A Forbidden Birthright

Chapter Thirty Five

As expected, it took a decent amount of convincing, but within a few hours, now well into the night, Percy sent a message back to them via a Patronus. The clock hands were inching toward midnight when he told them about the labyrinth beneath Azkaban, and had sent them the records in the form of a paper bird. Only a few minutes later, a sparrow of animated paper alighted on the window sill. Harry snatched it and scanned its contents, spreading it on the table.

Arthur had joined them now after giving his wife a Draught of Peace and a Draught of Dreamless Sleep. She would not wake till morning, and until then, he wanted to be aware of every inch of their plan. He listened silently with a stony expression on his face, a mask of fury shining through his eyes. For a second time now, that of his friend's and children's lives had been interrupted at his home on his property, and this time, he would make sure something was done about it.

The tunnels were a labyrinth just like Percy had said. They spread out in a wide circle, a mile in diameter for every point, crossing and intersecting the closer to the island they got. The intention was to confuse any prisoners that happened to discover it and think they could escape to freedom. The worst part was that each tunnel ended in a dead end except for one, which was cloaked with magic as Draco had predicted. 

It chilled Hermione's blood as she imagined being a prisoner and stumbling down into the tunnels. How many had thought they could escape? How many felt the flicker of hope for the first time in who knew how many years only to turn in aimless circles with nothing to guide their way, no lights, no sun. How many skeletons lay beneath the waves, crushed by a despair worse than the kind Dementors inflicted?

Where the tunnels exited on the island was unclear. There had been a map included in the few papers Percy had sent, but it was more of a schematic, a blueprint that was old and faded. Some of the lines of the tunnels were so faded with age, that Hermione was unable to determine the direction and intersection of them. Even with the map in their possession, it still told no specific location of the prison itself. 

Hermione wracked her brain on the history of the prison, trying to shake loose any piece of memory that would be useful. Something snapped into place. 

"That's it!" She cried suddenly, jarring those around her at her sudden outburst. "Sorry," she amended quickly. "It's just, well, the North Sea separates the island of Great Britain and the continental mainland. The Dover Straight, as well as the English Channel in the south, I believe, and the Norwegian Sea in the north connect it to the Atlantic Ocean, correct?" 

"Save the geography lesson for another time, Granger," Draco said. 

"Right. Well- does anybody here have a sextant?" 

"Yes, because we're all sailors," Harry drawled sarcastically. 

She groaned and rolled her eyes, fishing for her wand and transforming a nearby spoon into the device she wanted. 

"Somebody get me a map, please!" 

Fleur produced one with a sharp twist of her wand and slid it across the table to Hermione. She opened it, smoothing out over the wood, and marked the North Sea in relation to the other channels that connected it to the Atlantic Ocean. 

"A dark wizard named Ekrizdis is said to have been the creator of Azkaban. He practiced the worst kinds of Dark Magic- on Muggle sailors and those from the shore. He used the prison- well, it wasn't a prison yet, exactly, at least not a formal one- to torture the Muggles he captured," she explained as she used the sextant to mark the thoughts in her head on the map. "Which means there had to be land nearby." She tapped a skinny peninsula off the coast of Norway. It was the tip of Denmark. "Here," she said. I'm guessing here."