Outside the Botanical Garden, Leonard got down from a unicorn that happened to be free and had come by to grab a bite near the garden, then walked inside.
After several months, Leonard and Midgard met again. Since they were here to discuss serious business from start to finish, Midgard had not brought Claudia with her this time.
But although she had not brought Claudia, Midgard had brought someone else.
The giant wolf leader from the Forbidden Forest.
Leonard had spotted its huge frame before he even entered.
Only today, the giant wolf leader looked especially miserable. Its once-proud white fur was dull and dusty, its body all skin and bones, with large patches of dried blood still caked on it.
At the moment, it was clutching a chunk of meat and tearing into it savagely, trying to replenish its strength.
"What happened to you?" Leonard patted the giant wolf leader on the head. "How did you end up like this?"
The giant wolf leader stopped tearing at the meat, licked its lips, and instinctively rubbed against Leonard's hand.
"I'm tired!" it let out a long sigh.
"It was with Chercy and the others when this happened. It's the only one that made it back," Midgard explained. "It doesn't know how to Apparate, so it ran all the way back from Germany on its own. Our people found it near the manor."
All wizarding manors were located outside cities or even towns, usually protected by magic that confused Muggle sight and kept them isolated.
Intelligent magical creatures with huge bodies, like the giant wolf leader, would generally stay in those areas voluntarily or otherwise, so they would not be discovered by Muggles.
"That's rough, but you did well." Leonard patted the giant wolf leader again and checked the wounds on its body.
Before he arrived, Midgard had already had someone treat its injuries. The bandages were wrapped tightly and neatly.
"So you must have brought back some important information," Leonard said.
"Yes... but not much," the giant wolf leader said in a muffled, heavy voice. "We were ambushed. That big sister took us there by Apparition, and the moment we arrived, a group of people surrounded us."
"An ambush?" Leonard thought about it and did not find it especially surprising.
Apparition sounded miraculous, but it had a condition. You either had to have been to the place before, or have a detailed local map.
Chercy and her group were going there to stir up trouble, so they definitely could not use official Ministry channels. That meant a method like Floo powder, which would be monitored by the Ministry of Magic, was naturally out of the question.
So Chercy and the others had gone by Apparition.
In theory, Apparition had no distance limit, but every wizard's magic had an upper bound.
They could not simply ignore distance and keep teleporting wherever they wanted.
On top of that, Ministries of Magic in various countries had detection measures set up around their borders to monitor unauthorized Apparition across national boundaries.
But when the area was large enough, there would always be gaps in the surveillance.
That was where the smugglers came in.
Through repeated testing, they had found an Apparition route that could avoid detection. As long as you Apparated according to each designated point, you could slip past the Ministry's checks.
And since Chercy's group had been using a fixed route provided by smugglers, getting ambushed was not strange at all.
But the problem was that Chercy and the others had taken the Mandrakes Leonard had prepared. Even if they had walked into an ambush, they should not have been wiped out so completely that only the giant wolf leader managed to return.
There had been more than a dozen werewolf wizards with Chercy, along with more than a dozen giant wolves.
"I'm not too clear on that. I don't really understand wizard magic in the first place."
The giant wolf leader instinctively stuck out its tongue, trying to lick the wound that had already been bandaged up, but Midgard smacked it so hard its whole face twisted to the side. It could only sneeze, then continue, "I just saw a cloud of gray mist fall right into the middle of us, and then I got blown away."
"A cloud of gray mist?" Leonard frowned. Seeing Midgard look at him for an answer, he shook his head.
He had never heard of magic that took that form.
"Be more specific. What happened after you were blown away?" Leonard pressed.
"It felt awful, like my whole body was clogged up, all stuffy and miserable. The others were pretty much the same. Oh, right, a few of them said they couldn't use magic anymore."
"Couldn't use magic?" Leonard rubbed his chin.
In the wizarding world, there was only one kind of spell that could suppress magic, namely Finite and its higher form, Finite Incantatem.
But those two only erased the effects caused by magic, such as the results of Transfiguration or Fiendfyre produced by the Fiendfyre Curse.
Neither of them could stop a wizard from continuing to cast spells afterward, and neither had anything at all to do with gray mist.
So what exactly was it?
"Could it really be the Ravens?" Midgard had heard some things about the Ravens from Leonard, so the first group she suspected was that organization that had once provoked her.
After all, it was the sort of organization that sounded evil the moment you heard the name. Hidden secrets, unknown motives, and clearly up to no good.
Blaming some weird unknown magic on them felt perfectly reasonable.
"Not sure, but it's definitely worth looking into." Leonard glanced at the giant wolf leader and met its eyes. The gray in his pupils deepened.
Before he had fully shifted his attention to the Chamber of Secrets curse, Leonard had happened to be reading a book in the Restricted Section of the library.
Close Your Mind
It was a magical book that taught people how to stop others from probing their thoughts, and the spell it summarized was Occlumency.
The opposite of it was the magic both Dumbledore and Snape knew, Legilimency.
In the original story, Snape had once used Legilimency to teach Harry Potter Occlumency. When Legilimency rebounded, it would turn back on the caster instead.
So the two forms of magic complemented each other.
Leonard had learned Occlumency with ease, then used his understanding of it to work backward and derive Legilimency.
And right now, he was using Legilimency to peer into the giant wolf leader's mind.
Their eyes met, their minds connected, and the Ancient Sprout on Leonard's arm gave off a faint silver glow, coating his deep pupils with a pale silvery sheen.
The Ancient Sprout could assist with spellcasting, and that was what gave Leonard the confidence to probe the giant wolf leader's mind not long after learning Legilimency.
He wanted to see whether the giant wolf leader was truly reliable.
Had it really gone through countless hardships to make it back here, or had it actually been one of those captured, brainwashed in advance, and sent back out to spread false information?
He would only know after seeing its mind for himself.