gorgeous detailed characterisations and a really interesting choice of story to tell. it's sweet in its grown-up way, and witty, and a bracing look at the optimism of genuinely brave people in dark times, but it also has a palpable sense of suspense, which you've partly written in explicitly and partly laid out for the reader to catch in the canon references. severus in a death eater's cloak, the peril building for the longbottoms and tiny neville. it just pulls at the heart. lovely.