The echoes faded, and the vale fell quiet.
Lupin turned around.
His gaze passed over the silver-gray figures standing ramrod straight on the Moonlight Field and settled on the northeastern corner of the vale.
That corner.
The crystal coffin lay there quietly.
Lupin began walking toward it.
He did not walk fast. The hem of his silver-gray robes brushed the grass tips at his ankles with a rustle.
On the viewing stand, everyone's eyes followed him.
Fudge's fingers stopped on his commemorative medal, his lips slightly parted.
Scrimgeour nodded toward the other side.
Rita's Quick-Quotes Quill hung in the air for a beat, then plunged back into her notebook, writing faster than ever.
"What is he going to do?"
Fudge turned his head and asked Thicknesse beside him in a low voice.
Thicknesse shook his head.
"Make some sort of declaration?"
Fudge's voice rose another half pitch.
"Or is he going to... destroy the body?"
No one answered him.
In the second row of the viewing stand, Tonks tightened her fingers around the railing.
Her hair changed from silver-gray to dark brown, then back to silver-gray.
She watched Lupin's back as he walked toward that corner, step by step.
Lupin reached the crystal coffin.
He stopped.
Lowered his head.
Moonlight passed through the crystal coffin's six panels, refracting into cold, fragmented patches of white light that fell on the tips of Lupin's shoes.
Greyback looked no different inside the coffin than he had a year ago.
The preservation runes had frozen everything in place.
His shaggy gray-white hair, his bestially twisted features, and the enormous wound piercing his chest-its charred edges, its congealed flesh and blood.
Lupin looked at that face.
He had seen that face many times.
In nightmares, in newspapers, and beneath the moonlight in Italy's Apennine Mountains,