Chapter 4
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The baby basilisks—and she really needed to name them—preened on the counter with Kaaza in front of the mirror. She eyed their shimmering scales, still so jewel-like. “I think, issa, I’ll call you Zaran and Suuka.”she blurted. “What do you think of that, isss?”
The three snakes turned to her, the basilisks still with their eyelids firmly closed, the yellow glow obvious even in the light of the bathroom. The babes hissed happily amongst themselves before responding .
“Yes, please!”
“We would like that.”
Still smiling softly, Azalea blinked down at herself, at her, for once, sort-of new clothes, clothes that actually looked clean, that weren’t dingy or overly large, that weren’t Dudley’s. As nice as it felt, it hadn’t occurred to her that it would be much, much harder to hide them underneath the cornflower-blue sundress she’d been given than it would be in Dudley’s ginormous clothing. Thankfully, the dress had long sleeves and fell pretty much to her ankles, though it hung short enough not to encumber walking or running. She also had the scarf and the spare set of a child’s witch robe Mrs. Figg provided as well. She picked up the robe hesitantly, never having seen such a bizarre garment in her life, but pulled it on nonetheless. Each basilisk, of course, immediately wound their way underneath her wide sleeves to coil about her arms like living bracelets. Kaaza settled along her shoulders. She was the one most likely to be discovered by Mrs. Figg in the next few minutes, as the older woman had promised to help her with her borrowed scarf. At any rate, the robe did hide their added bulk rather nicely, with its loose fit. With a sigh, she slid her feet into a pair of gel sandals and closed the clasp, a ladybug, with some trepidation.
Her new outfit mostly completed, she opened the door to hunt down Mrs. Figg and found Tufty, one of the cats she’d commanded earlier, sitting outside. He glared at her arms and shoulders, but rather than starting up again, he got to his feet and jerked his tail toward Alannah’s bedroom, meowing impatiently.
Kaaza poked her head out of Azalea’s robe collar. “I think he wants you to follow him.”
Azalea stares at the cat in confusion. “Why would he want me to do that, issa?”
“To take you to the old two-leg.”
Azalea didn’t bother asking why one of Mrs.Figg’s cats would lead her to the woman, but instead told the grumpy feline, “Take me to her then, abair.”
A minute or so later she found herself downstairs, sitting cross-legged in the floor in front of Mrs. Figg as the woman wove her hair into place close to her scalp in two of what she called ‘French braids’. She tied each off neatly then carefully folded the scarf into a triangle and laid it over the crown of Azalea’s head. She swept either loose end back and knotted them together at her nape, tugging the edge down to cover her hairline “There you go my dear,” she said, the familiar song of Gaeilge so soothing in the aftermath of such emotional upheaval. “We got your hair all covered up for our trip.”
Azalea tilted her head to the side. “Why?”
Her hand lingering on Azalea’s head, Mrs. Figg smiled, a thin, broken little thing despite the kindness in her eyes. “So you won’t be immediately recognized. That hair of yours—everyone knows about your blood-red hair, and that scar on your forehead. They know about your eyes, too, but I can’t cover those with this scarf.”
“Oh,” Azalea breathed. She glanced down at the curve of her knobby knees through the sundress. “I forgot. He didn’t want me to know, abair.” She raised her head just in time to see Mrs. Figg flinch.
“No.” The fragile smile vanished. “No he didn’t, but no matter. You know now and we’ll protect you.” She gently smoothed her wrinkled hand over the slate gray fabric hiding two of Azalea’s most recognizable features. “I have something important to ask you, Azalea. Would you like to come live with me?”
Azalea froze, eyes going wide. Eventually, after a few moments of silence while Mrs. Figg waited patiently, she gave a tentative reply. “M-maybe?”
“Well—only if you want to. You’d never have to stay with the Dursleys again. We’d move in with my daughter at one of the Urquhart Estates. She was widowed recently and has a daughter about your age and two boys, one older and one younger. You’d have other children to play with, and your own room and clothes. Would you like that?”
“Never, abair? I never have to live with them, abair, or stay in a cupboard, or wear Dudley’s clothes?”
Mrs. Figg hugged her then. Azalea stiffened at first then slowly relaxed into her soft embrace. She’d seen Aunt Petunia hug Dudley, of course, and had seen other children hugged by their families, but no one had ever hugged her since she came to live at Privet Drive. “No, not even over my dead body.”
Thankful that the baby basilisks hidden underneath her clothes had decided to wrap around her biceps instead of her forearm or wrist, Azalea wrapped her arms carefully around Figg and returned the gesture. “Abair, do you promise?” She whispered the words, for all the world still a broken child. She blinked back the tears that threatened to fall.
“Yes,” Figg agreed, rubbing soothing circles on her back until she pulled away.
“Okay, ya.” She nodded, a tentative smile on her lips and seeming almost shy in stark contrast to her earlier confidence when confronting Figg about her heritage. “Yes, please.”
“Alright, let me just call Alannah back with your answer. We can go straight to the Manor after we leave Diagon.”
Azalea nodded and sat patiently on the couch while Figg updated Alannah. The young witch watched curiously as the old woman pulled out a mirror and called her daughter’s name, then startled slightly when she heard a feminine voice coming from the mirror as it responded to Mrs. Figg in rapidfire Gaeilge. It must be magic, she thought in wonder, eyeing the mirror with fascination. She’d expected Mrs. Figg to ring her over the telephone, not through an enchanted object.
The call lasted less than five minutes. After that, things moved rather quickly. After placing the things Azalea wanted most with her—the newspaper clipping, her stuffed animal, and her stash of books (including Figgs’s borrowed book)—into a small backpack, Figg took Azalea’s hand, leading her out of the front door and down the drive. Azalea gripped the straps of the backpack, which was far larger than it seemed from the outside and which belonged to Figg’s granddaughter, tightly in her excitement as Figg spoke in low tones to her. “We’ll take the railway as close as possible then walk or bus the rest of the way,” she explained. “So that it’ll be difficult for anyone with magic to track us.”
Azalea looked up at her curiously. “Abair, track us, Mrs. Figg?”
Mrs. Figg’s eyes darted around as she answered her in a steady voice. “Using magical transportation, short of Apparition, leaves ways for someone to find us. And you can call me Arabella or Nana, dear.” She glanced briefly at Azalea, smiling gently at her wide-eyed look.
Azalea nodded, trusting her old friend implicitly. “Okay...Nana.”
The young witch ducked her head shyly and missed the way Arabella’s smile softened even more.
They walked several streets over, leaving Magnolia Crescent and Wisteria Way far behind until they finally arrived at a bus stop. There, they checked the schedule and Mrs. Figg—Arabella—deemed the thirty minute wait too long and too much of a risk. “Besides,” she added as they continued on their way on foot to the station, “by the time it arrives here we could have already gotten there!”
Much of their journey was silent, interspersed with quiet conversation in Gaeilge. As soon as they arrived at their destination, Arabella quickly paid their fare and ushered Azalea onto the train, letting her sit by the window to watch the landscape as it sped past. A few minutes went by in silence before Azalea, glancing at Arabella, tentatively whispered the thing she’d been dying to ask. “Abair, Nana, can you tell me a bit about my parents? Did you know them?”
Arabella, who’d been reading through a novel she had in her purse, carefully closed the book, marking the page with her thumb. “What would you like to know?”
“Well.” The redhead fidgeted, gaze distant as she rolled her lip between her teeth. “Were they nice? Did they—” She felt tears threatening and roughly scrubbed at her face with her robe sleeve, the garment charmed to look like a sweater to Muggles. Whatever she’d been meaning to ask, she found herself blurting a different question. “—Did they love me, abair?”
Arabella sucked a breath in sharply. “Oh, you poor child, of course they did. You were the light of their life. They would have done anything, been anything, that you needed, and I’m sure they’re proud of you now.”
Nodding without looking up from the floor, Azalea let loose a shuddering sigh. She tensed when she felt a light touch on the back of her hand, but slowly relaxed into it as Arabella took her small hand into her larger wrinkled one. As Arabella spoke, her voice low and steady, Azalea closed her eyes and tried to picture the two people that the old woman described. “Your parents were crazy about each other, so young and in love, even though they couldn’t stand each other in school. Well, I take that back. It was more that James desperately wanted Yuri—and I never called her by her English name, mind you—he wanted her to like him, and she despised him for the longest time.”
The fondness in her voice as Arabella remembered Azalea’s parents and brought them to life for her made Azalea’s chest constrict with something painful—that, and Arabella’s use of her mother’s birth name, Yuri. Arabella squeezed her hand as if she could sense her emotions.
“Merlin, Yuri was so bright and full of life, so opinionated, and so talented. She had a hell of a temper, and yet she had a gentle heart. She showed kindness to people that others would have cast aside. Your father on the other hand was rather arrogant and obnoxious as a boy, a right terror, really, but trying to win your mother’s affection humbled him in the end. As much as his friends might have enabled him, Yuri was really a...grounding presence for James, once they got together. It was because of your mother that he eventually made amends with most of the people he wronged with few exceptions.”
Part of Azalea felt dismay that her father might have caused some people the same sort of trouble that Dudley caused her, but the fact that he made amends, that he learned from it and became better, and that her mother was the cause—that mollified her.
“James was a tall man, with wild jet-black hair and hazel eyes. He wore these rather unfortunate coke-bottle glasses. There isn’t much of James in your looks. No, you’re all Yuri, with her eye color and shape, bone structure, and blood-red hair (bit wilder than hers, though), and she got all of that from her mother, Namika, although Marlow also had red hair.”
Arabella chuckled. “Namika...that woman was as tough as nails. She wasn’t a witch, but she wasn’t a Muggle either—not really. She came from the Elemental Nations, trained as a shinobi, in her own day, just like her parents.”
“Elemental Nations, abair?” Azalea hated to interrupt, but she’d never heard of them before. Then again, a week ago she had no idea she was a witch. She opened her eyes to watch Arabella, who’d settled back into her seat. The woman gave her an encouraging look, unbothered by her inquiry.
“Think of the Elemental Nations as being like the Bermuda Triangle. Remember that program we watched on the tele? Well, in the Wizarding World, everyone seems to have heard of them, but not many people actually know anything about them. Most everything said about them sounds completely outrageous or like an outright pack of lies.”
Azalea leaned toward her eagerly. “So, abair, are they real, really real?”
“Oh, they’re real alright, and they have their own brand of magic that they call chakra,” Arabella explained. “Not that they think of it as magic. Of course, not many folks over here know about chakra, not that many know much about the Elemental Nations anyway. They assumed she was a foreign Squib like Marlow, but she confided in me at one point. She and I were friends, you see.”
Azalea gripped her bag tighter to her where it lay in her lap. “Abair, you knew my gran too?”
“Yes.” Arabella grew quiet. “She taught your mother all about your family’s affinity for something called Fuinjutsu. In fact, I suspect your family affinity contributed to your mother’s own affinity and innate grasp for Arithmancy and Ancient Runes. Both of your parents had a talent for Potions and Charms. Your father was also rather skilled with Transfiguration, Defense Against the Dark Arts, and Astronomy, though that’s to be expected when one of his ancestors was Dorea Black. The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black is known for their affinity for Astronomy.”
Something dark flittered across her features and they became momentarily shuttered. “That’s not your only connection to House Black.” She sighed, biting her lip, and stared at Azalea. “I’d rather tell you now than have you find out from someone else. Sirius Black is your godfather.”
Azalea felt suddenly as if the world were tilting. “S-Sirius B-Black?” She stammered as her brain processed the information, tried to catch up to the skittish thud thud thud of her heart. “But, abair, isn’t he the one who betrayed us?”
Arabella sighed, long and weary. “Aye,” she admitted, barely audible. “That he did, but before that your parents made him your godfather. For Muggles it’s just a legal nicety so that you’re not left orphaned if your biological parents pass on before you grow up, but for magical families it means more than that. Not only did Sirius and James magically adopt each other as brothers, but Sirius blood-adopted you, which is to say that he’s as much your father as James. Which means, as the child of the last descendent of House Black to carry its name, and as the child of the Head of House Black, you’re his heir as much as you are James’ heir.”
Azalea’s brows scrunched in confusion. It was an odd thought for her, to have not two patents, but three, and more, that one had betrayed the others. “Abair, what does that mean, Nana? What’s an heir?”
Arabella looked her in the eye. “An heir is someone who inherits a family’s fortune and titles. As your Lord grandfather Fleamont Potter passed the Headship on to your father, James, so James passed it on to you, in the same way that Sirius, now that he is—” She winced. “—in Azkaban prison for life and therefore unable to fulfill his duties, has also passed it on to you.”
She covered both of their hands with her other hand. “You are by all rights not just Azalea Nanami Uzumaki Potter, my dear, but a Lady.”
“A Lady, abair, like in storybooks with knights and princesses?” Her disbelief was evident in her voice.
“In a sense. You are Lady Uzumaki Potter, but you are also Lady Black. Any hereditary titles, any fortunes, any properties, any family artifacts or secrets—they are all yours to keep now.”
Some of what Figg said made sense to Azalea, although some of it she didn’t quite understand—mostly the foreign words thrown around, like Arithmancy and Fuinjutsu or affinity and hereditary. Arabellahad already explained what things like Muggles and Squibs were.
The rest of the ride passed quickly. She learned other things before it ended, and as they disembarked and exited the station, taking to the streets of London with her hand firmly grasped in Arabella’s. The woman told her that Yuri’s favorite dessert was treacle tart, that she was a fan of the band Kiss, that she was a proficient gymnast and martial artist, and that she loved the smell of rain and had a black cat named Tabitha as her familiar. She told her that James had a mischievous streak a mile wide and enjoyed playing pranks, that he could speak both Latin and Greek like many purebloods, that flying felt easier for James than breathing, that he’d played as chaser on the Quidditch team (an odd airborne sport that involved flying on brooms), and that despite his faults and above all else he valued loyalty. They were both proficient dualists and dead clever. Yuri had the voice of an angel, and James could name every constellation in the night sky. He wore mismatched socks just to be contrary, and Yuri became a vegetarian at age twelve. So many little things, quirks and likes and dislikes, habits and hobbies, any number of things that made them real and larger than life to Azalea, things that wouldn’t be listed in all the literature on her family, things that kept them alive. They were alive in Arabella’s memories, James making corny jokes and Yuri’s tinkling laugh. She even had things to convey about Sirius, Azalea’s third parent: about how his playful nature seemed at times tinged by something dark, about how he was always up for a good laugh, about how he enjoyed fencing and owned a flying motorbike and never turned down a dare. For the first time in her life, Azalea had a clear picture of her parents. She could actually feel close to them as individuals instead of some imagined abstract concept. She could almost hear them, almost see them, almost.
It would never be the same as having them, but it would be enough, and that was what mattered most.