Chapter 409: The Boy Whose Name Couldn't Be Spoken
Snape's eyes moved from speaker to speaker. When they laughed he pulled his mouth sideways. When they nodded he gave a nod of his own.
He'd caught most of it in pieces already. Even outside this society, rumors leaked steadily through the Slytherin Common Room.
In everyone's telling, the officials at the Ministry of Magic competed to be the biggest fool.
The Minister was a figurehead, the department heads were dead weight, and the Auror Office couldn't keep track of its own people. Apparently the whole world knew that building had been riddled through like a sieve.
The Ministry was stupid. That was settled doctrine in this room, and rapidly becoming settled doctrine across all of Slytherin.
But hearing it in the common room and hearing it here weren't the same thing.
In the common room it was rumor, fragments, half a sentence carried in by somebody's owl.
Here it was spoken as a future already fixed.
He listened without expression, and a different thought turned over in his mind.