Monday morning.”

Minerva straightened. “Lord Greengrass—”

“I am not suggesting that Hogwarts should account for every minute of every student's weekend, Professor. I am asking whether anyone can tell me when my daughter ceased to be under your supervision.”

“No,” Minerva said quietly, and he accepted it, which somehow made the anger worse.

Dumbledore gestured toward the chairs. “Please sit. There is something you should know. We have reason to believe that the absence was planned.”

“What reason?”

Snape produced a folded inventory. “Ingredients were removed from my private stores. They were not valuable ones, but useful ones: restoratives and stabilisers, materials to support continued travel or independent brewing.”

“Potter,” Lord Greengrass said.

“Precisely,” Snape said, with immediate approval.

Minerva gave them both a look. “We do not know who took them.” Snape appeared personally offended by this, and Lord Greengrass did not appear to care.

“What else?”

“Some personal belongings are missing from both students' dormitories,” Dumbledore said. “We have not yet established which items, or when they were removed. Harry's house-elf has also not been found.”

That interested Ophelia. “Dobby.”

Dumbledore looked at her. “You know of him?”

“Daphne mentioned him often.” Her husband turned toward her, and she ignored him.

“The castle wards,” Dumbledore went on, “recorded no unusual magical departure. There was no unauthorised Portkey and no breach of the outer protections that we can identify.”

“You have searched Hogsmeade? The known student hiding places? The Forest?”

“Hogsmeade yes, the hiding places thoroughly, and the Forest to the extent reasonably possible. There is no indication they remain on the grounds.”

Lord Greengrass reached into his robes. “Then this may save us some time.” He laid Daphne's letter on the desk, and for the first time since they had entered, Dumbledore looked genuinely surprised.

“She wrote to you.”

“Early Monday morning.”

Dumbledore picked up the letter, and Minerva rose and moved closer. Snape lasted approximately three seconds before doing the same. Nobody spoke while Dumbledore read, and his eyes slowed at the passage about Harry, and again at the one about Astoria. When he finished, he laid the parchment down with care.

“So they left voluntarily.”

“Our daughter did.” Snape's face made his opinion of the distinction plain, but he said nothing.

“She gives no location, only that they intend to travel,” Dumbledore said. “And you have no indication when this was written?”

“None. We sent a reply yesterday morning, and the owl returned without the letter before midmorning.”

Minerva frowned. “Delivered?”

“That is the reasonable interpretation.” Dumbledore asked how long the bird had been away, and when Lord Greengrass told him, nobody spoke for a moment. Snape was the first to break the silence.

“That is not enough time for Scotland. Nor France.”

“We are treating it as evidence, Severus, not measurement,” Ophelia said. “Owl travel is not precise enough to draw a circle on a map. But the bird did not come back exhausted, and it did not come back with the letter. Whatever accepted the correspondence could be reached quickly.”

“And you believe that means they are still in Britain.”

“I believe it makes Britain considerably more likely than the alternatives.”

Dumbledore acknowledged it with a small nod, one competence recognising another, and they were interrupted by a knock at the door. Minerva looked toward it. “That will be Astoria.”

* * *

Astoria entered expecting trouble, and she found both her parents, her Head of House, Professor McGonagall and Albus Dumbledore waiting for her. For a moment, even Astoria Greengrass reconsidered several recent life choices. Then she remembered the folded parchment hidden inside her robes, and not the letter, but the other one: the Map. Her face stayed perfectly calm. Mostly.

“Tori,” her mother said.

“Hello.”

“Sit down,” her father said, indicating the chair beside Ophelia. “You are not in trouble.”

It was exactly the sort of thing adults said immediately before making someone regret being alive, and Astoria sat. But he did not begin with accusations, and he did not ask whether Daphne had told her she meant to leave. They already knew the departure had been carefully planned. What mattered now was where she had gone.

“Did Daphne ever mention somewhere she wanted to visit? Recently?”

Astoria considered it honestly. “Lots of places. France sometimes, and Harry wanted to see America one day. There was something about Norway, because Daphne found a paper on their ward structures, but I don't think she wanted to go in winter.”

“Scotland? Anywhere in the north of England?”

“No.”

“A Potter property?”

Astoria blinked. “I didn't know Harry had properties.” Neither had Harry, not very long ago, but that seemed unnecessary to mention.

“Did he ever speak of places his family owned? A house, a cottage, an estate? Did either of them mention London?”

“Harry complains about London sometimes. Mostly the crowds.”

Her father's expression did not change, and Astoria almost admired him. He moved sideways rather than repeat himself. “Did Daphne ever mention someone outside Hogwarts they might trust to help them?”

Astoria took her time. “Dobby, I suppose. Harry trusts him more than almost anyone.”

“The elf has vanished too.”

“That doesn't surprise me,” she said, which was true.

“Did she ever say whether Harry had the means to support them both?”

“Everyone knows Harry's rich,” Astoria said, which was equally true and, for once, entirely public. “She never gave me a number.”

Her father nodded slowly and moved on. “Did they ever discuss travel around you? Muggle travel? Did Daphne ask you about railway stations, airports, Muggle money, maps?”

Astoria hesitated, not because she knew a route, but because Harry talked about Muggle things constantly. “Harry must know a lot about it. But I don't remember them talking about a route.”

Every answer she gave was true, and that was the beautiful part. Her father studied her face, and she met his eyes. He knew she was being careful, and she knew he knew, but careful was not the same as lying.

“Do you know where your sister is?”

“No.”

“Where she intended to go, or whom she meant to meet? Any property, any town, anything that would allow me to find her?”

Astoria thought of the Map inside her robes, which could have located Daphne perfectly if Daphne were inside Hogwarts. She was not. “No.”

Her father sat back. There was frustration in his face, but not disbelief, which was worse in some ways. He believed her, and he was not foolish enough to keep asking the same question once he had an answer. Ophelia reached for her hand.

“Did she write to you?”

Astoria paused. “Yes.”

Lord Greengrass looked at her sharply, and she drew Daphne's letter from her robes, and only Daphne's. Harry's stayed hidden. Her mother read it first, and Astoria watched the familiar sequence cross her face: the reassurance, the warning not to lie to anyone, and then the line You are not me. Ophelia stopped there and handed the page to her husband. He read it in silence, and Astoria watched him reach Do as much as you want to do. No more. Nothing moved in his face. He read on, past the promise that there would always be room for her, past the schoolwork and Tracey, to the final I love you. Then he folded the letter, not quickly.

“She expected us to question you.”

“She knows you.”

That could have gone badly, and her mother's fingers tightened around hers. But Lord Greengrass only looked at Daphne's letter, and then at Astoria. “You understand that I am trying to find your sister because she is fourteen and somewhere we cannot verify.”

“I know.”

“I am not trying to punish her, and I am not going to punish you for something she chose.”

Astoria believed him, which was important, and she nodded. He studied her for another moment, and something in him seemed to settle. He had asked good questions, and she did not have the answers, and pushing harder would not create them.

“Very well,” he said, and across the room Minerva watched him with slightly less suspicion than before.

* * *

After Astoria had gone, the adults remained around Dumbledore's desk. The picture was still incomplete, but it had acquired a shape. Harry and Daphne had planned their disappearance and taken useful supplies, and they had resources. Dobby was gone, Daphne's family accounts were untouched, and no conventional magical departure had registered at Hogwarts. An owl addressed directly to her had delivered a letter and returned quickly. None of it proved a destination, but taken together it suggested one.

Lord Greengrass stood at the window, looking out over the grounds. “A Potter property.”

“That remains your conclusion?” Dumbledore asked.

“It is my best guess, because it requires the fewest assumptions. Potter has money, which Astoria confirms Daphne knew. My daughter has touched none of her own accounts, yet she tells us they have everything they need. They need somewhere private, somewhere Potter believes nobody has authority over him, and if his family owns property in Britain, that is the obvious choice.” He rested a finger on the copy of her letter. “The owl supports it as well, not conclusively, but enough. It points to somewhere reachable from London in a short time, with staff or magical arrangements able to accept correspondence.”

“And a house-elf makes ordinary travel restrictions nearly irrelevant,” Ophelia added.

Snape folded his arms. “So Potter hides on one of his estates while the rest of us search Hogwarts.”

“If he even knew he owned them until recently,” Minerva said.

“No,” Dumbledore said slowly, and the others turned toward him. He had been quiet for some time, his fingertips pressed together. “And that is rather the point, Minerva. Harry did not know what he owned, so someone told him, and there is only one place in Britain that can. Properties require titles, and titles require records. A boy of fourteen cannot simply walk out of Hogwarts and into an estate. Someone has to confirm that it is his, and open its wards to him.”

Snape grunted. “You are suggesting the goblins.”

“I am suggesting that if Harry has a place to go, the goblins know where it is, and they have almost certainly known for some time.” Dumbledore looked at Lord Greengrass. “The same is true of the money. It cannot be carried out of this school in a pocket, so it has been moved, or arranged, or made accessible. In this country, that sort of arrangement passes through one institution.”

“Gringotts,” Lord Greengrass said.

“It is a thin thread, but it is the only one we have that leads anywhere.”

Lord Greengrass inclined his head, with something that was not quite respect but came close to it. “They will not disclose Potter's records. I expect them to refuse.”

Ophelia understood at once, and Minerva a moment later.

“But there are useful ways to refuse.” He adjusted one cuff. “And I would very much like to know what arrangements Mr Potter made before he disappeared.”

Dumbledore looked toward the window. Outside, students were crossing the grounds between classes, unaware that several adults had just built an increasingly convincing picture of two missing children hidden somewhere within Britain. It was coherent, and it fitted what little evidence they had. Nobody in the room had yet found a reason to doubt it.

“Very well,” Dumbledore said.

Lord Greengrass picked up his daughter's letter. “Then we speak to Gringotts.

* * *

Albus had always found Gringotts an uncomfortable place to negotiate.

It was not that goblins were unreasonable, which would have been simpler. Unreasonable people could be persuaded, embarrassed, frightened, or offered something they wanted more than whatever principle they were currently defending. Goblins were perfectly capable of all four themselves, and considerably less impressed when someone tried the same on them. The difficulty was that Gringotts knew exactly what it was. It was a bank, certainly, but it was also something older, something that had existed beside wizarding government for centuries without ever quite accepting that wizarding government stood above it.

The young goblin behind the first desk listened to Lord Greengrass's request without expression, and when he had finished she folded her hands.

“No.”

Lord Greengrass regarded her, and Albus said nothing. Beside them, Deputy Secretary Miriam Harcourt of the Ministry's Legal Affairs Office opened the leather case she had carried from Whitehall and removed a document. She had been a sensible choice. She was not a politician and had no interest in appearing in tomorrow's Prophet, and she had spent most of the journey from Hogwarts asking exactly the sort of questions Albus wished more Ministry officials asked before deciding they already understood a problem. Two missing minors, one in Hogwarts's care and one the daughter of an old family, both apparently acting voluntarily and neither known to be hurt. There was no established location and no confirmed crime, and that last point had made her reject three possible Ministry powers before they ever reached Diagon Alley.

She laid the document on the desk. “We are not requesting financial records, account balances or transaction history. We are asking for confirmation of whether either child is currently residing in property administered by the Potter estate.”

The goblin did not look at the parchment. “No.”

“Then I would like to speak with your supervisor.”

The goblin's expression shifted by perhaps half a degree. “Of course.”

The supervisor was older, and he read Harcourt's papers in full, and listened while Lord Greengrass established his relationship to Daphne and Albus explained Hogwarts's custodial obligations and Harry's unusual legal circumstances. Then he pushed the parchment back across the desk. “Gringotts does not disclose the location of clients, their use of property or information from their accounts.”

Harcourt tapped one paragraph. “Section seventeen permits emergency disclosure where financial confidentiality materially obstructs the recovery of a missing minor.”

“It permits disclosure by institutions governed under Ministry banking regulations.”

“Gringotts operates within Britain, so you recognise British law.”

The goblin's mouth curved slightly. “We recognise a great many British laws.”

Albus almost smiled, though Harcourt did not. “This distinction is not productive.”

“It is extremely productive from where I am sitting.”

Lord Greengrass, silent until now, leaned forward. “My daughter is fourteen. I am not asking what she has purchased, or what Potter owns, or what money has passed between them. I want to know whether she is sleeping tonight under a roof controlled by this bank.”

“That would reveal information about a client's use of property.”

“She is my child.”

“She is also a client.”

Lord Greengrass's expression became very still, and Albus noticed it, as did Harcourt. The goblin appeared to decide that he had said as much as he meant to. “If you wish to pursue the matter, Senior Manager Marrowgrim is responsible for the relevant accounts.” There was something in his tone that suggested this was not a concession, but permission to discover that the wall continued farther back.

* * *

Marrowgrim received them half an hour later.

His office was smaller than Albus had expected from a senior manager of Gringotts. Dark wood covered most of the walls, narrow shelves held ledgers whose spines looked older than several Ministry departments, and a heavy desk stood beneath two brass lamps. There was nothing ostentatious in the room, only the quiet confidence of a place through which very large sums passed without anyone feeling the need to display them. The goblin behind the desk was extremely old, though age seemed to have sharpened rather than diminished him.

“Headmaster Dumbledore, Lord Greengrass, Deputy Secretary Harcourt.” His eyes rested briefly on her Ministry insignia. “I understand you have been persistent.”

“We have tried to be precise,” Harcourt said.

“Far more valuable.”

He gestured to the chairs and waited, with no impatience whatever, which made the room feel oddly like a classroom in which the examination had already begun. Harcourt arranged her documents and made her request as narrowly as she could. Two minors whose location was unknown, both apparently gone from Hogwarts voluntarily. At least one had written to her family to say that she was safe, and there was evidence of careful planning and access to independent funds. They believed the children remained in Britain, and might be using property belonging to the Potter estate. Lord Greengrass slid Daphne's letter across the desk, and Marrowgrim glanced at it without touching it.

“We are asking for one of two things. Either confirm whether Harry Potter or Daphne Greengrass is occupying Potter property in Britain, or confirm whether Gringotts has recently arranged accommodation for either of them through Potter holdings.”

Nothing moved in Marrowgrim's face, though Albus thought he saw something that, on a less disciplined countenance, might have been amusement.

Harcourt went on for several minutes. She cited Hogwarts's duty of care, the Ministry's emergency provisions for missing minors, Lord Greengrass's parental standing, the limited nature of the request and the distinction between financial disclosure and confirmation of physical safety. She had prepared thoroughly, and Albus found little to object to. The request was reasonable and, more importantly, restrained. Nobody was demanding vault access or asking Gringotts to surrender Harry's gold. They were trying to find two fourteen-year-olds who had disappeared from school.

When she finished, Marrowgrim read the entire document, not quickly, and turned to the second page and read that too. Then he set both sheets neatly on the desk.

“No.”

Harcourt blinked once, and Lord Greengrass did not. “Senior Manager, perhaps I have not made the limits of the request clear enough.”

“You explained them exceptionally well.”

“Then on what basis do you refuse?”

“On the basis that the information belongs to clients of Gringotts.”

“We have just established several legal exceptions to ordinary confidentiality.”

“You have established several exceptions applicable to institutions governed by your Ministry.”

“Gringotts cannot operate in Britain while simply choosing which laws apply to it.”

Marrowgrim looked almost interested. “We do not. We comply with taxation agreements, currency treaties, anti-fraud provisions, commercial law, property registration where wizarding property intersects with Ministry jurisdiction, and roughly six hundred years of increasingly imaginative legislation concerning the movement of gold.” He touched one claw to the first parchment. “We do not recognise the Ministry's authority to open a client's private affairs because a Ministry secretary has found a section she considers broadly worded.”

“This is not about opening accounts.”

“No. It is about learning what is inside them.”

“My daughter is not asking you for privacy from a creditor,” Lord Greengrass said. “She is fourteen years old and she has left school.”

Marrowgrim turned to him. “Miss Greengrass has already authorised us to disclose certain information to you.”

That changed the room. Lord Greengrass leaned forward slightly. “She contacted you.”

“I did not say that.”

“You said she authorised disclosure.”

“I did, and when she did so concerns private correspondence.”

Lord Greengrass's jaw tightened. “What are you authorised to tell me?”

“That your daughter is safe, that she is acting of her own free will, and that she does not wish her location, movements, financial arrangements or correspondence disclosed.”

Lord Greengrass sat back. It was nothing Daphne had not already told him, and yet it was something. She had made arrangements here too, and Albus watched that conclusion settle over him. A Potter property became, if anything, more plausible.

Harcourt returned to the law. “Mr Potter's circumstances are different. Hogwarts retains obligations toward him, as does the Ministry under the Tournament statutes.”

“I manage the accounts of both children, Deputy Secretary,” Marrowgrim said, “and the estate they hold. Mr Potter's circumstances are a matter between Mr Potter and his bank.” He turned to Albus. “Does Mr Potter owe Gringotts money? Has he defrauded this bank? Has a court Gringotts recognises ordered his accounts frozen?”

“No,” Albus said, to each in turn, though the first answer came a fraction late.

The estate they hold.

Harcourt was already framing her reply, and Lord Greengrass was watching the goblin's face rather than weighing his grammar, and neither of them had noticed. But Albus had spent a very long life listening to the exact words people chose, and goblins did not misspeak. A joint estate was no small thing for two fourteen-year-olds to hold between them. He glanced up and found Marrowgrim's eyes on him, dark and unhurried. The old goblin said nothing. He merely inclined his head by perhaps a quarter of an inch, like a man acknowledging that a piece had been seen, and went on as though nothing had passed between them.

“Then his Tournament obligations are of no concern to us.”

“You know Harry is missing.”

“I know many things.”

“Then you understand why we are asking.”

“Yes.” There was no mockery in it, which was almost worse. Albus tried another direction. “Harry is fourteen.”

Marrowgrim's gaze sharpened. “In your school. Not in this bank.”

The words landed quietly, and Albus felt them anyway. There were old arguments beneath that sentence, some of them concerning reports Harry had never received and decisions Albus had once considered entirely reasonable. This was not the time for them.

Harcourt closed a folder. “So I understand your position correctly: even with a documented concern for the welfare of minors, Gringotts will not confirm whether they are in property it administers, or whether estate resources are supporting them, or whether either has recently drawn funds.”

“Correct.”

She studied him, and then she nodded once. Albus recognised the moment: she had reached the end of the law that could be used, as opposed to merely quoted. Lord Greengrass had not. “And if I challenge this refusal?”

“You may petition Chief Ragnok.”

The room went very quiet. Harcourt's expression altered for the first time that afternoon, not with fear but with recognition. The head of Gringotts was not another manager at the end of a corridor, and one did not ask him to reconsider a confidentiality decision as though disputing a fee. To do so would turn a search for two children into a matter between the British Ministry and the highest authority of the goblin nation.

“I do not believe that would be proportionate,” Harcourt said, closing her last folder.

“A sensible conclusion.”

Lord Greengrass looked as though he found nothing sensible about it, but he understood. Albus rose. “So that is all you will give us.”

“No, Headmaster.” For the first time all afternoon, Albus wondered whether they had gained something. “I will give you advice. If Miss Greengrass wishes to speak to you, she will. If Mr Potter wishes to speak to you, he will.”

“That is not advice,” Lord Greengrass said.

“It is when one has spent the afternoon trying to make other people tell you where they are.” Marrowgrim's mouth moved faintly. “Good evening.”

Lord Greengrass and Harcourt were already at the door, Harcourt gathering her case and Lord Greengrass with his daughter's letter back inside his robes and his jaw set. Albus followed them last, and he had almost reached the threshold when the old goblin spoke again.

“Headmaster.”

Albus turned. Marrowgrim had not risen, and his hands were still folded on the desk, but his voice had dropped below the pitch the others could hear.

“Another piece of advice, since you will not ask for it. Mr Potter already considers Miss Greengrass one of his own, a Potter in every way that matters to that family.” His eyes held Albus's. “You knew his father. You know what that means, and how Potters have always been about what is theirs. I would be very careful what is done to that girl.”

For a moment Albus said nothing, as the remark from earlier fell into place beside this one. Then he inclined his head. “I do know,” he said quietly, and followed the others out.

* * *

The forest was wet. It was not raining anymore, but it had been recently enough that water still gathered along the pine needles and dropped at irregular intervals into the ferns. Albus waited beneath an old beech where the ground was comparatively dry. He had come alone, and that had seemed important.

For nearly ten minutes nothing happened. Then a large black dog came out between the trees and stopped when it saw him, and for a moment neither of them moved. Then the dog became Sirius Black. His hair was tied back, his clothes plain and worn, and there was enough suspicion in his face to make it clear he had not come expecting a friendly visit.

“Albus.”

“Sirius.”

Sirius looked around the clearing. “You came alone. That means either that this is very good or very bad.”

“I suppose that depends upon one's perspective.”

Sirius gave him a tired look. “Still doing that, then.”

Albus almost smiled. “Harry has left Hogwarts.”

There was no surprise in Sirius's face, no confusion. He simply looked at him, and Albus felt something inside him settle. “You knew.”

“I knew he was thinking about it.”

“That is not what I asked.”

“No.” Sirius looked away toward the trees. Eventually he said, “They came to see me. Harry and Daphne.”

“When?”

“I don't think I'm going to answer that.”

Albus had expected as much. “Did you know they meant to leave Hogwarts?” Sirius was silent long enough that the answer became obvious anyway. “Yes.”

“And you did not tell me. Why?”

Sirius gave a short laugh with no humour in it. “Because Harry asked me not to.”

“He is fourteen.”

“I noticed.”

“And that was sufficient?”

“No.” Sirius folded his arms. “He was going, Albus. I told him it was dangerous. I told him that being angry didn't make disappearing a good idea. I asked enough questions that Daphne started looking at me as though she wanted to turn me into a timetable.” Despite himself, Albus could imagine it. “They had answers.”

“Children often believe they do.”

“Yes,” Sirius said, his expression hardening. “And sometimes adults believe the same thing.”

There it was. Albus let it pass.

“For what it's worth, I don't like it,” Sirius went on. “I'd much rather know exactly where he is, what he's eating and whether he's doing something stupid. But there came a point where I had two choices. I could refuse to help and let them go anyway, or I could make sure the plan had fewer holes.”

“What kind of advice did you give?”

“The kind you give someone when you know they're going whether you approve or not.”

Albus waited, but Sirius did not elaborate. “Do you know where they are?”

“No.” The answer came at once. “And before you ask, I don't know where they were heading, either. They hadn't picked a destination when I spoke to them.”

That was useful, more useful than Sirius probably intended, and Albus thought of Daphne's letter. For now we intend to travel for a while. “What did they tell you?”

“Enough to convince me they weren't planning to sleep in a ditch.”

There was affection beneath the irritation. “They have money?”

“Yes.”

“And Dobby?”

Sirius's mouth twitched. “Yes.”

“Transport?”

“They had plans.”

“What plans?”

“Albus.” Sirius shook his head. “No.”

The word sounded remarkably familiar after the afternoon at Gringotts, and Albus sighed. “I am not trying to punish Harry. I am trying to make certain he is safe.”

“I know.”

“And yet you continue to withhold information.”

Sirius was quiet for a while, and when he answered some of the defensiveness had gone. “Because I promised him.”

Albus looked toward the trees. A drop of water fell from somewhere above and struck a broad leaf beside his shoe. “Did you advise them on where to go?”

That made Sirius hesitate, only slightly, but it was real. Albus turned his full attention back to him. “Sirius.”

“They were worried everyone would guess the obvious routes.”

“London.”

“And Dover. International Portkeys, Floo offices, anything that looks like a fourteen-year-old's idea of leaving the country.” Albus felt several pieces move closer together. “What did you suggest?”

Sirius rubbed the back of his neck. “I told them not to go south first. Move inside Britain, Muggle transport if they could, north or west before doing anything else, and make the first trail point the wrong way.”

North. Albus thought of Lord Greengrass's owl, gone only a few hours and returned in good condition. He thought of Gringotts, of private arrangements and Potter resources and properties scattered across Britain.

“You told them to remain in Britain.”

“For a while.” The qualification barely registered. “North first.”

Sirius's eyes narrowed. “That was one suggestion.”

“Did they accept it?”

There was another hesitation. “Daphne said north first.”

It was not proof, and Albus knew better than to treat it as such. A plan discussed days or weeks earlier could change, since Harry was perfectly capable of changing a route halfway through it and Daphne was perfectly capable of improving one until the original barely remained. Still, there was the north, and the owl, and the absence of any international magical travel, and the arrangements at Gringotts. A Potter property would give them privacy, resources and exactly the independence Harry had apparently wanted.

“You believe they are still in Britain.”

Sirius went very still. “I didn't say that.”

“No,” Albus said, “you did not.”

For several seconds neither of them spoke. Then Sirius exhaled. “Don't turn one piece of advice into a map, Albus.”

“I won't.”

Sirius gave him a look that said he did not believe that for an instant, and Albus could not entirely blame him. “Have you heard from Harry since?”

It was the question Sirius had been expecting, and his face softened in a way he could not quite hide. “Yes.”

Albus felt relief before anything else. “Recently? Is he safe?”

“As far as I know. Daphne too.”

That was enough, and more than Gringotts had given him, more than he had possessed when he entered the forest. “Thank you.”

Sirius looked faintly surprised. “You're not going to ask where the letter came from?”

“Would you tell me?”

“No.”

“Then I shall save us both the time.” That earned him the first real smile of the evening, small and gone quickly. Albus started toward the edge of the clearing, and Sirius called after him.

“Albus.” He stopped. Sirius stood where he had been, hands in the pockets of his coat. “They're not doing this to hurt you.”

“I know.”

Sirius's face suggested that was not quite the answer he had meant, and Albus understood anyway. “That may be part of the problem,” he said, and left.

* * *

He walked for some time before Apparating, though there was no need. He could have returned to Hogwarts from the edge of the wards almost at once. Instead he followed the narrow path through the trees while the day's information arranged itself.

Harry and Daphne were safe, together, and had planned carefully. Dobby was with them. Gringotts was guarding their arrangements, and the Greengrass owl had apparently reached Daphne quickly. Sirius had advised them to move north or west inside Britain before taking any obvious route, and Daphne herself had said north first. Marrowgrim, for his part, had refused to confirm that they were on Potter property, but he had never once denied it. A refusal was not a denial.

One remark had followed him out of that office more stubbornly than the rest. The estate they hold. It had not been the estate Mr Potter holds, and a joint holding was not a convenience between friends. Potters did not hand over what they did not mean to keep, and Marrowgrim's parting warning had made it very plain what Harry meant by it. Albus had not yet decided how, or whether, to say so to Lord Greengrass.

None of it proved where they were, and Albus knew that. But searches did not begin with certainty. They began with the most reasonable place to look.

By the time he reached the road, he knew what he would ask Minerva to prepare in the morning: every Potter property north of London, then farther west if necessary. Private houses first, then unused estates, then anything old enough that Harry might reasonably believe nobody else remembered it. For the first time since Monday morning, Albus felt that they had a direction. He looked once toward the dark northern horizon, and then he Disapparated.

Several thousand miles away, Harry Potter was fast asleep, with no idea how effectively he had just sent half of magical Britain in the wrong direction.

* * *

March the first arrived cold, grey and without Harry Potter.

By eight in the morning, two Ministry Aurors were walking the corridors of Hogwarts on orders that had come directly from the Minister's office. The fourth champion was due to compete in a matter of hours, and nobody at the Ministry wanted to explain afterward why a fourteen-year-old had vanished from the host school without every possible effort being made to find him. The search was not subtle. Classrooms were checked again and empty rooms opened, the grounds were combed as far as the weather allowed, and both Harry's dormitory and Daphne Greengrass's were inspected a second time. Nothing had changed. Their beds remained unused and their belongings remained missing, and no new trace had appeared simply because the Tournament had reached the date printed on its schedule.

By half past nine, students were streaming toward the lake, and the Aurors had found nothing. As her partner prepared to follow the crowd outside, one of them, a broad-shouldered witch who had worked alongside Alastor Moody for more than a decade, stopped in the entrance hall.

“Where's Moody?”

Professor Flitwick, passing with a knot of Ravenclaws, paused. “Following a lead, I believe.”

“Since when?”

“Wednesday.”

She frowned, and her partner noticed. “What?”

“Nothing yet.” But she did not move toward the doors. “Has he checked in?”

Flitwick's expression shifted slightly. “I wouldn't know.”

She looked toward the marble staircase. “Dumbledore would.”

At the lake, there were only three champions, and that was what everyone noticed.

Fleur Delacour stood near the water wrapped in pale blue robes, with the look of someone holding the Scottish climate personally responsible for the morning. Viktor Krum waited several yards away, shoulders hunched against the cold, while Cedric Diggory spoke quietly with an official making final checks. The fourth place remained empty.

Hermione had seen it at once. She had known Harry was missing, and by now everyone did. The story had escaped whatever quiet containment the professors had attempted by Tuesday afternoon, and Hogwarts had spent the rest of the week producing theories. Potter had gone into hiding. Potter had been kidnapped. Potter and Greengrass had eloped, which had been considered hilarious until somebody pointed out that both of them were fourteen. Potter was training somewhere and meant to return dramatically at the last second. Hermione had rejected most of them, because there had always been another possibility, and she simply had not wanted to give it shape.

“Still not here,” Ron said, leaning toward her. She said nothing.

Below them, the judges sat at their table. Madame Maxime kept glancing toward the path from the castle, Karkaroff had checked his watch several times, and Mr Crouch sat rigidly with his expression revealing very little. Only Dumbledore seemed unsurprised. He was not unconcerned, since Hermione knew him well enough to tell the difference, but he was not waiting for Harry to come running down the path. That frightened her more than the empty place did.

Ludo Bagman stepped forward and raised his wand to his throat. “Sonorus! Ladies and gentlemen, students and honoured guests, welcome to the Second Task of the Triwizard Tournament!”

The applause was thinner than usual, and Bagman smiled through it. “As I'm certain many of you have noticed, we appear to be temporarily short one champion. Mr Harry Potter has not presented himself for today's event. Ministry representatives and Hogwarts staff are continuing their efforts to establish his whereabouts, and there is presently no reason to believe that any harm has come to him.”

Hermione caught the wording immediately. No reason to believe. It was not we know he is safe. Bagman moved on before anyone could dwell on it, assuring the crowd that the Tournament must proceed and that the remaining champions would provide a magnificent competition, and this time the applause came more easily. Hermione barely heard it. Has not presented himself. It did not say late or delayed. It said missing, and actually missing.

Harry had done it.

She remembered sitting beside him only days before, the novel Daphne had given him resting across his knees and a strange calm about him. She had apologised about the dragon and asked whether things between them might become better again, and through the entire conversation Harry had known he was leaving.

“You really think he left?” Ron said. He was not laughing, and that helped.

“Yes.”

“Just left Hogwarts? With Greengrass?”

“Yes.”

Ron rubbed his hands together against the cold and said nothing for a while. Then, still watching the lake: “Coward. He gets entered in the Tournament, everyone has to deal with it, and then when it gets hard he just runs off.”

The old answer rose automatically in Hermione's mind. There were rules and responsibilities, and you could not simply leave because something was unpleasant. Then she remembered the Hungarian Horntail, and knowing, and deciding that Harry should not be told because teachers and judges and Tournament rules all seemed to agree that was how things were supposed to work. Her gaze returned to the empty place below.

“We left him first.”

“What?”

She almost wished she had not said it, but she had. “You did, after the Goblet.” Ron's face tightened. “And I believed him, but I kept expecting him to do what everybody else said anyway.”

“That isn't leaving him.”

“No,” she said, looking toward Dumbledore. “Maybe not.”

Neither of them apologised, and neither suddenly understood everything that had happened between the three of them. Below, Bagman began explaining the rules, and three champions stepped toward the water. The whistle sounded, and Fleur, Cedric and Krum entered the lake while the crowd surged forward. Hermione remained still a moment longer, looking at the space Harry should have occupied.

For months, Hogwarts had told Harry Potter he had no choice but to compete. On March first, with hundreds of people watching, the Tournament finally discovered otherwise.

Albus watched the surface close over the third champion.

Harry was not coming, and he had known it before he took his seat, though knowing did not make the empty place easier to look at. Bagman kept up his commentary despite there being very little to comment on once all three champions were underwater, and the crowd settled into the peculiar restlessness of hundreds of people staring at a lake and waiting for something to happen. Albus glanced toward the castle. There was no Harry there, and no Alastor either, though that at least had an explanation. Moody had left on Wednesday to investigate the Potter properties in the north, armed with partial Ministry records and instructions to report anything useful. Albus had expected nothing quickly. Alastor did not report merely to announce that he had found nothing.

Still, someone touched his shoulder. One of the Aurors from the morning search stood behind him, and her expression was wrong. “Headmaster.”

He rose at once, and Karkaroff looked over. “Is something wrong?”

“Excuse me.”

Albus followed her out of earshot of the judges' table. “When did Moody last contact you?”

“On Wednesday, when he left. Nothing since.”

Her jaw tightened. “He wouldn't do that.”

“He was pursuing a lead.”

“Alastor Moody pursues leads for six months and still manages to send people paranoid little notes at three in the morning. He leaves instructions and he checks in with his contacts, and if he's going somewhere alone, somebody knows where. Especially now.”

Albus's faint amusement vanished. “What are you suggesting?”

“I don't know yet.” She looked back toward the castle. “But I want to see his office.”

The door was locked, which meant nothing. The wards were another matter. They were Moody's, or they appeared to be, and the Auror examined them for several minutes before she allowed Flitwick to open the door under Dumbledore's authority.

Inside, the office looked exactly as Albus remembered it, with its Dark Detectors and Sneakoscopes, its books and half-finished notes, and the enormous travelling trunk against the wall. The Auror stopped and fixed her eyes on it. “He left that?”

“Yes.”

“No.” She said it quietly, and with certainty. “Alastor doesn't go after a suspected hiding place without his field trunk.”

“Perhaps he took what he needed.”

“He'd take the trunk.”

The locks resisted them, though not for long. Flitwick removed the first enchantment, the Auror dealt with the second, and Albus opened the last himself. The lid rose on clothing, then equipment, then weapons. The fourth compartment dropped far deeper than the trunk should physically have allowed, and a ladder descended into the dark.

Nobody spoke. The Auror drew her wand. “Stay behind me.” Albus almost objected, then decided this was not the moment.

They descended. The smell reached them first, stale air and unwashed skin and potions, the smell of human confinement. At the bottom was a narrow room, and a man lay against one wall, painfully thin, hair hanging almost to his shoulders, one leg twisted awkwardly beneath a blanket. For a moment Albus simply stared. The man's remaining eye opened and struggled to focus, then fixed on him.

“Dumbledore.” The voice was little more than a rasp, and beside Albus the Auror stopped breathing.

“Alastor?”

The man turned his head. Recognition came slowly, and then fury. “Water.”

Flitwick conjured a cup, and the Auror caught his wrist. “No conjured food or drink.” Even now, even here. Albus understood at once, and a bottle was fetched from upstairs. The prisoner drank too quickly, coughed, drank again and rested his head against the wall, and his eye found Albus.

“Where is he?”

Albus's stomach had already begun to understand. “Who?”

The man's expression became murderous. “The bastard wearing my face.”

Somewhere far above them, faint through layers of enchanted wood and stone, the amplified voice of Ludo Bagman carried across the grounds. The Second Task was continuing.

Albus looked at the man imprisoned beneath the office, and then at the Auror beside him. Wednesday, and Moody leaving Hogwarts with the search records Albus himself had handed him, the list of Potter properties, everything Sirius had said about where Harry might have gone. All of it had been given willingly to someone else.

“Professor,” Flitwick said quietly, but Albus barely heard him.

“How long?”

Moody's eye closed. “Months.”

The single word felt colder than the lake outside.

The first champion surfaced to thunderous applause, and Hermione stood with everyone else. She clapped as Cedric was helped toward the judges' area, and watched officials hurry around him with blankets while Bagman's voice boomed over the water, delighted to have something visible to describe again. Nobody around her noticed that Dumbledore's chair was empty, but Hermione did. She looked toward the castle. Professor Flitwick was gone too, and so were the two Aurors who had been standing near the shore earlier.

“What?” Ron asked, following her gaze.

“I don't know.”

Another disturbance broke the surface of the lake, and the crowd roared, and Hermione looked back because everyone else did. But part of her attention stayed on the empty judges' chair. Harry was gone, and now Dumbledore was gone, and somewhere inside the castle, whatever everyone had believed they understood about the last several months was beginning to come apart.

By the time the final champion had returned from the lake, Alastor Moody was in the hospital wing.

Madam Pomfrey had forbidden questioning, and the Aurors ignored her for almost four minutes before she threatened to remove them personally. Albus required considerably less persuasion. There would be time. Moody was alive, and that mattered first.

What they already knew was enough to change everything. Someone had captured one of Britain's most experienced Aurors before the school year began and kept him imprisoned inside Hogwarts for months. Someone had taken his appearance and taught his classes, sat at the staff table and spoken privately with students, and watched Harry Potter prepare for the Tournament. And on Wednesday, after Albus himself had explained the search for Harry, that person had left Hogwarts carrying the best information they possessed.

Albus stood beside the window while cheers from the lake drifted faintly across the grounds. He had spent days trying to discover where Harry had gone. For the first time, another question seemed equally urgent. Who had wanted him here badly enough to build an entire deception around him?

Behind him, Moody stirred, and Albus turned. The old Auror's eye opened again. “Potter?”

“He is missing.”

Moody stared at him. “Missing how?”

“We believe he left Hogwarts voluntarily.”

Something complicated crossed Moody's exhausted face, and then: “Good.”

Albus blinked. Moody's eye closed again. “Whoever had my face wanted the boy.”

The sentence settled into the room. Outside, the Second Task ended without its fourth champion, and inside Hogwarts, Albus Dumbledore finally understood that Harry Potter's disappearance might not have been the disaster everyone thought it was.

It might have been the thing that saved him.

* * *

By the time Alastor Moody was invited into the Headmaster's office on Wednesday evening, Barty Crouch Junior had known for two days that something had gone badly wrong.

He had known since Monday's breakfast, really. Potter's seat had been empty, which alone meant little, since students skipped meals and Potter vanished with Greengrass often enough that half the castle had stopped finding it interesting. Then McGonagall began asking questions. By lunch Flitwick was checking classrooms he had no reason to enter, Sprout had sent two house-elves toward the greenhouses, and Snape had spent most of the day looking as though someone had personally offended him. By evening the teachers were no longer looking for a student who had missed lessons. They were looking for two children who were gone.

Barty had spent those days doing exactly what Alastor Moody would have done, which was to help. He had checked corridors, questioned portraits, suggested that anyone clever enough to avoid the castle wards might have used Hogsmeade, and growled at two sixth-years until they remembered precisely when they had last seen Potter. Nobody found his interest suspicious. Alastor Moody had spent half his adult life looking for people who did not want to be found.

When Dumbledore asked him upstairs after dinner, he followed with his wooden leg striking the stone in its familiar uneven rhythm and his magical eye turning lazily in its socket. The office was quieter than usual. McGonagall and Snape had gone, and Dumbledore stood beside his desk with several sheets of parchment laid out before him.

“Alastor. Thank you for coming.”

“Thought you might eventually remember you've got an Auror in the building.”

Dumbledore's mouth twitched faintly. “I had not forgotten.”

Barty lowered himself into the chair opposite. “What have you got?”

It was exactly the question Moody would have asked, and Dumbledore sat. “More than we had on Monday. Considerably less than I would like.”

He explained, and Barty listened. He heard about Daphne Greengrass's letter to her parents, and the untouched Greengrass accounts, and the owl that had carried Lord Greengrass's reply away and returned only a few hours later without it. His magical eye stopped moving for a fraction of a second when Gringotts came up. Dumbledore did not notice, or if he did, he gave no sign.

“They made arrangements with the bank, then?”

“Daphne did, at some point before she left, and Gringotts will tell us almost nothing about what.”

“That sounds like Gringotts.”

“Quite.” Dumbledore described the meeting with Marrowgrim: the refusal, the confirmation that Daphne was safe and acting freely, the protections around Potter's accounts and property.

Barty's mind moved quickly. Potter had money, Greengrass had gone willingly, the elf was gone and the bank was involved, and none of it had been part of the plan. Potter was supposed to be frightened and isolated, dependent on Hogwarts because Hogwarts was the only place he could reasonably remain while the Tournament held him there. Instead the boy had apparently built himself an escape route.

“How long have they been gone?”

“We do not know. We have no sighting reliable enough to establish one.”

That answer was worse than any date could have been. Barty grunted, but inside, something cold had begun working its way beneath his ribs. The Second Task was close, and Potter had to compete. The whole plan depended on that single fact holding all the way to the final maze, because without Potter there was no final Portkey, no graveyard, no blood and no return.

“There is another detail,” Dumbledore said. “I spoke with Sirius.”

That required considerably more control, and Moody's scarred face showed only irritation. “Black. You found him?”

“I spoke with him. He was more useful than he intended to be.” Dumbledore told him what Sirius had admitted: that Harry and Daphne had come to him, that he had known they meant to leave, and that he had given them advice. “North, or west, initially. Sirius told them that anyone expecting an escape from Britain would watch London, Dover and the usual international routes, and suggested they travel within the country first, by Muggle means.”

Barty frowned, not because he disagreed, but because he didn't. “That is what I'd tell them. Everyone looks for the clever escape, Portkey records and Floo and Apparition points. Two children get on a Muggle train and you've got nothing unless you already know which station.”

“That was Sirius's reasoning.”

“He was right.” Barty considered the rest. “And the owl supports it.”

“Lord Greengrass believes so.”

“So do I. It isn't proof, since owls do strange things and you can't measure distance cleanly from flight time. But set it beside Potter money, properties nobody's watching, a house-elf who can move them without touching Ministry transport and Black telling them to go north first. If I were searching, I'd start with Potter houses in Britain.”

“That is where we are concentrating the search. ”

Barty sat back, and there it was. Albus Dumbledore had just handed him the search, not a perfect one, and not certainty, but the best intelligence anyone in Britain presently possessed.

“I had hoped you might assist,” Dumbledore said. “There may be properties farther north that have not been occupied in years, some of them held through companies or older Potter trusts. Gringotts will not provide the register, but the Ministry has partial records.”

“Send me what you've got.”

“I thought you might say that.” For the first time all evening, Dumbledore looked slightly less tired, which almost made Barty laugh. Instead he rose. “One more thing. What happens if Potter isn't back for the Task?”

It was the obvious question, asked as Moody would have asked it, and Dumbledore's expression grew troubled. “I do not know. The Goblet's contract is ancient. Harry asked me the same question some time ago.”

That caught him. “He did?”

“And I told him the truth, that we do not know what refusal would do.”

Barty's hand tightened slightly around his staff. Potter had been thinking about this long before he vanished. “How much danger? Death?”

“I do not believe so.”

“Believe.”

“Yes, Alastor,” Dumbledore said wearily. “Believe.”

Barty grunted as though dissatisfied, and inside he was thinking very quickly. If Potter stayed away, the contract would act. Perhaps pain would force him back, or the magic would drag him toward the Task, or fear of whatever penalty awaited would make the boy reveal himself. There was still time, though not much.

He had reached the door when Dumbledore's voice softened. “Alastor. Find him if you can.”

Barty looked back over his shoulder through Moody's ruined face. “I intend to.”

That, at least, was entirely true.

He left Hogwarts before midnight, and the explanation required almost no invention. Moody had a lead and old contacts, and Moody did not ask permission to follow either. Dumbledore merely requested that he report anything useful, and Barty promised that he would. The real Alastor Moody remained unconscious beneath the floor of the trunk in his office, fed and dosed just enough to be useful if the disguise were needed again. Barty took sufficient Polyjuice for several days, and then he went to his master.

The Riddle House was dark when he arrived. Wormtail opened the door and stared for one ugly instant at Moody's face, and Barty shoved past him.

“Where is he?”

“Master is resting.”

“I did not ask.”

A thin voice came from the darkness beyond the sitting room. “Let him in.”

The thing that had once been Tom Riddle rested in the chair beside the fire, wrapped in robes far too large for the body beneath them. Even after everything Barty had done for him, even after Azkaban and the years stolen by his father, seeing his master reduced to this still produced the same fury. It was not disgust, never that, but rage at the world for allowing it. He dropped to one knee.

“My Lord.”

“Barty.” The red eyes moved over Moody's borrowed body. “You would not have come without reason.”

“No, my Lord.”

“Then speak.”

So he told him everything. Potter was gone, and Greengrass with him, and nobody knew when or how. Hogwarts had searched the castle and found nothing, and Gringotts was protecting them. The Greengrasses believed Potter's resources were supporting the escape, and Sirius Black had advised them to move north or west inside Britain before attempting anything more obvious. Dumbledore now believed the likeliest explanation was a Potter property somewhere in the country.

When he finished, the room remained silent, and Wormtail stood by the wall looking increasingly uncomfortable. Finally Voldemort said, “Dumbledore believes Potter is in Britain. And you?”

Barty hesitated only because the question deserved thought. “I believe the conclusion is reasonable.”

Wormtail shifted, and Voldemort noticed. “You disagree, Peter?”

“No, Master. Only Potter has always been unpredictable.”

“So are hounds, and yet one does not search the moon for one that has slipped its leash.” Wormtail lowered his head. “What does Dumbledore know of the Tournament?”

“Nothing that points to us. He knows Potter did not enter himself, and no more than before.”

“The Second Task?”

“Approaching.”

“And if Potter does not return?”

Barty allowed himself a thin smile. “The contract will have its due.”

Voldemort looked at him, and there was something in the red eyes Barty could not read. “You are certain.”

His smile faded. “The Goblet accepted him.”

“That was not my question.” Barty considered, and answered honestly. “No, my Lord.”

“Good.” The answer surprised him. Voldemort settled farther into the chair. “Certainty without knowledge is one of Dumbledore's more tedious habits, and I would prefer you not acquire it. Return north. Use Dumbledore's search. If Potter is hiding in one of his family's houses, I want to know before Dumbledore reaches him. If he appears for the Task, you return to Hogwarts and continue exactly as planned.”

“And if he does not?”

“Then we learn what the Goblet considers a broken contract.”

Barty bowed, and he left within the hour.

The Second Task arrived without Harry Potter, and by then Barty was nearly two hundred miles from Hogwarts.

He had spent the intervening days moving through the north under Moody's face, working from the Ministry records Dumbledore had provided and the contacts the real Moody had gathered over decades. The search was competent, and that was the infuriating part. There were Potter properties: a hunting lodge that had not been properly inhabited in twenty years, two houses held through trusts, a stretch of land warded strongly enough to make examination difficult. At each one he expected something, an elf or a footprint, a ward recently disturbed, a trace of Greengrass hair in a bathroom basin. He found nothing.

On the morning of the Task, he stood in the kitchen of an empty Potter cottage whose cupboards held three cracked plates, a dead mouse and absolutely no fourteen-year-olds. He knew what time it was, because he had been counting toward it all morning. At Hogwarts the other champions would be gathering, the officials waiting and the stands filling, and somewhere near the lake there would be an empty place where Harry Potter was supposed to stand.

He checked his watch and waited, and nothing happened. He almost laughed. Perhaps the contract required the Task to begin first. Perhaps Potter would suffer wherever he was. Perhaps—

Something pulled. It was not at his body, but deeper. Barty's breath stopped, and every hair on his arms rose, and his wand grew hot against his side. Then the sensation reversed, not pressure now but absence, as though something inside him had opened and drained away so quickly that he staggered against the kitchen table. His wand hit the floor.

He stared at it. The room was silent. He bent and snatched it up. “Lumos.”

Nothing.

“Lumos.”

Nothing. His heart struck hard against his ribs, and he slashed the wand toward the broken chair. “Reducto!” There was no light and no force, nothing at all.

His magic had always been there. It had been there in Azkaban, and beneath his father's Imperius, and through the years trapped inside his own body while someone else decided when he was permitted to think. It had been a pressure and a certainty, a part of himself so fundamental that he had never needed to notice it, and now there was nothing. He tried to Apparate, and the familiar turn never came. He remained in the kitchen. “No.” He tried again, and then he raised the wand in both hands as though force might make up for whatever had happened, and cast spell after spell. The chair stayed intact and the fireplace stayed cold, and a chipped cup sat on the table and did not so much as tremble.

Then Barty understood. The Goblet. Potter had not appeared, and the contract had gone looking for the magic responsible for the fourth champion. It had not taken the name or the boy, but the act, his act, the magic he had used to deceive it. He sank against the table. For the first time in years, perhaps in his entire adult life, he was afraid in a way that had nothing to do with death.

The Goblet had taken payment, and it had taken it from him.

It took him two days to reach the Riddle House, two humiliating, endless days without Apparition or a wand or any magical shortcut. The last of the Polyjuice wore off before the first evening, leaving Barty Crouch Junior standing behind a Muggle railway station in clothes altered for a much larger man. He stole replacements and bought a train ticket badly, and he walked miles after choosing the wrong stop. At one point he spent nearly an hour trying to understand a bus timetable, and considered murdering the man who had designed it before remembering that he no longer had a convenient means of doing so.

By the time Wormtail opened the door, Barty was dirty, exhausted and so pale that even Peter's expression changed. “What happened to you?”

Barty pushed past him. Voldemort sat in the same room and the same chair, and he looked at Barty's real face and immediately understood that something had changed. “Where is Moody?”

“Gone.” Barty dropped to his knees, not ceremonially this time, but because his legs would not hold him. “The Task. Potter did not appear, and the Goblet took my magic.”

Wormtail made a noise behind him, and Voldemort ignored it. “Explain.”

Barty did, every sensation and every failed spell, the Apparition that never came and the complete absence afterward. When he finished, Voldemort watched him for a very long time. “Your wand. Cast.”

“Master—”

“Cast.”

Barty pointed the wand toward the hearth. “Incendio.” Nothing happened. He tried again, and then another spell, and nothing happened. Finally Voldemort raised his own wand, and Barty felt magic pass over him, cold and intrusive and precise. It lasted perhaps ten seconds.

“My Lord?”

Voldemort looked almost fascinated. “It did not bind your magic.”

Hope moved painfully through Barty. “Then it can be restored.”

“No.” The hope died before the word had fully left the room. Voldemort went on with the detached interest of someone describing an unusual specimen. “A binding leaves something to unbind, and damage leaves something to repair. I find neither.”

Barty's mouth had gone dry. “What did it do?”

“It collected a debt.”

Barty bowed his head, and for several seconds he could not speak. Then, very quietly: “I failed you.”

“Yes,” Voldemort said, and Wormtail looked away.

“I will accept whatever punishment you—”

“I have no use for punishment.” Voldemort's voice was calm. “The plan failed because Potter removed himself from it. You failed to anticipate that possibility, and so did I.”

That was almost worse than anger. Voldemort looked toward the fire. “The boy has refused to play the part prepared for him.” There was no admiration in it, but there was interest. “What did you learn before the Task?”

Barty understood. He still had information. He straightened as far as exhaustion allowed. “Dumbledore's search was still concentrated in Britain, north first and then west. Potter properties were being checked one by one, Gringotts continued refusing access, and there was no evidence of foreign magical travel. No trace of Potter, Greengrass or the elf. Dumbledore spoke with Black, but Black did not know their location.”

That last he believed. Voldemort considered all of it. “Then Dumbledore is searching the same empty houses you searched, and Potter has had several days more to move.”

“Yes, Master.”

There was a silence, and Barty knew what question remained. He hated himself for needing to ask it. “My Lord, what would you have me do?”

Voldemort looked at him, and there was no pity there, though Barty had not expected any. Neither was there immediate contempt, only calculation. Once, Barty had been one of the most useful servants Voldemort possessed. He had entered Hogwarts beneath Dumbledore's nose and deceived the Goblet, and manipulated the Tournament, and done what almost nobody else could have done. Now he could not light a candle, and Voldemort did not pretend otherwise.

“You can no longer serve me as you did. But you still have eyes, and a memory. You know Potter and Greengrass, and Hogwarts, and Dumbledore's investigation and every assumption presently guiding it. And unlike my other servants, nobody will be looking for magic when you move.”

The humiliation of that struck at once, and Voldemort saw it. “Does that offend you?”

“No, Master.” It did. That did not matter.

“Good. Find out where Potter went.” The words landed harder than any curse. Barty stared at him. “Without magic?”

“If magic were finding him, Dumbledore would already have done so. Use Muggle transport. Watch the people he left behind. Learn what Gringotts will reveal accidentally, if not deliberately, and follow rumours and letters. Follow Greengrass if her parents make contact.” The red eyes narrowed. “And do not waste time searching houses simply because Albus Dumbledore believes the answer should be inside one.”

Barty thought of the empty cottage, and the dead mouse, and the days spent following a theory that had made perfect sense. “Yes, my Lord. And if he isn't in Britain?”

Voldemort's expression changed slightly, not much, but enough. “Then find out where he went.”

Barty bowed until his forehead nearly touched the floor. “I will.” The audience was over, and Wormtail moved toward the door, but Barty stayed where he was for one second longer, hating the weakness in the question before he asked it. “Master. If I find him, if I serve you well...”

He did not finish. He did not need to. Could it come back? Could he matter again?

“If there is a way to restore what the Goblet took,” Voldemort said, “I will know more once I have regained my body.”

It was not a promise, and Barty knew it. It was enough. He bowed again, and stood, and followed Wormtail from the room.

Behind him, Voldemort remained beside the fire. Harry Potter had escaped the Tournament. The boy had cost him his cleanest path to resurrection, deprived him of his best-placed servant, and vanished so completely that Dumbledore, Gringotts, an old pure-blood family and Barty himself had all spent days searching the wrong country. That required a new plan.

For the first time since the Goblet had produced Harry Potter's name, Tom Riddle had no idea where the boy was, and he found that considerably more irritating than hatred.

The ice cream parlour had a striped awning, a bell above the door and a chalkboard menu with more flavours than Daphne considered strictly reasonable.

It was also, according to the thermometer outside the bookshop, two degrees above freezing, a fact that the people of Boston appeared to regard as no obstacle whatsoever. Every table was taken, and a man in a heavy coat at the window was eating a cone with the tranquil expression of someone doing nothing unusual.

“It's March,” Harry said, holding the door with his elbow because both his hands were full of books. “It's cold.”

“It is a matter of principle. You told me the Dursleys never once took you to one.”

“They took Dudley to one. I got to hold the bags.”

“Then we are correcting an injustice,” Daphne said, and walked in as though she were entering a ministry.

The boy behind the counter wore a paper hat and the weary friendliness of someone who had been asked every possible question about ice cream. “What can I get you guys?”

Daphne studied the board for a full four minutes. She asked what the difference was between a scoop and a generous scoop, whether a flavour called Cookie Dough contained actual dough, and why anyone would pour fudge on something already sold as a dessert. Harry, who had been standing behind her working very hard on his composure, finally leaned over her shoulder.

“She'll have the maple walnut. She's been looking at it since we came in.”

“I have been evaluating it.”

“For four minutes.”

“It was an informed decision.” She turned back to the counter with great dignity. “A single scoop of the maple walnut, please, in a cone.”

“Small, medium or large?”

“What is the difference?”

He gestured toward a large, which sat in its cup the size of a Bludger. Daphne looked at it, and then at the boy, and then at Harry, with the stern expression of a woman realising that there were cultural gaps she had not accounted for. “Small,” she said faintly. Harry ordered chocolate chip, and she informed him that this was unimaginative.

“Says the girl who picked the one flavour I told her to.”

“It was already my choice.”

She counted out her dollars with great care, having studied the exchange rate at Gringotts the way other people studied for exams, and then stopped at a jar by the register marked TIPS. “Harry,” she whispered, “are we expected to leave advice?”

“Money.”

“Then why is it not called what it is?”

“Because it's America.”

They took a table by the window, and Daphne tasted her ice cream, and her eyes widened. “Acceptable,” she pronounced, and then she reached across and stole half of Harry's scoop.

“You have a whole one.”

“Yours is different.”

She glanced at the door out of habit, and he saw her do it, because he had done the same thing a dozen times that week. Then she let her shoulders drop. It was a small, quiet thing, but Harry watched her do it and his chest felt oddly full. Nobody in the shop knew who they were. Nobody looked twice, and nobody had any idea there was a name that meant anything at all.

“Nobody here has ever heard of you,” Daphne said, as though she had been following his thoughts.

“I keep waiting for it to feel strange.”

“Does it?”

“No.” He considered it honestly. “It feels like ice cream.”

She laughed, and he grinned, and then she leaned across the table and wiped a smudge of chocolate from the tip of his nose with her thumb. “You have been wearing that for ten minutes.”

“You could have said.”

“I was enjoying it.” And because the shop was loud and nobody was watching, and because he was looking at her in that stupidly happy way, she kissed him, quickly, before she could consider whether she ought to. He tasted of chocolate and mint, and went pink all the way to his ears.

“You taste like maple,” he said, a little dazed.

“And you taste like unimaginative chocolate.”

“Aw, you two are adorable,” the boy in the paper hat called from the counter, and both of them turned scarlet at once.

“We are aware,” Daphne said, with enormous composure, and licked a drip from her thumb.

Harry was laughing too hard to answer. When he finally managed it, he wiped his eyes and leaned back in his chair. “I should write Padfoot this week.”

“Next week.”

“I said three months.”

“And I said no.” She pointed her spoon at him. “Do you require another demonstration?”

“She hit me,” Harry told the ceiling, with deep theatrical sorrow. “Someone call a lawyer.”

Outside, a few flakes of snow had begun to fall, and neither of them noticed. At home, Dobby was almost certainly waiting with a tray of cocoa and strong opinions about their having gone out without him. An ocean away, half of magical Britain was searching empty houses in the north. And in a small warm shop in Boston, Daphne Greengrass pushed a bag of books under the table with her foot, informed Harry that she intended to try every flavour on the board before Friday, and meant it.