The first curse scorched a black line across the stone floor, and Daphne stepped through the gap in Hermione's shield wall before it had even finished forming.
Hermione swore, flung herself sideways, and shot three in quick return. Daphne batted the first aside with a lazy flick, sidestepped the second entirely, and let the third detonate against a shield she'd raised without breaking stride. The concussive pop of the blocked spell sent a crack splitting up the nearest pillar, stone dust raining down.
Harry fixed the crack right away as he watched from the far end of the manor's training hall with his back against the cold stone wall. Beside him, Celeste had given up any pretense of having other things to do and was watching intense focus. It looked like she'd placed an internal wager.
"She's fast," Celeste murmured.
"Daphne?" Harry said.
"Obviously Daphne." Celeste tilted her head slightly. "Though Hermione isn't slow."
She wasn't. That was the thing that made this worth watching. Hermione had spent weeks drilling herself on combat theory, on the kind of magic that actually worked when someone was trying to kill you rather than score points in a duel. She'd asked for this. Badgered Harry about it for days after Godric's Hollow, after she'd spent an entire evening listening to him and Daphne describe the inside of a house that had tried to kill them, privately reckoning that she would have been more useful there than back at the manor reciting protective enchantments at the walls. She hadn't said that part aloud, but Harry knew her well enough to read it.
So he'd talked to Daphne, who'd raised an eyebrow and said fine, let's find out what she's actually worth.
Hermione threw herself behind a stone column as a blasting curse hit the space where she'd been standing and blew a fist-sized chunk out of the wall. Grit and powdered stone showered in every direction. She came out from the other side already casting, two simultaneous spells on different trajectories, the second one a feint and the third a genuine cutting curse aimed at Daphne's left side. It would have opened her from hip to ribs if it had connected. In an actual fight, the tactic was sound. Against Daphne, it got you half a second before she read it.
Daphne stepped around all three and returned fire so fast it looked like a single movement. The curse hit Hermione's hastily-raised shield and the force of it physically pushed her back two steps, her heels dragging across the stone.
"She's doing well," Harry said.
"She's doing adequately," Daphne called across the room, not looking at him. "There's a difference."
Hermione's jaw tightened visibly from thirty feet away.
That was deliberate. Harry had seen Daphne do it twice already, making her assessments just loud enough to carry, and Hermione reacted the same way every time. Not by getting flustered. By getting sharper. She knew what was happening, she wasn't oblivious to it, but knowing the tactic and being immune to it were two separate things, and Daphne used the gap between them expertly, knowing that your opponent's psychology mattered as much as their wandwork.
Hermione stopped falling back and started moving forward instead.
Daphne looked genuinely pleased about this.
She came in hard, no longer trading ranged fire, pushing Hermione into close-quarters where reaction time narrowed to fractions of a second and theoretical knowledge stopped counting for much. Hermione had prepared for this too. Harry could see it in the way she read the shift and adjusted, pulling out of her defensive posture and committing to a more aggressive one.
She almost caught Daphne with a binding jinx aimed at her left ankle to yank her half a step out of position. It would've been a good hit. The kind that in a real fight might have bought the half-second needed to finish it.
Daphne feinted, acting like she was hit, and used her fake off-balance movement to come in from a different angle than Hermione couldn't see coming. Her simple banisher caught Hermione square in the chest with a crack, and Hermione went down hard. Her elbow hit the stone and she bit back a sound as the impact jarred up to her shoulder.
She was back on her feet in four seconds. One second to hit the floor, one to process it, two to get upright. Harry noted the time automatically.
Daphne let her get up. In a real fight she wouldn't have, and they all knew it, but that wasn't what this was. She circled, and Hermione circled with her, breathing slightly harder now.
"Your footwork on the close exchange," Daphne said, as if they were having a conversation rather than a fight. "You anticipated my first angle but you committed to defending it before I'd actually moved. You gave me information."
"I know," Hermione said, between controlled breaths. She hadn't lowered her wand.
"You also leave your right side slightly open when you cast dual spells. You favor your left pivot and your body weight follows it." Daphne moved without warning, stepping right and firing in the same motion.
Hermione went left. She'd heard the observation, catalogued it, and did the opposite immediately. The spell took a chip out of the column behind her instead of hitting her in the shoulder. She came back with a body bind and a severing charm stacked together, and Daphne's shield caught both but she had to move with it, absorbing the force in a way that cost her ground.
"Better," Daphne said.
"Was that a compliment?"
"It was an observation."
They went three more rounds. Hermione went down twice more. The second time she caught a cutting curse across her left arm that sliced through her sleeve and left a genuine if shallow gash, and she sealed it with a muttered charm mid-fight without breaking her focus, which Harry thought was worth noting. The third exchange was the closest. Hermione drove Daphne into a corner using shield pressure and terrain in a way that was tactically sharp, and Daphne had to push hard to get clear. She managed it, countered, and ended it. But it took longer than the early rounds had.
Hermione's robes were torn at the shoulder. Blood soaked through her sleeve above the sealed cut. A bruise was already purpling along her collarbone from a hit she'd taken early on. The training room was a mess. Scorch marks on three walls, a crater in the floor where Daphne's blasting hex had hit stone rather than shield, and one pillar that was not going to survive more than another session or two without structural concerns if Harry hadn't fixed it.
Finally, Daphne lowered her wand.
Hermione stood her ground for a moment, slightly wary about whether it was over. Then she lowered hers too.
Harry pushed off the wall. Celeste straightened beside him.
The training hall settled into quiet, dust still drifting down from the ceiling in one spot where something had hit a load-bearing section harder than intended.
Hermione walked toward them, breathing evening out, holding herself steady.
"Well?" she said.
Daphne walked over, wand put away, and studied Hermione for a moment with a flat appraising expression that gave nothing away.
"You're good," Daphne said. "Better than I expected, if I'm being honest, and I don't say that to flatter you."
"But," Hermione said.
"You think in complete sentences," Daphne said. "That's your problem. Everything you do is properly constructed. Logical. Sequenced. In a duel with rules and a referee, that's an asset. In an actual fight, against people who are trying to kill you and not concerned about whether their tactics are elegant, that same quality will get you killed. You're still running a half-step delay between seeing the threat and responding to it, because your brain wants to finish forming the plan before your body acts."
Hermione was quiet for a moment. Not defensive, but actually considering it. "That's a training problem. Not a permanent one."
"I agree," Daphne said. "Which is why my answer is not yet. A bit later, definitely."
Hermione looked at Harry.
"She's right," Harry said simply. "You're not ready for the field. Not for what we're walking into." He held her gaze, and she held his back calmly. She wasn't going to argue, she was listening. "But Daphne's right that it's fixable. A few more weeks of this and we revisit it properly. That's not a door closing. That's a door with a timeline on it."
"I know the difference," Hermione said. She glanced at Daphne. "Thank you. For being honest about it rather than gentle."
Daphne looked faintly amused. "You wouldn't have thanked me for gentle."
"No," Hermione agreed. "I wouldn't have."
They left it there. No ceremony about it. Hermione rolled her healed arm and started toward the corridor, Harry falling into step with her, Celeste and Daphne behind them.
xXx
The Wizarding Wireless had become their best and most maddening source of information over the past weeks. The Death Eater-controlled broadcasts were obvious for what they were, Ministry propaganda wrapped in cordial announcements. But there were frequencies they'd stumbled across that operated differently. Harry had noticed it first. A nightly programme that seemed, on the surface, to be a simple commentary show. Quidditch results. Weather patterns. The kind of banal domestic topics that suggested nothing had changed at all.
Except nothing about it was banal if you knew what you were listening for.
He and Hermione had cracked the first layer of the code relatively quickly. The Quidditch match results had no correspondence to any actual results, because no matches were being played. They were location identifiers. The weather discussions mapped to casualty references. A cold front moving through meant snatchers operating. Significant snowfall meant organised action, multiple teams. The host's commentary on which counties were experiencing the worst conditions was, translated, a running map of where Voldemort's snatcher networks were most active.
It was clever. Simple enough that the Death Eaters running the official frequencies probably dismissed it as an eccentric programme, complicated enough that you had to spend time with it before it resolved into meaning.
They listened to it most evenings now.
Tonight Harry had the wireless on low while they worked through what remained of dinner, and he was paying closer attention than usual because the pattern of the last three nights had been building toward something. The announcer had referenced the same three county clusters repeatedly, describing them as experiencing unusually persistent cold, and tonight the weather commentary had shifted into language they associated with escalation. Not snatchers moving through. Snatchers converging.
"He's describing coordinated action," Harry said, turning the volume up slightly. "Listen to the phrasing. Widespread frost across Shropshire, Herefordshire, and the Welsh borders. That's not three separate mentions. That's the same system."
Hermione was already leaning forward over the table, her full attention on it.
"Wait," she said. "He just said the cold front is meeting resistance in the western valleys. He said resistance."
Harry looked at her.
"He's never used that word before," she said. "In all the nights we've listened, the cold fronts don't meet resistance. They move through or they stall. They don't encounter opposition."
The announcer's voice continued, pleasant and unhurried, discussing how several locations had reportedly experienced early thaws due to unusual local conditions, quite remarkable for the time of year. In the context of everything else he was saying, it translated out neatly. Bodies. People pushing back. Snatchers dying out in those western hills, and someone responsible for putting them there.
"Dead snatchers," Celeste said. She'd joined them at the table, her full attention on the wireless. "That's what the early thaw means."
"Multiple locations," Hermione confirmed, leaning over the map she'd pulled out from the study. She had her finger moving across it, marking the points the wireless had described against the geographic framework they'd built up over weeks. "He's mentioned three distinct places where conditions have changed. Not one, three."
Daphne watched the map. "Someone else is hunting them."
The announcement continued. The announcer noted with particular interest that tonight, conditions in a narrow corridor between Ludlow and Knighton were expected to be severe, with further cold weather systems moving into the region around the same time as the next evening's forecast.
"He just told us when and where," Harry said.
"Roughly," Hermione said, though she was already marking it. Her quill moved carefully over the map, adding the new points to the pattern that had been building across the previous nights' broadcasts. Three separate events, three locations in the same general arc, each one separated by consistent distances, each one following a timeline that, when you drew a line through them, suggested clear directionality.
The pattern was the same logic she'd applied the first time, weeks ago, when she'd worked out from movement reports and rumor where Harry had found his first cluster of snatchers. The same structured thinking that Daphne had, this very evening, described as a liability in a firefight. In this context, sitting at a table with a map and a quill, it was something else entirely.
"The next location in the sequence," she said, tapping the map, "if whoever is doing this maintains their pattern, is here." She circled a point in the hills east of Knighton. "And based on the timeline, tomorrow night."
She looked up.
Harry and Daphne were already looking at each other.
"The snatchers we killed," Daphne said. "Some of those locations he described tonight. Was that us?"
Harry's mouth pressed together. "Maybe."
There was a pause. The wireless continued discussing the weather.
"Someone else is working the same ground," Daphne said quietly. "And they're organized about it."
"Either way." Harry looked at Hermione's map. The circle she'd drawn was precise that meant she was confident. He trusted her pattern recognition the way he trusted Daphne's combat instincts. Different kinds of knowing, both reliable. "That's our next target."
Hermione put the quill away. "I'll have everything mapped properly by morning. Grid references, approach routes, any associated settlement records I can cross-reference."
"Do it," Harry said. He looked at Daphne. She gave him a short nod. Done.
The wireless carried on, describing tomorrow's expected weather across Wales and the border counties.
xXx
It was Celeste who brought it up, which meant it was inevitable, and the only variable had ever been the timing.
She waited until Hermione had folded the map away and Harry had turned off the wireless before appearing in the doorway of the sitting room with an expression of absolute innocence that meant she'd been thinking about this for at least an hour.
"So," she said. "Ritual."
Harry looked at her.
"Don't look at me like that," Celeste said pleasantly. "You've been putting it off for two days while you both recovered, which was sensible, but you're healed now, and Hermione and I have been very patient, and frankly the Horcrux isn't getting any weaker on its own." She shifted her weight and let the innocence slip. "Also, purely as a matter of ritual logistics rather than personal interest, Daphne and Harry have now been sharing a bed for three nights and have yet to take advantage of circumstances that the ritual specifically benefits from. That seems like an oversight."
Daphne, who was in the armchair across the room, raised her eyebrows very slightly and then looked at the ceiling.
"Celeste," Harry said.
"I'm being practical," she said. "The resonance between two people who have recently established a genuine emotional bond is significantly more potent than between participants who are already settled into familiarity. The ritual functions best in a window of heightened connection. That window doesn't stay open indefinitely." She paused. "Also it has been two days and I have been extremely patient."
"You said that part already," Hermione said.
"It bore repeating."
Harry looked at Daphne, who had lowered her gaze from the ceiling and was looking back at him with an expression that was almost entirely composed but not quite entirely. Three nights in the same bed, the particular close proximity of four people sharing space in the aftermath of something enormous, and Celeste wasn't wrong. There was something between him and Daphne that hadn't finished finding its shape yet, something new, and Celeste had already said that the ritual worked best when that charge was live.
"She's not wrong," Harry said.
"I know she's not wrong," Daphne said dryly. "That's the irritating thing about her."
Celeste beamed.
Harry held out his hand to Daphne. She took it, rising from the armchair, and they made their way toward the corridor that led down to the ritual chamber, Celeste and Hermione falling into step behind them.
"I want it noted," Hermione said as they went, "that I am participating in this entirely willingly and in no way under duress."
"So noted," Celeste said.
"And that you are insufferable."
"Also noted," Celeste said cheerfully. "But I prefer enthusiastic."
xXx
The ritual chamber always felt different the moment you stepped through the heavy oak door. Something in the air, or the light from the torches, or the runes covering every surface pulsing in their slow golden rhythm. The outside world went very far away in here. The cold of winter didn't reach down this deep. The war didn't either, for the length of time it lasted.
Hermione moved to her position at the head of the altar without needing direction, parchment already in her hand. She'd committed the incantations to memory weeks ago but still brought it. Old habit. Celeste moved to her own position across the altar.
The runes responded to their presence, brightening incrementally, the gold deepening toward amber.
Harry looked at Daphne.
She was standing at the altar's edge, looking at the runes with an expression that was calm and thoughtful and, underneath both of those things, something quieter that he recognized. He'd felt it himself the first time. That strange weight of meaning that came from doing something for meaningful reasons, desire and real feeling and the ritual's purpose all present and real simultaneously.
He stepped close to her and she turned toward him.
"Alright?" he said, low enough that it was just for them.
"Yes," Daphne said with as much calmness as she could muster. "Ask me again in a minute and see if the answer changes."
He kissed her before she'd finished the sentence.
She kissed him back properly, her hands finding his collar and then sliding into his hair. He felt her exhale slowly as she settled into it. His hands moved to her waist, then her lower back, drawing her in close. She pressed against him and the kiss shifted from exploratory to truly heated.
Behind them, Celeste murmured something to Hermione. Hermione murmured something back that sounded very much like stop commenting and start chanting. Neither of them paid any attention to it.
He walked her back toward the altar and she went with him easily. When her hips met the stone edge, she pulled back just far enough to look at him, her eyes darker than usual in the torchlight, her mouth slightly swollen.
"The window doesn't stay open indefinitely," she said.
He laughed, quiet and warm. "Celeste's words."
"Doesn't make them wrong." Her fingers moved to the buttons of his shirt. "Besides. We have a Horcrux to weaken."
"We do," he agreed, and helped her with the buttons.
He shed his shirt and she pulled her own over her head in a single fluid movement and dropped it somewhere beside the altar. He'd seen her without it before in the aftermath of Godric's Hollow, but that had been a necessity. Every other instance after it was different, this even more. This was her watching him look at her and not looking away, not covering herself, meeting his gaze directly, unflinching.
She was beautiful. The torchlight caught the curve of her breasts, the line of her collarbone, the flat plane of her stomach. He told her so without dressing it up.
"I know," she said, and the absence of false modesty in it made him laugh again. She answered it with a small real smile.
He kissed her throat and she tilted her head to give him room, her breath quickening. His hands moved over her, unclasping her bra, drawing it away, and he cupped her breasts in both palms, his thumbs brushing across her nipples. She made a sharp sound and pressed into his hands.
"Ahh," she breathed. "Do that again."
He did. Twice. Then he leaned down and took one into his mouth, his tongue working slow circles, and Daphne's hand went into his hair and gripped.
"Harry." His name came out rough and breathy and he felt her other hand tighten on the altar's edge.
Hermione's voice began behind them, low and rhythmic, the incantations rising and falling in the pattern Harry now knew as well as a heartbeat. Celeste's voice joined a beat behind, the two of them weaving together. The runes surged, amber pushing toward white at the edges, and Harry felt it immediately, that particular pull at the base of his magic that the ritual always produced, a warmth flooding through him from the inside out.
He and Daphne finished undressing with the runes blazing around them. Her fingers worked at his belt and trousers with focus, not even remotely shy, and when she pushed them down and her hand wrapped around his cock he went completely still for a moment and breathed through it.
"You're already hard," she said, not quite surprised but noting it.
"Have been since the corridor, if I'm being honest," he said.
The corner of her mouth moved. "Good." She stroked him once, slow and sensual, watching his face the whole time. The rune-light made her eyes look almost silver. "Now lie back."
He raised an eyebrow at that but complied, settling back against the velvet cushion on the altar. She climbed up after him, her knees on either side of his hips, her thighs warm against his. She was looking down at him with an expression that was focused and wanting and unapologetically so, and he had a moment to think that this was exactly what he'd meant when he'd told her she showed him she thought he could handle honesty.
She reached down and wrapped her hand around his cock again, positioning the head against her soaked entrance. She rubbed it against her lips, moaning softly as he pressed against her, and then sank down slowly.
Both of them went quiet.
"Oh," Daphne said, after a moment, barely above a whisper. "Oh, that's—"
"Yeah," Harry managed.
She stayed still for a breath or two, adjusting, her hands braced on his chest. Then she moved, rolling her hips in a slow experimental arc, testing the angle, and both of them moaned at essentially the same time. She found the rhythm that worked and settled into it, her hips moving in a steady fluid motion, and Harry's hands went to her thighs, gripping firmly.
The ritual magic kicked in properly then.
It was immediate and unmistakable. Every feeling amplified, layered with intensity beneath it, the full sensation present all at once. He felt Daphne through it not just physically but in that deeper sense that the ritual produced, her magic brushing up against his with the warmth and character that was entirely her own. She felt it too. He could see it in the way her breath changed, sharper, her rhythm faltering slightly.
"What is that?" she breathed, her eyes wide.
"The magic," Harry said. "Just let it in."
She did. He watched her do it, watched her consciously stop bracing against the unfamiliar sensation and let it move through her, and the effect was immediate. Her back straightened, her head tipped back, and she let out a loud moan that came from deep within her.
"Merlin," she breathed. "That's—"
She stopped trying to describe it and started moving properly instead.
Her hips found a harder rhythm and Harry pushed up to meet her, his hands moving to her waist to guide the pace. The altar's runes blazed, responding to the energy building between them, the light cycling through amber and gold and more. Hermione's chanting had risen, steadier now, her voice carrying easily above the sounds of their furious lovemaking. Celeste's wove beneath it, the two of them anchoring the magic that Harry and Daphne were generating.
Daphne leaned forward, her palms flat on his chest, and drove her hips down in a way that dragged a low rough groan out of him.
"There," she said immediately, filing it away. She did it again, slowly, watching his face. "That."
"Daphne." His hands tightened on her waist.
"I'm paying attention," she said, not remotely apologetically. She rolled her hips on the next stroke and he bit back a moan. She smiled and did it again.
He got a hand into her hair and pulled her down into a kiss that she returned with her full attention, her hips still moving, never losing the rhythm. He rolled them over in one motion without breaking the kiss, settling his weight over her, and she made a sound of surprise that dissolved into a loud cry of pleasure when he began to rapidly thrust into her.
"Better," she gasped against his mouth.
"Much," he agreed, and gave her something to work with.
He drove deeper and she arched beneath him with a moan that tore out of her, her head pressing back against the velvet, her hands finding his back and gripping. He set a pace that was careful and thorough and she matched it with her whole body, her hips rising to meet every thrust, her breath going ragged and open.
"Don't stop," she gasped. "Whatever you do, don't—aahhhh—" She broke off on a loud wail as the ritual magic crested, both of their energies surging together through the connection the ritual built between them. He felt her pleasure through it directly, not inferred from sound and movement but actually felt, feeding back into his own, sharp and immediate, and the loop of it built fast.
"I can feel you," he said, partly wondering, partly informing her.
"I know." Her voice was wrecked. "I can feel you too. That's—it's a lot, Harry, that's really a—" She stopped talking entirely and just held on.
He pushed harder, following the cues she gave him, and she was making sounds now without apparent concern for volume, each one timed to his movement, her hips snapping up to meet him like she couldn't help it. The runes had reached full brightness, blazing across every surface of the chamber, the light so intense it cast no shadows. Celeste's and Hermione's voices were at full pitch, riding the crest of the magic, holding the circuit stable as everything built toward its peak.
Daphne came first.
It hit her hard. He felt it through the ritual connection before it showed in her body, a wave of pure sensation that rolled through her and then registered outwardly, her back arching completely off the altar, a cry tearing out of her that echoed off the stone. Her nails raked his shoulders from top to bottom and he barely felt it over the surge of the ritual feedback, her pleasure amplified through the magical circuit and flooding back into him doubled.
He followed her over thirty seconds later, driving deep and staying there as it broke through him in a long wave, the ritual taking what it needed from the moment and tearing something loose from the walls of his mind on the way through. He felt it retreat. The dark presence that had lived in his scar since before he could remember, pulling back slightly from the walls of his mind like a tide pulling back from the shore.
He dropped his head on her chest and breathed.
The runes dimmed gradually. Hermione's voice slowed, then stopped. Celeste's followed a moment later. The chamber settled back into its hum, warm and quiet.
Daphne lay still beneath him. Her chest rose and fell in slow deep breaths. One hand had come up to rest flat on his back, not gripping now, just present, the warmth of it against his skin. He shifted carefully and lay beside her, and she didn't pull away.
"Alright?" he said. He'd asked her that at the start of the evening. It seemed worth asking again.
She turned her head to look at him. Her hair was thoroughly wrecked, her cheeks flushed, and she had the particular look of someone who had been comprehensively reminded that the body is capable of more than it usually bothers with. "Yes," she said. "Very much so." A pause. "That was different."
"From what we did in the forest?"
"From anything. That feedback loop, feeling you while—" She stopped, considering. "It's really difficult to think clearly with that happening. Which I imagine is somewhat the point."
"A bit, yeah," he agreed.
Harry lay on his back and turned his attention inward, the way he'd learned to do after each ritual. The connection to Voldemort was always his reference point. After Hermione, it had shifted from something constant and immediate to something periodic. After Daphne in the forest, it had shifted again.
Now he pressed against it and found almost nothing.
A ghost. Attenuated to near-transparency, the way a sound carries when you've moved the source far enough away. It was there. He could identify it if he reached specifically for it. But it had no weight, no push. No leak of mood or intent bleeding through unbidden.
He tried, carefully, to do what he'd attempted once before: push the connection the other way. Reach through it and find the other mind on the far end, see what Voldemort was doing and thinking in what ought to be his moment of greatest vulnerability.
He found the connection. He followed it. He hit something dense and closed and could not get further.
Weakened. Not yet broken.
He opened his eyes.
"It's very weak," he said. "The connection. I reached for it and it barely responded. He can't be getting anything through it anymore." He paused. "I tried to go the other way. Into his head."
"And?" Hermione asked. She was sitting cross-legged at the altar's head, parchment set aside.
"Couldn't get through. He's not weak enough yet. But I reached the wall, which I couldn't do before."
Daphne propped herself up on one elbow. "So next time—"
"Maybe," Harry said. "The next ritual, or the one after. Then it might actually be possible to breach it."
"That's significant," Hermione said quietly.
"It is." He looked at her. "You alright over there? It's a lot of magic to channel."
"I'm fine," Hermione said. "It's—it's a lot, but I'm fine." The slight color in her cheeks was not purely from exertion and she clearly knew he knew that, and equally clearly had decided not to address it. "Celeste?"
"Perfectly well," Celeste said from her corner, and it was clear that she had thoroughly enjoyed the last forty-five minutes and was not bothered about whether that was obvious. "Though I will say, for the record, that Daphne's first time with the full ritual is absolutely something to witness." She looked at Daphne directly. "How did it feel?"
Daphne considered being arch about this and then apparently decided it wasn't worth it. "Like being plugged directly into something enormous," she said. "And like all of my normal means of keeping myself composed became temporarily unavailable."
"That's the ritual," Hermione said. Her voice was rather carefully matter-of-fact. "We know all about it."
"You both had that very knowing look when I mentioned it earlier," Daphne said. "Now I understand why." She looked at Harry. "It still feels like something. Even now."
"That fades," Hermione said.
"A few hours," Celeste added helpfully. "Very pleasant few hours, mind."
Daphne lay back down, looking up at the ceiling of the chamber with an expression that was warm and somewhat undone and entirely her own. "Ridiculous," she said. Fondly, though. "The whole thing is completely ridiculous."
Harry looked up at the same ceiling, stone worn smooth by centuries, and felt something settle in him that had been tight for days. The ghost of Voldemort in his mind, barely a presence now. Four more rituals. Four more steps toward silence in the part of his head that had never, not for a single day of his life, been truly quiet.
"Tomorrow night," he said.
The mood shifted slightly.
"Tomorrow night," Daphne confirmed.
Hermione nodded. "I'll have the approach routes mapped before morning."
xXx
They came in from the north, Harry and Daphne, moving through the hill country in the hour after midnight when the cold had teeth and the sky was the moonless kind that hid things well. They moved in silence under the Invisibility Cloak, Harry's magic extended outward in that careful slow reach through the surrounding land, feeling for anything that resonated with dark intent. The killing curse carried something distinct that he could catch at distance.
So far, nothing.
They'd positioned in a shallow dell below the ridge line, trees thick enough around them to provide cover, with the hamlet Hermione had identified visible as a scatter of lights in the valley below. A small place, twelve or fifteen houses clustered around a lane, the kind of magical community that existed in official records as a Muggle settlement but housed three or four wizarding families alongside the rest, invisible to anyone who didn't already know.
Snatchers liked these places. Easy to move through, isolated enough that no one heard anything inconvenient.
"Anything?" Daphne murmured, her breath visible in the cold.
"Not yet," Harry said.
"Maybe they've taken a night off," she said. She didn't sound like she believed it.
They waited. Harry kept his magic extended, feeling the landscape, the slow hum of the earth in winter, the ambient warmth of old settlements where wizarding families had lived for generations. Nothing sharp. Nothing violent. He let himself go patient in the way the last months had rewired him, the waiting that used to make him impatient reduced now to something close to stillness.
Ten minutes. Twenty.
Then he felt it.
Faint. Far enough to be at the edge of his range. But clear and unmistakable, the specific cold discharge of a killing curse sent. One. Then a second, slightly different direction.
"Got something," he said quietly.
Daphne went still and ready in the same instant.
"Killing curses. Down the valley, east. More than one."
"How far?"
"Far enough. We'd miss it if we walked." He looked at her. "Hold on."
He apparated them clean and fast, three cracks of displaced air in rapid succession as he triangulated toward the source, each jump bringing them closer. On the third arrival they were in the thicket of trees, on a hillside looking down over a cluster of farm buildings and a lane, and there was nothing subtle about what was happening below.
The hamlet was under attack.
Or rather, it had been.
The snatchers were there, but not how they'd expected to find them.
Harry counted six in the first sweep. Three were already down, bodies sprawled in the lane at angles that left no ambiguity. The nearest one had hit the frozen ground face-first and lay with his wand arm thrown out at a completely wrong angle, snapped at the elbow, and the back of his skull was simply gone, the grey matter spread across the frost in a ragged dark fan. The second had caught something in the chest that had caved it in, his ribcage collapsed, and he'd folded backward over a low stone wall like a broken hinge. The third was face-up in the lane, staring at nothing, the top half of his head missing cleanly, and the blood pooling from what remained of his neck had already begun to freeze at the edges where it met the cold ground.
Two more snatchers were backpedaling hard, their wands throwing light in every direction, clearly trying to regroup against something that was not giving them the angle they needed. The sixth was running flat out toward the tree line and not going to make it.
Three witches were working through them with a proficiency that was genuinely unsettling to watch. They moved in coordinated arcs that cut off retreat and kept the pressure constant, reading each other's positioning without needing to communicate it, the kind of coordination that came from either long practice or the specific intimacy of people who'd fought together enough times to share instincts. They wore simple dark masks covering the face, and their robes were unmarked. They cast to kill. No warning shots, no stunning, no interest in prisoners or information. Clean and methodical and absolutely lethal.
One of the retreating snatchers tried to run for cover behind an outbuilding. The witch on the left tracked him, stepped wide to get a clear angle around the corner, and put a curse through his back before he'd made it halfway. He hit the building's wall and slid down it, leaving a dark streak on the whitewashed stone.
The other one turned and ran straight.
A bright clean curse hit him between the shoulder blades. He went off his feet, hit the frozen lane, and didn't move.
The sixth snatcher had made the tree line by ten yards and one of the three witches turned immediately. A crimson bolt shot through his back on the left, and he fell, painting the white ground crimson.
The two other witches converged in the lane, moving between the bodies. One of them started casting fire, clean controlled Incendio, and the bodies took it quickly, the cold dry air feeding the flames. The smell of it drifted up the hillside as the third witch did the same with the rest.
Harry and Daphne watched on silently.
"Who are they?" she asked, unblinking.
Harry was already looking. The magic of two of them was familiar in the specific way that only magic could be familiar, something in its structure that you recognized the way you recognized a voice without being able to explain what made it recognizable. He knew it. He'd encountered it before, known it well, and the recognition was sharp and certain and hit him like cold water.
He knew who they were.
He looked at Daphne.
She looked back at him, reading his expression. "Harry. Who are they?"
He stepped out of the tree line and walked down the slope toward the lane leisurely, putting the Cloak away as he moved. Daphne came with him one step behind, wand in hand, her eyes on the three witches the whole way.
They registered him the moment he cleared the tree line. They were good. No panic, no shouting. Three wands came up and three bodies shifted into the kind of stillness that preceded action, watching him come down the hill with a focus that was not remotely uncertain about what it was looking at. An unknown figure walking toward them out of the dark was a threat until confirmed otherwise and none of them were taking a step back from that assumption on sentiment.
One of them spoke. Her voice was low and the authority in it was unmistakable. She'd made enough split-second calls in enough bad situations that the calm in it was fully earned.
"Who are you," she said, "and what is your business here?"
Harry stopped walking. He stood in the lane with the smoke from the burning bodies drifting past him and the cold settling around them all. Amused, he spread his arms out to his sides, easy, showing that he was not reaching for his wand.
"Funny way to greet an old friend," he said with a smile, taking off his disguise.
The borrowed features dissolved back into his own. Green eyes that were all too recognizable. The particular untidiness of his hair. The lightning bolt scar visible at his hairline, the way it always was if you were close enough and knew what to look for.
The witch who'd spoken let out a sharp breath. The one to her left said something that was absolutely his name, in a voice he knew so well he felt it in his chest. The third pulled off her mask entirely, and Harry looked at her face in the dim light.
He smiled at them, wide and real and entirely unguarded.
"Hello, Susan, Tonks, Fleur."
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