Chapter 195 - I Shall Rise Again

Dumbledore nodded with satisfaction and took the bottle of Polyjuice Potion. Praeris raised her wand beside him and restored the grave to its original state.

Before she cast "Reparo," Dumbledore had written a small note and tucked it inside the scarecrow's clothing. The handwriting looked nothing like his own.

The signature read "Nicolas Flamel."

"This isn't a living person," Dumbledore said, his tone easy. "If Voldemort decides to do something to my body and disrupts your magic in the process — he may suspect my old friends rescued me."

"Even though Nicolas Flamel isn't remotely the sort of person who would go out of his way to retrieve a body." His voice was light, almost amused. "No one will question it. Voldemort doesn't know him."

Seeing that name, Praeris remembered, the creator and former owner of the Philosopher's Stone. A great alchemist.

"Won't the Dark Lord send someone to find him?" A thread of worry crept into her voice. "What if he finds Nicolas Flamel's body..."

The end result would be no different from before. Worse, it would mean the late Nicolas Flamel enjoyed exactly the same treatment as Dumbledore after death, his grave dug up.

"That's an interesting question," Dumbledore said calmly. "Fortunately, no one can find where Nicolas Flamel is buried."

Praeris knew nothing about Nicolas Flamel beyond what she'd read. But Nicolas Flamel was Dumbledore's friend and collaborator, and she could only go by Dumbledore's quiet certainty, trust Dumbledore's trust in Nicolas Flamel.

A flash of intuition struck her. She wondered, suddenly, if this was exactly why Dumbledore's followers had no choice but to follow him. Why Voldemort feared him.

Dumbledore was powerful enough. His breadth of knowledge wide enough. The span of time he had lived through long enough.

His past was the stuff of legend. And the vast majority of living people were, in his eyes, merely children, a dozen years old, a few dozen at most.

Perhaps he had witnessed the full lives of many people, while almost no one alive could claim to truly see through the hundred-odd years he had survived.

After drinking the Polyjuice Potion, Dumbledore transformed into a young man with blond hair. He touched it and flashed a teasing smile. "Praeris — is this your aesthetic preference?"

"I see you're quite satisfied with the look yourself," Praeris shot back.

Dumbledore smiled without answering, as if tacitly agreeing, as if expressing nothing at all.

Praeris ignored him, locked her suitcase, and prepared to leave.

Then Dumbledore said, "I like this epitaph."

"What?" Praeris couldn't quite make it out.

Dumbledore, farsighted eyes and all, said to Praeris, who hadn't yet fully shaken her night blindness: "Resurgam."

"I thought you didn't fear death."

They walked among the gravestones toward the church.

"Resurgam" is a Latin word. It means "I shall rise again."

In Christianity, "Resurgam" is often used to describe the resurrection of Jesus.

"No, Praeris." Dumbledore shook his head. "What was killed was the person called Dumbledore. But what rises again is the Dumbledore that lives in everyone's hearts."

In the eyes of his followers, Dumbledore had died, and yet, because of love, he lived on in each of them. The Order of the Phoenix and the D.A. would carry his convictions and his unfinished will forward, against the darkness.

That was the meaning of "Resurgam."

But there was also a rather satisfying irony to it, because Dumbledore wasn't actually dead. "Resurgam" would eventually become a slap straight across Voldemort's face.

"Sir, I prefer another epitaph." Praeris looked at him and spoke slowly. "'Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.' That's from the Gospel of Matthew, isn't it?"

Beneath the Polyjuice Potion, Dumbledore's eyes were no longer blue. They still sparkled.

He said gently, "I like that one too."

To avoid running into Voldemort and the Death Eaters, who might also come to dig up the grave, neither of them lingered in the village of Godric's Hollow. They slipped into the forest at the edge of the valley.

Praeris began to think through where they should go.

Black Moon Crescent Alley was out of the question.

In the Hospital Wing, Winnie had told her that Narcissa Malfoy knew that address too, she simply hadn't revealed it.

Praeris suspected Mrs. Malfoy had no interest in letting anyone know she'd ever been in contact with a traitor.

Diagon Alley wasn't even worth considering. People everywhere, eyes everywhere. The most dangerous place there was.

That left only one option: Praeris's birthplace. Southend-on-Sea.

She was just about to ask Dumbledore's opinion when she noticed something was wrong. According to the feigned-death potion she and Professor Snape had spent countless sleepless hours developing, Dumbledore should have returned to normal by now. But he still looked weak. His lips were pale.

"This isn't right." Praeris found a crooked tree in the forest and settled Dumbledore against its roots. "Sir — did something else happen to you that night?"

Aside from Professor Snape, who had acted on Dumbledore's own authorization, had someone else actually had the nerve to lay a hand on the most powerful white wizard alive?

Dumbledore sighed. "It seems I really am getting old..."

"Get to the point," Praeris cut him off.

Dumbledore told her: the bleeding to gain entry to the cave. The potion he had drunk inside it.

Praeris swore out loud.

"Do you think you're still strong and robust?" she said, voice sharp. "Do you even take your own body seriously?"

"There was only Harry and me. Between the two of us, I preferred it to be me." Dumbledore's voice was tired. "I am already very old. Harry is still young..."

"Consider the possibility," Praeris said coldly, "that Harry would have preferred to drink those potions himself. If not for your orders, he,"

Dumbledore's gaze was very gentle. "Of course. But I would not permit it."

In truth, Dumbledore had known those potions were harmful. He simply hadn't anticipated how much damage they would do. Praeris's body-strengthening tonics had made it far too easy for him to forget what the past year or two had already cost him.

"Praeris." Dumbledore spoke slowly. "In my eyes, both you and Harry are remarkable people. At the Christmas lunch — when you didn't touch your food and rose to stand up for me — I thought then that your attitude toward fate was something I genuinely admired."

"What I didn't expect," he continued, and there was something in his gaze she had never seen there before, "was that you would go on to save my life more than once. You know, I had already stopped caring about this life. Perhaps letting it all happen and dying would have been its own kind of fortune. But..."

"But you have to live." Praeris commanded the elder in a tone that was utterly without courtesy. "Don't think for a moment you can just die and be done with it, you haven't repaid what you promised me."

She opened her suitcase again. She stared at the rows of potions inside, her mind unsettled, hating, genuinely hating, that she had turned out to be a gifted potions researcher. She grabbed a bottle she knew Dumbledore would recognize and shoved it into his hands.

"Drink." Her voice left no room for argument. "We're going to Southend-on-Sea."

It was the restorative tonic Dumbledore had taken after his limb regeneration. Praeris's plan was to let his own constitution carry him through until they were settled somewhere, and then work out how to actually fix him.

Dumbledore drank without hesitation, which told Praeris clearly enough that he had no real intention of wriggling out of this by dying.

"You'll likely have to be the passenger for my very first Side-Along Apparition," Praeris said quickly. She was honest about it. "And my memory of Southend-on-Sea isn't exactly sharp."

"I believe in you," said the young, blond version of Dumbledore, so dazzling it was almost painful to look at directly.

The Muggle whose hair Praeris had taken was not particularly handsome. But with Dumbledore inside him, he was something else entirely. Perhaps what makes a person truly magnetic isn't the face at all. It's the soul beneath it.

Praeris closed her eyes and pulled up the image of the beach at Southend-on-Sea, the stretch of sand by the water. She was certain a place like that wouldn't change much with the years.

The world lurched and spun.

They both hit the sand. Hard. Each of them scraped by the landing.

Praeris ignored her own wounds. She scrambled up, checked Dumbledore's condition, and hauled him upright, the two of them stumbling toward where the old house should have been.

What she hadn't expected: the neighbors' houses were all still standing. But the Williams' house had simply vanished, disappeared clean from the gap between the two buildings on either side.

Dumbledore, leaning on her, patted her shoulder and spoke through the pain. "Your mother did not want anyone other than you and Severus to have claim to your home. She wrote to Severus. Implored him to take you both in."

The "both" meant Praeris and the villa in Southend-on-Sea. Perhaps in Sylvia's eyes, she still wanted Praeris to grow up in that house, to never truly know what it meant to live at someone else's mercy.

"So?" Praeris was surprisingly calm.

"So, thank my past self, from over a decade ago. He cast magic here." Dumbledore had no wand. He simply raised his hand.

The neighbors' houses slid apart on either side, and the Williams' two-story villa came into view.

The house had worn badly under the years. No one had touched it in over a decade. The furniture was buried under a thick, undisturbed layer of dust.

The first-floor living room was in chaos, with signs of a struggle throughout. Those marks might have been left by Sylvia when she killed Dipur. Or by the Aurors when they came to take Sylvia away.

Praeris cleaned the sofa with a spell and helped Dumbledore lie down on it, then turned her attention to figuring out how to make him better. That task alone took nearly a week. The end of July was drawing closer.

In those dozen-odd years, Southend-on-Sea had quietly transformed from an ordinary fishing village into a lively seaside tourist town.

Every day, Praeris used Transfiguration to swap her clothes for something that looked like tourist wear, and she moved through the crowds to buy food. She was lucky on one count: she spent every summer in the Muggle world. She had always kept savings in pounds and pence.

"Ingredients are nearly impossible to find here!" She hung her straw hat on the rack by the entrance. "How are you feeling today?"

"Wonderful," Dumbledore said pleasantly. "What about becoming a Potions professor after the war, to share some of Severus's workload?"

"Don't even think about it." Praeris tossed the bread down in front of him. "That's a fine way to repay kindness."

"Harry's birthday is getting closer. Voldemort will certainly move..." Dumbledore looked at the hard white bread with a pained expression.

Praeris said, in a voice like honey, "You want to save him? I thought the plan was to kill the giant snake before any of that."

Because Dumbledore had told Harry that Praeris had indirectly destroyed 2 Horcruxes, Harry had chosen to believe she was one of them.

That opening had given Praeris what she needed. From Harry, she had learned that Voldemort would have 7 Horcruxes.

Think through the count. The diadem and the golden cup, Praeris had been part of destroying both. Harry had dealt with the diary in his second year. The curse Dumbledore had suffered came from the ring. The potion in the cave was almost certainly connected to the fifth Horcrux. Nagini was the sixth.

So what was the seventh?

Praeris thought back to the principle behind Horcrux creation: murder. And the most notorious murder Voldemort had ever committed was the night he killed the Potter family.

Why did Harry and Voldemort share that channel of consciousness, those flashes, those dreams? Why could Harry see Nagini sinking her fangs into Arthur Weasley? And Nagini herself... wasn't she the Horcrux made from Bertha Jorkins's murder?

Horcruxes connected to each other through the ties between soul fragments, linked across the ocean of consciousness. Dead objects had no awareness of their own. Which meant the only ones that could truly perceive each other were the 3 living ones: Harry, Nagini, and Voldemort.

This was what Dumbledore had not wanted Praeris to know yet. Harry Potter was the seventh Horcrux.

When Voldemort slaughtered the Potters, he had accidentally fulfilled the conditions for it. And then Lily's love had struck back and split a fragment of his soul loose. That fragment must have lodged itself in Harry's scar, which was why Harry sensed Voldemort again and again, and why every sensing came with that searing pain.

On the night in the Godric's Hollow forest, when Praeris learned Dumbledore had drunk the cave potion for the sake of a Horcrux, she had immediately understood it was the fifth.

But it wasn't until she returned to Southend-on-Sea, after so many years away, that she had finally pieced the whole picture together.

The one truly deserving of sympathy was Harry Potter, who was doomed to die.

Dumbledore held the bread. His face was quiet. "You and Severus are very alike. At heart, you are both merciful, he also questioned me like this once. Called me cruel."

"But I don't think you want Potter dead," Praeris said, level. "If you did, why drink the potion in the cave at all?"

➤ Next: The Two-Person Conference at Southend-on-Sea