Hallow Way, Sherwood Forest
“Oh, relax,” Seth said, with only slightly less contempt than he might have done, after watching Toby scramble away from the side of the public loo he’d fallen against and try and scrape himself off. “The paint’s self-cleaning.”
“That’s a nice trick,” he said suspiciously.
“Isn’t it,” Seth agreed with a smugness that turned, after a moment, a bit lip-curling. “You haven’t the background for the details of the formula, of course, but I’m sure you can, at least, imagine why I came up with it.” Purely smug again, in answer to Toby’s skeptical look, “I could only get it patented last year, because if you go through the Ludicrous Patents Office as a private citizen instead of as a member of one of the professional guilds you might as well just put your formula in the papers, but I came up with it in ’74. About two months after the school started letting us, and by ‘us’ I primarily mean ‘my room-mate Avery,’ visit the village and its two pubs on the occasional weekend.”
Toby had thought he was meant to be amused at this Laddish Anecdote. Possibly not, though, because Seth got one of his chillier snotty looks and went on, “Not that I wouldn’t have liked to before. After our first Hogsmeade weekend, however, my Housemates became quite eager to enable my research.”
Passing as neutrally as possible over the landmine in that one, Toby remarked, “I suppose you must be doing well for yourself, then.”
Seth froze.
Toby raised an eyebrow at him. It had been the sort of freeze that had used to mean Whatever Petty Evans Told You Behind My Back Is Probably Slightly True Even Though Her Version Is Hysterically Inflated And I At-Least-Mostly Didn’t Mean To Even Though She Had It Coming But If You’re Expecting Me To Explain Myself I Wouldn’t Hold My Breath Because It Was Actually Lily’s Fault/Idea/She Secretly Wanted Me To, Very Loudly, Even If She Didn’t Come Out And Say It And Is Now Taking Her Cow Of A Sister’s Side Like I Knew She Would Which Is Why I Didn’t Mean To. Except She Wanted Me To So Yes I Did.
He’d always wondered if Seth had ever noticed that, while he did get punished for those, it was usually just by having his day filled with the sorts of chores he only minded when he felt they were between him and his books.
At least, when it had been Toby the girl had come tattling to, and he’d been thinking clearly. She’d had a knack for barging in to be righteous at him at the wrong moments. Then of course sometimes she’d told Eileen instead. Ellie hadn’t thought Seth was doing right in taking falls for his little friend, taking the position that it was both lying and bad for young Lily’s character.
“I, er, I trade as much as possible in Sherwood, I don’t like to buy and sell here,” he muttered. “They’ve been… good to me, and things are… things are different here. And outside… Evan’s such a naïf, he doesn’t know what it’d do to him if I flooded the market with everything I could. He wouldn’t care, but his people would be embarrassed and… they’re not the sort… it’d be an awful mess.”
“We’ve had our differences,” Tobias said, trying for neutral, “and we’ll leave aside what I think of your… thingy—”
Seth rolled his eyes irritably.
“—But I shouldn’t have thought I’d raised a lad who’d sp—live off anyone.”
“Don’t be absurd,” Seth said witheringly. “He kept trying to make me promise I would if I had to, till I had to threaten to hit him over the head with A Compendium of Common Curses and Their Counter-Actions.”
“…Why?” he demanded, hand over his eyes again. If anyone had asked him why he was asking, he wouldn’t have been able to tell. He was quite sure there was not one single answer to be had that he wanted to hear.
“We were studying for our A-levels at the time; it was the largest soft-cover handy.”
“…Right.” At least the stroppy little sod only meant he’d been whacking at people with his grimoires, not with all the nasty things in them.
“Well, I could have used the Encyclopaedia of Toadstools,” Seth said defensively, as if being too merciful was the problem, “but I didn’t want to brain him. I don’t mean he hasn’t got any as a rule—brains—but he wasn’t acting like it much, spouting nonsense like that, and you never know. Someone might have hexed him under the table at breakfast. He’s always been hopeless at mornings.”
“…If you say so,” Toby sighed, because the alternative was almost certainly getting more information that would make him want to slam his own head against the nearest brick wall even more. Oh, Seth might say, if Toby were stupid enough to press, that he knew about the hopeless at mornings thing because of being in the same year at school, but Toby had heard about the things that might go on between boys of the same year (or not) even in a normal public school.
And when he’d worried about what children with too much power could get up to away from their parents, Ellie had never said anything reassuring like Don’t talk stuff, a school that old knows all the tricks its students could ever come up with and then some, or Nonsense, the teachers are all very strict and they had ways of making sure we behaved. What she’d said was that the Headmaster had been her Housemaster and he was a kindly sort. Not reassuring in the slightest.
Seth looked rather chuffed with himself, the brat, probably over the way Toby could feel his hair going greyer. “In any case, I just had to make sure to get a research job that’s enough like questing for the Holy Grail to pass in his family’s circles for an obsessed eccentric’s hobby-horse, instead of devoting myself to pursuits that look more like trade. I was just as pleased, anyway; it’s been nearly as good as getting paid to make real progress on curing cancer, if cancer was thought of as if it were leprosy.”
Relieved, he felt his face try to smile, only the grooves and muscle habits of a lifetime stopping it. “That what you mean by ambition, then?”
Seth slid him a sly little eye-flick. “It’ll do for a start.” He made a face. “Only I shan’t be allowed to do it anymore, and so.”
“And teaching won’t embarrass, er, his people?” he asked dubiously. If being ‘in trade’ was an embarrassment, he wouldn’t have thought being a schoolteacher would be much better, despite what the lads down their way would have thought of it. And have said, too, although possibly not to Seth’s face, since he still had that flicker of a cold look at the corner of his eyes that said he was not significantly less likely to physically try and bite a bloke’s ear off in a tight corner than he had been at thirteen.
“Hardly. If I make it through the training year and am really hired, I’d be teaching a mandatory class at the only wizarding school of any repute in the empire entire. By which I mean that aside from Hogwarts there are probably a few private tutors who take on more than one pupil at once, and may in extreme cases teach out of their own sitting rooms instead of doing all home visits. It’s a class which everyone must take through their O-levels and anyone who wants to be a healer or copper must excel in at A-level.”
Looking depressed, he added, “It seems I’d also be taking over for my old Housemaster, which means very nearly everyone I’ve ever met would be hounding me to death over the disposition of their future offspring.” With a sigh, “At any rate, it’s a quite exclusive post of some responsibility, and that’s very well understood, even if it’s also well understood that the exclusivity entails a certain difficulty in enforcing quality control. Witness bloody History.”
“If, seems, would,” Toby noted, folding his arms.
Seth didn’t exactly grin at him, but he looked, actually, quite cheered up. “Well, yes, quite.”
He pursed his lips. “You’ll be sitting this training and buggering off, then?” he asked, but not as if he meant it. It had been an oh good, I don’t have to be embarrassed by being related to a noodle-nob sort of cheered-up, not the ah, yes, I have remembered I’m off the hook sort.
“I refer you to my previous commentary,” Seth drawled, “about the relative positions of world and ears, and regarding how predictable I consider the immediate to moderately near-term future to be. And, on that subject.” He pulled some sort of a short… garment out of… somewhere, and held it out. It was too heavy to be a shawl. A cape, Toby supposed.
Toby looked at it. Flatly.
Just as flatly, Seth said, “After the extent to which you’re already trusting me, balking at this is just nonsense.”
He kept looking.
Grimly, Seth said, “It’s safer to bring a non-wizard here than most places, but that doesn’t make it a good idea, and you’re wearing bloody blue jeans and I would really prefer not to press my luck. Between this and your creepy yellow baboon eyes—”
“Hazel, you cheeky little git.” His eyes had been a sore point for a while, although they weren’t now. They’d been what made Eileen notice him. Unusual colors like his were more common in the wizarding world, it seemed; she’d taken him for one of them for all of, oh, five minutes or so. He’d thought she was drunk or concussed for not quite so long as that, although he couldn’t recall now what strangely-named place she’d been imperiously asking him to direct her towards before she came over all circumspect and mysterious. She’d snapped at him for years that maybe his ‘golden’ eyes meant Seth’s magic was ‘as much your blood as mine, Tobias Snape,’ as though that was meant to make him feel better.
Her son grinned, less mysteriously than like a minor demon of wickedness, but didn’t pause. “—You can probably pass even if you do gawk like a tourist, as long as it’s only at the tourist attractions and not at everything magical we meet.”
His mouth tightened. “It must be thirty degrees out.” And sweltering with it. They’d been having heavy, lowering, sullen, sweaty days punctuated by growling thunderstorms that didn’t help so much as he’d have thought for near on a week.
Seth’s mouth tightened right back, and the cape wasn’t so much thrust at him as it floated through the air and wrapped itself around him. There weren’t any ties, but it didn’t appear to need them.
Suddenly it felt more like twenty degrees. Nothing like August at all.
Seth smiled nastily. “I’m good at temperatures,” he said sweetly.
That, Toby did remember, but he managed to neither scuff his feet nor rub his bum.
Then someone else bumped into it. He turned to see a squat, pleasant-faced, rosy-cheeked little… well, a witch, it must have been, and couldn’t possibly have been anything else. She wasn’t even wearing just a short cape, it was a full, ankle-length affair that was as much like a set of mauve monk’s robes as a woman’s frock, and if her fussy, flower-bestrewn cap wasn’t anything like what a bloke might picture up against the moon on a dark night, it was decidedly pointy, in a plumply twisty, too-coy-for-her-age sort of way.
She was also beaming at Seth, where before seeing him she’d seemed more inclined to blame Toby for not moving away from the loo/tree she’d just come through than apologize for barreling into him. “Neythen, our Severus!” she exclaimed, reaching up to fuss with his waistcoat and straighten his silly grey cravat. “No one was looking to see you today!”
“Neythen, Maylis,” Seth mumbled, looking humiliated as only a twenty-year-old lad having his cheeks pinched at by a maiden aunt could, never mind that he didn’t have anything much to pinch that wouldn’t cut and Ellie had been an only child. “No, I, er, wasn’t planning on visiting.”
“And who’s this, then?” she asked, giving Toby an unabashed once-over that, if he’d been Seth’s age, would have frankly terrified him.
Seth hesitated only a moment, calculating, and then went over all courteous in a way that Toby was going to laugh himself sick over later. “Madam Maylis Dale,” he said, bowing slightly in the witch’s direction in a way she seemed to expect, “Mr. Tobias Hind.”
Toby wasn’t sure if he was more flummoxed to be introduced with his own right first name—long form, too, such as no one called him except for Ellie in a strop—or his mother’s maiden name. [1]
“Mr. Hind,” Seth was continuing, “Madam Dale is the healer attached to our local Quidditch team—you know, the Merrymen.”
“Ah, right,” Toby nodded sagely. “Good lads.” He was amused to feel a sense of relief wafting over from his lad’s direction without seeing a trace of it touch his face. As if anyone didn’t know how to talk about the footie.
Well. Seth probably didn’t, come to that. Even if he had played. And he had, had even played the normal sort a bit once he’d started playing the flying kind at school.
He’d always been that sort. The sort who could, somehow, not just fail to be interested, not just fail to know how to say the right and usual things, not just start a fight by taking a position about a team or player that was unpopular in the room, but actually get it wrong. And more than that, so wrong as to leave everyone staring at him instead of raising their voices over his faux pas by way of leaving it (and him) behind.
“And just might have a chance at the cup next year,” the witch beamed, patting Seth on the arm in a proprietary manner, “on those new Silver Arrows. I can’t imagine what you did with them, I’m sure, but Leonard Jewkes just raves, and the boys say this year’s model’s at least twice as easy to control, and lands on a knut.”
“It’s the varnish,” Seth explained, flushing in embarrassment. Toby didn’t know why anyone would bother varnishing arrows, silver or otherwise (and what a waste of good silver, even for an archery prize, anyone of sense back in those storied days would have traded it for nonperishables that weren’t cash, one way or another, the same day or the next, before it was taxed back, and sworn blind they’d sold it for ale and pissed it away), but his attention instantly honed sharp. “And a solution to soak the bristles in. I know they say nothing can interfere with a broomstick’s enchantments but dark magic, but mine were known to do some rather funny things during games on occasion; I don’t much like relying on charms alone.”
Ah. They were still talking about the mop-footie. Not actually archery at all. He wondered whether the idiot boy had bothered to get paid for this little job of his, either. If anyone had asked him, he would have guessed not. Not if wizards felt about their flying footie the way normal people did—which Toby had gathered they did, from the way Seth had been so irritated about it before he started playing.
Not if Seth liked to think this place he hadn’t grown up in was more his home than Lancashire. Which he did seem to; he’d certainly never taken it so well when one of the biddies in their neighborhood had called him ‘our Seth.’ The boy had learned, tucked away in Ellie’s shadow, about doing for people without trying to ingratiate yourself, continuously, until they felt you’d always been one of them.
Toby had admired the hell out of her for that when he’d first brought her home. Everyone had thought she was so stuck-up and she’d been in tears every night, and no one but him had seen one trace of them. He had really, however much it had humiliated him later, when all he had to bring home was the dole he hadn’t earned and all they had to eat was the neighbors paying back her favors.
The witch shook her head and cast Toby a tolerant we-must-indulge-his-little-whims-mustn’t-we expression. Toby gave her an eh-well sort of shrug back through his retroactive alarm (he’d certainly never heard about any flying accidents!), but now her attention was fixed on him again, her eyes darting curiously from him to Seth.
“And, Maylis,” Seth said resignedly, “Mr. Hind… well, you know how it is. His wife isn’t much of a one for flowers, so I thought I’d bring a little business by.”
“You’re a good boy,” she said decisively, patting his hand while giving Toby an old-fashioned look. The shine, apparently, was off the rose. Toby was not mourning it. “Best be off with you before he closes, then.”
“So we had,” Seth agreed, glancing at the sun without bothering to explain who ‘he’ was. “Give them my best then… this way,” he added to Toby, striding away after a nod to the witch, who was already bustling off in another direction.
They passed people and shops as they hurried. Toby tried not to stare, since Seth had been trying so hard not to be worried sick about it. There were a lot of those monks-robe frocks, on the men as well as the women, although plenty of the younger folk were in, if not exactly what he’d have called normal outfits, more or less the same combination of passable clothes under a full cloak or half-cape that Toby was wearing and the Rosier-thing had come to call in.
Several of them were wearing unnervingly well-behaved cats with too-intelligent eyes draped around their shoulders, or had rats-or-mice poking out of a breast pocket, or owls perched on a shoulder or hat. One witch’s hat croaked loudly in Toby’s ear as she passed. He would have jumped a mile if he’d been alone, but of course he couldn’t let Seth see him that unnerved.
The bookshop looked nearly normal, and the stores were recognizably stores, for all their displays zipped and swooped and flashed, but he didn’t recognize half of what they passed as they made their way through an outdoor market. And, for a touch of the truly surreal, the very few who didn’t have their purchases floating alongside them and weren’t stuffing them into bags far too small to fit were tailed by meek, stunted little creatures like flap-eared Sméagols.
“House elves,” Seth said—quietly, but in a tone that made it sound as if he were discussing the weather or the price of potatoes. “Hobs, you’d say, or brownies, though the stories don’t have it quite right.”
“Obviously,” he said sourly. He’d never heard of a brownie willing to be seen, and said so.
“It’s a market day,” Seth explained. “They don’t get seen by the unmagical, as a rule, and it’s true that in many households it’s a point of pride for them that the work gets done nearly as if it were doing itself. That’s not practical for errands, though. I really shouldn’t have brought you here today—the street is open to muggles quite often during the tourist season, but the locals have to do their shopping, and not just for neeps and tatties. It’s not egregious, though,” he said, as though someone (not Toby) had scolded him. “It’s not as if you don’t know about wizards.”
“But you said it was a bad idea,” Toby pointed out, folding his arms. If he was needling a little, he felt it was owed him.
“It is,” Seth said flatly. “I don’t think those who’ll care would come here, and I don’t believe these people would spread my business. But reminding certain parties of where I come from and from whom, and declaring that I don’t mind and am not ashamed—yes, to be blunt, it’s nearly as bad a risk as letting things lie as they are. And that’s bad.”
Toby pursed his lips, trying to lick the taste of that off his teeth, since he couldn’t wash it down. He noted that Seth hadn’t actually said he didn’t mind and wasn’t ashamed—but then, he hadn’t said the reverse, and he’d very nearly said that he was declaring it, whatever he really felt. He wanted to ask what the hell made owning him such a ‘bad risk,’ but that was a cruel question, every part of it a blow, both sides of the hearing and the telling. He’d been asked it, once. He’d refused to answer.
He refused to be the asker, now. Instead, he nodded at the hob-Gollums. “You keep one of those?”
“I live in a flat. If a family who already had one moved, the elf would come with them, but a family has to have been living in one place for a long time before the first elf will… well, probably will either be drawn to them or be born from their magic sinking into the magic of the land. No one’s really sure how that works. I don’t know if that’s because they won’t tell or because no one’s bothered to ask. Those who have nothing else should be allowed some privacy. They do have erklings together, but I haven’t personally seen any indications that it’s a mammalian-normal process. Except that they are gendered. But that could be mimicry of some sort, for all I know.”
“Oh.” He blinked. “So… are they servants, are they people, what are they?”
“Yes and yes and no one quite knows,” Seth shrugged. “My friends are all from old families who have them, and most of their elves are utter tyrants, but they’re old retainer tyrants. Completely loyal, and they can’t disobey their family’s orders—magically, they can’t, and I’ve never seen one want to. Unless they get conflicting orders, which is rather horrible. They use magic in ways wizards can’t, but, well, you know children aren’t allowed to use magic out of school.”
He nodded, but a little sarcastically. He’d heard that this was a rule, but he also knew that Seth had found at least half a dozen ways to break it into splinters without getting in trouble.
“All right, it’s not permitted to cast spells,” Seth agreed with the ghost of a smirk. “Well,” he further qualified, “you get one warning if you do, before you get in real trouble. And I got my warning when my friend Narcissa sent one of her elves to check up on me one year, and Cranny tried to…” his eyes flicked coldly to Toby, “to help me. Which she did, but I got a warning letter, and Narcissa helped me protest it so my record would be clean. And my wand showed the healing spell the Ministry had detected. We proved it a different way, but, well… elves may serve without an option, but they’re not getting nothing out of living with wizards, I don’t think. The idea of being ‘freed’ horrifies them, terrifies them, and I don’t blame them in the least. It’s not just being let go without a reference, if that were a ‘just.’ I think it’s being sacked without your hands.”
Neither of them could entirely repress the shudder at that one.
“I might be wrong,” Severus added scrupulously. “The hypothesis fits the evidence, but is untested.”
“How sound is your lot on the scientific method, then?” he asked, more to change the subject than out of interest.
Looking more pathetic and woeful than he had as long as Toby could remember (neither he nor Ellie had ever given the boy the impression that whinging or puppy eyes would get him anywhere, but the Rosier-thing had looked like the sort who’d try it on, and probably be weak to it, too), Seth turned a long mask of tragedy on him and groaned, “Not. At. All.”
“…Ah.”
He hadn’t really the least idea what to say to that, and they walked on in silence for a bit. No one came up to Seth and gushed like the first witch had, but Toby noticed he was getting the same amiable but unfussed oh-it’s-you looks and nods that Toby would have expected from his own friends back home, when they both had other places to be. They were the sort of looks that said It may have been a while, but since you belong here, there’s no need to make any special effort for you; we can always catch up later.
“Is there anywhere to eat here?” he asked eventually.
“Oh, yes,” Seth said vaguely. “But it’s more important to get to Heartwood before closing; food’s easy.”
Toby sighed. “When you say ‘food’s easy,’ do you mean there are lots of restaurants open at unlikely hours, or that you can wave your stick and magic up a sarnie?”
Seth paused thoughtfully. “I suppose I could summon some apples,” he said, “although as I recall, the nearest trees are better for pies. But I meant I could, if my errand lasts past when everything’s closed even in the Wizarding area, take you back to yours or mine and cook, and then drop you back off at your lorry after.”
This was so outrageous that Toby couldn’t even find the breath to splutter. The certainty of losing first his appetite and then his meal during this process was only part of the problem. He was afraid that if he asked ‘what is wrong with you’ again, the answer he’d get would be even worse.
Perhaps fortunately for his blood pressure, it was at this point that Seth said, prosaically, “Here.”
A sweet shop was the last thing he’d been expecting, although he supposed it did explain that comment about Ellie not being one for flowers.
The place looked oddly normal compared to everything they’d walked past on the way—the proprietor had gone so far as to stick the obligatory paper badges on the walls with the names of customers who’d left money for charities. Toby even recognized some of the charities. The theme was decidedly Robin Hood, but not in any overpowering or childish way. It was the color scheme, mostly, Lincoln green against the golden wood, and that the labels and badges were cut into the famous feathered-hat shape, or bows, or quivers. Also, the bulls-eyes were colored like real archery targets and there was a kind of bark called ‘Forest Floor’ with crystalized flowers on it, a shield-shaped chocolate with a fruity red blob in the middle called Lionheart, that sort of thing.
The man behind the counter was in the grizzled-bear mold, affable barman type, about Toby’s size. He’d looked up with a hint of why do you buggers have to come in five minutes before closing exasperation, but it melted into a big smile when he saw them. Seth got a, “Neythen, our Severus!” from him, too, and he came around the counter to clasp Seth’s bony wrists in his paws.
“Dickon,” Seth said softly, looking uncomfortable in an entirely different way from when the little witch had plucked at him.
The bloke had got about halfway through his puzzled look and who’s-this-then before he stopped and started staring hard between Toby’s face and Seth’s. Seth shrank into his clothes a little. No longer an affable bear, the man accused, “No.”
“This is Richard Gowan,” Seth told Toby, face blank, sounding rather miserable. “Dickon, this is me da put that away.”
It wasn’t, really, anything like looking down the barrel of a gun was made to look on the telly, not even at that angle and with stony eyes behind it. Ellie had never gone that far with him, and neither had Seth after he’d started to hold himself like someone who didn’t just want to be taken seriously but knew he should be. Toby had always wondered, and never wanted to find out.
He gave the man his best What The Hell Do You Think You’re Doing warning look, but didn’t move to snatch the thing in his face away just yet. One hint of a wrist-quiver and it’d be so many splinters; what kind of divvy noodle-noggin threatened a man with a slim wooden range weapon from less than five feet away? The kind who needed to learn a drop of respect for the normal ninety-nine-odd percent of the species, maybe? But presumably Toby had been brought here for a reason. Seth usually did do things for reasons (often jawdroppingly addled ones, granted), when he wasn’t doing them out of pure spite and stubbornness.
“Give me one good reason,” Gowan said, eyes the frozen grey of a sky stuffed fat with snow over the ugly set of his lantern jaw. “And ‘because I’m asking’ won’t fit the bill, our Sev. If boys like you made the decisions about their parents that ought to be made for them, there’d be no room in Azkaban for the dementors.”
“How’s this, then,” Seth said, his tone cool and indifferent. “That man was a raving drunk. This one’s sober enough to hold down a job and not insult a wizard who’d taken Amberella right in front of him and had already been wearing a flowery waistcoat. And you know what muggles are like about that sort of thing.”
“I knew that was a test,” Toby grumbled. He couldn’t let himself think about the rest of it. Not even about his boy agreeing out loud Toby was doing better enough that it mattered to him, made a difference to him. Never mind about any of the things it meant that this stranger a hundred miles from home knew enough about their family to have opinions about it, thought he had the right to act on them. There was nothing to crawl away from the thoughts into—he couldn’t let himself, not when Ellie was relying on him to show a bit of spine, not after the things Seth had said today, and he didn’t even want to go where that would lead, not really. So he couldn’t let them gnaw at him in the first place.
“Everything’s a test,” Seth said, still coolly. “Everything. Always.” He slid his eyes towards the shopkeeper, and they said together, with the same ironic set of the mouth, “This is Slytherin.”
The shopkeeper was Toby’s age, if not older. Toby thought he was older, and by a fair few years at that, considering he himself had worked too hard for too long and then spent a year or two too many drunk to have aged as well as any wizard who could do god-knew-what to ease the way for himself. The man couldn’t possibly have been at school with Seth, unless it was as a teacher, but the store didn’t look new.
He hadn’t softened by any means, but the tilt of his head was encouraging Seth to go on talking.
“Or, if you don’t like that,” Seth said, with a little shrug, “let’s try, ‘I need him right now.’”
“Oo-aye?” the wizard asked skeptically.
Toby felt a bit that way himself. “I notice we haven’t mentioned anything about laws and that,” he mentioned, keeping his voice mild, as if he were talking to Ellie in one of her pets.
They looked at him with identical expressions of slightly disgusted disbelief, and went back to their eye-duel.
He sighed, just glad Eileen hadn’t been there to see: that rules-what-rules attitude was exactly what she’d fretted about when Seth’s first letter had come back from school in a green envelope, although she’d never seemed to feel she’d explained it to him properly.
At the time, she’d been more concerned that her-father-that-bastard would instantly assume the boy was automatically a hopeless case and cut off even the half-hearted gestures of tentative reconciliation and the meager little drops of practical support that had been dribbling from that direction since the Toasted Mittens incident. Which he had, and at once, although someone had kept sneaking them useful objects of the sort a fine household would think were all used up.
Over time, though, Ellie had got worried about it herself, although by then her sullen, accusing, glowering silence had told Toby that everything wrong with his son was definitely and entirely his fault, and not magic’s. At the time, he’d considered she was being howlingly unfair.
“Yes,” Seth answered Gowan as if Toby hadn’t spoken. “I’ll be away, and things are getting dangerous out there, and you know what she’s like, she’s a grindylow for clamping onto an idea. Won’t let go if it breaks her damn fingers. She won’t even agree to be equipped to protect herself, as things stand. I’ve argued myself blind, and I’ve come to the conclusion there’s no breaking the status quo unless he does it.”
Toby could almost see lightning sparking in the thunderheads. “You’re not telling me she needs anyone’s permission, a witch like that,” Gowan accused. Toby was fair lost, but he didn’t think he liked the man’s tone.
“I’m telling you,” Seth said patiently, “that she’s a mule-headed Gryff with a billywig—a bee in her bonnet, and she’s decided she’s made her bed and will, as a point of what her addlepated mane-brain calls honor, lie in it, and who else is she going to let near enough the sheets to change them?” This last was with a touch of have-a-care-how-you-answer, although it sounded as though Seth was using the threatening tone perfunctorily, more as a matter of rote obligation than as though he thought he was going to need it with Gowan.
Reassuring as that was, Toby’s head still drew back, offended. “We’re not talking about my wife, here,” he accused in turn. “You’re not talking about your mam like that.”
The wand dipped a little, pulling back slightly with a new hint of uncertainty. Toby’s eyes narrowed. He retroactively liked that fiercely protesting tone with its notes of admiration less again. Far, far less. He wanted the man to stop threatening him, of course he did, but ‘out of respect for Eileen’ was the wrong reason.
“For pity’s sake,” Seth snapped at him distractingly, “what else d’you think I’d go to this sort of trouble for? I assure you, there is nothing I could need to do for my friends that could possibly necessitate putting myself in the way of one of your wobblers.”
“You did Friday last,” Toby pointed out reasonably, since objecting to ‘wobblers’ would only sound childish enough to deserve it.
“…No, I didn’t,” he said sullenly. “That was damage control, it wasn’t my idea. That is, it was my idea, obviously, but I’d been put in a position where there really wasn’t anything else to do that would have worked. And anyway, I didn’t need you to do anything; everyone would have expected you both to deny everything anyway.”
Gowan had been in a bit of a holding pattern, but now he looked like someone who was pausing to re-evaluate. More shrewdly than a bear ought. “Then that rumor I heard recently…”
“Er,” Seth admitted, with a more sheepish face than he’d ever put on for Toby. Whose fingers seemed to be curving in a shape that would have fit nicely around the handle of a jug glass. Toby (and Eileen) had objected (loudly) to the idea of Seth’s telling anyone he’d fallen back into old habits, but purely out of indignation. He hadn’t expected it to land him in trouble.
The candyman sighed, and leaned back against the counter, seeming far less likely to punch through Toby’s face or curse him in the heart. He even put the wand away. “What sort of a mess are you in, lad?”
“The sort where you wake up in the middle of the night and think instigating a minor bureaucratic nightmare to inveigle a stiff-necked, magic-hating muggle into the Sherwood is a brilliant answer to one of the smaller-but-itchier tangles in it?” Seth replied. His voice made it a question, but his face made it an apology, if not an actual cringe.
Toby hadn’t been called a muggle to his face since Seth was a burning-eyed, knob-wristed, paper-faced, shirty fifteen even the pretty-pretty Evans girl couldn’t control, never mind Eileen.
That summer had been the worst one and the last; Seth had found himself a summer job with room and board the next year, thank Christ, and they’d wanted him back the year after. Toby hadn’t felt called on to say that wanting Seth back was hard to credit, since the lad hadn’t been home when he found out. If there was one way Seth had always been not just all he could have asked but in a way he could explain to his mates, it was in being a hard worker.
At least, when the work caught his interest. Laundry as washed by Seth was subjected to experimental or prehistoric procedures that were generally rather hard on it, or done perfunctorily and spottily, and was hung up to dry all right but then not folded unless you stood over him. Which was a waste of everybody’s time, since he’d done it so badly, until the time he’d snarled, opened a pen-knife with an impatient flip any street tough Toby’d ever met would have taken seriously, and carved a handful of runes onto the bottom of the laundry basket. After which everything tossed into it had, to Toby’s reluctantly impressed furious depression, neatly folded itself.
But that summer had been the worst one, and Toby had, in some desperation, spent most of it answering all of the unveiled contempt by calling him Snow White back, pretending to think he’d been borrowing the girl’s lipstick or stealing her stuck-up sister’s.
He would have been so pleased if Seth (who had not, in fact, even been lining his eyes like some of the other lads his age who listened to music even more dreadful than he did) had just smirked or blushed-and-muttered about how that wasn’t how he was getting Lily’s lipstick on him, like a normal boy. But it had gotten his goat good and proper the first time, so of course Toby’d had to keep on with it.
And everything he’d worried about had turned out even worse than he’d thought, although apparently over on the Other Side of the Invisible Line they didn’t give a toss or even turn a hair.
As if to prove it, the man said, droll, “What is it that dish of posh nosh of yours—”
“Dickon!” Seth howled before Toby could even choke.
“Oh, all right, that posh bloke of yours—”
“Thank you. Ugh.”
Gowan rolled his eyes tolerantly. “What is it he calls you again? Grievous Bodily Harm?”
“Blunt Force Trauma,” Seth said sulkily. Defensively, he added, “Sometimes he says Precision Corkscrew.”
“And means it?”
The scowling silence was as clear a ‘no’ as Seth could ever have grumbled out loud.
“Well, far be it from me to spoil your reputation with the Johnnies,” Gowan said affably, patting him commiseratingly on the shoulder. “I’m sure you worked hard for it.”
“Johnnies?” Toby eyebrowed.
“King-Johns, John’s men. Wizards from outside. Who think the Ministry is…” Seth paused. “The feeling among the Nottingham and Sherwood witches and wizards,” he tried again, delicately, “is that it’s not polite to laugh in the Ministry’s faces, and that while graft and other corruptions are inevitable in government, as long as taxes seem to be going mostly towards education and the hospital and so on, these are worthy causes with which the community should, as patriots who do use those services at need, cooperate.”
“And what do you call yourselves?” he asked Gowan, looking around at the hat-and-bow shaped labels and the sunshine-on-leaves colors of the shop and wondering if it was going to be Greenies or Hoodies, since ‘merry men’ was apparently taken.
He got an are-you-thick stare. “Brits.”
“Ah.”
Seth shot his bear-friend a mildly dirty look, and told Toby, “Foresters.” It sounded more like ‘fosters,’ really, but Toby could, just, hear the R he’d glided over.
“Some of the younger city lads have started calling themselves Notties,” Gowan relented, but he was, very clearly, bending purely to Seth.
Who made one of his more spectacular revolted faces. “Oh, dear god. Gryffs?”
Toby was sure that he had seen that face since it had been about sprouts.
—He’d recommended Ellie not give into the boy at all on that one, on principle and to avoid setting a precedent. He’d had to admit that roasted had been better, though, and the house had certainly been a nicer-smelling place to come home to after a good, long day’s loom-tuning, especially since by the time the lad was on solids and old enough to have opinions about them (other than ‘this is new, I don’t trust it,’ which had been not just normal but an inflexible constant until raw radishes (which Mrs. Evans ought not to have let him try, even if she hadn’t thought he’d like them, because she should have known he was contrary and they were too dear even to be thought of, and Seth couldn’t even grow weeds, just hadn’t the knack), because Seth had been touched in the head even when he was young enough for it to have been cute) the musty mold and termites had already started creeping through the mill. It was a wonder the old barn had burned before collapsing on all their heads, really. He could still remember the not-quite-right smell of the place. Roast sprouts had been a better smell to come home to after a day of it than boiled, but he still didn’t think Ellie should have humored the boy.
He must have seen that face since then, and vaguely thought he did remember seeing it on an older Seth, but he couldn’t recall when.
“Mostly. One or two Ravens and Puffies, along for the excitement, I think. A few years above you, mostly, some a bit older than that.”
“I could guess,” Seth said grimly. “Why is it always gangs, with Gryffs?”
“Because armies would need plate-mail, our Sev, and that’s a right bugger to have fitted.”
Surprised, Seth laughed, just a bit. “True enough.”
The Evans girl had also called him that, but it had taken a few summers after Toby had first met her before it had been “May Sev please come out and play with me?” instead of “K’nSefcoompleeywifme?” Which he’d frankly preferred, even if he’d barely understood one word in ten. Or possibly twenty. Hard to tell, the way she’d jabbered on like bobbins rattling loose in a pan at that age. But Gowan didn’t mean it like that, like ‘Seth’ come out Scouse, although the way he talked, he might have.
He didn’t, and Toby wasn’t just assuming. He could hear the difference, a faint needling emphasis directed at him, Toby. He was trying not to decide whether he thought it was more challenging or possessive, since once he did he’d have to react to it and then he’d lose even if he won. Seth had even come right out and said ‘everything’s a test,’ and you couldn’t ask for clearer than that.
He didn’t have to like it, mind. Whether or not he was meant to. Which didn’t matter, because he didn’t mind meeting Seth halfway—even if what that really meant was ‘not objecting to being kidnapped.’ Toby didn’t believe for half a second that Seth really thought he needed anyone but himself to protect Eileen, even if he really thought she needed it, so putting himself out to involve Toby at all was a gesture, even if he was being a sidewinding, jackrabbity collection of nettles and thornbushes about it, as usual. So Toby could keep his peace and play along.
But by the same token, he hadn’t been the one to start making digs (he didn’t think. Had he? Seth probably thought he had. But he didn’t think so), and he’d lost his whole day to this nonsense. So if Seth thought he was going to be grateful, the snippy little git had another think coming.
Seth wasn’t snippy with Gowan, though. He was looking at the man quite seriously, and saying, “Speaking of fittings.”
“No need for that,” Gowan assured him. “Of course, it would be better if you could persuade her to come by, but, well.”
Toby eyed him suspiciously.
“No, I should think I’ll have a difficult enough time persuading her to take one if he,” Seth nodded to Toby, “tells her he can live with it. I was hoping that if you knew what kind she used to have…?”
“I can look it up, if you don’t know,” Gowan assured him. “I didn’t make hers, it would have been me da or Aunt Bess, but it’ll be in the records. There’s no guaranteeing that a new one of the same description will work for her, though. Sometimes it’s the combination, aye, but they do the choosing, you know. And besides, she’ll not be the same as she was at eleven, when her old one chose her.”
“No, I know,” Seth agreed, “but it’s worth a try, and at least she can call the bus if she’s holding one. But I didn’t just come for hers, as it happens.”
Gowan turned an unimpressed I beg your pardon look on him, and demanded, “Beg pardon?”
“What exactly are we talking about?” Toby broke in, completely exasperated.
It looked as though Gowan was about to give him a perfunctory answer, but then the grey eyes snagged on Seth’s face, so Toby looked, too.
At pure, sparkling, cut-obsidian mischief.
“…No,” Gowan said again, but rather helplessly.
“Oh, come,” Seth said wickedly, more tempting than pleading. “A muggle in your backroom. No one else in history, most like. How could you possibly slap the Ministry in the face more than that, and if they ever charged you with it, he already knows about us, so it’s technically no breach of the Statute at all. You could make the popinjays burst like frogs, if you wanted. And you’d have a cast-iron argument against prejudice on the one side, and if you had to, on the other, you could spin it as the cruelest muggle-baiting since Minos.”
Gowan stared at him, even more helplessly, and scrubbed a hand down his face.
“The phrase you’re looking for,” Toby said helpfully, again in that place where he didn’t know what the hell was going on except that he knew exactly what was going on, “is, ‘Son, what is wrong with you.’”
Now Gowan stared at him, and then his shoulders slumped ruefully. “Actually,” he said, “I think the phrase I was looking for is ‘Salazar save us all from cobras with a sense of humor.’”
“I think the phrase you were looking for,” Seth said smugly, before Toby could ask why all Seth’s friends were obsessed with cobras, “is, ‘Blunt force trauma, my arse.’”
Toby winced. “I’m somehow going to forget you said that,” he prayed. Seth glared a glare at him that only partially meant an edict of without alcoholic assistance (unnecessary), being mostly made of you fuck off out of my private life right now (outrageous).
“And it really wasn’t,” Gowan said dryly. “Words cannot express how much it wasn’t. I may send your lad a card congratulating him on his perception.”
Seth lifted his chin and folded his arms. “He’ll conclude you’re congratulating him on his good taste,” he sniffed.
Gowan rolled his eyes tolerantly. “I suppose he would at that. Oh, all right, then. Just turn the closed sign, will you, while you’re spinning everything else on its head? It was time anyway.”
Looking both unreasonably and incomprehensibly pleased with himself, Seth did. He beckoned Toby to follow Gowan through the one thing in the shop that wasn’t green, gold, or made of sugar: a perfectly ordinary industrial-grey metal door behind the counter, unlocked with a bog-standard steel key with (Toby sighed to himself) a green cap on.
The green-and-amber theme continued in the back, but there wasn’t any more chocolate. Just shelves and shelves of long, thin boxes, about the size you’d put a necktie in but deeper, a couple of cabinets stuffed with tins and jars in the back, and a carpenter’s workbench with a wood-turning machine and a scattering of gleaming metal tools in sloppy piles of sawdust.
Now it was Toby’s turn, looking at the slender length of wood on the machine, in the middle of being drilled down the center, to groan, “Oh, no.”
Seth gave him the wicked sparkling mischief look, and this time he was actually grinning. Sharply, actually. Maybe he had been Jack the Ripper, last life. “You’re going to give it to her with your own hands,” he promised darkly.
“We get by fine,” Toby sighed, cupping the back of his neck to stretch it pre-emptively, trying to ward off the headache.
Losing the sparkle, Seth said curtly, “I told you, things are getting dangerous, and I’m not as low profile as I’d like. Which means neither of you are, either. You will make her take it, and keep it on her. I don’t care if she ever uses it, as long as she has it to hand just in case.”
“What things, dangerous?” Gowan asked, his attention honing.
Seth shot him an annoyed look. “Christ, Dickon, just because the Prophet’s a tool of the Ministry’s no reason not to read it. You ought to know what they want you to think.”
Toby put on his blandest face and started whistling Working Class Hero.
Seth looked coldly at him, which was unexpectedly unnerving, and very deliberately turned back to the other man. “Don’t you know people have been disappearing?” he asked. “Without a trace. Muggleborns. Blood-traitors. I’d like to dream that Mam’s got some protection because of the friends I have, because I’ve been careful about never asking for favors yet, and I more honestly think she really might because she’s dropped out of the wizarding world, but I won’t rely on it. She might just be the platonic ideal of a blood-traitor, between Da and helping out the muggle neighbors, except for keeping herself to herself and not making herself a spectacle publishing indignant screeds in the paper.”
Before Toby could embark on his own indignant screed, Seth turned back to him and curtly explained, or at least said, “It’s a technical term.”
“Oh, it is not,” Gowan said wearily. Toby had the sense not so much that he’d found himself in the middle of a pre-existing conversation of theirs as in the middle of a script that everyone but him knew by heart, whose lines they were whizzing past because no one could be bothered to actually say them aloud anymore.
“All right,” Seth conceded, “it’s a slur that doesn’t have a polite equivalent and is therefore, regrettably, doing double duty as a technical term.”
“Either way, you ought to be the last one to use it, our Sev,” Gowan said reproachfully. Toby got the feeling, somehow, that he was, somehow, this time, doing it even more on purpose.
“Not if I want to keep enough credibility in the right quarters to keep Mam and Lily safe, I oughtn’t,” he retorted, adding with a reproachful look, “What kind of serpent are you?”
“Desert kingsnake,” Gowan replied at once, unruffled.
This seemed to be an impressive answer for some reason, because Seth’s oh was, if not exactly cowed or even subdued, rather taken aback and blinkish. He recovered quickly, though, and said with the same reproachful note, “Well, a Slytherin named for a snake known for playing dead should understand about protective coloration.”
Gowan looked pointedly around his backroom filled with, presumably, wand-boxes, and then out into his sweet shop. “I’m more surprised to hear that a spitter’s even heard the term.”
Seth looked at him calculatingly, eyes hooded, and then, very deliberately, stuck out his tongue. Gowan laughed, and then made a comment that didn’t make any sense at all about how the way Seth was dressed unsuitably somehow should have given him, Gowan, a hint. And didn’t say a hint about what.
Toby decided being patient wasn’t doing him any good, and wandered over to look at the cabinets. The one with the tins seemed to just be tea, tea, more tea, and a few books he couldn’t make his eyes focus on to read their spines (which was exactly what he hated about wizards, though there were plenty of things he could have said that about), but the other was more what he’d expected. Its jars were full of things that had been powdered, shredded, or chopped to the size of new peas, and their labels said things like Unicorn Hair, Manticore Sting, Sphinx Feather, Mokeskin, Ashwinder Shell, Salamander Scale, and on, and on. Only about half the names were monsters he knew.
Then there started to be zzzp! noises behind him. He whipped around, and was roaring, “What the HELL are you doing,” even before he’d seen Gowan measuring the base of Seth’s nose. Well, his first thought was to say Gowan was doing it, but actually the measuring tape was moving about by itself while Gowan was laying out a roll of wooden dowels on a table.
“Er,” Seth squirmed. As well he might.
“Standard practice,” Gowan informed him, impatient and a bit superior.
“For WHAT,” he demanded, fists on his hips.
Seth sighed. “I said I was going away for a bit,” he said in a prompting tone.
“You snuck it in there sidewise,” Toby corrected, uncompromisingly folding his arms.
Oddly, or, perhaps, depressingly, they both looked just a bit pleased with him. “If you like,” Seth said, not quite as snottily as he might have. “In any case, I am, and I’d feel better about it with a reserve wand tucked away. Just in case.”
Toby glared at him. “And you think bringing me there to watch you get one is going to make me feel better about it all, do you?” he mocked.
“Of course I do,” Seth returned, somewhere between savage good cheer and snappish return mockery. “Magic is an art that you don’t understand, isn’t that right? But ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’”
“And the devil can quote scripture to his purpose,” Toby fired back, narrowing his eyes. He wasn’t letting Seth just get away with tossing the greats at him as if they’d been in some cozy book club together all these years. If the little sod threw in Clarke’s second law as well as the third, something was getting chucked at his head, wands or no wands.
Seth narrowed his own eyes back. “You couldn’t build a telly, could you. Or explain vacuum tubes, or what makes the hoover suck and turn off, or how electricity moves the metal and the signals, or why the waves sent through the wires or what-have-you resolve into sound and pictures. It might as well be magic, but we call it science and you live with it and you’re comfortable with it, so you call it technology and you don’t have a problem. Well, call magic a genetic trait that gives me access to an energy whose particle science hasn’t named yet, watch the engineer design the admittedly rather medieval tool that facilitates its manipulation, and belt up.”
His mouth curling unwillingly at one corner, Toby reminded him, “I work for the library, you snippety little git. Meaning, we have one now.” He could find out about bloody outdated vacuum tubes any time he didn’t have anything better to do, thank you.
“…Well, yes, but muggles keep on publishing fiction,” Seth explained his assumption, unabashed.
“I’ll send you How It Works for your next birthday, shall I?” he asked drolly. “All twenty-one volumes.” It wasn’t much of a threat, but then, he couldn’t afford to go through with it. But then again, it didn’t matter what the threat was when the tone was there.
“You do and I’ll send you all my old potions journals and make Evan paint nightmarish amalgamations of technology and Albrecht Dürer,” Seth fired back predictably, as if he wouldn’t have quite happily lost a month to sitting down and reading through the thing first cover to last if Toby did send it to him. “Moving ones. And stick them to your bedroom walls with Permanent Sticking Charms. Half the journals are written in Chinese or German, and the other half are liberally scattered with Futhark.”
“I think we may be moving towards muggle-baiting, our Severus,” Gowan said mildly.
Having briefly forgotten him, Toby started, but was pleased to see Seth blink a bit, too. He was then entertained by Seth’s attempt to explain that it couldn’t be muggle-baiting (because baiting was categorically to be applied only to helpless persons) without either bringing up the past or explicitly explaining that the reason Toby wasn’t helpless now was that he could always rat on Seth to his mam.
Ellie could shrivel the boy into a sullen prune with one look when she felt it called for. From halfway across the country, if necessary. Quite often without bothering to buy a stamp.
It didn’t go well, and the measuring tape kept zipping around him all the while.
Taking pity, losing interest, or disliking to hear Seth dance around the topic of his mam, Gowan eventually took the lad by the arm and manhandled him over to the table with the roll of dowels. “D’you remember this bit?” he asked.
“The rods are from different sorts of trees,” Seth told Toby, possibly by way of answering. “In Celtic and Druidical lore, and in the old language of Ogham, each type of tree is associated with certain—or, in this context, I suppose I might say resonates with certain qualities and magics. Each will work better for some people than others. Just as hearing people might have perfect pitch or be tone deaf or neither, wizards can be more or less sensitive to this sort of thing, so when a witch or wizard comes in for a wand, Dickon has them see if any of the wooden rods feel better than others. I understand that Ollivander doesn’t, in London, though.”
Gowan made a face, with a flared nostril. “Ollivander just shoves wands at people until one of them works. Oh, he measures, but he says he can feel what’s right. Load of rubbish, in my opinion. If he could feel it, he’d be able to give a witch or wizard the wand that’s chosen them straightaway, or at least narrow down the wood or core or something. But it can take more’n an hour, they tell me, and as far as his customers can tell he’s just grabbing any old thing off the shelves.”
Seth slowly loosed a curling little smile, eyes gleaming. “Maybe I’ll find out one day,” he mused, “and let you know.”
“Don’t you think on it,” Gowan scolded sternly. “He only sells three cores, and not a one of them would be right for you, and besides, all his wands have the Trace. He’s well in the Ministry’s pocket.”
The smile widened. “That’s what I mean.”
Gowan slid him a disturbed look. “You mind what games you play, our Naj,” he warned, which only made Seth smile even wider and more curlingly. “Now, just you give your attention to what you’re doing, my lad, if you please.”
Seth’s eyes crinkled, and then he pulled a mocking contrite face and, sobering, did. He stroked his fingers lightly over the dowels, occasionally nudging one forward or drawing back suddenly as though stung.
When he pushed the last rod forward, Gowan said flatly, “You never.”
Seth looked puzzled. “Why not?”
“I only put that in for completeness. How did it feel?”
Still puzzled, and now a bit suspicious, Seth said slowly, “Warm. A bit… cat having a kip in the sun, in a bit of a stupor, but pleasant, welcoming. Not what I’d call responsive, not like, say, these,” he touched a few of the others he’d indicated, “but… why, what is it?”
“Apple,” Gowan said, in the same flat, disbelieving tone.
“It is not,” Seth spat. When Gowan’s silence said yes, it was, he hiked up his shoulders like a cat who was not in the sun but had just been threatened with a bath. He hissed, “You can stop looking at my nose right this instant and if you tell Ev about this I will end you. Or his mother. God.And don’t you look at my feet either. Or anywhere else. Thank you very much. In fact, give me my cloak back,” he snapped at Toby, and snapped his wand, too. The cape whipped away and sailed through the air to curl around his shoulders. It then proceeded to grow into a full-length one.
“It’s to do with truth, peace, memory, and transformation, too,” Gowan offered, voice trembling behind the side of his hand he’d nearly stuffed into his mouth.
“Fuck off.”
“Ruling out peace, then,” he murmured.
“Right off!”
“How much does this conversation have to do with Aphrodite winning that beauty contest, then?” Toby asked, only sort of under his breath.
“Let me put it this way,” Gowan said. “Did Ms. Eileen ever tell you what a squib is?”
Tabling his disapproval of what he felt was an inappropriately familiar way to refer to his wife, he replied, “Other than an explosive? Yes.” She’d told him in the context of My arsehole father’s cut me off with a shilling because any or all of our babies might be one. He knew perfectly well what a squib load was, too, but wasn’t going to admit it. Even if the word did also mean a firearm malfunction, he’d rather enjoyed, at the time, the idea that he and Ellie might pop out a little load of miniature dynamite.
They had, in fact, and it hadn’t been much fun for anyone once he’d turned out not to be the so-called-malfunctioning sort.
“Well, there was one from Switzerland who I understand was rather well known among the muggles. Bloke named Carl Young?”
Toby nodded, cautiously and a bit skeptically. From what he’d heard about Jung he would have suspected drugs, but he supposed insanity due to being raised by wizards also made sense.
“Talked about how all humans have a sort of… if everyone’s mind is its own lake, they all feed into a great ocean of pooled ideas, sort of thing?”
He nodded again, more because Seth was sulking rather than arguing than because he himself knew what the bloke was talking about.
“Well, he thought magic worked like that—sort of, works the way it does because of the ideas people have. Not that it works because we think it should, you understand,” Gowan explained, “but that our stories give it shape, over the centuries.”
“…So this conversation has everything to do with Aphrodite,” Toby concluded glumly, “and you’re both surprised because the apple wood felt different to Seth when he were a lad.”
“Stung him like a wasp,” Gowan confirmed cheerfully.
“Sod off and rot,” Seth continued to sulk.
Toby would definitely not be telling the Rosier-thing. Or its mum. He might be able to bring himself to tell Eileen, but he might really, really need to at least be a little drunk first. Biting the bullet, he stuck out his chin and asked Gowan, “What do you think of, er, the, er, the ginger, then?”
“Oh, well done,” Seth muttered sourly, folding his arms and hiking his shoulders up even more, like a moulting pigeon, but Toby thought he had, in fact, been as diplomatic as could have been expected of him and more.
Gowan looked taken aback and bemused. “Who, Rosier? Wearrlll…” he considered. “It pains me to see a good Northern lad stepping out with a bloke who rhymes ‘thank you’ with ‘hanky,’ I don’t mind telling you, and his family has more issues than Witch Weekly. But he’s got a reputation among those who know and don’t speak for being a touch cannier and more sensible than he lets on, and you’ve only to talk to him five minutes to know the only two things he cares about are—”
His voice was cut off by a buzzing noise, like a whole hive of bees swarming placidly a little ways off. When Toby looked around in confusion, Seth was glaring even harder with his shoulders even higher, defiant, his face rather red.
“Ah,” Toby uttered understandingly.
“Know and don’t speak my eye,” Seth snarled, the buzz dying away. “I came for wands, Dickon, not to have my allies’ secrets betrayed.”
“He don’t make much of a secret of it, Severus,” Gowan said, amused.
“If he were more than he lets on, it’s not particularly good manners—” Seth began heatedly. Toby interrupted him with a snort for Seth lecturing anybody on good manners.
“A man wants to know whether his child’s being taken for granted or taken advantage of,” Gowan said, unmoved.
Or, more likely after seeing them together, taking advantage of an unworthy innocent he secretly despised, Toby might have added, but didn’t. Everything else about the whole thing was awful, but at least he didn’t seem to have to worry about that. And he hadn’t, really; it wasn’t as if Seth had the patience to pretend he cared for anyone he loathed long enough to hook them, even if he went briefly mad enough to think he’d be able to stand someone he thought was an idiot for longer than thirty seconds put together. Toby was more concerned about the Rosier-thing being shallow, which it might or might not be, and perverted, which it patently was.
“Yes,” Seth sneered, “he very villainously refuses to let me do any of the tidying-up and made me sign a contract in blood to index my never-more-than-fifty percentage of the rent with my salary.”
They stared at him.
Irritably, he said, “Not really in blood.”
“Well, it might have been, with you people,” Toby pointed out, dry.
Gowan snorted, and said, “Actually, it might have been, with his people.”
“Yes, well, with Evan it was with blackberry sauce out of a pastry bag onto a pancake the size of his head,” Seth said, still irritably. “Possibly even the size of his ego. And then he covered it with whipped cream ‘to seal it in,’ and ate it. So I couldn’t sneak in alterations, he said. Never mind that eating it meant he would subsequently be unable to produce the contract, he said that We Would Both Know, which, alas, is true. And thus, with my damnable honesty unsuitable to a Slytherin, the affinity with the apple-wood is explained to everyone’s satisfaction I'm sure, so may I have a reserve wand now?”
“Your son,” Toby said later (it must have been near on ten o’clock), “is a sneaking, slippery, unscrupulous, conniving, kidnapping, bullying little con artist.”
“I told you what it meant when he was writing home in green envelopes and wearing green scarves ten years ago, Tobias Snape,” Eileen said irritably, stepping back from the door with the flames of the oil lamp softening the long lines of her face and rewriting her inky eyes in gilt. She was wearing that nightgown he liked under her dressing gown, the red one. He had, with great effort, managed not to find out whose it had been before hers, and with great restraint managed not to ask her how she’d turned it red. He knew she’d tell him she’d dyed it, but he had trouble believing anything that grew could really make a red so bright as that without help from chemicals or magic or that beetle juice they put in food these days. She couldn’t have afforded the former, and if it was either of the latter he didn’t want to know.
“You also said it was probably prejudice,” he reminded her. “I’m here to tell you it is no such thing, El. Stone fact, chiseled in, and proud with it.”
She frowned. “What do you mean, kidnapping?”
He explained about Seth mucking Central Processing about.
She looked frightened, which scared him, and demanded, “Did he say he counfounded them or used Imperius or what?”
“Said he mesmerized them,” he told her, and then tried, “Hypnotized,” and then had to explain in more detail. And then had to deal with the fuss she made over Seth’s doing ‘wandless magic,’ in public, despite the fact he’d been doing it since he was four and doing it on purpose and with purpose since he was probably six or eight or so, and despite his having told Toby it wasn’t magic this time. Ellie loudly scoffed both at that idea and at the idea that it was nothing much to do it on purpose. Of course, she was the lad’s mother; you had to expect it now and again, when Seth wasn’t there to hear her and get a swelled head from it.
“But what was he about, leading you about by the nose like that?” she asked, baffled, setting the tea tray down.
“Wanted to introduce me to your man down in Nottingham,” he said casually, stretching out on the sofa. He didn’t give it the twist of his voice that would have made it an accusation rather than an ordinary turn of phrase, but he watched her for signs of beflusterment anyway. Gowan had acted more like a man carrying a torch than one who’d ever had an affair, right enough, but you never knew, and Lord knew Toby’d given Ellie enough reason to at least think about jumping ship, back when he was sunk in the misery to his eyes.
She frowned, not angrily, and admitted, “Well, I did go that way once or twice after I first got our Very his school things, when one of the neighbors was very bad and I couldn’t just go out into Bowden or one of those fine ladies’ gardens and pick what I needed. It was Very who went down as often as he could get away and find the port-tree in the part of the Sherwood near us. He used to trade his little potions and garden wines with the shopkeepers for stationary and Christmas presents for his school friends and that. I wasn’t there often enough to make friends, myself. Can’t say as I know who you mean.”
“The lad still does that,” Toby said drolly. “I make it he’d be doing a right good business if he were taking their money. Must want to live there someday, ‘sall I can think. Any road, you may not think you have friends, but I think the candyman’s a bit sweet on you.”
She blinked. “What, at Heartwood?” He raised his eyebrows at her over his tea. She thought about it, and then raised hers back, and her chin, too, and threw back a shoulder. “And why shouldn’t he be?” she demanded.
He grinned, and lifted his tea to her. “Suppose he did seem sensible enough,” he allowed. “Down to earth bloke, for all I take it that on the quiet he’s as much of an underhanded snake-in-the-grass as Seth likes to think he is.”
“Is he, now,” she said thoughtfully. “I suppose that explains why he’s kept on—but why would Very bring you there?” she asked sharply, belatedly suspicious.
One of the bad things about the drink that he’d even realized was a problem at the time, he reflected, was that for years, everyone in his house had been not only sharper but swifter than him. Seth’s smart mouth was part of what had driven him to it in the first place, of course, but he’d never felt Eileen was running circles around him until he was well and truly pickled.
“Says he’ll be on the continent for the rest of the month, and in Scotland after that and won’t be able to get away much,” he grunted, and reluctantly reached for his bag. “Reckoned you ought to have this. He were right fraught about it, tell you the truth.” Still reluctantly, and probably ungraciously, he shoved the green and amber box at her.
She took it, staring, as if it were made of soap bubbles and might explode. “That’s never,” she said, trying for flat and dismissive and only managing uncertain. “You’d never.”
“Well, I thought about it,” Toby told her. “He’s always been all nerves and nose, right enough, but what was he jumpy about? Getting thumped and shouted at for things that damn right he was going to get thumped and shouted at for them. Walking down the streets you don’t walk down unless you can handle yourself. Setting off folks as did have short fuses. I don’t recall him ever once being frit of a monster under the bed or a ghost in the wood, or having that same sort of hysterics just because he didn’t like it when your knitting friends fussed at him and pinched his face, like Davey Cheetham down the way.”
She gave him the Are You Going To Stop Jabbering And Talk Sense And Get To The Point Sometime This Century cross and impatient look.
He explained, “It’s his way to make things worse for himself, Ellie, but if he says he won’t sleep nights unless you’ve got a gun under your bed, I’m inclined to think we may as well think on it as a sensible precaution.”
She went back to uncertain, with a healthy dose of skepticism mixed in (he didn’t blame her), and said, “If this is to do with that nonsense he and that Rosier boy were spouting about Lily Evans—it didn’t even make sense.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” Toby said. “I only caught the gist of it, mind, but as I understand it, something’s a bit sinister’s going on with your lot. People disappearing. Seth told Gowan you were just the sort, even though maybe you weren’t because Seth has friends—which sounds bloody dodgy, if you ask me—and because you’ve dropped out of their circles completely. Used the word ‘blood-traitor.’”
Ellie went white, at least half with fury, and sat down.
“Said the word was a slur doing double duty as a technical term for lack of anything nicer to say,” he offered, and nudged her teacup at her.
“I suppose it is that,” she said, still thin-lipped. She looked down at the box again. “But you don’t want me to have this,” she declared, bristling with pre-emptive self defense. And didn’t say You broke mine, much less You snapped mine in front of my face and threw it in the fire.
“Can’t say it’s at the top of my Top Ten list of Things I’ve Been Hankering To See About The House,” he agreed levelly, and drank his tea.
Bristling more, she snapped, “I said I’d live muggle-enough when I married you, and I meant it. And when you… when I lost the use of my old one, I decided, myself, I decided I could live without it, and would. Besides, if he’s right that not using magic’s keeping me safe, the Ministry can tell when magic’s suddenly getting used in a place it usually isn’t. And if we start getting things done too conveniently, if the chores don’t take long enough, the neighbors will notice, believe you me.”
“I’m not suggesting you should use it to make the beds and sweep the floor like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” he said, still levelly. “I’d much rather you didn’t, matter of fact. Only, he may overreact about absolutely everything, but I don’t think he gets the wind up about nothing at all, and you’re the one who used to tell me a bread knife wouldn’t be much use against your sort.”
Then he sighed. What Ellie seemed to be taking from this wasn’t so much that things could well be so bad that even he was willing to have a damned wand in the house as that he’d put a wand into her hands. From her expression, this was going to work out well for him in the short term, at least, so there was that to look forward to, but he felt it also meant she wasn’t really paying attention.
“It probably won’t even work,” she said, hands caressing the amber ribbon. “It’s not like ordering from the milkman, one bottle, pat of butter, half a round of cheese. The wand chooses the witch. Even if he made it just like my old one…”
“I think he was going to,” Toby mentioned, “and then Seth kicked up a fuss. Just like him,” he added dourly.
“Ten inches,” she murmured, pulling the ribbon open slowly, as if she were the one who’d been hypnotized, “rowan and thestral wingbone, very stiff.”
“That’s what they said, exactly, except for the rowan,” Toby said. “That was what Seth spat out his dummy about. Said rowan was ‘a seeker’s wood for questers and young girls with stars in their eyes,’ wouldn’t do anymore.”
She paused with her hand ready to pull off the top of the box, looking unsettled. “What else did he say?”
“Said you’d been through the storms and were apt to dig your heels in and stay where you were,” Toby said resentfully, not adding that Seth had put in whether she ought to or not, “and you mix with your friends but you’re never quite one of them and so it ought to be holly.”
“And is it?” she asked warily.
“How am I supposed to know?” he demanded grumpily. “It’s a stick.”
“Well, what did Gowan say?” she demanded back, cross.
“Said Seth probably knew his own mam best,” he conceded, more grumpily. “Said it was a good wood for defense.”
Slowly, she lifted the top off the box, revealing a long, cream-colored stick that curved and kinked at the base—very nearly the way a gun did, actually, only more decorative. Even Toby could see that it was designed to compensate for the way wrists worked, so that a woman who hadn’t held one in a long time wouldn’t have to twist her arm to aim properly.
Her face was unreadable as she looked at it, and then hard as she looked at him. “Give it to me,” she said.
His mouth went tight, remembering Seth predicting this. But he’d already made his decision, and whatever she thought, it didn’t have anything to do with owing her or anything like that. The boy was a trouble-magnet and had more than enough experience to know it when he smelled it, and that was that. And it helped him that she’d come to the door wearing that nightie, just because he’d had a long day, and that at least some of that look in her eyes wasn’t just you owe me this but I want to see what will happen when you touch it, Golden-eyes, he’s your blood as much as mine.
He took the stick out of the box, but for all of him it was just a stick, and (some comfort) she looked just a bit disappointed, not triumphant or superior at all.
Until he passed it to her. Then gold and black sparks washed up and down her arms, without her so much as waving the thing, and her breath caught and her eyes caught fire.
He held very still, waiting for anything to happen. When it didn’t, he waited for her to come back to herself, and then met her eyes. Levelly, he said, “Just self-defense, Ellie.”
She looked like she was trying to argue with him, but wasn’t finding the words for it.
“That’s what you just said,” he went on evenly. “Yourself, just now. You know what you said.”
Now she looked like she wasn’t so much going to argue with him as just wanted to.
He let his own eyes harden. “I didn’t keep count of how many times I would have killed for a pint today,” he said quietly, “but it must have been at least two hundred. Just today. Today was a bad one, fair enough, with the lad interfering and putting me on the road all day and all, but even on a normal day, well over twice an hour. Well over, Eileen.”
“You haven’t had a drink in years,” she accused, as though she suddenly didn’t believe it.
“S’right,” he agreed. “And every five minutes, it’s still bloody hard. Pubs everywhere you walk. And you haven’t cast a spell in years, and maybe it hasn’t been so hard for you, just sticking to whatever you do in that kitchen of yours, and maybe now it will be. Just self-defense, Ellie. It’s the reasons you think of when the demons don’t have you by the throat that are the sane ones.”
Reluctantly, very reluctantly, she put the stick down. “What did I say?” she asked begrudgingly.
So he reminded her. And he reminded her again in the morning, when she wanted to tie the handy convertible sheathe Seth had sent with the wand at her hip rather than the back of her neck, and the morning after that, and the one after that, and kept on ostentatiously drinking his very unsatisfying tea and apple juice.
[1]Tobias’s mother was not the Mabel Hind who was an IRL famous performer at the Malt Cross, but was probably a relative. There may well have been a magical strain in that family, as a matter of (in-canon-)fact, going by the surname: the white deer (stag or doe, hart or hind) is a strong presence in folklore, symbolizing everything from unrequited love in France to the beginning of a quest (for knowledge and/or the unattainable) in Arthurian legends to purity, redemption, and good fortune in Scotland, a return to one’s homeland in Hungary, and, for the Celts, that something terrible has been done and doom is coming. To see one is now considered good luck, but this has not always been the case, and to kill one has never, ever been considered a very smart thing to do.