The Garden of Ashes Ch. 18 (Patreon)

Chapter 18: The Garden

The road ran out of pavement about two miles back. After that it was gravel followed by two dirt ruts with grass growing down the middle. Harry had stopped checking the map a while ago. There was nothing on it to check against. Just hills, brown and purple with heather, and a lot of gray sky sitting low on top of them.

They had apparated to a village north of Inverness that morning, drunk tea in a café, and walked from there. It was past noon now. The rain had been coming and going for hours, never heavy enough to bother with a charm.

“Are we sure it’s this road?” Neville asked. He walked a step behind Harry with his hood up and a canvas satchel bumping against his hip. He had taken the day off from Hogwarts. “Feels like I’ve been looking at the same hill for twenty minutes.”

“It’s the same hill,” Luna said. She walked ahead of all of them with her hands tucked in her sleeves, her plain Department robes dark with rain at the shoulders. “That’s the second layer. It’s sending us around in a loop. We’ve been walking in a very gentle circle since the stile.”

Harry stopped. “Since the stile? That was half an hour ago.”

“Forty minutes, actually. I wanted to see how long it would let us.”

“Luna.”

“I was gathering information.” She looked back at him with a smile. “You’d have done the same if you could see it properly.”

Daphne gave Harry a look that said not to start. She had her coat buttoned to her chin and her hair tied back, and she had been quiet most of the morning, watching Luna’s hands more than the road.

“I still don’t get why it’s Scotland,” Harry said, starting to walk again. “The map you showed us had the Lake District circled. Twice.”

“That’s where the signature comes up.” Luna pulled a small brass instrument out of her sleeve, round and flat like a pocket watch with too many hands, and checked it before putting it away again. “The anchor sits here. The wards bend the reading south, the way a mirror around a corner shows you the room you aren’t standing in. It took me four days to work out I’d been looking at a reflection.”

“So we’ve been looking at the wrong county,” Neville said.

“The wrong country, technically. But Ross would have wanted that. Nobody checks Scotland for a Ministry project. It’s too far from everything.”

“That’s a bit clever,” Harry admitted.

“It’s very clever. He’s a clever man.” Luna said calmly. “That’s why we’re going to be careful.”

They walked another ten minutes when Luna held up a hand, and the others stopped behind her.

Harry looked ahead. The road went on between two low hills and curved out of sight, and there was nothing else to see. He kept looking anyway, and a strange thing happened. His eyes slid off the gap between the hills every time, the way your eyes slide past a word you’ve read too often. He had to make himself look back.

“That’s the first layer,” Daphne said quietly. “Notice-Me-Not. It’s a strong one.”

“It’s the oldest one,” Luna said. “Ross put it up himself. After that come the Muggle-Repelling charms, the loop, a signature ward, and the fog. Five in all. The trick is to take them down in the right order, and not to be in a hurry.” She reached into her robes again and handed each of them a small tarnished ring, plain and gray, no bigger than a button. “These are Department keys. Put it on a finger. It won’t make you invisible, but it will tell the wards you’re meant to be here, as long as I’m the one doing the talking.”

Neville turned his over in his palm. “And if they figure out we’re not?”

“Then they’ll ring a very loud bell somewhere in London.” Luna smiled again. “So let’s not.”

She went first. It was strange to watch. She didn’t wave her wand much. She stood still with her eyes half closed, and now and then she tapped the air with two fingers, and each time she did something changed. The first tap made the gap between the hills look wider. The second made the road look like it went somewhere. Harry felt his stomach lurch a little when the loop let go of them, like he’d missed a stair.

“One, two,” Luna murmured. “That’s the Muggle charms done. I always liked those. They’re so polite.”

The signature ward was harder. She spent a long time on it, and Harry saw her jaw tighten. Daphne stepped up beside her without being asked and put a hand flat on Luna’s back, and the two of them worked together for a minute without talking. Daphne’s wandwork was neat and small. Luna’s was loose and fast. Somehow, they met in the middle and the ward let out a soft sound, like a sigh before going still.

“Four,” Luna said. “Now the fog. I’ll warn you, this one is unpleasant.”

It rolled down the road toward them a few seconds later, thin and gray and cold, and the moment it touched Harry he forgot why he was there.

It was that simple. One moment he was walking up a road with three friends on a job that mattered, and the next he was a man standing in the rain with no idea what he wanted. He felt a little embarrassed. He thought he should probably go home.

“Harry.” Daphne had his wrist. She turned his hand over and held it up in front of his face, and there was a word written on the back in black ink, in her neat handwriting. HALCYON. He had watched her write it that morning and thought it was overcautious. “Read it.”

He read it. It all came back at once, the road, the garden, and what they were here for, and he let out a breath.

“Bloody hell.”

“Say it out loud,” she said. “All of us. Every few steps.”

“Halcyon,” Harry said.

“Halcyon,” Neville said, from somewhere to his left, in a voice that sounded like he was fighting to remember how to say it. “Is it normal that I suddenly want to go home and water my ferns?”

“That’s the fog. Hold on to my sleeve,” Luna said. “Halcyon, Halcyon, Halcyon. It’s not very good at poetry, so that’s how you beat it.”

They walked through it like that, saying the word to each other like a chant, with Neville’s hand wrapped in the back of Luna’s robe and Daphne’s fingers gripping Harry’s wrist the whole way. It took three or four minutes. When the fog thinned and finally let go, all four of them stood in the road breathing hard.

“Five,” Luna said. She sounded pleased. “That’s all of them.”

The road made a last turn between the hills, and the Notice-Me-Not gave way. Finally, Harry saw the gate.

It was a tall iron gate, rusted orange and hanging open on one hinge. A stone wall ran away from it on both sides, about eight feet high, with moss growing thick on top. Beyond the gate there was a garden, and it looked like it had been left as it was for about ten years.

Nobody said anything for a bit. Harry stood at the gate with his hands in his pockets, taking it in. The ground was green as it ran down wide and shallow in the hills, hedges growing in tall shaggy walls. Trees leaned over the paths. There were beds everywhere, and every bed was bursting with leaves and flowers in colors that didn’t belong in the Highlands in October. Pale blue, deep purple, a gray-white that seemed to glow a little in the rain. Far down in the middle of it all, through a gap between two yew trees, he could make out the corner of a big stone house with a slate roof.

“It’s beautiful,” Daphne said, sounding unhappy about it.

“It’s meant to be,” Luna said. “People are less afraid of a garden.”

They went in. The gravel crunched under their boots for the first few steps, and then it stopped being gravel and turned to moss. Harry noticed the plants about ten feet in.

They were moving. Not a lot. A fern beside the path unrolled a frond toward him as he passed, and a cluster of white flowers on a low bush turned their faces to follow Neville, slowly. A hedge to the left leaned out over the path, slowly, and then drew back when Daphne looked at it. Harry glanced behind him and saw the grass where he’d stepped was standing up again like it was curious.

“They know we’re here,” he said.

“Of course they do,” Neville said. He had a funny look on his face, the one he got in the greenhouses when he found something he hadn’t expected. He crouched at the edge of a bed and held his hand out flat, not touching anything, and a tall plant with narrow silver leaves leaned toward his palm and then pulled back. “Merlin. Look at this.”

“What is it?”

“Asphodel.” He said it like he was afraid he’d get it wrong. “Real asphodel, not the garden stuff you can buy in a pot. See how the root bulb shows above the soil? And that’s wormwood beside it, there. Put those two together in the right ratio and you get Draught of Living Death. That’s not what this is for, though. There’s too much of it. It’s grown in a bed, in rows, like a crop.”

He moved down the path a few feet, and Harry followed. Neville pointed at things as he went, quietly, ticking them off with one finger.

“Valerian. Lovage. Poppy, the dreamless sort, that’s very hard to get right. That gray one is a sedge, silver sedge, they use it in tonics for fever and it’s not exactly rare.” He stopped, his voice going a little thin. “That one is.”

It was a low plant with round gray-green leaves and one thin stem growing from the middle. There was a single closed flower on the end of the stem, small and tight, the color of old bone. Neville looked at it for a while without saying anything.

“Mnemosyne’s thistle,” he said finally. “I’ve only seen it in illustrations. It’s supposed to be extinct in Britain. There was a purge of them in the eighteenth century because the potion makers were using them up faster than they grew.” He swallowed. “It’s used in one kind of potion. Memory work. Dampening, softening. Rewriting, if you push the dose. And there’s a whole bed of it.”

“How much?” Daphne asked.

Neville looked down the slope. “More than the Hogwarts stores would hold in a hundred years.” He stood up slowly, brushing off his knees. “This isn’t a garden. It’s a farm. Somebody grew everything they needed for mind potions right here, on the spot, and it’s all been kept alive for years.”

“For the cognitive scaffolding,” Daphne said flatly. “That’s what Hermione called it. The memory work that kept the children from knowing what had been done to them. They didn’t have to buy the ingredients. They grew them in the yard where the children played.”

Nobody had anything to say to that.

The thistle in front of Neville was still closed. But as Harry walked past it, something moved at the corner of his eye. He stopped and looked back. The bud had opened, just a little, and the pale petals were leaning toward him.

“Neville.”

“I see it.” Neville frowned. “That’s not normal. They don’t open without a reason. Usually it’s a particular scent or a particular kind of magic.” He gave Harry a long look. “Have you been near one of these before?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Harry said, his voice a bit rough. “Would I?”

Neville didn’t answer.

They followed the main path down toward the house, but they didn’t get far before Luna stopped them.

“Wait,” she said. “Before we go any closer, I want you to see it from above.”

“See what?” Harry asked.

“The garden.” She was already walking back up the slope toward the wall, where a rough set of stone steps led up to an old watchtower, half fallen down, with grass growing out of its roof. “I thought something was off when I read the signature from a distance. The shape was wrong for a normal estate. I want to check.”

The tower had no door and the stairs inside were slick with rain. Harry went up behind Daphne with one hand on the wall. He knew where the stairs turned before he got to each turn, but he didn’t mention it. At the top there was a platform with a low parapet, and from there the whole garden lay below them.

He looked at it for a good ten seconds before he understood what he was seeing.

The beds weren’t scattered. They were arranged in rings, wide ones, with narrow paths cutting across them in straight lines from the edge to the middle. The hedges weren’t hedges at all. They were lines, long ones, bending and turning and meeting each other at sharp angles. Taken one at a time they were just shrubs. From up here they were symbols, huge ones, each one as long as a house.

“Merlin,” Neville breathed.

“It’s a diagram,” Daphne said. “It’s all one runic diagram.”

“The biggest one I’ve ever seen.” Luna had her instrument out again, and she held it up toward the garden with one eye shut. “Ross didn’t use stone or chalk. He used plants. They hold a rune better than anything else if you keep them alive, because they grow into it. The more they grow, the stronger the signature gets.”

Harry leaned on the parapet. He found he could read some of it, which made him uneasy. Not all of it. A few of the shapes in the outer ring pulled at him, the way a familiar face pulls at you in a crowd. “What does it say?”

“A lot of things.” Luna ran her finger through the air, tracing the shapes, and her voice went distant and careful. “The outer ring is containment. Keep in, keep still. The ring inside it is forgetting. The next one is a kind of holding, a way of tying one thing to another so it can’t be moved. And all the lines run to the middle.”

“The house,” Harry said.

“Under the house,” said Luna. “I think.”

She didn’t explain that. She just lowered her instrument and stood there for a moment, looking at the pattern, her hair swaying in the wind.

“How old is it?” Daphne asked.

“The oldest parts are older than the war. Look at the shape of the third ring. That’s an old design. Somebody started it long before Halcyon was a project.” Luna paused. “Ross built on top of something that was already here.”

Nobody asked the next question. They all climbed back down.

-Break-

The house was bigger than it looked from above. Three stories of dark gray stone, with a slate roof that had lost a few slates and tall windows with their shutters closed. Ivy had climbed most of the front, and one corner of the building had a young tree growing out of the gutter. The front steps were broad and clean. Too clean. No moss, no weeds, not a leaf on them.

Harry went up first. The door was black oak with an iron ring where a handle should be, and no keyhole. He tried the ring. It didn’t move. He tried the basic unlocking charm, mostly because he felt he should, but the wood stayed shut without so much as a shiver.

“Let me,” Daphne said.

She tried six different charms in a row, her wand moving fast, her mouth set. Harry watched the third one bounce off the door in a faint ripple of blue light and the fifth one fizzle out before it landed. After the sixth she lowered her wand and rubbed her wrist.

“It’s not a normal lock. It’s a binding. A signature lock.” She stepped back and looked at the door with her head tilted. “It’s keyed to specific people. Only those people can open it. Anyone else could throw spells at it all week.”

“Which people?” Neville asked.

Luna had come up beside them. She laid her palm flat on the wood, and held it there, her eyes going unfocused. “The Seven,” she said at last. “Their signatures are all in the grain, very faint. Ross. A handful of others I don’t know.” She paused. “It doesn’t have to be the living ones. A signature stays in a binding after the person is gone. That’s what makes it so hard to break.”

“Then we can’t get in,” Harry said.

“Not this way.”

He put his own hand on the door, not really thinking about it, just to feel the wood.

It was warm.

That was the first thing. The oak should have been cold from the rain, but it wasn’t. It was warm the way a stone is warm after the sun’s been on it. A low hum ran up his arm, steady and soft, and for about two seconds he had the strange feeling that the door knew him. That it had been waiting for him to come back.

Then it stopped, and he took his hand away.

The door stayed shut. However, the hum in the wood had changed, he was sure of it. It sounded different now, deeper. Luna was watching him with her head on one side. She didn’t say anything. She took out a small notebook from her robes and wrote something down.

“What?” Harry said.

“Nothing. I’ll tell you when I’m sure.”

“Luna.”

“I’m only a little sure.” She smiled at him. “It’s not worth saying until I’m a lot sure.”

Harry gave up and stepped back down the stairs. Daphne followed him. She didn’t say anything either, but her hand brushed his as she came down beside him.

They split up to look around the outside of the house, with Neville and Luna going left and Harry and Daphne right. The side garden was a long lawn with grass up to their knees, a stone sundial in the middle, a low hedge, and an iron bench with a lot of rust on it. Beyond that there was a high yew hedge with an arched gap cut into it.

Daphne stopped on the lawn.

“Wait,” she said. She walked over to the bench and stood in front of it, and then without a word she knelt down and laid her palm flat against the grass.

Harry watched her. She had her eyes closed and her breathing had slowed down. He knew this look by now. It was the one she had in the sitting room at Shell Cottage when she worked on his memories, calm and focused, her whole attention pointed at one thing.

“What is it?” he asked quietly.

“There’s something here.” She didn’t open her eyes. “Emotional imprints. Do you know what those are?”

“Not really.”

“When a child feels something strong, over and over, in the same place, a little of it soaks in. Into the ground, the stone, whatever’s close. It’s not a memory. It’s more like a stain.” She pressed her hand down a bit harder. “You can’t see it. A healer who works with minds learns to feel for it. Usually, you only find it in a room where somebody was ill for a very long time. I’ve never felt one this strong.”

“What do you get?”

“Fear.” She said it slowly. “A lot of it. Quiet fear, the kind a child learns to hide. Somebody sat on this bench every day. They didn’t talk. They just watched the gate.” Her lips thinned. “Waiting. They were counting something. Over and over. It feels like numbers.”

Harry looked at the iron bench. It was an ordinary bench. He looked at the gate far away across the lawn, a tiny shape through the trees, and felt something cold go down his back.

“There’s more over here,” Daphne said. She got up and walked toward the sundial with her hand out, and he followed. “This is different. This is less afraid. Somebody laughed here. Just once, maybe.” She frowned. “It’s strange. It’s so much smaller than the rest. Like it was stolen.”

“Stolen,” Harry repeated.

“Hidden. Kept very quiet so nobody would take it away.”

He wanted to say something, but he didn’t know what. He stood beside her and looked at the sundial. His eyes went past it to the arched gap in the yew hedge, and his stomach dropped.

He didn’t decide to walk toward it. He just found himself doing it. His boots went through the long grass and he stopped in front of the arch. The hedge on either side of it looked taller than it had a minute ago. His mouth had gone dry.

“Harry?”

“There’s a loose stone,” he said. His voice sounded odd to him. “On the left. About knee height. The third one up from the ground. It wobbles.”

Daphne came up beside him, slowly. She crouched, put two fingers against the wall inside the arch, and pushed the third stone from the ground. It moved. It rocked back about half an inch and came to rest, and there was a hollow behind it, empty and dark.

“How did you know that?” she asked, very softly.

“I don’t know.” His heart was banging hard against his ribs. His hands had started to shake, and he shoved them into his pockets so she wouldn’t see. “I just knew. Like I knew where the stair was in the tower. I knew there was a stair before I saw it.”

“You didn’t say that.”

“I didn’t want to.”

She stood up. She didn’t ask him anything else, which he was grateful for. She took his arm above the elbow and held it, firm and warm, and said, “Breathe. In for four. Out for six.”

He breathed. In for four, out for six. It took a good minute before his heart slowed down. When it did, he felt stupid and tired, and a bit sick.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be.” She hadn’t let go of his arm. “I’m going to say something and I want you to listen. It’s okay that you recognize it. It doesn’t mean something’s wrong with you. It means it’s real, and that you were here, and that your mind kept what it could. That’s a good sign. It means they didn’t get everything.”

He nodded. He couldn’t think of anything to say. He looked at her hand on his arm before looking up to find her watching him with that steady, serious look of hers, and felt his chest go tight.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Come on,” said Daphne, quietly. “Let’s see what else is here.”

-Break-

Neville and Luna were waiting for them at the far corner of the house, on a gravel path along the back wall. Neville was kneeling by a low stone marker about a foot high, with runes cut into the top. He looked up with a serious expression on his face as they came closer.

“Come and see this.”

The marker had been pulled out of the ground. It lay on its side in a shallow pit, with the soil around it still dark and damp. The runes along the top had been cut across with one clean line. Not smashed. Cut. The edge of the stone was smooth where it had been split.

“There are more of them,” Neville said. “I’ve counted nine so far. Around the edge of the lawn, in a circle, and every one of them has been pulled up and cut.” He rubbed soil between his fingers. “This was done this week. Maybe two days ago. Maybe three.”

“Somebody’s been here,” Daphne said.

“Somebody has been here a lot,” Luna said, staring down at the stone. She went down on one knee and put her fingers in the pit. “The workings are tidy. It’s very patient work. Each marker has been taken out in order, clockwise, and the wards around it unpicked first so nothing went off. Whoever did it didn’t hurry.”

“It’s him,” Harry said. “Corvus. It has to be.”

“The pattern fits.” Luna held up her fingers. A faint trace of black residue clung to them, and she rubbed it between her thumb and forefinger. “It’s the same hand as the murder runes. The same spiral on the cut. It’s a signature, in a way. Everything he touches comes out neat.”

“How many are left?” Daphne asked.

“Of the markers? Maybe a third.” Luna stood up. “The garden is dying. Look.” She pointed. Past the pit, a long bed of low plants had turned brown and curled in on itself, and farther on another one was gray and limp. “As each marker comes out, the plants it was tied to lose their anchor. Neville, you’d know better than I would.”

“They’re starving.” Neville stood slowly, his face troubled. “It’s not just the wards. The whole garden is being fed by the runes, and when he cuts them it stops getting what it needs. It’s been dying for months, and it’s speeding up.” He wiped his hands on his trousers. “I don’t like to say it, but somebody’s looked after some of it. See here.”

He pointed along the path edge where a row of silver-leaved plants had been trimmed. The cuts were clean, angled, and made just above a node where the stem branched.

“That’s careful pruning. Somebody who knew exactly what they were doing, and who cared if it grew back.” He shook his head. “I can’t explain it. He’s pulling the whole place down, and he’s taking care of the plants while he does it.”

“Maybe he’s got nothing against the plants,” Harry said.

“No,” Neville agreed quietly. “Maybe not.”

Luna had wandered a few steps down the wall toward the corner, and now she called to them from beside the sundial.

“I think I’ve found something.”

At the base of the sundial, half buried in grass, there was a flat stone plaque about the size of a book. Rows of tiny runes ran across it, worn smooth by weather. Luna knelt in front of it and brushed the moss away with her sleeve. She read in silence for a long minute, her lips moving a little.

“What does it say?” Harry asked.

“It’s a map, sort of.” She sat back on her heels. “It’s a marker for the work crew, I think. The people who built the structure. It tells them where things are.” She pointed at a line near the bottom. “Here. This line says the east approach leads to the lower level. And this word here, this is a technical term. It means intensive. And this one means treatment.” She swallowed. “It says the most intensive treatments were carried out below. Under the garden. Not under the house. Under the garden itself.”

“Under the orangery,” Daphne said flatly. “Where all the lines go.”

“That’s what I think.”

“That’s where the central point is,” Neville said slowly. “In the diagram. The middle of the rings. There’s an old glasshouse down there, I saw it from the tower. It’s right in the center.”

Harry looked down the slope. Beyond the house, past the yew hedges and the long beds, a glass roof caught a little of the gray light, and the whole garden seemed to pour toward it. He found he didn’t want to go there, but he also found that he was going to anyway.

“Right,” he said. “Then that’s where we go next.”

-Break-

The path down to the orangery ran through a formal part of the garden, a wide terrace of gray flagstones with low hedges cut into neat squares on either side. It was the only part of the garden that still looked tidy. Nothing grew between the stones. Not a single weed.

Luna saw it before the rest of them. “Stop,” she said sharply. “Don’t walk on the stones. Walk on the grass at the edge, the whole way across. I don’t like how clean they are.”

“Right,” Harry said.

He walked on the grass, and he got about halfway across when he saw something in the corner of the terrace, a small brown shape against the flagstones, and thought for half a second it was an animal. He instinctively stepped onto the paving to look.

It was just a dead bird. By the time he knew that, the stone under his boot had gone warm.

“Harry!” Luna yelled. “Off, off, get off it!”

He jumped, but it was too late. A pale line of light ran out from his foot along the cracks between the stones, fast, and every flagstone on the terrace lit up in the same gold color for about one heartbeat.

Then the hedges moved.

They didn’t sway. They grew. Every low square of box on either side shot up in a rush of leaves, taller than a man, taller than two men, and kept going. Yew trees along the edge of the terrace leaned in over it with a loud, dry rustling. Harry felt a hand clamp onto his wrist, and he knew from the rings on the fingers it was Daphne’s, and then a wall of green came down between them and Luna and Neville.

“Neville!” he shouted.

“Harry! Daph...” A tangle of branches swallowed the rest, and the sound of Neville’s voice faded as the wall thickened. For a few seconds there was just a great rustling noise and the smell of cut wood. Harry spun in a circle. The hedge was on all sides now, sixteen feet high, closing in with a hiss. The terrace was gone. There was a short path of packed earth running in one direction, and it was growing narrower.

“Wands out,” Daphne said. She had hers in her hand already. She was breathing fast, but her voice was steady. “It’s a trap. It’s meant to isolate us.”

“Why us?”

“Because we’re the ones who stepped on it.”

In Harry’s pocket, something warmed against his hip. He pulled out the galleon and saw words forming around the rim in Luna’s neat script.

OUTER RING. SAFE. FOLLOW THE CENTER. IT FEEDS ON FEAR AND ANGER. STAY CALM.

Then the words went dark. He looked up. Daphne was reading over his shoulder with her mouth set in a thin line.

“Well,” she said, “that’s reassuring.”

“She’s good at that.” He stuck the coin back in his pocket. “Come on. There’s only one way to go.”

-Break-

The path wound down and in. The hedges stayed tall on both sides, but a gap opened every now and then to show a stretch of garden beyond, tangled and wet, before closing again as they walked past. The plants didn’t look like they had earlier. They had been curious then, leaning in. Now they were watching. Harry felt it in the back of his neck, just the way it felt when someone was staring from across a room.

He tried to keep his mind quiet. It wasn’t easy. He kept thinking about the stone under his hand, the arch, and how he had known the way. Every time he thought about it, his temper rose a little. Who had done that to a child? Who had put a child on a bench for years and counted how long he could stand it? He felt the anger come up hot in his chest, and all along the path the vines started to twitch.

“Harry,” Daphne said.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not. Look at the left.”

A long green tendril, thick as his wrist and covered in thorns, had slid out of the hedge and was curling slowly toward his ankle. It moved like it was in no hurry. Harry stepped away from it. Another came out on the right. Then three more, all at once, whipping across the path with a snap that made them both flinch.

“Reducto,” Harry snapped, and blasted the nearest one into pieces. The pieces dropped and then wriggled, and from each piece grew two new tendrils.

“Don’t do that,” Daphne said. “That’s what it wants. It’s feeding on it.” She grabbed his arm. “Stop. Just stop.”

“I’m trying,” he said through his teeth. A thorn caught his sleeve and cut through to the skin, searing a hot line of pain along his forearm. He swore. Three more vines hit the path between them and the way ahead, and the hedge on his right started closing in a few inches at a time. “I’m trying, Daphne, I’m bloody trying.”

“No. You’re fighting.” Her face was very close to his. Her eyes were very steady, and she held his gaze. “Look at me. Not at them. At me. You’re angry, and that’s fine, you should be. But you can’t be angry right now. You have to put it down. Just for a few minutes.”

“How?”

“The way I showed you. In for four.”

“Out for six,” he finished. He felt stupid, but he did it anyway. In for four. He looked at her, at the small crease between her eyebrows, at a strand of hair that had come loose and was stuck to her cheek with rain. Out for six. The thorn vine near his boot slid back an inch. In for four. Her thumb moved on the inside of his wrist. Out for six.

The vines pulled back. Slowly, one at a time, all around them.

“There,” she said, quietly. “See?”

“That’s the worst garden I’ve ever been in,” Harry muttered.

She let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “Neville would be offended.”

They kept going. It was slow. Every time Harry’s temper flared, the hedge responded, and he had to stop and do the breathing again. Daphne walked just ahead, her wand held loose, never glancing back at him, and he understood that it was intentional. She was giving him something steady to follow.

After a while the path ended at a wall.

It wasn’t a hedge. It was thorn, a solid mass of black stems as thick as his arm, woven so tightly he couldn’t see a gap anywhere. Thorns as long as his finger stuck out of it in every direction. In the middle, about shoulder height, a rune had been cut into the stems in a pale glowing line. It was a spiral with three arms. It gave off a soft pulse of light, once every few seconds.

“Look at this,” Daphne said. She reached out toward it and then stopped, her hand an inch away. “It’s a gate. A paired gate. It needs two signatures at the same time, working in the same direction. Not just two people casting. Two magical signatures, resonating.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we have to match.” She turned to face him. “Not the spell. The magic. If I cast one thing and you cast another, even if they’re meant to do the same job, the rune sees two separate things and refuses. It has to see them as one.”

“How do we do that?”

“I’ve done it before with patients. Healers do it sometimes, when one person’s too injured to hold their own magic steady.” She hesitated, and he saw her go slightly pink. “It’s a bit personal.”

“Personal how?”

“You have to let the other person feel your magic from the inside. Properly. And you feel theirs. It can’t be done if either of you is keeping anything back.”

Harry stared at her. “You want me to open up my magic. To you.”

“Yes.”

“Daphne, my magic’s been a mess lately. You know that. It’s doing things I don’t understand.”

“I know.” She said it very gently. “That’s why I’m asking you to trust me with it.”

The hedge creaked behind them. He glanced back and saw it had moved in about a foot since they’d stopped. They didn’t have all day. He turned back and looked at her, at the damp hair and the stubborn chin and the small flush across her cheekbones, and he thought that there wasn’t a person in the world he trusted more at that moment.

“Okay,” he said. “What do I do?”

“Close your eyes.”

He did. A second later, he felt her step in front of him, close enough to feel warmth through his coat. She took both his hands and lifted them, and then she pressed his palms flat against her ribs, just under her breasts, over the thin wool of her jumper. He felt her heartbeat go through his hands, quick and strong.

“Breathe with me,” she said, her voice low.

He did. It took a while to get the rhythm right. She breathed slowly, and he tried to follow. At first he kept getting ahead of her, and she moved her hands up to his face, putting her forehead against his. He could feel her breath on his mouth now, warm and a bit unsteady, and he stopped trying to think about anything.

That was when he felt it.

It wasn’t like anything he’d done before. Her magic came toward him slowly and a bit shyly. It was cool and careful, with a faint scent in it, lavender, and it went through his chest and down his arms in a thin silver thread. It felt orderly. Everything in it was in its place. And underneath it was something else, a low sad ache, as if she had spent a very long time looking after other people and nobody had ever looked after her.

He didn’t say it, but he thought she probably felt him think it.

“Yours is loud,” she whispered.

“Is that bad?”

“No.” She laughed softly, her lips nearly touching his. “It’s stubborn. And it’s frightened. You’re so frightened, Harry. All the time. You hide it so well.”

“I know,” he said, his voice coming out thick.

“You don’t have to hide it from me.”

He didn’t. That was the strange part. He let go of the last of it, the part he kept shut up tight even from himself, and felt his magic pour toward hers, warm and rough and unsteady. For a moment it was too much. It crashed up against hers and he felt her flinch. Then she took it, all of it, without pulling away, and he felt her magic fold around his own. The two began to move together, slowly, in the same direction.

When he opened his eyes, the rune on the thorn wall was shining white.

“Together,” Daphne said, her voice shaking a little. “Now. Cast with me.”

They raised their wands together, still standing with their foreheads touching, and said the word at the same moment. The light poured out of both wands in a single line and struck the spiral. The thorn wall shuddered before it peeled apart in the middle with a long dry rustling noise until there was a narrow gap, about the width of a person.

They stood there, breathing hard.

“Well,” Harry said when he could. “That was something.”

“Yes.” Daphne was flushed to the roots of her hair. She still hadn’t let go of his face. “Yes, it was.”

Neither of them moved. He could feel her pulse in the hands he still had pressed to her sides, and her thumb was moving slowly along his jaw, back and forth. The thorns creaked. The gap in the wall waited.

“We should go through,” she said.

“We should.”

She didn’t move. He didn’t either.

He kissed her. Or she kissed him. Afterward he honestly couldn’t have said who actually started it. One second there was a hand’s width of air between them and the next there wasn’t.

Her mouth was warm and soft, and a bit desperate against his own, her lips parting at once so he could taste the faint sweetness of whatever she’d been drinking earlier. Her fingers had closed tight on the front of his coat, her knuckles pressing hard against his chest as if she meant to keep him from pulling away. He made a low sound against her lips, and she answered it with a sound of her own, hungrier, and pulled him closer, hard, until he walked her back two steps and her shoulders met the side of the gap.

It wasn’t gentle. It had been building for weeks, in kitchens thick with the smell of tea and ink, on garden walls where their hands had brushed and neither of them had moved away, across tables full of paper where their eyes kept catching and holding too long. Now there was nobody to see. Nobody to interrupt.

He pushed his hands into her hair and the tie came out at once, soft strands spilling over his fingers. He closed his fists in it, tilting her head so he could kiss her deeper, slower, then harder again when she made another small broken noise into his mouth.

Her coat had come open somewhere in the scramble. He slid his hands under it, over the thin wool of her jumper, feeling the quick rise and fall of her breathing, and the heat of her body through the fabric. His hands slid under that, to the warm skin at her waist, bare and soft.

He spread his fingers there, his thumbs stroking the delicate skin just above the waistband of her skirt, and she gasped into his mouth before she dragged him in by his belt. The leather creaked under her grip. Her leg came up against his hip, her knee hooked high, and she pressed her body completely against his. He could feel everything through the layers that remained, and he found he loved the way she arched into him and the way her hips shifted, seeking more.

He kissed down her throat, open-mouthed, tasting the salt of her skin, and felt the frantic pulse beating under his lips. She tipped her head back against the thorns with a soft, helpless moan that went straight through him. Her hands were still locked in his belt, pulling him flush, and when his teeth grazed the side of her neck she shuddered hard enough that he felt it in his own body. The air between them was gone. There was only heat and the rough scrape of wool. The only sounds that could be heard were the wet sounds of their mouths and the way she kept making those quiet, needy sounds every time he kissed lower.

Her fingers tightened and her leg pressed harder against his hip. He dragged his mouth back up the column of her throat, found the soft place just beneath her jaw, and sucked lightly. She said his name then, low and shaken, like it had been torn out of her.

Behind them, something creaked.

It was a different creak this time, sharp and low, and Harry felt the hair on his arms rise. He pulled back as Daphne opened her eyes, and they both looked around.

The vines had come back. They were not threatening, just there, hundreds of them, hanging from the hedge walls on both sides, turning slowly toward the two of them like a crowd that had heard something interesting.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Harry said.

Daphne burst out laughing. She put her forehead against his chest and shook with it, gasping, her hair a mess. “It can tell. It’s reading us. It doesn’t think we’re calm.”

“I’m perfectly calm.”

“You are not.”

“No,” he admitted. “I’m really not.”

“Neither am I.” She lifted her head. Her lips were red and her eyes were bright, and she looked about as dignified as he felt. “Later. Please. When there’s not a hedge watching.”

“Later,” Harry agreed, with a rueful smile, and tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. “That’s a promise.”

“Good.” She straightened her coat, looking pleased and flustered at once. “Now put that look away, Potter, before we get strangled.”

He tried. It took a few breaths but he managed, and they went through the gap together with their fingers laced as the thorns closed behind them.

-Break-

The orangery stood in a clearing, but the clearing was dead.

Harry noticed that first. All the way down, the garden had been crowded and green. Here the grass was gray, and the shrubs had dropped their leaves. The air smelled of old wet earth.

The orangery itself was a long building, mostly glass in a white iron frame, with half its panes cracked or gone. Inside it a mass of overgrown things had pushed against the glass from within.

A huge old oak grew right beside it. Its roots were enormous, black and twisted, rising out of the ground like knuckles and running toward the orangery’s foundations. Some of them had broken the paving stones apart.

Daphne went toward the tree. She stopped about ten feet from it and stood very still.

“Harry.”

He walked over and stood beside her.

There were straps on the roots. Old brown leather, rotted and cracked, nailed to the wood with iron nails. There were four of them on one root, at a low height, evenly spaced. The leather was narrow and short. Harry looked at them for a long time before he understood what size they were meant for.

“That’s for a child’s wrists,” Daphne said, her voice barely a whisper. “And ankles.”

Harry didn’t say anything. His stomach had turned over, slowly. He walked up to the root and put out a hand toward the straps and then pulled it back without touching them.

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t be angry. Not here. Not yet.”

“I’m not.” He wasn’t sure that was true. He closed his hand and opened it again. “I’m trying not to be.”

“I know.” She came and stood at his shoulder, so close their arms touched. She didn’t take his hand, and he was grateful. If she had, he thought he might have broken. “After. We’ll be angry after. All of it. I promise you.”

He nodded and breathed in for four.

The orangery door was glass, hanging off one hinge, and nothing stopped them from stepping through. Inside it was dim and green. Great dead vines hung from the ceiling, and there was a long wooden table down one side, a dry fountain, and dozens of clay pots all smashed on the floor. In the middle, set into the flagstones, there was a round iron plate about six feet across, pitted with age. A ring of runes had been cut around the edge.

“That’s it,” Daphne said. “The way down.” She went to the edge and crouched, running her fingers over the runes. “It’s the same kind of lock. Paired. But it’s older, and it’s meant for three or four signatures, not two.”

“We don’t have three.”

“No. But we’re already tuned.” She looked up at him. “Together, it might take. It was already trying to read us as one. Let’s see.”

He held out his hand. She took it. They both knelt, and each placed a palm on the iron. He felt her magic find his straight away, easier this time. The two threads wound together without any effort at all. The runes along the edge of the plate glowed white, then gold, and the iron gave a long groan and slid sideways on a track in the floor.

A stair went down into the dark, narrow and made of stone, with a cold draft coming up.

They exchanged a glance and began descending.

The stairs went down for a long time, and it was colder at every turn. At the bottom, there was a short corridor with a low ceiling, and at the end of the corridor was a round room. Harry stopped in the doorway and just looked.

It was big. Bigger than the orangery above it. The walls were smooth gray stone, and they rose up in a spiral with narrow ledges cut into them, one above the other, going around and around like the inside of a shell. In every ledge there was a small recess. Each recess held a glass vial, sealed with lead and wrapped in a band of iron. The vials glowed faintly, silver and pale blue. There were hundreds of them.

“A memory vault,” Daphne said, her voice echoing in the space. “It’s a proper one. They use them in St. Mungo’s for dangerous cases.” She went in a few steps and stopped. “The glass is warded. Every one has its own seal. They’re not just storing these. They’re containing them.”

“Containing?”

“Memories that were too dangerous to leave in a child’s head, even in a changed form.” She walked slowly along the first ledge, looking at the labels. Each vial had a small tag of yellow parchment tied to the neck with a number and a date written on it. “The rest of the binding suppressed things. This was for the things that couldn’t be suppressed. Too strong. Too vivid. Too likely to break through. So they took them out and locked them up.”

Harry climbed to the second ledge and looked along it. Number after number, date after date. He read some of them without meaning to, scanning for something, and was angry at himself for doing it.

He didn’t find his name. He hadn’t expected to. It still left him with a cold feeling.

“Harry.” Daphne’s voice had changed. “Come here. Look at this.”

She stood on the third ledge, looking at the wall. He joined her. About half the recesses in this row were empty. They were clean, with no dust inside them, and the stone around them was slightly paler than the rest. The tags had been taken too.

“That’s recent,” she said. “Look at the dust on the shelf. These are barely a month old, at most.” She moved along the ledge, counting under her breath. “Twenty. Thirty. It goes on. There are more down there, and a whole row up above. Nearly half of the vault has been emptied.”

“Corvus.”

“Or whoever he’s working with.” She turned around and looked at the room with a bleak expression. “He’s been here. He knew exactly what to take. He didn’t touch the rest.”

“Why not? If he’s trying to free them?”

“I don’t know.” Daphne pressed her fingers to her eyes. “Maybe he’s taking the ones that matter most to him first. Maybe he’s gathering them. Or maybe he can only take them in a specific order.” She dropped her hand. “I need Hermione for this. And a Pensieve. And about a month.”

“We don’t have a month.”

“I know.”

They went around the vault together, searching, because it seemed the only thing to do. Harry climbed to the top ledge and checked the last row, finding nothing but the same silver glass in the same iron bands. It took a long time. His legs ached by the time he came down. He found Daphne at the far side of the room, standing in front of a part of the wall where the roots of the great oak had pushed through the stone.

They came down through the ceiling in thick black coils and went into the floor. Between two of the biggest roots there was a narrow gap, a hollow in the wall, dark and half hidden.

“Hold the light,” she said.

He lit his wand. The hollow was about the size of a loaf of bread, and something sat at the back of it, wrapped in a rotted gray cloth. Daphne drew her wand and cast a revealing charm, and the cloth fell away on its own.

It was a vial. A small one, plain, with a cork and a wax seal. The seal was whole. The glass was old and slightly clouded, and the liquid inside it moved lazily, silver with a thread of warm gold running through it. A small label was tied to the neck with a bit of string.

There were only three words on it, written in careful block capitals. It looked like the person who had written it had only recently learned how to write properly.

THE FIRST DAY.

Harry stopped breathing.

He had never seen it before. He was almost certain of that. But his whole body had gone still, and his heart thudded against his ribs. He somehow knew with absolute certainty that he had been looking for this since the moment he walked in.

“It hasn’t been touched,” Daphne said. “Nobody’s taken it. Look at the seal. It’s a different kind. It’s hidden carefully.” She was staring at the label. “This isn’t from the program’s records. Somebody put it here by hand, in secret.”

“Somebody who was a kid.”

“I think so.”

Harry reached out for it, but Daphne caught his wrist.

“Not bare-handed. The seal could be keyed to anyone.”

He nodded slowly and pulled back his hand. She drew her wand and lifted the vial out with a gentle levitation charm, and it floated up into her cupped palm and settled there. She held it up to the light. For a second the silver inside it swirled faster, as if it knew them.

Behind them, the whole vault shivered. A long low sigh ran through the stone.

“Daphne.”

“I feel it.” She closed her hand around the vial. “I think it’s the trap. It’s letting go. We found what it was guarding.”

“That’s it? It just lets us go?”

“I think we passed.”

They went back up the stair together, with the vial in Daphne’s hand, and neither of them said a word.

-Break-

The hedges had sunk back down to their normal height by the time they came out of the orangery. A wide gravel path led away through the garden, straight and clear, one that hadn’t been there before. Harry took it as both a good sign and a bad one. The garden had let them go. He wasn’t sure it had done it out of kindness.

They walked up the slope without speaking. Daphne held the vial against her chest with both hands, and he could see how tightly her knuckles were pressed together. He kept himself between her and the plants. It was a stupid thing to do, since the plants had left them alone, but he did it anyway.

Neville and Luna were standing at the top of the lawn near the gate. Neville was gripping his wand in one hand, and a long thorny cut ran across his cheek, but he was grinning when he saw them come around the corner. Luna had her brass instrument in her palm, turning it.

“Oh, good,” Neville said. “You’re alive. Luna said you would be.”

“You were gone forty minutes,” Luna said. “Not that anyone’s counting.”

“You were counting.”

“A little.” She looked at Daphne, and then at the vial, and her face went very still. “You found something.”

“The First Day,” Harry said. “It was in a hidden alcove. There’s a whole vault down there, Luna, it’s half empty. Somebody’s been taking the memories.”

“Show me.”

Daphne held out the vial, and Luna took one careful step closer and read the label. She said nothing for several seconds. When she looked up, there was something in her face that Harry didn’t like, and it was gone again before he could ask.

“I need to look at this properly, in a safe place,” she said. “That’s not a memory to look at in a garden.” She glanced at the instrument in her hand, and the spinning hands on it had begun to slow. “And I think we may have a problem.”

“What kind of problem?” Harry asked.

“The signature ward. The fourth one.” She tapped the brass. “I let it tell the wards we were meant to be here. It worked for the length of time we were walking. But the garden has been recording since we came in, every spell we cast, and when the trap went off it sent out a signal. I felt it go. I couldn’t stop it.” She held the instrument up. Eleven small points of light were moving across its face, slowly, in a ring, drawing in. “They’re about a mile out. Eleven of them. That’s aurors, and some of them are the Department’s own people.”

“How long?” Neville asked.

“Four minutes. Maybe less. They aren’t hiding.” Luna swallowed. “And one of them is different from the others. The signature is very old and very clear. It sits right at the front.”

Harry felt his stomach drop. “Ross.”

“Himself.” She looked up at him. “He’s come in person.”

“Bloody hell.” Harry looked at the hills. “Can we apparate?”

“Not from here. The garden’s inside the anchor wards. We can’t leave the boundary without crossing the road.” Luna’s eyes went to the gate. “They’ll be coming up that way. There’s a portkey in my robes, an emergency one, but it won’t activate for another ninety seconds. Department rules. A countdown.”

“Then ninety seconds,” Neville said.

“And there’s another problem,” Daphne said.

They all looked at her. She hadn’t moved. She stood with the vial held up in both hands, looking at it, and Harry saw that she had gone white.

“We can’t take this with us,” she said. “Not like this. The seal is tied to the garden. The moment it crosses the boundary, it’ll register as moved. Ross will be able to follow it anywhere. And if they catch us holding it, they’ll take it. That’s it. They’ll take it, and we’ll never see what’s in it.”

“Then we leave it here,” said Neville.

“They’ll find it.”

“We break it,” Harry said, and hated himself for saying it.

“No. If we break the seal, it’s gone. All of it.” Daphne shook her head sharply. “It can’t be destroyed. And it can’t be left. We don’t have a Pensieve or time to view it. We’d need hours.”

“Then what?” Harry asked. “Daphne, what do we do?”

She looked at him. He knew that look. He had seen it in the cottage when she’d knelt in front of his chair and said she was going to open his mind, and he hadn’t liked it then either.

“There’s a technique,” she said.

“No.”

“You haven’t heard it.”

“I don’t have to hear it. You’ve got your professional face on. It’s a terrible idea.”

“It’s called keeping.” She said it fast, as if she wanted to get it out before she lost her nerve. “It’s an emergency method. A healer uses it when a patient’s memory is too dangerous to leave out in the open and too unstable to store. You take it into yourself. Your own mind holds it, behind your own shield. Nobody can find it, because it isn’t anywhere. It’s just in you.” She drew a breath. “The Ministry can search the vial, the house, the garden, every one of us. They can’t search that.”

“Not without taking you apart,” Harry said, flatly.

Her silence told him he had hit the nail on its head.

“Daphne. I’m not letting you do that.”

“It’s my decision.” Her voice was gentle, and very firm. “I’m the only one here who’s trained for it. If it’s going to be done, it has to be me. And you know it.”

“It’s a child’s memory. Bound, probably. It could be anything in there. It could be something that breaks you.”

“It could.”

“Then why would you!?”

“Because it’s the first day.” She said it quietly, and for a moment she sounded much younger. “Because somebody hid this where they thought nobody would look. Because they wrote it themselves, Harry, in their own writing, and kept it safe for years. I won’t let a man like Ross put his hands on it.” She stepped closer and put her free hand against his face. “I’ll be all right. I’m very stubborn.”

“Sixty seconds,” Luna said, softly, behind them. “And the gate is going to open.”

Harry stood there. The wind pulled at his coat. He looked at Daphne, at the steady eyes and the loose hair and the line of her mouth that he’d kissed barely an hour ago, and every part of him wanted to knock the vial out of her hand and run.

“You’d better wake up,” he said, his voice thick.

“I will.”

“I mean it.”

“I know.” She went up on her toes and kissed him once, hard and quick, in front of Luna and Neville, before she stepped back. “Hold them off. Give me a minute.”

She turned away from him. She raised the vial in her left hand and drew her wand in her right, and she set the tip of the wand against the cork. A thread of silver light rose out of the glass, thin as a hair and bright as moonlight, and curled up to meet the wand. She touched the wand to her own temple.

The memory went into her.

It happened fast. Harry saw her whole body go rigid, her back arching, and her free hand clenching around the empty vial until it cracked. Her mouth opened but no sound came out. Her eyes rolled back until only the white showed, and her legs went out from under her.

Harry caught her before she hit the ground. He went down on one knee with her head against his shoulder and gently lowered them with both hands on her face. She was breathing. Her pulse was jumping under his fingers, fast and uneven. Her skin was burning.

“Daphne. Daphne, look at me.”

Her lips moved. She said something. It was very quiet, and it didn’t sound like her voice. It sounded small and young and frightened, and he couldn’t make out the words.

“She’s integrating it,” Luna said, her expression tight. “I don’t know how long it takes. Harry, hold her head. Keep her airway clear. Don’t let her fall.”

“Right. Right.” Harry did as he was told, his hands steady, and he would only remember later how calm he sounded.

On the road beyond the gate, small and far, a line of figures in dark robes had appeared around the bend. They were walking, not running. They carried their wands low. The one in front was a tall man in an ordinary gray traveling cloak, and he walked as if he were taking a stroll through his own back garden.

Harry knew the face from the file photographs.

“Thirty seconds,” Luna said.

“I can’t carry her through that.”

“No.”

“Then I’ll give you the time. Hold her like Luna said, Neville.”

“Harry,” Neville said as he obliged. “What are you doing?”

“Something stupid.” He stood up and turned to face the garden.

It stretched out behind him, down the long green bowl of the hills, all of it still, all of it listening. He could feel it. For the first time he understood that he had been feeling it all day, a low steady pressure at the edge of his mind. The plants. The wards, the runes in the soil, the thousands of roots running down in the dark. They were all waiting for something to react to.

He thought of the straps on the root of the tree.

He let himself think about it. He let it come all the way up from his gut, hot and ugly and unfiltered, for the first time since he’d walked through the gate. A small child’s wrist. A bench by the gate. A copper taste in the back of his throat. Eleven men with their wands drawn, coming up the road to bury it again.

It was easy. That was the frightening part. It had never been so easy.

The garden woke up.

It started under his boots. The grass lifted all at once and every blade pointed down the slope toward the gate, and then a sound came up out of the ground, a groan, deep and long. The hedges swayed. The old yews tore their roots out of the earth with a loud tearing noise, and they lurched forward on the path. Vines poured out of every bed in a green wave, rushing past him on both sides, thorns bristling, flowers snapping open and shut.

He hadn’t expected it to be this much.

“Harry!” Neville shouted. “You can’t hold that!”

“I know,” he yelled back. He could feel the magic running out of him and down into the ground, far faster than he meant. His hands were shaking. His whole body hummed. Something under his skin moved, the same low thing he had felt in the middle of the night, and it didn’t feel afraid. It felt glad. “I know, I know!”

Down at the gate, the line of Aurors had stopped. He heard shouting. Wands flared, red and white, and the first few spells hit the vines and sent chunks of green into the air. They didn’t slow it. The great wave rolled over them and the whole line broke and scattered back into the road, shouting.

Only one figure didn’t move. Ross stood in the center of the gate with his hands loose at his sides. The vines went around him. He wasn’t looking at the plants. He was looking straight up the slope, across the whole length of the garden, at Harry.

For a second their eyes met. Harry saw him smile a little, and it wasn’t an unfriendly one.

“Ten seconds,” Luna called. “Harry. Now!”

He turned and ran. Behind him the garden roared, a deep green noise that shook the ground, and ahead of him Luna was kneeling with a gray pebble in one hand and her other fist closed in Neville’s sleeve. Neville held Daphne the same way Luna had asked him to. Her mouth was still moving, forming words nobody could hear.

Harry spared her just one glance as he threw himself down beside them and grabbed her hand, the world spinning around them and knocking the wind out of him.

TBC.