Narcissa — Lionheart

Chapter 31: Narcissa

Outside in the cold distance

A wildcat did growl

Two riders were approaching

And the wind began to howl.

—Jimi Hendrix, “All Along the Watchtower”

It was always the same dream.

Andy was a poet. Not a very good one, but then, good teenage poets were so rare as to be a contradiction in terms. She told Narcissa about a half-blood American poetess who married a British muggle and written a lot of lovely poetry and a novel, and Narcissa, assuming that this witch was in the way of an aspirational figure to Andy, asked politely how her career was going now; and Andy said that she had gone mad and killed herself. And Narcissa had said, perhaps less sensitively than she could have done, I daresay I should too, if I had to marry a muggle, and Andy had burst into tears — which would have alarmed her more had it not been a daily occurrence — and said she didn’t get it, Cissa, it was about freedom, and Narcissa said what freedom, the bint was mad and then she was dead, and the muggle who killed her is alive and selling her books, do you call that freedom? I call that evil.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

When she ran away, Andy left them presents. For Bella, she left a copy of Wuthering Heights that Bella touched but once, to deposit it in the fireplace, and Narcissa received a poetry collection. She hid it from Bella to spare it from the flames.

I lift my lids and all is born again.

She had never told this to anyone — not even Severus — but it was always the same dream. She was in Malfoy Manor, and she was holding her son, and the world was falling, her sister and her husband swept away at once in a bath of green lights that shone from every window.

When the dreams began, she recorded them in a little journal in her bedside table, but once Draco was old enough to snoop — which was quite young, he was such a clever boy — she burned them. She screamed when she was asleep, she knew that. She had made Dobby swear to cut out his tongue if he ever told, and she Obliviated the maid. But when it came to her son, there was nothing left for her but denials, and now Draco rejected even those, with the curl of his lip that had once been his father’s.

Narcissa woke up and sighed. The sky above her was the phosphorescent darkness of the English country.

She sat up and found her feet were wet. They were sunk ankle-deep in the waters of the lake, and her toes had taken on an undesirable blue pallor. She tried to move them. They did not comply.

She lifted her arm and read from the bars of ink that lanced her forearm.

10 August, 1994. Lucius is dead. Draco is alive. Trust Severus Snape.

When none of these things surprised her, she congratulated herself, and erased them with her wand. Then she rose and made her way home.

She dressed in the dark, without bothering to light a candle, in clothes she could part with willingly: culottes, an old blouse, and a double-breasted overcoat of black satin with only a little silver embroidering around the collar, a thin speckled ruff of fur. A modest showing, for her taste. She tied her hair up with a silver claw and pulled a black glove over her left hand, leaving her wand-hand free and her signet ring uncovered. Her finger brushed over the jewel, a bone-white band of petrified stone studded with a black diamond like a sightless eye.

“You’re taking chances.”

“A mask is cowardice,” she said.

“You sound like Bella.”

“Bella isn’t as foolish as you thought,” she told him. “She was always smarter than you all gave her credit for.”

She glanced in the vanity mirror. The room was empty.

“I still love you,” she said.

No one answered her.

A silver chain hung by her bedside. When pulled, it made no sound, but a minute later there came a tap on the door.

“Good morning, Lady Malfoy.”

Briselda looked tired. She carried a tray with eggs and coffee, and a small vial of lavender potion.

“Good, you’re awake. I’m going out. Feed that to whatever creature wants it, I don’t.”

She took the potion and uncorked it. It smelled of sulfur and indignity. She drank deeply. It tasted worse.

“You would think,” she said, replacing the vial carefully, “that the greatest potioneer of his age would be able to ensorcel his concoctions so as to delimit the flavor of mouse droppings. Don’t you agree?”

“Surely, m’lady.”

“Or, if the droppings are intractable, might one cut them with a more pleasant flavor, such as chalk? I suppose such trifling ruminations have kept me from being a great potioneer. Thank you, Briselda, that will be all.”

“Does m’lady want her coffee?”

“No, m’lady doesn’t. In fact m’lady is contemplating a finger of bleach.”

“…Does m’lady like for me to fetch some?”

There was much to be said for Briselda, but none of it about her brains.

“No, thank you. Go light the fires. I shan’t be back until this evening, so don’t bother with a place for me.”

The Clarifying Potion worked quickly. The world came into focus as if a grain or tinted lens had been removed, and she could detect much more clearly the note of sourness in Briselda’s tone when she said, “As m’lady likes,” and trudged out of the room.

Getting a bit mouthy, was Briselda. Narcissa wasn’t of a mind to take much of any tone from a witch who hadn’t even finished her O.W.L.s. Andy had finished her O.W.L.s, and Andy hadn’t enough sense to fill a thimble.

It was a quarter-mile walk to the Manor gates.

No one could Apparate onto Malfoy Manor. The enchantments would splinch anyone who tried. That had been Abraxas’ idea, since he’d built the place, and she had to admire the nastiness. Now, there was a man who understood the importance of property.

A vile human being, of course, but vile human beings could be useful in all sorts of ways. Albus Dumbledore had proven himself tremendously.

With the gates secured safely behind her, she Apparated.

The villagers of Little Hangleton still called it “the Riddle House,” though she did not know why, or what the riddle was, if it had ever existed. It stood on a hill overlooking the village, its windows punctured, its roof thinned of shingles, veiled in ivy as if ashamed to show its broken face. The gate hung loose from a twisted hinge and parted at the touch of her boot.

So it went. A family had lived here, once, and then it had died, and no one had come to take care of it. Sic transit gloria mundis.

A wave of her wand revealed nothing in the way of wards or protective charms. He was gone, then.

Movement in the shadows by the door, a rippling of air. She twirled her wand through her fingers, waiting.

A black shape melted out of the shade. It resolved into a ghostly candle-wick of a person, with contemptible hair and the shabby robes of an academic, a high-collared cossack wrinkled from wear and shrouded in patches, which no amount of cruel badgering had ever convinced him to part with. He dressed like a poor boy who was ashamed of it, and rather than ever dressing differently, he persisted in it with pathological stubbornness, as if he could bully the world into not caring.

“Severus.”

“Narcissa,” he said, and bowed, slightly.

What she felt was not comfort — it would be inappropriate for the sight of any man not her husband to bring her comfort — but she would admit to a certain relief at the sight of her son’s godfather, in the same way she was relieved to close the deadbolt on a door, and relieved to watch a man collapse at the end of her wand. Somehow that ghostly little man, with his homely sneer and his middle-class frocks, had become the only sincere assurance in the world that danger had passed.

Another sound came from the shadows, this time a honking sneeze. Something small and dark moved in the grass by her foot.

She pointed her wand at it. Electricity crackled over the tip.

The rat scurried out of her way and transformed into a balding man in brown rags.

“Merlin’s sake, Wormtail. I nearly cursed you.”

“Sorry,” said Pettigrew, who was clearly not. “I’ve been hiding out in the gamekeeper’s house.”

“Why.”

He kneaded his own fleshy hands like dough. “D-D-Dumbledore is after me. He wants me dead, I know it. I think he’s sent s-spies to follow me…”

Narcissa glanced at Severus, who did not find this nearly amusing as she did.

She pressed her lips together and folded her hands behind her back.

“…I overheard one asking about rat catchers at the Hanged Man…”

“Albus Dumbledore has far more important concerns than the whereabouts of an impotent coward,” said Severus. “It is humiliating to hear you ideate your own significance. I am far more likely to kill you than he.”

“Yes, I know that,” said Pettigrew peevishly. “You’ve only offered half a dozen times since you came back. Though I never thought you’d have the nerve to call me a coward, Snivellus.”

Severus’ wand was flush against his throat before he could so much as twitch. The lines in Severus’ neck were white and rigid as bone, sculpted by the sort of rage that burned so hot it crossed back into cool serenity.

Narcissa twitched. They were useless. Children. She could have killed them both, and done the job her bloody self, if the madman only trusted her.

“I beg your pardon, gentlemen. Shall I return home? I can pop back in when you’re ready to work, if time is what you require. I don’t mean to be rude, but schoolboy quibbling bores me tremendously, and if neither of you are going to kill each other, then this is a waste of my time.”

Severus’ glare could have flayed a layer of skin off an animal; but Narcissa had stared down Walburga Black and lied about her son’s smoking habit. Twice. She lifted her eyebrows.

He lowered his wand. They stepped apart.

Pettigrew, massaging his neck resentfully, spat: “We should have let Remus have you.”

“Pettigrew, find your dignity, if you can’t find your sense,” she said.

“What? I don’t know where he gets off blaming me — I got tortured because of him, you know.”

“For nine minutes,” said Severus quietly.

“Yes! So what, nine minutes? Under the Cruciatus Curse? I should have been welcomed as a conquering hero for five! And he didn’t have to torture you at all.” Pettigrew’s leer was remarkably nasty. “You ran your mouth like you were paid to.”

“Pettigrew, honestly.”

“I mean, here’s a thought, you miserable greasetrap: if I was in love with a girl, and I knew she had a baby, I wouldn’t go nattering to the Dark Lord about any newborns, prophesied or otherwise! D’you wonder how he even knew the Potters had a kid? I don’t see how he would, unless one of his dear lieutenants happened to be obsessed with Lil—”

Severus lunged, and Narcissa didn’t stop him. At that point, he had a right to it.

His wand lashed a line across Pettigrew’s mouth. Nothing changed, but Pettigrew staggered as though he had taken a heavyweight’s knuckles to the nose. He choked, clamped a hand over his mouth, and dropped to his knees. Several convulsions rocked him, and then he vomited a string of teeth into the lawn, pattering like pearls into the earth. When he was finished he sat down hard, and gagged around a soft, bloody maw of a mouth.

His tongue slipped ineffectually against his gums, and he let out panicked grunts and squeals as he realized that he could not speak.

She lifted her eyebrow. “Is that a new one?”

Severus held his wand tightly enough to snap it, breathing hard. Pettigrew wailed, dribbling blood down his chin.

“Well, either way, kill him or fix it. I’m not going to look at that while we work.”

Severus gave an inarticulate snarl — “Eloquent,” she said — and stabbed his wand at Pettigrew. The man hunched over, groaning, and when he rose again he sported a row of fresh, if bloody, incisors.

“I hate you,” he wailed.

Severus turned to Narcissa. “It is inside,” he said.

Neither of them spared a glance for Pettigrew as they went in.

The smell of decay laid thick as the snowfall of dust on each surface. A row of mullioned windows on either side of the front cast the sickly gray light of morning through a cosmos of spiderwebs. The door to the kitchen was unlocked and un-warded. It must have been a muggle house, then — but she could not imagine what the Dark Lord would want with a muggle house.

On the landing, at the end of a dim passage, a dim light poked its finger under the far door. From behind it came the sounds of a crackling fire, the first evidence of life to be found in the old place. She hesitated, and let Severus move first into the room, but he pushed open the door and revealed it empty.

Perhaps it had once been a very nice room, but such a time, if it ever existed, could not be recalled by looking. A deep stone fireplace sat into a wall of dark bookshelves, and floors of black wood scraped clean of lacquer now chipped and threaded splinters through threadbare carpets. The ashes in the grate had cooled from gold to dead white, and the room smelled foul. The reason for the room’s smell was in part its want of cleaning, and in part the dead body on the floor.

The corpse had been a plump woman with sandy hair, dressed in a frilly peasant frock of camel brown, a garment which could hardly look worse for being torn open at the neck. Two puncture marks drove deep into her throat, perfectly symmetrical.

She rolled the woman onto her back with a shove from her boot. “Vampirism?”

It was one way of staying alive, though not one the Dark Lord would favor. He loathed half-breeds. They’d cleaned out a nest of them from Transylvania, back in the good days of the war; Constance lost her husband in the fight.

“His familiar,” said Severus quietly. “A snake.”

“The Dark Lord doesn’t have a familiar.”

“Now he does.”

He had very dark irises — so deep brown they were black in all but the keenest lights. It made it easy for him to hide what he was feeling. Fear, however, had a way of making itself known.

Perhaps she was only projecting.

“You’ve seen him, then?” she said quietly.

“No.”

“Then how do you know? Because we’ve seen hoaxes before.”

He nodded towards Pettigrew, who was sulking by the door.

She rounded on him.

“You’re his new handservant?”

“Oh, you’re surprised? Did you think it would be either of you?” he snapped. “After you’d forsaken him? The only people he can trust are in Azkaban. I’m the only one who’s free and alive—”

“For now,” said Severus stonily.

Pettigrew swallowed. “I will be rewarded for my loyalty in this, his time of need.”

“The same promise was made to you fourteen years ago. Have you been rewarded?”

“The first time, you mucked it up! You squealed! And now you’ll come crawling for forgiveness, and I — I will receive boons. He promised.”

“You poor, insipid wretch.” She wondered what would be left of his dull mind, after the Dark Lord finished with him. Death first to cowards and traitors. “You will never be a Death Eater.”

“Oh? Oh, I won’t, will I?” He wrenched back his sleeve. “What’s this, then?”

A knot of black scarring marred his forearm. Her breath was driven out of her lungs in one cold blow.

His head swung between them, grinning savagely — courting horror, shock, impressment. Like it was another one of his old boys’ club’s pranks. Peter Pettigrew had never taken himself seriously; even when his friends became men and then soldiers, he remained a boy, desperate for a safe harbor, incapable of looking darkness in the face. Narcissa turned back to the body on the floor.

Did he think he was the first stupid boy to wear a death sentence on his arm? Did he think he would impress her, waving it around, like a flag?

“Bury it in the garden, do you think?” she said, twitching up her sleeves.

“It must be unrecognizable,” said Severus. “She cannot be found.”

“Burn it first, then.”

“Quite.”

A sweep of her wand lifted the corpse into the air. It floated along beside her like it was buoyed on a stretcher, and in this way she carried it back down the stairs, out to the garden, where the first rays of sunlight were splintering over the hills.

Severus gouged a small dirt pit from the lawn with his wand. She lowered the body into it.

“I don’t suppose she has a wand to dispose of,” she said. When Severus had no answer, she turned to Pettigrew, who hunkered down on the porch steps. “Do you know?”

“The Dark Lord took it,” muttered Pettigrew.

“She’s not a muggle?”

Pettigrew shrugged.

“Answer me.”

“Some stupid bint named Bertha Jorkins. Ran into her in a pub. She almost hexed my nose off before I knocked her out. I was sneezing blood for weeks.”

“A crime for which she surely deserved to die,” said Severus.

“Where you get your piety, I certainly don’t know,” said Pettigrew. “Talked to Barty lately?”

“Barty’s dead,” Narcissa interrupted, relishing the flicker of shock on his piglike face. Severus did not even have the decency to look grateful for the change of subject, and it was his fault the bastard had been in Azkaban. “So is Evan. You’ve been gone a long time. You’d do well to remember.”

She snapped her wrist and tossed a jet of blue flames into the pit. They caught the edge of the witch’s dress and licked hungrily up her body, twining around her neck, and erupting in a crackling fire when they touched her hair. Rancid smoke guttered from the fire pit in thick black gnarls of miasma.

She pressed her hand over her mouth. The smell of fire reminded her of Draco’s birth.

A son was a terrible thing. She had wanted a daughter; she would have liked a daughter more, but loved her less. A daughter would betray her. She couldn’t help it. She would grow up clever and beautiful and hungry, and when the time came, she would forsake her family, and leap into the arms of the first passing man who promised her the galaxy. That was what the Black daughters did: they lied and dreamed and betrayed each other and moved on. It was easy to love one; they were loving, too, in their own way.

But sons— no one wise ever loved a son of the House of Black. It wasn’t because they were unworthy. With few exceptions, the Black sons were noble as they came, and every bit as beautiful as their sisters. But the Black boys had stars for names and they lived like it, high and bright and best worshiped at a distance, for they broke every heart they ever touched, whether they meant to or not.

So she would have preferred a girl. But Narcissa Black would never bear a daughter.

What she bore instead was nine pounds and two ounces of the only thing she had ever done that was good: a tiny Lucius with her nose and her smirk and hair like snow, and that fine proud conqueror’s laugh that had been Bella’s before it was his, the Black laugh, the vixen’s laugh, that enchanting, deathless sound. Nobody heard that laugh without falling in love, just a little, even if only while it lasted. She could see it in the way people listened, when Draco spoke to them — attentive, mindful, as they should be — and when he laughed, the world held its breath. He was so beautiful when he was laughing he was hardly human, like something made from marble wandered off its plinth.

When enough time had passed that the corpse was charred beyond recognition, Severus rolled his wand over the pit in a slow arc. The earth folded over itself like a coverlet, cloaking the body in a thick tongue of dirt, and suffocated the fire. Black coils billowed from the earth and stung at her eyes, turning the air sour.

“Finally,” grunted Pettigrew, lumbering to his feet. “Well. Toodle-oo, you twats. I have to go see a man about a wand.”

He raked up his sleeve.

“Severus,” she warned, but Severus didn’t need prompting: his hand had flickered as soon as Pettigrew stood, and a red bolt caught him in the chest. He toppled over.

Once he fell still, she stepped over him and snatched up his wrist.

“It’s real. That horrid fool,” she said. “I thought perhaps he’d done it himself.” She threw down his wrist with a disgusted noise and rose to her feet. “He should have stayed dead.”

“And so he would have, if not for Sirius Black.”

“Don’t say that name to me.”

“I shall say whatever pleases me, for one, I am not a Black, and for two, if I were, your practice of familial shunning still strikes me as jejune.”

“You wouldn’t understand it.”

“Forgive my presumption, Lady Malfoy,” he murmured. “When one’s blood bears such an indelible taint—”

“No one cares about your father, Severus.”

“So you say.”

The house creaked riotously, resettling on its foundations.

Severus drew his wand casually over the smoking grave, casting a Siphoning Charm on some of the smoke. “Is my godson alive?”

“Draco is quite well, thank you for asking. He’s read his way through half the summer and flown the rest. I’m pleased to say he got his father’s taste for academia, not mine.”

“A house-elf could say as much.”

“I detest whoever allowed you to believe yourself funny,” she said. “For the record, I was a prefect.”

“How the years have matured you. Has Draco liberated any more of the staff?”

The upturned lilt in the end of the sentence was Severus’ version of a smile.

“We’ve had words about that,” she said.

“I expect so. What would Lucius have said, I wonder?”

Lucius would never have allowed it. But Lucius had never raised a son alone, and never had to worry about losing his trust.

There were things more important than one helpful vermin.

“One of my aunts made a hobby of hunting house-elves on horseback in her teenage years,” she said. “Her parents had to borrow help from the neighboring barons. Freeing one elf is hardly the end of the world.”

“Does he know of your activities?”

“No. He’s away for the rest of August.”

“The Cup?”

“With the Weasleys.”

Severus’s cheek twitched.

“You listen to me.”

“I don’t care.”

“At least they’re wizards. One of his friends doesn’t even come from wizardry.”

“It is astonishing,” said Severus, mostly to himself, “how many things people presume I care about.”

“I’m sure you’ve seen her. Uppity little thing she is, too — and would you care to tell me why I had to hear about that development three years late? Were you ever planning to inform me, or did you intend to wait until he turned seventeen, snapped his wand, and ran off to muggle London? Don’t answer that. I’m furious with you.”

“As if I have nothing better to do. Do I seem like a man of leisure? I have never thought to ask.”

“Why am I here?” she demanded. “You’re more than capable of burying a body.”

He finished siphoning smoke, and the last trails dissipated into the lusterless morning.

“I am a messenger.”

“Obviously,” she said impatiently.

“He wants to know if you will still honor the terms of the agreement.”

Sometimes she wondered if it was too long since she’d last hexed him. His hesitation rankled even more than his audacity. “Then you’ve wasted my time,” she said coldly. “Our accord remains in force. So long as he understands—”

“It is perfectly understood.”

“Good. What on earth does he want, then?” She tried not to sound plaintive. “A mark on my arm?”

“Harry Potter is in danger.”

Personally, she did not think this was any sort of revelation. But it seemed to trouble him, and she understood why.

She’d known Lily Evans only a little. For a mudblood, she was clever enough. Like most of her cohort, she’d been brave and stupid from it, quick to ask questions, furious about all the wrong things, and never smart enough to keep her mouth shut when it mattered. A remarkable talent at Runes, it was said, though Narcissa had never bothered with all that. For a while she had lurked around in the Slytherin common room, where Severus trailed her like a lost niffler, until one day she stopped, and that was the end of that.

It had given her a minor heart attack to see her spawn at King’s Cross, grinning at Draco and Molly Prewett’s umpteenth brat — the very grin that James Potter had worn the last time she ever saw his face. The one they plastered on every newspaper in Britain, the night he died.

The grin for which Severus’s life had been ruined.

She didn’t understand most things about her son’s godfather. How you could love anyone who didn’t love you back, for instance, even for a moment, let alone thirteen years.

A brisk wind raked up from the valley. They were far from Wiltshire, and even the encroachment of daybreak failed to shed any warmth on the cold shadow of Riddle House. She folded her arms against the chill. “Does he have a plan?” she asked.

“Doubtlessly. He intends to infiltrate Hogwarts. Pettigrew claims there is a rat in the Ministry, and after what happened to the Greengrass girl, Dumbledore has been forced to make compromises with the Board to retain control of the school. Events are happening this year which he would not otherwise permit. The wheels are turning far faster than we anticipated.”

It had happened this way in the first war, too: there was a moment before everything broke open, when everyone knew what was coming, but nobody knew what it would look like. And life moved on, in its slow, normal way, full of its trivial pleasures, as they frittered away the little time they knew they had left. Dark Marks went up in the news, parents went missing, aurors disappeared, and still, the seventeen-year-old braves of Slytherin House drank martinis in broom cabinets and smoked the overpriced cigarettes Sirius smuggled in, as if no one would ever die, and as if nothing could ever fall.

That was the world she came of age in. She felt as though the past thirteen years had been merely a long summer abroad, and now, as the winds turned, she was finally coming home.

“I didn’t mean him, Severus. Tell me what Albus Dumbledore wants from me.”