"The test subjects you need are not your concern," Grindelwald continued, and his tone carried the same easy calm it always did when discussing things that would make most people uncomfortable. "Most of this country welcomed me back. But there are holdouts, and there are the ones who used my imprisonment to settle scores with the Saints. For your girl's sake, their contribution is worth something."
Tom nodded. He understood the logic, and he was not going to pretend otherwise.
The situation had shaken him, but not beyond function. He had the people and the resources and the knowledge base. As long as he kept working, an answer existed.
"On another matter," Grindelwald said, shifting register, "I've found some insects on my side. Not Dumbledore's people."
Tom was not in the mood for peripheral concerns. "Why tell me? Handle them yourself."
"I'm planning to move against several neighbouring countries." Grindelwald laid it out plainly. "This stalemate has gone on long enough. I want to break their will to resist, force Dumbledore into negotiations by making the alternative too expensive. A decisive strike, not a prolonged campaign."
Tom followed the implication. "And you want me because you'd rather not send yourself to get swarmed by three hundred Aurors."
Grindelwald was formidable. He was also made of flesh, and three hundred trained Aurors casting simultaneously did not ask whether you were the most powerful wizard of your generation before the spells arrived.
"That is part of it." Grindelwald's expression took on something that was almost playful. "Your human Transfiguration has reached genuine mastery. I was thinking: if two Gellert Grindelwalds appeared at the same time, what would they do?"
Tom turned this over.
The old man had a sense of theatre. He had to give him that.
Disguising himself as Grindelwald presented no technical difficulty. Dumbledore himself would not catch it quickly, not at first glance.
And the opportunity to fight alongside someone at Grindelwald's level, against that many trained opponents, did not come along often.
"Agreed. Contact me in advance when it's time," Tom said. "Push it to next month if you can. I'm starting my trial tasks soon, and a large operation right now would pull Dumbledore out with Fawkes and have him circling the continent."
Grindelwald nodded. He handed Tom the unconscious Nagini and they parted.
Back in London, Tom found Daphne still deeply asleep. He picked her up and shook her with neither ceremony nor gentleness. She swayed back and forth like something that had been stuffed, came partially conscious, and spent a full disoriented minute working out where she was and why she was moving.
"Tom," she said finally, voice thick and aggrieved, "there are normal ways to wake people up."
"Every normal way takes an hour minimum with you." Tom set her down. "We don't have an hour. Get up, wash your face, we need to get to the station."
"Look at your sister," he added, gesturing toward the doorway. "Astoria's been ready since before breakfast. She's younger than you. Think about that."
"I am the older one," Daphne said, with the conviction of someone establishing a fact against opposition, then shuffled off obediently to get dressed.
Lady Greengrass arrived a little while later and drove them all to King's Cross.
The platform was already busy. As Tom moved through the crowd, conversations dropped away and people stepped aside, some looking at the floor, some unable to help looking at him instead.
In the wizarding world, the reputation that followed from violence settled into something heavier and more persistent than it did in Muggle society. Tom had not personally cast the spells, but he had driven more than a dozen wizards to their deaths and reduced a prominent pure-blood family from its peak to a shadow, quickly enough that people were still processing it. What that produced in the people watching was not quite admiration and not quite fear, but something that incorporated both and added a third element that had no clean name.
This was the effect Tom wanted. Not on the students. On the parents behind them.
The previous Tom Riddle had been capable of something catastrophic. The current one had already demonstrated it without anyone being able to point to a specific law he had broken. Anyone considering making an enemy of him was now doing arithmetic about their family's size and history before they finished the thought.
They found an empty compartment, Tom sent Cho a message, and she joined them shortly after. The journey passed in easy conversation, and the train arrived at Hogsmeade before it felt like it should have.
Coming through the oak doors, the students found someone waiting.
Snape, arms folded, face arranged in its customary expression of generalised displeasure, standing at the entrance the way a storm front stands at a coastline.
He was not there for the students. When his gaze found Tom, he jerked his head toward a small side room and walked into it.
Tom followed, mildly curious.
Snape closed the door behind them and got to it without preamble. "I understand you've collected a significant number of Inferi. I need some. A hundred or two hundred."
Tom stared at him for a moment, then laughed despite himself.
"Professor. You're asking me for a hundred or two hundred and saying that's not much. By what standard, exactly?"