Disclaimer – standard disclaimer applies. Not mine. Nor are the legal principles. Don’t sue.
Chapter 21 – The Trial Pt 2: True Perspective
“Mr. Malfoy, how would you describe your relationship with Gerald Tarrant?”
I hated him, with an absolute passion that I haven’t felt since Harry Potter – no, not even that – my hatred for Potter was a boy’s emotion. This was the hatred of a full-grown, fully confident adult…
“I hardly knew the man. We had only met twice before, and for some reason he took me in dislike. I was not pleased with him and his crusade, of course, but apart from that, I was not aware of him as an individual person.”
“Mr. Malfoy, will you please describe the events of the day in question…?”
I killed him. Isn’t that what you want to hear? I killed him, and I reveled in every agonizing scream… But he didn’t say that, of course he didn’t. Instead, he went over the events again, emphasizing how the man had struck Ginevra, the way he had threatened them, if not with words, then certainly with actions.
There was an argument for self-defence, there – he could play the ‘concern for a loved one’s safety’ card, if he cared. Of course, the only problem was the issue of proportionality – essentially, matching the level of his defence to the degree and severity of threat. As much as one might want to, one couldn’t use the Killing Curse on a muggle street kid with a stick. There were only too many people willing to testify that Draco had been an Auror, once, and a lethal one at that; and Tarrant, civilized, sensitive and new age as he was, would have had less than no chance of standing against him. So much for self-defence.
“You attacked him, Mr. Malfoy? It was not the other way around?” Grey eyes watchful, Draco nodded. Oh, he knew where this was going, and where it would lead…
“Tell me, Mr. Malfoy,” Aquinas purred again, “is it not a fundamental tenet of High Clan behaviour, especially Malfoy behaviour, to never, ever, under any circumstances, lose your temper?” The bastard was enjoying this; he had a major grudge against the High Clan somewhere in his background, Draco was sure.
“None of us is perfect, Counselor,” he said, softly,
tauntingly. “Only saints never lose their temper.”
“You claim that when you lost your temper, this time, that you went cold, I think you said. You described it a complete loss of rational thought, and the complete surrender to instinct, but you still managed to restrain yourself to curses that were still relatively legal, that were not strong enough on their own to kill.”
Draco closed his eyes, only for a moment – so weary – and then he looked back up, into Aquinas’ eyes, too tired to be insolent or coy anymore. He nodded.
“So you were angry, because of his recent revelations about you in the Prophet, because he struck Miss We-“ he cut himself, “Lady Malfoy. And you took your anger out on him, in the heat of the moment, before the passion cooled, and in doing so, you inflicted a number of charms of a,” he raised an eyebrow, “dubious morality on Mr. Tarrant, twisting them to cause pain. Only, you say, you didn’t know that he had a pre-existing heart condition, and things went farther than you intended them to.” Aquinas’ smooth, rich voice was decidedly skeptical – and his skepticism was swaying others in the crowd, he could see them raising eyebrows and sneering delicately too.
And what of it? It was, for one of the very few times in his life, the exact truth. He had indeed lost control when he saw the blood on Ginevra’s white skin. and he had deliberately chosen low-level curses designed to inflict maximum pain and minimum real damage. Their relative legality was not deliberate, he had been too far gone to think about such things, but evidently some part of him had been alert, or perhaps it was simply because he had chosen them as an insult, knowing their more conventional applications, or because it had tickled his dark sense of irony.
He had never been a Death Eater, but he been raised by two men who had, and he’d listened to things he shouldn’t have, learned things they would far rather have kept from him, including the deepest, darkest truth of his own capacity for cruelty that had honestly shocked him. But this was the first time he had ever, even subconsciously, given free reign to it. For the first time in his life, he had completely lost control. And look at the consequences.
“I think, Mr. Malfoy,” Aquinas’ voice was intense, now – he was going for the kill, “that you knew exactly what you were doing. And so, I think, did your uncle – why else did he not intervene?” He half turned towards Luc, focusing the spectator’s attention on Luc Malfoy and all that he represented. “He would not have allowed you to go so far unless he saw some benefit, some profit in it…” Luc didn’t react to the deliberate insult, only raising an eyebrow; Draco stiffened, outraged by this completely unwarranted attack.
He moved, drawing the attention back onto him, somehow coiled and intense now, dangerous even in chains and with aurors posted all over the room.
He half rose out of his chair, ignoring the pulled wands and the sudden tension. “Nobody owns me,” he said very clearly, to keep from hissing. “I do not answer to my uncle, or to the de Sauvigny…” He didn’t finish, didn’t say the unspoken ‘or to anyone or anything else’. It would not have been wise. But the damage had been done – they saw the difference, now, between himself and themselves, between the High Clan and the rest of society. They had heard his unspoken words.
The questions continued, relentless and invasive, chipping away his composure, his moral high ground with their intensity and their stark objectivity, reducing tangled, complex issues to stark black and white, yes or no. Reduce everything he had done, everything he was, to such a basic, fundamental level, and what did you have? A murderer. Nothing more, nothing less. Most people preferred to see the world in black and white.
It made things much easier, removed any necessity for them to see beneath the surface, deep into the complexity that lay beneath the apparently tranquil exterior. Quite frankly, they didn’t like dealing with difficult, ambiguous issues…
Aquinas, his rich voice purring in satisfaction, in anticipation of final victory, called his last expert witness to the stand – Dr. Phineas Crane, an academic expert on High Clan lore, Law and behaviour. Crane, who had no High Clan blood of his own, had been fortunate enough to secure the patronage of Richard Clearwater, lesser scion of a lesser Clan, and had based his findings and his writings, such as they were, on the behaviour he had observed amongst the Clearwater and similar other, lesser Clans. Nevertheless, he had a solid reputation among the wider community, if not within the High Clan, and his writings were quite respected and applauded.
An old, almost neurotically precise man, with carefully slicked back white hair and ancient, wire-rimmed spectacles, he looked the part of the shy, reclusive scholar he was. Sometimes, stereotypes held an element of truth.
“Dr Crane,” Aquinas asked, his voice respectful, “could you please tell us in what circumstances the ancient, traditional Law of the High Clan will allow murder?”
Crane tilted his head to the side, an oddly birdlike mannerism. “Well, quite frankly, the Law does not so much as allow murder as justify it under certain, strictly controlled circumstances…” he polished his glasses nervously, unnerved by the scrutiny of so many of the truly powerful Lords, whom he had always scrupulously stayed away from. “First of all,” he stated, his manner pedantic, like the worst kind of schoolmaster, “the perpetrator must be a Clan Lord, or acting on a Clan Lord’s direct order.” He bowed his head oddly in Draco’s direction, acknowledging that Draco met that particular criterion. “Second, the perpetrator, or the man who ultimately orders the death, must have an utterly compelling reason, and be able to prove it, beyond a shadow of a doubt, if his actions are called into account.”
Aquinas nodded. “Mr. Malfoy states that he attacked the victim because Tarrant laid hands on Miss Ginevra Weasley, his fiancée, with the intention of causing her harm and even death. He claims he was only protecting and defending her. In your expert opinion, is that enough to justify such a horrible death, Dr. Crane?”
The doctor’s eyes unfocused, and he stared into the distance, thinking. Any High Clan spectators, who had been steeped in the Law since childhood, concealed their own disgust and their contempt for this scholar who could not even judge such a simple case. The Law, considering that Draco was the Malfoy Lord, that he and Ginevra were bonding, might have allowed a severe beating and could, with Malfoy influence, be stretched to include a death, an execution, but given the differences in their relative magical skill, strength, and knowledge of the Law, and that Ginevra had really been in no danger at all, such a horrific torture-murder was an unnecessary overreaction.
Eventually, in much more complicated language, Dr. Crane came to the same conclusion – really, the only thing that would mitigate this was the fact the Malfoy were known to be possessive of what they thought of as theirs, and that Malfoy in the process of bonding were even more volatile, even more predisposed to emotional displays. But really, the man was hardly a threat…it was understandable, what with all that had been going on, what with the revelation of the unfortunate events of twelve years ago appearing in the newspapers on that very morning, but still… It was that but still that was going to cause all the trouble. They all knew it. And they all wondered what the Malfoy had under his sleeve…
*****************************************************
Blaise Zabini watched in fascination. There had been something different about Draco as he had walked back into the room after the adjournment. Something remote, something untouchable, something…otherworldly.
He had never, ever seen it before – not in his father, not in Luc Malfoy, not in Lucius, not even wholly in Dumbledore – but he knew what it was, nevertheless.
It was the indefinable aura of a true Clan Lord, of a man both humble and supremely self-confident, independent of all allegiances but tied, inextricably, to his obligations, a man strong enough to hold what was his against all comers, but gentle enough not to crush it, utterly fragile as it was… He had known, from seven years with Draco at Hogwarts, that he had the potential to be a great leader, but he had never expected this.
Somehow, between all those who had had some influence on his life – Lucius and Luc and Dumbledore and even Snape – they had created a man worthy of being called Clan Lord. Now all they had to do was make sure their creation didn’t spend the rest of his days in Azkaban, and that there would be a Clan left for him to rule, after the troubles that were coming whether Draco won the trial or not.
He looked out of the corner of his eye at Rayden Lestrange and Brandon Avery, two figures who had seemed god-like when he had been child, who were still god-like now – only he was not as afraid of them as he was of Luc Malfoy – to see whether they knew something of what was going on, if they had any clue how the Malfoy were going to get out of this.
But Lestrange and Avery only watched Draco with strangely avid, hungry eyes, as if they were yearning for something they couldn’t name, for something they hadn’t even known they were searching for.
Perhaps, perhaps they could call it faith – belief in something they had always dreamed of, in something they had never thought to see. So much of High Clan culture was built around the idea of a Clan Lord, but not one of them had ever known a true one, not a Lord in the oldest sense; by the time they had been old enough to understand, the corruption of the High Clan had already begun, and in Blaise’s case, well and truly advanced…
They were not Gryffindors, to dream of gallantry and chivalry. But they had heroes, nevertheless, chief among them Brandon Andenais, who, for all his ruthlessness, had led his followers through the wilderness, had walked beside them all the way, had supported them when they tired, had carried them when they fell. They called him Faithless, because of his acts against the original inhabitants of this land. But he had kept the faith with his followers, at least, no matter his other betrayals, his other sins…
Oh, the Slytherin High Clan boys hadn’t dreamed of Godric Gryffindor, or of any of the other English folk heroes the Gryffindors so worshipped. But they had had other ideals, other, darker, more shadowed, more ambiguous myths – the Goddess and her Consort, who gave his blood and his life in times of famine and war; the Fisher King, whose wounded body represented the earth, and who bled, continuously, as a symbol of renewal; the Good Son, who had been sacrificed, so that his death might bring life to the world once more.
Artos the warrior-king, who at the moment of his greatest triumph, had sown the seeds of his own destruction by lying with his own sister in her guise as a priestess of the Lady, fathering the son who would eventually kill him. Just so did the cycle of death and rebirth replay over and over, and just so did every man’s actions determine his eventual end – the price that all must pay for that most precious and dangerous gift of all, free will.
Not, Blaise thought, that this situation was in any way comparable to those…shaking his head to clear it of the mysticism he was all too prone to, he ignored the primitive thrill that ran down his spine when he looked into Draco’s eyes, shook off the eerie recognition that was entirely at odds to his modern, civilised mind. He looked over to Dumbledore to see his reaction to the Malfoy Lord – but saw, instead, that the old man was watching him with those blue, too-perceptive eyes.
He felt as if they could see straight through him. How did he know? How could Dumbledore know what he was thinking, his innermost, most utterly secret thoughts and dreams? He had never, ever spoken of his yearning to anyone, let alone to the Headmaster, or to the Slytherin boys he had gone to school with – but somehow the old man could see it, could see the hunger, the yearning…
And he pitied them for it. He pitied them. For their dreams. For their wishes, their deepest, darkest hopes that they had never, ever dared voice; he pitied them all, proud and powerful lords, because they had always dreamed of something they couldn’t have, dreamed of something sacred in this all too profane world. Dreamed of purity, when their whole world had been tainted before birth…
And now, when they had seen it, when they had seen everything they could ever have dreamed of and it was within their grasp, it was in danger of being destroyed. Could the Zabini remain neutral and watch from the sidelines as the High Clan tore itself apart?
Yes, his Clan had been neutral for two and a half thousand years. Yes, he had been brought up to stand apart, just as surely as Draco had been brought up to stand in the middle, but what good was neutrality when the whole system is falling down around your ears? His original ancestor had known, when he had made his choice of the lonely burden of neutrality, that some day it would come to the point where a Zabini would have to make the choice again.
His Clan, or the High Clan? Safe neutrality, on the sidelines, or partisanship that would put him in the front lines of the conflict. He knew they would not judge him, no matter which choice he made – such was the reputation they had built for themselves, over the centuries – but could he live with himself if, by his inaction, he ushered in the end of everything his ancestors had fought so hard to build, and then to preserve?
No. No, and no, and no. He would not let their only hope of salvation die, either in Azkaban at the hands of the Dementors, or in the mystic agony that came from a snapped Covenant; not when he stood a chance of preventing it.
************************************************
The next day they came back to hear the jury’s decision, and just outside the courtroom, Luc put a respectful hand on Ginny’s arm and drew her aside, his face blank but his eyes vaguely troubled.
“What is it?” she asked under her breath, aware that they were the focus of a number of eyes, paparazzi among them. Ever since that little conversation they had had at the Castle, Luc had treated her with the utmost respect, as an equal – but now he looked at her, and she knew that this time, he didn’t see her, he saw a potential vulnerability, a liability. His words confirmed it for her.
“Ginevra, things may become dangerous, from now on. I think that Draco would be more – comfortable – knowing that you were safe, somewhere far away from here…”
She scowled at him, her Weasley temper and Gryffindoric courage combining to stiffen her spine against the force in Luc’s eyes. “I will not run away from anything that you and Draco stay to face.”
He opened his mouth to argue, but she forestalled him. “And I will not be sent away for my own good. I am twenty-six years old, Luc, old enough to make my own decisions. I will not be packed off like a good, obedient, submissive wife.” She smiled dangerously, her impulsiveness getting the better of her. “And speaking of that, where is Kate?”
But he was not to be diverted. “I don’t doubt that you can defend yourself, but listen, Ginevra. The bond ties you together – what you experience, so too does he, and vice versa.” He lowered his voice until it almost vibrated with intensity. “Listen to me; something is going to happen today. I can feel it, I can almost taste it. Draco cannot afford to be distracted, worrying about you and your safety.”
“I can look after myself,” she hissed softly.
He looked at her rather strangely. “Can you?” he asked, almost to himself, almost as if he had had this conversation before. Perhaps he had. “They will try to use you against him, if you stay. Are you ready for that? Now that you are bonded, if one of you dies, so too does the other – I will not risk his life for your pride and arrogance.” She hid a scowl, but nodded, to show she understood the stakes, and the price. Conceding defeat, he sighed. “Do not get caught.”
She nodded confidently again, but as she walked away, Luc knew that she had no idea of the truth of his words. The Malfoy Soul Bond was their greatest, most terrifying vulnerability – there had been too many Lords who had been brought down because their wives had been taken, or killed; he did not intend to see Draco join their ranks.
And as for Kate, he had made sure that she was well out of this. Far more experienced and with more understanding of the shadow world than Ginevra, she knew all too well the vulnerabilities of the bond; she also knew, after all the long years in Slytherin and the High Clan that she could not, in fact, look after herself. If she had ever been impulsive and Gryffindoric like her twin sister Lily, life and experience had taught her differently.
As they took their seats again, Ginny saw the six renegades and their followers, saw their complete confidence and the arrogance with which they came in; they acted as if they had already won, as if it was a foregone conclusion that Draco would soon be on his way to Azkaban. Remembering Luc’s words, she looked over to him and to his companions, Lestrange and Avery, Andahni and Courtney, to Snape, who sat dourly next to Dumbledore.
They were, all six of them, showing subtle signs of readiness and awareness – the slight, coiled sense of intensity, the humming awareness that seemed to vibrate in the very air around them. But looking around at the rest of the courtroom, she could see no signs that anyone else could sense the tension, sense the potential for sudden violence that was far, far more frightening than the mob had been yesterday.
Somehow, she knew that the mob would be easier to subdue. Harcourt could see it, she noticed – he himself was coiled – as well as some of the other aurors, who were seemingly always ready for trouble, but no one else from the general public. She didn’t know what that meant, whether it was because the High Clan were so different, or because the general public was simply unused to violence, now, and no longer expected it.
Oh, and yes, over there, was Blaise Zabini, his grey-green eyes impassive as they rested on Draco, who was in turn casting his eye over the crowd and searching for something in particular – she realized, after a while, that he was searching for all the people who supported the six renegades. Following his eyes, she saw they were distributed in a semi-circle around the back of the room, prepared to block off all the exits.
What is going on…?
She caught Draco’s eye, and something of her worry must have communicated itself to him, because he nodded reassuringly – it would have had more effect, if she hadn’t seen the fatigue and the concealed worry in his eyes, if she hadn’t felt the tension of the Lords at her back, if she had been more sure of how Zabini would jump.
Then the judge came in, and the noise level died, and with the silence came a new awareness of the tension that ran, invisibly but almost tangibly, throughout the entire courtroom. Luckily for them, the judge was not the long-winded type, and he got straight to business. With a gesture, he ordered the doorman to open the door and let the jury back into the room, and the twelve witches and wizards, most of them middle class, middle income, filed in.
The judge cleared his throat. “Have the jury reached a decision?” he asked in a grave, level voice.
The head juror nodded. “We have.” Conscious of the significance of this case, he cleared his own throat importantly and, with great ceremony, unfolded the parchment scroll that held their decision. The tension in the court was palpable, it was dead silent and no one dared to move a muscle.
“On the charge of the use of forbidden and dark hexes and curses, we find the defendant…not guilty.” A breathy sigh ran through the room, a slight relaxing of tension. But there was still the most important charge to come. “On the charge of the murder of Gerald Tarrant, we find the defendant…”
“NOW!!!” A voice shouted, and simultaneously, every single one of the renegades’ supporters came to their feet and intoned the one word, “Incendio!” while the renegades themselves spoke the words that opened the aetheric plane – and allowed a spell cast here to take effect in six places at once.
All at exactly the same time, six out of the Thirteen Locks, the Groves that anchored the workings of the Great Binding, went up in magical flames, fire that ignored the rules of nature and burned everything it touched to ash. The foundations of wizarding Britain, which had been established with the advent of the High Clan two and a half thousand years ago, began to shift…
The world…ripped…as if a hole was torn in a veil, allowing a glimpse of something terrifying, something unimaginably ancient, awakening…
The Covenants shattered, and the threads of magic thus freed backlashed…The balance hung, tilted, tilting, sliding out of control, six locks broken, six locks holding, and one…one more holding…precariously, it stabilized, and the hole torn in the veil remained as it was, the foundations groaned, but held…But the magical backlash all came back on the centre, on the balance point, with all the force that had been released when the bonds had been cut…
Draco’s whole body jerked, convulsed, and so, unknowing, did Ginny’s – but she couldn’t feel it, caught up as she was in Draco’s mind.
The centre was the strongest, the most powerful…but even so, it was rocked by the six others impacting it…
Blood trickled from Malfoy’s nose, from his eyes and his ears and his mouth, staining his white, white skin – so, too, did Ginny bleed.
Somehow, the other six locks absorbed the impact, bending almost to breaking point…
Luc bent over Lestrange and Avery, Andahni and Courtney, Snape and Zabini, who had thrown his weight behind the Malfoy at the last minute – they, too, were bleeding, and completely unconscious. He sat back on his heels; a peaceful island in the screaming storm all around him, but his mind was anything but calm. Draco had finally gone beyond his reach – for all his influence, he could do nothing here. He did not rule one of the Thirteen…
For an eternity, the fragile balance hung, precariously, in limbo…six straining against it, six striving to preserve it, and one striving to centre it…
Chapter 21 – The Trial Pt 2: True Perspective
“Mr. Malfoy, how would you describe your relationship with Gerald Tarrant?”
I hated him, with an absolute passion that I haven’t felt since Harry Potter – no, not even that – my hatred for Potter was a boy’s emotion. This was the hatred of a full-grown, fully confident adult…
“I hardly knew the man. We had only met twice before, and for some reason he took me in dislike. I was not pleased with him and his crusade, of course, but apart from that, I was not aware of him as an individual person.”
“Mr. Malfoy, will you please describe the events of the day in question…?”
I killed him. Isn’t that what you want to hear? I killed him, and I reveled in every agonizing scream… But he didn’t say that, of course he didn’t. Instead, he went over the events again, emphasizing how the man had struck Ginevra, the way he had threatened them, if not with words, then certainly with actions.
There was an argument for self-defence, there – he could play the ‘concern for a loved one’s safety’ card, if he cared. Of course, the only problem was the issue of proportionality – essentially, matching the level of his defence to the degree and severity of threat. As much as one might want to, one couldn’t use the Killing Curse on a muggle street kid with a stick. There were only too many people willing to testify that Draco had been an Auror, once, and a lethal one at that; and Tarrant, civilized, sensitive and new age as he was, would have had less than no chance of standing against him. So much for self-defence.
“You attacked him, Mr. Malfoy? It was not the other way around?” Grey eyes watchful, Draco nodded. Oh, he knew where this was going, and where it would lead…
“Tell me, Mr. Malfoy,” Aquinas purred again, “is it not a fundamental tenet of High Clan behaviour, especially Malfoy behaviour, to never, ever, under any circumstances, lose your temper?” The bastard was enjoying this; he had a major grudge against the High Clan somewhere in his background, Draco was sure.
“None of us is perfect, Counselor,” he said, softly,
tauntingly. “Only saints never lose their temper.”
“You claim that when you lost your temper, this time, that you went cold, I think you said. You described it a complete loss of rational thought, and the complete surrender to instinct, but you still managed to restrain yourself to curses that were still relatively legal, that were not strong enough on their own to kill.”
Draco closed his eyes, only for a moment – so weary – and then he looked back up, into Aquinas’ eyes, too tired to be insolent or coy anymore. He nodded.
“So you were angry, because of his recent revelations about you in the Prophet, because he struck Miss We-“ he cut himself, “Lady Malfoy. And you took your anger out on him, in the heat of the moment, before the passion cooled, and in doing so, you inflicted a number of charms of a,” he raised an eyebrow, “dubious morality on Mr. Tarrant, twisting them to cause pain. Only, you say, you didn’t know that he had a pre-existing heart condition, and things went farther than you intended them to.” Aquinas’ smooth, rich voice was decidedly skeptical – and his skepticism was swaying others in the crowd, he could see them raising eyebrows and sneering delicately too.
And what of it? It was, for one of the very few times in his life, the exact truth. He had indeed lost control when he saw the blood on Ginevra’s white skin. and he had deliberately chosen low-level curses designed to inflict maximum pain and minimum real damage. Their relative legality was not deliberate, he had been too far gone to think about such things, but evidently some part of him had been alert, or perhaps it was simply because he had chosen them as an insult, knowing their more conventional applications, or because it had tickled his dark sense of irony.
He had never been a Death Eater, but he been raised by two men who had, and he’d listened to things he shouldn’t have, learned things they would far rather have kept from him, including the deepest, darkest truth of his own capacity for cruelty that had honestly shocked him. But this was the first time he had ever, even subconsciously, given free reign to it. For the first time in his life, he had completely lost control. And look at the consequences.
“I think, Mr. Malfoy,” Aquinas’ voice was intense, now – he was going for the kill, “that you knew exactly what you were doing. And so, I think, did your uncle – why else did he not intervene?” He half turned towards Luc, focusing the spectator’s attention on Luc Malfoy and all that he represented. “He would not have allowed you to go so far unless he saw some benefit, some profit in it…” Luc didn’t react to the deliberate insult, only raising an eyebrow; Draco stiffened, outraged by this completely unwarranted attack.
He moved, drawing the attention back onto him, somehow coiled and intense now, dangerous even in chains and with aurors posted all over the room.
He half rose out of his chair, ignoring the pulled wands and the sudden tension. “Nobody owns me,” he said very clearly, to keep from hissing. “I do not answer to my uncle, or to the de Sauvigny…” He didn’t finish, didn’t say the unspoken ‘or to anyone or anything else’. It would not have been wise. But the damage had been done – they saw the difference, now, between himself and themselves, between the High Clan and the rest of society. They had heard his unspoken words.
The questions continued, relentless and invasive, chipping away his composure, his moral high ground with their intensity and their stark objectivity, reducing tangled, complex issues to stark black and white, yes or no. Reduce everything he had done, everything he was, to such a basic, fundamental level, and what did you have? A murderer. Nothing more, nothing less. Most people preferred to see the world in black and white.
It made things much easier, removed any necessity for them to see beneath the surface, deep into the complexity that lay beneath the apparently tranquil exterior. Quite frankly, they didn’t like dealing with difficult, ambiguous issues…
Aquinas, his rich voice purring in satisfaction, in anticipation of final victory, called his last expert witness to the stand – Dr. Phineas Crane, an academic expert on High Clan lore, Law and behaviour. Crane, who had no High Clan blood of his own, had been fortunate enough to secure the patronage of Richard Clearwater, lesser scion of a lesser Clan, and had based his findings and his writings, such as they were, on the behaviour he had observed amongst the Clearwater and similar other, lesser Clans. Nevertheless, he had a solid reputation among the wider community, if not within the High Clan, and his writings were quite respected and applauded.
An old, almost neurotically precise man, with carefully slicked back white hair and ancient, wire-rimmed spectacles, he looked the part of the shy, reclusive scholar he was. Sometimes, stereotypes held an element of truth.
“Dr Crane,” Aquinas asked, his voice respectful, “could you please tell us in what circumstances the ancient, traditional Law of the High Clan will allow murder?”
Crane tilted his head to the side, an oddly birdlike mannerism. “Well, quite frankly, the Law does not so much as allow murder as justify it under certain, strictly controlled circumstances…” he polished his glasses nervously, unnerved by the scrutiny of so many of the truly powerful Lords, whom he had always scrupulously stayed away from. “First of all,” he stated, his manner pedantic, like the worst kind of schoolmaster, “the perpetrator must be a Clan Lord, or acting on a Clan Lord’s direct order.” He bowed his head oddly in Draco’s direction, acknowledging that Draco met that particular criterion. “Second, the perpetrator, or the man who ultimately orders the death, must have an utterly compelling reason, and be able to prove it, beyond a shadow of a doubt, if his actions are called into account.”
Aquinas nodded. “Mr. Malfoy states that he attacked the victim because Tarrant laid hands on Miss Ginevra Weasley, his fiancée, with the intention of causing her harm and even death. He claims he was only protecting and defending her. In your expert opinion, is that enough to justify such a horrible death, Dr. Crane?”
The doctor’s eyes unfocused, and he stared into the distance, thinking. Any High Clan spectators, who had been steeped in the Law since childhood, concealed their own disgust and their contempt for this scholar who could not even judge such a simple case. The Law, considering that Draco was the Malfoy Lord, that he and Ginevra were bonding, might have allowed a severe beating and could, with Malfoy influence, be stretched to include a death, an execution, but given the differences in their relative magical skill, strength, and knowledge of the Law, and that Ginevra had really been in no danger at all, such a horrific torture-murder was an unnecessary overreaction.
Eventually, in much more complicated language, Dr. Crane came to the same conclusion – really, the only thing that would mitigate this was the fact the Malfoy were known to be possessive of what they thought of as theirs, and that Malfoy in the process of bonding were even more volatile, even more predisposed to emotional displays. But really, the man was hardly a threat…it was understandable, what with all that had been going on, what with the revelation of the unfortunate events of twelve years ago appearing in the newspapers on that very morning, but still… It was that but still that was going to cause all the trouble. They all knew it. And they all wondered what the Malfoy had under his sleeve…
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Blaise Zabini watched in fascination. There had been something different about Draco as he had walked back into the room after the adjournment. Something remote, something untouchable, something…otherworldly.
He had never, ever seen it before – not in his father, not in Luc Malfoy, not in Lucius, not even wholly in Dumbledore – but he knew what it was, nevertheless.
It was the indefinable aura of a true Clan Lord, of a man both humble and supremely self-confident, independent of all allegiances but tied, inextricably, to his obligations, a man strong enough to hold what was his against all comers, but gentle enough not to crush it, utterly fragile as it was… He had known, from seven years with Draco at Hogwarts, that he had the potential to be a great leader, but he had never expected this.
Somehow, between all those who had had some influence on his life – Lucius and Luc and Dumbledore and even Snape – they had created a man worthy of being called Clan Lord. Now all they had to do was make sure their creation didn’t spend the rest of his days in Azkaban, and that there would be a Clan left for him to rule, after the troubles that were coming whether Draco won the trial or not.
He looked out of the corner of his eye at Rayden Lestrange and Brandon Avery, two figures who had seemed god-like when he had been child, who were still god-like now – only he was not as afraid of them as he was of Luc Malfoy – to see whether they knew something of what was going on, if they had any clue how the Malfoy were going to get out of this.
But Lestrange and Avery only watched Draco with strangely avid, hungry eyes, as if they were yearning for something they couldn’t name, for something they hadn’t even known they were searching for.
Perhaps, perhaps they could call it faith – belief in something they had always dreamed of, in something they had never thought to see. So much of High Clan culture was built around the idea of a Clan Lord, but not one of them had ever known a true one, not a Lord in the oldest sense; by the time they had been old enough to understand, the corruption of the High Clan had already begun, and in Blaise’s case, well and truly advanced…
They were not Gryffindors, to dream of gallantry and chivalry. But they had heroes, nevertheless, chief among them Brandon Andenais, who, for all his ruthlessness, had led his followers through the wilderness, had walked beside them all the way, had supported them when they tired, had carried them when they fell. They called him Faithless, because of his acts against the original inhabitants of this land. But he had kept the faith with his followers, at least, no matter his other betrayals, his other sins…
Oh, the Slytherin High Clan boys hadn’t dreamed of Godric Gryffindor, or of any of the other English folk heroes the Gryffindors so worshipped. But they had had other ideals, other, darker, more shadowed, more ambiguous myths – the Goddess and her Consort, who gave his blood and his life in times of famine and war; the Fisher King, whose wounded body represented the earth, and who bled, continuously, as a symbol of renewal; the Good Son, who had been sacrificed, so that his death might bring life to the world once more.
Artos the warrior-king, who at the moment of his greatest triumph, had sown the seeds of his own destruction by lying with his own sister in her guise as a priestess of the Lady, fathering the son who would eventually kill him. Just so did the cycle of death and rebirth replay over and over, and just so did every man’s actions determine his eventual end – the price that all must pay for that most precious and dangerous gift of all, free will.
Not, Blaise thought, that this situation was in any way comparable to those…shaking his head to clear it of the mysticism he was all too prone to, he ignored the primitive thrill that ran down his spine when he looked into Draco’s eyes, shook off the eerie recognition that was entirely at odds to his modern, civilised mind. He looked over to Dumbledore to see his reaction to the Malfoy Lord – but saw, instead, that the old man was watching him with those blue, too-perceptive eyes.
He felt as if they could see straight through him. How did he know? How could Dumbledore know what he was thinking, his innermost, most utterly secret thoughts and dreams? He had never, ever spoken of his yearning to anyone, let alone to the Headmaster, or to the Slytherin boys he had gone to school with – but somehow the old man could see it, could see the hunger, the yearning…
And he pitied them for it. He pitied them. For their dreams. For their wishes, their deepest, darkest hopes that they had never, ever dared voice; he pitied them all, proud and powerful lords, because they had always dreamed of something they couldn’t have, dreamed of something sacred in this all too profane world. Dreamed of purity, when their whole world had been tainted before birth…
And now, when they had seen it, when they had seen everything they could ever have dreamed of and it was within their grasp, it was in danger of being destroyed. Could the Zabini remain neutral and watch from the sidelines as the High Clan tore itself apart?
Yes, his Clan had been neutral for two and a half thousand years. Yes, he had been brought up to stand apart, just as surely as Draco had been brought up to stand in the middle, but what good was neutrality when the whole system is falling down around your ears? His original ancestor had known, when he had made his choice of the lonely burden of neutrality, that some day it would come to the point where a Zabini would have to make the choice again.
His Clan, or the High Clan? Safe neutrality, on the sidelines, or partisanship that would put him in the front lines of the conflict. He knew they would not judge him, no matter which choice he made – such was the reputation they had built for themselves, over the centuries – but could he live with himself if, by his inaction, he ushered in the end of everything his ancestors had fought so hard to build, and then to preserve?
No. No, and no, and no. He would not let their only hope of salvation die, either in Azkaban at the hands of the Dementors, or in the mystic agony that came from a snapped Covenant; not when he stood a chance of preventing it.
************************************************
The next day they came back to hear the jury’s decision, and just outside the courtroom, Luc put a respectful hand on Ginny’s arm and drew her aside, his face blank but his eyes vaguely troubled.
“What is it?” she asked under her breath, aware that they were the focus of a number of eyes, paparazzi among them. Ever since that little conversation they had had at the Castle, Luc had treated her with the utmost respect, as an equal – but now he looked at her, and she knew that this time, he didn’t see her, he saw a potential vulnerability, a liability. His words confirmed it for her.
“Ginevra, things may become dangerous, from now on. I think that Draco would be more – comfortable – knowing that you were safe, somewhere far away from here…”
She scowled at him, her Weasley temper and Gryffindoric courage combining to stiffen her spine against the force in Luc’s eyes. “I will not run away from anything that you and Draco stay to face.”
He opened his mouth to argue, but she forestalled him. “And I will not be sent away for my own good. I am twenty-six years old, Luc, old enough to make my own decisions. I will not be packed off like a good, obedient, submissive wife.” She smiled dangerously, her impulsiveness getting the better of her. “And speaking of that, where is Kate?”
But he was not to be diverted. “I don’t doubt that you can defend yourself, but listen, Ginevra. The bond ties you together – what you experience, so too does he, and vice versa.” He lowered his voice until it almost vibrated with intensity. “Listen to me; something is going to happen today. I can feel it, I can almost taste it. Draco cannot afford to be distracted, worrying about you and your safety.”
“I can look after myself,” she hissed softly.
He looked at her rather strangely. “Can you?” he asked, almost to himself, almost as if he had had this conversation before. Perhaps he had. “They will try to use you against him, if you stay. Are you ready for that? Now that you are bonded, if one of you dies, so too does the other – I will not risk his life for your pride and arrogance.” She hid a scowl, but nodded, to show she understood the stakes, and the price. Conceding defeat, he sighed. “Do not get caught.”
She nodded confidently again, but as she walked away, Luc knew that she had no idea of the truth of his words. The Malfoy Soul Bond was their greatest, most terrifying vulnerability – there had been too many Lords who had been brought down because their wives had been taken, or killed; he did not intend to see Draco join their ranks.
And as for Kate, he had made sure that she was well out of this. Far more experienced and with more understanding of the shadow world than Ginevra, she knew all too well the vulnerabilities of the bond; she also knew, after all the long years in Slytherin and the High Clan that she could not, in fact, look after herself. If she had ever been impulsive and Gryffindoric like her twin sister Lily, life and experience had taught her differently.
As they took their seats again, Ginny saw the six renegades and their followers, saw their complete confidence and the arrogance with which they came in; they acted as if they had already won, as if it was a foregone conclusion that Draco would soon be on his way to Azkaban. Remembering Luc’s words, she looked over to him and to his companions, Lestrange and Avery, Andahni and Courtney, to Snape, who sat dourly next to Dumbledore.
They were, all six of them, showing subtle signs of readiness and awareness – the slight, coiled sense of intensity, the humming awareness that seemed to vibrate in the very air around them. But looking around at the rest of the courtroom, she could see no signs that anyone else could sense the tension, sense the potential for sudden violence that was far, far more frightening than the mob had been yesterday.
Somehow, she knew that the mob would be easier to subdue. Harcourt could see it, she noticed – he himself was coiled – as well as some of the other aurors, who were seemingly always ready for trouble, but no one else from the general public. She didn’t know what that meant, whether it was because the High Clan were so different, or because the general public was simply unused to violence, now, and no longer expected it.
Oh, and yes, over there, was Blaise Zabini, his grey-green eyes impassive as they rested on Draco, who was in turn casting his eye over the crowd and searching for something in particular – she realized, after a while, that he was searching for all the people who supported the six renegades. Following his eyes, she saw they were distributed in a semi-circle around the back of the room, prepared to block off all the exits.
What is going on…?
She caught Draco’s eye, and something of her worry must have communicated itself to him, because he nodded reassuringly – it would have had more effect, if she hadn’t seen the fatigue and the concealed worry in his eyes, if she hadn’t felt the tension of the Lords at her back, if she had been more sure of how Zabini would jump.
Then the judge came in, and the noise level died, and with the silence came a new awareness of the tension that ran, invisibly but almost tangibly, throughout the entire courtroom. Luckily for them, the judge was not the long-winded type, and he got straight to business. With a gesture, he ordered the doorman to open the door and let the jury back into the room, and the twelve witches and wizards, most of them middle class, middle income, filed in.
The judge cleared his throat. “Have the jury reached a decision?” he asked in a grave, level voice.
The head juror nodded. “We have.” Conscious of the significance of this case, he cleared his own throat importantly and, with great ceremony, unfolded the parchment scroll that held their decision. The tension in the court was palpable, it was dead silent and no one dared to move a muscle.
“On the charge of the use of forbidden and dark hexes and curses, we find the defendant…not guilty.” A breathy sigh ran through the room, a slight relaxing of tension. But there was still the most important charge to come. “On the charge of the murder of Gerald Tarrant, we find the defendant…”
“NOW!!!” A voice shouted, and simultaneously, every single one of the renegades’ supporters came to their feet and intoned the one word, “Incendio!” while the renegades themselves spoke the words that opened the aetheric plane – and allowed a spell cast here to take effect in six places at once.
All at exactly the same time, six out of the Thirteen Locks, the Groves that anchored the workings of the Great Binding, went up in magical flames, fire that ignored the rules of nature and burned everything it touched to ash. The foundations of wizarding Britain, which had been established with the advent of the High Clan two and a half thousand years ago, began to shift…
The world…ripped…as if a hole was torn in a veil, allowing a glimpse of something terrifying, something unimaginably ancient, awakening…
The Covenants shattered, and the threads of magic thus freed backlashed…The balance hung, tilted, tilting, sliding out of control, six locks broken, six locks holding, and one…one more holding…precariously, it stabilized, and the hole torn in the veil remained as it was, the foundations groaned, but held…But the magical backlash all came back on the centre, on the balance point, with all the force that had been released when the bonds had been cut…
Draco’s whole body jerked, convulsed, and so, unknowing, did Ginny’s – but she couldn’t feel it, caught up as she was in Draco’s mind.
The centre was the strongest, the most powerful…but even so, it was rocked by the six others impacting it…
Blood trickled from Malfoy’s nose, from his eyes and his ears and his mouth, staining his white, white skin – so, too, did Ginny bleed.
Somehow, the other six locks absorbed the impact, bending almost to breaking point…
Luc bent over Lestrange and Avery, Andahni and Courtney, Snape and Zabini, who had thrown his weight behind the Malfoy at the last minute – they, too, were bleeding, and completely unconscious. He sat back on his heels; a peaceful island in the screaming storm all around him, but his mind was anything but calm. Draco had finally gone beyond his reach – for all his influence, he could do nothing here. He did not rule one of the Thirteen…
For an eternity, the fragile balance hung, precariously, in limbo…six straining against it, six striving to preserve it, and one striving to centre it…
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