Grindelwald had once been a man who trusted too easily and felt too deeply. He believed his followers wouldn't betray him. He believed his personal magnetism could convert even the opportunists who had joined for their own reasons.
And to his credit, it had worked more than once. A fair number of Ministry plants sent to infiltrate the Saints had ended up as true believers. But it only took one or two who wouldn't turn, and the damage they caused was catastrophic.
So now he operated the way Tom did: trust nothing external, use everything as a tool, and keep no illusions about what surrounded him. He was alone at the top, and he had made his peace with it.
Whether Bulgaria had set a trap was, in the end, beside the point. No trap meant more assets. A trap meant an opportunity to bloody the ICW badly enough to drag Dumbledore to a negotiating table.
"Sir..."
Vinda hesitated. She knew Grindelwald well enough to know he'd already calculated the risks, which meant this was deliberate bait-dangling on his part. Still.
"If Dumbledore uses this as an opening, will you be in danger?"
Grindelwald turned the bone artifact over in his hands, a piece taken from a rival family's collection, its surface still flickering with faint green light. He smiled at it.
"Vinda, you know me. But you don't know Dumbledore."
Vinda's expression stiffened, carefully.
I have absolutely no reason to know Dumbledore, she thought. That's not my department.
Grindelwald continued, unbothered. "Haven't you noticed? Whenever Dumbledore and I have fought in public, it's always been restrained. Neither of us has ever gone all the way. I don't care about restraint, but he does. He cares about the collateral. Other wizards getting hurt. The risk of the magical world being exposed."
"So Dumbledore would never agree to set a trap for you," Vinda said, completing the thought, "because he knows you wouldn't fall for it. But Babajide will take the gamble. The Ministry officials and Ministers who oppose you will try, because the longer they wait, the larger your influence grows, until it becomes something they simply cannot contain."
That was the genuine threat Grindelwald posed. He had an ideology, clearly articulated and consistently applied, and it drew from every corner of the wizarding world. Pureblood, half-blood, Muggle-born: in his framing they were all "our own." His goal wasn't to hand power to any one faction. It was to end the farcical situation where a wizard could be imprisoned for putting a spell on a toilet.
Outside Berlin and the German territories already under Saint influence, debates about Grindelwald's ideas were spreading faster than anyone in power was comfortable admitting. The supporters were too numerous to dismiss. That was precisely why the other Ministries felt they had to act, even at cost. Let him continue and the restlessness would become something uncontrollable.
Voldemort had none of this. His pure-blood supremacy declaration had cut off a vast portion of potential support before he'd begun. And his methods, pure coercion and fear, attracted only the old-guard conservatives and the people who followed him because the alternative was dying. Without an actual army to march somewhere and conquer something, his "movement" was a court of the unwilling orbiting a single, very dangerous man.
Grindelwald nodded to himself. Clever people were pleasant to talk to.
Vinda, remembering something, said, "Sir, Riddle's people sent word just before I came. He says the goods are ready."
Grindelwald sat up straighter. "Finally. Go to Hogwarts and bring everything back. Now."
The alchemical implements themselves were secondary to him. What he actually wanted was to see Tom complete his trial task. The legendary golden apple had occupied his curiosity for some time.
"Find him something before you go," Grindelwald added. "Art. The more beautiful the better."
It wasn't purely sentiment. Sending gifts to Tom while Dumbledore watched was its own small pleasure, a reminder planted quietly in the old man's mind that Grindelwald had not stopped thinking about Tom and would not stop.
Vinda nodded. She had browsed the Rosier family collection alongside Tom before and remembered what he liked. It wasn't a difficult assignment.
"One more thing."
She was halfway to the door when Grindelwald called after her. She turned and waited.
"Schedule the Bulgaria meeting on a weekend."
"A weekend?" Vinda could not immediately identify the relevance.
Grindelwald said, with the patience of a man explaining something obvious, "I'm inviting Tom. He only has time on weekends."
It was a strange thing to contemplate, that the shifting tides of wizarding world politics might be arranged around a school timetable. And yet.
Vinda moved quickly. She sent the formal notification to the British Ministry of Magic that same day, and when no response arrived by the following morning, she departed anyway with a small escort.
No country along the route made any move to stop her. The calculation was simple: touching a Rosier might wound the Saints, but the retaliation would be absolute.
She arrived at Hogwarts with the force of someone who simply expected the doors to open, and they did. Professor McGonagall and Snape accompanied her from the gates to the headmaster's office, an escort that was, perhaps more accurately described as a watch.
Dumbledore had understood her purpose before she arrived, but he had no grounds to prevent the transaction. He sent word to Tom.
Tom received the message in the Forbidden Forest, both hands submerged in a bucket of warm water while he washed Poppy and Pixie. Both pandas had filled out considerably. The natural scent pandas carried, a faintly sour musk they used to communicate with each other, needed to be managed with regular baths. But these two were no ordinary pandas. They were 4X-class magical creatures, and the scent was far milder in them, softened further by their months of eating bamboo shoots until they carried a faint, clean green fragrance underneath everything else.