The Raven and the Writing Desk
Chapter 4
By Anne B. Walsh
31 October
Hogwarts Castle
"He's faking."
Ron looked doubtfully at the very flat form of Professor Quirrell, then back at Mal. "How d'you know?"
"He went down wrong." Mal spoke in a rapid undertone to carry below the screaming which filled the Great Hall. "Too rigid. If he'd really passed out, he would've been limp. It's fake."
"But why would he fake passing out because of a troll?" Jean asked just before Professor Dumbledore's firecrackers restored silence.
Henry's eyes were half-lidded, his expression abstracted. Clearly he was thinking his hardest. "Either because there isn't any troll," he said under the noise of students getting to their feet and prefects calling for their Houses to follow them, "or because he's got something to do with it."
Mal shook his head as they joined the line of Gryffindor first years. "Can't be because there isn't one. It'd get figured out too fast, and too many questions'd get asked. So he's got something to do with it—probably he let it in himself—but why?"
"I don't—" Ron stopped, memories of some of his mother's tirades against the twins flooding through his mind. "It's a distraction," he said. "There's something else he wants, somewhere in the castle. He needs everyone out of the way to get at it. Students in their dorms, teachers in the dungeons—"
Jean gasped. "The third-floor corridor! He's trying to get in there! Whatever that dog is guarding, he must want it—we should get a teacher—"
"They'd just chase us off to the dorms." Henry glanced around. The line of students, with Percy and a sixth-year girl at its head, was just passing through a five-way intersection. "Perfect. Quick, everyone—"
Almost faster than Ron's eyes could follow, his friend darted out of line, towards what looked like a solid stone corner, where the sixth corridor would have been if one had existed—
Without a sound, Henry's hurtling form vanished through the stone.
"Guess one does," Ron muttered, and followed where Henry had led, Mal and Jean on his heels. A breath of cool washed over him, like walking through a ghost, and then he was in a narrow, dank passageway, Henry already several yards ahead of him.
"How do you know where all this stuff is?" he asked when he'd caught up with his friend. "The passages, and the kitchens, and I've never seen you miss a trick staircase…"
"My dad and Jean's loved exploring while they were at Hogwarts." Henry grinned briefly over his shoulder at his cousin. "They even made a map of all the stuff they found, and enchanted it to show where people are within the castle. Filch took it off them their seventh year, though…wonder if he still has it? We should check his office sometime…"
A flight of stairs, and then another, and the little party slowed to a walk, Mal peering through each slit window they passed, then murmuring a few words to Jean. "He's got better eyes than I do, and she's got just about a perfect memory," Henry informed Ron, who nodded. He'd known about the memory already, and the eyes should be obvious to anyone who'd ever picked up Henry's glasses by mistake.
Finally Jean patted her hand against a section of stone, and Mal put his shoulder against it and heaved. It grated a little, then stopped. Henry and Ron ranged themselves one on either side of the blond boy, and on Henry's count of three they shoved.
The resulting sound was very like one of the twins' explosions, Ron thought, but at least they'd got out of the passage safely. Besides, there was little need for subtlety now. The door to the mysterious third-floor corridor, through which they'd peeked in a nighttime exploration a few weeks ago, stood wide open, with growls in triple harmony coming from beyond it.
"Just what I wanted to spend my Halloween doing," he said under his breath, dusting off his robes and following his friends to the threshold. "Working out how to get past a big, nasty, three-headed dog…"
"That wasn't there before," said Henry, pointing to a harp sitting in one corner of the room, beyond the opened trapdoor over which the dog stood, its threefold growls rising in volume as six eyes spotted these new interlopers. "Wonder if it means something?"
"Orpheus!" The word wasn't one Ron knew, but Jean was beaming as if she'd found a thirteenth use for dragon's blood. "Mal, do you have—"
"Never travel without it." Mal reached inside his robes and drew out the slender wooden pipe Ron had seen him play a few times. "Let's see now, lullabies for puppy dogs…"
"Orpheus was the greatest musician of all time, in the old stories," Jean explained, drawing Henry and Ron back from the door as Mal began to play. "When he went down to the underworld to rescue his wife, he played his music to the dog that guarded the way—the three-headed dog—and it was so beautiful that all three heads fell asleep."
"But that's just a story," Ron objected.
Then he looked back into the room.
Two of the heads had already sunk to the floor, eyes shut, growls replaced by snores. The third was gaping, in the middle of an enormous, sharp-toothed yawn.
"Or maybe not," he finished weakly. "So what're we supposed to do, then?"
31 October
Hesperus Manor
For all that his life had taught him the value of waiting patiently, John Gray had never learned to like it. Far less did he like waiting patiently for the children he loved, the sons and daughter who had come to him as precious gifts, to walk into a deadly trap, to be used as its bait.
But the last nine years of his life had also taught him the value of his wife's most unusual dreams.
"Verse," he muttered, skimming his eyes down the parchment scroll he held. "Why did it have to be verse?"
"You would have preferred whirling colors and snatches of words?" asked Danger from her seat across the room, her hands busy with her knitting, her eyes fixed on a similar scroll which hung in the air before her. "Be thankful for small mercies. Like the fact that we still get these at all."
"I know, I know." John sighed and returned his attention to the cryptic lines.
Upon the night when ten years gone
A deathly spell went far awry,
The one whose life that night was won
Must win his own life—else, he'll die.
His friends may help him reach so far,
But those who're grown, and love him dear,
Must wait and watch, in case they mar
The moment which has brought him here.
Alone the raven may pursue,
Until the spells have all been cast—
Ignore this ban, that night you'll rue,
For He Who Lived shall die at last.
But if he stands as he's been taught,
And faces danger fearlessly,
The flight from death shall fall to naught;
Dark warrior goes forever free.
"One of the most emphatic 'stay out of it' messages we've ever received." John chuckled darkly. "I can only imagine how well Ryan's taking that. There's a reason you gave it to Carrie and not to him directly, isn't there?"
"Oh, absolutely." Danger echoed her husband's laugh. "Also a reason she took him over to their wing of the house before she let him see it. And if I know her, she slapped some heavy-duty soundproofing spells on the room. Otherwise we'd be hearing him all the way over here."
"We still might, if he ever figures out who the raven is meant to be." John managed a stronger laugh this time. "'What do you mean, I'm supposed to trust him?'"
31 October
Hesperus Manor
"What do you mean, I'm supposed to trust him?" Ryan Black stared at his wife and his cousin in utter shock. "Since when is Sni—" Narcissa's glare cut him off mid-syllable. "All right, all right—Snape. Since when is he trustworthy with our children's lives?"
"Since Albus Dumbledore says he is, and so does whoever sends Danger her dreams," Carrie snapped back. "And just in case you're forgetting, those dreams are also responsible for the fact that you are sitting here in your comfortable home, worrying about your children, instead of being stuck in a cell in Azkaban with no idea who two of those children even are!"
"I know, I know, I know—it's just…" Ryan groaned aloud, getting to his feet to pace. "This is not what I signed up for," he said to the far wall, pushing off it as he turned. "I wanted to protect them. Keep them safe. Not sit here and be safe while they trot blithely into harm's way!"
"If you will notice, we keep them safest tonight by remaining aloof until all is said and done." Narcissa rolled up her own copy of the prophecy and set it aside. "And since these prophecies have never yet failed us, I have the strangest feeling that something else is troubling you, cousin."
Ryan glared at her over his shoulder. "I should have known it was a mistake getting involved with you," he grumbled as Narcissa returned the glare serenely. "What gods did I offend to get stuck in the same house with not one, not two, but three women, all of whom can read my mind?"
Carrie laughed. "Better make it three and a half," she said when the cousins turned to look at her. "Pearl's developing her skills early."
With a laugh of his own, Ryan dropped down on the window seat. "True, she is. All right, then. Though it's kind of hard to pinpoint. It's just…" He shrugged. "If the prophecy's right, we're getting rid of the Dark Snarker for good this time. And once he's off the map, we can round up the rat without any trouble. But what happens next?" He spread his hands. "What do we do once we don't have to hide anymore?"
"I assume we stop hiding." Carrie frowned at the look on her husband's face. "Did you have another idea?"
"Not an idea. Not as such. I was just thinking about what it's going to do to the kids." Ryan shook his head. "None of them have ever known a world where we weren't hiding, except maybe Mal, and him only just. It's not fair to them, is it, what we had to do?" His mouth twisted in familiar, bitter lines, like the expressions he had so often worn in the first year or two after his assisted escape, as he thought over what had happened to him and to his friends. "We've done our best, but was our best really good enough?"
"Ah yes, how these children suffer," said Narcissa coolly before Carrie could respond. "Clearly we dress some of them in rags and give them out-of-the-way corners filled with dust and spiders in which to sleep, while others have the finest clothes money can buy and sumptuous bedchambers for their very own."
Carrie snickered and took up the thread. "Obviously we make some of them work all day long, do every last chore around the house here, and the others never have to do anything. And you know how much we encourage the ones we like best to bully the rest of them."
"And we ourselves, of course, constantly project our ill-will towards their parents onto the unfortunate ones," Narcissa took over once more, inclining her head to Carrie in thanks. "Refusing them all knowledge of their families and their pasts. While the fortunate ones, in their turn, are constantly told of those families and those pasts as the impossible model of perfection up to which they must strive to live…"
Ryan cast his eyes up to heaven. "At the risk of repeating myself," he said to the ceiling, "why?"
31 October
Under Hogwarts Castle
Ron stared at the line of seven bottles, feeling a rising dread. He'd never been any good at the sort of puzzle Henry'd just read off the scroll. From the look on his friend's face, neither was Henry. Mal and Jean, he was certain, would both be very good at them, but Jean lay unconscious two chambers behind them, the sacrifice he'd had to make to win the chess game (at her snarled insistence when he'd objected), and Mal was a chamber behind that, having discovered when he tried to take off on a broomstick after the flying key that the Devil's Snare had cracked a couple of his ribs before Henry's fire, hastily conjured at Jean's shouted instructions, had frightened it back.
"What do we do?" he asked.
"Mum always says, just take these things slow." Henry unrolled the scroll all the way and sat right down on the floor with it. "All right, so here's something certain. The biggest bottle and the littlest one won't kill us if we drink them, so that means they're not poison. They could still be the go-ahead potion, the go-back one, or just wine, but at least we know one thing they're not." He glanced up at Ron. "Got a quill on you?"
"Somewhere. Let me look." Ron rummaged in a pocket, and only saw the movement on the small table out of the corner of his eye. "What the—"
He jumped back as one of the bottles tipped forward and smashed on the floor.
"What did you do—" Henry began furiously.
"That's not me!" Ron held his hands out to the sides as evidence. "It's something else—"
Henry's eyes widened, and he pointed. Ron turned to look.
The stone floor had begun to dissolve where the bottle's contents had splashed. Curls of steam were rising from the crater.
"I think," said Henry unsteadily, "that was probably one of the poison ones."
Along the table, a second bottle took the plunge, this one sending up a hissing sound reminiscent of a whole nest of snakes being disturbed at once. Ron edged back, away from flying droplets, and caught a momentary glimpse of something familiar scurrying behind the bottles. A long pink tail, a whisk of gray fur—
"Scabbers?"
A third bottle fell to the floor, going up in a burst of fire. Ron yelped and shaded his eyes.
When he could see again, two of the other bottles lay on their sides, sharp-smelling streams of pale green glugging out of them. Of the last two to remain upright, one, a squat vessel to the left of the line, had been shoved all the way to the edge of the table nearest Ron. The other, a tiny vial barely big enough for a few drops, had been pushed away from him.
Towards the black flames which barred the door leading onwards.
"Scabbers?" Henry repeated, standing up. "Did your rat just solve the puzzle for us?"
"I don't know!" Ron skirted the ankle-deep hole in the floor and picked up the tiny vial. "How would he even get down here? Or know which one was which?"
"Maybe he followed us," Henry suggested, though with a look on his face which said he didn't think much of his own words. "Or maybe you saw something else and thought you saw him. Who knows. Do you think this one's right, then?"
"Do we have a choice?" Ron weighed the vial carefully in his palm. "There's hardly anything in here. I suppose only one person's meant to go on."
Henry shrugged. "We've come this far together. Flip a Knut for who drinks first?"
Ron's call of heads, much to his consternation, came up on top, so that he was the first to take the tiniest of possible sips from the vial. A shudder ran through him as ice seemed to flood his veins, and he barely managed to hold onto the vial long enough to pass it over to Henry before he dashed through the black flame, praying the potion would last—
Magic caught at him and snatched him off his feet, pinning him against the far wall before he could shout. "Well, well, well," said the voice he was half-expecting. "What do we have here?"
"A spare," hissed a different voice, as Ron's eyes cleared enough to see Professor Quirrell, his face alight with unholy excitement, his turban slightly askew and vibrating in time with the words. "Not important. Kill him."
"NO!"
Quirrell whirled. Ron collapsed, regaining just enough ability of motion on the way down that he landed on his feet rather than his face or his backside. His chest burned and he felt like he might throw up, but he fought the feeling down.
Silhouetted against the black flames, his fingers pressed against his forehead, Henry stared at Quirrell, his face unreadable. "No," he said more quietly. "It's not him you want."
His thumb sketched a complicated sign against his skin. A moment later, that skin began to change, turning paler and paler, like coffee into which more and more milk was being poured. The change spread outwards from that initial spot, spreading across face, arms, hands, until the black-haired boy whose green eyes had never left Quirrell was nearly as fair-skinned as Ron was himself.
He was also frighteningly familiar.
"It's not him you want," said Harry Potter, lowering his hands to his sides. "It's me."
31 October
Under Hogwarts Castle
In the shadows, Severus forced himself to stillness. It was one thing to recognize a look in the eye, a tilt of the head, a trick of handwriting, or to hear from Narcissa the tale of how a tiny boy had been rescued and disguised. It was quite another to see a copy of the face he'd hated above all others, dominated by the eyes he'd loved so dearly. And what he would now have to watch ranked high, as it always had, on his list of personal nightmares.
But if the words of the prophecy-poem were to be believed, this was the only way to victory. To watch, and wait, and allow this child to face his own dangers. And to that end—
He stabbed a Silencer onto Ronald Weasley as the boy struggled upright, then Summoned him across the room, adding a lift to the spell so that no skidding heels would give the game away. "Stay still," he said in his lowest tones as the boy arrived at his side, adding a grasp on the shoulder tight enough to enforce his edict. "He must do this himself."
Quirrell was unwinding his turban now, turning to face away from Harry. Ron's mouth fell open as what lay beneath that turban was revealed, and the words his lips shaped made Severus thankful the Silencer was still in effect. He felt none too steady himself at the sight of his one-time Master, but found strength in the feeble twinges sent out by his Dark Mark. Voldemort's continued existence was a blow, yes, but the Dark Lord was incredibly weak in this form. One strike, at the proper time, and the horror would be finished forever.
"Courageous, but foolish, Harry," Voldemort whispered, his red eyes fixed on the face of the boy before him. "Stepping out of concealment this way, showing me how you have been hiding all these years. I had wondered, when dear Quirrell crossed my path and brought me up to date on the news from home, what could have become of you, how you could have been kept out of sight so well. But now I see—a simple change in skin tone, with so-called parents to match—"
"There's nothing so-called about my parents," Harry fired back, his eyes blazing up.
"Then you deny that you are the son of James and Lily Potter?" Voldemort's tone was light, almost playful, as if he were teasing Harry from across a schoolyard. "You deny what they gave you, their lives, their deaths?"
"No." Harry's hands were fisted tightly in his robes. "I've always known who I was born, and what that meant I might have to do. But I also know who I've grown up to be. And I think my parents—all my parents—would be proud of me for that."
"Perhaps you are right." Voldemort nodded Quirrell's head, giving Snape a momentary glimpse of his colleague's face, eyes shut, mouth slack. Beside him, Ron shuddered briefly, but the boy's wand was in his hand, though Severus doubted he knew many spells which would be useful here. "And in their memory, I believe I shall allow you to live. Provided, of course, that you do me one small service." A pale hand swept towards the back of the room, indicating the standing mirror located there, with the carved letters marching around its top. "This is the Mirror of Erised. It shows each person who looks into it their heart's true desire. Hidden within it at the moment is a small, insignificant object—a stone, translucent red, of a size to lie in your palm—"
"That turns things into gold and would let you live forever," Harry interrupted. Voldemort raised the place where an eyebrow would have been, and Harry snorted. "I have cousins," he said shortly. "They like to read, and they like to talk. And even if they didn't, I still wouldn't do it. The answer's no."
"You refuse?" Voldemort's voice had gone to its softest, most persuasive tone, which Snape knew as the Dark Lord at his most dangerous. "Such a simple favor, and you refuse?"
Harry squared his shoulders. "Someone doing a 'simple favor' for you nearly ruined my entire family's lives," he said, staring disdainfully into Voldemort's flattened face. "It killed my first parents, it sent my dad to Azkaban when he hadn't done anything, it left my mum and my uncle all alone in the world. And that's not even mentioning the person who did the 'favor' and got it blamed on my dad instead, who's been hiding as a pet rat for ten years because he had to fake his own death to make it work the way he wanted it to."
Severus felt rather than heard Ron's inhalation of shock.
"People doing what you wanted wrecked my aunts' and my cousins' lives too," Harry went on, warming to his topic. "Oh, not always in the same way, sometimes not even in a way that would show, but they did. And things only ever got better for them when the people who followed you, who did what you wanted, your 'simple favors', were gone. I may not be the brightest person in my year, but I can tell the difference between a good idea and a bad one." He lifted his chin, his eyes bright and clear. "I won't help you."
"Very well." Voldemort flexed Quirrell's wrist, bringing his wand into his hand. "On your own head be it."
Time seemed to warp, slowing in one spot, speeding in another. Severus could watch the wand rise onto its target, could see the thin lips opening for the first of the two words that would cause Harry Potter's death, all while his muscles refused to respond to his desires and his thoughts raced uselessly around their track in his mind—such a stupid child, a brave one but stupid, this gets us no closer to our goal—
"Avada Kedavra," hissed the voice of Lord Voldemort.
The Dark Lord will simply find another to give him the Stone, you could have cooperated and then held it hostage against your own life—
The green bolt of light burst forth from the wand's tip, accompanied by a sound like a great rushing wind.
Why must it all be for nothing?
As the Killing Curse flung Harry backwards across the room, Voldemort's red eyes rolled upwards in his head, and Quirrell staggered a step—forward, not back. "Master?" he said in tremulous tones. "Master, what—"
Severus's paralysis ended. "Now," he breathed to the boy at his side, snapping off the Silencer, and bolted out of hiding.
He might not have been able to save Lily's son, but he could, at the very least, avenge him.
And thus we head for the final chapter. What will become of our heroes? Who will succeed? Who will fail? Read on to find out…
Oh wait. You can't yet. I haven't posted it. :evil grin: