Regulus walked forward.
He didn’t walk fast. He was thinking.
Any wizard with a working brain who took over a castle as a base would stuff it full of traps. The Anti-Apparition field and the perception interference were only the outer shell. The real killing moves were inside.
Moody had said the Prewett brothers came here chasing Augustus Rookwood. A man from the Department of Mysteries meeting Antonin Dolohov in a place like this meant the place was useful to the other side.
Moody hadn’t said how the brothers got stuck in there. They’d probably tailed Rookwood all the way here, watched him go in, followed, and walked straight into a trap.
The traps were most likely standing defenses. Order of the Phoenix, Aurors, Ministry investigators, whoever stepped through that door would get the same ready-made welcome.
The brothers’ problem was that they’d chased too recklessly and turned a scouting mission into a straight-up fight. A common mistake for young people. Once the blood was up, they forgot their limits.
Moody had come after a call for help, and even then he hadn’t charged in. He’d stayed outside to observe and called for Dumbledore. Calling for help was smart. Charging in was stupid.
Regulus took a dozen or so steps. His boots rustled over the dry grass.
He wasn’t going to walk in there. Being bold and being reckless weren’t the same thing. The enemy held the high ground, and the layout, the traps and the spell setups were all unknown. Going inside meant being on the defensive.
He walked a few more steps, and a plan took shape.
He stopped and turned his head.
Dumbledore was watching him from beside the stone wall, eyes gleaming faintly behind his spectacles. His expression was a little puzzled and a little interested.
Regulus grinned, and the magic on his skin churned outward.
Dumbledore blinked at that grin.
At The Raven and Fiddle, when the boy had dipped Gingerbread in Mead and burned his tongue on how awful it tasted, he’d had this exact look. At the moorland tavern, right before he knocked out that wizard in the fur robe with one punch, he’d had it too.
Dumbledore opened his mouth to say something.
Regulus beat him to it, still grinning. The wind carried his words. "Tell them to get Protego ready."
Then he tilted his head, thought for a moment, and added, "A Bubble-Head Charm too."
Moody’s brows knotted together. He turned his scarred face toward Dumbledore, his eyes full of distrust.
Some silver-haired young wizard nobody knew anything about had walked a dozen steps and turned around with a nonsense instruction. Protego made some sense. But what was the Bubble-Head Charm for?
Moody had seen far too many people who talked big and fell apart once the fighting started. He opened his mouth too.
Dumbledore looked at Regulus in silence. The puzzlement in his eyes hadn’t faded, and now there was resignation with it.
Then he lifted his wand. A silver bird spread its wings from the glow at the tip, skimmed silently across the open ground, and slipped into the castle’s stone walls.
A few seconds later, two lights appeared behind the turret window. The silver of Protego, and the pale blue of the Bubble-Head Charm.
Moody shut his mouth. He stared at the lights a moment, then turned. His voice was rough and openly displeased. "Albus, who is this guy?"
Dumbledore looked back at him and smiled.
He’d already said what needed saying. No killing, no escalation. Regulus had listened.
But his gut told him the boy was planning something big.
"Geralt," Dumbledore said, his tone lighter, his smile a little wider. "An adventurer."
Moody glared at him, the corners of his mouth turned down.
A young wizard who looked like he could fight, brought along by Albus, who was casual enough around him to joke. That alone said something. If the guy was useful, Moody would watch and see.
But an adventurer?
What the hell kind of job was that?
He rested his hand on the wand at his hip and stayed where he was.
Regulus stopped about a hundred and fifty meters from the castle, at the edge of the drover’s-road wall. The distance was about right.
He raised his wand, tip pointed upward. Silver light flared. Protego.
Instead of wrapping around his body, the light spread out in midair, curved, and closed into a sphere half a meter above the tip, one and a half meters across.
The shell was so thin the castle showed through it, a faint metallic sheen flowing across the surface. Magic poured steadily from his wand, holding it in shape and at full strength.
Next came the air.
He flicked the wand tip upward, and a pinprick hole opened silently at the top of the sphere.
Ventus.
A thread of magic split from the wand tip, slid up the outside of the shell, slipped into the hole, and formed a small, constantly spinning vortex at the opening. It turned inward, dragging air from outside and forcing it in.
For the first few seconds there was almost no change. Then the wind picked up.
The nearby dry grass all bent the same way. Dust and bits of grass lifted and flew along the airflow, bouncing off the shell into a slowly rotating band of gray around it.
Regulus’s hair and the hem of his short vest were pulled toward the sphere.
He stood in the wind without moving an inch, wand steady. The two spells came from the same tip and never bled into each other, one running through the shell’s structure, the other through the hole at the top.
Running two lines of magical manipulation in parallel demanded extreme precision. Protego needed a perfectly even output, or the shell would thin and crack. Ventus had to hold the vortex steady, fast enough to feed the shell but never fast enough to overload it.
For an ordinary wizard, this was the upper limit of multitask casting.
For Regulus, it was just a normal day.
Over ten seconds passed. The sphere began to glow a very faint bluish-white, hazy, rolling slowly along the inner wall. Under extreme pressure, the air was so dense it had started scattering light.
He spread his magic perception over it. Every step up in pressure doubled the rate of collisions inside, and it was already dozens of times higher than outside.
Twenty seconds. Thirty seconds.
The negative pressure grew more obvious. Wind blew in from farther away, pebbles rolling with it, and the dust band rose half a meter off the ground. Dry grass a dozen meters down the wall was ripped out by the roots.
The howling grew louder. It started as a low hum, then turned sharp and piercing as air from far away was forced into that pinprick hole.
Forty seconds. Fifty seconds.
The haze inside brightened from bluish-white to pure white, boiling along the inner wall and lighting up the whole sphere.
He kept pouring in magic. Ventus forced air in gust after gust while Protego held the sphere from expanding, and every bit that went in raised the load on the shell a notch.
The pressure inside was now around two hundred times normal atmospheric pressure, and still climbing.
More than three hundred and fifty cubic meters of air had been packed into a volume of 1.77 cubic meters. If he let go of Protego now, the gas bursting out could flip a wooden house.
But that wasn’t enough. Flipping a wooden house and blowing apart a stone castle were several orders of magnitude apart.
Sixty seconds. The shell started to tremble, and a faint high-pitched hum came from it.
Protego’s normal containment had hit its limit. Any more air and the shell would shatter, and the gas would blast out in every direction, not concentrated enough to break the castle walls. It would just explode in front of him and cover his face in dust.
Regulus’s expression didn’t change. The gold in his amber slit pupils was blindingly bright.
It had hit the limit. Perfect.
He narrowed the Ventus opening and slowed the intake, holding it right at the threshold where the shell wouldn’t break.
---
On the castle’s ground floor, at a west-facing window, a masked Death Eater frowned and glanced outside.
The magical fluctuations out there were strange. Highly directional, concentrated on one point, but he couldn’t make out what was going on.
At a hundred and fifty meters, all he could see was a white-haired wizard by the drover’s road holding up his wand and doing something to the air. There seemed to be something next to him too. Transparent, round? It shimmered faintly, and all the dry grass around him bent one way.
Wind? He was out there playing with the wind?
The Death Eater muttered something under his breath, pulled back from the windowsill, and leaned against the stone wall by the stairs again.
---
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