Shadow Magic • Harry Potter X Theodore Nott •

(7) Lord Of Shadows

"Did you see the headline, my lord?"

Harry snorts as he looks at the Daily Prophet that Theodore's handed him. BOY-WHO-LIVED MISSING! it screams across the top of the page. He hands it back to Theodore. "Of course Dumbledore would do that. He doesn't understand that I can move unseen. Or he probably thinks that I'm Apparating. He'll try to hinder me as much as he can."

"It won't be a concern, my lord?"

Harry shakes his head as he digs into the breakfast the Patil house-elves have delivered for them. Honestly, he thought there might be a problem with the house-elves, but once a few of them saw Padma's mark, they immediately assumed a mantle of faithful service to Harry and Theodore, too. "Of course we have to be cautious. But cautious isn't the same as paranoid."

"The way you think Voldemort is becoming."

Harry grins. "Yes."

The research that his Ravenclaws have done and that they're owling him now—or, in Padma's case, just coming to their rooms to tell him—is moving better than he ever thought it could. Terry was the one who had the bright idea to search for Slytherin artifacts, since after all Voldemort is supposed to be descended from Salazar Slytherin. It turns out that Slytherin didn't leave a whole lot of relics. One of them is a golden locket with an emerald snake on the front that should prove recognizable. Another is a huge ring that passed into the Peverell family. Su is working now to trace what happened to the Peverell family after it stopped being called Peverell.

Hufflepuff's relics seem to be limited, given Padma's talks with the insufferable Zacharias Smith, to a single golden cup with a badger on the side and large handles. The Smith family once owned it, but it was apparently stolen long ago from one Hepzibah Smith who was accidentally poisoned by her house-elf.

Harry's eyebrows went up when he heard that. Right. The old house-elf is dead now, so there's no way to prove it, but Harry would be willing to bet his Parseltongue that Voldemort arranged for the murder and also for the house-elf to be blamed.

Which doesn't tell them where the cup is now. But at least they know what they should be looking for.

Ravenclaw's relics are supposedly more numerous, including a wand held by a Swedish family that claims to be her descendants, but Theodore is the one who points out that Voldemort would hardly be content to let someone else keep his Horcruxes.

"It has to be her diadem," he tells Harry one lazy morning when Harry's been refining Dementor-killing plans and Theodore has been reading through the owls that the other vassals have sent in. Wayne's mother turned out to have a distant relation to the Peverells, too, which has made that part of the research a little easier. "That's her most famous relic and the most long-lost. Lost almost a thousand years ago, in fact."

"Then how would Voldemort find it?"

"You know how clever he was, my lord. Besides, he might have asked the Grey Lady."

"The who?"

Theodore rolls over and gives him an amused look. "My lord, you are truly not that observant of things at Hogwarts that don't relate to your own concerns. The Ravenclaw ghost, the Grey Lady. She was the daughter of Rowena Ravenclaw in life," he adds, when Harry just keeps frowning at him. "If she knows where her mother or Ravenclaw's other descendants disposed of the diadem, she could have told Voldemort."

Harry shakes his head a little. "How common is the knowledge that she's Ravenclaw's daughter? Surely Su and Terry and Padma would have bragged about something like that. And I'm surprised Luna never told me."

"It's known, but it's considered an odd little fact by now." Theodore shrugs. "She very rarely talks to anyone. I assume a wizard as powerful and as charming as Voldemort was reputed to be could have tricked her into revealing her secrets, however."