Chapter 335: New Year, New Landscape |
Baruk's front leg extended again, this time pointing at the deep purple robes in Minchum's photograph. "...Pretty..."
Regulus turned his head and gave the spider a look. Since when did an Acromantula have aesthetic opinions? And who'd taught him?
"You think that's good-looking?"
Baruk clicked once.
Regulus tilted the newspaper toward him, letting the spider get a better view of Minchum's face.
"That shade needs a darker complexion to carry it. He's too pale. Can't pull it off." He tapped the photo with a finger. "Looks like someone dumped red cabbage juice on him and forgot to rinse."
Baruk's pedipalps worked open and shut. He reversed course without missing a beat. "...Not pretty."
Regulus let it go and flipped through the rest of the paper. Festive advertisements, holiday discounts. Nothing worth reading.
He turned back to the front page and scanned Minchum's speech again.
"Will not permit any individual or organization to place itself above the Ministry."
He set the paper on his knee.
The Muggle situation rang a faint bell. Oil embargo, Britain's three-day work week, global economic turmoil. The first half of the seventies had been rough across the entire Western world.
Cokeworth, though. A northern factory town that lived and died by its mills. The impact there would be worse than most.
Power restrictions meant reduced output. Reduced output meant layoffs. Workers with no shifts had no pay, and New Year's wouldn't have been a cheerful affair.
Lily's family lived in that town. Couldn't have been pleasant.
He didn't dwell on it. Minchum deserved more attention.
Harold Minchum. He knew the man.
Department of Magical Law Enforcement. Secretary in the Department of International Magical Cooperation. Deputy Head of the Auror Office. Every step placed squarely in the Ministry's core apparatus. A textbook elite career track.
Known for strict procedural adherence. In normal times, that was a compliment. At this particular moment in history, it meant something else entirely.
Regulus knew that Minchum's stance toward the Death Eaters would prove ambiguous at best. Over the next several years under his leadership, the Ministry would mount no meaningful resistance to Voldemort's expansion.
The specifics of his governance were hazy, though. Regulus only knew the broad strokes and key turning points.
The details had to be inferred from what lay in front of him.
Eugenia Jenkins hadn't left willingly.
"Personal reasons," in the Ministry's political lexicon, meant forced out.
Toward the end of her tenure, Jenkins had realized that Voldemort's threat exceeded the Ministry's capacity to respond. She'd quietly sought Dumbledore's help.
Few people knew. But secrets like that couldn't hide from those who made it their business to know, and the Sacred Twenty-Eight had no shortage of such people.
A sitting Minister for Magic, going to the Headmaster of Hogwarts for help in secret. That alone told you the Ministry could no longer handle the Death Eaters' infiltration through normal channels.
She'd known Voldemort was the real threat but hadn't dared say so publicly.
Acknowledgment would have demanded confrontation. Confrontation would have meant antagonizing the Pure-blood families already openly siding with Voldemort. Antagonizing them would have cost her the seat.
So she'd handled it quietly. Never opposed him in the open. Tried to use Dumbledore's personal prestige to balance the scales, trading delay and compromise for the appearance of stability.
Classic institutional thinking. The assumption that any threat could be absorbed through the machinery of governance. That Voldemort could be managed through politics.
The logic wasn't wrong in the abstract. The target was. Voldemort didn't play politics. He played fear.
Minchum was different.
Jenkins had lacked the ability. Minchum lacked the alignment.
His first act in office was to emphasize neutrality, stability, impartiality. But the Death Eaters' operations were already half in the open.
Pure-blood families were being pulled in. Some went willingly. Others were coerced. A large bloc sat on the fence, watching.
The Auror Office was receiving nearly twice the usual number of missing persons reports, yet fewer than a third led to formal investigations. Many of the victims' families never filed at all, or filed and then withdrew.
Against that backdrop, talk of neutrality was permission for Voldemort to keep expanding.
Inaction was endorsement.
Baruk's front leg reached out once more, this time tapping a word at the newspaper's edge.
"...This... what..."
Regulus glanced down. Baruk was pointing at "Wizengamot."
The spider's curiosity about written language pleased him, in a small way. A literate Acromantula beat an illiterate one.
"The wizarding court," he explained patiently. "Makes rules and puts people on trial."
Baruk's pedipalps worked twice. His head swiveled. "...Trial... spiders?"
"They don't try spiders."
Baruk retracted his leg, apparently losing interest in the institution.
Regulus thought on.
Minchum had said something else. "Will not permit any individual or organization to place itself above the Ministry."
On the surface, that was aimed at Voldemort. In practice, it was aimed at Dumbledore.
Jenkins had at least known to ask Dumbledore for help, which meant she could tell who the real threat was.
Minchum wouldn't ask. He'd treat Dumbledore as a rival. The old man's influence was too vast.
His seat on the International Confederation of Wizards. His position as Headmaster of Hogwarts. His title as Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot. Stack them together and the Minister for Magic didn't amount to much.
Any Minister who wanted to feel in control would instinctively view Dumbledore as a challenge.
And a Minister who treated Dumbledore as an adversary was, in Voldemort's eyes, if not an ally, then at least someone who didn't need dealing with.
Whether the Death Eaters had played a direct hand in Minchum's rise was hard to say.
Voldemort hadn't openly infiltrated the Ministry's upper ranks by 1974, but the groundwork had been laid long ago.
The Malfoy family's web of Ministry contacts. The Nott family's voting bloc in the Wizengamot. Vault keys placed openly on the right desks.
But the more likely scenario was simpler. Voldemort didn't need to install Minchum personally. He only needed the existing system to feel threatened.
Manufacture disappearances to spread panic. Plant informants in key positions to distort the flow of information. Make a few people in the right places go quiet or go missing. The system would choose its own candidate, one favorable to the status quo.
Minchum was what the system produced when it panicked.
He wanted to preserve the current order, to avoid anyone rocking the boat. Voldemort could ride that neutrality straight into expansion.
Minchum wasn't a Death Eater. But over the next few years, the Ministry would turn a blind eye.
That meant several things.
The Order of the Phoenix would lose the Ministry's unofficial backing. Room to maneuver would shrink.
The Auror Office would receive directives to maintain neutrality. Substantive operations against the Death Eaters would decline.
Fence-sitting Pure-blood families would accelerate their drift toward Voldemort, because the Ministry had proven itself unworthy of their trust.
And the Ministry's neutral posture would hold for a few years at most. Voldemort wouldn't settle for other people's neutrality forever. Eventually, he'd demand they pick a side.
When that day came, Minchum would discover that the situation he thought he controlled had slipped away long ago.
"...This one..." Baruk pointed at another word.
Regulus glanced down. "Auror. Wizards who catch dark wizards."
Baruk pressed on. "...Catch... spiders?"
"They don't catch spiders."
Baruk seemed satisfied. The leg withdrew.
Regulus lifted his gaze from the paper and looked at the sunlight beyond the window.
Regulus stood and tossed the newspaper into the hearth.
Flame licked up the edges. Minchum's tight-lipped photograph curled in the fire, blackened, and crumbled to ash.
All of this concerned him. It concerned everyone. But right now, none of it was his problem.
So forget the rest. Save the Whomping Willow first.
He pushed the door open. Sunlight hit his face, warm and easy.
Baruk squinted on his shoulder, eight legs gripping fabric, body pressed flat.
He walked toward the clearing.
The healthy Whomping Willow still swayed in the morning breeze, its hooked branch-tips catching the light.
The other one lay where it had been that morning. Branches trailing on the ground, trunk cracked and grey. Lifeless.
He stopped in front of it and sent his magical perception inward.
Almost nothing left.
An empty shell, bone-dry.
The natural life force within the trunk was fading too.
For a Whomping Willow, it couldn't even match an ordinary dead tree. A dead tree could at least draw water from the soil. This one had lost even its root-system magic channels.
He pressed his palm against the trunk. The bark felt dry and rough, like touching cardboard.
Verdant Magic surged from his palm, seeping inward through the cracks in the bark.
Verdant Magic had a natural affinity with plant life. No connection to establish, no calibration needed. Pour it in.
He forced the circuits open, starting from the roots, pushing upward along the main trunk. At every fork, he split off a thread of magic into the secondary channels.
The circuits were intact. The structure held. Fork angles unchanged, pathway widths unshrunken. They were simply empty.
As magic filled them, the circuits lit up again. Lines that had gone dark regained flow, like water flooding back into a dried riverbed.
Magic completed one full lap through the circuits and came back weaker than it had gone in. The Whomping Willow's tissues had absorbed a portion.
Circulation had restarted.
As long as magic ran through the circuits, they'd maintain themselves. Magical plants had a kind of inertia. The prerequisite was having something inside to keep it going.
He kept pouring.
Verdant Magic flowed from his palm in a steady current, filling circuits, mending the cycle, reactivating the root system's absorption channels.
The roots were the key.
Like all magical plants, a Whomping Willow normally sustained itself by drawing ambient magic from the surrounding soil through its root network.
Once those channels reopened, it could feed itself. He wouldn't need to keep supplying it.
On his shoulder, Baruk's eight legs spread slowly outward. His body flattened, front legs draped over the highest point of the shoulder, hind legs dangling down the back. The entire spider lay across Regulus's shoulder like a small furry blanket.
The ambient wash of Verdant Magic was, for Baruk, deeply comfortable.
His magical nature had a natural affinity for it. The Forbidden Forest was one of the richest sources of Verdant Magic anywhere, and he'd grown up there. This feeling was home.
Regulus ignored him and kept pouring.
His Verdant Magic was potent. Direct infusion was nothing like the gentle seepage of establishing a connection.
The healthy Whomping Willow next to him noticed. It had been swaying lazily, but now its movements turned noticeably livelier. Small branches at the tips began to quiver, angling toward him.
The half-dead tree responded even more.
Along the trunk, the edges of dried, grey knots began to change color. Ashen white shifted to greyish brown, as though parched skin were soaking up moisture. A few of the drooping branches twitched.
The most visible change came at the tips.
On a dying lateral branch, from the blackened, desiccated point, a tiny sliver of bright green emerged. A bud, barely there.
He felt it. Inside the trunk, Magic Circulation was accelerating.
Not just the Verdant Magic he was feeding in. The Whomping Willow's own residual life force had been partially reawakened. The two currents merged and ran through the circuits with increasing ease.
The root channels were recovering too. He could sense it. At the tips of the root network, faint absorption had begun. Magic from the soil was being drawn in thread by thread, painfully slow, but it had started.
He maintained the infusion. Time passed. The sun traveled from the east to directly overhead.
Around noon, footsteps sounded across the clearing.
Agnes walked over from the greenhouse, carrying a lunch box. A teapot drifted along behind her of its own accord.
She stopped at the edge of the clearing. The attack range of two Whomping Willows. She was the one who'd told Regulus about it in the first place.
Then she saw the one on the left.
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