Roman Holiday

Chapter Thirty-Two

Slytherin’s smile disappeared as if it had been zapped with an Erasing Charm.

“The Fils du Couteau?” he repeated, looking troubled. “Why would a sweet little thing like you want to know about nasty business like that?”

Sweet little thing? Hermione raised her eyebrows.

Despite Slytherin’s protestations of modernity, she had the feeling Camille Paglia wasn’t heavily represented on his bookshelf.

“I’ve got my reasons,” she said shortly. “What do you know?”

“I know that it’s nothing I want to talk about,” he said flatly. “That’s one potential disaster that’s in the past, and it’s going to stay there. That little ditty you sang me isn’t worth that kind of information, anyway.”

Hermione glared at him, irritated. “A deal’s a deal, Salazar,” she said. “I handed over the tune - now pony up.” At his mulish look, she slid out of her chair and went over to him. “Look,” she said. “I’m only asking about this because I need to know.”

“Get it from the library,” he said. She sighed.

“Do you think I haven’t tried?”

“Give up, then,” he told her. “It’s not worth dragging out into the open, believe me. If I had my way, it wouldn’t even be in books.”

Hermione laid her hand on his arm, ignoring the chill that raced through her bloodstream. “Listen,” she said. “There’s a student in this school with a little black mark on the back of his neck. I just overheard a conversation that gives me reason to believe he’s going to be … activated … over the Christmas holidays.” She set her jaw resolutely. “Whatever it is, however awful it is, it’s not in the past anymore. And I can’t find anything useful about it in a book; you’ve got to help me, or something awful’s going to happen.”

Slytherin stared at her. He had faded from pearly-gray to stark, chalk white.

“Do you mean to tell me,” he said, “that the prophecy’s been fulfilled? Someone’s actually made one?”

Hermione flushed. “Someone - two people, I assume - made him,” she corrected him frostily. “Draco Malfoy. A person. Not a thing.”

Slytherin waved this distinction away. “Has nothing to do with the person,” he said. “Just the blood. But you probably already know that much.”

Hermione nodded. “It’s one of the few things I do know. None of the sources I’ve read have much to say about it.”

“For good reason,” Slytherin said. He looked weary. “The Fils du Couteau,” he said, “has only been used once. And under entirely different, entirely appropriate circumstances.” He gave Hermione an appraising look. “What do you know about the Goblin Rebellions, girlie?”

“Um …” Hermione blew out her breath. “Professor Binns talks about them a lot in History of Magic, but it’s not information that sticks with you,” she admitted. “Sort of dull, actually.”

“Hmph.” Salazar rolled his eyes. “Dull, she says. You little pipsqueak, I lived through those rebellions, and dull had nothing to do with it.” He surveyed her with grim amusement. “You see them at Gringotts, right?” he demanded. “Wearing their little red uniforms, scrambling in and out of their little trolleys, pushing their papers and rattling their keys. You think it was always like that?”

“Uh …”

He didn’t wait for her to answer. “My dear Miss Granger, goblins almost took us over at least twice, that I can recall. Clever, cunning little bastards. Powerfully magical. And excellent spies.”

“Spies?” Hermione echoed.

Salazar harrumphed. “That’s what I said. Until they were defeated in the thirteenth century and forcibly stripped of certain of their powers, goblins were the best shape-shifters in the business. Could look like you or me, blink of an eye. Played havoc with our troops, let me tell you.”

Hermione had the feeling she knew where this was going. “So, the Fils du Couteau …”

“Was invented - by me, I’m sorry to say - in a moment of desperation.” He studied the flames for a long heartbeat. “They came to me for a solution - what passed for a Ministry back then - and I did what I could. Wouldn’t have come up with the same thing, had it been peacetime, mind you. Wouldn’t have required blood, if I could have found another way around it. But we were strapped for time, and it was all I could think of.” He closed his eyes. “It worked a little differently, then. Our sacrifice was a volunteer - gave himself up for the cause … and we fried goblins for miles around that night, I’ll tell you. Pillars of green flame, all over the countryside, like poplar trees, and the smell of burning tar …” He shook his head. “Screams, the most awful screams. Never heard anything like it.”

Hermione wrapped her arms around her knees. “And the Fils du Couteau?”

“Ah, yes.” Slytherin nodded thoughtfully. “There were peace talks, eventually, and a surrender - and in negotiations, the goblins agreed to give up their shape-shifting powers, if we would dismantle our weapon. So I destroyed my notes, and we thought that was the end of it, until it popped up again a couple of centuries later.”

“Someone figured it out?”

A hint of a grim smile played around the corners of Slytherin’s mouth. “Not entirely,” he said. “The wizard who did it wasn’t as adept as I. He couldn’t make it work instantly, the way I’d done it, with a willing volunteer. Lots more trouble involved; you had to conceive an infant in the middle of a Dark ceremony, then wait until the child reached majority to complete the ritual.” He rubbed his hand over his eyes. “Good news for us, of course - the little girl was only six or seven when Ministry Aurors tracked him down and killed him, and that was the end of that. She grew up, married a shopkeeper, and got rich selling cosmetics. But the bad news -“

“Let me guess,” Hermione said. “He changed the focus of the spell to target Muggle-borns.”

Even before he nodded, she knew she was right.

“I thought we’d destroyed all the documentation,” Slytherin said quietly. “I thought there was nothing left but that half-assed prophecy. Which of course was no prophecy at all - more like a wizarding version of Mein Kampf.” He looked angry. “Of course, I thought a lot of things, among them being the naïve-to-the-extreme belief that the atrocities we endured as magical folk would make us more sympathetic to the differences among ourselves.”

He met Hermione’s eyes with a gaze so empty and gray and old that she shivered. “I can tell you only two things that might be of help,” he said. “First. Kill the wizard who initiated the ceremony - in this case, I’m assuming it’s our friend Tom Riddle - and you void the curse. Your ill-fated classmate will wear the mark of the Knife to his grave, but it might as well be a bunny rabbit, for all the harm it’ll do.”

Hermione ran her tongue over her teeth. “Kill Voldemort,” she repeated. “Easier said than done, I’m afraid.”

Salazar raised his eyebrows. “But not impossible,” he said. “You must continue to believe that.” He leaned back in his chair. “Here’s my second piece of advice. The Fils du Couteau, if its current incarnation is anything like the bastardized version I thought I’d destroyed, will wipe out all targets within a fairly localized area.” He shot her a shrewd look. “Voldemort’s spent almost twenty years preparing this weapon,” he said. “He’s going to be damn selective about when and where he plans to use it. If I were you, Miss Granger, I’d make a short list of probable targets and try to figure out when they’re all likely to be in one place.”

**

That, Hermione thought, was excellent advice. However, it didn’t really address the issue at hand.

“This is the thing,” she said, and launched into an exposition of Operation Blood Buddy. When she was done, Salazar whistled low in his throat.

“You’re sharp, all right, girlie,” he said. “I’d not thought of that. It may very well work. But then - what’s your problem?”

Honestly, did she have to spell it out?

“My problem,” Hermione said tartly, “is that I’m sleeping with this guy, I have a boatload of squishy-but-mixed feelings for him, and though I’m not quite sure if I’m in love or not, I’d still rather his blood stay bottled up inside him.”

Salazar guffawed.

“You’re a piece of work,” he gasped, when he’d calmed down enough to speak. Hermione glared at him.

“Do you mind?” she asked, affronted. “I mean, it doesn’t rank up there with saving all the Muggle-borns in Britain, but it’s still not high comedy. I’ve got feelings for him.”

Slytherin nodded, sobering. “Right,” he said. “In that case, all you can do is this: either kill Voldemort, or make sure he knows that his weapon’s been deactivated, before he has a chance to figure that out for himself.”

“Okay.”

Hermione opened her mouth to ask something else, but was interrupted by her growling stomach. She glanced at her watch.

Six p.m.

Oh, Jesus.

“I have to get back,” she said, looking up at Slytherin with wide eyes. “They’ll have called out the Queen’s Royal Guard by now.”

**

Getting back into the main body of the school from Chez Slytherin was much easier than Hermione had expected. Salazar himself walked her the opposite way out of his chambers and pointed her toward a steeply up-sloping corridor.

“That’s going to bring you out right into the Trophy Room,” he said. “When you open the door, you’ll be hidden in an alcove, behind the tapestry of Morgan le Fay hunting unicorns. Know the one I’m talking about?”

Hermione nodded.

“Oh, and the trapdoor in the dungeons won’t work for you again,” Salazar said offhandedly. “It only opens accidentally - if you’re trying to find it, that floor’s solid as Gibraltar.” He looked suddenly wistful. “I don’t know if you’re much interested in visiting an old man, Hermione, but you’re welcome back anytime.”

“Of course I’ll come back,” she promised him. “And I’ll bring you some sheet music.” Slytherin’s lined old face lit up.

“Excellent,” he declared. “You can use the door in the trophy room. The password’s ‘Coleridge’.

**

Dinner was about to end when Hermione, puffing from the long climb, finally opened the door to the Trophy Room and peeked out from behind Morgan’s tapestry.

Lots of questions if she went in to dinner now, she thought, and opted instead for a quick bite in the kitchens. The house-elves still vaguely disapproved of her, but they couldn’t help but be accommodating to a hungry visitor.

Hunger pangs satiated, she yawned, thanked Dobby for the extra cream puffs, and headed for Gryffindor Tower. She hadn’t gotten three steps toward the Great Hall when something invisible grabbed her hand and yanked her into an empty classroom.

Either Harry or Draco, she thought, and couldn’t stop her mouth from dropping open when the cloak came off to reveal both of them.

“Where the hell have you been?” they both hissed. Hermione gulped.

Well, even ‘surreal’ didn’t quite cut it now. Deciding she was too tired to care why they were getting along, much less under the same Invisibility Cloak, Hermione squeezed in beside them. It had been easier to fit three-to-a-cloak back when they were first-years, she thought, and philosophically wrapped her arms around both lean waists.

“We’d better go to my room,” she said. “It’s a long, long story.”

**