"I merely did some organizing," he said. "What was truly valuable were the firsthand observations provided by Hogwarts students." When he spoke the words "Hogwarts students," his tone lifted slightly at the end, as though draping those words in a thin layer of belonging.
The woman across from him moved her quill and drew a star in the margin of her notebook.
Meanwhile, in Berlin, roughly nine hundred kilometers from Paris, someone else was doing something similar in a room surrounded by heavy oak bookshelves.
Lockhart himself had not appeared there, of course. The one present was a special envoy dispatched by the Pure-Blood Alliance.
He presented a letter bearing Lockhart's personal seal. The letter had been handwritten—penned by Lockhart's assistant, though the handwriting imitated the upward sweep Lockhart used at the end of his signature.
The letter mentioned technical details concerning a new Shield Contingency Plan soon to be completed by the heir of a German alchemical family, and included improvement suggestions Lockhart had proposed "based on an analysis of Basilisk venom properties."
The suggestions were precise enough in their professionalism to be alarming, because they touched upon three key parameters of the technology that had not yet been made public—and the source of those parameters had been intelligence intercepted by the Shadow Society's network during an internal leak within that family.
The recipient sat in a leather chair before the oak bookshelves and turned the letter to its second page. He was a tall, middle-aged man with graying temples and rimless glasses, their lenses reflecting a thin streak of light beneath the lamp.
He read every word on the page, then folded it and returned it to its envelope. Without looking at the envoy waiting for an answer across from him, he simply said, "I need three days