regulus
“Mister Black,” the bouncer of the Crow Club said, “Miss Evans is upstairs.”
Regulus nodded and slipped down a hallway behind a potted bonsai tree. Regulus trailed his fingers along the panels behind the potted tree and pressed his thumb into a notch in the wall. It slid open, and he climbed a corkscrew staircase that was only used by staff of the Crow Club.
Lily’s room was on the third floor, at the very end of the hallway. Initially, Regulus had offered her a place at the Slat with James. However, Lily had insisted on getting a room here. She'd told him she loved the privacy and distance from the other Order members it gave her. Besides, comparing the Slat's ugly and crooked structure and the quarters at the Crow Club, the accommodations here were definitely cozier.
Regulus was careful to take his time on his trip up the stairs so as not to injure his leg. Once facing Lily’s door, the one decorated with the numbers 1981, Regulus rapped on the door.
She opened it cautiously, keeping the chain latched. “Oh,” she smiled, visibly relaxing the moment she saw Regulus. “You.” She unhooked the chain and let him show himself in, “Come in.”
Lily’s room was small and modest, draped in red tapestry with a single window in the far left corner of the room overlooking the city. A tall dark skinned woman - who Regulus imagined was the same woman James had seen Lily with the night before - was currently seated on the edge of the bed in a black bra on, putting a pair of pants on. Lily Evans was resting against the window frame dressed in an old emerald green dressing gown with a cigarette between her fingers. She was short and built like the figurehead of a ship carved by a generous hand.
The two women were silent, and Regulus felt as though they were purposefully looking away from one another. He could feel the tension in the air, so thick he could have cut it with one of James’ knives.
“I hope I’m not interrupting”
Lily blew the smoke away from her face. “No, you came at the right time. Maggie was just about to leave.”
“Lily’s right,” she replied, “I would have loved to stay but I have work in an hour.”
The girl in question –who was currently fastening her belt and putting on her coat on– looked as if she was trying to get out of the room as quickly as possible.
“It was fun, Evans,” said Maggie, “But please, do think about what I said,” she added, looking at Lily, who currently was looking out the window with her cigarette still in her right hand, her left hand playing with the pendant around her neck. She looked as though she refused to glance in Maggie's direction.
She sighed. “Black,” Maggie continues, looking at him now, “Always a pleasure. Now if you will excuse me, I don’t think I’m welcome here any more.”
Maggie left, slamming the door loudly, leaving Lily and Regulus alone.
“Saints.” she said, putting the cigarette butt in an overfilled ashtray. Lily closed the window and began lighting scented candles around the room to diminish the smoke scent.
“What happened?” Regulus asked.
Lily sat on the edge of the bed and put her head in her hands. “Maggie and I, we shagged. I accidently called out Mary’s name instead of hers.”
"Beginner's mistake," he replied, prompting Lily to roll her eyes.
She wriggled her feet out of her slippers, digging her toes into the plush white carpet. “Ahhh,” she said contentedly. “This is better.” She shoved one of the cakes from her nightstand into her mouth and mumbled, “What do you want, Black? I’m not stupid, I know you’re not here to chat”
“You have crumbs on your tits.”
“Don’t care,” she said, taking another bite of cake. “Talk, now.”
Regulus shook his head, amused and impressed at how quickly Lily shed the distant, guarded attitude she had when he first came in, gradually reverting to the Lily he knew: the caring but ruthless Lily Evans, who would never back down from a fight if it meant defending the people she cared about.
“What do you know about jurda parem?”
Lily shrugged. “There are rumours, but they sound like nonsense to me.”
With the exception of the Council of Tides, the few Grisha working in Ketterdam all knew each other and exchanged information readily. Most were on the run from something, eager to avoid drawing the attention of malevolent people.
“They aren’t just rumours.”
“Squallers flying? Tidemakers turning to mist?”
“Fabrikators making gold from lead.” He reached into his pocket and tossed the lump of yellow to her. “It’s real.”
“Fabrikators make textiles. They fuss around with metals and fabrics. They can’t turn one thing into another.” She held the lump up to the light. “You could have got this anywhere,” she said, just as he had argued to Dumbledore a few hours earlier.
Without being invited, Regulus sat down on the plush settee and stretched out his bad leg. “Jurda parem is real, Evans, and if you’re still the good little Grisha soldier I think you are, you’ll want to hear what it does to people like you.”
She turned the lump of gold over her in her hands, then wrapped her dressing gown more tightly around her and curled up at the end of the bed. Again, Regulus marvelled at the transformation. For most of her waking hours, she played the part other girls wanted to see – the powerful woman, serene in her knowledge. But sitting there with her brow furrowed and her feet tucked under her, she looked like what she truly was: a girl of barely twenty, raised in the sheltered luxury of the Little Palace, far from home and barely getting by every day.
“Tell me,” she said.
Regulus talked. He held back on the specifics of Dumbledore’s proposal, but he told
her about Lucius Malfoy, jurda parem, and the addictive properties of the drug, placing particular emphasis on the recent theft of Ravkan military documents.
“If this is all true, then Lucius Malfoy needs to be eliminated.”
“That is not the job, Lily.”
“This isn’t about money, Regulus.”
It was always about money. But Regulus knew a different kind of pressure was required. Lily loved her country and loved her people. She still believed in the future of Ravka and in the Second Army, the Grisha military elite that had nearly disintegrated during the civil war. Lily’s friends - Marlene, in particular - back in Ravka believed she was dead, a victim of Fjerdan witchhunters, and for now, she wanted it to stay that way.
But Regulus knew she hoped to return one day.
“Lily, we’re going to retrieve Lucius Malfoy, and I need a Corporalnik to do it. I want you on my crew.”
“Wherever he’s hiding out, once you find him, letting him live would be the most outrageous kind of irresponsibility. My answer is no.”
“He isn’t hiding out. The Fjerdans have him at the Ice Court.”
Lily paused. “Then he’s as good as dead.”
“The Hogwarts Council doesn’t think so. They wouldn’t be going to this trouble or offering up this kind of reward if they thought he’d been neutralised. Dumbledore was worried. I could see it.”
“You talked to the schoolmaster?”
“Yes. He claims their intelligence is good. If it’s not, well, I’ll take the hit. But if Malfoy is alive, someone is going to try to break him out of the Ice Court. Why shouldn’t it be us?”
“The Ice Court,” Lily repeated, and Regulus knew she’d begun to put the pieces together. “You don’t just need a Corporalnik, do you?”
“No. I need someone who knows the Court inside and out, someone you know very well.”
Mary Macdonald.
She leaped to her feet and began pacing, hands on hips, dressing gown flapping. “You’re an idiot, you know that? How many times have I come to you, begging you to help Mary? And now that you want something …”
“Snape isn’t running a charity.”
“Don’t put this on him,” she snapped. “If you’d wanted to help me, you know you could have.”
“And why would I do that?”
She whirled on him. “Because … because …”
“When have I ever done something for nothing, Evans?”
She opened her mouth, closed it again.
“Do you know how many favours I would have had to call in? How many bribes I’d have had to pay out to get Mary out of prison? The price was too high.”
“And now?” she managed, her eyes still blazing anger.
“Now, Macdonald’s freedom is worth something.”
“It—”
He held up a hand to cut her off. “Worth something to me.”
Lily was furious. “Even if you could get to her, Mary would never agree to help you.”
“It’s just a question of leverage.”
“You don’t know her.”
“Do you? She’s a person like any other, driven by greed and pride and pain. You should understand that better than anyone.”
“Macdonald is driven by honour and only honour. You can’t bribe or bully that.”
“That may have been true once, Lily, but it’s been a very long year. Macdonald is much changed.”
“You’ve seen her?” Her green eyes were wide, eager. There, thought Regulus, the Barrel hasn’t beaten the hope out of you yet.
“I have.”
Lily took a deep, shuddering breath. “She wants her revenge, Regulus.”
“That’s what she wants, not what she needs,” said Regulus. “Leverage is all about knowing the difference.”