Chapter 8: Political Awakening

The invitation arrived with the sausages.

It floated down among the toast racks and porridge bowls as if it had been waiting for him to look up. By the time he touched the thick card, a dozen hands had already reached for similar envelopes along the Slytherin table, and the length of the Hall hummed with the small crackle of wax seals being broken.

Thomas Riddle, it said in an elegant secretary’s hand. Ministry Observation Programme — Special Session of the Wizengamot. Professor Slughorn has arranged discreet travel and seating. Presentable robes required.

Professor Slughorn’s fat hand waved at him from the High Table. The pleased little nod Tom received—in the same fraction of a second as Abraxas Malfoy received his—told him the thing had been meant. Slughorn’s eyes shone as if he had personally invented the Ministry and the purple robes in it.

Tom slipped the card into the inside pocket of his robe. It lay against his ribs with the small stiffness he knew; that earlier hardness did not yield. He touched the seam as if to neaten it. The morning felt taller, as though the ceiling had crept back to let more cold light through the enchanted sky. He took a last piece of toast and did not butter it.

Abraxas slid onto the bench opposite, robes immaculate, hair like spun straw under glass.

“You will enjoy it,” Abraxas said. He had the tone of a person speaking about a theatre performance he had already seen twice.

“You’ve been,” Tom said.

“Since I was ten,” Abraxas said. “Grandfather thinks a boy cannot learn manners unless he is bored by old men in hats.”

Tom glanced at the shining platinum snake coiled around Abraxas’s cuff. “They wear hats?”

“Not like Muggles,” Abraxas said, an amused curl in his lip. “Purple. Points on them. The points are to make them feel taller.”

“Do they vote with the hats?” Tom asked. The toast snapped between his fingers.

“They vote with hands,” Abraxas said. “And with other people’s hands.”

There was a murmur farther down the table—Avery had spilled jam on an envelope and was pawing at it with a napkin, laughing too loudly. Tom examined his own card. The seal was intact, a small silver W. Slughorn had his silly little ambitions about connections and dinner parties; sometimes they opened useful doors.

A second owl made a low circle and dropped another envelope on his plate. This one held a square of neat handwriting on cheap paper.

Ministry travel departs from Professor Slughorn’s office directly after lunch. Do not be late. H.S.

Slughorn had underlined do not in green ink. Tom folded the paper, smoothed it as though it mattered, and put it away.

He passed the rest of the morning half-listening to Binns droning about the International Warlock Convention of 1289 and translating the jabbering mist of the ghost’s lecture into dates and fines and names. It was almost restful, the way nonsense became a faint diagram under his pencil when he forced it.

The little stiffness under his ribs pressed when he leaned. He sat very straight.

At lunch Slughorn hovered like a beaming balloon, gold watch ticking, coat smelling faintly of cologne and caramelised pineapple. He shepherded them in a warm cluster through the empty dungeons and into his office. They passed between cluttered tables and polished jars of slimy things. Slughorn’s grate hummed green, the fire flaring higher as he tossed a pinch of powder in it.

“The Ministry of Magic, Reception Hall!” Slughorn sang out. “One at a time, please, and for goodness’ sake clear the grate.”

Abraxas went first, tossing his head as if to show the soot could do nothing to him. Tom stepped after him. The world pinwheeled green, became hard and cold, and he stumbled out onto polished black stone.

The atrium spread before him like a long lake, lit with cool torches. The fountain in the centre shot gold water into a bowl crowded with figures—witch, wizard, goblin, centaur, house-elf—their faces smooth with the same self-satisfied blankness. Posters along the walls showed a dark-eyed man: GRINDELWALD MUST BE STOPPED.

Slughorn shook ash from his mustache and beamed at a passing man.

“Ah! Dear boy!” Slughorn called, catching the man’s wrist with surprising grip. “This is one of mine. Tom Riddle. Extremely promising. We’re on our way up. Do introduce him to—oh! Are those the new purple robes? Splendid shade.”

The man murmured, nodded, shuffled off. Slughorn jollied them toward the lifts. Tom watched everyone. You could tell the ones who mattered by the way others arranged themselves in their path, the way heads flicked a fraction sooner when they spoke. An old wizard with an ivory cane didn’t seem to touch anyone, yet the crowd flowed about him.

Abraxas leaned in without looking at Tom. “Lord Nott,” he said. “You will see him again.”

The lift rattled and sang its thin song. When the gates opened, they stepped into a corridor lined with arched windows that looked onto the open air of the atrium, so that the light fell in lancet shapes across the runner. Voices came from a high set of carved doors ahead. Tom felt the pull of it, the way one felt the weight of water before stepping into a lake.

The Wizengamot chamber was arranged in a circle, with tiered benches rising to tall walls. A chain-wrapped chair stood in the centre. Purple robes filled the benches—lean faces, heavy jowls, rings, a flickering minute-hand of coughs and whispers.

They were led to a wooden gallery. Tom set his hands on the carved rail and watched. He had expected drama and found neatness. The Chief Warlock sat beneath an elaborately carved canopy and hammered a small bell.

“Order,” he said. “In the matter of the Wand Registration Bill.”

A clerk in black, with spectacles perched at the end of his sharp nose, stood below and recited in a voice like a spoon on a bowl. “A Bill to regulate the registration and transfer of wands, to provide penalties for unlicensed wand possession, to establish a Registrar of Wands, and for connected purposes.”

Abraxas sat very straight, as if the sound of it pleased him. Tom watched his hands. Abraxas’s long fingers twitched once and lay still.

A witch with hair like iron nails rose from a bench, the purple slipping off one bare shoulder. “War measures,” she said. “Prudent and overdue. The Wand Registry will protect us from those who would use our own tools to harm us.”

A man one tier down, with a small, bitten mouth, stood second. “There has never been a Registry,” he said, deferential to the Chief Warlock, not looking at the witch. “We are not at war with our own, Madam. We have not been at war on our Isles in my lifetime. These are dark measures. We must not shame ourselves with panic.”

Tom saw it then, the thing Abraxas had talked about without saying the word. Before the man spoke, three heads had turned on the far side of the chamber. The old man with the ivory cane—the one Abraxas had called Nott—did not move, but the witch next to him adjusted her papers. A young wizard farther to the left, hair parted as if with a ruler, slid a finger along the edge of his bench and raised it a fraction, as if to scratch an eyebrow. The movement was duplicated, with bored neatness, by three others on three different benches.

Hands, Abraxas had said. Other people’s hands.

“Chief Warlock,” Nott said in a voice that sounded like dust, and did not stand. The Chief Warlock’s eyes flicked up. “I propose that this Bill be read and referred to Committee, where its provisions may be considered by those familiar with the work of enforcement.”

A murmur like a draught in a narrow chimney. The man with the bitten mouth looked as if the air had changed. He took a breath to speak. The witch with iron hair rose, and she did not quite smile.

Second, said two voices. Tom had barely seen where they came from; the men had half stood, then sat, lazy as cats.

“All those in favour,” the Chief Warlock said promptly. The clerk stood ready with his book.

Hands moved. They moved in clumps, in agreeing groups. Some eyes slid sideways to see who was moving first. A ripple ran through the purple, and it was done. The Bill was going away. Where? To Committee. And who was Committee?

Tom watched the Clerk mark names. The nib scratched briskly. When the hands had stopped moving, there were still a few raised, floating like drowned things. The man with the bitten mouth lowered his hand last. He looked at the floor, as if something there might give him back what he had dropped.

“We will proceed,” the Chief Warlock said. He smiled at no one. “Order. Next business.”

Slughorn leaned forward and breathed, syrupy warm, in Tom’s ear. “Now, that was very adroit. Sensible heads on Committee. Very sensible. Hmm?”

Tom put his finger on the carved rail. The wood was worn by other fingers. He did not look at Slughorn.

They watched three more items. One was a petition regarding a goblin grievance about a banking ordinance. It was tabled with courtesy and speed. Another concerned a regulation on artefact export; it went to a Subcommittee to be examined for profit—which was to say, to be held as if under water until it stopped struggling.

When they were released, they filed out in a school line, Slughorn beaming and preening and speaking to no one he could not impress. Abraxas fell in step with Tom without seeming to notice he had done it.

Lord Nott stood in the corridor. He did not look at them. People moved around him again, as if there was an invisible hedge. Abraxas inclined his head a fraction of an inch. Tom did not.

“Do you understand,” Abraxas said, as if he were answering a question Tom had asked, “why it was sent to Committee?”

Tom turned the envelope in his pocket with his thumb. “Because the Committee belongs to the people who want it,” he said.

Abraxas’s lip curled. “Belongs is a vulgar word. It is composed of persons of experience.”

“What does experience mean,” Tom said, “if it can be so neatly arranged?”

Abraxas looked pleased, as if Tom had put his knife and fork together correctly. He nodded at the far wall, where portraits of Ministers smiled down like greedy grandfathers. “Experience means,” he said, “that one’s grandfather lent the Ministry money once. Or that one’s uncle employs half of the Registry’s cousins. Or that one’s sister is married to an Auror and has five healthy children who like biscuits. It means Aunt Euphemia hosts supper every third Thursday and everyone who goes leaves with toffee stuck to their teeth and fond memories and votes the way they were told.”

“And Nott?” Tom asked. He had not used the honorific. Abraxas’s eyebrow lifted, and Tom let his mouth soften in a polite apology too smooth to be an apology.

“Lord Nott,” Abraxas said, stressing the first word by breathing on it, “ensures that experienced persons attend to sensible matters. He does this by remembering who owes him. Most people owe him.”

“For what,” Tom said.

Abraxas smiled with all his teeth. It was not a nice smile. “Being born where he was born,” he said. “His grandfather’s grandfather decided to lay out his money in favours instead of vaults. People speak ill of it when they cannot do it. He buys summer for people. He buys school for sons. He pays off fines. He sends posies for wives who are unwell. He hires cousins. He reads the small notices in the bottom corner of the Prophet and writes a letter that says we can manage this quietly. When he writes that a thing will be managed, it is managed. Do you see?”

Tom watched a young witch pass with a clipboard pressed to her breast. She wore a working robe, not purple. She looked at the portraits to avoid looking at Nott. “I see,” he said.

Abraxas liked being asked for more. He leaned in. “Power,” he said softly, “is only sometimes a wand. It is more often a cheque-book, or a whispered word, or a cousin’s hand. Are you disappointed?”

Tom looked at him.

“You are always disappointed when magic turns out to be ordinary,” Abraxas said. He sounded amused, or he wanted to sound amused. “You thought the Wizengamot was thunder. It is arithmetic.”

Tom’s hands were ordinary hands. He flattened them against the banister, felt the bone, the metacarpals, as if they belonged to someone else. His jaw was tight enough to hurt. “Thunder,” he said, “strikes where it likes. Arithmetic goes where it is sent.”

Abraxas tipped his head. “Precisely,” he said.

They were called to order by Slughorn’s bellow. “My young friends! We mustn’t get lost!” Slughorn shook himself as if he were a wet dog and beamed at a stern witch with a sheaf of scrolls. “Ah! Madam Bones! A pleasure! One of mine—oh, she’s gone. Never mind.”

The group piled back into the lift, shoulders brushing. The metal gate clanged shut. The lift shuddered. Inside the cage, Tom could see his pale face in the bright strip of brass along the edge of the door. It was a neat face, the face of a studious boy. He imagined breaking the brass and bending it.

On the way to the Floo grates there was a minor commotion. An Auror with a clipboard spoke low to another, showed her a parchment with names. A wizard in work robes objected, gestured. The Auror's eyebrows went up a fraction. He lowered his arm and stepped aside. Tom saw the little act of restraint and filed it where he filed everything, each movement in the system that meant more than it said.

Nearby, a door opened that had no sign on it—just a number, 9, in brass that had been polished so often the edges were soft. A young man stepped out, perhaps twenty-five, with the sort of face that was forgettable on purpose. He wore plain robes, not purple, and carried a leather case that might have held documents or might have held nothing at all. He glanced at the Aurors and the commotion with an expression of mild professional interest, the way a surgeon might watch someone bandage a finger.

"Department of Mysteries," Abraxas murmured. "Unspeakables. They study what the rest of the Ministry pretends doesn't exist."

The young man's eyes swept the corridor—over the Aurors, over Slughorn's little flock of students—and for a moment they rested on Tom. There was nothing particular in the look. It was the look of someone cataloguing faces the way Tom catalogued faces: automatically, without judgment, for later use. Then the man turned and walked the other way, toward a lift that did not seem to go where the other lifts went.

"What do they study?" Tom asked.

"Time," Abraxas said. "Death. Love. Prophecy. The things that make magic magic, rather than just a trick." He shrugged, elegant. "My father says they're half mad and twice as clever. He also says they're the only people in the Ministry who actually matter, because everyone else is just moving paper while they're moving... something else."

Tom watched the man disappear around a corner. The leather case swung at his side. He had not looked back.

"Do they have names?" Tom asked.

"Rookwood," Abraxas said, as if reading from a list. "That one, anyway. Augustus Rookwood. His family used to have money; now they have secrets instead. Father says it's a better investment."

Back at Hogwarts the air was colder, honest cold. Slughorn clapped him on the shoulder again in the dungeons, eyes bright with fat satisfaction. “Marvellous education,” he said. “You cannot buy such an education, my dear boy. Well. One can. But one should not. Tonight at half seven, a little gathering. Wear the tie.”

Slughorn swelled away, pleased with himself.

In the afternoon Tom sat in the library, a law book open in front of him. He had found it in a dim corner of the restricted section—a frayed copy of Erastus Flint’s Parliamentary Spells and Procedures, with a nasty temper that pinched if handled roughly. He read about Committees with names that sounded harmless: On Agricultural Charms; On Artefact Disposal; On Registry Oversight. The spells used to call votes were nothing special, simple charms on the counting quills. Proxies could be presented by parchment if sealed with a family crest. A crest could be authorised to a cousin. A cousin’s friend could hold papers. There was a charm, old and legal, that allowed a proxy to be transferred in the case of illness. Illness might be very broadly defined if one had a cousin in St. Mungo’s to write it up.

He closed the book on his finger and stared at the spine. It gave him a sly pinch. He ignored it.

Arithmetic, Abraxas had said, as if it were a pleasant game. Tom imagined Nott’s house, imagined the dinners, the quiet envelopes, the cosy lapses in memory. He thought of the small offices where committees met. He thought of the men in purple hats leaning back, their fingers not quite meeting above their stomachs. Someone poured tea. A quill ticked. A thing was put aside.

A clerk could be paid less than he was worth. A clerk could be paid more. A man’s name could be in a drawer somewhere in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. A drawer was locked with a charm. A charm could be broken by the person who cast it. Tom laced his fingers together on the table until his right thumb whitened.

It had been childish to assume that power was waiting in a wand if one had the will to reach for it. One could be brilliant and lose to a man who had never learned a Shield Charm but knew to scratch his eyebrow at the right moment.

He wrote down three names in small letters on the back of a scrap of homework, not the names of men but the names of Committees. He folded the scrap twice and slid it behind the seam of his pocket, where it lay with the stiff thing and the Ministry card.

At half seven he knotted a thin green tie and went back to Slughorn’s. The room was all light and flowers and the sweet, heavy smell of candied fruit. Cushions were arranged to suggest intimacy, as if people might accidentally tell secrets if they sank into them. Slughorn’s little collection assembled itself with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Abraxas glided. Daphne Rowle sat with a proper demure expression. Avery tried to sit on the piano and Slughorn scolded him from across the room without looking.

“Mr Riddle!” Slughorn called, delighted. “Front and centre. We have a guest tonight. A man of parts. You will delight him. Ah! Here he is.”

The man who came through the door had a tired hat and a sharp face. He wore a suit that had been good some years ago, and rings that glittered heavy rather than expensive. His grey eyes took everything in as if he had paid for it.

"Caractacus Burke," Slughorn trilled. "Of Borgin and Burkes!"

Burke did not laugh at Slughorn's joke about Knockturn Alley. His gaze travelled across the circle and stopped on Tom.

“This one,” Slughorn said, plucking Tom forward by the sleeve. “Half-blood—don’t frown, my boy, it does you no harm—brilliant at Potions, head like a file-box. Tom, say something clever. Mr Burke likes clever.”

Tom inclined his head. “Good evening,” he said. “Thank you for the invitation.”

Burke’s mouth did not move much. “You pronounce your words as if each one costs you,” he said.

“Perhaps they do,” Tom said. He kept his voice mild and his shoulders loose. He did not want to look eager; eager boys did not receive offers that mattered.

Burke took a glass from Slughorn without looking at him and did not drink. He rocked on his heels and watched the room without moving his head, seeing everything from the corners of his eyes. “Slughorn tells me,” he said, “that you went to see our lawmakers today.”

“We observed,” Tom said.

“And what did you observe,” Burke said. He did not inflect it as a question; he simply left the sentence open and waited to see what Tom would push into it.

“People who did not want to be seen deciding anything,” Tom said. “They sent things to be decided elsewhere.”

Burke’s eyes narrowed a fraction. “Sensible,” he said. “One mustn’t have one’s name on a thing one might want to deny.”

Avery made a loud sound that was meant to be a laugh. He had a mead moustache. “I like a clean kill,” he said, and then realised he had said something too sharp for the room and looked at Slughorn, who tittered, and at Daphne Rowle, who did not.

“Mr Burke is an admirer of pragmatism,” Slughorn said. “He tells me it is a pure virtue in a mixed world.” He beamed at his own wit, which would have been improved by going to bed.

Burke shifted his glass to his other hand. The ring on his third finger caught the candlelight and threw it away. “I admire profit,” he said without shame. “Pragmatism is the cheapest way to avoid poverty. Purity,” he added, and he turned the word over with distaste as if it were an over-ripe fruit, “is a word that means different things depending on how full the speaker’s larder is.”

Abraxas’s chin lifted. His smile remained. “We are agreed that poverty is objectionable,” he said.

“Ah,” Burke said, and his eyes rested on Abraxas’s cuff. “We are agreed that it is vulgar. We are not yet agreed that it is rare.”

Slughorn intervened in the way a man tosses a tart to a quarrelling table. “Mr Burke’s shop deals in rare artefacts,” he said. “Not legal if acquired by wrong means, naturally—don’t look so lugubrious, Tom, it’s perfectly busy in Knockturn. But—”

“I did not bring a ledger to show the children,” Burke said. He looked bored, and did not bother to hide it. “I came because Horace likes to look at his little orchard and I owe him a favour. He sent me a letter that said there was a boy with a head on him. I wanted to see if he exaggerated. He often does. He does it to get free dinners.”

Slughorn flushed and laughed as if it were a fine old joke that he paid in flattery for hams. Tom watched Burke’s hands. The fingers were square and stained with something that did not come off easily. There was callus where his pen sat. His left thumb had a scar. The rings were old and did not match. He had spent too long staring at shop glass for the glass to reflect anything back but himself.

Burke said, “You observed a government today and saw that it runs on debts. Good. What do you intend to do with that observation, Tom Riddle.”

Slughorn made a small distressed sound. “Such a question, Caractacus! The boy isn’t at law school.”

Tom said, “I intend not to be the sort of person whose name is on the petition that drowns.”

“Hmm,” Burke said. He watched him as one watches a lock to see if the key will turn. “You have been told all your brief life that blood is everything. Is that so.”

It was not a question, but Tom answered it anyway. “Some say so,” he said. He felt the inside of his cheek tighten under his molar.

“Some whose great-grandfathers were stupid enough to be rich when it was cheap to be rich,” Burke said. “Pardon me, Malfoy, your people have always had taste. Others climbed six flights to their good names and now try to stamp on the stair. Nott will tell you that purity makes a good wand. I will tell you a wand is good when it does what you mean it to. Purity sells because it is simple to write on pamphlets and because it gives mothers something to say at teas.” He lifted his hand, two fingers pinched close together. “It is a useful cudgel. That is all.”

Abraxas’s face hardly altered. It was a thing to admire in its small way. “I suppose,” he said, “that Mr Burke would sell the cudgel to any hand.”

Burke’s eyes creased. “Consider this,” he said pleasantly. “The market for cudgels is largest when one convinces as many hands as possible that there are wolves about. What is a wolf, Malfoy? The thing the salesman tells you to fear. I do not sell cudgels. I sell the thing you want in the dark when someone else is carrying a cudgel.”

Tom smiled before he could stop himself. Burke noticed. Abraxas noticed. Slughorn did not. Slughorn was offering a dish of crystallised pineapple to Daphne.

“You are not fond of the purity sermon,” Tom said.

“I am fond,” Burke said, “of whatever sermon leaves me with the most gold. And of whatever sermon leaves me alive. Pure blood does not keep you from bleeding. Half-bloods bleed the same colour. Your Minister will bleed. Your Nott will die in his bed because he is careful; those who use his words and do not understand them will not. Sentiment kills more quickly than poison.”

He set his untouched glass down on a low table. The glass made a small, neat sound. He looked at Tom. “Do you know why families like Malfoy prefer boys like you not to learn how things are done.”

Abraxas’s head turned a fraction. He did not speak. Tom said nothing. The air in the room felt thicker; candles hissed.

“Because you will not be grateful,” Burke said. “Gratitude spoils the taste of meat when there is too much of it. It is fetchable from the poor, from the slow. You are neither. You will not take the envelope and smile and go. You will want to know who wrote the cheque. You will want the book where the cheques are recorded. You will want the key.”

“Mr Burke,” Slughorn said, flustered, “has strong views. We needn’t—”

“Why is blood useful,” Tom said.

Slughorn’s hand fluttered to his tie. He swallowed. “My dear boy—”

Burke’s smile was like a thin strip of silver paper; it reflected, it did not warm. “Blood is useful,” he said, “because it is an excuse you can carry anywhere. You cannot always carry the Auror or the vault. You can carry your father’s name in your pocket as if it were a letter written by the Minister to you personally. It opens doors that ought not to open. That is not morality. That is a key.”

“Some think it is a lock,” Abraxas said.

“They like it to be a lock when they own the door,” Burke said.

Avery, who had been fidgeting, blurted, “My mother says Muggle-borns—” and stopped, because Burke had tilted his head at him as one might at a fly one did not intend to swat.

“Your mother,” Burke said gently, “takes her chewing-gum out of her mouth to say grace. I am sure she is correct about everything she says. I have known Muggle-borns who would sell their fathers to buy the right wand. I have known pure-bloods who sold their birthright for a bottle. It is a funny old world. Do not be stupid in it.”

Slughorn clapped his hands, strained. “Music!” he cried, as if he could change the subject with noise. “A little Chopin at the pianoforte! Daphne, sweet girl—”

“Not now,” Burke said, not looking at him. He had not raised his voice. Slughorn, absurdly, obeyed.

The room had gone very attentive. The gas lamps sang softly. The pineapple smelled like a nursery’s idea of luxury. Tom found his fingers had clasped each other. He unclasped them slowly; there would be marks on his right palm from his left thumb’s nail.

“You talk like a man who hates everyone,” Abraxas said in his polite voice.

“I talk like a man who knows the cost of things,” Burke said. “Do you know it. Malfoy, you spend to be looked at and be seen as the right sort of man. That is a cost. Riddle, you will spend to make people look away. That is also a cost. Do not pretend it will be otherwise.”

Tom let the words sit on the table between them like cards. He did not reach for them. He bent his head, as if to examine the nap of the cloth, and watched from under his eyelashes the way Burke’s mouth had a habit of tightening slightly when he wanted to be vicious and was deciding not to be.

“What do you sell,” Tom said.

Burke glanced at Slughorn. “In front of the children,” he murmured.

“Tell him,” Slughorn said, flapping, surrendering.

“I sell objects that are difficult to own,” Burke said. “I sell things that stand between a man and his enemies. I sell things that confer certain advantages when other people are too squeamish to see how the advantages are conferred. I pay less than a thing is worth and sell it for more. This is called business. Sometimes the people who bring me things are too stupid to know what they have. That is not my fault. Sometimes the Ministry comes and asks for something back. Sometimes I give it. Sometimes I do not. This is called negotiation. You would be good at it.”

Abraxas said, still polite, “He is an excellent scholar.”

“He will be a fine negotiator,” Burke said. He looked at Tom again. “You put your feelings in your fingers. They are too still. Learn to move them while you are angry. People will not know when you want to hurt them.”

Tom loosened his hands and picked up his glass. He sipped the sweet punch, for something to do with his mouth, and then put the glass down and did not touch it again. “You do not object to blood talk on principle,” he said. “You object because it is inefficient.”

Burke’s mouth showed a strip of teeth. “Oh no. I object because it bores me and because it makes people poor who might be useful to me. I object because when everyone is looking at who had a grandmother, no one is looking at the ledger. I would prefer they looked at the ledger.”

Tom let a breath out. “And the ledger lives in the Ministry.”

Burke’s eyes flicked to the side—slight, there and gone. He saw that Tom had seen that, and his smile altered, as if the silver strip had turned at an angle. “The ledger lives in a hundred pockets,” he said. “But yes. Some of those pockets have purple robes over them. It is not necessary to wear the robes to have the pockets.”

Slughorn had found his equilibrium; he laughed so heartily that the jelly on a dish jiggled. “Mr Burke and the Ministry are the best of friends,” he said. “He is forever lending them—”

“Please,” Burke said, and it was not a request. “Do not finish that sentence.”

Avery made a face as if he had eaten a lemon. “It is unmanly,” he muttered, “to talk of money as if it were magic.”

“Only fools pretend it is not,” Burke said. He looked back to Tom. “Will you pretend.”

“No,” Tom said.

“Good,” Burke said. “Come to my shop one afternoon when your timetable is kind. Tell me a day. I will show you something about how pockets are filled.”

“Sir,” Slughorn blurted, half rising, “they are schoolchildren.”

“You should not have introduced him to me if you wanted him to be a schoolchild,” Burke said. He held Tom’s look easily. “Bring nothing valuable. Or bring something and I will show you why you should not have.”

Tom nodded once, slow. “I will come,” he said.

Burke reached into his coat and produced a card. It was stiff and cream and unadorned; it had only his name and the address of the shop on one side, and on the other, written in a hurried, upright hand, a narrow mark like a central line. It was not a rune Tom recognised. Burke handed the card to him. The card looked ordinary. It felt heavier than it ought when it slid against his fingers.

“Show the reverse to the boy at the door,” Burke said. “He will not be clever, but he will not bother you. He knows the mark.”

“I thought your boys had no use for marks,” Abraxas said, but there was a flick in his tone, a small admission. His fingers played with the platinum serpent as if it had an itch.

“My boys,” Burke said, “use any mark that keeps idiots out. Pure, impure—I do not care. Useful is pure. Useless is impure. There you are. That is my ideology. Put it in your diary.”

“Practical to a fault,” Slughorn said, relieved to be able to put the conversation into a box. “You boys will go far. Do have a toffee, Mr Burke. You’ll like the spice.”

Burke took a toffee. He held it as if it were evidence. He put it in his pocket. Slughorn looked hurt and went to refill glasses.

People began to talk about other things for show. There was chatter about the latest issue of The Practical Potioneer, about broom adverts, about a third-year who had turned her eyebrows green. Laughter rose and fell. Burke sank into a chair without asking and looked at nothing at all for a minute, as if listening to the room’s machinery. Tom stood near him, not standing too near. Abraxas drifted away, smiling thinly and putting a quiet sentence into Avery’s ear.

“You liked the Wizengamot,” Burke said after a time.

“It was instructive,” Tom said.

“When you are older and fatter,” Burke said, “you may enjoy the sound of your own voice in that chamber. For now, learn where the votes are counted before they are counted. You understand me.”

Tom looked down at his hand. He had taken the card without thinking where he would put it. He slipped it inside his robe, past the neat seam, to the inner pocket. It settled there, next to the scrap of paper with three committee names and the rigid weight he had been nursing there since the Gaunt house. For a moment he felt each object separately, then together, like a chord.

He said nothing.

After Burke left, Slughorn rebounded to himself as if a muffled boom had moved through him and dissipated. “What an extraordinary character,” he said in a whisper that could be heard across the room. “He frightens the house-elves. He frightens me. He would be worth knowing, though. And Mr Riddle—my boy—do be careful. Men like Mr Burke are not safe. They have their uses. They are very, very clever. But I do not want to hear that you have been down in Knockturn doing anything that might result in questions.”

“Of course not, Professor,” Tom said. Slughorn patted his shoulder twice and fluffed his own moustache as if it were a pet. When he moved away Tom saw that two girls had watched the exchange with avid eyes and were whispering into their hands. News travelled.

Abraxas came to him with his careful gait. “He will teach you to cheat,” Abraxas said, as if offering a sweet. “He will make you useful to himself. You will not enjoy being another man’s usefulness.”

“Nor will you,” Tom said. His voice was pleasant. “We can both endure unpleasantness when it has a point.”

Abraxas studied him as if trying to see the seam of something. “You do not believe in anything,” he said, as though it were a remark about the weather.

Tom thought about this and did not once look at the card in his pocket. “I believe in gravity,” he said. “It always wins.”

“Such a dreary thing to believe in,” Abraxas said, but he looked satisfied, as though he had pronounced correctly a foreign word he had been practising, and went to talk to Daphne, who was playing a few sugared notes at the pianoforte.

When Tom left Slughorn’s, the corridor was empty and cool. He walked alone, footsteps soft on old stone. The torches in their brackets breathed. A draught from somewhere high snuffed one and then let it flare again.

He kept his left hand inside his robe as he walked, fingertips resting lightly on the inner pocket, as if to steady the things there. He did not need to, but it made his stride even. The small stiffness under his ribs was familiar now. He imagined the Committee rooms with their tea and ledgers, the quiet shuffle of paper. He imagined Burke’s rings on his fingers, the weight of them. He imagined Nott not looking at anyone and making them not exist for a moment by not looking at them.

He turned a corner and almost ran into a first-year who skittered to the wall like a leaf. The boy’s eyes went wide. Tom did not say anything. The boy pressed himself flatter; his satchel knocked against the stone, and a book fell out with a slap. Tom stepped around it. He did not bend to pick it up.

In the common room two older boys were arguing about the relative grace of different brooms. A girl was knitting with violent speed. The fire made a low, steady sound. He went to the far wall where the shadows were deepest, sat, and thought.

He had wanted, always wanted, to be apart, to be above. To win the thing in front of him because he was the only one who could. It had shone, that wanting. It had been clean. He saw now that it would not be enough, because the floor moved under the game. The rules were not rules; they were agreements among people who ate supper together on Thursdays.

To win such a game one could not simply play well. One had to move the table. People would leave if one moved the table too visibly. They would complain. They would try to bolt the legs down. One must make them think they had wanted the table moved. One must slip cards under one side of it until it was higher, pour tea, smile.

He put a hand on his jaw to stop himself clenching. He breathed out, slow and controlled, until the urge passed. He wrote down another word on the small scrap, folded around itself now so many times it was as thick as a talisman. Not a Committee this time. A name: Registrar of Wands.

At lights-out he lay on his back and looked at the cracked line running across the ceiling above his bed, as if the castle had been quietly broken once and repaired and did not want to draw attention to the scar. In the darkness there was the small presence just under his ribs, the card and the scrap and the old thing, all together. He thought of the way Burke had said, You will want the key.

He did not want the key because Burke had said it. He wanted it because there was a lock.

He smiled in the dark, thinly, as if at a joke he wished no one to hear. The smile faded. His fingers curled and straightened against his blanket, practised at moving while he was angry.

He slept.

In the morning he rose before anyone else and went early to the library. He found, after an hour’s pleasant hunt, that the Registrar’s office had moved its premises three times in thirty years, and that one of the clerks had been named Rosier. Rosier meant Abraxas’s mother’s people. He made a small note of it and put it with the other small notes. Slughorn drifted in to look ostentatiously for a book he never read. He saw Tom and beamed and scurried away as if he were responsible for the boy having eyes.

By afternoon a quiet message arrived, neat hand in green ink. Thursday at four, said the card. He did not have to ask who had sent it. The reverse bore a thin central mark.

At dinner Abraxas told a story about a cousin’s Quidditch triumph. Avery laughed in the right places. Daphne Rowle watched Tom with her eyelashes lowered, glittering with a curiosity that looked like pity. Tom ate without looking at any of them. The stew was thick; it sat heavy.

He had the peculiar sensation that the day had begun somewhere else and he had walked into the middle of it. The Wizengamot would sit again without him; Burke’s shop would open and close in Knockturn and the boys at the door would wave in people with the right marks and glance past those with no marks at all. Slughorn would deliver pineapple to someone he wished to be invited to supper. Nott would sit like a blank and a boy would look at him like a wall.

No single cleverness would move any of that. But it was not immovable. It was a structure. Structures had supports. Supports could be kicked out from under if one could do it without being seen.

He touched his ribs once, lightly, under the table. The small stiffness there did not yield. He liked that.

He thought of thunder and of arithmetic. Thunder gave men stories to tell. Arithmetic built bridges. He did not want to be a story. He did not want to be remembered for the sound he made when he hit something hard. He wanted to walk across where no one had walked and have the structure remain after he was halfway across so that it was too late for anyone to stop him.

He finished his stew, put his spoon down in quiet order, and looked up at the ceiling where the enchanted sky had gone an even black.

He was not disappointed anymore.