Chapter 82: The Princess’s Tale, Part II
By a combination of reflex and luck, respectively, they caught Snape before he hit the parquet. Some effort saw him leveraged into a wingbacked chair, where he sprawled and caught his breath.
“Did you come all the way from Hogwarts tonight?” said Draco.
Snape jerked his head.
“That was stupid,” he snapped. “Do you think they’re not watching the Floo? Or the trains? They’ll have men across the countryside searching for you. Could you even Apparate if you needed to? Merlin, look at the state of you. I doubt it.”
Hermione cleared her throat, faintly. Draco stepped back, radiating discontent, and Snape caught his breath.
“I came,” Snape rasped, “by coach.”
“Coach? What coach?”
“By muggle coach?” said Hermione, whose disbelief achieved insult. Snape flashed her a withering look.
“It is a serviceable method of transportation.”
“I know that, but — I mean, have you used it before?”
“Did you think Hogwarts pays its teachers enough to travel by sedan chair?”
Hermione blinked. “I didn’t think cost was the relevant obstacle to that,” she said. “It would be a lot slower. Professor, what happened to your arm?”
“Is your question rhetorical, or ironical?”
“I think it’s medical,” she said, eyeing it with conflicted curiosity. “Why… bones? I thought Pomfrey could regrow—”
“Poppy has left me fit to wield a wand,” said Snape grimly, rolling the skeletal fingers. “Further convalescence would have wasted essential time. Flesh is largely ornamental.”
“It’s not. Really. For a lot of things it’s quite essential.”
Snape ignored her. “I have something for you,” he said to Draco. “From your mother. A bequest.”
The word bequest left a stinging pain. “An owl wouldn’t have sufficed?” he said roughly. “What is it?”
Snape reached for the brass chest. Fumbling for want of dexterity in his right hand, he fished a key from a chain on his neck and unlocked it, revealing a set of thirteen vials set in a bed of purple silk. They held a swirling, mercurial liquid.
“You have a pensieve, I assume,” said Snape.
Draco picked up the chest. His mother’s memories lay in two shining rows between his hands.
“I was sorry,” Snape added, “to have missed the ceremony.”
It didn’t bear talking about. A person like Severus Snape did not attend funerals. Draco had always known that; he hadn’t been at his father’s funeral, either. That one had been a society event. Snape’s trial at the Wizengamot had been only four months concluded; he hadn’t gone.
Anyway, it was better, perhaps, that Snape hadn’t been there. Draco snapped the chest shut.
“Who don’t you trust?” said Hermione suddenly.
Snape raised his eyebrows at her to demonstrate the breadth of possible answers to the question.
“I’m talking about today. You didn’t come to the ceremony. It obviously wasn’t because you couldn’t make the journey, so who was there that couldn’t see you?”
“The question implies I have knowledge of who attended; which, as I did not, I do not.”
She didn’t even bother with that. “Was it Andromeda? Everyone else is Order.”
Snape’s face did something odd; he braced a thumb and fourth finger on either side of his brows. “You invited,” he said, “Andromeda Black.”
“She happens to have been related to her,” Draco said.
“And was it a pleasant reunion? Did she act with reverence and cordiality for the deceased?”
“No. In fact, it was greatly unpleasant, as a regrettably large share of decent things are. Severus, answer her question.”
Snape tilted his head at her slightly; his eyes glinted. “Nymphadora Tonks,” he said, “reports in the first instance to Alastor Moody. Who would not hesitate to throw me to what he regards as my former brothers-in-arms.”
“Dumbledore wouldn’t allow that,” she said.
“It is one of Albus’s more famous traits, that he is rarely around, and never more rarely than when one needs him. I try never to depend on it.” He tapped the box: click-click, bone on brass. “Hasten to those,” he added. “Memory is an unstable substance. It has a tendency to warp.”
Draco tightened his grip. “And you?” he said flatly. “Are you leaving?”
“I will lodge for the night, if you permit. I have business to attend in the morning.” He nodded at the box. “Speak to me. After.”
Draco set the box under his arm. Hermione said meaningfully: “Professor, have you eaten?”
“I can see myself to the kitchens,” he said, rising to his feet. “I have been here before.”
“Right. Of… course you have. I’ll go tell Briselda there’s another guest here,” she said briskly, dusting her hands, “so you don’t scare the daylights out of her—”
“Granger,” said Draco. She looked at him.
“Oh,” she said, in a different tone. “Oh. Yes. If you’re— sure.”
He tipped his head towards the door. Snape inspected the bookshelf, expressionless. Hermione threw a glance between them and followed Draco out.
His father’s study sat in the library wing. A surprisingly light room, it sported ample windows that in daylight exposed a full square of lavish green on the Manor grounds, and at night cut black quadrilaterals into the wooden walls. Between leatherbound shelves hung portraits of pale wizards with striking glares. In a glass case at the back of the room, set between a stuffed lion and a bust of Charlemagne, there stood a golden reliquary in the Gothic style, with rubies set into each of the ornamented spires.
When he closed the door, a candelabra burst to life at his elbow with unusual promptness, as if the Manor were apologizing for the unfortunate business with Snape.
“Was all of this your father’s?” Hermione murmured, caught evidently between her affection for the room’s style and her political distaste for its excess. She wandered down an aisle of artifacts, tapping on the glass encasement of a set of jeweled ortolans. Her finger drifted over the lion’s mane. He caught her hand.
“Museum rules,” he said. “I don’t know which are cursed.”
She looked over her shoulder at him as if this might be a joke.
“It’s true. The lawyers have it noted down in our asset portfolio, but it’s longer than the tax code and even Gatz hasn’t read the whole thing. Until I do, it’s best not to take chances.”
Her lips parted.
“My father collected some of it,” he said, to ward off a probably salient criticism. “Not much. He preferred books and broomsticks. He inherited the collection from his father, and he from his, et cetera. It’s not his anymore.”
She blinked at him, and scanned again the jeweled birds, the lion, the portraits. Her face belied an uneasy cousin to wonder.
Unsettled, he pressed the small of her back, pulling her along. “The pensieve is here.”
“I’ve never used one before. Is it difficult?”
“The hardest part is opening the pensieve.”
He tried to remember how his father had done it.
The reliquary’s front face bore a pair of little golden doors. He unlatched them, and when he pulled the ruby capstone from the top, the sides of the reliquary unsealed and unfolded neatly to hang down around the stem.
Inset in the velvet beneath was a round pool of misty fluid so still it might have been glass. Standing, it reached knee-height, so he set the box down and knelt. Hermione did, too, albeit with a pointed tug.
“About this,” she said suddenly. “Are you sure?”
“I never do anything except.”
“Yes, that’s — well. Bald lie, for one thing. For two: it’s Narcissa’s memories.” She watched him open the box and carefully remove the first vial, unstopper it, and empty it into the pensieve. Memory dribbled from its lip in a sluggish crawl, the wisps thin and yellowing; older ones, he suspected. Childhood. Perhaps infancy. The surface tension on the pensieve shattered, and it began to swirl.
“Both are true,” he said, unstoppering another. This one was cleaner, and poured faster. “What’s your point?”
“I don’t think she would have wanted me to see this.”
“You don’t even know what ‘this’ is.”
“I know she made it her last bequest to her only son. I don’t have to know what’s in it. I know she didn’t bequeath it to me.”
With a twist of his wrist, another vial slipped into the pensieve. “She’s not here,” he said cruelly. “So if the only thing stopping you is concern for her feelings, I have good news on that score.”
“Draco.”
The empty vial slipped and cracked on the floor. He closed his fingers too late around where it should have been.
“I can’t do this,” he said, clearly and carefully.
“You don’t have to.” Her hand closed over his, and steered it away from the vial. She brushed it aside with a businesslike flick of her hand. “Especially not tonight. My God. Or ever, if you don’t want to.”
“She wanted to tell me something.”
“Then she can wait for you to want to listen,” she said hotly. He listened to her with great tiredness. Everything was so simple, when Hermione spoke; everything was so clear, the world so bright, the sun so high and shining, even if only for a moment, through a winking cloud. “Putting aside your point about her feelings, even though, incidentally, it’s correct — I’m not certain you are obligated in the way you suggest. No one who loved you would have wanted you to use their memory to hurt yourself, and any rate, it’s certainly not something they could ask of you. The dead don’t have special entitlements because they’re dead. They play by the same rules as the rest of us, and when they want something, they have to give you a good reason to give it to them, and so I don’t see a good reason for you to put yourself through this, if you’re not ready, and you’ll forgive me for saying I don’t think any such reason exists in a formation I couldn’t beat stupid if it was put to me.”
He caught her by the chin and kissed her. She inhaled in surprise, but her mouth slackened into his, sliding together in an artless clash of mouths and teeth whose sensual element was nearly irrelevant. He made a hard sound, and she cupped his face a good deal more carefully than he touched hers. He pulled her forward, dragging her on her knees on the parquet until she had to catch herself on her shoulders with another hitch of breath.
“You have to breathe it,” he said. Their foreheads were braced together, so close his breath stirred her hair. “The memory. That’s how it works.”
Hermione sighed.
“Okay,” she said. “I don’t enjoy that, mechanically.”
“I thought you wouldn’t.”
“There is air in it, still, when you…? You’re still breathing? Never mind, don’t tell me.”
“We have to go at once. A deep breath, to get to the bottom.”
She sat up on her knees, peering doubtfully inside. The mist reflected on her drawn face.
“Latin,” she murmured. “Spirit. Breath. Spirare. It’s the same root, you know.”
“Who taught you that one?”
“It’s general knowledge,” she said, haughtily. “You don’t need citations for a morpheme.” She sniffed. “Tell me when. Actually, don’t tell me. Just do it, no warning. I’m going to lose my nerve, otherwise.”
“I was about to tell you the same thing.”
His mother’s memories ran in a clockwise current of braided mist, glowing.
“Alright,” announced Hermione. “One—”
He did as she asked; there was no warning. He pulled them under without a sound.
Once his ears slipped under the surface, all senses — the clench of her hand, the cold edge of the pensieve, the wood under his knees — faded together into the mist. He remembered the first breath of the pensieve, memory filling his lungs with dust-bitter not-quite-air.
Then he was loose in the current of time, cresting the edge of a waterfall, and descending.
She was falling, and then she was not: she was looking at the plasters on her fingers, which were pressed to one side of a locked door.
Grandpapa had whispered once that if she never slammed doors and cleaned her shoes before coming in, then Witherfell would do her favors, when it could. She never knew if it was her magic or the house’s, but when she tugged the doorknob, the lock clicked.
Coals guttered red in the hearth. Moonlight limned two girls in the windowsill, faces shrouded in dark hair. The bigger one was crying into her arms.
Andy had her arm stretched awkwardly around the bulk of Bella’s shoulders. “It’s alright! It’s alright! Oh, Merlin, don’t cry. She didn’t mean it. It wouldn’t even make any difference, if you were a boy.”
She yelped. Bella had pinched her.
“What did you do that for? Now you’ve gone and made me cross,” she snapped, reaching for her wand, and Bella raised her head, her expression glad and savage, when Narcissa closed the door behind her. The sound made them both turn.
“Go away,” Bella spat. “I don’t want you.”
“You would if you knew what I’ve got. But you have to promise to smile when you get it.”
“Give it first,” Bella demanded.
“I shan’t.”
“I want it!”
“Then you must promise! I don’t do anything for nothing.”
Bella nodded shortly. Andy sighed, buffing her nails.
Narcissa drew back the fold of her robe. She slipped from the interior pocket a shabby and somewhat charred copy of Secrets of the Darkest Arte, Vol. I.
Bella’s eyes widened. “You saved it,” she murmured. “How?”
“I waited until Mummy took her potion, and Daddy went to the parlor with Lord Crabbe. I don’t suppose even Kreacher saw me do it. I beat most of the coals off with the poker — I couldn’t save the others, though, I’m sorry.”
Andromeda gasped. “Cissy! Your hands!”
Narcissa dropped the book on Bella’s lap and stuffed her hands under her arms. “You can still read it. I checked.”
Bella folded her hands around the book tenderly. Narcissa held her breath.
“Do you need burn cream?” muttered Andy.
“No. Hush.”
“Fine. Ruin your hands, see if I care.”
Bella tucked the book into her own robe without speaking. She bent down and pressed a long, soft kiss on Narcissa’s cheek, like she was made of glass.
“Thank you, princess,” she murmured. Narcissa smiled and kissed the nearest part of her she could reach, which was her knee. Andy scoffed.
“…believe what they say, she’ll be a Nott before the year’s out.”
The clocks were tolling eleven. The space was paneled in wood, personal, with wood rafters and the inevitable smell of must that clung to medieval buildings. Even in August, Knotscliff Peak held a chill.
By the hearth, Orion held court with Lord Rosier and Lord Lestrange and his younger brother, Rabastan. Narcissa feigned interest in an oil-portrait of Sibelius Nott’s grandfather.
“…lovely thing, the oldest, but headstrong. It’s a cold marriage bed he’s after.”
“Did you hear what she did to Macmillan’s girl?” said Orion, not unhappily. “Ghastly thing. Cygnus paid handsomely for it.”
“Perhaps she’ll do him a credit,” said Lord Lestrange. The firelight made gilt of the silver in his beard. “I daresay he would not be courting her if he did not see something in her to be admired.”
“Do you have an interest?”
Lord Lestrange shrugged. “She seems hearty,” he said. “My work takes me often from my home. It would behoove my wife to be independent. But while I thank you, Orion, I hope you will not interfere with Sibelius’s courtship. It is an inopportune time for him to resent me.”
“What ‘work’?”
“His little political group,” drawled Rosier. “The lad down south who’s always nattering about mudbloods.”
“I don’t see why you don’t join the Cavaliers,” Orion muttered, docking his pipe on the ottoman.
Lord Lestrange smiled. “I appreciate the suggestion,” he said. “I may return to it. In the meantime, I am satisfied with my little political group.”
“I didn’t mean to offend,” said Lord Rosier.
Rodolphus Lestrange’s smile did not waver, though it adopted a certain paternal chill. “My good lord,” he said, “I would never accuse you of meaning to do anything. Good night.”
Narcissa slipped away.
Across the room, Bellatrix leaned on the drinks table, and was drinking from an overfull crystal of firewhiskey. Andy leaned against a pillar beside her, watching the dancers mournfully.
Narcissa touched her elbow. Bellatrix acknowledged her with a glance.
“Tris says Sibelius is going to propose.”
“They were debating my dowry over the soup,” she said, “but it’s good of you to keep me informed.”
“Shall I poison him?”
Bella flashed a thin smile. “Now, silly,” she said. “How am I supposed to make poison look like an accident?”
“I heard he’s cruel,” said Andy, plucking a string of lace on her cuff. “That he hits his staff.”
“So? House-elves need whipping, it’s good for them.”
“No, the people.”
Bella paused. “Purebloods?”
“Half. It’s still in poor taste. Won’t you refuse him?”
“And then do what? Wait thirty years for my lord uncle to keel over, and pray my good cousin lets me sleep in the attic at Witherfell?” She threw back her firewhiskey and grimaced. “I suppose I should be grateful my lord husband’s arthritis will prevent him from often troubling my bedchamber.”
“Isn’t there any boy you like better?” wondered Andy. “I’m sure we could induce him to propose before Lord Nott does.”
“With my suite of charms, hm? Or have you been reading Cyrano?”
“Madame Bovary. Tell me, darling, do you want to live in Paris?”
Bella laughed. The nearest hemisphere of the room turned in a retinue of frightened enchantment. Andy met Narcissa’s eyes, and cast her wry smile down to the floor.
“You’d wrong any boy to mention me,” said Bella, into her glass. “I’d go through him like paper, and then you’d feel awfully guilty.”
“That’s rather an overstatement, don’t you think?” murmured Andy.
“The paper?” said Bella.
“The guilt,” she said, looking at Narcissa. Narcissa scowled back, pressing closer to Bellatrix’s arm.
Boots pounded out a reel on the dance floor. The light in the room was red and writhing.
“I overheard Orion talking to Lord Lestrange,” she whispered.
“…then he told me I was a brat. And I told him I could have him hauled out back and beaten for saying that to me, even if he weren’t a mudblood, and then he told me that my whole family were brats by birth, and if the Ministry taxed us out of existence within a generation it was only to spare us the effrontery of the guillotine.”
Slughorn had taken the common room for his party. Firelight sparkled on floating baubles of red and green. Wreaths piled high from the rafters, spotted with red berries and crusts of enchanted frost. Girls in heels and boys with pressed shirtfronts shuffled together to honeyed music. A redhead — one of Slughorn’s pet mudbloods, an indulgence — was whispering together with a dark-haired first year in the corner.
Narcissa wore a ballgown of powder-blue, with cap-sleeves and a jabot, and pearls on her wrists and in her ears. Andy wore a leather miniskirt and a tartan scarf. Tris Avery had taken one look at her and walked into a wall.
“… and I worry, Cissa.”
She turned her head. Andy was studying the perfect 0-shapes of her nails like they were a scorecard for something important. “Don’t you? It’s not the politics — I don’t know any of that. But the squib riots aren’t a decade past, and so much has changed. Now Slughorn is saying the squibs were right all along, though I swore he didn’t like them, and everyone said Dumbledore was a radical but now he’s to be headmaster, and — don’t you think it’s odd? How the world changes its mind?”
“Stupid people believe what they’re told,” she said. “Powerful people fight each other, and the winner tells them. The Cavaliers lost, and now Jenkins is Minister. It’s all quite tedious.”
“You sound like the lovely Lady Lestrange.”
“I don’t think so,” Narcissa laughed. “I don’t think Bella’s said that many words about politics in her life. I doubt she could name five members of the Wizengamot she wasn’t related to.”
“In her defense, that excludes most of them. Cissa, don’t you ever worry?” She swept her hand, indicating with great theatricality a fairly mundane room full of people. “Don’t you think of what they’ll say about us in ten years? Or a hundred?”
“Gracious. A hundred years is a long time to talk about anything.”
“Not for our family.”
“Name your grandfather’s youngest sister.”
“I mean important things. Like truth and love. And choice. And courage.”
“None of those are names,” said Narcissa.
When she turned her head, he cut across her eyeline. Six feet of him in black tails, white hair curtaining the slender planes of a face like a desaturated Leyendecker. A sweet contempt in the tautness of his mouth. His eyes were so pale they seemed to glow.
Andy said, “What I want, really—”
“I’m going to get a drink,” she interrupted. She tugged out her handkerchief and sieved it through her fingers to the floor. “Don’t pick that up.”
Andromeda paused in reaching for it. “You slattern,” she said wryly. “Have oodles of fun. Don’t let him get to third without proposing.”
Narcissa rolled her eyes and detached decisively from their table.
“You can always break the engagement in the morning,” Andy called. Narcissa made a rude gesture guised by her sleeve, which cast her sister into giggling. She plucked a flute of champagne from the tower and located herself in one of the pockets of space between conversations so involved that no one would be tempted to recruit her.
In a few moments, a shadow dimmed the candlelight over her face. Lucius stood over her, the handkerchief notched between his outstretched third and forefinger.
“That’s a lovely object,” she said.
“You’re very kind,” he said, and inclined his head in a sardonic bow. “I’ve come by it recently. I think it suits you.”
“I shouldn’t accept,” she said. “I don’t take gifts from strangers.”
She picked it delicately from his upturned palm. His hand was warm, and clean, and smooth.
“It needn’t be a gift,” he said. “I could ask for something in return.”
“As you’ve already given it to me, you’re in a weak position to negotiate.”
“Shouldn’t that be an enticement to you? It leaves me quite pliable.”
“Why don’t I get the sense that’s true, Mr. Malfoy?”
Lucius smiled. It was a small movement, but it seemed to change the whole cast of his face, like wood transmuted into marble by a finger of sun.
“Perhaps,” he said, “it leaves you in a weaker position to have accepted without knowing the cost.”
“I know the cost.”
“Forgive me, but I doubt it. I haven’t even decided what to ask for.”
“Yes, you have,” she said.
The arch of his eyebrow nearly made her smile.
“This is an unorthodox negotiation. I say I don’t know what I want, and you offer to tell me.”
She settled her flute on a floating tray. “You knew what you wanted before you came over here.”
“Did you read that in my tea leaves, Miss Black?”
She drew a cigarette from a gold case in her purse, notched it between her fingers, and after a pause, she extended it for lighting. Lucius raised his eyebrows, but like a gentleman, he obliged.
His lighter was goblin-silver, so polished she could see her lipstick’s red reflection. It took a certain wizard to carry a goblin-silver lighter, when any first-year could conjure flames.
“Among other things,” she said, and put the cigarette to her lips.
Lucius smiled, and it revealed the earlier gesture for a counterfeit. Now she would know the difference.
“Do you have another one of those?” he said, glancing at her cigarette case.
Then it was her turn to grin.
“You resolved to marry a Black sister.”
“I resolved to marry one, in particular,” he said, striking something out. “The offer is non-fungible. Please make that clear to your family, if it isn’t.”
The Hogwarts library smelled of dust and leather. Red carpets muffled her footsteps as she moved around his table, her steps deft and idle. Lucius twitched his glasses up his nose and continued copying something from the textbook beside him.
“Bellatrix is stronger,” she said. “The better witch. And third in line to the lordship.”
“I do not seek a wife to duel my enemies,” he said, “and ‘third’ is hardly an improvement from ‘fifth.’ And she’s married.”
“She wasn’t always.”
“No,” he agreed, “and in many ways, I think she still isn’t, now. Cissa, your sister’s soul is cast from a hard metal. We would damage each other in the engagement.”
“Andromeda, then.”
Lucius grimaced.
“She’s more charming,” she added. “It would balance you, who are not.”
“I beg your pardon. I have, to date, charmed at least one woman.”
“I was not charmed.”
“But you performed it so beautifully,” said Lucius. When she turned, he still bent over the paper, examining it, but his eyes flickered up at her from under the sheaf of his hair. The lamplight turned it so dark it was silver. His cheek was suspiciously taut.
She cleared her throat.
“I was bewitched by your discussion of gilt-edged securities,” she said. “Your imitation of rigor mortis at Puddifoot’s subsumed me in lust. I should have rode you there on the table, if you permitted.”
Lucius made an ungraceful noise in his throat. His glare was adorably scandalized. She smiled at him.
“The question remains,” she said, rubbing the dust between her fingers. “You inherit a position with social responsibilities. Andy is sociable. I am — cold, by comparison.”
“Cold?”
“Reserved.”
He slipped his reading glasses off his nose and regarded her, blinking, through fresh grey eyes. “Being reserved is not a fault. Discretion is a virtue.”
“You’re not marrying me because I’m discreet.”
Lucius crossed his legs at the knee, dangling his glasses from one armrest. “Why do you think I’m marrying you?”
“Mother says I’m the loveliest,” she said blandly. “Perhaps you’re shallow.”
He smiled: a thin little cluster of lines at the corner of his mouth. “Perhaps I am.”
She perched on the table beside his work. When she grazed her fingers over his handwriting, her engagement flashed in the light. She had loved that ring from sight. Loved its weight. Loved the way it caught and held the room’s eye.
“That word is redundant,” she said, resting her forefinger on the page.
He didn’t look at it. He was still watching her. “Alright,” he said.
“And Bella’s asked to throw us an engagement party. Some of Roddy’s friends want to meet you.”
“Alright,” he said.
“And you should send my uncle some elf-wine for Christmas,” she said. “He prefers a bordeaux. Mention the name ‘Harold Minchum.’ They’re running him for Minister against Jenkins in the next cycle. My uncle will set a meeting.”
“You’ll choose the bottle?”
“Mm.”
He offered his palm. She laid her hand over it, lightly. The diamond winked out as his fingers closed over hers.
He touched his lips to her knuckle: warm and clean and smooth.
The doors were open onto the veranda, and the swans moved sluggishly through a late twilight on the gardens. Inside, the house was full of screaming. Aunt Wally’s voice drowned the rest, though Regulus piped through, reedy and shrill.
But it was all distant. Narcissa was running, her bare feet springing through the lawns, as Andy stalked up the drive with her trunk. She was wearing a traveling cloak and muggle clothes, one sleeve torn where Bella — well.
“Andy, listen—”
“Let go of me. I’ll jinx your arm off.”
“Stop! Listen! She didn’t mean it—”
“She did mean it,” Andy spat. She whirled around. “She always means it, Cissa, are you blind?”
“You told her in a bad way, it was artless, you didn’t have to start with—”
“Start with what? The truth? Wouldn’t want too much of that around here, would you?”
“You didn’t give her half a chance! She’s been off with Roddy and their coven half the year, trawling the country, and you didn’t give her a night’s sleep before proclaiming your mudblood lover at the dinner table—”
“He’s not just ‘my lover.’ I love Edward,” she said passionately. “I adore him. I’d die for him. He’s everything to me. And I don’t have to say it artfully, or delicately, and honestly, I can’t believe you’re such a fool you think it would make a difference how I said it when they all want him dead, anyway!”
“You’re ridiculous,” said Narcissa, trying not to laugh. “He’s everything to you? You met him last year!”
“You’re marrying someone you met last year!”
“That’s different. We’re equals. The mudblood can’t offer you a life!”
“I don’t want a life! I want Edward!”
She did laugh, then, and Andromeda’s face darkened. “Listen to yourself! Are you going to run away? With what, stupid dear? You haven’t any money; you didn’t even take any N.E.W.T.s. Come back. You can keep your lover, I won’t tell anyone. Plenty of people have odd tastes — everyone knows Uncle Alfie doesn’t really have business in New York — but you just can’t expect everyone to be so modern. The dinner table isn’t any sort of place—”
“You’re not listening,” said Andromeda faintly. “You’re pretending to listen, but you’re not. I said I love him. I don’t want to sneak him in the garden gate after midnight. I want to sit next to him at dinner—”
“You loved every boy that ever looked twice at you.”
“—I want to feed him ice when he’s feverish, I want to hear him tell me the weather—”
“You loved every boy that promised to take you to fairyland, and you cried like a baby every time they didn’t. Don’t you ever tire of it?” said Narcissa, and her sibilants whistled with scorn. “Aren’t you ashamed to be some man’s fool?”
“Better his fool than his concubine,” she spat, brandishing her bare left hand. “Don’t condescend to me, Cissa. Your fairyland might come with diamonds, but that doesn’t make it better than mine.”
Narcissa slapped her.
Tried to: Andy caught her wrist. She sneered between their crossed arms.
“There you are, Lady Malfoy,” she said.“I see you now.”
She threw Narcissa’s wrist back at her.
“I will be Lady Malfoy,” said Narcissa. “And when you tire of lying there on your back beneath a brute, don’t owl me for help getting up.”
“I wouldn’t owl you for every goblin’s gold.”
“You think he’ll please you? He won’t. You’ll tire of him in a fortnight. You think a man can make you happy? You think anything can? Lord Merlin, Andy, if there was I would’ve found it! In a year’s time you’ll be lonely and poor, wondering why you thought what the castle lacked could be found in sty—”
“In a year’s time I’ll have a baby,” said Andy.
Narcissa stopped still. Her feet were shrouded in earth. The wind battered their skirts against their ankles, two black birds straining to fly.
“You’re lying.”
“I will.” Andy lifted her chin, and her voice nearly didn’t tremble. “Six weeks late. If it’s a boy, I’m naming it after him.”
“It’s anathema,” she said shrilly. “The bloodline—”
“Fuck the bloodline,” exclaimed Andy, with a trill of exhilaration. “Don’t you ever tire of cliché? None of you really care, you’re all spitting shit at each other over tea and trifle — you live without thinking! How can you bear it, waiting to breed and rot and die—”
Narcissa tried to take Andy’s hands, but she shook her off. “If you have— if you let him — I won’t — you’ll break Bella’s heart, you—”
“Bella! There’s one woman who’ll survive it,” she exclaimed, astonished. “She’s already doing what I am, just in the other direction. She’s in love with her husband’s blood zealot, did you know? You’d all see it if you only let yourselves. Some days I think I’m the only one who looks at her, the way you people act — like she’d care if that dry old cack you married her to keeled over and died on the mattress! All she really lives for are the days she leaves that castle. But you can’t understand it, because you don’t really have the courage for love, do you, Cissa? In my shoes, you wouldn’t make it past the front door.”
Narcissa straightened. Her spine was a temple pillar, perpendicular to the ground.
“In your shoes, I would have cut that animal out of my body before I let it do to me what you’re about to.”
Andy closed her mouth. Her face slackened — not calm, merely dead.
“I’d rather do that to mine than what you’ll do to yours,” she said. “You’re going to raise a monster. And I hope, Cissa, I really hope you enjoy it. You’ve been waiting long enough for one to love you back.”
Narcissa’s wand whispered out of its sheath. She pointed it at her, palm-down, forefinger laid straight along the wood. At her side, Andy was holding hers in the same way.
A door slammed in the house, and light spilled over the lawns. Andy whirled and ran, her back retreating over the trembling end of Narcissa’s wandpoint, until she slipped into the trees, and was gone.
Fuming noon. Cooling Charms trembled vainly against the shimmer of a heatwave. Narcissa, faintly shining in a gown of thick lace, sat under a vast tent of cloth-of-gold, while a quartet of selkies performed Pachelbel. Dancers moved up and down the shaded pavilion, their robes a glittering braid, studded with gilt in the ladies’ hair.
At the children’s table, Sirius had shucked his tie and jacket; he was refilling his third firewhiskey. Regulus made a quartet with Crabbe, Avery, and Dolohov, who dwarfed him comically in height. Their periodic waves of laughter failed to move him. Heat melted an older wizard’s dress robes over his scrawny shoulders. He was calm and miserable.
Walburga and Orion had a table with Rodolphus Lestrange, who said something that made Orion laugh. Cygnus had sequestered himself under one of the flower arches with the Carrows’ girl. Down by the lake, Druella had taken a few of the younger Rosiers to examine the peacocks, whose feathers were the same color as their hair.
Bellatrix had come in a gold shirtwaist and black skirt. Her left hand sported a thick gold band; on the other, a black diamond signet spotted her forefinger, which she rolled around and around with her thumb. Her dark eyes sifted restlessly through the crowd, gravitating to the exit.
Narcissa leaned over to her ear. “Did you invite a paramour?”
Bellatrix recoiled. “My husband’s at that table,” she hissed. “Are you mad?”
“It was a joke. You seemed restless, dear.”
“Strange joke to tell at your wedding,” said Bellatrix, but it mollified her. She leaned over, and spoke in a low voice. “The Lord wants me to go with him to Romania. Alone.”
“It’s an odd thing to call him, isn’t it? There isn’t any House Voldemort.”
“He’s not a lord in the traditional sense. Listen — Cissy, I’m learning things. Magic they didn’t teach at Hogwarts. If we go to Romania, I could learn more.”
“If you go to Romania, your husband will notice,” muttered Narcissa, reaching for her wine.
“‘Notice’ isn’t ‘mind.’ And he’s too frightened of the Lord for it to matter. He’s weak.”
“What do you need me to say? You’ve already worked it out.”
“Don’t sound so judgmental,” said Bellatrix, frowning. “I’m not going to do anything iniquitous. The Lord isn’t like that. He doesn’t want—”
Narcissa’s face pinched in acute, frustrated pity. Bellatrix faltered.
“All men want that, dear.”
“He doesn’t,” she said venomously. “There are no other men like him.”
“What is not like other men is not a man.”
“Then he isn’t. He doesn’t deal in the chattels of desire,” she said, and her voice became distant, dreamy. “All he wants is power. It’s more honest, you know; he never lies. And what is desire if not power, recognized? You would understand it, if you met him. The things he can do—”
Narcissa sat up. Lucius had come back from the crowd of dancers. Against the gold of his cloak, his long hair was so white it shone.
By the arm he held a shabby teenager, with oily hair brushed forward to hide his spots. He wore trousers that showed his ankles, and a Slytherin tie, and the Malfoy crest on his tie pin suggested to whom it belonged.
“Cissa,” said Lucius, “you remember Severus.”
“I do. You’re in Sirius’s year,” she said indulgently. “What does Slughorn have you doing?”
He spoke from the corner of his mouth, with his hands in his pockets. “Amortentia. And Dreamless Sleep. Wolfsbane, sometimes.”
“Gracious. In fourth year?” She smiled. “I’m not sure I’d pass it, now.”
“I work from the N.E.W.T. book,” said Snape. His voice was flat and smug. “If it comforts you, I’m not sure he’d pass it, either.”
“Risked expulsion last year,” said Lucius. “Slughorn had to pull him out of an incident with Meadowes. He calls him the dungeon’s resident genius.”
“How did this genius get himself caught?” said Bellatrix coldly. Snape curled his lip, but it was Narcissa who spoke.
“Meadowes called Cadmus a name,” she said. “He retaliated. I saw it.”
Snape smirked, an acrid expression of embarrassed pride; but Bella’s lips thinned.
“The Dark Lord isn’t on the market for a dog,” she said. “Bring him back in two years, when he’s less green.”
“In two years, I’ll be past the Hogwarts curriculum,” Snape complained. His voice cracked. “Slughorn won’t have anything to teach me. He barely does now.”
“Then find a way to make yourself of use.” She threw back her chair and dropped her napkin. “The Dark Lord’s service is not a Potions mastery. If you want to be a technician, go to Cambridge.”
Narcissa opened her mouth, but Bella stalked down the dais, cutting a path to her husband’s table.
“I wouldn’t rend your shirt over it,” murmured Narcissa, in tones of hesitant sweetness. “She’s slow to warm. And you are young.”
He bristled. “I wasn’t going to rend anything—”
“I should say not,” said Lucius, “it’s my shirt you’re wearing—”
“—and I resent you, Malfoy, for conceding to her metaphor,” said Snape bitterly, shrugging him off. “I’m not your lord’s dog. Nor, for that matter, am I Mulciber’s, though I thank you for that implication—”
“That’ll do,” said Lucius, and Snape fell silent. “Show Cissa your wedding present.”
Narcissa raised her eyebrows and crooked two fingers. With ill grace, Snape stepped up and placed before her a trifolded parchment sheaf, sealed with crestless black wax.
She slit it open and unfolded it. On the parchment there was written in difficult scrawl:
ELECTROSEMPRA
Verbal — 5th parry into classic riposte — focus
Wear rubber soles
Narcissa lifted the paper delicately between forefinger and thumb. “You wrote this?”
“Writing it wasn’t the hard part,” muttered Snape.
“One would be forgiven for considering it extraordinary,” said Lucius. “At the age of fourteen. It’s distinctly unique.”
Snape threw him another furtive look; it was shuttered and irritable, but even so, it glowed with obvious, thirsty pleasure.
Narcissa handed it back. “The Latin is evocative,” she agreed. “A bit dramatic. The Greek would have been subtler.”
“It works,” said Snape intently. “I’ll teach you. It takes some doing, but—”
“Show Lucius,” she said firmly. “It’s very nice. But I don’t suppose I’ll have much use for it.”
To her surprise, Snape edged it back at her. He said: “Keep it. You’d be surprised what you can find a use for.”
Thunder broke overhead, but the air was full of fire instead of rain.
The ward-alarm screamed. Footsteps pounded down the hallways, and men in bone-white masks flurried through the house, swarming at the exits. The aftertaste of Disapparation made the air taste of ozone. Smoke cloaked the Manor windows, billowing from the lawns, which glowed like a field of coals.
Narcissa stumbled down the marble stairs and dropped hard to her knees at the bottom, clutching the full round of her belly. She cried out.
“Lucius!”
One of the masked wizards Apparated into being at her elbow, and knelt to help her up. “He’s at the vanguard.” The voice was Snape’s. “Where’s your rendezvous? I’ll take you.”
“Forget the rendezvous. Take me to St. Mungo’s.”
“Lord fucking Merlin. Now?”
“It doesn’t happen on command, you cestode. Take me to Mungo’s.”
He scoffed, but it had an edge of panic. “I can’t Apparate you to London, Lady Malfoy. If you hadn’t noticed, the Order of the Phoenix—”
“Hang the Order. Take me, now.”
“I am not your seneschal,” he said tightly. “I have other responsibilities. If Lucius fails, neither you nor I will be free.”
“He won’t fail. He never does. He’s a legion unto himself, you know it, he never needed either of us, he— ah!”
She gave another cry, and almost fell, but he caught her. When it ebbed, she tilted her head up, flushed and shaking. “Severus,” she rasped, “help me. Please. Trust Lucius — he has your spells, and his cunning. He doesn’t need you as I do.”
A group of soldiers ran past and almost knocked her to her feet; she clutched his shoulders. Thunder crashed, and a whorl of green flame rolled up from the lawns. Another alarm began screaming.
“I can take you to a country hospital,” Snape ground out. “In the village.”
“No.”
“Narcissa, be reasonable.”
“I won’t have some filthy muggle put his paws on me. I’d rather die—”
“I was born in such a place. It may not suit. But it will serve.”
“I don’t— I can’t, Severus, I—”
“Stand back from her.”
At the top of the staircase, Bellatrix stood, her cowl thrown back, the hair unfurling like a second cloak over the black gleam of her armoring. The armageddon-light from the windows bathed her in red, and her gloved right hand closed around a hilt of lacquered vinewood. The other clutched a white mask.
“Lucius called you to the vanguard,” said Snape. “He’s marshalled your division. They await orders.”
“Convey them to his control.” She swept down the stairs. “Mulciber’s cavalry is ten miles distant. He brings the giants under Karkus. Tell Lucius he holds the line.”
“When can I tell him to expect you?”
“Once he wins, Severus.” She lifted Narcissa in her arms, bracing her arm under her knees. Narcissa latched her arms around her neck. “And tell my sister’s lord husband that he can come meet our heir on the morrow.”
Scrambling soldiers surged clear around the path of Lady Lestrange as she carried Lady Malfoy through the corridors. Shouts to hail her met no answer. House-elves flitted ahead to mind the doors, and one hauled open the double-door to the master bedroom barely in time to avoid a blow from Bellatrix’s boot. Narcissa pressed her face to Bellatrix’s shoulder, moaning, as her body seized again.
In the master bedroom, where only a red seam glowed behind the drapes. Bellatrix settled her onto the bed — moving with stiff, ungraceful care, by turns too gentle and not enough — and the candles in the room burst to life with a wide sweep of her wand.
Narcissa screamed again. Her hands scrabbled on the coverlet. Bellatrix vaulted onto the bed beside her, grabbing her head before she slammed it against the headboard. She shoved her back down. Her ring dug cold into Narcissa’s fevered temple.
In the shadows of the room, a dark-haired figure swam through the smoke and haze, her curls tied with ribbons. A girl was singing in the distance, over the sound of thunder.
“Andy?”
Bellatrix recoiled. “She’s gone,” she snapped. “There’s no such thing as Andy. She never was. She wasn’t one of us, in the end, she wasn’t strong enough—”
“Andy — where’s Andy? It hurts—”
The figure moved into the firelight. It was not Andy, but Walburga, her skin hollowed around the starveling contours of her skeleton. She turned and slipped soundlessly through the window.
“She’s not here,” said Bellatrix, furious. “I’m here. Look at me.”
“Please, make it stop — make it stop.”
“You have to push.”
“No, I can’t. I’m going t-to die.”
Bellatrix pulled her wand and lit a flame at the end of it.
“Push,” she said, “or I’ll give you something to really scream about.”
Narcissa clenched Bellatrix’s hand. “Aide-moi,” she rasped. Her body rolled with the next contraction. “Bien-aimée, aide-moi.”
“Toujours,” she murmured. “Push or die, princess.”
A contraction seized her; she screamed, and blood poured over the silk sheets. Bellatrix pressed their foreheads together, and the scream reverberated through the walls, while the house shook to its foundations with lightless thunder.
It was dawn; the smoke was still rising from the grounds. Narcissa sat against the headboard, her hair ragged and loose around her bare shoulders. Draco nestled against her breast, making tepid noises of discomfort. She gazed at him rapturously, cradling his tiny head in her palm. Hesitantly, she leaned forward and touched her lips to the tiny bulb of his nose.
He squawked and groaned. She giggled, tapping his nose, and then his ears, his cheeks, the little bow of his philtrum. When she nosed into his neck, he gave a loud whine, and it made her cackle madly to herself. The light filtered through the smoke on the window, an artificial midwinter.
Footsteps rapped out on the corridor. When the door flew open, she had to drag her eyes away from the baby.
Steam rose from Lucius’s armor; ash filmed his gauntlets and his hair. The smell of magic clung to him, and the blood on his boots did not seem his own.
Her blood had soaked through to the mattress. She sat in the ring of it like a pearl in a clamshell.
“I won,” she said. Her voice was hoarse. She lifted the baby in the cradle of her arms.
Lucius let out a laugh.
Narcissa held a swaddled infant to her chest in the sitting-room. It was dark. A draft hung about the Manor still, and orange leaves clustered on the sills.
Draco was sleeping, his face burrowed comfortably into her neck. She hummed to herself while he dozed, smoothing down the tufts of white hair. He still had the sickly-sweet infant smell about him.
The Floo burst green. Lucius staggered over the hearth, bracing Snape over his shoulder. Blood streaked the front of Snape’s robes.
“Dead,” Lucius barked. He threw Snape down on one of the sofas. “The Dark Lord’s dead.”
Narcissa froze. She looked at Snape, but he did not appear to hear them. He had fallen with his face down, and he was making a horrible sound between a sob and a wail. It ricocheted down the halls, twin to Draco’s.
“I warned him,” Lucius snarled. “Potter sent a distress call. The Order were coming. There wasn’t time. But he wanted to make the cursed thing there, with the boy’s soul, he said, it was fitting — when he finished preparing, we went upstairs, and found the wife in a pool of her own blood. She made a heartsblood pentagram. A shielding rune.”
Snape’s howl tapered off, and he fell to trembling, silently.
“On the child,” said Narcissa quietly.
“That was not the Dark Lord’s conclusion,” said Lucius grimly. “He took the spell to be for herself.”
“And now he’s dead?”
“Or gone to test the power of his horcruxes — Merlin’s sake, Severus pull yourself together.”
“Did the child survive it?” said Narcissa stiffly. Draco wailed into her shoulder, and she rubbed his back in fruitless consolation. “Or did it perish, too?”
“He’s alive,” said Snape throatily. “She did it right. A perfect circle — heartsblood pentagram, witch’s blood, midnight on Samhain. Of course it worked. The Dark Lord went to kill the child— he stepped over her— over her b—”
He pitched down to his knees at the hearth, and threw up in it. Narcissa curled her lip and held Draco away from him.
“What happened to the child?” she said.
“Presumably the Order has it,” Lucius said, stripping off his gloves. “It was an expeditious retreat. Your cousin was at the gates. I had to pull this one out by the hair—”
“You should have left me,” Snape rasped doggedly, still wiping spittle from his mouth. “I should have died.”
“That would have helped no one,” said Lucius, “least of all the mudblood.”
“Don’t call her that.”
Lucius rolled his eyes, gesturing boredly with his glove. “Your prize, then. She won’t like you any better in the afterlife, I assure you, and especially not after this.”
“Don’t!”
“Turned Pettigrew into a pavement stain,” Lucius added. “Black. Plain sight of twelve muggles, not that they saw much — if your aunt had seen it, she might have restored him.
“What of my sister?”
“She and Roddy fled north. The second of tonight’s failures: She spent so long playing with her food she forgot to eat it.”
“Don’t speak that way of her,” Narcissa said faintly. “So — he’s gone. What happens now?”
Draco burst into tears. Dobby appeared with a crack at her elbow to take him. He bowed deeply to both Malfoys, and vanished again, severing Draco’s cry with a ghostly echo.
“We call counsel with Bellatrix,” said Lucius. “I doubt she will hear of surrender.”
“But she won’t pursue — with the Lord gone, it would be foolish, to— she wants only freedom. She doesn’t wish to die. I can convince her—”
“I have always wondered what it is you think you love, in Bellatrix,” said Snape. His head still hung low. “Did it never strike you odd that no one else recognizes in her the graces you do?”
“Does it never strike you that you are a half-blood abomination?” she snapped. “Does it never strike you as audacious to speak to me that way, though you stand here alive by my husband’s generosity? Does it strike you, Severus, that you know nothing of us, of our families, or of the ways we love?”
“It strikes me daily,” he said, turning, and the look of him made her step back. His face was a dull, vacant object, hollowed by the gnawing woodrot of grief. “It strikes me often, nowadays, that I am not loved by you, nor by anyone else. That either of you would throw me to the dogs, if it suited you — and I think it will suit you, one day, I am not so naive as to think myself endeared — and that when it happens, I will be buried wordless and lightless in a pauper’s tomb. I have only the right to dream otherwise, and even that I do not do, these days. Lady Malfoy, all I ever knew of love I learned by watching. But I am glad to say I did not learn by watching you.”
Lightning bathed a writhing sky. Rain churned up the Manor grounds, tar-slick mud underfoot, as the storm cast ghoulish bars of light and shade over the mausoleum.
Four figures stood together under the poplars. Spells flickered back and forth through the churning wheel of lightning-flashes, colors lurid in the darkness. Lucius Malfoy and Rodolphus Lestrange dueled with the relentless focus of artisans, their movements perfectly mirrored across the ten-pace distance between them. White hair whirled through the darkness, matched by sabled crag-dark gray. Bellatrix clutched Narcissa to her chest while she thrashed, screaming.
“Let me go, please— stop him,stop him—”
“It’ll be fast,” said Bellatrix softly. “Roddy will be quick.”
“I’ll give you anything — I’ll do anything — take me instead, please, Bella!”
Bellatrix hugged her tightly and pressed her lips to her ear, ignoring her thrashing. “Hush, pet. It’ll be over soon.”
Rodolphus Lestrange thrust his wand down. A roiling ridge of spikes erupted from the earth and undulated like the tail of a great beast, throwing Lucius from his feet. Narcissa screamed raggedly.
Lucius caught himself and rolled, flipping upright on one knee. Rodolphus crossed the piste, a serrated blade sprouting from his wand. Lucius snapped his head up and lunged.
The spikes melted into a wave of tar that drenched Rodolphus’s boots. A whisk of his wand froze it to stone. Lucius pulled, and Rodolphus lurched, catching himself at the last moment with a blast of Bombarda. The stone shattered, and the rain turned the dust to grime. Lucius threw three blasts up the piste and began sparring again, boots darting back and forth across the mud like dancers in a reel.
Rodolphus drew his wand up, and the earth beneath them began to writhe. A black dart flashed out of the woods.
A spell flickered across the lawn. Rodolphus dropped his wand, clutching his throat.
Blood bubbled through his fingers. Wounds peeled open across his chest, soaking through his shirtfront, as if the skin had unsealed in a dozen places at once. Rodolphus lifted his head, and lightning flushed the color from his weathered face. Red flecks pebbled the short crop of his beard.
He stared at Bellatrix, reaching for her. She stiffened, and her breath caught, but she did not cry out for him. Her arms remained firm around Narcissa.
Rodolphus collapsed to the ground. Snape stood behind him, his wand still suspended in the last position of the curse.
“Release your sister,” he called. His voice rippled in between peals of thunder.
“You killed my lord husband,” said Bellatrix softly. “And Lord Malfoy forfeits the duel by dishonorable conduct. The law accords me the honor of revenge upon you both.”
“Between your husband and your honor, I question which you care for less,” called Lucius. “Flee now. Mourn your lord’s ghost. I imagine you will prefer its company to any other.”
“He is not dead! The lord lives! You know he does, you knew it, and you betrayed him anyway — I called on you to seek his resurrection with me, and you denied it! As we speak he walks the veil alone, waiting in vain for the fulfillment of your vows, while those who swore to serve him glut themselves on a coward’s prizes — mourn him? I never mourned him, for he never died! I mourn that my sister ever touched you, feculent liar. I mourn that your name stains the title of my heir. I mourn all blood of yours in his sacred veins, would that I could bleed it out of him—”
“The aurors are coming,” called Snape. “In the time it takes you to kill both of us, they will be here.”
Bellatrix made a cross between a snarl and a whine.
“Death first to cowards and traitors,” she hissed. She threw Narcissa aside and vanished into smoke.
She appeared again on the lawn, drawing her wand, and Lucius raised his only in time to catch a brilliant, shuddering thunderclap, shattering sparks across the green. Narcissa scrambled to her feet and screamed again, but Snape had darted forth and caught her, bracing around the waist, hauling her back from the fight, as waves of magic bloomed from the lawns in oscillating pendulums of light, flushing the night as bright as dawn. Snape shoved her down to the earth and threw a shield over their heads, rippling blue; Narcissa clung to his robes, screaming again, as the dueling figures coalesced and vanished into the nova.
The vision cleared.
Draco stood before her. He could not have been fourteen. He had Lucius’s eyes, pale and bright, but his hair was short and combed, and he held himself differently. It was in the casual cant to his hip, the leonine deliberation of where he placed his feet — for Lucius moved like a colonel inspecting his regiment, the thoughtless bravery of one who never looked where his feet would fall; but when Draco stepped forward to catch her, and he put himself exactly where he had to, to catch her fall.
“Darling,” she murmured. Her face was filmed with sweat. She touched his cheek, smiling, but he did not return it. He had inherited such a furious little scowl.
“Mother, come down from there,” he said. His voice had yet to drop; he had to lower it to trembling, to get the tenor of command.
Behind her, wind trailed through the yawning square of the window. The sill bent under her feet. She stroked her thumb up the line of his jaw. He flickered, and there was Lucius, cold and sightless: another flicker, and he was young and furious.
“Come down from there at once,” he said sternly.
There were voices behind her: Girls were singing in the fields. She turned, and Draco caught her elbow.
“Do you hear that?” she said.
“Hear what? Mother, get down.”
My heart is pierced by Cupid… I disdain all glittering gold…
“Nothing,” she said. When she brushed her cheek, the black diamond dragged a cold line across the skin. “Help Mummy, sweetling.”
She wrapped her arm around his shoulders, and he helped her down on trembling feet.
“I have you,” Draco said, strained with the effort of bracing her up. “Come this way. You’ll be alright. Watch there, for the glass.”
“I never worry,” she whispered, and kissed his temple. Lucius turned and smiled thinly at her, shifting his arm around waist, and she tilted her head against his shoulder.
They were in the Manor again, her and Snape. She sat in a chair by the hearth, her sleeve rolled back, while he stitched together a blackened gash on her arm.
“You were a fool to try it alone.”
“A fool, or sick of caves,” she said tonelessly, watching him sew. Snape bit off the end and laid it aside. “Dumbledore doesn’t want to admit it, because it’ll mean hell to get the wretched thing out, but if it’s anywhere in the world, it’s Witherfell Abbey. Regulus wouldn’t have put it anywhere he needed to reach by going outdoors. Anyway, I grew up there. I suppose I thought it would welcome me.”
“You did not think to ask for help?”
“Would you have come?” she countered. “You’re supposed to be playing the pageboy. You’ve no time to rescue a wandering madwoman.”
“Neglecting that oafish play for sympathy,” said Snape, “which, for pity, I will not touch — you might recall that you have a son.”
She hummed. He tugged the stitching, making her hiss.
“We fought before he left. Badly.”
“And you thought to punish yourself by dying?”
“Lord, no. Not all of us are as melodramatic as you,” she said crossly. “He went to be with his half-breed brood in London, and — ow. That hurts.”
“It certainly does.”
“Why are you punishing me?” she hissed. “I have allowed it, have I not? I have allowed him more than my mother ever would have. My father— don’t make me laugh. Do you know, the girl—”
“Careful.”
“The muggle-born, Severus, I wasn’t going to — she slept under this roof. Can you imagine what Lucius would have said?”
“No, but I doubt I would enjoy it.” Snape snapped the surgical kit closed. Narcissa frowned.
“You think he’d be wrong to say it,” she said. Her expression grew chilly, and then mocking. “Why, thou bleeding heart. After all this time, Severus, have you become a believer? Has Dumbledore sold you a bridge?”
“You say that like a childish thing. I do not know why. You and I both obey him; to believe what he does is at least to give it a varnish of choice. Do you really wish to die at the hands of a master?”
Narcissa rolled her arm, testing the stitches. “I have no master,” she said. “I have a son.”
“I am aware of your fanatical devotion. It does not answer my question.”
“Well, it was my turn for one,” she said curtly. “Fanatical devotion. Both of my sisters had their vainglorious obsessions with men who annihilated them. I always get everything last.”
One of the pipes dripped. In the old kitchen, the burnished copper caught any scrap of light from the windows.
“Draco,” said Snape, in tutorial tones, “is hardly annihilatory. He is caught between the river and the deeps. And he fights the current for your sake.”
“Why, how good of him. It’s hard to do the unprecedented, isn’t it? Most people give up on me well before the fifteen-year-mark. Why trouble over the little wallflower, when there are so many blooms in distant gardens, and this one is so difficult to deal with—”
“It is a peculiar vice in your family to regard oneself as the still point around which the world turns,” said Snape dryly. “Andromeda did not marry with the object of scorning you—”
“Don’t say that name to me.”
“—and your husband, as I recall, made great sacrifices to avoid parting from you — seems cruel to blame him, under the circumstances — and I will use the names that please me. I’ve dealt enough in my life with taboos.”
“Kindly remove my neck from between your teeth,” she said dully. “Why my beliefs are suddenly important to anyone, I’d love to know. Only one man ever loved me for what I think, and I buried him.”
He tucked the surgical kit into his knapsack, wedged between a set of knives and vials. “If that’s a complaint, it’s hypocrisy,” he said, “as you don’t love Draco for what he thinks, either.”
She massaged her wrist, glaring at him. He gestured indulgently for her to speak.
“That shows your ignorance. Motherlove is the conquest of reason. Your girl understood that,” she said, with silken cruelty. “Between her son’s life and a knife in her chest, it would not have required a second’s thought. There is no space between the love and its object for thought to pass.”
“No,” said Snape, and his voice was almost soft. “For her, there never was.”
The wax pooled beneath the candles in thick white coils. The clocks tolled three.
“You love her still,” she said. “Lily.”
Snape did not reply, but the set of his face made her nod.
“Do you?” he said.
“Him? Yes.”
“And her,” he said, watching.
Through her sleeve, her finger traced the path of her scar. “Oh, darling,” she said lightly. “Toujours.”
“You would have done better,” she said.
They were in the mausoleum, the door slitted open over a triangle of moonlight. Narcissa sat with her knees drawn close to her chest. Her back pressed to the bars of her husband’s tomb.
“Andy once said I’d raise a monster.” The stone caught her voice and threw it back at her, accusingly. She listened to it calmly, without complaint, and replied: “For the pleasure of having it love me. —Forgive me the anathema. I only do it once a year.”
The ghosts obeyed her. She pressed her knuckles to her mouth.
“He isn’t a monster,” she said worriedly. “I don’t think he is. I would know. I could — tell.”
The tomb said nothing to her.
“My father would have adored him. He would have made Regulus laugh. Mare that it was. And Bella never wanted children. But she swore she’d love mine.”
An owl cried out from the distant trees.
“Some days I forget you,” she said. “I think I made you up. I worry that the best I remember of you is only what I’ve learned by watching him.”
She paused, and reached through the bar. Her finger traced the edge of the place left for her own coffin.
“Exit seraphim, and Satan’s men,” she murmured. She giggled to herself. It skittered around the Malfoy crypts, ghoulish and indulgent. “Isn’t it funny, darling? I’ve known him as long as I knew you.”
Yellow windows hung like lanterns from the silhouette of a twilit street. The houses were brick and square, perched close to the pavements, with flat facades and first stories made from white plaster. Narcissa stood at the gate, a green velvet cloak drawn low over her face.
Voices rippled from the open kitchen window.
“Darling? I’m getting a takeaway curry.”
“Oh, good. Can’t be arsed to cook. Can I have a vindaloo?”
A vague hum. “Samosa?”
“Mm. I shouldn’t.”
“I’ll get two.”
“Oh, don’t, darling, I’ll feel obligated.”
A shadow passed over the window, and Narcissa drew back behind the gatepost.
Andromeda turned on the faucet. She wore her hair back, and a pale brown blouse, with hoop earrings and little makeup. The lines around her eyes and mouth showed the beginning of a great descent in her face, but the ethereal beauty lingered in the shape of her mouth and the haughty, aquiline arch of her nose.
“…should call Melissa tomorrow,” she was saying, “it’s been ages, she’s going to think you’re dead.”
“Dastardly thought. She’d have to find some other way to get you over for Christmas.”
“The love between me and your mother will long outlive you, dear. Never worry.”
A man stepped into the square of the window and kissed her on the neck. She shrieked, slapping him with a soapy hand.
“Off! Off! I’m going to bite you. Go put the bins out, make yourself useful.”
Narcissa closed her eyes. There were diamonds on the tips of her lashes.
“I’m sorry about that.”
Dumbledore stood under the streetlamp. He wore a three-piece muggle suit of brown tartan, and a soft cap. “I thought you might like to see it,” he said, in tones of not-apology. “But I did not think you could bear to come yourself. You are entitled to resent me for the deception.”
Narcissa lifted her eyes, a faint smile upon her lips. “An apology, for what must seem to you such a trifling indignity,” she murmured. “How you spoil me. My son cannot abide the sight of me because of you. And you apologize for this?”
“It is not you he cannot abide.”
She turned. Her eyes burned bright with loathing. “In my life, I have lost all my battles but one,” she said softly. “One triumph. And you would take him, too, from me.”
“I would save him for you. I would keep him from the Dark Lord. I only wanted to spare him.”
“Nothing will keep him from the Dark Lord,” she said. “Nothing. You have made him too brave, Albus. He thinks he can fight.”
“Perhaps he can,” said Dumbledore intently. “Perhaps he can win.”
“And perhaps he will be killed,” she said, “prosecuting the third generation of your war against the inevitable. Perhaps my boy will rest beside the Potters in the bodies at your feet. And only then, in your arrogance, will it occur to you that he would have lived longer, whatever his beliefs, if you had not made him an enemy to himself. Perhaps, finally—”
“Narcissa—”
“—finally, you will question,” she said, her voice thick with rage, “if your dreams of justice are worth what you did to my child. What you will do to him, every day of his life, while darkness walks this world. I know what happens to brave boys, Albus, I mourned my share of them.”
“Why did you throw in with me at all, if you did not rate our chances?”
A coach glided past with a whistle of exhaust.
“Because he is the only thing that matters,” she said softly. “All I ever did well, I did for his sake.”
“Never your own?” he said sadly. “Truly? Have you never thought for a moment, in all your suffering, that the world for which you have suffered and denied yourself, the world for which you sacrificed the greater part of your family — you never questioned the value of a devotion it has never seen fit to reward?”
Narcissa smiled at him suddenly, and her eyes shone like asphalt under frost.
“My family names its sons after stars,” she said. “I had one for a father, and one for a child. Their light takes us lesser creatures through the darkness. That path is mine by right; I am the last of the great astronomers.”
“It is hard going, by starlight,” said Dumbledore, melancholy.
“That may be,” she said. “But it is the only way I know.”
She walked up the street, instead of Apparating. Her cloak swept the gleaming pavement as the sky turned from blue to black.
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