the obvious suspect.
And Severus Snape himself might or might not be even remotely trustworthy.
Someone had declared war against Harry, their first strike had been meant to take out Draco and Hermione both, and it was only by the barest of margins that Harry had saved Hermione.
You couldn't call it victory. Draco had been removed from Hogwarts, and if that wasn't death, it wasn't clear how it could be undone, or what shape Draco might be in when he got back. The country of magical Britain now thought Hermione an attempted-murderer, which might or might not make her decide to do the sane thing and leave. Harry had sacrificed his entire fortune to undo his loss, and that card could only be played once.
Some unknown power had struck at him, and if that blow had been partially deflected, it had still hit really hard.
And when Harry knew who...
...kill them?
No, said all the voices in Harry's mind that seized the moment to speak. Even his dark side, if it had a different opinion, remained silent. His dark side hadn't asked anything of him in exchange for saving Hermione, either. Maybe because his dark side wasn't an imaginary voice like Hufflepuff; Harry might imagine his Hufflepuff part as wanting different things from himself, but his dark side wasn't like that. His 'dark side', so far as Harry could tell, was a different way that Harry sometimes was. Right now, Harry wasn't angry; and trying to ask what 'dark Harry' wanted was a phone ringing unanswered. The thought even seemed a little strange; could you owe something to a different way you sometimes were?
In this quiet moment, the thought of killing off two-thirds of the Wizengamot seemed as foreign and as horrifying as the thought should properly have been, to any civilized eleven-year-old.
So, said another part of Harry, will you catch your enemy, and put him in a Dementor-free prison, and have him break loose and kill more people? Are you sure beyond reasonable doubt that you can safely hold Lord Voldemort himself, if not even Death stopped him before? If Professor Quirrell is a bad guy, what could possibly make him non-dangerous except killing him?
It was the sort of question you would be wise to decide in advance, if you were going to fight a war. If you needed to kill, you might not be able to spare a second to hesitate. Or if the wisest path was to obey Batman's code of nonlethality, you wanted to decide that while you were calm, not think it through in the middle of a battle.
Harry stared up at the random stars, the scattered twinkling lights that human brains couldn't help but pattern-match into imaginary constellations.
And then there was that promise Harry had sworn.
Draco to help Harry reform Slytherin House. And Harry to take as an enemy whoever Harry believed, in his best judgment as a rationalist, to have killed Narcissa Malfoy. If Narcissa had never gotten her own hands dirty, if indeed she'd been burned alive, if the killer hadn't been tricked - those were all the conditions Harry could remember making. He probably should've written it down, or better yet, never made a promise requiring that many caveats in the first place.
There were plausible outs, for the sort of person who'd take an out. Dumbledore hadn't actually confessed. He hadn't come right out and said he'd done it. There were plausible reasons for an actually-guilty Dumbledore to behave that way. But it was also what you'd expect to see, if someone else had burned Narcissa, and Dumbledore had taken credit.
And at what odds would you bet on that, said the Voice of Contrary Argument, if you had no personal stake in the issue? Uncertainty is no excuse for inaction. There's at least a substantial probability that Dumbledore killed her; shouldn't you take a quantitatively proportional step toward making him your enemy?
Harry shook his head, flattening one side of his hair and then another against the stone-tiled floor. There was still a final out, Draco could still release him from the oath at any time. He could, at least, describe the situation to Draco, and talk about options with him, when they met again. It didn't seem like a very likely prospect for release - but the idea of talking something over honestly was enough to satisfy the part of himself that demanded adherence to oaths. Even if it only meant delaying, it was better than taking a good man as an enemy.
But is Dumbledore a good man? asked the voice of Hufflepuff. If Dumbledore burned someone alive - wasn't the whole point that good people may kill, but never kill with suffering?
Maybe he killed her instantly, said Slytherin, and then lied to Lucius about the burning-alive part. But... if there was any possibility of the Death Eaters magically verifying how Narcissa died... and if being caught in a lie would've endangered Light-side families...
Be careful what we cleverly rationalize, warned Gryffindor.
You have to expect reputational effects on how other people treat you, said Hufflepuff. If you decide there's sufficient reason to burn a woman alive, one of the predictable side effects is that good people decide you've crossed the line and have to be stopped. Dumbledore should've expected that. He's got no right to complain.
Or maybe he expects us to be smarter, said Slytherin. Now that we know this much of the truth - no matter the exact details of the full story - can we really believe that Dumbledore is a terrible, terrible person who ought to be our enemy? In the middle of a horrible bloody war, Dumbledore set one enemy civilian on fire? That's only bad by the standards of comic books, not by any sort of realistic historical standard.
Harry stared up at the night sky, remembering history.
In real life, in real wars...
During World War II, there had been a project to sabotage the Nazi nuclear weapons program. Years earlier, Leo Szilard, the first person in the world to foresee the possibility of a fission chain reaction, had convinced Fermi not to publish the fact that purified graphite was a cheap and effective neutron moderator. Fermi had wanted to publish, for the sake of the great international project of science, which was above nationalism. But Szilard had
