Chapter 221: The Man Behind the Eye

 

He flew until there was nothing left to fly on.

When the wings would not hold him any longer the Phoenix came down in a clearing somewhere north of nowhere, and the gold went out of it, and Edward arrived on his knees in wet grass as himself with his hands in the mud.

 

Every breath came in burning, the cold had got through the sweat into his back, and he could not make his fingers close properly. He had emptied himself before, in the arena and under the lake, and never once like this.

He got the mirror out of his robes on the third attempt and put what was left of his magic through the glass, and Sirius came up in it looking as though he had been awake for a week.

"Edward. Where are you? Harry came through into the Shack ten minutes ago saying you had thrown him a Portkey and stayed - "

"I do not know where I am and it does not matter." His own voice came out of him unrecognisable. "Voldemort has a body. Peter Pettigrew made it for him in a graveyard tonight, and the man who arranged the whole of it is inside the castle. It is Moody. Take him now. Tonight, before he hears what happened."

The black dog came through the bushes four minutes later and Lupin arrived from the other side of the clearing a moment after, and the faces both of them made when they saw him were much the same.

"I am not hurt." Edward got up with Lupin under his arm. "There is nothing left in me, that is all. Get me to the castle. The moment that man learns the ritual went wrong he will either run or do something a great deal worse than running."

The Headmaster's office had every candle lit.

Harry was telling it in order and without embroidery: the maze, the runes, the graveyard, the cauldron. When he came to the thing in the black cloth, Professor McGonagall put her hand over her mouth and left it there, and behind the half-moon spectacles something had gathered in Dumbledore's eyes that nobody in that office had seen for years.

Then the door opened and Edward came in between Sirius and Lupin, and every head turned.

"He has been resurrected," he said from the doorway because he was not certain of reaching a chair. "He did not get Harry's blood and I burned out most of the ring, so the working ran short. The body he is standing in is not right and he knows it." He met Dumbledore's eyes. "And the man who set all of this up is Alastor Moody. Or whoever has been wearing him since August."

Dumbledore was already on his feet, and the mildness had gone off him entirely.

"Severus, take whoever you need and seal the Defence office and the rooms behind it, every door and every window, and do it before you speak to anybody. Minerva, raise the castle wards to the second order at once - no Apparition, no Portkey, and I want the Durmstrang ship and the Beauxbatons carriage inside the boundary, not outside it. Remus, Sirius, with me."

Snape went out of the room like something falling. McGonagall's wand came up and a low note of magic went through the walls and the floor and away in every direction. Dumbledore was moving before the sound of it had finished.

He did not knock at the Defence office. He put his wand against the wood and the lock turned over, and the door swung inward on its own.

The man inside had his back to them, working fast over a copper basin of something thick and clouded, and the smell coming off it was Polyjuice and nothing else. He came round at the sound with his wand already up, and both eyes were wrong: the ordinary one had panic in it and the magical one was spinning hard enough to blur.

"Stupe - "

"Expelliarmus."

Dumbledore had not raised his voice. The wand went out of the man's hand across the room and Lupin caught it, and Sirius's ropes had him round the chest and knees before he hit the floor.

He lay there and began to change. The scarring across the ruined face crawled and rearranged itself while the wooden leg stayed exactly where it was, and what came up out of Moody's features was a much younger man, hollow-cheeked and grey, with the unfinished look of somebody kept alive for years somewhere without light.

"He is back." Barty Crouch's son was laughing at the ceiling with his voice still half in Moody's register. "You cannot put it back in the box. He has returned, and everything after tonight belongs to - "

"Petrificus Totalus."

Dumbledore said it without any relish whatever, and the laughing stopped in the middle of a word.

"Severus will bring Veritaserum," he said, looking down at him. "You will tell us all of it and you will not enjoy the telling. Sirius, stay with him and do not be alone in the room."

The rest of the night arrived in pieces.

The professor sent down to the Durmstrang ship came back to say Karkaroff's cabin had been stripped: papers gone, strongbox gone, wardrobe open, and a grate still warm with whatever he had not wanted found. He had gone out through the international Floo during the third task, and by now he could be in any of forty countries.

From the maze, Madam Pomfrey and three others found the four Durmstrang champions folded into a corner of the thorn with their eyes open and their skin cold. It took Dumbledore himself, and a good deal more than a Finite Incantatem, to bring them back. Viktor Krum's first words when he could speak were not about the tournament.

"That eye," he said. "The one that turns. It was on us all year."

By the small hours the office had emptied. Barty Crouch's son had gone down under guard, McGonagall was somewhere in the castle organising patrols and telling four hundred frightened children something that would let them sleep, and Harry had been carried off to the hospital wing insisting for the fourth time that he was perfectly well.

Edward finished a second restorative draught and found that his hands had stopped shaking.

Dumbledore stood at the window with his back to the room for a long while before he said anything.

"An imperfect resurrection," he said quietly. "Of everything tonight has produced, that is the single line I am grateful for." He turned round. "But Tom is walking about in a body again, and no amount of gratitude alters that. The world is going to spend the next few years learning what that means."

His eyes came to rest on Edward.

"You were given a choice in that graveyard that I would not have wished on a grown man, and you made the right one inside a few seconds. You put Harry out of reach, you damaged the working badly enough that it will not heal, and you handed us the man who has been living in this castle since August. I do not say this often to fourth-years, and I am saying it now."

"The Ministry has to be told," Lupin said flatly.

"They will be told, and they will not believe it." Sirius did not bother to make it sound like a question.

"Cornelius will hear it from me directly, whatever he then chooses to do with it." Dumbledore looked at the three of them. "But the more important thing is this castle. Tom's intentions are not obscure. He wants Harry, and after tonight he wants you." He was speaking to Edward. "You cost him the thing he had spent a year arranging, and he is not a man who takes that as an expense. There is a real sense in which you now stand in more danger than Harry does."

Edward nodded. He had worked that out over the yew trees on the way north, and had found, somewhat to his own surprise, that it frightened him less than it should have.

"Sirius, Remus - I want you near this school. Not in it, necessarily, but near it."

"You will not have to ask twice," Sirius said.

Dumbledore came back behind his desk and rested two fingers on a small silver instrument standing there, and inside its glass a slow drift of light turned over.

"The dark is rising again, and this time we are not being taken by surprise. We know who he is. We know who was standing in our own corridors. And what he most needed to take tonight is upstairs arguing with Madam Pomfrey about whether he needs a bed."

Outside the window the deepest part of the night had gone, and over the Forbidden Forest there was the first thin grey that comes before anything else. The towers stood black against it, and the few windows still burning stayed burning.

Somewhere a long way south, in a graveyard nobody had visited in a century, a tall thin figure was still looking north.

There were two names on the account now instead of one. Potter, and Black. And of the two, it was the second that had been added tonight, in fresh ink, and pressed hardest into the page.