“Well,” said Ron at long last, looking drawn and ill and distressingly weak, “That’s it, then… it looks like I’m going to Azkaban.”
“I don’t believe it,” Hermione said quietly, her voice almost a squeak. Her knuckles were white, and her hands shook as she clutched her tea cup. “How can they… it’s… well, everyone knows you didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Yeah,” growled Ron, snatching the piece of parchment and crumpling it up. “Never stopped that idiot Bellowes, though, has it? I reckon the only reason he became an Auror was so he could get all the people he hates in trouble.”
Hermione blinked her stinging eyes. “Oh, Ron, I can’t believe this… aren’t you scared?”
“No,” he replied staunchly, with a defiant tilt of his chin. “Of course not.” His voice cracked, and suddenly, he lost control, great shuddering sobs wracking his body. “I’m bloody terrified,” he croaked, burying his head in his wife’s shoulder.
Hermione did not try to offer words of comfort to her husband, who considered fighting off dark wizards and coming within an inch of death part of his daily routine. She knew him too well. Instead, she wrapped her arms tighter around his neck, and whispered, “Me, too.”
Emma kicked angrily at the sofa in the Common Room before throwing herself onto it and curling up like a cat. Her toes throbbed horribly after whacking them so hard against the side of the sofa, but she barely noticed. Her mind was elsewhere, probably still lurking around the same mysterious place it had been all week, since her father had been sent to Azkaban.
All year long, she’d known her dad was in trouble, known Hadrian Bellowes wanted to ship him off to prison, but somehow, she’d never expected it to actually happen. She’d always assumed that he’d get out at the last minute though some lucky coincidence, like so many of his other close scrapes.
Not this time.
He had already been sent off to Azkaban by the time she’d gotten her letter, and there as nothing that she could do about it. She imagined her father, huddled shivering in a dank cell, dressed in threadbare prison robes, kept company by screaming madmen and crazed dark wizards shouting and cackling maniacally in their sleep… and her eyes began to prickle and burn.
Oh no, she thought furiously. I do not cry. I am brave. I am in total control…
“Emma?”
She whirled around to face Tyrone Thomas, his expression hopefully earnest.
“What?” she said, in a voice that sounded weirdly choked and muffled. Ugh. She’d been hoping for more of a snarl.
“I heard about your dad,” Tyrone said uncomfortably. “Er… I got you these.” He handed her two packages, both full of frogs”one box of chocolate frogs, another of cheap green rubber ones. Emma had no idea why Tyrone would give her rubber frogs, but then again, his mind was a bizarre place.
“The toy frogs are for chucking against the wall,” Tyrone explained, as if reading her mind. “They kind of… splat well. And I thought you might need some chocolate.” He smiled, but it wasn’t his usual dazzling, cocky grin. It was more of a sad, sympathetic smile. “I kinda know how you feel,” he admitted quietly. “When my mum died, I… well, all I wanted was to chuck frogs like this all day… don’t tell Fido I said that.”
Emma opened her mouth, with the intention of demanding that he go away and leave her alone, but amazingly, something very different escaped her mouth. “Thanks,” she muttered, determinedly not meeting his eyes. Godric, why did she sound like a shy three-year-old with a bad cold?
“Hey, you’re welcome,” Tyrone replied, looking somewhat startled at the softness of her voice. “Well, uh, I know you want me to leave you alone now, so I’ll just go and””
“No,” Emma said suddenly, and blinked, seemingly surprised by her own words. She patted the spot next to her on the sofa. “Look… sit down, have some chocolate… you spent your money on it, after all. I could do with a bit of company.”
Tyrone flashed her his classic grin. “Aw, cool!” he exclaimed, and jumped over the back of the sofa to plop down beside her. She almost smiled in spite of herself.
“Nice shirt,” she said dryly.
He looked down at his torso, checking to see what he had chosen to wear in the haze of early morning, and grinned yet again. His t-shirt proclaimed in bold, red letters, “PRIZE INSIDE.”
“Well, honesty has always been one of my best qualities,” he said importantly, his mouth crammed full of chocolate frog.
“This coming from the boy who has a sign hanging from his broom that says ‘My Other Ride Is A Unicorn,’” Emma shot back.
Tyrone looked affronted. “Hey, it worked on my ex-girlfriend.”
“Oh? Why’s she your ex-girlfriend, then?”
He smiled bashfully. “She found out it wasn’t true.”
Emma threw one of the rubber frogs at his face, where it splatted against his nose and stuck there with a very satisfactory SCCCHLORP. Both of them laughed madly.
“Hey, I’m not complaining!” laughed Emma. “It beats that shirt of yours that says ‘WARNING: CONTENTS MAY BE HOT!’” The insane laughter began again and lasted a little longer than necessary.
Emma was quiet for a moment, then said at long last, her voice hushed, “How do you do that?”
“Do what?” he asked brightly. “Be so gorgeous? Well, every morning, I””
“I feel so much better,” she said slowly. “It’s incredible.” If she hadn’t known him better, she would have sworn Tyrone was blushing.
“Er… I’m magic?” he said after a moment, twirling his wand theatrically. He shrugged. “Listen, Em, your dad’s gonna be fine. He’s a tough guy. And it’s just a little while in Azkaban.”
Emma gave him a small smile. “Thanks,” she said again.
It was an odd kind of reconciliation after two months without speaking. There were no apologies, no mentions of the past, no pleas for forgiveness.
But in those few moments, some secret, unspoken understanding had come between them, and as Emma had said, suddenly they both felt much better.
Tyrone was right, she thought. It had to be magic. What else could it be?
Jordan felt very daring and rebellious sitting in Professor Zabini’s classroom the next day. The professor was droning on and on, relating everything the class would need for their exams the next month, but he wasn’t taking notes, or even paying the slightest bit of attention.
True, his eyes were fixed on Zabini’s, and he looked every inch the raptly attentive student. But he wasn’t thinking about strengthening solutions or the draught of the living dead. He was trying for the umpteenth time to perform Telemency.
He knew he wasn’t the only one not listening. Haley seemed to be having a humorous conversation with Lee, her diary, as she practically had to stuff her hand in her mouth to mask her giggles, and across the room, Anatoly Capshaw was playing Solitaire without even the slightest attempt to conceal what he was doing. Two Ravenclaw girls were bewitching origami cranes to flutter around their desks, and a Hufflepuff boy was doodling what looked like smiling unicorns and flowers all over the back of the Transfiguration homework that he would have to turn in later that day.
And Emma… she had been fuming with anger since her father had been sent to Azkaban. But now, she looked dramatically cheerier as she and Tyrone alternated muttering the word ‘potato,’ interjecting it into the professor’s speech in increasingly louder and louder voices in a competition to see who would be caught first.
Tyrone? Since when were he and Emma friends again? They hadn’t spoken since February! Jordan groaned inwardly”now that they were friends again, there was always the chance that they’d meet a horrible demise in the forest. He’d thought he was through worrying about that vision.
“…and of course, the chief ingredient of Veritaserum is a large…”
“Potato.”
“Which, if used properly, will produce a potion with no discernable colour, taste, or…”
“Potato.”
Jordan did not smile at their antics. He was concentrating, staring deeply and unblinkingly, into the pupils of Zabini’s cold black eyes until he felt his mind slip into the professor’s. It was amazing, really, how few people used Occlumency, he reflected, as a string of images poured into his mind.
Zabini, turning red with rage as Haley sang ‘All You Need Is Love’ atop the Gryffindor table. Zabini, forcing a small boy to sample his own clearly badly-made potion. Zabini, as a child himself, putting on the Sorting Hat. A young Zabini staring up in awe at Professor Snape in his first-ever Potions class. Zabini in his early twenties, kissing a girl under a tree. Zabini in his late teens, shouting angrily at a pale blonde boy who could only be Draco Malfoy. A young Zabini watching Malfoy with a smirk as… was that really…?
Jordan almost blinked. Malfoy was dueling a tiny, scrawny boy who could only be a much younger version of his own father, while a vapid-looking blond man looked on. It was beyond weird seeing his dad, so young and terrified-looking, and even weirder to see Draco Malfoy besting the famous Harry Potter in a fight.
He brought his attention back to Zabini’s mind, where he saw a room full of serious-looking men and women in what looked like lab coats brewing massive vats of potion, while an adult Zabini looked on.
And then… Jordan could hardly believe his eyes at the next one, certain that his mind was playing tricks on him. The next image was that of the shadowy forms of Emma and Tyrone running through the forest, talking and laughing and holding hands… pale moonbeams puncturing the almost complete darkness… four middle-aged men holding… what were they holding?... and a shattering ‘bang’ accompanied by a horrible inhuman howl of pain, and an anguished male voice crying, “Me! Me! Get back here, if you’re going to shoot her, why don’t you come after me as well?”?”
He broke the connection at once and closed his eyes, watching the images dance around inside his own head.
How was it possible for Zabini to have that same string of images in his mind? Could it be possible that Jordan himself had been thinking it at the time and mistakenly thought he had seen it inside the professor’s head? But no, he knew perfectly well what Legilimency felt like, after practicing for a year.
Could he have actually performed Telemency, transferring his own thoughts into the professor’s mind? But, no, that didn’t make sense. The memory he’d pushed to the forefront of his mind for experimentation with Telemency was a particularly bloody moment in the French Revolution that he’d witnessed in a dream a few nights before. It had to be Zabini’s own memory. Could Zabini be a Seer, too?
If nothing else, it might explain why he always seemed to have a sixth sense. Or even more terrifying, what if he, too was a Legilimens, and had seen the vision in Jordan’s head? But no, that wasn’t possible, either. Jordan was careful to use Occlumency at all times.
He didn’t want to think about it any longer. It just didn’t make sense, and it didn’t do to give himself a migraine headache. He looked for another victim on whom to experiment.
Hmmm… he didn’t want it to be anyone he knew or liked; he wouldn’t wish the disturbing scene of the French Revolution on any of his friends or aquaintances.
His eyes rested on Charybdis Nott, who was sitting at an angle from him that would make it very simple for him to plunge into her mind. Of course, there might be the awkward question of why he was staring at her… but then, he was a Seer, and therefore practically expected to do mad and slightly disturbing things without question. There was something freeing about it, he realized, being a lunatic. Was this how Anatoly felt all the time?
Charybdis’s mind proved even simpler than Zabini’s to break into, and before long, he was tunneling through her memories. There was Charybdis giggling as she set up the trap for Anatoly earlier in the year, there was a younger Charybdis holding hands with a happy and confident Ophidias as they sauntered through the hallways, there was Charybdis examining herself in the mirror decked out in ball finery, there she was entering the Triwizard Tournament, mocking Ivy with Ophidias on the Hogwarts Express in second year, entering Hogwarts… sitting in a corner sobbing…
Jordan realized that he was beginning to get into some pretty personal stuff, but there was something oddly fascinating about seeing into Charybdis’s head. He dredged up a memory at random.
The screen door of a lovely country home banged open, and a man and woman with dark hair and open, friendly faces stepped inside, carrying suitcases. “I do hope you like it here,” said the woman. “This is going to be your new home.”
Two little girls who looked to be about four and six followed them, looking around the house with expressions of mixed mild interest and confusion.
“It’s pretty,” said the smaller one, a tiny birdlike creature with two long plaits of straight copper-coloured hair. She was dressed in a little turquoise dress with puffed sleeves and a full skirt. “But do Mummy and Daddy know we’re here?”
The couple exchanged uncomfortable glances.
“Mummy and Daddy are gone, Chary, remember?” the taller one said with a solemn, patient air. She had a round, sad-eyed face and mousy brown hair that fell into her eyes, and her pink dress was exactly the wrong shade for her pallid complexion.
“Oh,” said the tiny Charybdis dreamily. “As long as they come back soon.” She stepped over to the mantelpiece and squinted. “Your house is funny,” she proclaimed. “The clock’s only got two hands and the pictures don’t move.”
Her older sister shifted uneasily and hissed, “They’re Muggles. The nice man with the lollies said so. Mummy and Daddy told us about Muggles.”
Charybdis giggled. “Their pictures are silly.” She poked a photograph of the dark-haired couple on a boat and clapped her hands together. “Scylla! Scylla, come see! Look, they don’t even blink or anything!”
The dark-haired couple smiled fondly at the little girl. “Your sister is so cute, Scylla” said the woman. “She has such an active imagination.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Mariolini,” said the older sister, Scylla, politely, giving the distinct impression that she was tiring of receiving so many compliments about how cute her sister was and none about her.
Charybdis marched right up to Mr. Mariolini and prodded him in the stomach with a little finger. “Can you really not do magic?” she asked matter-of-factly.
Mr. Mariolini looked down at her, chortling. “What an imagination indeed,” he said.
Suddenly, the memory dissolved, and was quickly replaced with a fresh one. It was the same country house, but less tidy, clearly the home of two young girls. Mr. Marioli was reading the newspaper, Mrs. Mariolini was in the kitchen chopping vegetables and listening to the radio, and a plain teenage girl with limp, mousy hair was sitting on the sofa, demurely reading a book. Charybdis was nowhere to be seen.
Just then, the doorbell rang, and the teenager who had to be Scylla jumped up to answer it, smoothing the skirt of a rumpled sundress that did not suit her at all. She opened the door to reveal a face that Jordan recognized at once.
“Hello,” the man at the door said pleasantly. “My name is Professor Remus Lupin, and I’m here to see Charybdis.”
“Are you another one of her teachers?” Scylla asked in a long-suffering sort of way. “Only Charybdis is always having weird things happen to her, and I know she makes a lot of trouble, but””
“Er, not exactly,” said Professor Lupin delicately.
“Well, come inside,” Scylla offered. “The sitting room’s over there, and my foster parents will be happy to talk to you. I’ll go see if I can find my sister anywhere.” She bustled off with the air of a girl playing the mother in a game of house.
Mrs. Mariolini set down the carrot she was peeling and hurried into the sitting room, wiping her hands on her apron to shake Lupin’s hand. “Hello, I’m Miriam Mariolini, Charybdis’s… er… guardian. I’ve been her foster mother for the last seven years. This is my husband, Jason.” Mr. Mariolini inclined his head.
“So, are you from Charybdis’s school? I know that the, er, incident with the lemurs last week was”” her voice trailed off when she saw the confused look on the professor’s face and she sat down, leaning forward slightly.
“Mrs. Mariolini, what I’m about to tell you might sound insane, but please listen to me,” Lupin said in that low, calm voice that automatically made everything he said sound both sensible and wise. “Charybdis has been accepted into a very, er, selective boarding school in Scotland called Hogwarts. It is a school for children with unusual gifts.”
Mr. Mariolini narrowed his eyes. “What unusual gifts?”
“Well, for example, what you were saying about the lemurs… I’m assuming things like that happen to her all the time,” he explained, smiling slightly. “It’s not just a coincidence. It’s magic.”
Mr. Mariolini let out an odd sort of choking cough as Lupin continued on to describe Hogwarts, talked about the nature of magic, explained that Charybdis’s own perents had attended it, and even demonstrated a few spells.
Several moments later, the Mariolinis were sitting white-faced and shell-shocked looking, still blinking in a dazed and disbelieving sort of way. It was then that Charybdis came thundering down the stairs, her face alight.
“YES!” she shouted, racing into the sitting room. “I knew it! I told you all along! I’m not crazy! I knew I wasn’t a Squib like Scylla!”
She stopped dead in the centre of the sitting room and pointed an accusing finger at the Mariolinis, her expression curiously dark and dangerous for a girl her age. “You’ve been acting like I’m crazy for years. You were too stupid to believe me when I said magic was real. You told me to stop it because I was getting in trouble and you made me go to a stupid shrink! But I’m not mad! I can get away from you stupid Muggles and go somewhere where people will believe me!”
Lupin looked unsettled, peering with disbelief at the little girl. She was small and pretty in a delicate, china-doll way, but her yellow-amber eyes were as hard and angry as those of the most worldly and jaded witch. “I’m going to show you,” she hissed. “I’m going to be a real, live famous witch one day.” She pointed at Scylla. “And you’ll be stuck living like a Muggle your whole life”serves you right! You remember Mum and Dad, but you still acted like you thought I was mad. I thought--”
But Jordan never found out what she thought, because while he was watching scenes from Charybdis’s life, he heard something most unusual.
Professor Zabini was still lecturing, Emma and Tyrone still potato-ing, and all seemed normal… until it wasn’t.
“Of course, these ingredients can only be found in the…”
“Potato.”
“… but the advantage is that even if drunk by a…”
“Potato.”
“…it will still be an efficient cure for…”
“Potato.”
The Professor paused, and Tyrone shrank back in his seat, clearly having uttered his last ‘potato’ a bit too loudly.
“Thomas,” Zabini said in a dangerously soft voice. “You have…” his voice cut off, and his face froze, and he suddenly exclaimed, “EUREKA!”
Jordan’s head whipped around at the sound of the word, wondering what could have possibly happened and inadvertently found his way into Zabini’s mind. It was a strange jumble, a soup of shapes and sounds in the Professor’s excitement as he gathered up the ingredients in front of him, and it clashed strangely with the images of Charybdis’s mind as they played against each other. He couldn’t tell where one mind began and the other ended. It was like he was seeing into one big brain.
Wait a minute… it slowly dawned on Jordan that this was not normal. He was seeing inside Charybdis’s and Zabini’s minds… at the same time. He couldn’t believe it. Performing Legilimency on two people at once?
And just then, he realized something. He could combine two minds by looking into both of them at once. If he focused on his own mind, not singling out one memory as he had before…In fact… yes, he was quiet sure. If he could perform Legilimency on himself and someone else at the same time… Legilimency was all about eye-contact. What if he just… made contact with his inner eye?
He barely even noticed as Zabini ran off into the storeroom, shouting ‘class is dismissed!’ over his shoulder in a weirdly giddy voice. He barely even noticed as the rest of the class gathered their books and got to their feet, murmuring about why Zabini could have possibly just dismissed the class and (in the case of two particular students) still exclaiming “potato!”
Jordan didn’t know or care what epiphany Zabini had just had… because he was having one of his own.
Cyril ab Llewellyn was a small and unremarkable third year boy whose most distinguishing feature was his tendency to stare into space with his mouth slightly open.
Perfect, thought Jordan, sitting across the Common Room from him later that day. It wasn’t a matter of going into someone’s mind and planting a thought there. He’d always thought of it as a click and drag option, but it wasn’t. But if he concentrated hard enough on the contents of two minds, they would be bound together into a kind of stew of thoughts… and it he did the job properly, then he would leave his own memories imprinted on Cyril’s brain and guide him into thinking the thoughts he wanted to convey once their minds were fused into one. It was like something he’d once seen in some old Muggle science fiction show.
Keeping his own mind open and awake, he stared hawk-like and unblinking into Cyril’s eyes. He imagined his own eyes were twin drills boring neatly into the pupils of the younger boys’, making tunnels through which he could enter.
He had gotten good at this. He’d done it before on Tancred Apple, of course, but now, aided by the memories of centuries of Legilimenses thanks to his gifts, he knew where to find everything, what had to be tweaked. Brain science, like so many other Muggle creations, deserved far more credit than it got from the magical community.
Cyril’s memories were none too fascinating, and Jordan managed to nudge them aside and make his way toward what really mattered.
His mind, Cyril’s mind, his mind, Cyril’s mind… it was as if their brains were in a blender. Was he Jordan or was he Cryril? He could scarcely tell anymore”it was like they shared a single brain between the two of them. Had he ever tripped over her dog, or was that Cyril? Did he even own a dog? His memory told him, clear as day, that he had. But why could he remember four different parents, two with the last name Potter and two with the last name ab Llewellyn?
After one extraordinarily confusing moment”or it could have been an hour or a day or a month”he managed to gather his mind together and pull it out, becoming himself once more. Exhausted and sweating, he leaned back in his armchair, his eyes closed. It had been one of the strangest moments of his life… and he had no idea if it had worked.
But just then, he saw Cyril, clutching his head and moaning, “Whoa… that was so weird… my mind just, like, jumbled up for a second, and then it was like I was watching all this stuff that I never saw… Man, I think I’m sick.”And he staggered off to the dormitory to lie down.
It had worked! IT HAD WORKED! He had cracked the mystery of Telemacy, the one thing that even Merlin could not accomplish in his lifetime. It was nothing, it was so simple and obvious, but he was the first, and he had done it!
Not caring who saw or what they thought, Jordan leaped out of his armchair and let out a bizarre sound, somewhere between a whoop of victory and maniacal laughter. “YES! HAHAHAHAHAHA! AAAAAAAH!” He punched the air with his fist, feeling absolutely weightless and completely un-Jordanlike.
It was then that the door of the Common Room opened, and Haley, Ted, Ivy, Tyrone, and Emma stepped inside, talking animatedly with one another. They froze in their tracks when they saw Jordan, his arms spread and his head thrown back as he laughed like a madman. His face shone with the odd, radiant beauty that it had the night of his seventeenth birthday, and there was no tension or stiffness anywhere in his body. He looked… graceful.
“What the…” said Emma.
“Yeah, I’m inclined to agree with her,” said Haley, staring.
Jordan ran up to them, beaming. “I did it!” he exclaimed, his voice hushed with rabid excitement. “I’ve figured out Telemency”passing on thoughts from one person to the next! I tried it on Zabini and Charybdis Nott, and just now I did it… I gave Cyril ab Llewellyn my memories, and””
“Wait, is this that thing you were talking about that’s supposed to be impossible?” asked Ivy.
Her brother nodded frantically. “Yes! Only now I get it… and it’s so simple, I can’t believe I didn’t earlier. I can’t believe nobody else got it earlier, either!” Jordan never used exclamation marks at the end of his sentences. It had to be serious.
“Er… well done!” said Ted, obviously confused but managing to grasp that this was a vast achievement more than worthy of congratulation.
Emma, however, did not look so happy. On the contrary… well, had she not been Emma, it would have almost looked as though she was terrified. “You did that thing? Where you break into people’s minds? Without even asking if you could try it on them?”
“Well, no, of course I didn’t ask if…”
“You moron!” Now the only word to describe her expression was ‘furious.’ “Why would you do a thing like that? That’s seriously creepy.”
“What do you mean?”
Emma’s hands were balled into fists at her sides. “Listen, you don’t… use people like lab rats! I mean, just because they’re not as smart as you? That’s sick!”
Jordan wasn’t sure why she had this aversion to his experimentation. It wasn’t as though she even liked Zabini, Charybdis, or Cyril, anyway”and she hadn’t been too keen on it when he’d first told her about it months ago, either. In fact, she’d called him a freak…
Well, he didn’t particularly care what Emma thought. She was no concern of his.
Just as he was thinking that, a memory surfaced in his brain… his first-ever vision, way back over the summer… the dream in which he’d been a pathetic hobo and Haley had begged him for help. He’d thought of that dream often, and how the glamorous, older Haley had told him that he was responsible for Emma’s death. It had kept him awake at night. But it had been a long time since he’d really remembered the dream Haley’s exact words.
I know you’re too afraid to face anyone from the wizarding world after what you did in your sixth year, and I don’t blame you. Of course, you’re Bellowes’s hero now, especially since Ron died. And, yeah, everyone pretty much hates you, especially for what happened to Emma Weasley, but you can redeem yourself.
Or he wouldn’t have to. There would be no need for him to redeem himself again in ten years, no need for Ron to die in prison, no need for anything horrible to happen to Emma. There was a reason why Emma was so worried about Telemency, why she’d been even more touchy than usual lately, and Jordan was sure it had to do with Ron. Maybe if Ron had never been in trouble with Bellowes, none of this would have happened.
And there was something Jordan could do. Something that had a million ways to go wrong, that other people had failed at in so many ways. But Jordan wasn’t other people.
“What’s up?” asked Tyrone anxiously. “You looked kind of weird just then.”
“So what else is new,” muttered Haley.
Ivy peered anxiously at her brother. “Was it a vision?” she asked.
Jordan, not keen to tell the whole truth, lowered himself into his armchair again and faced the group. “Yes,” he said seriously. “I had a vision that Uncle Ron’s going to die in Azkaban.”
The result was instantaneous, and it didn’t take a Seer to predict what it would be. Haley let out a little squeak of horror, Ivy gasped and grabbed Ted’s hand, Tyrone went greenish-lilac, and Emma made a strangled sort of choking noise, and her hands shook so badly that she dropped her schoolbag.
“We have to save him,” Jordan stated, looking thoroughly solemn.
“How?” snarled Emma, her face very white. “If he’s going to die, there’s no use.”
It was sometimes shocking how little most people knew, thought Jordan. “Visions aren’t a guarantee of what’s going to happen,” he explained simply. “They’re what’s going to happen unless something’s done to change them. The future can always be altered.”
Haley squinted. “Wait, so you’re saying we just skip out of school and bust him out of Azkaban? I’m thinking that’s not one of your more brilliant plans, Jor-jums.”
“That’s because it’s not my plan,” he replied with a mysterious half smile. “And never, ever call me Jor-jums again, or your future will be grim.” He sighed. “What we need is evidence that will convince the Ministry he’s innocent.”
“But the diaries are missing, and they’re the only proof,” Ted said sadly.
Jordan shook his head, still smiling that infuriatingly mysterious smile, and plunged his hand into the front of his robes, pulling out something on a long gold chain. “What about the Final Battle?” he said.