Switched

"No...you simply considered Danny's education a greater priority...why? To prepare him for what?" She paused.

Dumbledore refused to say, but that didn't really matter, because apparently Fawkes thought Druella deserved to know...whatever the reason was. His cooing warble was accompanied by a heavy sense of certainty, not unlike Harry had felt on first seeing Druella, but much bigger, wider-reaching and...more significant, maybe.

The witch's head snapped around to fix on the bird. "There was a prophecy?"

"Fawkes!" Dumbledore complained, earning him glares from both the phoenix and the witch.

The bird chittered at him for a moment, in a way Harry thought sounded disapproving, though he couldn't make out anything more than that — phoenix was really different from any other language he'd ever heard. Druella and Dumbledore clearly understood it, though. And Fawkes equally obviously understood English, which was weird. Before today, Harry hadn't realised that phoenixes were that smart, let alone that they had their own language.

Oh, yes, they're intelligent beings, and of course exceptionally long-lived, on the order of thousands of years. Most people consider them to be lesser fae, though truthfully the distinction between greater and lesser fae is completely arbitrary. The population here is most likely colonial in origin — there are only about three-hundred in any given timeline of this universe, and they reproduce only about once every hundred renewal-cycles, which is to say every three-hundred to nine-hundred years. The natural progress of the renewal cycle slows as they age. They can be killed if the renewal cycle is interrupted enough times before it is able to complete naturally or if they are consumed, though I believe humans and goblins, various groups of whom have been known to hunt them for their feathers, are their only predators in this plane.

They feed on magic, heat, and sunlight, and so tend to settle in highly magical, equatorial regions, or occasionally attach themselves to extremely powerful individual mages to explore other climates. There is a myth that they associate only with the pure of heart, like unicorns, or those naturally inclined to light magic — and it is true they find truly dark magic uncomfortable to associate with, much as you find the lightness of Sunset Flare's magic to be discomfiting — but truly they prefer "fire" personalities as companions — highly reactive, self-righteous individuals. They also often associate with veela, whose history is kept almost religiously from outsiders, but their magics and their languages are so similar one does have to wonder exactly how much influence phoenixes had on the development of the younger species.

And you? Harry asked, somewhat amused.

What about me?

Do they also associate with you? Because you clearly speak their language and know a lot about them...

I don't speak their language. I know just enough to mimic certain phrases, like hello, Sunset Flare, lovely to see you again. I do speak the Aquitanian and Cretan dialects of the Speech — the veela language — passably well, however, and they — phoenixes are hermaphroditic — switched to that language immediately after I greeted them. I also wouldn't say phoenixes in general are particularly fond of me. I've only spoken to one at any length, a relatively young individual known as Desert at High Noon, who hadn't yet been outside of the Sahara, but most people are willing to hold a conversation or two with a curious visitor so long as they are polite, and Desert at High Noon was equally curious about humans.

Oh. So what's Fawkes saying to Dumbledore?

That I have no ill intent toward him, and if I'm offering to help him Albus would be a fool not to accept, because he's in over his head and Sunset Flare doesn't want to see him hurt trying to disentangle this situation himself. Sunset Flare also thinks that the prophecy in question has been fulfilled, though Albus clearly doesn't.

"What exactly were the contents of this prophecy which demanded the original Harry Potter be raised with all possible advantages?" she asked aloud, addressing (Harry thought) the phoenix. "What event or challenge did you intend Andromeda to prepare him to face? And did you inform Andromeda that she was to do so?" Oh, maybe addressing Dumbledore, then. "Or did you simply assume she would raise him as the Blacks raised her — that he would arrive here fully qualified to take his OWLs, debate politics and history with sitting members of the Wizengamot, and defend his own life with deadly force if necessary? Because that was the product of a training regimen I have since been informed was absolutely psychotic. As such, I assure you, the only one of my daughters who would be inclined to pressure a child to achieve the same standards they were held to as children themselves is Bellatrix. Andromeda considered their lessons excessive in hindsight as soon as she realised the standard to which other children were held — she was rather upset about it, actually — and Narcissa once opined that it doesn't matter if Draco is prepared to take over House Malfoy by the age of fifteen as long as he knows that he's loved and has some inherent value as a person."

Draco has some inherent value as a person? This was the first Harry had heard any such thing. He could understand if Narcissa loved him like Aunt Petunia loved Dudley, in spite of his general uselessness, but...

No — Draco may theoretically have some inherent value as a person if and when he develops into an actual person, which I have serious doubts about his ability to do.

Harry was completely unable to stop himself laughing at that, and trying only led to a very loud, very obvious snort. Both adults and the bird turned to stare at him. "Um, sorry. Just...nothing. Funny thought. Please, carry on."

Fawkes cocked his — their — head to one side in what Harry read as a suspicious way, before turning to Druella and apparently answering her question with a long series of trills and whistles and subtle, complex pulses of magic Harry really couldn't follow at all. When the bird finished, Dumbledore looked positively grim, and Druella looked annoyed.

"I will grant that the events surrounding Samhain of Nineteen Eighty-One would fulfil the core points of the prophecy in question, suggesting that Lily's son being the subject is a valid interpretation — though I would lean toward identifying Lily herself as the proximal saviour with the boy's existence as a motivating factor, rather than considering the boy the primary agent of Thom's downfall. Which part of this, exactly, do you believe remains unfulfilled?"

"The part where neither can live while the other survives, Druella! Those were the words, I heard them myself! Harry — Danny — is not safe while Lord Voldemort yet lives, and as he is not truly dead — as I'm sure you are aware, knowing that despicable man — when he manages to return to power he will stop at nothing to ensure that the boy with the power to vanquish him is eliminated! Danny must be prepared to defend himself, yes, but also to hone the power the Dark Lord has never held — the power of love, which motivated Lily's sacrifice and protects him to this day—"

This time it was a snort from Druella which interrupted. "Oh, he needs to hone the Power of Love, does he? Well, in that case, you ought to have had him raised by Mirabella."

"This is not a laughing matter!" Dumbledore snapped. "And Mirabella Zabini is a cold-hearted snake who knows nothing of love!"

"Mirabella is a complicated young woman who is far more emotional than the face she shows the world as Director Zabini, but that was a sex joke, Albus. Because this is a laughing matter. Sunset Flare is correct: Thom has already been effectively vanquished. All that remains is to mop up the pieces — and now that his power has been broken there is no reason that cannot be accomplished by any number of others. You yourself could have done so well before now, I suspect, if you had bothered to try."

"Sadly, Druella, I am certain that is not the case. I spoke to the Seer who made the prophecy after she came out of her trance, showed her the memory, and her interpretation was—"

"You did what?" Dumbledore froze at Druella's astonished interruption. "Why? What on earth were you thinking?"

"I was thinking, Druella, that as a prophecy is interpreted and expressed through the mind of the Seer who communicates it, that Seer might have some insight into the way their words ought to be interpreted — associations, assumptions, and biases of their own which might have influenced the words they chose, and what was actually meant by them."

Druella blinked at him. "Okay, that's actually...reasonably logical. If I had communicated the prophecy in question, it would be a perfectly valid method to attempt to find the most likely interpretation. Unfortunately, I'm the exception, not the rule: Seers tend not to be the most logical, self-aware individuals."

Wait, does that mean you're a Seer? Harry asked.

Yes. Technically. So are you — that's how you could tell my furniture and clothing are conjured, and why my actions seem fated to you. I prefer to minimise the peripheral fuzziness and uncertainty which surround me as much as possible, which means acting as decisively and consistently as possible. I'm also an arithmancer and diviner, however — I've never been one to make intuitive claims; all of my predictions are backed by divination and arithmancy which require no special talent to achieve or verify — so no one suggested that most of my peculiarities would be explained if I were in fact a Seer until I took my current post at the College in Nineteen Eighty-One. Despite having already been treated as an oracle for the better part of thirty years by then.

"Prophecies made in a trance state are exclusively the realm of Seers who personify magic because they can't comprehend the things they See without doing so — and moreover can't consciously comprehend even what their personal reflections of Magic attempt to communicate without being possessed by said imaginary friends."

How does that work? And what's the difference between an oracle and a Seer?

"Seer" is a less precise term, referring to anyone who intuitively gathers information about things and people through magic. Psychometry, legilimency, the various types of instinctive clairvoyance, and arguably magesight are considered to be related traits. People tend to think of "the Sight" specifically as some combination of psychometry and clairvoyance, ultimately stemming from a degree of disalignment between the Seer's soul and the plane they are born into, which gives them a slightly different perspective on time than most people native to a given plane.

So, Harry was going to go ahead and say that his earlier thought about Dru not being entirely a part of this world was absolutely accurate. Though, apparently he wasn't, either? Trippy...

Oracles are better thought of as members of a vocation than individuals sharing a specific magical talent. They're generally clairvoyants who have a conscious or semiconscious ability to access their talent at a time-scale useful for answering petitioners' questions and giving advice, but ritualists who have an established relationship with a particular Aspect of Magic which has an interest in sharing knowledge can also act as oracles. We could spend hours on the differences between Seers and ritualists, and characterising their relationships with magic, psychological and magical traits which make it more likely for an oracle become a medium — to be involuntarily possessed by or voluntarily channel an Aspect to allow it to communicate with others directly — and why, but suffice to say, most oracles answer questions by relaying them to some Aspect — either personal or autonomous — and interpreting its response for the petitioner.

But that's not what you do.

No. Serving as an oracle is often considered a very religious or spiritual calling. Some would call the fact that an oracle speaks for an Aspect to be the defining feature of the vocation. 'Petitioners' treat me as an oracle, asking questions and seeking advice, but most oracles would say I'm not one of them. I'm actually considered somewhat of an obnoxious, arrogant anti-theist in Seer circles, because I've never really seen the point in developing a personal reflection of Magic to stand between myself and reality, and I've never been shy about saying as much. When someone asks me a question, I scry relevant events — both historical and across potential timelines — and construct arithmantic models to predict the relative likelihood of different outcomes.

"Since you generally consider my entire field to be approximately as meaningful and useful as cloud gazing, I suspect you must know that spontaneous prophecies almost always concern certainties surrounding particular events or individuals, and are generally expressed to one or more of the individuals directly involved or affected to have paid it any attention at all. The irony, of course, being that your usual approach of ignoring any and all advice would actually have been the most reasonable response to witnessing this particular event."

Dumbledore sighed. "Yes. I will admit that I have very little use for divination, generally speaking, but it was...very difficult to ignore a prophecy such as that. And in any case, I could hardly ignore it when it was overheard, and at least some of the contents reported to Voldemort."

A smirk pulled at Dru's lips. "Was it really?"

"Indeed." The old wizard glowered, apparently not seeing what was funny here. Harry didn't either, but he suspected Dru was going to tell them.

"That's somewhat hilarious. Also, please don't call him by that ridiculous nom de guerre. His birth-name was Riddle, if you prefer to avoid sounding as though you were ever on familiar terms with him."

From the way Dumbledore flinched at that, eyes widening slightly, then narrowing behind gold rims, Harry was going to guess he'd already known that, but hadn't expected anyone else to. Dru ignored it, though, and Harry wanted to know what the deal was with prophecies, so he didn't interrupt.

"Generally the certainties referred to in a prophecy are a set of potential sequences of choices and events, all of which lead to a specific outcome, but which may involve different individual actors and have different peripheral consequences. Most of them are simply observations sparked when the last remaining timeline bud which would prevent a true canalisation of the events in question becomes an impossibility. The leading theory is that the pseudo-consciousnesses through which less cognisant Seers mediate their observation of the Tapestry, routinely petitioned by their Seer or medium to reveal information with a greater degree of certainty and specificity than they really can, are so eager to actually communicate something certain that they volunteer the information. It doesn't sound quite right to me, but no one wants my thoughts on how their imaginary friends work, so I haven't bothered trying to figure out exactly how it's off."

So, when Bella told...whoever was actually pregnant with me before she killed her — I didn't catch her name, but she looked like you — that she owed Magic a child and a life for letting a Seer die, and she should've lit a candle and asked for advice, that was what she meant? Appealing to some personal projection, imaginary friend thing?

She did what?

Harry waited patiently while Dru sought out his memory of the memory the Family Magic had shown him through the Mabon ritual and the (relatively) long silence which followed. (Thought-conversations happened much more quickly than normal, audible conversations.)

...I should probably be more upset that Bella murdered Priscilla — the woman who bore you was my youngest sister — and I don't even want to think about how she might have managed to ensure that Priscilla carried you to term in spite of what had to have been a significant degree of magical incompatability between you, but she should have asked me what the hell was wrong with her daughter. No one mentioned Adelaide's illness to me until after she died. Granted, I wasn't aware at the time that I was a Seer myself, but it likely would have been obvious that she was psychometrically overwhelmed. And in any case, I find myself a bit distracted by the Black Family Magic referring to me as fae.

Oh, right. Harry had forgotten about that — a comment about Bella being more otherworldly than Dru, or something, for feeding him with blood and magic instead of nursing him, which she couldn't have anyway. He was guessing he wasn't going to get an answer to his question, then?

The Family Magic wasn't present for Bella's birth, Druella noted absently. (Apparently not.) I refused to deliver her under its wards because I was convinced I would die if I came too close to bleeding out — or any number of other horrible potential childbed cum deathbed fates — while surrounded by magic as malicious as that. I gave her soulfire as well, when my mother gave her back to me to suckle, and Mother proceeded to have a fit because apparently instinctively attempting to nurture a new soul with energy unpolluted by the mundane is more horrifying than allowing the parasitic creature to continue cannibalising one's physical body even after it's delivered.

Harry caught a flash of memory: Dru lying in bed, exhausted, slightly delirious, and on the verge of tears because the only part of this whole reproduction ordeal which had felt right and not painful or traumatising or simply humiliating was apparently wrong, and her mother was shouting at her, disgusted and horrified, and she had taken Dru's child, just...snatched it away, after all the work she'd put into producing it, its tiny, brilliant soul burning with potential, giving voice to her frustrations with its shrill cries.

"Give it back, Mother! It's mine, I made it, you have no right—"

"It?! She's a person, Druella! A little baby girl! What kind of freak forces a newborn infant to subsume raw magic instead of nursing her like a normal person? What would your husband think?! Babies need to eat, Druella! If you won't do it, Claudia will! She needs a wet-nurse, and—"

"Fine!" Druella snapped, breaking down. She didn't have the energy to fight, let alone try to explain. "Fine, just– just go! I can't— Just take it! Take it away and leave me alone!"

"I don't know where I went wrong with you, Druella, I really don't..."

The woman who must be Harry's great-grandmother, whom he sort of hated as of right now, gave Dru one last disappointed-terrified-how-did-my-child-grow-up-to-be-this-monster look, and then she was gone, and the baby, and Dru was left alone to cry and hate herself for not being able to do even this one most basic human thing right.

...And it really took the Family Magic casually referring to you as fae for you to think maybe literally everyone else might have a point about you not being human?

Honestly? The Rosiers tend to be a bit...peculiar. My pervasive, irrational perception of the world around me and my own physical body as imperfect and repulsive isn't actually that strange, if my father's family are taken as the norm...

Dumbledore had just said something Harry hadn't caught, and was staring at Druella as though he expected an answer.

What was I... Oh, yes. Death being petty. She wrenched her focus back to the present moment and the audible conversation, breaking off the legilimency contact she had been maintaining with Harry so he wouldn't distract her again.

"No, just a tangential thought. Nothing relevant. Most of the time, spontaneous mediated prophecies are completely pointless, and attempting to subvert them or control the means by which they are realised equally so.

"In some cases, however, rather than communicating the observations of their personal envisionment of Magic or Fate, whatever they call it, a Seer is possessed by an autonomous Aspect with its own agenda to communicate a prophecy which only becomes certain by the fact of its communication — so-called self-fulfilling prophecies. Given that you say the prophecy was reported to Thom, and that I know most of the precautions he took against being killed were tied to his physical body — deteriorating mental faculties aside, he had very few weaknesses by the time his daughter managed to undermine him — it seems a reasonable conjecture that one or more Aspects deliberately coordinated the sequence of events. My money would be on Death. Samhain of Seventy-Nine certainly suggested that Power had taken an interest in young Lily, and Thom had a rather pervasive habit of using mind-magic to make people believe him when he made outrageous claims for rhetorical purposes — that he had managed to circumvent death, for example, and made himself immortal.

"All of which suggests to me that the consequences we mortals are so concerned with — the cessation of our war with its very real stakes and consequences, subsequent political developments, whether there is or is not a nation of New Avalon, perhaps going back as far as Lily's conception — are merely peripheral effects of a sequence of events whose primary goal was to impart a very petty reminder to Thom that he too is in fact mortal and would do well to stop telling people he's not, or at least stop enforcing the point with mind magic." She paused, grinning. "I don't know about you, but I always find it amusing how very human gods can be."

Well, when she put it like that, it sort of was. Harry found himself giggling, which earned him a stern look from Dumbledore.

"He isn't dead yet, though," the old man pointed out, far less amused than either Harry or Dru.

"No, but he is now far more vulnerable, and will be for quite some time, even after regaining a body. It does, after all, take time to procure or create a vessel which will not be corrupted by prolonged possession, and many of the rituals he initially used to protect himself can only be used once. The potentials he sacrificed to realise them are already gone.

"And in light of this interpretation, I withdraw my earlier criticism. It seems whatever your Seer told you did turn out to be a valid interpretation. For future reference, however, it's considered extremely poor form to ask a Seer to interpret their own trance-mediated prophecy — it's hardly useful, since Seers who are unaware of their own biases are most likely to reinforce those biases in interpreting an already inspecific prophecy, and most Seers are acutely aware that, while the ultimate events prophesied in a trance are inevitable, their interpretation can have an enormous effect on the specific chain of events which fulfils the prophecy and therefore the peripheral consequences as well. Asking them to interpret a prophecy on top of communicating it in the first place has exponentially detrimental effects on their psychological wellbeing because they are not sufficiently confident in themselves to counter the guilt associated with actively altering the course of history. It's simply not done."

"But giving unsolicited advice is?"

Dru raised an eyebrow at the old man's peevish tone. "I have never lacked self-confidence, Albus, not when it comes to predicting probabilities. And I am not some half-blind medium drunk on poppy tea or alcohol to numb her to the constant echoes and potentialities surrounding her at all times, unaware of her own thread in the Tapestry. I make the best choices I can, as evaluated by my principles in the context of the information available to me at the time. I commit to them, and while I may correct course as information becomes available, I refuse to second-guess myself.

"In this case, I am advising you to listen to your companion — the prophecy in question has almost certainly already been fulfilled — out of a concern for the futures of my grandson and the boy whose destinies you have entangled. If all you wanted was for Harry Potter to grow up safe from retaliation from Bellatrix, in a loving home and out of the public view, congratulations, that goal has been accomplished. If you wanted Eridanus Black to grow up unaware of the Dark, that was never going to happen. He's a Black.

"While Thom does pose a threat to at least one of the boys, he is hardly an immediate threat — and neither is he a threat which cannot be dealt with by someone other than Harry Potter, regardless of whether he was the subject of your prophecy or not. It would, in fact, be incredibly irresponsible for you to leave the threat he poses unaddressed, awaiting the maturation of your appointed boy-hero."

"While I will admit I am no expert in divination, my dear, I find I simply cannot agree with you on that point. Is it not true that the person to whom a prophecy is made normally has an intuition for when it has been fulfilled?"

"It is, but you're the least intuitive person I've ever met, Albus, so forgive me if I fail to trust the strength of your feelings on the matter. I do not expect you to address the problem, I simply wished to note explicitly that the decision is in keeping with every other you've made with respect to the boys."

Dumbledore glowered at her — more offended, Harry thought, by the matter-of-factness with which she called him irresponsible and unintuitive than by the assessment of his character itself.

She ignored him, of course. "The greatest problem at the moment, since I understand both Harry and Danny are now aware of their respective identities, is that they are currently thought to be each other by practically everyone else, which will make it exceedingly difficult for either to claim their respective Houses when they come of age. Since I presume you have no intention of marrying them to each other, you will need to switch them back at some point, and the longer you put it off the more difficult it will be — every day they masquerade as each other is another day they become further entangled with others as each other. Moreover, the longer you wait, the more it will seem you were attempting to meddle in both Houses' succession. Given that you so adamantly refused to share your plan to do so, or even assure me that you have such a plan, I am forced to conclude that you do not.

"This is a far greater problem with Eridanus Black than Harry Potter. If 'Daniel Tonks' announces when he comes of age that he was really Harry Potter all along, takes a blood test to confirm it, and affirms that he was raised in a loving home and educated as he ought to have been, no one will think the worse of you for arranging for him to grow up out of the spotlight. Some of the Light may think Andromeda a questionable choice of guardian, but I expect most of them will understand that your pro-muggleborn sensibilities and disdain for tradition inclined you to place him with the only family you know of who could train him as the heir to a Noble House but also give him a commoner's perspective on life and society. If 'Harry Potter' announces when he comes of age that he was really Eridanus Black, was raised by muggles, and has no idea how to act the part of a Lord of a Noble House, there will be a scandal — even if it doesn't come out that he was subjected to abusive childhood memory alterations, and Morrigan knows what else you've neglected over the past decade.

"It would likely be better for Harry's prospects not to be widely known as Bellatrix's child. It would be simple enough to claim he truly is Sirius's bastard on some long-dead muggleborn, and imply that he was raised by her family until this year. Sirius may be considered equally mad by some, but his character is far more salvageable. Having lost one's mind temporarily in grief at the loss of one's beloved liege is a much more romantic reason for having committed murder than because one simply enjoys killing people, and you know as well as I do that he was never a spy."

"A spy, perhaps not," Dumbledore admitted. "But he certainly betrayed the Potters. Quite aside from Peter's dying declaration, he held the key to one of the spells we used to conceal the Potters' location. No one could have found them without his assistance. I'm afraid it is true that he betrayed them, regardless of his relationship with James. Why, I simply cannot fathom, but..."

"Well you could ask him," Dru suggested. "I was hardly keeping up with events over here at the time, but I sincerely doubt he could have done so intentionally. Not would have, could have. He broke with the House of Black. That doesn't mean he managed to break his conditioning to find a place for himself in a feudal hierarchy. From what Narcissa told me about her cousins' lives, it was fairly clear Sirius had given his loyalty to James Potter with the same degree of moderation he ever did anything else — which is to say, none.

"I have no idea how those ridiculous rumours about his being the Dark Lord's Right Hand started — you would do well to arrange a public trial to establish that he was not and that the only murders he committed outside of open conflict with the Death Eaters were those of Pettigrew and the Edinburgh bystanders before doing so. Whether he is capable of testifying on his own behalf after ten years of dementor exposure, I don't know — I haven't spoken to him at any length since he was nine years old — but I shouldn't be surprised if he is. He was never terribly stable to begin with, but he had the stubbornness and strength of character to withstand and resist the years of psychological torture he was subjected to as a child without breaking, and I don't imagine dementors are as creative as the Blacks. If he hasn't fallen into a melancholic episode and starved himself to death, he likely retains some semblance of logical faculties.

"To explain his ersatz son posing as Harry on rejoining our world, I suggest you wait to reveal the boys until after we have dealt with Thom — by we, I mean Harry and I, not you—"

"You and Harry?"

"Yes. He was the one who brought the problem to my attention. In deference to the fact that he is only slightly less useless than most eleven-year-olds, I will walk him through solving it, but he won't learn anything if I simply do it for him. It shouldn't take too long, I expect."

Dumbledore gave her a very doubtful look. "I am aware that you believe yourself so incredibly superior to we humble mortals as to be able to do literally everything better than everyone else, Druella—" Dru scoffed. "—but if it were a simple matter which could be quickly resolved, I assure you I would have done so before now. I suspect he must have some esoteric soul anchor to persist on this plane when his body has been thoroughly destroyed."

"Hmm, yes. Horcruxes. Five, I believe."

The old man blanched. "Five?"

"My understanding is that he altered the ritual after the first to avoid the Kegorian Effect," Dru noted blandly. Harry wasn't sure if she was deliberately misinterpreting Dumbledore's shock, but he was pretty sure it was the fact that there were five of these things stopping the Dark Lord from dying that was freaking the old wizard out, not the fact that he managed to make five despite what sounded like some magical theory reason he shouldn't be able to.

"And you know this how, precisely?" Dumbledore asked, with what seemed like an unwonted degree of suspicion to Harry.

Dru obviously thought so too, rolling her eyes at him. "Honestly? You know I didn't actively support either side of the war, and I will never forgive Thom for failing to tell me about Cygnus's abuse of Bellatrix before he could harm Andromeda as well, but he was still my only friend for years, trapped in that awful House."

The old man gave her a look that said as clearly as words that he thought she was being naïve. "Tom Riddle was never capable of true friendship, Druella. He was cruel and manipulative even as a child. I feel certain that he was merely using you for his own ends, whatever they may have been."

Dru shrugged. "Call our relationship what you like. I kept his secrets in exchange for his promise not to play with my memories and helped him with some of his projects simply for the joy of having another adult to talk to about magical theory, rather than vapid nonsense."

"You helped him, and yet you claim not to have supported him in the war?" Dumbledore sneered.

"Oh, yes, I'm sure figuring out how to make him look like a human-lamia hybrid and playing with adapting mind magics into charms and glamours was very useful to the war effort," she scoffed. "I daresay I know more about him than any living person save Bellatrix. I'm fairly confident I will be able to locate at least one of his soul-anchors, and then it will be only a matter of time until I find a tracking charm or ritual he didn't think to or couldn't ward against. A year or two at the very most. After Thom is disposed of, it can be publicised that Harry was acting as bait in order to lure him into the open — a position he happily volunteered for, because it sounded like fun."

Harry grinned. "It does sound like fun."

Druella rolled her eyes. "Well, I would hardly expect you to carry off a deception which didn't play to your strengths. This would neatly explain how Harry comes to be the Heir of the House of Black and give you an excuse to have waited until that point to reveal his 'true' identity as James Black, or whatever you decide to call him."

"James is fine," Harry said, shrugging. "It's my middle name now, actually."

The witch nodded. "James, then. I will discuss with Andromeda and Danny whether his identity may also be revealed at that time, but it's hardly urgent and ultimately has no bearing on the plan. Since you will still be expected to produce an Eridanus Black, I strongly suggest that you fabricate evidence of his entirely unsuspicious death several years ago. Telling people he jumped off a fourth-floor balcony because he was manic and absolutely convinced he could fly would be in keeping with the expectations of those who are most likely to care what happened to him — given that most of them knew Bella as a child, and more of them knew of her. Mira and Narcissa will ensure that anyone who questions the story comes to the conclusion that Harry is really Eridanus, rather than the fictitious James, without actually confirming it. I'm sure you know how these things go.

"Those most likely to question the deception are also those most likely to support Eridanus and consider it a travesty that he was raised by muggles. They will, however, forgive your deception and agree to play along — without actually acknowledging as much, of course — because after he was reintroduced to our society under his assumed name, you arranged for me to take custody of him and educate him properly. This should also be acceptable to those who believe him to be James Black — Narcissa and Andromeda were, of course, closer to the heart of the Black Family than I, but one can understand how you would be reluctant to allow anyone to be educated by Narcissa, given how poorly Draco has turned out, and most of the Dark nobles will commend you for refusing to give him to a blatant class traitor like Andromeda.

"It should also be acceptable while he continues to masquerade as Harry Potter. Like you, there will be those who doubt my qualifications as a parent given that Bellatrix chose to become a Dark Lady in her teens rather than marry an appropriate young nobleman, but your confidence in your decision will convince them that their fears are unfounded, and no one doubts the standards of propriety to which I raised the girls, or that they were fully prepared to take on the roles they chose for themselves upon leaving their natal House. There are few people better qualified to bring a child whose pre-Hogwarts education has been entirely neglected up to speed in the few months afforded between Hogwarts terms.

"Any questions?"