James Potter And The Morrigan Web (91 page)

“Help from where?” Scorpius asked, meeting Ralph’s eyes. “Anyone who knows enough to join us is either already gone or too squashed under Grudje’s thumb to do anything about it.”

Albus frowned. “Where’s he at most of the time, anyway? How’s he keep everyone so terrified when it seems like he’s gadding about who knows where every other day?”

Ralph shrugged. “Probably meeting up with the Minister of Magic to give him his orders.”

Rose’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. James regarded her curiously.

“What are you thinking, Rose?”

She shook her head. “Nothing. Just… something strange.”

“The whole thing’s strange,” Zane sighed.

“What about all those Yuxa Baslatma vines and leaves and stuff that got caught up in your robes when the Jiskra was chasing us,” James prodded, still watching Rose. “Maybe they’ll tell us what we need to do if you just use them?”

“Rose has some Dream Inducers?” Ralph asked, sitting up hopefully.

“I already told you,” Rose snapped, “Not a chance! They’re all jumbled together and miss-matched. There’s no way to know even which pots they came from. Nobody’s using them, and
especially
not me. It’s way too dangerous.”

“Rose,” James insisted intently. “If the Morrigan Web goes off at the Quidditch final, it’ll kill every witch and wizard there! Players, students, Ministry people, guards, even Titus Hardcastle and his Aurors! We’re seriously running out of options, here!”

But Rose was firm in her resolve. “Those Yuxa Baslatma fragments won’t help us, James. They’re too mixed up and torn apart. If I was smart I would just bury them somewhere and forget about them. But I do have an idea for how we can save at least a few people, and maybe even more than a few, if the Morrigan Web does go off. We just need to get started immediately.”

“What, Rosie?” Zane asked eagerly, leaning forward again.

Rose looked from face to face. “It’s too simple, really,” she said. “The Web connects every wand in the vicinity with some sort of ultra killing curse, right? We just go to the Quidditch final without our wands. Us and as many other people as we can convince.”

There was a moment of awed silence as everyone considered this. James nodded, remembering. “In Crone Laosa’s story, her mother survived by not having her wand with her. She’d broken it that morning in some sort of accident. She was right in the midst of the Web, but since she didn’t have a wand, it didn’t hurt her…”

Ralph, however, was sceptical. “Hard to imagine that the best way to go into magical battle is to leave your wand at home.”

Nastasia tittered.

“It is if you want to live to see the actual battle,” Rose countered, giving Nastasia a steely glance. “And I’m not suggesting we leave them back in the dormitories. I say we find a place to hide them nearby, perhaps beneath the grandstands or even the equipment shed, safely stowed but available to us afterwards.”

“That’s pretty grim, Rose” Albus said. “You’re suggesting we watch everyone else get murdered, then pick over their bodies to grab our wands and fight Avior and whatever bad guy squad he’s assembled?”

“You have a better idea?” Rose asked, clearly unhappy with the prospect herself. “We’ll need to protect the Muggle survivors. It’s not a perfect plan, but it’s all we’ve got at the moment.”

“This is worse than last year,” Ralph shook his head with slow emphasis. “It was bad enough when Lucy was killed and New Amsterdam was laid out there for all the Muggles to see. But this is just worse. This is like… like…”

“Like the end of our world,” James sighed morosely. “The end of Hogwarts. The end of the Ministry of Magic. It’ll be a massacre.”

“I can’t believe you lot are even considering this!” Albus suddenly declared. “Ralph already said it! We can’t just give up! We have to
stop
the Morrigan Web, not just figure out how to survive it like…” he waved his hands helplessly, “like
cockroaches!
”

This was followed by a long moment of awkward silence. James was sure that everyone was thinking the same thing, even if they could not bring themselves to say it. Uncomfortable glances were passed furtively around the room.
Stopping the Morrigan Web may well be impossible
, those glances said,
but surviving is better than dying
.

Thankfully, Scorpius spoke up, breaking the pause. “No one is giving up,” he said with a decisive nod. “But until we figure out something better, we do what we can to convince as many as people as possible to hide their wands away. We’ll stow them in a trunk beneath the Gryffindor grandstand, and we’ll do it hours before the tournament, before Hardcastle and his Aurors arrive as guards.”

“We’ll have to conceal the trunk somehow,” James agreed. “Hardcastle’s crew will sweep the pitch for anything suspicious.”

“We could hide it under the invisibility cloak,” Ralph suggested, brightening.

“We
could
,” James agreed pointedly, “if Albus here hadn’t left it lying on the floor of Avior’s office.”

“I didn’t just
leave
it lying,” Albus protested. “I was being chased by a mad two-headed, fire-breathing bird monster if you recall!”

Zane gave a low whistle. “You left your dad’s prize invisibility cloak in the bad guy’s office? Does he know?”

Albus deflated. “No. And neither does Filch, fortunately. We nicked it from his desk but he’s been too swamped to notice.”

Scorpius dismissed these concerns with a wave of his hand. “Either way, Ralph can put a Visum Ineptio charm on the trunk to make it look like a rock or something. He’s good at that kind of magic. With all the wands hidden away, the Web can’t hurt us.”

Rose sighed deeply. “Then, if we fail to prevent it…” She swallowed hard. “We can protect the survivors: the Muggle government leaders that Avior and his people will try to assassinate once everyone else is dead.”

“Bloody hell,” Ralph murmured. “Merlin was right. This changes everything.”

There was a rumble of grave agreement as the meeting broke up.

The next few days were some of the tensest days of James’ life. One at a time, he, Ralph, Rose, Albus and Scorpius met with as many students as they dared trust, attempting to warn them of the impending attack. They refrained from referring to the Morrigan Web, since that would only incite scepticism or confusion, and either way demand lengthy explanations. Instead, they exploited the general sense of angry suspicion the entire school harboured toward Headmaster Grudje and his Draconian policies.

“I
knew
he was hiding something!” Graham hissed angrily as he and James threaded their way to the Astronomy tower. “You say he’s covering for some big conspiracy?”

James nodded. “Something like that. The point is it’s absolutely essential that we all hide our wands before the Quidditch tournament. Seriously. Life and death.”

Graham glanced at him, not with scepticism, as James had expected, but grim awe. “What’s the old power-monger up to?” His mouth dropped open in shocked revelation. “He’s going to confiscate everyone’s wands next, isn’t he? First he clamps down on the post, then Hogsmeade weekends, and now he’s taking away our wands so we can only use them when he wants to let us! Of course! Why, that total dictator!”

James did not dissuade Graham from this suspicion. Frankly, it did seem like the sort of thing Grudje would do. “We’ll be collecting wands the night before the tournament and hiding them away. No one will find them.”

Graham nodded. “And then, when Grudje tries to confiscate them, boom, no wands to confiscate! And later, we can all collect them again. Brilliant! That’ll teach the old tyrant.”

James nodded and shrugged at the same time. He didn’t like lying to Graham, but not disabusing him of his own notions seemed acceptable under the circumstances. Unfortunately, most of the other students James spoke to were not as easily persuaded as Graham.

“I’m not going anywhere without my wand, James,” Mei Isis insisted stubbornly. “Not the way things have been going lately. Especially if, like you say, something terrible is going to happen at the tournament.”

Heth Thomas and Deirdre Finnegan felt the same way, seemingly caught between refusing to believe James’ warning, and feeling that even if it was true, their wands were their own best recourse.

“But your wand will
be
the weapon!” James insisted frantically.

“Of course my wand’s the weapon,” Deirdre rasped impatiently. “That’s the whole point! Have you even
been
to a Defence Against the Dark Arts lesson?”

By the time he cornered Gabriel Jackson, captain of the Hufflepuff Quidditch team, outside the Ancient Runes classroom, she had already heard rumours of James’ whispered warnings.

“None of the Hufflepuff players carry wands while in the air,” she assured him dismissively. “My own rule, ever since that incident my third year when my sister Julian got blindsided by one of Beetlebrick’s Bludgers and decided to fry him with a friendly Stunner in mid-air. Lost the match on a technicality that time. No way I’m going to let that happen again. No wands while the match is on.”

James accepted this with a relieved sigh.

“Still,” Gabriel mused thoughtfully. “Beetlebrick
did
deserve it. And he’s never blindsided Julian again, I’ll tell you that. Overall it was probably a net gain for the team. Maybe we should revise the no wands rule next year.”

“You do that,” James nodded. “
Next
year.”

Rose, Ralph, Scorpius and Albus had had similar luck with their own contacts.

“Joseph Torrance and Cameron Creevey were easy,” Rose muttered as she followed James into the Great Hall for dinner. “Joseph trusts you, and Cameron is your biggest fan. Lily and her friends will go along as well. No luck with Aloysius, Shivani or Penelope, though. Even worse with the Hufflepuffs who aren’t playing in the tournament. They want to be able to celebrate with firework charms, the clueless morons.”

James nodded gravely. Secretly, he couldn’t blame the Hufflepuffs, or anyone else, for doubting their story. Without details, it sounded paranoid and stupid even to his own ears.

Scorpius, who could be surprisingly persuasive, and who had taught Defence club during his first year, had somewhat better luck, convincing almost half of the Ravenclaws to stow their wands the night before the tournament. Albus and Ralph, however, had made almost no headway with the Slytherins who, like the Hufflepuffs, were keen on magically celebrating their predicted win.

Still, with only four days left until the Quidditch Summit, they had convinced over a third of their fellow students to attend the tournament wandless. It wasn’t much-- it was, in fact, horrifyingly unsatisfying-- but it was indeed better than nothing.

James and Ralph prepared an old Quidditch trunk to house the stowed wands, hiding it in the shadows beneath the Gryffindor grandstands and disguising it with one of Ralph’s Visum Ineptio charms.

Walking away from it, James couldn’t help feeling that, despite their best efforts, they were resigning themselves to watching most of their classmates killed before their eyes. It was a dreadful, harrowing thought. And yet, even now, he felt no closer to unravelling Avior’s plan. Despite what they had learned in the cellars beneath Alma Aleron, they simply could not guess how the Morrigan Web might be powered, or what form it might take. As the days crept by and preparations for the Summit loomed, a sense of deep, palpable dread settled in James’ stomach.

This was worsened by the frustrations with not being able to meet in the open. Even the brief, secret conversations he, Rose, Ralph and Scorpius had engaged in while waiting in line for lessons or while navigating the halls between classes became too dangerous, as Filch seemed to have been charged with watching them specifically. He could regularly be seen hovering outside their classrooms, steely eyed and silently seething, gripping his black cane like a lifeline.

And then, strangest of all, at the last Care of Magical Creatures class of the term, Hagrid himself gave James, Ralph and Scorpius a detention.

“You lot,” he called across the barnyard, his voice uncharacteristically gruff. “Talking during lesson, are yeh? Why that’s the last straw. Detention for yeh!”

James straightened, his mouth dropping open in shock as foot-long purple salamanders ran pell mell about the yard, chased futilely by the other students. “What? Of course we’re talking! We’re trying to round up these crazy lizards you set us on!”

“Talkin’ back, too,” Hagrid frowned, his beard bristling. “Double detention then. Report back here tonight at dusk and not another word from any o’ yeh.”

James could scarcely believe his own ears. He turned to Ralph and Scorpius incredulously. Ralph shrugged while Scorpius merely rolled his eyes. James didn’t know if he was more surprised or hurt by Hagrid’s sudden antagonism. All he knew was that it contributed to what was already a thoroughly miserable day. This carried into the dinner hour as Lily displayed an official-looking parchment emblazoned with the Hogwarts crest.

“I’ve been chosen as a student ambassador!” she trilled happily, waving the parchment. “I get to attend the big dinner after the tournament! We’ll be singing the Hogwarts salute from the head table and answering questions about the school. I’ll get to meet presidents and queens and all sorts of important people!”

“Quit showing off,” Graham muttered. “And don’t remind us of the stupid Quidditch tournament. No collection of Muggle stuffed shirts is going to distract us from the fact that we aren’t even competing this year. Stupid Lance Vassar. The gall of his parents, donating some stupid Chalice on a year there’s no chance Gryffindor can win it. And it’s all his bloody fault!”

“You can’t lay all the blame at Lance’s feet,” Deirdre commented, frowning at Lance and his cronies further down the table. “James deserves a lot of the credit. If he’d shown up for try-outs--”

“We all know the story by now,” James interrupted tersely. “Give it a rest already!”

James spent the rest of the evening in the Gryffindor common room, trying unsuccessfully to focus on his homework and studies. It was utterly useless.