17th January 1996, the Headmaster's office, morning
Albus Dumbledore had not slept.
He stood by the window in the grey morning light, one hand moving slowly through Fawkes's scarlet plumage, and the phoenix leaned into the touch and crooned, low and soft, the way he only did when his master's heart was heavy. On the desk behind them lay the memory of last night's silver owl... Ethan's Patronus, arriving through the window-glass at midnight with its terrible message... and Dumbledore had spent the hours since then doing what could be done across an ocean, which was much, and which was not enough. He knew that already. He had felt it in the owl's voice.
The fireplace flared green.
"Headmaster." Kingsley Shacklebolt's face hung in the flames, and one look at it confirmed everything. "It's done. The attack came last night... I had it within the hour, through my contacts in the MACUSA Auror Office, faster than the official channels will move."
He drew a breath. "Ilvermorny was hit. Hard. The outer assault was hirelings... expendables, dozens of them, thrown at the staff to pin them. The real work was inside. The snakewood tree is gone, Albus. Destroyed... unmade. And the wand..."
Kingsley's jaw tightened. "He has it. Confirmed by the Aurors who reached the courtyard. He was seen holding it."
"Casualties," said Dumbledore quietly.
"Students injured... none dead, by grace and by warning; the alarm you raised through MACUSA got their Aurors moving twenty minutes before they'd otherwise have stirred, and it made the difference on the grounds. The staff held. But..." Kingsley paused. "The Vice-Headmaster. Elias Woodrow. He caught them at the tree and stood his ground. He's dead, Albus. The Aurors say... they say the body was drained. Grey. Like something had taken the life out of everything around him, the stone included. They've never seen a curse leave marks like it."
Dumbledore closed his eyes briefly. "I knew Elias," he said. "A fine duellist, and a better teacher. Thank you, Kingsley."
"There's one more thing. Ethan's addendum... I've passed it to my MACUSA contacts already, flagged highest urgency: that the school may not have been the only errand. That the next target is likely their prison. The prisoner Drazkan."
Kingsley's face was grim. "They've doubled the watch on the facility. Whether doubling will matter, after last night..." He let it hang.
"It may not," Dumbledore agreed heavily. "But it must be done regardless. Keep the channel warm, Kingsley. And... thank you. Go carefully."
The flames guttered orange.
Dumbledore stood a long moment in the quiet, his hand still in Fawkes's feathers, and let out a sigh that seemed to come up from somewhere very deep and very old.
And then he felt it.
A disturbance... slight, deliberate, courteous almost... brushing the ancient lattice of the school's wards at their furthest southern edge, where the lawns gave way to the eaves of the Forbidden Forest.
Not an intrusion.
An announcement.
Dumbledore crossed to the window and looked down across the frosted grounds.
At the treeline, small with distance but unmistakable, stood a centaur.
It was looking up. Directly at his window... at him, across half a mile of winter air, with the patient certainty of a creature that had known exactly where he would be standing.
They regarded one another for the space of several heartbeats.
Then the centaur turned, unhurried, and walked back into the trees.
Dumbledore's eyes shone with contemplation.
"Mind the office, old friend," he murmured to Fawkes, and took up his wand, and went down to the forest.
Deep within the Forbidden Forest, the bright morning failed.
The canopy closed overhead, dense and interwoven, and the light came down scattered and green-grey, and the frost lay unmelted in the hollows, and Albus Dumbledore walked calmly among the ancient trunks, following the faint silver thread of that deliberate disturbance the way another man might follow a path.
It led him deeper than most dared go, and then, abruptly, into brightness: a clearing where the canopy opened, floored in soft green and... impossibly, in January... scattered with small flowers in bloom, white and gold, breathing a faint warmth into the cold air.
At the clearing's heart, a centaur stood caressing a sleeping owl that perched upon his forearm... white-blond, palomino-bodied, with eyes of astonishing blue.
"Firenze," said Dumbledore, inclining his head.
"Albus Dumbledore." The centaur did not look up from the owl. "You came quickly. Humans usually keep the stars waiting."
Dumbledore smiled faintly, and moved into the clearing, and... with the unhurried ease of a very old man in a garden... lowered himself to examine a flower blooming from a crack in a boulder, out of season and unbothered by it.
He knew the centaurs of this wood well; he had been Headmaster a long time, and he was, as certain colleagues put it when they believed him out of earshot, an old fox.
He knew, therefore, precisely how extraordinary it was to be summoned by one.
"You honour me," he said, touching the flower's petal with one finger. "And you puzzle me. Which is rarer."
"I intend to speak to you of the stars," said Firenze.
"Ah." Dumbledore did not look up.
"Then I am puzzled further. For as I understand the ways of your people, Firenze... their wisdom is their own, and the sharing of it with humans is not merely discouraged." He straightened, and his blue eyes were mild and very keen. "It is called treason, among the herds. Is it not?"
The sleeping owl stirred. Firenze's hand stilled it.
"It is," the centaur said. "And I have thought long on that, and I stand here regardless, because what I have seen outweighs what I was taught."
He lifted his gaze at last, and his blue eyes were troubled in a way Dumbledore had never seen centaur eyes troubled... not with anger, but with uncertainty, which in a centaur was far stranger.
"Understand first what our wisdom is, and is not. You humans read tea-dregs and dream-books and the lines of a single palm; you divine the trivia of single lives... who shall love whom, who shall prosper, who shall stumble on a stair."
A flick of the tail; the old contempt, worn smooth by long use.
"The stars do not stoop to such things. Astrology speaks only of what is significant to mankind entire. The great tides. The wars and the endings. The movements of fate that govern many. That is what we watch for, over decades, and that is all we watch for."
"I have always understood it so," said Dumbledore.
"Then understand this." Firenze's voice lowered. "Five years ago... a little more... my herd read a deviation in the sky. Slight. A trembling in a pattern that had held steady for a generation. It centred..." his blue eyes fixed on Dumbledore "...upon a knot of fates that govern very many indeed. Yours, Albus Dumbledore. The boy's... the one who lived. And the one who would not die."
He paused. "Mars, and the wanderers around Mars, and the old fixed lights behind them, all of it trembling at once, around you three. We watched it. We debated it. And we dismissed it... for the sky trembles sometimes, as water shivers without wind, and the pattern seemed to hold beneath the shiver."
Dumbledore had gone very still, though the calm never left him. "And now?"
"Now the deviation is neither slight nor dismissible." Firenze took a step closer, and the flowers bent about his hooves.
"Season upon season it has grown clearer. Bolder. The pattern does not tremble any longer, Dumbledore... it bends. Openly. Away from what was written." His voice dropped further, almost to wonder, almost to dread.
"And here is why I have committed treason this morning. The most gifted seer of my herd... old Magorian's mother, who read the fall of Grindelwald in the sky eleven years before it came... has looked, and looked again, at the brightest single thread in all that pattern. The one every centaur alive has known since your war with the last Dark Lord. The thread that all our readings agreed upon, decade after decade, fixed as the pole star."
He stopped. And said it.
"Your death. Your destined death, Albus Dumbledore... its season, its manner, its place in the great pattern, which we have read unchanged for thirty years." The blue eyes held his. "She cannot see it any more. None of us can. The thread is... gone. Not moved. Not delayed. Removed from the sky, as though a hand had reached into the loom and drawn it out."
For one unguarded moment... one only... Albus Dumbledore's eyes widened.
It passed.
The ancient amiability flowed back over his face like water closing over a stone, and he chuckled... softly, genuinely, a sound with a hundred years of philosophy in it. "Well," he said. "Fate is full of wonders. I had been given to understand my appointments were rather fixed."
But Firenze did not smile. His visage darkened; the sleeping owl, sensing it, shifted on his arm.
"Do not jest with me, Headmaster. You are the cleverest human I have ever known, so I ask you plainly, as the stars cannot."
His voice had gone low and hard. "Have you done this? Have you found some working, some art, some bargain, to avert your own written fate?"
He pressed on before Dumbledore could answer. "Because if you have... hear the warning I broke my people's law to bring. A fate that governs many cannot be cheaply moved. Draw one thread from the loom and the whole cloth shifts; the pattern will re-weave itself, Dumbledore, and it does not re-weave kindly. What replaces a written death is not written life. It is unwritten future... blank sky... and into blank sky anything may come. A calamity without a name. A price that none can bear... not you, not the boy, not the world of wizards, and perhaps not the world of the unknowing millions beyond it."
His eyes burned. "Have you done something?"
The clearing was very quiet. Somewhere far off, a jay called once and was still.
Dumbledore's eyes narrowed... a fraction, thoughtful, giving nothing... and when he spoke his voice was gentle and perfectly opaque.
"I confirm nothing, Firenze, because I have nothing to confirm. What I can tell you..." and here something surfaced in the old face, brief and absolutely sincere "...is this. Whatever hand has moved in that loom, if a hand has moved at all... I give you my word that if such a working were ever mine to make, I would never spend it on so poor a purchase as the avoidance of my own demise. I have made my peace with that appointment many years since. I keep my accounts in other currencies."
He inclined his head. "I thank you for your treason. It will be kept as safely as you kept it."
Firenze looked deep into the old wizard's eyes... a long, searching, star-reader's look... and whatever he found there, it seemed he already had his answer, and had had it before he asked.
He nodded, reluctantly, once.
Dumbledore turned to go. At the clearing's edge he paused, without looking back, and said one thing more... quietly, to the trees as much as the centaur.
"And for what it is worth, Firenze... if the price of a gentler future were mine to pay, I should pay it gladly, and count the purchase cheap at any sum."
Then he walked back into the shadow of the canopy, and was gone.
Firenze stood a while in the flowering clearing, his hand moving slowly over the sleeping owl.
Then, without turning his head, he spoke to an inconspicuous corner of the treeline... a stand of holly and shadow where a silhouette had been standing, motionless, for who knew how long.
Long enough.
The Headmaster, Firenze suspected, had marked him too, in the last moment before leaving; old foxes missed little.
"You should come out now."
The shadow detached itself from the holly and became a gentleman.
Ethan Esther stepped into the clearing light with a woven gathering-basket over one arm... moon-thistle, silverweed, three kinds of dawn-cut bark; materials, to any eye that knew, for a student's education in ritual magic... and he smiled, and lifted his hat, and bowed with unhurried Victorian courtesy, as though they were meeting on a garden path.
"Master Firenze. Good morning. Forgive the eavesdropping... though in fairness, I was here first."
And Firenze... to the astonishment of any who knew how centaurs received wizards... returned the courtesy: the foreleg drawn back, the head and torso lowered in the grave, archaic bow of his own people, offered to perhaps three humans in a century.
Then he straightened, and looked at Ethan for a long moment, and let out a heavy sigh... the sigh of a scholar closing a long calculation whose answer he had feared.
"So," said Firenze. "It was you who challenged the sky."
Ethan chuckled, setting down his basket on the boulder beside the impossible flower. "You speak far too highly of me."
"I speak precisely." The centaur's blue eyes moved over him... not over his face, Ethan noted with genuine interest, but slightly around him, the way one studies a light source by its halo.
"I have walked beneath the stars for sixty years. I have met your kind's seers... the dreamers, the trance-mumblers, the poor haunted vessels. And once, when I was a foal, a true one, awake to her gift, and she blazed to my eyes like a lantern in fog."
His voice lowered. "You do not blaze like a lantern, Ethan Esther. You blaze like a second sky. You are the most powerful true seer I have seen in the whole of my life, and I suspect, in the whole of the records of my people... and there is a hand-shaped absence in the loom, and here you stand in my clearing, gathering herbs at the exact hour of my treason."
The sigh again.
"It was you."
"Remarkable," said Ethan, and meant it, and his eyes had taken on the bright taking-things-apart warmth that his son would have recognised instantly.
"At a glance. No casting, no asking... you read standing light the way we read moving fate. I've always said the wizarding world's dismissal of centaur art is our profession's most expensive arrogance. Your people watch the one text none of us can forge." He inclined his head. "I'd give a very great deal, someday, to be taught even the alphabet of it."
"Flattery," said Firenze, "and sincere, which makes it worse."
But something in the stern face had eased a degree; praise of the herd's art, from this source, landed.
Then the ease went out again, and the centaur stepped closer, and the January cold seemed to come back into the flowering clearing with him.
"Hear me, Seer. I said to the Headmaster what the sky permits me to say, and he answered me in riddles, as he answers everything. You will not."
His voice was granite. "The thread you drew from the loom was not yours. It was not even his, though it wore his name. A death like that one... a death written for a man like that, at a time like this... is a keystone, Esther. It governs the arch. The war turns on it; the boy's road runs through it; fates beyond counting are mortared to its sides... the whole of your magical world, and I have read enough of the bleed-lines to fear the unknowing world beyond it too."
The blue eyes were terrible now.
"You know your own law better than any creature alive. For whatever Fate bestows, there is always a price. You have not merely asked Fate a question. You have reached into her loom and re-woven. The price of that is not your health, Seer. It is not your years. It is a price that none can bear... and it will be exacted, and when the loom re-weaves around the hole you have made, the new pattern may be darker than the one you unpicked. Can you tell me... can you swear to me... that this will not lead to a worse end than the one that was written?"
Ethan was quiet a moment.
The lecture-warmth had gone out of his face, and what remained was something Firenze had not yet seen on it: perfect calm, and under the calm, perfect resolve, the two laid together like still water over bedrock. He looked sternly into the centaur's eyes, and when he answered, his voice was low and even and left no more room for argument than gravity does.
"I know the price," Ethan said. "I have known it, exactly and in full, since before I began... I did not stumble into that loom, Firenze; I studied it for years, and I costed the working to the last measure before I laid a finger on a single thread. I know what it will take."
A pause, and the amber eyes did not waver.
"And I assure you: I can bear it."
"No single back can..."
"And it will be borne," Ethan continued, quiet and inexorable, riding over the rising voice without raising his own, "by me alone. That was the first term of the working and the last, and I built the whole of it around that term. No part of the price touches the boy. No part touches the old man. No part touches the many whose fates you fear for. The bill comes to one address, Firenze. Mine. I made certain of that before anything else... it is the only thing I made certain of first."
The faintest smile touched him then, brief as the winter light.
"You may check my arithmetic against your stars, if the sky ever deigns to show the ledger. I did not round anything down."
Firenze stared at him... at the pleasant, composed, iron-cored man standing hatless in a flowering clearing in January... and for once in a long life of reading, found the text closed to him.
Ethan took up his basket.
"As for the rest of it," he said, lighter now, settling his hat, "the darker outcome, the calamity in the blank sky... may I offer a professional observation, one seer to another people of seers?"
He paused at the clearing's edge, and looked back, and there was warmth in it, and steel in the warmth. "You read the future as a text already written, and mourn its editing. I have spent my whole life closer to the ink. And I will tell you what the ink knows: the outcome has not happened yet. The re-woven pattern is not fixed; it is forming... which means the chance of the best outcome, the gentler future, is not gone. It is live. It is on the loom at this very hour."
His hand tightened, once, on the basket's handle. "And I intend to see that it is the one that gets woven. I will spend anything I have to make it so, Master Firenze. Anything, and everything, I have got."
He lifted his hat a final courteous inch.
"Thank you for your treason. It was well spent. Good morning."
And he walked away into the green shadow with his basket of moon-thistle, an unhurried gentleman on a morning stroll... and Firenze stood among the impossible flowers with the owl asleep on his arm, watching the space where he had gone, and found that for the first time in sixty years of reading the sky, he did not know whether what he felt was dread...
...or hope.
24th January 1996, the Room of Requirement, evening
"Expecto Patronum!"
Silver light bloomed and died and bloomed again down the length of the training hall. The M.S.S.G. had come to the summit of its syllabus... the Patronus Charm... and the Room rang with incantations and laughter and the occasional whoop as somebody's silver mist gathered, for a heartbeat, toward a shape.
It was going well. Cho's swan was nearly whole; Cedric had produced a gleaming shield of light that held for ten full seconds; one of the Creevey brothers had startled himself flat on his back with a burst of silver like a camera-flash.
And up and down the hall moved Harry, diligent and patient, adjusting a grip here, coaxing a memory there... happier than that, the happiest you've got, don't be shy with it... while Luna drifted along the opposite rank doing the same, trailed by her own faint silver hare, which lolloped between the students and made the younger ones laugh.
From a bench along the mirrored wall, two observers watched neither the spells nor the silver.
"Look at them," Hermione murmured.
"I am looking," said Astoria grimly.
They watched Luna finish with her rank, and... Luna being Luna... come skipping across the hall to Harry, dirty-blonde hair flying, to report her duty like a soldier who had never once in her life stood at attention: the third-years were getting mist, Padma's memory wasn't strong enough but she was too polite to say so, and one of the Hufflepuffs was trying to cast off a memory about toast, which was interesting but probably insufficient.
And Harry smiled at her... a wry, careful, pleasant smile... and said something short. From the bench, it read with terrible clarity: good job. A nod. And then he excused himself, quickly, smoothly, and crossed the hall to correct a fourth-year's wandwork that did not especially need correcting.
Luna stood a moment where he'd left her, head tilted a fraction. Then she drifted serenely back to her rank.
On the bench, two frowns deepened in unison.
"That," said Astoria, very quietly, "is the fourth time tonight. I've been counting."
"It's been weeks," Hermione said. Her jaw was tight. "Since just after the breakout news. And it's not... he's not avoiding her, that's what makes it so hard to name. He talks to her. He's kind. He's..." she hunted for it and hated the word she found "...normal with her. Friendly. Like she's... like she's Neville, or Susan Bones."
She shook her head. "Harry has never in his life been normal with Luna. He used to orbit her. He used to drift two inches down a bench without knowing he was doing it. And now it's all just... correct."
Astoria's eyes had narrowed to slits. "Shall I say the name we're both circling?"
"...Rolf."
"Rolf." Astoria said it like a diagnosis.
"Think about the timing. Because I've watched them too, you know... Ravenclaw table, the courtyard, the library. He's with her constantly now. Walks her to Charms. Saves her seats. Last week he gave her a first-edition of his grandfather-in-craft's field notes and she talked about nothing else for two days."
Her mouth thinned. "Luna hasn't the faintest idea, bless her... she thinks she's made a wonderful friend, and she has, that's the maddening part... but Hermione, the boy is courting her. Openly. By the old forms, practically. Anyone raised in my world would read it off him at forty paces."
"And Harry..." Hermione had gone very still, working it through, and her voice dropped. "Harry's stopped. That's the other half. He used to look at Rolf like... you remember the lion hat morning. The fork. He used to watch that boy the way a kneazle watches a postman. Pure murder, every single time."
She turned to Astoria, and the worry in her face had sharpened into something urgent. "When did you last see him do it? Because I've been trying to remember, and I can't. Rolf walked right past us at breakfast on Tuesday, with Luna, and Harry just... looked at his porridge. Pleasantly."
"Which is alarming," said Astoria flatly.
"Which is very alarming," Hermione agreed. "Jealous Harry was silly. Silly is safe. This is..." she pressed her lips together "...this is Harry deciding something, all by himself, in that overtrained hero head of his, and not telling a living soul what it is. And I think we can both guess the shape of it, and if he's decided what I'm afraid he's decided... noble, self-sacrificing, for-her-own-good idiocy..."
"...then he'll fold himself out of her life one polite inch at a time," Astoria finished, "and call it protecting her, be proud of it, and Luna will wake up one morning next to a stranger who smiles like Harry."
Her voice had gone cold. "No."
"No," Hermione agreed.
"So. The boys." Astoria was already planning; it was, Hermione had learned to appreciate, what Greengrasses did. "Draco. Viktor. Ron and Neville, dorm access, they can watch him at night... he's not sleeping properly either, look at him. We brief all four, we compare notes, and then we engineer something. Firewhisky is traditional but he's fifteen, so... a chess ambush. A locked room if necessary. Whatever it takes to make Harry Potter spill his guts before he does something irreversible and heroic about his own heart."
"Agreed. Tonight, after the meet..."
Hermione stopped. Astoria had raised her eyebrows, gaze snagged across the hall, and a slow delighted wickedness was spreading over her face. Hermione followed the look... and there, in the far corner, was Daphne Greengrass, elegant as ever, practising the Patronus Charm in a paired drill with Anthony Goldstein... standing perhaps a full four inches closer to him than the exercise required, laughing... Daphne, laughing... at something he'd said, her silver mist and his curling together in the air between them like question marks.
The two conspirators looked at each other. The giggle escaped them both at once.
"Later," Hermione said firmly, wrestling her face straight. "One romantic crisis at a time..."
...
The ward-stone in Harry's pocket screamed.
It was silent to the room... the alarm rang bone-deep, owner-only, Lupin's clever design... but Harry went rigid mid-sentence at the far end of the hall, and his hand flew to his pocket, and the paired stone's surface bloomed with an image that turned his blood to ice water.
The corridor outside. The illusion... the seamless fold of nothing-to-see that had hidden their door all year... peeling, visibly, like scorched paint. And standing before it, wand raised in one pink-sleeved hand, working a slow deliberate counter-charm with a smile of wide and patient triumph: Dolores Umbridge. Behind her, filling the corridor, the Inquisitorial Squad... Theodore Nott at the front, fuse-lit smile ablaze at last.
'She found it. She found US.'
"LISTEN TO ME." Harry's voice cracked across the hall like a whip, and every Patronus died at once, and thirty faces turned. "Umbridge is outside. She's breaking the concealment... we have minutes. Emergency plan, exactly as drilled: the Room is making the back ways now..." and it was; along the far wall, doors were already blooming out of the stone, three of them, four, passages the castle was opening at their need "...you go in your escape pairs, you go quietly, you scatter by the routes, and you do NOT run in the corridors. Prefects lead your groups. Move."
They moved. Weeks of Harry's drilling paid its dividend in thirty seconds of fast, frightened, orderly evacuation... Cedric anchoring the biggest group, Ginny towing the youngest, Hermione and Astoria sweeping the hall for anything nameable left behind...
"Harry, come on..." Ron, at the last door, holding it.
"Someone has to be in here when it opens." Harry was already walking the other way... toward the front of the Room, toward the door that was about to fail, pulling his sleeve down over the ward-stone. "If it's empty she'll know it emptied, and she'll hunt the corridors and catch the slow ones. If she catches me, she stops looking."
His voice was flat and fast and absolutely settled. "I'm the one she wants anyway. Go."
"Mate..."
"Ron." Harry looked back, once, and the look ended the argument. "Get them home. That's the job. Go."
The last door sealed itself into blank stone. The Room, emptied, quietly rearranged its furniture into something resembling an innocent study hall, which fooled no one, least of all the boy standing alone in the middle of it with his heart hammering and his face composing itself, breath by breath, into Ethan Esther's courteous calm.
The main door burst open.
Harry ran... for form's sake, for the story's sake, out the door and hard left down the corridor, past the shrieking triumphant pink, three strides, four...
"Trip him!"
The Trip Jinx took him at the ankles... Theodore's voice, Theodore's spell, of course it was... and the floor came up and struck him, and then there were hands on him, Crabbe's and Goyle's, hauling him up by the arms, and Theodore Nott's face arrived an inch from his own wearing four and a half years of accumulated spite distilled into one shining moment.
"Got you," Theodore breathed.
And past his shoulder came the clicking of small heels, and the wide glistening smile, and the soft, sweet, victorious little cough.
"Hem, hem. Well, well, well," said Dolores Umbridge. "Mr Potter. Caught."