25th September 1995, Hogwarts, the yard before the gates
The crowd began to break up, students drifting back toward the castle in a buzz of delighted whispering — and Harry and his friends went the other way, against the tide, back toward where Ethan still stood with Dumbledore.
They reached the two men a little breathless. Dumbledore turned his half-moon spectacles on them, and there was a twinkle behind them.
"Professor," Harry said, and the others chorused their greetings.
"Mr Potter. And company." Dumbledore inclined his head, mild and pleased.
Then he laid a hand briefly on Ethan's shoulder — a small, private signal, we'll speak shortly and, with a last serene nod to the children, made his unhurried way back inside, leaving them to it.
And then Harry was in his father's arms.
"Kiddo." Ethan held him a moment, ruffled his hair, and looked round at the rest of them with warmth. "And the whole disreputable lot of you. Hello, Hermione, Draco — Miss Greengrass, Mr Weasley, Neville. Viktor." He nodded to each.
They fell over themselves to tell him how magnificent the whole thing had been — the credentials whisked out of Umbridge's grasp, the starlight, the riddle, the pink retreat. Ethan accepted it all with a small humble tilt of the head and a "yes, well, she rather asked for it".
Right up until Ron launched into an account so embellished "and then your eyes went all — and the wind — and she nearly fainted, I swear she nearly went down right there—" that the whole group dissolved laughing, Ethan included.
But the warmth in his eyes did not entirely hide the shrewdness behind them.
"Now," he said, when the laughter had settled, and his voice dropped just enough that it carried only to them. "I know what you're up to."
Harry had the grace to flush. Of course he did; Harry had told him, in their letters — the Hog's Head, the parchment, the M.S.S.G., all of it.
"And I think it's the right thing," Ethan went on, surprising them. "Someone ought to be teaching you something real, and Merlin knows it won't be her." His expression sobered. "But you will be careful. She is still the High Inquisitor, and that Decree of hers has teeth — expulsion, not lines. While I'm here, she'll have to tread a great deal more lightly than she'd like; I'll see to that. But that is not the same as safe. Don't give her anything... Don't get caught."
He looked round them all, until each had nodded. "Promise me."
They promised.
"Good." The warmth came back. "Now — I'm wanted in the Headmaster's office. Department business, and a great deal of it." He settled his hat, and his eyes curved. "Behave... Mostly."
And he was gone up the steps after Dumbledore.
25th September 1995, the Room of Requirement, early evening
By the time the day's classes were done, the Room had made for them exactly what they'd asked of it: a long, high training hall, lit warm and even, mirrors down one wall, cushions and practice space and shelves of defensive texts — and tucked away through a separate door, the smaller staging space they'd set aside as the M.S.S.G.'s own, where the work of preparing went on out of sight.
Harry, Hermione, Viktor, and Daphne were setting the hall to rights. Across the room, Luna and Astoria had their heads together over a slip of parchment, working out a set of Runes — something short, something memorable, a key the members could carry in their heads to find their way into this particular fold of the Room.
"It ought to be a poem," Luna was saying serenely. "People remember poems." "It ought to be short," said Astoria, "before Weasley loses it."
The work was nearly finished when the main door opened and Ron and Draco came in — and with them, to a small chorus of delight, a familiar figure in a teetering stack of mismatched hats.
"Dobby!"
"We found him on the way," Ron said, hefting a heavy hamper. "Good thing, too — turns out carrying enough dinner for twenty up through a castle full of Inquisitorial Squad is a bit conspicuous. Dobby sorted it."
"Dobby is most happy to help Harry Potter and his friends, sir!" The house-elf beamed round at them, ears quivering, as everyone who knew his story — which was all of them — greeted him warmly. But he had come, it emerged, on his own errand. "Dobby was looking for Harry Potter, sir! Dobby has a gift to give him — from Mr Lupin, sir!"
He produced it with enormous ceremony: a small, plain, entirely unremarkable object in two parts, no bigger than a pair of river stones, and a letter folded around them.
Harry read the letter, and smiled.
Lupin knew about the group — from Ethan and knew the state the school was in, and so had sent this: a two-part portable ward, the newest thing out of Atid Stella, deliberately built to look like nothing at all. Once set, Lupin's neat hand explained, it would watch — you registered the people you trusted to pass freely or the people you wanted flagged as hostile, and the moment any unregistered soul, or any flagged one, came near the warded ground, the ward would alert its owner and send an image of the intruder to the second stone, wherever the owner carried it. And, at need, it could throw a temporary illusion over the warded area — a diversion, a misdirection, a wall of nothing-to-see-here to send the curious the wrong way.
Harry read the gist of it aloud, and his friends made the appropriate covetous noises, and then someone — Ron, observed, with great feeling, that it was deeply unfair that Harry got to have a dad who ran Atid Stella, and the covetousness turned comical.
"There's a P.S.," Harry added, grinning. "For me to pass on. Lupin says—" he cleared his throat, doing the voice "—'tell Ethan he owes me three letters, and that of all the weeks to abandon the company to go and play schoolmaster, he has chosen the very worst, and I shall remember it.'"
The wry smiles went round. Somewhere across the castle, they all silently agreed, Remus Lupin was drowning in paperwork and composing murderous thoughts about his absent employer.
Dinner came out of the hamper, and over it Draco produced the other thing he'd brought back — the errand he'd bolted off on that morning, when Decree Sixty-Eight first went up.
"I found out how Theodore knew." He set something on the table between them. "About the Hog's Head."
Ron and Hermione both recognised it at once: a long, flesh-coloured string. An Extendable Ear.
"Banned, of course," Draco said dryly. "Decree Thirty — all Weasley products prohibited. Which is exactly why it's clever. Theodore got this off Filch, out of the confiscated stock — then tinkered with it. Made it smaller. Subtler. Near invisible."
His mouth was a hard line. "And he planted it on Tracey Davis. Followed her. He couldn't have known which of us would talk — but he knew Tracey runs with my lot, and he gambled she'd go to whatever we were organising. So he listened through her, the whole meeting... Which means the leak wasn't the parchment, and it wasn't her. Someone in our House — someone I'd asked to pass the word along to the others, talked to Theodore before anyone signed anything. Before Luna's ritual could bind them."
His jaw tightened. "I've found him. He's been dealt with."
The faintly dangerous way he said dealt with made nobody ask for details.
Daphne, beside him, dipped her head. "It was our carelessness. We brought people in, we vouched for them, and one of them sold us. I'm sorry, all of you. Truly."
"It's not on you," Harry said, meant it, and the others murmured agreement. "It's Theodore. He's got a mouth and now he's got a Ministry behind it — of course he came at us. We just learned how. That's worth knowing."
He looked round. "So now we know the parchment holds — the leak got round it by going early, not through it. We tighten the front door. We're more careful who we bring, and when." He nodded at Luna and Astoria's slip of Runes. "And we lean on the things she can't beat."
"There's one more thing," Draco said, and his tone made them all look up. "She's founded a... squad. The Inquisitorial Squad. Hand-picked students, given authority to police the rest of us. Dock points. Hand out punishments. Report to her directly."
He didn't need to say who was in it. "Theodore. Pansy. The whole crew."
A low growl went round the table.
"But," Draco continued, and now there was a thin, satisfied edge to it, "the Squad patrols on a schedule. A fixed one. And it so happens—" he drew out a second slip of parchment with the flourish of a conjurer "—that I have a copy of their routes. And their times. Through this whole wing."
The cheer was immediate and heartfelt. Ron flung both arms around Draco in a rib-cracking embrace of pure gratitude — "you beautiful Slytherin, you glorious scheming—" — until Draco, with an expression of profound disgust, got a hand under Ron's chin and shoved him bodily off, and the whole table howled.
25th September 1995, the Room of Requirement, eight o'clock
At eight, the members came.
They came in careful batches, not all at once, led up through the castle by Hermione, Daphne, Luna, and Neville along routes that wound clear of the Squad's schedule — and as the last group filed in through the disguised door, Harry felt the knot in his chest loosen. All present. All safe.
"Any trouble?" he asked Hermione, low.
"We saw the Squad twice," she said, pleased. "Theodore's lot, swaggering about by the tapestries. Didn't see us — we had the route, and we ducked a corridor early both times." She allowed herself a small smile. "Worked perfectly."
So Harry stood up in front of them — the whole crowd of them, every house, every face from the Hog's Head and felt the old shyness rise, and pushed it down, because this part, at least, he knew how to do now.
"Right," he said. "Before anyone waves a wand at anything... we start with what magic actually is."
And he gave them what Ethan had given him, the same words he'd given the others in the Grimmauld basement over the summer: magic as versatile and sentimental, answering to what you mean and not only what you say — but rule-bound underneath, the deep rules that keep it from collapsing into chaos. The intent at the core. The caster as anchor. The coiled thread of your own magic reaching out to catch the magic of the world. Knowledge as the fuel; imagination as the range.
The room listened in something close to awe. Even Viktor — Viktor Krum, Triwizard champion had produced a small notebook and was taking notes, frowning thoughtfully. And the handful who'd already had all this in the Grimmauld basement stood at the edges watching the newcomers' faces light up, grinning, remembering their own first hearing of it.
Then he set them to it — every one of them, on Lumos. Not to the standard he'd driven the summer group to; just to feel it. To find the sensation, the movement, the intent, and hold a small light in the dark, and in doing so begin to feel the shape and the edges of their own capability.
Cedric got there first — faster than anyone, a clean steady glow blooming at his wandtip almost at once, his understanding leaping straight from the light to the principle behind it. Harry sent Luna over to him. "He's ready for more — start him on Protego, same way: feel it, don't just cast it."
Then he split the room.
Everyone who'd trained at Grimmauld — and Viktor — he paired off, one-on-one, with someone still struggling, to coach them through the first light. And he took the weakest of them himself, the ones whose wands sputtered and died, and crouched down beside them in the warm lamplight, patient as his father had once been patient with him, and began, one careful spark at a time, to teach.