Chapter 206: A Clean Name to Walk In With

Edward left the celebrating to the people who wanted it and went up the North Tower alone.

The moon had come out over the bluestone and lay along it like spilt water, and the wind off the Forbidden Forest carried pine, and eight floors down the noise of the Great Hall thinned away to nothing worth listening to.

He took the two-way mirror out of the inside pocket of his robes, put his fingers across the glass, and said the word that woke it.

The blue came up and turned over, and Sirius was there. He had rock behind him, a rough grey wall running out of the frame on both sides, and he had not shaved or slept in a while, and the moment he saw who it was every other thing went out of his face.

"I have been at this mirror for three days. I read the Prophet on Tuesday and the whole country has read it since. Inferi in the lake, and your Phoenix form printed on a front page. Are you well? Is the poison out of you?"

"It is out. Madam Pomfrey had the antidote in me within the hour and there is nothing left in the arm." Edward kept his voice down out of habit, though there was nobody above the seventh floor. "But the paper has half of it and it has the wrong half. That was not an accident in a lake."

He set it out in order. Moody stopping the whole assembly to speak to four champions, and taking twice as long over one of them. The hand that had stayed on his shoulder past the point of encouragement. The eye going over his cuffs, and the advice about clever equipment not holding when the moment came, delivered perhaps four minutes before something arrived in that water that his fire could barely touch. And Karkaroff, who had accused him of inventing the whole thing and then developed an illness the instant the Ministry's findings went up in front of four hundred people.

"This tournament may have been somebody's plan from the first evening," he finished. "Moody is wrong. Karkaroff is in it. I would not put them at the same level."

Sirius had gone very still, and the hand holding the mirror had lost its colour at the knuckles. He had spent a war learning what that kind of patience looked like from the inside.

"I am coming back tomorrow."

"You are not," Edward said without any heat, which made it land harder. "Inside the castle you are a dog who cannot ask anybody a question. Outside you are the only person we have. Karkaroff walks where he likes because he is a headmaster, and we both know what he was before he was that. Every time he leaves those grounds and every word he sends out of them is worth more to us than another body in the corridors."

There was a pause on the other side of the glass.

"And Moody?"

Edward looked out along the dark bulk of the castle below him. "Moody is mine. He is here and I am here." "I want to know what he is actually for."

Sirius opened his mouth to argue and then evidently ran the argument through and found the end of it, and let it go. Then something else arrived and his whole brow came down.

"The Ministry letter. You have to go to London and stand in a room and turn into a Phoenix in front of the Department of Mysteries." He was not asking. "And I cannot walk you in. I am a wanted man with a warrant still open. I cannot go within a street of that building."

He put a hand across his eyes for a moment.

"Understand what I am saying to you. This castle has Dumbledore's wards on it and half a dozen of the best in the country teaching inside it, and somebody still raised Inferi under the lake and pointed them at your name. The Ministry is not warded and it is not sound. Nobody can tell you where the Department of Mysteries stands on anything, Magical Law Enforcement is full of people who were friendly with the wrong families ten years ago, and what is left of the Death Eaters would give a good deal to have you in a corridor with your magic on show and your back to a door. Walking in there alone is worse than the lake, not better."

"I know what it is." Edward's thumb moved over the Mithril at his cuff without his attending to it. "And I am still going. Refuse a compulsory registration and they take my place in the tournament, or they open a file on an unregistered Animagus concealing a high-risk form, and then I am answering questions from the wrong side of the table for a year. There is no version of not going that ends better."

"No. There is not." Sirius drew a breath and when he spoke again he had a plan in his voice, which was a considerable improvement on what had been in it before. "So you do not go alone. I will send word to Remus tonight. His name is clean, he taught here last year so nobody can call it strange, and he is careful in a way I have never managed. He knows how the Ministry asks a question and how to answer the one underneath it. He will stand at your shoulder from the door to the street."

"Remus is the right man." Something eased in Edward's chest that he had not noticed tightening.

"Then here is the rest of it." Sirius leaned closer to the glass. "I take a room in Hogsmeade and I sit on Karkaroff, and Remus and I keep one line between us and no more. You do not leave Remus's side inside that building, not for a corridor and not for a minute. If they ask you for verification beyond what that letter says, you decline it, politely, and you keep declining. And if anything is wrong, anything, if it is only a door that should not have been open, you put your hand on this mirror and say my name. I will come whatever I am in the middle of."

"I promise."

He meant it, and something went through him while he said it that he did not entirely trust himself to look at. The man was living in a cave under a false name with the country hunting him, and he had spent the whole conversation working out how to put somebody between Edward and a door in London.

The blue went out of the glass slowly, and the tower was quiet again.

Edward stood a while with the mirror in his hand and looked out over the grounds. The forest was one long block of black and the lake beyond it caught what the moon gave it and gave nothing back. Whatever had been under that water had gone, and everything that had put it there was still exactly where it had been on Tuesday.

Below him the castle windows were warm all down the face of it, and the noise of the hall came up faintly, four hundred people who had spent the afternoon deciding they were on his side and were now enjoying it thoroughly.

He was in the middle of this whether he had chosen it or not. The thing inside the school, the Ministry that could not decide whether he was a hero or a case file, whatever was standing behind Karkaroff, and a tournament that increasingly looked less like a competition than like a room with the doors counted. All of it was waiting to be laid out properly, and there was nobody else placed to do it.

He turned and went down, and his robes went out behind him on the stairwell draught like something folding its wings.

In the shadow of the seventh-floor corridor a portrait of an old witch watched him pass and spoke behind her hand.

"That is the Black boy. Look at the set of his face. They all have it in the end."

"No." The old wizard in the next frame did not agree, and did not raise his voice to disagree. "I have watched a good many of that family go by this wall. He is not walking the road they walked."

Edward heard none of it. He was already in London, in a room he had never seen, working out who would be sitting in it.