LEE: We've had Gryffindors hunting down horcruxes, our guest the Hufflepuff prepared to destroy the Death Eater Ministry, now some of the exploits of the brave Ravenclaws.

JUSTIN: They were certainly brave, though whether to call it an 'exploit' is a matter of taste and definition. And there was a Slytherin involved here too. The story is basically this.... Daphne Greengrass, of Slytherin, and Anthony Goldstein of Ravenclaw were friendly before the Death Eater takeover of Hogwarts, and stayed friendly afterwards.

LEE: Just friendly?

JUSTIN: Probably more. Or at least it would have been more, under different circumstances. Close enough, at any rate, that Daphne kept Anthony informed on the gossip she was privy to, which included some of the comings and goings of Death Eaters. Most crucially, it included the news of who was about to be marked.

LEE: Did Daphne know that Anthony had been in Dumbledore's Army?

JUSTIN: Yes.

LEE: So, this would have constituted passing state secrets to the enemy. Which had to be a capital offense. So why did she do it?

JUSTIN: We never got to ask her, because her family fled the country and never returned. If I had to guess, I would say, she sympathized with the resistance and thought this might somehow be passed on and help them in some way.

LEE: Another alternative is that she was on Voldemort's side and wanted to impress Anthony, win him over by showing that she was in contact with the important people.

JUSTIN: But nobody who knew Daphne ever described her as the kind of silly girl who would do something like that because it was a cool thing to show off for a cute boy this way. Well. Picking up the story. Daphne told Anthony that the next induction ceremony would be for one of their fellow students, Vincent Crabbe. Which surprised him at the time, because he was sure that the first Hogwarts student to get that honor would be Draco Malfoy.

LEE: And passing Draco over would have been another way of rubbing it in to Lucius, from Voldemort's point of view.

JUSTIN: Especially passing him over in favor of one of his own former... personal subordinates.

LEE: I think the technical term you're looking for is "arselickers."

JUSTIN: [Laughing] Well Anthony shares this knowledge with Terry, his best mate. So they were joking about – that's how it all started, just as a joke, what if they put something in Crabbe's dinner so that he threw up over Voldemort. No, even better, put something in it so that he actually exploded, and showered Voldemort with his guts. No, what about... And then they started thinking, what if we could actually do this, do it right, it might actually be a way to get rid of Voldemort. They had just had a solution to the problem we had at Downing Street, how to find Voldemort, had the answer handed to them. Since Voldemort's presence was an indispensible element of the marking ceremony.

LEE: Sorry to interrupt when the story's getting good, but since probably none of our listeners have heard about this, explain how you know about it.

JUSTIN: It came out when Anthony, Terry, Padma Patil and Michael Corner testified at a closed session of the Portius Commission.

LEE: Which we will get to. So...

JUSTIN: So they thought about potions, poisonous potions, which could be injected under the skin, in the place on the left arm where the Dark Mark would be inscribed, and which would be released by, either by the magic or by the heat of the marking. Which is why they called in Padma and Michael, who were very good at potions and who had also been part of Dumbledore's Army.

LEE: There was another Ravenclaw though, who was also good at potions --

JUSTIN: Right.

LEE: -- but who they apparently did not approach.

JUSTIN: Luna Lovegood. And they explained at the hearing. It wasn't because they doubted her loyalty, that thought never crossed their minds. They said – primarily Anthony said, he just couldn't think of her as being part of a secret project, with life-and-death consequences. Not so much that they were afraid she would blurt out the secret, though that did cross their minds, at least one of them thought it was a serious possibility that they would be in the middle of a potions lesson and Luna would suddenly say "Oh, Terry, wouldn't this troll blood mix be useful for our extracurricular project?"

LEE: I bet it was Corner who said that.

JUSTIN: We all love to dump on poor Michael, don't we? After all, he's The Boy who was Mean to Ginny Weasley [Laughter]. I think it's past time for the wizarding world to forgive him for that. Actually – well, no I'm not going to say who it was. In any case, it was more because they thought it would be a disconcerting experience having her in with them while they were working on this deadly, dangerous matter, given her habit of, coming out with these, ah, surprising and confounding declarations.

LEE: "I don't think we should continue today, the wrackspurts are too active"?

JUSTIN: Something like that, and they thought it would make working conditions a touch difficult. As it turns out, they were able to put together a very ingenious mixture, without Luna's assistance. They were inspired, if that's the word, by the section in the seventh-year manual which was there to deter the overly curious experimenters; the part that contained all the warnings about what not to do, which ingredients you should never combine, especially under this or that kind of heat. And from that starting point they just needed to use some imagination, do some extrapolations, perform the bubble-head charm and do some experiments on rats, and voila, they had a poison which was instantly deadly to anybody nearby – which Voldemort would have to be, he would be leaning over Crabbe to perform the marking. The best part was, since it involved a combination whose ingredients were basically harmless in themselves, and only deadly when combined and activated under heat, they wouldn't be detected with a magical sweep. The heat generated by the Morsmordre itself would do the damage.

LEE: That still leaves the problem of feeding the ingredients to Crabbe.

JUSTIN: That was a major difficulty. They came up with a number of plans which basically ended with stunning him, planting the ingredients, and obliviating him. The primary difficulty was in getting him alone. But the plan never got that far, because Hector Greengrass found out – well, he didn't find out that the Ravenclaws had these assassination plans, but he found out that his daughter was telling them about matters in the... of special concern to the Dark Lord. And he panicked.

LEE: Understandably.

JUSTIN: This part comes from Snape's diary, because Mr. Greengrass went to Professor-- Headmaster Snape, begging for permission to take his daughter out of Hogwarts. Snape couldn't or wouldn't grant his request without an explanation, and so he forced it out of him. Snape describes Mr. Greengrass as "obviously frantic with terror," for himself and his family, but Snape insisted, either tell him there and now or have the both of them take a trip to see Voldemort personally and have him do the questioning.

LEE: Was he bluffing?

JUSTIN: I don't know. Possibly. But he couldn't just let the Greengrasses go without finding out what was behind this mysterious request. Temperamentally, if there was one thing Snape was greedy for, it was information, he wouldn't want to let a source of it slip by him without a struggle. That was just ingrained in him, one of the habits a spy has to keep. And he would have told himself that he couldn't do the job Dumbledore had set for him unless he knew as much as it was possible to know. So, bluff or not, it worked, Greengrass told him about Daphne's little indiscretion, and Snape said he would let them out, would even help provide a cover story if Voldemort ever inquired after them, how he had a job offer in France. As it turned out, he never did, never considered it important enough, I suppose, that one family moved and a student transferred to Beauxbatons.

LEE: Why would this have stopped the Ravenclaws from going through with their plans for Crabbe?

JUSTIN: Because they didn't know yet – whoever Daphne's source was, hadn't told her yet, what was the date of the marking. And the potions were very time-dependent, they couldn't be left, left in Crabbe, for more than a day without losing their potency.

LEE: No, it's never a good idea to leave stuffed Crabbe out too long.

[Pause]

JUSTIN: I think – I don't think I'll comment on that.

LEE: Now you say that what happened next was covered during the private hearing, so we'll hear an excerpt from that in a moment. First, though: why wasn't it a public hearing?

JUSTIN: There would have been no hearing at all, we wouldn't have known anything of the story at all, if it hadn't been for Snape's diary, and his comments were so brief and elliptical it wasn't clear what had happened. In other words, there wasn't anything like a prima facie criminal case against the Ravenclaws, so there seemed no call for a public inquisition. The statute of secrecy on the testimony has just expired though, so we can talk about it now.

LEE: Now in this reading we'll hear from Anthony and Madame Portius?

JUSTIN: Right. In propria persona.

* * * * *

PORTIUS: ...and what happened after you discovered Miss Greengrass was missing from Charms class?

ANTHONY GOLDSTEIN: We didn't think much about it, it was only one class after all. But when class was over, Professor Flitwick said that I was wanted in Headmaster Snape's office, immediately. Naturally that had me worried, but the fact that it was only me, that Terry, Padma and Michael weren't being call in too, gave me a little hope that this wasn't about the assassination plan. Well, that turned out to be wishful thinking. The Headmaster didn't even ask me to sit down, he just started by saying, "I understand you have expressed an interest in the marking of Death Eaters, Mr. Goldstein."

PORTIUS: And you answered?

GOLDSTEIN: I honestly don't know what I said to him then, and I doubt that even a Pensieve would help, because that only works if you had a functioning consciousness at the time. I must have mumbled something, because Snape said "Come now, Mr. Goldstein, speak up. Surely you don't feel that this is a matter for embarassment? The glorious prospect of making an unbreakable vow of lifelong service to the Dark Lord himself?" And he talked for a long time – an excruciatingly long time – about what it meant to be a Death Eater. That your life belonged the Dark Lord, and that carrying out any order of his, in no matter how seemingly slight a matter, was the only purpose of your life until you either succeeded – in which case you must never dare to expect any thanks or reward – or you failed, in which case you must never dare to protest, even within your own mind, against whatever punishment he decided on, in his sovereign wisdom. That your greatest happiness would be discovering some threat to the Dark Lord or to his plans, and being given the privilege of crushing any presumptuous fool who dared to offer such a threat, making him curse his parents for giving him life.

I was just about on the verge of either drawing my wand or taking flight, even though I knew the odds were very, very badly against me either way. But Professor Snape lowered his voice then, and said to me that if I had been a Gryffindor he might suspect I had "some mad plan" in mind when I asked Miss Greengrass these questions, but that since I was a Ravenclaw, he was sure I was intelligent enough to decide for myself whether I really wanted to involve myself in Death Eater ceremonies. And then he dismissed me. I couldn't account for this, I really couldn't. If he didn't know about the plot, why did he bring me in and do his best to frighten me? And if that wasn't his best, I hope – excuse me, I'm grateful -- that I never encountered him at his best. And if he did know anything, how could I have possibly gotten off with just a warning? Later on, of course, we learned what Professor Snape was doing, and it made a lot more sense.

PORTIUS: For the record, it does not appear that Professor Snape knew there was an assassination plot revolving around the marking. He almost certainly did not know who were the participants.

GOLDSTEIN: I'm very glad he didn't.

PORTIUS: Did you consider, Mr. Goldstein – did any of you consider, when you were planning this assassination – that it was entirely extra-legal, that you had placed yourself outside the protections given by the laws of war?

GOLDSTEIN: No, Ma'am. That didn't really enter our considerations.

PORTIUS: You realize, that you and your friends were not legal combatants, you were not under the authority of the Order of the Phoenix or any other organized resistance movement?

GOLDSTEIN: Again, Madame Chairman, this just wasn't something that concerned us. We were trying to rid England of a vicious dictator.

PORTIUS: I realize that, and I admire your courage and ingenuity. But if you had been brought to trial, I would not have been able to help you, to defend your actions on any legal basis.

[Pause]

GOLDSTEIN: With all due respect, Ma'am, I really don't think, if it came to that, that your intervention would have... well, it wasn't something we were counting on. We weren't even counting on getting a trial. We thought it was more likely, if we were caught, that our parents would have received letters regretfully informing them we had all been killed in an unfortunate incident in the Forbidden Forrest. Trampled by wild hippogriffs, say, or eaten by acromantula...

PORTIUS: Trampled by hippogriffs? What an odd notion....

* * * * *

LEE: Madame Portius didn't get the joke, did she?

JUSTIN: No. Though anybody who had been at Hogwarts in those years would have.

LEE: It's funny to think, nobody knew a tenth of what Ron and Harry and Hermione got up to and into in those years, with polyjuice and basilisks and time turners and on and on and on, but absolutely everybody knew what our heroes did for Divination homework. That by itself would have made them legends.

JUSTIN: We used to look forward so eagerly to the latest installment, like it was a WWN daytime serial.

LEE: "Deaths of Destiny, or: The Perils of Poor Potter." And on the other hand, Anthony seemed quite flummoxed by Madame Portius' questions about legal and illegal combatants.

JUSTIN: He certainly was. Madame Portius had a absolute and unalterable attachment to The Law, and that made her seem obsessive and fanatical to people who didn't share that outlook. That was simply who she was. It was what let her stand up to the Death Eaters, and it was also what made her take the line she did with Anthony and the others.

LEE: Would the plan have worked? Leaving horcrux immortality aside.

JUSTIN: Professor Slughorn thought it would have. He told them to burn all their notes, and had the book which originally inspired them recalled.

LEE: We'll be right back with Justin Finch-Fletchley. You're listening to Many Rivers here on WWN.

* * * * *

LEE: We're back, talking to Justin Finch-Fletchley. Justin, you have another secret that's been kept for the last ten years, involving Downing Street's plans for the worst-case scenario.

JUSTIN. Right. The worst-case scenario would be Voldemort in complete control of wizarding Britain, having finished off the Order of the Phoenix and all other organized opposition. And the Blair government had determined, if this happened, Voldemort must be destroyed no matter what the cost. NATO was even brought in at this point, which means the U.S., Canada, Germany, France, all had signed off on this. They were certain that the non-magical world would be the next target, and the nightmare, for them, was the prospect of fighting a protracted war against an enemy who could nullify all their standard strategies of warfare, all their technological prowess. Because how do you fight someone who can control your mind, can disappear at will, and so on. So long as he was still occupied by wizarding resistance, the situation was barely tolerable. But once that was removed, again, destroy him at any cost.

LEE: And there are probably still some listeners to this program who have no idea what that would mean in practice, given the kinds of weapons at their disposal.

JUSTIN: I suppose pretty much everybody of our age or thereabouts knows full well what that means. And of course I also knew, at the time. My father and I were in on the planning, and the worst-case scenario did involve using nuclear weapons over a populated area, if it could be ascertained with certainty that Voldemort was at the location.

LEE: And on May 5, 1998, you had ascertained with certainty that Voldemort was at Hogwarts.

JUSTIN: Kingsley had ascertained it. But I didn't know, when Kingsley grabbed me, where we were going. And that was – he apparated in to Downing Street HQ, and all he said to me was, "there's a battle shaping up, we need everybody we can get," and he took me via portkey. And just before the portkey activated I could hear the military people screaming at Kingsley "wait, wait, WHERE? Tell us WHERE!" He didn't tell them.

LEE: Deliberately.

JUSTIN: Deliberately. And I was confused. Because the planning was very clear: if Kingsley knew where it was, if he was in the fight and it seemed hopeless, a magical homing signal would go back to Downing Street, and that would tell the UK, NATO people to launch the missiles at that location. We'd been over it, practiced it dozens of times. They were certain that within three minutes at most they could have obliterated an area too large for even Voldemort to apparate out of.

LEE: And yet we know now, that even if a twenty-megaton bomb went off next to old Tom's head, it wouldn't have necessarily ended things.

JUSTIN: But actually, in the event, it would have. Because his last horcrux, the snake familiar, would have been killed along with him. So we might have – I was about to say, "we might have lucked out," but one could scarcely call what would have happened "lucky."

LEE: It depends in part on who you're calling "we" in that thought.

JUSTIN: Not you or I personally, obviously. We would have been atomized.

LEE: The heart of wizarding Britain would have been destroyed. But the non-magical UK wouldn't have come out too badly. Aside from the panic caused by a nuclear weapon suddenly going off in the middle of Scotland,

JUSTIN: And there would have many deaths from radiation, from fallout.

LEE: But their civilization would have stayed essentially intact. What would have been left of ours, if Hogwarts was gone?

JUSTIN: And there's the thing that I have to confess, still separates the purebloods from the newbloods. Hogwarts, Hogwarts, hoggy-hoggy Hogwarts. That was the first thing that came to your mind, like it was the first thing that came to Kingsley's mind: not that you and I and he and all our friends and teachers and allies and all the people of Hogsmeade would have been dead, but that Hogwarts would be gone, and that absolutely could not be allowed to happen, no matter what. We were – Kingsley was willing to see thousands of witches and wizards die, if it meant ridding the world of Voldemort, just as Blair was read to sacrifice a large non-magical city. But what Kingsley could not allow was the destruction of this sacred site.

LEE: I can't think of any – anybody who grew up in the wizarding world, who would.

JUSTIN: You were about to say "any wizard," weren't you?

LEE: I suppose I was. Sorry; you know I think that "purity of blood" is nonsense.

JUSTIN: I know, Lee. But still, automatically, "any wizard" to you invokes an image of a pureblood wizard, not a newblood. And that's just the way our minds are wired, I suppose, just as for people who grow up in a culture dominated by straight white males, when you read some sentence with the word "people say" or "people think," your mind offers a picture of straight white males.

LEE: Even if you're a gay white male?

JUSTIN: Even then. Blood-talk may be nonsense, but upbringing isn't nonsense, it does matter. You were brought up being told all the time about this place, this place that every witch and wizard whose name meant anything in all of British history had passed through, the place which was responsible for the passing on of magic from one generation to the next. As you just said, the "heart of wizarding Britain." The place where magic as you knew it was born, and magic itself might die if it didn't have a home at Hogwarts. To me, when I found out about it, I thought, wonderful, I'm going to the wizarding Eton. To you, it was more like the wizarding Mecca. I've tried to look at it that way, to imagine how a Muslim would feel about a plan that involved sacrificing Mecca in order to save the world from Hitler or Stalin taking it over, and they would also say, "let Hitler and Stalin win, they'll be brought down eventually, but Mecca can't possibly be replaced."

LEE: I didn't think of it as Mecca, Justin. I know George and Fred didn't. You don't set off firecrackers and create swamps in Mecca.

JUSTIN: All right, not literally Mecca. But you notice that even the swamp became something legendary, a tale of heroic defiance to be passed down and emulated. Hogwarts does that somehow, it turns even acts of irreverence into semi-sacred places. Or at least it seems that way to most witches and wizards in retrospect, once we're well out of it and don't have to do homework. The homework drops out of most people's memories, I've noticed.

LEE: And you didn't quite grasp this at the time, ten years ago.

JUSTIN: No. And Kingsley had to make me promise, that I could not tell anybody in the wizarding world. Bad enough the UK was looking to blow up the Ministry, but the Ministry doesn't mean anything compared to Hogwarts. Kingsley thought if it got out that the Muggles had been ready to destroy Hogwarts, that it would cause an unimaginable backlash, that it could make Lucius Malfoy the next Prime Minister.

LEE: Why reveal it now, then? Aren't you worried about the backlash anymore?

JUSTIN: Not as much. It's history now. And we've had those ten years in which people on both sides have goten better used to the idea of living with one another, or at least living on the same island. We know that we don't have to be enemies. The UK certainly hasn't made any aggressive moves against wizards, doesn't have any plans to destroy us or enslave us.

LEE: And because of your status, both as a newblood wizard and the son of a UK political figure, you're one of the very few people who can testify to that from personal knowledge.

JUSTIN: And I have to hope that I've established enough credibility here, as a "real wizard," that my testimony will be trusted.

LEE: As it should be.

JUSTIN: Thanks.

LEE: As we promised, we're going to take some floo calls now for Justin. Our first call... well, all the way from the Antipodes. Brad from Down Under, spiffing of you to give your time to us Pommies, what's your question for Justin?

BRAD: Justin, what are your thoughts on the status quo as it now exists, the separation of the Muggle and Wizard worlds by virtue of the enforcement of the Statute of Secrecy? How long can this situation continue to exist, given the increasing numbers of Muggleborn - excuse me, Newbloods - that enter Wizarding society every year, with their Muggle families in the know? Do you think the statute is a good idea? What do you think is likely to happen should the secret one day be 'outed'? What would the UK government do? I imagine the general public would NOT appreciate their Prime Minister having kept such a secret from them ...

LEE: A very appropriate set of questions to follow what we've just heard.

JUSTIN: Yes. At this point, I think we're just on the tipping point of it becoming impossible to keep the secret. Both for the reasons the caller quite correctly notes, and because so many people in the UK ministry and military had to be let in on the secret. And the general increase in population not only means more Newbloods who have brothers and sisters and cousins who are in the know, it means more potential for stumbling upon wizarding settlements. Highways are getting closer to Hogwarts. Hikers are criss-crossing it much more often than they did fifty years ago, even ten years ago. But I still think it would be better to keep the separation as long as we can. We've been talking about the wizarding reaction to learning what the UK was ready to do during wartime, but of course there's another side of it; the non-magical world learning that for a time, the British Ministry of Magic was run by people who tortured Muggles for sport.

LEE: And, as Brad says, the revelation that this had been kept a secret...

JUSTIN: And it couldn't be confined to Britain; non-magical people all over the world would quickly realize that if Britain has a magical population, odds are rather good there are more of us all over the world, who've escaped their notice. I'm sure it would be a huge recruiting tool for what they call in America "the religious right."

LEE: And to these groups we are, for all intents and purposes, demons.

JUSTIN: Or the servants of demons. And responsible people on both sides are naturally concerned about this, and they have taken steps to reassure people. I know that if the Statute of Secrecy broke down, Downing Street would release the records of the agreements in place between NATO and the International Confederation of Wizards, which involve unbreakable vows on both sides not to engage in aggression against the other.

LEE: Still, one vote here for maintaining the Statute of Secrecy. Next call is Simon, from Lancaster, your question?

SIMON: Hi, good show. I wonder, even with the points raised by you and Brad, do the Muggles really have the capacity to attack us, without wizarding assistance? I mean, Hogwarts is still protected from Muggle entry, or even from their knowing it's there. And Durmstrang is even more secretive and more protected. I don't think there's really much to worry about in terms of witch-hunts starting again.

JUSTIN: Yes, that's a fairly widespread response. And I also don't think we're going to have a return to the bad old days either. But as for keeping the existence of Hogwarts a secret, I'm afraid that train has already left the station. And Durmstrang too. Believe me, NATO knows precisely where Durmstrang is. And they made sure that Durmstrang knew that they knew.

LEE: How can technology do what magic can't in this case, when technology – at least, what relies on electricity – can't even function in magic-heavy areas?

JUSTIN: Because technology which relies on electricity can't even function in magic-heavy areas. [Pause.] Got it yet?

LEE: Give me another hint.

JUSTIN: All right... Suppose nobody knew Hogwarts' location at the time I was a first-year, and the UK decided to use me as an unwitting spy, had a tracking device planted on me and tried to follow me to Hogwarts. "Ah HAH," many witches and wizards would say, "silly Muggles, they don't realize their technology doesn't work against magic." But...

LEE: Oh, of course; you would be tracked up until the train came into Hogsmeade, then the signal would stop. And a big red pin would go up on the map they were using, showing the last spot where the device was working.

JUSTIN: And that's the South boundary of Hogwarts/Hogsmeade. You do the same thing, basically, to settle the North, East and West boundaries, and there you have it. It's much like the way astronomers locate black holes; you can't see a black hole, but you can see where odd sorts of events are taking place all around the something you can't see, and these events could only be caused by a black hole.

LEE: Our next floo call is from Sarah in Devon. Go ahead, Sarah.

SARAH: Hello Lee, hello Justin.

LEE, JUSTIN: Hello!

SARAH: Justin, especially after all the testimony we heard about the plans the Death-Eaters had for making Slytherin House their "vanguard party" with special privileges over the rest of us, what do you think of the idea of abolishing Slytherin House?

LEE: A subject that comes up pretty much every year.

JUSTIN: But with diminishing momentum, it seems. Which is in a way a good thing, because the initial demands were part of a general movement to keep all Slytherins out of politics, to keep them all under a kind of permanent probation, and that never would have worked, would have been a great injustice if it was tried. Still, I've always been in favor of abolition. Not because I think this would banish the darkness or anything of the sort, but the existence of a special house for the ambitious is a recipe for disaster. Let's say you're an otherwise normal boy or girl, who happens to have a strong competitive streak. You're put in Slytherin, where everybody else has that trait, and the only way you're going to get ahead is by out-competing all the most competitive, get-ahead people of your age. It ends up bringing out the very worst in you. You're afraid that if you don't obsessively refine your strategy for getting ahead, if you don't use every ethical loophole that will help you along the way, you inevitably fall behind. And in fact you would fall behind, because the same logic of fear is governing every other student in your house.

LEE: Thank you, Sarah. Next call is from Eleanor in York.

ELEANOR: Justin, what do you make of the idea of creating hate-speech statutes, making it a crime to call somebody a "mudblood"?

JUSTIN: Very much against it. For one thing, I treasure my own right to call purebloods all sorts of names [laughter], so it would be quite hypocritical of me to give my own group special protection there. Seriously, I prefer to reserve criminal trials and punishments for more tangible offenses. I can offer an alternative though: shunning. In a community as tightly knit as Wizarding Britain – we're almost like a big small town, by nonmagical standards – this sort of social disapprobation can be very effective.

LEE: Justin, we're just about out of time. Any final thoughts?

JUSTIN: Just that even after all that's happened, I'm still very glad and very proud to have gotten that first owl when I was eleven. And almost twenty years after, there are still days I wonder if it's not a dream.

LEE: Justin, a pleasure as always to talk to you. See you at the next DA reunion,if not sooner.

JUSTIN: Pleasure was all mine.

-END-

A/N: This last chapter was put together a bit hastily, so apologies in advance for errors or sloppy writing. Thanks to all readers, special thanks to reviewers Gioia, Illyra and madbrad, and especial-special thanks to the latter for his provocative question for Justin.

The Daphne/Anthony ship was inspired by Antosha's The Wiser Course, which is an absolute must-read. One version is complete, at SIYE, another is in progress at Phoenixsong dot net.