Free Web NovelChapter 314: Chapter 314: Courtesy and Sinister Intent
Somewhere in the distance, the Fiendfyre gave a muffled roar, like a great dragon toppling something over. Stone and flame tumbled down together.
Voldemort withdrew from the mental space and said nothing for a while. His gaze stayed on Regulus’s face, the vertical pupils contracting slowly, as though pulling something into focus.
Then he spoke. "Dumbledore."
It wasn’t quite a question, nor a statement, and barely sounded as if it were addressed to Regulus at all.
He’d only spoken the name, the way one might read a familiar title aloud while leafing through an old book. freewёbnoνel.com
There was something faint underneath it, too thin to call mockery, too thin to call anything, nearly transparent. But it was there.
He had seen the parallel memory: Dumbledore’s magic and his own, laid out on the same plane.
Regulus’s expression didn’t shift.
So Voldemort had found the memory. The arrangement had worked.
"Professor Dumbledore is my headmaster." Regulus spoke evenly, stating a fact that required no defense. "I learn from every great wizard, my lord."
He had weighed every word.
Every. That single word placed Voldemort and Dumbledore in the same category.
Great wizards. It acknowledged Voldemort’s standing without setting him on a throne of his own.
Dumbledore was a great wizard. So are you.
What he was saying was this: you are part of how I understand the world, your magic is something I want to grasp, but you are no different from any other great wizard. You’re a reference point. I walk my own road.
Voldemort gave almost nothing back.
The pupils didn’t widen. The flat nostrils flared once. The thin line of his mouth, like a shallow wound, held its shape without the faintest curve.
His breathing was too soft to hear from four meters away, and he hadn’t adjusted his stance at all.
But he looked at Regulus a little longer than before. Only a little. Half a second, maybe a full one. In those serpent’s eyes there was no finer measure to be had.
Then his gaze left Regulus and settled, for the first time, on Bellatrix.
She still lay among the rubble, her body twitching only faintly now. Her lips moved, shaping something.
Two syllables, by the look of them, repeated over and over, slurred. Dried blood crusted at the corner of her mouth.
Perhaps she was saying Master.
Voldemort glanced down at her.
No anger, no tenderness, no disappointment, nothing that could be read at all.
Then he looked away.
"She used the Killing Curse on you." His voice drifted, weightless. "She failed. You may dispose of her."
Regulus understood.
Voldemort hadn’t asked whether he wanted her dead. He was stating something. A permission. An authorization handed down from above.
I allow you this.
To kill her would mean accepting the framework of power Voldemort offered. You give me the right, and I use it. frёewebnoѵel.ƈo๓
To spare her depended on the reason.
And the wording itself. She failed. What if she hadn’t? What if the Killing Curse had landed?
Then tonight would have been a different story.
Voldemort did not speak to the corpses of small wizards.
He would simply have walked in, glanced at the two bodies on the ground, a dead Black heir and a still-breathing Bellatrix, and turned to leave.
Before the Killing Curse there was no fair or unfair. Only hit and missed.
Bellatrix had lost, so she’d been laid at Regulus’s feet.
Had Regulus lost, he likely wouldn’t have earned a second glance.
His mind turned the whole thing over, and he shook his head. A small motion, but its meaning was clear.
Then he bowed his head slightly, with the proper measure of respect.
In a moment like this, to refuse the power offered to you, you owed a little extra courtesy to make up the difference.
"She’s family," Regulus said. "This is a family matter, my lord."
Family pulled Bellatrix back into the frame of blood. She was a daughter married out of the House of Black, his cousin.
A family matter bounded everything tonight within the limits of an internal dispute. The right to deal with her lay with the Blacks and no one else.
He had not accepted Voldemort’s authorization.
Among pure-bloods, the logic of family matters was something everyone honored. Even Voldemort couldn’t take offense at a man reclaiming his own household affairs.
It was a kind of Black pride, too. The way I deal with my own kin requires no one’s approval, not even yours.
Yet that pride wore a coat of deference, enough to keep it from tipping into insult.
My lord. I shook my head. I explained. I had my reasons. I was polite.
Voldemort watched him, and there was another brief silence.
Then Bellatrix was gone.
No motion. No wand. No incantation. No warning.
One second she lay among the broken stone, and the next she was absent. All that remained was a human-shaped hollow, the blood beneath her gone with her, clean, as though she’d never had any business being there at all.
Her wand went too. The wand that had cast the Killing Curse, the Cruciatus Curse, the black mist, the black barrier, taken away with its owner.
Regulus filed the detail away.
Silent, wandless. Nothing remarkable in that. But there was something else here. Precision and range.
Bellatrix, the blood beneath her, the wand at her hand, all lifted at once, without a trace left behind.
The highest form of Apparition. Or something past the bounds of Apparition altogether.
Tonight he had disrupted her Apparition and torn a layer of flesh from her in the doing. What Voldemort had just done, he hadn’t even been able to sense.
"Regulus." Still that soft, unsettling voice, every syllable worn round and smooth. "I look forward to our next meeting."
Regulus kept his deferent posture, his head dipping. "My lord."
Voldemort turned and walked back the way he had come.
Darkness spread again from that direction, thicker now, with more weight to it, rising from the ground like liquid, seeping out of the cracks in the ruins, gathering around his shape.
His robes dragged over the rubble without a sound. His outline blurred in the dark, its edges dissolving, melting into the gloom around him.
He took two steps. Then he was gone.
There was no instant of vanishing. No crack. No pressure of displaced air.
After a certain step he simply wasn’t there.
The darkness lingered a while after him before it drew slowly back, and moonlight and firelight returned to the place.
Regulus stood alone in the center of the ruins, his legs a little weak.
No fear, of course. The drain on his mind had only carried itself down into his body.
Occlumency run to its limit had wrung him nearly dry, and his muscles had begun to answer for it, aching, his knees not quite steady.
He drew a deep breath. Star Guided Meditation surged at full power, restoring him to a workable state in moments. Then he looked toward the three-headed beast a short way off.
The Fiendfyre had only dared to flare back up after Voldemort was gone, creeping in, testing the ground again and again, making sure the thing was truly absent before it spread close.
He wanted to try something.
He pushed his will down the connection, the way Voldemort had, the caster’s will pressing against the flames’ instinct toward autonomy, telling them that direction was forbidden.
All three heads shuddered at once. The serpent’s tail drew back by half. The dragon’s wings tightened. The chimera buried its head against the serpent’s body.
A response. But not the same.
When Voldemort had come, the Fiendfyre had been afraid, truly afraid.
When he pressed down, the flames obeyed too, because the connection held. But it was more like hearing a command than meeting a natural predator.
The gap.
The gap again.
Fine.
He withdrew his will, thought for a moment, and decided to call the Fiendfyre back. There was no joy left in burning.
Earlier, watching the manor come down piece by piece, he’d thought it rather satisfying. Burning the Lestranges’ ancestral seat, the right amount of noise, every ear in the pure-blood circle that needed to hear it had heard.
But after Voldemort’s visit, the sight of three great beasts cringing in the corner, too cowed even to burn, drained the fire of its appeal, and the burning of the manor with it.
Let it go. Call them in. A ruin left standing would serve better than ash.
The wreckage of Lestrange Manor would sit here for anyone passing to see, traveling faster than any message, plainer than any spoken account.
A pure-blood estate two centuries in the making, burned to this by a twelve-year-old in a family quarrel. The image alone made the finest warning.
And the manor hadn’t burned to the ground. A few broken walls still stood, which meant the Lestranges would have a choice to make.
They’d want to rise again where they’d fallen, announcing to everyone that they hadn’t been beaten, that they might come for satisfaction at any moment.
Build somewhere new, a new estate, new pomp, a fresh start on different ground. That was biding their time, quietly gathering strength, waiting to take revenge later.
Rebuild on the same ground? Sinister intent. You mean to have your vengeance.
Rebuild elsewhere? Sinister intent. You’re plotting a greater vengeance still.
Neither answer was right. Let them sit with it.
The corner of Regulus’s mouth twitched, and he turned to the real work.
