The ghost was speaking. Harry pulled his thoughts back to the present at Cygnus Vepres' next words. "Defeating a Lord of this castle does not give you the right to rule," she pointed out with academic detachment. "And Salazar Slytherin was never one of us."

"Yes," Harry agreed calmly, "neither Voldemort nor Slytherin define who I am, because I will bind you in my own name, with my own power."

Power was the only thing they all respected. Very well, he would show them power.

Harry shifted his gaze to the first ghost in the circle, who stood a little apart from the others. The scorn on his strange, proud face pinned Harry with the contempt of a lord for one of his serfs. He was tall, skeletal, as if his body had collapsed into itself under the weight of his power even before his death. His milky white eyes bore into Harry's as if he could sear his hatred into Harry's mind. Harry said steadily to the wraith, "Otho Linarius. You gave this castle your name and bound to it the ghosts of your victims. Dark Wizards flocked to your banner. You ruled for two hundred years and made Toadflax Keep the most feared name in the wizarding world."

The ghost bowed mockingly, but Harry wasn't done. "You searched for the Philsopher's Stone all your life but never found it. And then you died as all mortals die, an old and doddering man whose name no one remembers now but scholars of history in their dusty libraries and those, like me, who use it to bind you."

He turned to the next ghost before Linarius could make a reply. "Sabinus Atrum. You gathered those who, like you, hungered for power over the lives of others, and formed an army that ruled through terror for fifty years."

This ghost did not bow, but stood glowering at him silently. Harry continued, "But you, like Voldemort, underestimated those who stood with the Light and were defeated. Even now you search these halls for your cursed and scattered bones."

On around the circle he went, naming each ghost and yielding to them bits and pieces of their own lives, tidbits memorized from hours and hours of poring over ancient histories of the wizarding world. Names were important here, a binding as old as magic itself. It was why he had not given Claudius Pertennius his name. Knowledge was power—he'd realized that from very early on. But it was Albus who had taught him that the knowing was not enough; it was the ways in which one used that power which determined the kind of person one became.

Finally, he turned back to the witch still standing in front of him. "Cygnus Vepres," he gave her name back to her. "You had the power to carve your own little kingdom, but instead you chose to remain in this castle, living in obscurity and killing only to defend your peace. Now your peace is once again threatened—the Aurors will return again and again until they have breached the castle's defenses. Will you let that happen?"

Vepres shrugged contemptuously. "They are incompetents who can be destroyed like so many insects when the time comes. Dragonsweyr takes care of itself."

"And if I should be the one to lead them inside?" Harry questioned quietly. "How safe would your precious secrets be then?"

Her eyes narrowed a little. "What makes you think you would be allowed to leave this place?" she returned.

Harry laughed, a cold, humorless laugh that his friends would not have recognized as his. "What makes you think you can stop me? My body is far beyond your reach, and you do not have the power to touch my soul."

Vepres considered this. The other ghosts, chained with the weight of their own names, were silent. "Very well," she conceded grudgingly. "Then as Lord of this castle, would you swear to protect it with all the power at your command?"

"I would," Harry replied solemnly, pushing away the bitter guilt that shuddered through him as he spoke those words.

"Very well," Vepres said again. "Open yourself to me."

He considered the circle of ghosts silently. Then he closed his eyes and flung open the gates to himself, surrendering all the paths they had guarded to the ghost standing before him. At the very instant he did so the other ghosts attacked with all the power at their disposal. Their magic he had bound, and so they attacked him with the only thing that he had not touched: their minds. Honed on the weight of centuries, on death and cruelty and uncontained power, they sank cold talons of unrelenting hatred into his thoughts, rending his name from him and scattering it to the shadows, leaving him nameless. He opened his mouth, but words flew away from him until the only sounds that emerged were the stark, fierce calls of a bird of prey in its wildness.

He pushed at those alien minds savagely, but they stole forward into his memories, draining their meaning away one by one until he could no longer recognize any language save that of creatures as nameless as himself.

A man and a woman waved and smiled at him. They were his...they were...they.... He tried frantically to understand their words, but he could only hear as a bird could hear, and the sounds washed over him in an undecipherable, jagged stream. They vanished from his thoughts, to be replaced by a man with long black hair and a handsome but haunted, too-thin face. The man turned and walked away from him, towards an ancient crumbling archway hung with its tattered, rippling veil of black. He threw out a hand desperately, tried to cry out a warning, but even he could not understand the harsh broken sound that emerged. The man disappeared behind the veil. The archway faded even as he ran towards it, croaks tearing from his throat like a crow's sobs. He stopped to find a kindly old man with flowing white hair waiting for him. The old man, too, was speaking; his voice was rich and slow and gentle: the murmur of a deep river on a summer's day. But he could not comprehend the river's meaning, and that memory, too, spun away from him.

Eyes as blue as the reflection of the sky on a river's surface darkened into a raven's black. He was caught within their stillness, a gift of knowledge whose language was a birthright that could not be revoked. A single wordless touch, a name spoken by fingers whispering over skin, filled him with warmth.

He whispered a name, very gently. And he remembered.

The wraiths' hold on him shattered. In their moment of confusion he drove them out of his memories and sealed them mercilessly with an impenetrable barrier in the space of his mind.

And then he touched their minds with grief.

He forced on them, these ancient lords who had always taken exactly what they desired, the knowledge of loss. They struggled against him blindly like calves against the heat of the branding iron, but he held them with implacable strength as he filled their minds with his memories: of the Death Eater who had died for an illusion, a man whose name he never learned; of the terrible resolution on Neville Longbottom's face the day he learned that his grandmother had perished along with half the staff of St. Mungo's while defending the hospital from a surprise attack; of the elves' silent, heart-broken sorrow when their children had been returned to them, victims of a Dark Lord's sadistic pleasures; of all the sacrifices throughout the long war that he had sealed into his memory so that someone, at least, would remember and honor them.

The ghosts raged against him, but that he understood. He gathered their fury and returned it to them, intertwined with the deeper pain of accepting a reality he could not change.

One by one the wraiths stilled, became silent. One by one they stepped forward. One by one they bowed to him and faded away.

Finally only Vepres remained. Her voice was still as cold as wind on a sunless winter morning when she sighed, "We have lived our lives and existed years beyond counting without knowing what you have just forced upon us. It would have been better that way."

"Not better," he returned. "Easier, perhaps."

At last, she too bowed. "We accept you as Lord of this castle, Harry Potter," he heard the whisper in his mind as she faded back into the shadows.

Harry closed his eyes, waited. But however prepared he was he could not have been ready for the castle's next test.

Images crowded into his mind, of rooms that he had never seen and would never have wanted to see. The castle showed him with horrifying clarity what had been done to protect its every stone, the countless other ghosts that roamed the darkest depths of the castle, forgotten, lost, bound to it even now by pain and the violence of their deaths. Images raced past in an unending, nightmarish procession: a woman with a gaping hole in her chest that gushed blood every time she moved, a man with empty eye sockets and mouth frozen into a rictus grin, a little girl who reached out to him with arms that ended in bloody stumps instead of hands, the things that had been done to them. The room started to fade with a familiar sickening lurch as he realized that—oh Merlin!—these were the castle's memories, which meant....

Holding himself there in that room while the memories passed before him was the hardest thing he'd ever done—would ever do. But he held on with the strength of his desperation, because he knew that he would never have a second chance.

[[center:***]]

Voldemort had discovered Dragonsweyr in the year before his defeat. By that time, aided by the invaluable intelligence Severus Snape continued to gather at the risk of his life, they had already slowly turned the tide of the war in their favor. They would never know how exactly Voldemort stumbled on the secret of Dragonsweyr, but somehow he pulled apart legend and myth to find it there waiting for him, darkness to darkness and ancient power to new desire. He claimed the castle as its master and made it his stronghold. Then he summoned every remaining Death Eater to him.

In the months following Harry would return again and again to his memories of that night, a turning point in so many ways, seeking reconciliation for the hope and despair which both had their genesis within those few hours. There must have been something he could have done, something he could have said...something he should have known... But his mind could only circle back like a lost falcon over images of those two faces: the one pleading and calm with acceptance, the other twisted with fury and deepest loathing.

Few knew the truth of that night, though many had their theories. Harry, who had been there and yet had arrived too late, did not have any truths to give to anyone. But this time—this time, at least, he would ask an answer of the only man who could give him that truth. That single determination was what had carried him through the months of waiting and the desperate days following.

For he knew, now, something of that man hidden so carefully in his shadows. Things which perhaps only Albus had ever seen before.

The dagger-edged wit had always been evident, of course. But if he told Ron that their former Potions professor had the courage and loyalty of a dozen Gryffindor lions, would he believe it? Harry rather suspected not. But he knew of the countless times the man had risked discovery for a bit of information they absolutely needed. He'd seen the Potions master who supposedly plotted to feed students to the giant tarantulas in the Dark Forest walk through magical inextinguishable fire to rescue second-years too terrified to make a run for it themselves. Harry knew, too, of the fact that Severus refused all recognition because it would have made his job as spy that much harder, even though it might have shielded him against the suspicious stares of his own allies.

Those things did not make Severus a nice man, but they made him a decent man-and even, sometimes, an admirable one. There was bitterness-of course there was-for a life gone so horribly wrong for a young Slytherin with an eager vision of what the world could and should have been. That much was obvious. Yet there was contentment, too, snatched in odd moments of serenity alone with the potions that were the chosen object of his passion. And there were no recriminations—ever—from this man, no pointed fingers, no scrambling for a target of blame.

It was not an easy path, the journey to find that complex, bewildering man who allowed himself only the strictest form of reality, and who faced the world from behind a barrier as impenetrable as the walls of Merlin's Tower. The path was certainly not without its pitfalls. But trust was a wild rose that, nurtured through the storms of years of past hatreds, could climb even walls of enchanted glass. And trust, deep-rooted and unexpected, was an enchantment all its own.