The first sign was small enough to miss.
A rumour, moving through the Slytherin common room in the particular way that rumours moved there — not loudly, never loudly, but present suddenly in the way a smell was present, in the slight shift of a conversation when Mia walked past, in the way two fifth years looked at each other and then away when she came into the common room.
She noticed it on a Tuesday. By Wednesday she knew it was deliberate.
By Thursday Narcissa was sitting down across from her at breakfast with the expression of someone delivering intelligence under social cover and said, while buttering her toast with great precision, "Someone has been asking questions about the Peverell line."
Mia kept her face neutral. "What kind of questions."
"Genealogical." Narcissa didn't look up from her toast. "Specific ones. About the Welsh branch. The documentation."
"Who."
A pause. "I don't know directly. It came through a third year who heard it from someone else." She finally looked up. "But the third year is a Lestrange cousin."
Mia looked at her plate.
"He's been quiet for two months," Narcissa said. "That means he's been busy."
"Yes," Mia said. "It does."
She told Bellatrix that evening.
Bellatrix listened without interrupting, which she only did when something had her full attention and she was already three steps ahead. When Mia finished she was quiet for a moment.
"The Welsh documentation is solid," she said. "I built it solid."
"I know."
"There's nothing in the genealogy that doesn't hold up."
"I know that too." Mia looked at her. "The problem isn't the documentation. The problem is that he's looking at all. The moment someone starts pulling threads, even solid ones, they attract attention."
"And attention is what we can't afford."
"Exactly."
Bellatrix stood up and moved to the window. It was dark outside, the grounds cold and empty below. "He's not doing this himself," she said. "Rodolphus doesn't do his own research. He has people." She turned. "Someone with access to genealogical records. Ministry, possibly, or a private archive."
"Can you find out who."
"I can find out who." Said flatly, as a certainty. "Give me a few days."
"There's something else," Mia said. "The rumour in the common room. It's not just about my genealogy. It's — vaguer than that. Something about my background, my loyalties. Nothing specific."
Bellatrix's expression sharpened. "He's building a narrative."
"Before he has facts to support it. He's creating the atmosphere first." She paused. "It's smart."
"It's very smart," Bellatrix said, which cost her something. "He's not going to find anything in the documentation. So he's making people doubt before they've seen evidence. By the time he presents anything, real or invented, the ground is already prepared."
They looked at each other.
"We need to get ahead of it," Mia said.
"Yes." Bellatrix was quiet for a moment, thinking. "We need someone in the common room who hears things and is trusted enough that what they say lands. Someone who can quietly, credibly, be certain of you."
"Narcissa's already—"
"Narcissa is thirteen. She has credibility in five years. Right now she's a third year whose opinion carries weight only with the people already disposed to listen." Bellatrix turned back to the window. "We need a seventh year. Someone Rodolphus's allies respect."
"Avery's been watching us since September," Mia said. "You said he was recalibrating. Where has he landed."
Bellatrix considered this for a moment. "Cautiously positive. He respects ability and he's seen enough of yours." She paused. "He's not Rodolphus's man. He's his own, which makes him actually useful."
"Can you talk to him."
"I can do better than talk to him." A slight pause. "I can let him draw his own conclusions. Avery trusts what he decides for himself more than what he's told. If I give him the right information in the right context—"
"He decides you're worth backing."
"He decides we're worth backing." She finally turned from the window and looked at Mia properly. "This isn't just about neutralising Rodolphus's rumour. This is about establishing something more solid in the common room before we need it."
"Before the shadow war gets louder."
"It's going to get louder," Bellatrix said. Not pessimism. Just reality. "Voldemort is recruiting. He's been recruiting quietly since we were in third year. In a year, two at most, the Slytherin common room is going to divide along very clear lines and everyone in it will have to choose." She met Mia's eyes. "I want us to have already built something before that happens."
Mia looked at her. The lamplight was warm and Bellatrix was standing in it with that particular quality she had when something had fully engaged her — alive, focused, the brilliant and slightly dangerous thing she was when she was thinking at full capacity.
"You've been thinking about this for a while," Mia said.
"Since September." She sat back down. "I wasn't ready to say it until now."
"What changed."
Bellatrix looked at her steadily. "I knew what I was doing this for."
Mia held her gaze for a moment.
Then she reached across and opened her notes. "Right," she said. "Tell me everything."
They found the genealogical researcher on a Friday.
Bellatrix found her, specifically — through a chain of correspondence and two carefully placed questions to people who owed her favours, with the focused methodical precision she brought to everything she decided to pursue. She came to Mia's table in the library and sat down and said "Crouch" without preamble.
"As in—"
"Bartemius Crouch Senior. He's not involved directly but someone in his office is." She kept her voice low. "A junior records clerk who has been accessing historical genealogical records outside of working hours. The access logs are technically restricted but my grandfather sits on the Ministry oversight board and his secretary is extraordinarily helpful."
Mia stared at her. "You got Ministry access logs in three days."
"Four days." She opened her own notebook. "The clerk's name is unimportant. What matters is that the records accessed were specifically the Welsh wizarding family registers from the 1800s. Our section."
"Did they find anything."
"Nothing that contradicts us. I told you the documentation was solid." She looked up. "But the fact that he's gone to Ministry records rather than just private sources tells us something."
"He's building a case," Mia said. "Not just a rumour. Something he can present formally."
"A formal challenge to the contract's validity based on fraudulent identity." Bellatrix's jaw tightened slightly. "If he can prove Mia Peverell doesn't exist—"
"The contract unravels."
"The contract unravels, the duel result is contested, and we're back where we started." She closed her notebook. "We need to make the documentation more than solid. We need it to be unassailable."
"How."
"Physical evidence." Bellatrix looked at her. "Right now the Peverell records are documented but not embodied. Anyone looking hard enough can find gaps. What we need is something material — a physical object, an heirloom, something that ties the name to a real history in a way that can't be questioned."
Mia thought about this for a moment. "The Peverells had three famous objects."
"The Deathly Hallows."
"The wand is gone. The stone's in the Gaunt ring. The cloak—" She paused. "The cloak is in my timeline with Harry's family. Here it should be—" She thought. "Dumbledore had it. He borrowed it from Harry's father."
Bellatrix looked at her steadily. "James Potter has the Invisibility Cloak."
"He's — fifteen, yes. He'd have had it already." Mia paused. "We can't exactly take it from a fifteen year old."
"No," Bellatrix agreed. "But we don't need the actual cloak. We need something else with Peverell provenance." She was quiet for a moment. "There's a vault."
"What vault."
"Gringotts. My grandfather has access to an unclaimed vault — very old, no living claimants. It's been in Gringotts records since the 1700s under the name Peverell." She looked at Mia. "I found it in the archive two years ago. I never knew what to do with the information."
Mia stared at her. "There's an actual Peverell vault."
"An actual Peverell vault." The corner of Bellatrix's mouth moved. "I suspect this is what your landing on our estate rather than somewhere random was about. The magic that pulled you there."
"You think the magic knew—"
"I think old magic does what it needs to do." She met Mia's eyes. "Whatever is in that vault is yours. Legitimately, magically, in a way no Ministry records clerk can challenge."
Mia sat back in her chair and thought about landing in a field in August rain and a girl extending her hand and something in the ground saying yes, here, this is right.
"When can we go," she said.
"Saturday," Bellatrix said. "Obviously."
The Gringotts visit was, relative to their recent outings, refreshingly undramatic.
No wards to dismantle. No curses to counter. No riding out through the ceiling on anything.
They presented the vault key — which had been in the Black family archive in a box labelled miscellaneous unclaimed, 18th century — and a goblin with the expression of someone who had seen everything and been surprised by none of it led them down through the underground passages to a vault so old the door had grown a thin layer of something that might have been moss or might have been the physical manifestation of centuries.
It opened without resistance the moment Mia touched the handle.
Inside was not large and not dramatic. A modest collection — some old coins, a stack of documents in a preservation case, a set of books in a language Mia half recognised as archaic Latin, two small objects she couldn't immediately identify.
And a ring.
Not the Resurrection Stone — nothing like it. This was simpler. Dark metal, old and plain, with a small Peverell seal — three objects, a wand a stone a cloak — engraved on the inside of the band.
Mia picked it up.
It fit her right hand as if it had been sized for her.
"Oh," she said quietly.
Bellatrix was standing at her shoulder looking at the ring. Something in her expression was still in the way that things were still when they mattered.
"Put it on," she said.
Mia did.
The ring settled on her finger and the old magic in it woke up and recognised her — she felt it, a warmth up through her hand, brief and certain, like something clicking into place that had been waiting a very long time to do so.
"There," Bellatrix said softly. "Now let someone try to challenge the documentation."
Mia looked at the ring on her hand. Then at Bellatrix.
"Thank you," she said. "For finding this. For finding all of it."
"I found a box labelled miscellaneous," Bellatrix said. "You did the rest."
"You know that's not what I mean."
Bellatrix looked at her for a moment in the old vault with its quiet and its centuries of waiting. Then she reached up and touched Mia's face briefly — just that, just her hand against her cheek, warm and certain.
"I know," she said.
On the cart back up through the Gringotts passages Mia turned the ring on her finger and thought about Rodolphus and his Ministry clerk and his carefully built narrative and felt something that wasn't quite triumph but was close to it.
"He's going to find out about the vault," she said.
"Yes," Bellatrix said. "I'm counting on it."
Mia looked at her.
"Let him find it," Bellatrix said simply. "Let him see what he's built his case against." She looked back at the passing stone walls of the passage, the torch-light moving. "He wanted to question who you are. Now there's a vault at Gringotts older than his family name that answers the question for him."
Mia thought about this. "You planned this."
"I planned for the possibility." A pause. "Since October."
"Since October." Mia stared at her. "You've been sitting on information about that vault since October and you waited until we needed it."
"It seemed useful to hold in reserve."
"Bellatrix."
"Strategy requires—"
"You are the most—" Mia stopped. Laughed. "I love you enormously and you are occasionally insufferable."
"Occasionally is generous," Bellatrix said, very composed, and Mia laughed again and the cart rattled upward through the dark and the ring was warm on her hand and Rodolphus Lestrange was somewhere above them building a case that had just become significantly less useful.