Valley of the Shadow, Act II

“But it was so clever of you to ask your aunt for the invitation, darling!” Narcissa praised warmly as Severus meandered her down some really very charming foresty paths.

“Oh, well, obviously it was Evan’s idea,” Severus demurred like the goose he was.

She patted his arm and was kind enough not to agree with him about the ‘obviously.’ “No, darling, I meant it was clever of you to really-truly go through with it, graciously. Or, at least, without kicking up an enormous stink so that you only immortally offended the poor vampires the first time.”

“That was not my fault,” Severus declared indignantly.

She patted him again. “Of course not, darling.”

“It wasn’t!” he protested. “It’s not as if I put on a black cloak with a red lining and slicked my hair back. I can’t help being pale!”

“Now, that’s not true, Severus,” she had to point out. “You used to go quite a reasonable color by the time school got out when we made you study outdoors enough.”

“I’ve been working all summer,” he pointed out grumpily. “In a lab. Indoors. Under a roof. A skylight charm isn’t actual sunlight, you know, even when it’s spelled to induce cholcaliferol synthesis.”

“English, darling.”

He eyed her warily. “Sunlight makes your skin produce vitamin D?”

“I’m sure that was closer,” she encouraged.

“It’s good for your bones?”

She decided that this was probably the best she was going to get, or wanted to. Besides which, he ought to be dissuaded from an ecstatic swoon into swotty, starstruck details about what probably only really amounted to the joyous, life-growing side of the magic in the sun that everyone had known about since they’d called it names like Lugh and Bel and Apollo. “That’s nice, Severus. So I suppose making sure a little boy plays outside is really quite important after all?”

“Yes, although sunburns ought not to be taken as a sign of ‘well done, keep it up,’” he noted, giving her a dubious side-eye.

“Well, I should think not,” she agreed. “Do they burn in the sun, by the way?”

“For pity’s sake, I didn’t ask,” he protested, passing her little test by looking appropriately indignant. “I had enough impertinent questions to ask them, I should think, even discounting the initial…”

“Fracas?” she suggested, dimpling one cheek at him. “Calamity?”

“Misunderstanding,” he corrected stiffly, raising his chin.

“Well, really, darling, I don’t know what you expected them to think,” she pointed out, not unsympathetically.

“I didn’t expect them to notice!” he half-groaned. “Yes, all right, senses of smell heightened towards mammalian aromas I expected, but I didn’t expect them to have evolved to detect the smells of foreign soil!”

“Well, I think it makes sense,” she said, practically. “It would be like perfume to them, wouldn’t it? Or, I suppose, more like oils in their bath, if they need to sleep on it. Especially if they’re mostly nocturnal and their vision is more about movement than color or shapes, as Professor Graves said. It would help them know each other.”

“It’s just in my shoes,” Severus said helplessly.

Narcissa looked at the trees around them, carefully keeping all traces of accusation out of her face.

“Yes of course I launder my socks!!!”

“Merlin’s oak, Severus,” she said mildly, “there’s no need to startle the grouse.”

He snarled, and bad-temperedly shot the illusion of a grey fox in the path of the fleeing birds, chasing them back to their nest, or at least the point in the undergrowth they’d shot out of. Narcissa was glad that neither she nor any of her ancestors had drunk dragon’s blood, or however it was that one really learned the green language. From the sound of it, the grouse were swearing at Severus something dreadful.

“They thought I’d dyed my hair and I was making fun of them,” he said sulkily. “I don’t dye my hair, Narcissa! If I were the sort of vain sod who took time out of my day to dye my hair, it would not look like this! If their senses of smell are so bloody fantastic, why did they think I’d dyed my hair!?”

She thought about it, because he was in the sort of take-me-seriously-or-I-shall-scream mood that little girls who weren’t Bellatrix were trained to express in other ways by the time they got to Hogwarts.

Most little boys were, too, she thought, really, but Severus’s mother could be justifiably called wretched as an adjective as well as a pejorative. Whether or not she’d done her honest best with him, Narcissa had had to pick up a great deal of the woman’s slack far too late to do much good. She hadn’t minded doing it—much—once they’d really got to know each other—but it really had been rather too late.

Of course, Severus might just have been the wizarding world’s most broadly applicable Object Lesson in all manner of ways, but Narcissa didn’t think he’d mind overly if she used him to point out to Lucius that, with children, it was never too early. For anything of importance. Severus would complain and be sulky, of course, but she was sure that he would also agree, and, therefore, not mind. (Much.)

Presuming he survived what even he had readily admitted was a somewhat ill-advised determination to romp about with dark creatures in search of wisdom no one else was clever enough to particularly care about, let alone pay him for. In the end, the only thing she could think of was to ask, “Do you have walnuts in your soap?”

He blinked and shot her one of his squinty-eyed suspicious looks. “Why?”

“Walnut juice is a stain, isn’t it? People have known about it for ever so long,” she reminded him. “Even the oldest vampires might.”

His mouth quirked the suspicion away, and he sang—very quietly, as he nearly always did, as though if anyone who wasn’t his intended audience heard him he might find himself pelted with rotten fruit. Which ought to have been nonsense, but tragically wasn’t. His voice was a bit pinched and furry when he was almost as much speaking as singing, but it was lovely when he wasn’t so self-consciously afraid of being heard that he stuffed it all into the back of his head. He’d have had nothing to be ashamed of if he only stopped worrying about it.

What he sang, equally nonsensically, was, “The lady who dyes a chemical yellow or stains her grey hair puce—or pinches her figure—is splashed with great vigor with permanent wa-alnut juice…”

All she could think of was to weakly demand, “Puce?”

“I assume they were trying for a truer ginger and failed,” Severus explained gravely. At least, he was pretending to say it gravely; she could see straight through him, and despite strangling his own voice like a terrorized chipmunk he was in quite a good mood really. “It takes more work to color white hair than blond, you know, even an ash-blond that looks white, like Lucius’s. It’s as if the hair says, ‘no, thank you, I am a sage and an elder now and I wish everyone to know it.’” He put on a sniffy face as he drawled, and made a dismissive little gesture.

It wasn’t one of his sweeping gestures; more fiddly, like a parody of a fussy old thing. She smiled; he and Evvie did so much hand-Ogham together, as if no one had eyes, that his thumb had automatically hit a few rune spots on his fingers, which were less stained than usual now he’d been away from his stillroom for a while. She might have amused herself with trying to spell out the word, but really it wasn’t right to encourage him, and a passing breeze coaxed her nose with something fresh and tantalizing.

“Did we just pass some sage?” she asked, feeling as if she might have missed an opportunity to pick something that smelled wonderful—far more wonderful than any boy’s clay-lined socks, at any rate, laundered or not.

“Russian sage, yes, I believe we did,” Severus agreed, looking pleased with her a bit out of proportion, in her opinion. “Although it’s a mint, really. Shall we go back for it?”

“Yes, let’s,” she agreed, and they turned. He paused to let her stoop for some acacia that she thought would stand out nicely against the silvery purple, and tolerantly wand-twisted some grass into a springy green basket for her. “You never said about the walnuts,” she reminded him.

“My day-soap is made with chestnuts,” he said in his scrupulous voice. “Not a staining agent. No walnuts.”

“Well, perhaps a nut is a nut to them.”

“I suppose,” he agreed, standing patiently while she considered a cluster of begonias and instantly forgot about them when the breeze teased her with a wisp of jasmine.

She beamed at him, even wider when she saw he’d added a handful of blue and white violets to the basket, and a whole, gloriously aromatic flowering elder twig. “You’re awfully accommodating today, darling.”

He shrugged, looking off into the woods with one of his almost-smiles. “It’s a nice day. Our ministry-appointed babysitter is confusing and I don't have to deal with him for the moment. Allow me my fun.”

“If I get a lovely bouquet for my breakfast table out of it, I shall be only too delighted to allow you anything you please, you hedgehog,” she laughed, and bent to pluck him a thistle that caught her eye.

He took it with a blink that looked almost uneasy, then smiled wryly, bowed over it, and dropped it into the basket.

“How is your ‘babysitter’ confusing?” she smiled, putting that blink aside in her mind to consider once she had anything to connect up with it.

“Oh, he and Evan can’t stand each other,” he explained, looking very confused indeed. “I keep expecting them to start barking and hissing at one another—and, Narcissa, I can’t tell who’d do which!”

She started laughing so hard at his poor befuddled hatchet face she had to sit down on a mossy log. He sulked, and whumphed down sulkily beside her to sulk more. “Never mind, darling,” she comforted him. “I’m sure Evvie has it well under control.”

“That’s it, though,” Severus looked up at her, troubled. “I’m not so sure he does. They don’t like him much here, Narcissa. He just… he doesn’t get on with people like he does at home, and the friendlier he is, the more their lips curl. I can’t understand it. Karkaroff says he haggles well, but he can’t seem to persuade anyone of anything. Everyone he paints at home raves about him—here, they talk about how sensitive Brits like me are so they wouldn’t want to say something bad, so how would it be if I just let them talk about the paintings, and then they rave. Just about the paintings.”

“They don’t want to hurt your feelings?” Narcissa asked. “Are they afraid of you?”

“No,” Severus shook his head, adding a new layer of puzzled to his trouble. “They’re quite jovial, as a rule. They keep slapping me.”

Narcissa opened her mouth. Paused. Considered Severus (in the light of his being Severus). Shut her mouth. Raised her eyebrows on a long sigh, and asked, “Where do they keep slapping you?”

He waved a discomfited hand. “Oh, you know, on the back and the arm and so on. It’s rather unnerving, but I haven’t hexed anyone on reflex yet.” He pursed his lips in embarrassment, and admitted, “I almost did, once, but almost everyone in the room was over fifty and after they’d finished ducking and putting up shields and gave me my wand back they just said they understood and it was a pity someone my age was already like that and they hadn’t thought England was having much of a war lately. And then they tried to get me drunk.”

“Did they get you drunk?” she asked, fascinated.

“Oh, we all had a drink, I’m sure I couldn’t say who drank how much.” The sly, there-and gone sideways quirk of his mouth told her not at all. More somberly, he added, “They had quite a lot of stories. Things were very bad here, you know.”

“So in London Evvie’s more popular,” she brought him back on task practically, “and here you are. Well, that’s just as well, isn’t it? Stop looking at me as if I’ve turned gravity upside down and painted the sky polka-dotted pink and green, Severus, it isn’t my fault that you’ve only ever spent any time in three places.”

“Four,” he corrected her, giving her one of his dubious and wary looks.

She waved her hand airily. “Summer at the Manor doesn’t count. That could count as either London or Hogsmeade. Hogwarts people approve of Gryffindors, these people approve of… well, something about you that Evvie doesn’t show them. It’s really quite simple, Severus. Tastes differ, you ought to know that.”

He gave her the blank look that meant his ears understood every word she was saying but his brain was never going to make sense of them, ever.

She sighed. “Did you get what you needed from the vampires, at least?”

“Oh, well, more or less,” he said, looking a little disgruntled but mostly relieved to stop having to think about why anyone might not despise him. “Well. No. Not from the vampires,” he scrupled.

She smiled. “But?”

Embarrassed, he said, “But it turns out I have a cousin who I get on with? Well. I say a cousin.”

“Like you have an auntie?” she teased.

He made a face halfway between scandal and revulsion, presumably due to thinking about how the phrase ‘Auntie Gussie’ would feel in his mouth, shuddered, and pursed his lips in marginally more serious contemplation. “A bit like that, only with a few more removes or seconds or what-nots.”

She poked him, mostly playfully. “Severus!”

“I told you I ran into Alessia de Medici at the potions convention, didn’t I?”

“No, you didn’t,” she said, a bit archly. “My aunt Callisto, however, did.”

He waved a details, details hand he would never have allowed from her if she’d, to take an example purely at random, muddled up greater and lesser mugwort. “Evan suggested I mention the matter to Mrs. Longbottom, and I said why, and he said because ‘everyone knew’ the Prince line got started when Edward of Middleham’s great-grand-daughter—”

“When Melusine Plantagenet married Harry ‘Say-no-more’ Boleyn,” Narcissa nodded.

“Those are exactly the names he went out of his way to legally shed,” Severus noted mildly.

“Perfectly ridiculous,” Narcissa tossed her hair. “The Boleyns were a fine old family, and he could hardly go about calling himself Tudor when he was being hidden away from the muggle world, could he? Only a man would have been surprised when everyone started calling him Seymour, under the circumstances.”

“Yes, well, under the circumstances and considering no grandson of Henry VIII’s was likely to have taken kindly to being expected to take on his wife’s name, I suppose ‘Prince’ was the most reasonable compromise,” Severus said dryly. “If one doesn’t mind painting a bend sinister into the family arms both irrevocably and unignorably.”

“One ought to be who one is, oughtn’t one?”

“Easy for you to say,” he riposted, still quite dry. “In any case, Ev said ‘everyone knew’ they’d met at the Polyhistoria Conglia in Florence, and that the British Princes are only the main branch of the bloodline and probably only theoretically at this point and if you want to find an obscure connection a Black witch can’t find for you, you should ask a strega. So.” He shrugged.

“So you wrote Miss de Medici?”

“Maestra de Medici,” he corrected, with the sort of resentment that meant he didn’t resent that someone else had reached his goal before him, exactly, he just wanted to be where they were sooner than he thought he might get there. It was an easy thing to mistake, Narcissa was prepared to concede, if you didn’t know him. Or if you knew people who acknowledged competitors (as opposed to enemies) outside their own heads.

“All right, you wrote Maestra de Medici. And?”

Severus sighed. “And Princes are, historically, utter pigheaded morons who like to swan-dive into situations far above their capacities in the name of Defeating The Darkness In The World.”

“…Oh, really?” she managed, fingers very coincidentally landing over her mouth.

Severus glared. “And who therefore occasionally end up with as much blood as a plantain, exercising their dramatic streaks by adopting names like,” he winced, “‘Sanguini.’ No, no, you needn’t try to stop laughing, explaining your death by hypoxia to Luke will surely finish him off, too, despite his grief, and then we can hand Draco off to someone who will raise him in a reasonable manner.”

“Oh, Severus,” Narcissa eventually managed, clinging to his arm with her hair falling out of its pins down their backs.[1]

“Don’t mind me,” he said dolefully. “I was born to populate a panto singlehandedly.”

“Oh, darling,” she giggled, patting his arm sympathetically.

“She’s related to him, too,” he said in an explaining tone of vicious satisfaction.

“Ah,” she tried to gather herself, “so she’s the cousin you get on with.”

“…He didn’t try to eat me; I suppose that counts?”

“Oh, he didn’t?” she managed, stifling more giggles.

“Well,” he said fairly, “not very hard. I mean, it can’t have been very hard if quoting Americans was enough to make him recoil back going augh augh augh the light.”

“Americans?” she couldn’t help asking, despite being entirely certain that she didn’t want to. In a certain sort of mood, Severus could do that to a person.

He gave her one of his mad, glittery shark grins, and, half snarling, purred, “God! Though this life is but a wraith—although we know not what we use, although we grope with little faith—give me the heart to fight—and lose!”

She raised a well-tended eyebrow at him. “I think I might recoil as well, Severus.”

Still purring and glittering, he oiled, “No one wants to go up against a rabid Jarvey.”

Crossly, she said, “Oh, Severus, you are not, stop it at once.”

And, as a matter of fact, she thought that it had, perhaps, not been a question of the vampire Prince noticing that he was up against an insane wizard who wouldn’t notice he’d been defeated until he woke up in the infirmary with both Narcissa and Madam Pomfrey scolding him.

To everyone’s unending discomfort and despair, DADA had been a class that Narcissa’s form had shared with Gryffindor. She distinctly remembered Graves telling Evans that no, holding up a cross would do her no good at all unless she was wielding it with a ferocious faith fueled with not only all the force of her magic but real conviction—but not telling Evans that this would, by definition, be dark magic. Severus had complained about that later, tediously and at length but correctly. As usual.

At the time, though, Sirius, the ass, had asked, “What if I really believe in my quill?”

Graves had rolled her eyes, and said, “In that highly unlikely event, Mr. Black, it would work just as well as Miss Evans’s books tell her a cross would.”

And then Severus had put up an earnest hand and asked what if someone put Black under an Imperius curse so that he would really believe in his penknife as a religious weapon. Narcissa had been able to tell Severus later that Graves had said it wouldn’t work because false conviction was by definition unreal. This had been possible because since she’d been close enough to the front to read the professor’s lips.

No one had been able to hear anything: Potter had predictably decided to take words that emerged from Severus’s lips as a threat to his friend. Equally predictably, Siri had until then seemed to think Severus’s question was not only normal and reasonable but interesting. Afterwards, of course, he’d felt obliged to not only back his friend up but to take the suggestion that he ought to feel offended and threatened and run away to Wales with it.

Sirius actually was a rabid Jarvey. He certainly spoke like one—not even out of instinct instilled by poor childhood training, but because he liked to. Narcissa did hope Severus would cooperate and remember he was at worst a rabid occamy or kneazle before she had to point out to him the sad comparison he had unwittingly drawn.

“Oh, well, if you insist,” Severus did, in fact cooperate—not as if he realized his danger, but obligingly, as though to humor her.

Suspiciously obligingly, in Narcissa’s opinion. There was something entirely off about him today; it was something like the same sort of anticipatory buzz he’d used to get when he knew Slughorn was going to have them make something ‘interesting’ in class, only more restless and distractible and jumpy.

Only it wasn’t the usual Severus-jumpy. Although he was startling when the underbrush rustled, he didn’t seem to have any real concerns that the rabbits were going to attack.

Gratifyingly (if worryingly) oblivious to her suspicion, he rattled on, “In any case, they wouldn’t let me have any samples to take home, but ‘Baron Sanguini,’ which is to say, Sylvester Prince, has scheduled at least a first lab date with me and Maestra de Medici. She’s agreed to chaperone as long as she gets at least a mention in the text of the paper—I explained it’s a thesis, not a regular publication, so she agreed to forgo co-author status. And since he won’t do it without a chaperone who’s both ‘of his blood’ and known to him and frankly I prefer to have someone else in the room myself, I must perforce agree. Besides, she seems reasonably intelligent and might well have something useful to add. It’ll most likely have to be in a Romanian or Italian lab, but with an IAMB-accredited de Medici’s teeth sunk into the project, I don’t expect more than a token protest from the Ministry regarding my travel plans.”

“Well, I hope not,” she mostly agreed, drifting up from the log. Later there would be letters to write, if only because Severus became most counterproductive when he was thwarted by utterly mundane and even more utterly predictable things he disapproved of philosophically and had therefore forgotten to account for. The active search for self-interest by Ministry officials for instance. The forgetting was charmingly Puffy of him, but the inevitable overreaction would be tedious and noisy. To say nothing of the other inevitability that by the time she was subjected to it, he would already have offended everyone he needed.

Just now, however, there was a juniper tree she hadn’t noticed before, with some lovely purple columbine twining around its branches that would accent the Russian sage beautifully. She broke off a heavily berried branch well wound about with flowers and brought it back for Severus’s basket. “That ought to be willow,” she said severely, apropos of nothing, and changed the grass of it with her wand. “I wish I had a lotus flower. Oh, or some lemon verbena, that would smell divine with the sage.”

“Would it?” Severus asked, his head tilted in a quirky quarter of a smile. “I could conjure you a lotus if you’d like to eat one.”

“I can tell you’re being wicked even when I don’t know what it’s about, you know,” she scolded him, looking about in case she could find some verbena after all.

“Mm,” he hummed infuriatingly. “What did you mean, you hope not?”

“Oh…” it was her turn to feel a bit restless and anxious. “Only… only that it’s gone a bit tense at home, you know. I’m sure Reggie’s told you.”

“Well,” Severus said cautiously, planting his hands against the mossy log and leaning back with a coiled curve to his back, “He did mention he’d personally had a rough day of it recently. And I did hear something from Evans about the Ministry getting its back up a bit, but she didn’t really say what that meant.”

“Oh, it’s so absurd,” she said crossly. “The Ministry’s starting to show up at people’s doors asking to search for Dark objects and curses—for our protection, of course, using the pretext that those awful people appeared just out of nowhere in the Portkey Office, which is Ministry-protected, and so how can anyone be certain of their own wards.”

“Are they showing up at the right doors?” Severus asked cynically.

“Well, I’m sure I don’t know what you mean by the ‘right’ ones,” she was careful to say, “but aside from their own members, who’ve naturally all volunteered, and Morgana only knows how much time they gave themselves to prepare, most of the visits seem to be at the Houses of families who have always been good, traditional witches and wizards, or who were known to think Grindelwald might not have been completely mad.”

“I meant the right homes to outrage everybody,” Severus said, equally carefully. “And it sounds as if they are. You’re describing some very fine old families, and of course Grindelwald’s methods and his motives, as everyone’s, are separate matters to be judged separately. But surely they can’t just go in.”

“No-o,” she agreed, stopping her face from making a face, “but they can tell the Prophet to make a meal of it when they’re denied, and to call it terribly suspicious and all that.”

“How… impertinent.”

“Oh, I don’t think I should have called the Ministry impertinent, Severus,” she said gently.

“Out loud,” he finished for her, with that long twist of a smile that served him for a grin.

Ignoring this accuracy, she finished for herself, “I would have said rude.” It would have been pleasant to think that this sort of behavior would provoke the appropriate outrage, but the war for control of the Prophet’s editorial page was always a most delicate field of financial mayhem. The current editor, not unreasonably, found Abraxas a touch offputting, and the dear old man was being sadly overprotective when it came to overburdening Lucius. It was true that her husband could be unsubtle and come across a touch on the pompous side when he was either nervous or overconfident, but since only experience would remedy that, it wasn’t a credible excuse at all.

“How fallible of me,” Severus agreed solemnly, and waved his wand to produce—some sort of flower. She didn’t really notice, because she’d spotted a cluster of gorgeous, lush ferns that she had to have for his basket.

When she got back to him, he was still holding out a little nosegay of larkspur and white lilac with his eyes all crinkled up: laughing at her ‘humility.’ She sniffed at him, wove it into a coronet, and settled it onto her head, turning her nose up at him.

He rose, and held out a hand to her. “Had enough of a walk?”

“I suppose so,” she agreed, taking his arm, although she did rather feel the basket was a bit empty. “It is lovely here, though. I wouldn’t have thought a mountain wood like this would be such a garden.”

“Perhaps it’s blooming for you,” he said.

She eyed him. His tone had been gallant, but just a touch bland. It made her think that it was blooming for her, because he’d enchanted it to, and that he wouldn’t tell her why yet, should she ask.

So she didn’t. Even though she had a nagging feeling that she really ought to know. This was Severus: he was only an excruciatingly annoying boy about keeping secrets from you when it involved a present he thought was his best work but was somehow still certain you weren’t going to like. She’d seen him set traps for people, and this was simply not what his face did at those times.

In any case, those people generally deserved it, and there were, as far as she was aware, about six of them in the world, of whom she was not one. He wasn’t that stupid.

Instead, she told him how furious Bella had been when the Ministry had turned up at their father’s door, as they walked back towards the Bulgarian Embassy, plucking the occasional flower or sprig of sweet grass that caught her eye.

It had been silly of Bella to feel threatened as well as outraged, she felt. Mother was always entertaining; there was nothing the Ministry could have found without doing a much deeper dive than concern for the safety of a great and noble House could have warranted. That would have exposed them to exactly the same sort of publicity they’d used to shame the Parkinsons.

She and Lucius were safe for the moment, she considered. His father had always been too busy being aggressive about the family wealth to be quite so ostentatious about the family’s values, and the two of them had not only enough of their own friends among the up-and-comers of the Ministry to make things a bit awkward, but had Slughorn’s warm approval on their side.

But that only meant they had time to get the Manor in order while firming up their friendships. Lucius might not have realized that yet, but she supposed that he didn’t have to, having married her.

She smiled at Severus as she stooped to snatch up a handful of hawkweed: no one would have had to tell him that, even though he wasn’t a Black witch by birth. She was so glad he hadn’t needed her to marry him. She couldn’t have done it and wouldn’t have wanted to, and he was the sort of person who made you want to give him what he needed because you knew he’d never ask, and wouldn’t accept if you offered unless you bashed him over the head and used a sticking charm to get it into his pockets while he was unconscious.

She was nearly equally glad, for more or less the same reason, that Evvie wasn’t the sort of person who worried about his welcome. Anyone who did anything other than comfortably assume themselves welcome with Severus got their faces bitten off, and sometimes even then.

“Narcissa?”

“Yes, darling?”

“Er… why are you cuddling me?”

“Am I, darling?” she asked in surprise, blinking.

“Er, well, my arm, a bit. Erm, we’ve been out of the forest for a good street and a half, Narcissa.” Which meant he was feeling stared-at.

“It will raise your stock no end,” she said firmly, and airily refused to even look at what she was sure was a dreadfully pained expression. “Goodness, but they do have a lot of roses in the windows!”

“They are very proud of their roses here, yes,” he said, that pained expression ringing in his voice.

“I suppose it’s made Evan entirely insufferable,” she smiled, giving his arm another squeeze.

“Evan is always entirely insufferable,” he agreed, in her favorite long-suffering tone. You had to know him before you knew it meant he was deeply, deeply happy. In fact, it neither sounded nor looked like the others, but while his transports of meltingly delighted affection looked like nothing else ever found on his face, they looked exactly like profoundly annoyed resignation did on anyone else’s.

“Will we have a rosehip tea?” she asked playfully. “I shouldn’t mind a spot of tea before long, I think.”

“Perhaps we’ll have some in a bit, then,” he replied, “but I need to do a small errand first, if you don’t mind.”

She shot him a really, couldn’t you have planned your day better than to take a guest on an errand look, to which he responded with a stubborn and silent I’m doing exactly what I mean to do and you’ll only fruitlessly spoil the day for both of us if you insist on pointing out how wrongheaded I am.

With a sigh for the fact that a pigheaded, mannerless twit was the only person in her life to deserve the status of ‘favorite sister,’ she let him escort her further into town.

At least he didn’t seem to be in one of his hurries, and was willing to amble along with her, although she wasn’t entirely sure what kind of teasing he was doing when he turned to a street vendor and bought her a paper cone of roasted walnuts with a pretty comment about nothing daring to stain her delicate porcelain fingers. She was rather afraid that the teasing might only have been distraction: that he was offering her something to eat because he didn’t intend to have tea.

He stopped her in front of one of the many doors, ‘closed’ only by mostly tapestries that in most cases had seen better days, that alternated with striking black-and-white striped columns along the left length of Ustra castle’s Veiled market square. Which was nearly empty at the moment, although it looked as though one or two merchants might have hired some of the less fortunate to save them the best places. No stalls were in evidence, but the tents were… charming, in a grub—or rather, a rustic sort of way.

“I had to go in as soon as I saw the sign,” Severus noted at the door, whose faded tapestry showed a willow-like tree. A Whomping Willow, although one that looked more inclined to dance and, perhaps, strangle, than maim. Its long leaves looked like red-veined crow quills. He had on one of the nonexpressions that someone else might not have recognized as a quiet smile. “It seemed a good omen, having Marcus Aurelius over the door.”

She looked at the words at the top of the tapestry, which were in unapologetic Cyrillic. “I’m afraid I haven’t cast any translation spells for reading today, darling. It didn’t seem worth it, when I’d be with you the whole trip. You know how odd it is when you go back to English and they’re still on.”

He commented on what she was sure he saw as her laziness by not commenting on it, and merely read, “Dushata stava boyadisani. The full quote is, ‘The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.’”

“That’s lovely, Severus,” she said warmly, eying the store with some trepidation.

“He was, rather. Or, at least, rather wise. Or, at the very least, clever enough for his job, which, let us be just, is saying something. Let’s go in.”

“Let’s not,” she proposed a more viable alternative.

He swept the tapestry aside for her.

With a sigh, she stepped inside.

And felt more comfortable at once. The walls were draped with more tapestries, and some of them were also faded or a bit tattered around the edges, but these were very familiar looking. They weren’t the trees of families she personally knew, but they were old and tangled and rich with the history of these mountains.

It was a history which was quite as ancient and steeped in magical nobility as her own island, as she would staunchly and graciously maintain until the very second she got back home. At which point it would no longer be impolite to remember how very muddled lines of succession could become in the haze of a Continental war. Or how seldom it was that the world lacked a Continental war.

The tapestries made her feel more at home, and the embroidered fish swimming through their waving, quilted reeds on the carpet were soothing and not notably shabby, but this was not the sort of establishment into which Narcissa had ever ventured. There were racks of… of, perhaps, wands on the walls. They looked almost exactly like wands.

Then again, given that she’d come in here with Severus, they might just as easily have been stirring rods: not more than a handfui of them were made of wood. Like stirring rods and unlike most wands, the wood was all bare, unvarnished, and their lengths were almost uniform—all short for wands, straight, and untwisted, despite some variation in the style of the handles. Unlike stirring rods, though, there were far more of metal than wood or even stone, and they all, to a one, tapered to needle-sharpness.

Before she could get a look at all the trinkets, each displayed like museum pieces, in the rough-hewn, well-polished shelves, Severus had stepped forward to speak with the shopkeep.

Who looked like nearly-human-sized, red-haired Hagrid, in Narcissa’s opinion, if paler and with more freckles. He dressed like Hagrid, at any rate, and his beard was quite as much of a disaster, though he’d made at least some attempt to bind back the crushed handful of wires that Narcissa supposed he must call his hair.

“Ilinov!” the fellow boomed, coming to meet Severus with a hearty back-slap that probably shook his teeth and every bone down to his toes, poor toast-rack. “You have come back!”

“Am I supposed to call you that?” Narcissa whispered quickly. This was behavior unworthy even of Reggie, she realized as soon as the words had escaped her. On the other hand, she reassured herself, if Severus got into trouble by failing to warn her about a need for complete discretion with so little time to prepare herself while already in such alien environs, it was entirely on his own head and he deserved it.

“No,” Severus replied in a normal tone, not noticeably reproachfully, “we’re not come under any false pretenses. By the time I met Maïstor Mastilov, I had come to the conclusion that I was tired of the way our guide was mispronouncing my name, and preferred to give the good Maïstor my matronymic so as to be less annoyed while speaking with him.”

“Milka Karkaroff never beat little Igor enough,” the Hagrid opined wisely. “But,” he shrugged and made a philosophical noise, “the crow cannot become a dove.”

“But a young swan can be mistaken for the ugliest of ducklings,” Narcissa smiled charmingly at him, her nails sinking warningly into her duckling’s long-cuffed sleeve.

“Hristo, may I present Maïster Schwarzrosiger’s cousin, Gospozhitsa Black,” Severus said dryly, adding as an aside to her, “It means ‘Mistress, as in Miss-or-Mrs. There is a Miss and a Mrs., but on the premise that discretion is the better part of valor, I’ve declined to learn them. I have no wish to be beaten to death with a parasol for guessing wrongly.” She could tell he wanted to step on her foot in retaliation, but he hadn’t actually done that in years, even in private.

She smiled prettily, reflecting that even if they weren’t there under false pretenses, Severus was certainly doing his awkward best to be discreet. He wasn't in any way making it impossible for the fellow to decipher who they were, so she concluded that he was merely trying to keep his and Evan’s names from being set down In the shop’s physical records. She herself, she noticed, either didn’t merit or wasn’t considered to need such careful consideration.

“Narcissa, Maïstor Hristopher Mastilov.”

“Ahh,” Mastilov said—again, sagely—pounding Severus on the back. Again. “So, then, you are serious, Ilinov!”

“Always,” Severus said, very nearly as if he believed himself.

“I don’t mean to pry,” Narcissa said demurely, with a curve to her smile that should have told Severus he was going to have to do some fast talking and faster groveling to make up for putting her in a position where she had to do anything so crass as pry, “but what is it that you’re serious about, just at the moment?”

Severus looked, to her eyes, abruptly embarrassed. “I’ve asked a service of Maïstor Mastilov. He requires certain assurances before he may legally provide it.” Which meant and I don’t want to raise suspicion by trying to dodge. “They have to come from a relative of Evan’s.”

She allowed herself to look a bit cross, although not actually to frown. She needed to keep as much out of the muck of his and Lucius’s work as possible. Everyone she knew was in such a hurry to rush into trouble that it was absolutely vital that someone hold back and wait for them to need rescuing. “Really, darling, if you needed a testimonial, I’m sure Reggie—”

“I preferred to ask you to join me, today,” Severus said, looking at her with more gravity than she felt was called for. Which meant there was indeed something going on, and she hadn’t the least idea what it was. She sighed.

“Well, well, then let us see to it,” the Hagrid declared, bustling Severus into a chair and pulling another out for Narcissa. “First: can it be done for you?”

Narcissa had the irritated sensation that the landscape had gone astray, and she was going to have to track down the bits that she recognized. Really, Severus was so irksome sometimes.

“What he means,” Severus answered her annoyance, “is: will you vouch that Evan would consent to my using his blood for personal reasons.”

She checked herself, trying not to stare at him. In truth the answer, when she’d got over the bizarrity of the question, was that of course Evan would ‘consent’ to that; Evvie would probably consent if Severus asked for one of his bones for ‘personal reasons.’

Severus wasn’t above sneaky, surprise gifts. Quite the reverse, in fact, and so Narcissa might have assumed he’d talked the shopkeep around into allowing Evan’s consent to be by proxy.

Except that there were considerably more than three chairs in the room. She hadn’t paid much attention it before, but there were enough chairs clustered around the low counter for a small family conference. And four of them were clearly chairs for guests of honor, such as would be reserved for one’s grandparents or great-grandparents. Would be reserved, put in plain speech stripped of sentimentality, for the Masters and Mistresses of one’s blood-Houses.

What Severus wanted mustn’t normally require the consent of the blood-donor, because that was assumed, Narcissa concluded. It normally needed the blessing of the families and the Houses of both of the young idiots involved, who as a rule should not be trusted to know their own minds.

Narcissa kept her face pleasantly skeptical as she deman—inquired, “And what would those reasons be, darling?” Inside, however, in silent, dawning delight, she started to plot bridesmaids’ robes that clashed horribly with dark red hair. And, of course, to design formal robes that it would be physically or magically possible to bully Severus into wearing. He was sure to insist that something soberly professional would do, the goose.

Severus got that look that meant he wanted to drop his face behind his hair and mumble and quite possibly kick a hole into the ground that he might crawl into. Just a touch too quickly, he did, in fact, mumble, “EryouknowEvan’stree.”

“I’m sorry, darling?” she prompted, because he not only deserved but was begging for it.

Scowling at her, he snapped, “Evan’s tree. On his arm.”

She permitted herself a moment of intense disappointment while she put her event-planning on hold… again. “You want one?” she asked kindly, dimpling to torture him with how sweet he was being. Even if he was, unlike Evvie, approaching the sober matter of sealing his alliances very nearly like a normal and responsible wizard. Evan hadn’t even waited to reach seventeen, let alone declared himself to either of their parents or House heirs. Really she ought to be praising him for remembering to make sure someone in Evvie’s family approved.

Still, she’d thought for one shining moment he was about to be really reasonable and let Evan’s father and Aunt Dru relax about their House’s future. Not to mention giving Narcissa and Aunt Dru and Mother something more colorful to talk about than Draco’s nappies. And he was boorishly refusing to tell her what it was all about. One had to have some compensation, and it was this:

He glared. Helplessly. Like a little cornered goat. Because, just at the moment, he needed her.

“Did you…” she waved a couple of fingers in lieu of describing sordid things, “contribute to his, darling?”

“No,” he said in an ominous not yet tone, and caught her eye to ask keenly, “but you’ll also attest that that’s only because he didn’t think of it or didn’t think I’d agree if he asked, won’t you? Or, at least, he wasn’t even old enough to get one then, properly, but you’ll agree he wouldn’t object to the idea now.”

Narcissa would not, herself, have liked at all to have Lucius’s blood under her skin. It seemed so unhygienic, even with magic to purify it. Evvie had never been as squeamish as one might have thought to look at him and his haberdashery, though, and he could be awfully Hufflepuff at the oddest times. “I suppose not in principle,” she agreed cautiously. “It would all depend.”

“Just so,” Severus agreed, trying not to roll his eyes because he did, in fact, need her.

“But how did you get his blood, darling?” she asked pointedly. “I assume you already have it.”

“Used a collection vial; he didn’t feel a thing,” Severus shrugged.

She looked disapproving.

Crossly, Severus pointed out, “He could have painted a hundred portraits of me sleeping against my express wishes, you know. I regard that possibility as…” he paused, and pursed his lips grimly. “As moderately unlikely, but if he does it, I’ll be in no doubt as to why.   We’d have a fight if I found out, make no mistake, but I wouldn’t be outraged or shocked. There’s theft for one’s own profit, and there’s appropriation for the purposes of meddling. You cannot deny that he extends me the privilege of meddling.”

She shot him an I can deny whatever I please look, but raised a gracious hand in agreement even before he started trotting out evidence she was almost certainly better off not knowing about.

“Then,” put in the Hagrid with shaggy-bear affability, “it is only to make certain—for my records, you will understand, we must take care in these matters to protect the families and the young people—that the lovely lady is a blood relation to your, did you say, collection vial.”

Narcissa, very quietly, sighed.

It didn’t take long, though; the man merely passed a wand over her wrist and Severus’s vial, and then said how pleased he was that ‘Ilinov’ had been able to bring as close a relative as a first cousin if he couldn’t bring Evan’s mother. It looked better in the records; he was sure they understood.

“Perfectly,” they said together, drily, while Narcissa pitied a nation so decimated that cousins were considered close relations. Then Severus started fussing with the man about types of wood and fruit versus flowers and the feasibility of coal.

Narcissa concluded she’d completely misunderstood everything and Severus was brewing something strange after all. Since Severus had given her an alarmed and cautioning and pleading and, she might even go so far as to say, panicky look when she’d stood to leave them, she summoned her elf instead, and had Melly bring her correspondence.

Only halfway through making sure none of her refusals to garden teas and so on sounded exactly alike, she got the feeling that someone was looking at her. Lifting her gaze, she saw that it was Severus, and he was squirming. “Yes, darling?” she asked pleasantly. Evan thought that Severus ought to be discouraged from squirming when he didn’t deserve to feel guilty, but Narcissa disagreed. Only insofar as it applied to her, of course.

“Er,” Severus began, in his very-nearly-apologetic voice, which wasn’t so much apology as embarrassment, truth to tell. Except when it was directed at Evans, when it was not so much embarrassed as embarrassing. “Hristo needs an affidavit.”

She went on looking pleasantly at him.

He gave up on weaseling, which also made him stop squirming and hunching. It was just as well, really; he made a much more appealing hawk than a vulture. Anyone would. More firmly, he said, “You’ll have to watch so you can attest it’s really Ev’s blood being used, as his family’s representative.”

She sighed. “You realize that this is all awfully suspicious, darling, and the only reason I’m going along with it is that I rather think you might actually chew your own wand-hand off rather than hurt him especially badly.”

Severus considered this. Dubiously, he allowed, “I’m not so ambidexterous as I’d like, but I suppose people have learned to cast with their off-hands before, when circumstances wouldn’t let them decide the project was low-priority. The prospect is fairly horrific, but I suppose we do have better prostheses than muggles… still, Narcissa, I’m sure he’d advise me against it.”

Narcissa closed her eyes expressively, so he wouldn’t see her doing anything so vulgar and childish as rolling them. There was probably something to be said for reducing the amount of time one spent with one’s childhood friends. Friends as strange and clever as Severus didn’t pall, but they also never stopped evoking responses one usually considered oneself to have long since outgrown.

When she’d counted to ten, remembered where all the letters were in finger-ogham, and taken one more bracing breath for good measure, she opened her eyes again and asked, “How much are you going to owe me for this, darling?”

He tilted his head and squinted at the ceiling. Thoughtfully, he decided, “I’d say it’s a tossup between your deciding, by the end of the day, that I don’t owe you anything because you’re delighted and that I don’t owe you anything because you’ve murdered me.”

“You’re being very mysterious,” she didn’t grumble at all.

“Yes, well,” he didn’t disagree, most unhelpfully, and turned to walk through a tapestry, which didn’t move aside for him as he disappeared behind it.

Alone, Narcissa drummed her fingers on the table, and considered having Melly take her home. Severus was really being awfully provoking. The only thing stopping her was that he was clearly doing it out of nerves this time, not to be smug about his own cleverness. Even that was a thin rope indeed: that toss-up line had been very deliberate bait.

In the end, though, she knew that whatever he was baiting her into, it wasn’t a trap. It would be against both his character and his interests, and she’d given him no reason to.

On the other side of the tapestry, Severus was in a chair, and he wasn’t even in shirtsleeves, just his vest and his flex-release wand-sheath, which had been one of the first things he’d ever bought for himself with real money, covering his Dark Mark. The vest was black, with buttons over his shoulders, of all things, and made him look far paler than the usual horrible greeny-blue-brown mossy-slate colors that no one with his coloring should have even walked near.

Then again, he might have genuinely been paler than usual, because the Hagrid-man had one of those metal wands pierced into his skin, below the wand-sheath, in the blue-shadowed tangle of blood vessels in his wrist.

“Doesn’t that hurt, darling?” she asked, trying to sound more amused than tentative. He might not be able to tell her if it was doing anything beyond hurting at the moment. Clearly it was meant to do something real, but he still might not want to discuss it in front of the artisan.

The Hagrid-man grinned at her without really looking up, a flash of yellow teeth in his dull ginger beard. “Is not so bad,” he assured her, drawing a second, wooden wand carefully across Severus’s skin while keeping the metal one perfectly still.

“It’s not like… any other sort,” Severus said carefully. He wasn't bleeding and didn’t look as though it hurt him, exactly, but he did rather look as though he were trying to work on an essay in the library while refusing to acknowledge that Siri was flicking hexed spitballs at his back. “Not like the sort that uses small needles to deliver inks or potions, where any magic is liquid, which I’m told is indeed painful, or a literal or magical… brand. It feels like water wearing easy channels into sand, and my flesh is the sand, moving aside for it, but also like growing scales, but then the scales aren’t there.”

“That is because you choose the wood,” the man told him, moving his second wand in careful stripes that ended in tight little clusters of what she assumed were runes he and Severus had agreed on. “The heart of the wood grows in your skin, but you do not grow bark, only the heart.”

“That would be a quite different spell,” Severus said dryly, and was told to stop talking because he moved a little when he talked.

To Narcissa’s astonishment, that worked. She made much of sitting down in shock with a hand fluttering to her throat, and got scowled at.

But not barked at!

If only she thought it would work in other circumstances!

The drawing of invisible stripes went on for a few minutes. Narcissa had to charm the shoulder-straps of Severus’s vest unbuttoned for the man, which made Severus hideously and delightfully and well-deservedly uncomfortable. Then he switched to a third wand, also wooden but a different wood, and repeated the whole business, with the stripes going in another direction.

By the time he’d finished and pulled the metal wand out with a hasty healing spell, pale shadows were beginning to struggle up on Severus’s wrist. They began, curling and elegant, about an inch up from where his shirt-cuff would end, wrapping around to the other side of his arm where the straight, diagonal stripes began.

Narcissa couldn’t make sense of it. She asked, “How can you see what you’re doing, Maïstor?”

“Ah, but I can see it very well, Gospozhitsa,” he said, wagging a knowing finger at her.

Severus, who had no sense of decorum except when he did, rolled his eyes. “I have on an area—finite! I had on an area-specific glamour. He had lines to follow until just now.”

She pursed her lips ominously at him.

“You’ll see it when it’s done,” he said stubbornly.

“Just at the moment,” she said, her tone matching her expression, “I haven’t seen anything about which I could make any sort of Evvie-related affidavit.”

“Well, no, there hasn’t been anything yet,” Severus agreed. “This,” he gestured dismissively at the rapidly-fading pink knut-sized oval on his own wrist where the metal wand had pierced, “is just a… a framework. Now you’re here we can,” he made another gesture, helpless. “We can do that.”

“Here, here,” the Hagrid-man encouraged, picking up a small worktable of polished marble and crashing it down at Severus’s elbow. Severus jumped, of course.  

The Bulgarian, or whatever he was, unrolled a cloth over the marble—raw blue silk, with an embroidered array in thread-of-gold that spoke of swallowing and transformation and gifts and seamless joining. She wasn’t good enough at arithmancy to be able to read its exact purpose, but what she could read made her rather nervous about it. “So!” he exclaimed triumphantly.

Severus and Narcissa looked at each other. Severus seemed rather at a loss. Forbearing to roll her eyes again (she was already well over quota and Severus had told Lucius he might not have her back for supper), she wiggled her fingers to get his attention and signed C-O-M-P-L-I-M-E-N-T \ I-T.

“What fine workmanship,” Severus said dutifully. His tone was rather more is this what I’m meant to say? than convinced, much less admiring. She didn’t blame him. It did look hand-sewn, without the even elegance and detail a wand-driven needle could create.

The man seemed to chalk it up to his accent, fortunately, or perhaps he just wasn’t equipped to notice when a compliment wasn’t full-throated if it wasn’t outright sarcastic. “Yes, yes, my old grandmother, she makes it! No, that is not your word, my grandfather’s grandmother.”

“Great-great grandmother,” Severus told him, suddenly finding the piece of cloth more interesting. The man beamed, presumably thinking Severus was giving his ancestress respect. Narcissa suspected he was really examining it for preservation charms he hadn’t been taught at Hogwarts.

“Well,” the man agreed expansively, and made a put-it-here gesture at the cloth. “You have these things?”

Without nodding, Severus slipped his hand into a breast pocket.

In his vest! Who on earth put pockets in their vests? She was going to have to start overpaying the poor tailor even more, if Severus was being this absurd. Then again, he might be adding them himself. She wouldn’t have put it past him. Not head-butting his way past a tailor’s garment-finishing protection spells so as to alter the garment, and not thinking it was in any way acceptable to do so.

When he brought his hand out again, it was curled protectively around the staid, cylindrical amber-glass vial of Evan’s blood (ugh) he’d had before, but then he brought out another. This one was clearly one of Evvie’s special wand-blown vials made for sale: a rose-red crystal swan that glittered like autumn in the shop’s many magically-bright candles. Narcissa couldn’t imagine that he’d allowed Severus to buy it from him, but since it was obvious that Evvie had no idea they were here, she also sincerely doubted that Severus had asked to borrow it. But it wasn’t the sort of thing she thought Evan would think Severus would like, or an idea she thought he’d come up with on his own. Not a red swan.

“Did you tell him you didn’t think he could make it?” she smiled, coming to her conclusion.

“Well,” he said judiciously, “I told him it was so unnatural that he couldn’t make one that would be lovely enough that it wouldn’t make people nervous on an instinctive level, what with red being the blood color and all. Not without turning it into a flamingo.”

“But why, darling?” she demanded, her smile going perplexed.

He paused, in that way that looked a bit lofty but really meant he was feeling a bit caught-out. “I felt he needed to think about color and nonsense. As a palate-cleanser, so to speak. This trip’s been rather hard on him, Narcissa; I believe he’ll be glad to return to work in his usual stomping grounds. He does so want to do well here and make connections for his father’s firm. You understand me.”

“Oh, yes,” she agreed, frowning just a little, without letting her lips really crease. “Yes, my husband did say he was fretting about…” she waved a hand.

Of course, what she meant, and expected Severus to hear, was that Lucius was fretting about the effectiveness of Evan’s efforts for the association that all the wizards involved had decided to bother her by getting themselves entwined into. Which was, indeed, largely Evan’s father’s doing, as well as Lucius’s.

Growing impatient, the Hagrid-man made a grab for the red swan.

Narcissa hadn’t finished flinching from the crash of the marble table on the floor before an ice-faced Severus was three steps closer to the door in a textbook dueling pose, wand drawn on the poor proprietor. It seemed excessive: Severus had already swaddled him up like a spider’s supper in some sort of thick dark stuff that was as much like cloth as webbing, and as much like shadow as cloth.

“Oh, darling, really,” she cried reproachfully, and moved forward with a cutting charm and her prettiest manner. “Maïstor Hristopher, I’m ever so sorry, I do hope you’ll forgive my friend? He doesn’t mean it, you know, it was only because you moved so quickly. He can be awfully jumpy, poor pet. I don’t know if you can understand it—”

“No, no,” the man waved her off, red-faced and gasping a little into his prickly beard. “No, only I did not think—you are both children, too young!”

“That’s what they said at the pub,” Severus muttered over Narcissa’s indignant sniff, letting his wand drift out of ready as his shoulders started to crawl up and his face to creep behind his hair. Letting the impertinence of ‘children’ go (after all, Severus hadn’t introduced her so as to clarify that she was a married woman, and it would only have been good manners if he hadn’t been listening to their private conversation), she came up behind him and took his bare arm. Shadows were still fading in and out in a grid pattern over it, but she didn’t mind that. It was something he’d intended, so it wouldn’t do her any harm.

“Yes, yes, the old men, they are saying ‘Drink with Rosy-yurr and work with Snyep,” Mastilov agreed.

In return for Severus only punching her hard in the stomach with his sourest glower rather than his actual bony elbow, Narcissa did her very best to only die laughing with her eyes rather than her actual voice and breath. Not in the least because apparently he’d been telling the truth earlier, which meant had been a waste of effort to remember not to use either of his real names. Although she might as well keep that up at this point, she supposed.

“But your Albus Dumbledore,” Mastilov pointed out, mauling the old man’s name even worse than Evvie’s as he hauled his little table upright and checked his great-great-grandmother’s cloth for damage, “he kept your England out of the war!”

“Not all wars are fought with armies and trumpeted with newspapers,” Severus muttered, fully retreated behind his black curtain now, staring at a corner of the floor like an humiliated vulture.

She drew him back towards his chair. “It’s all right, Naja,” she murmured, petting his bare arm. “Come sit down again, darling. Put your shirt back on, you’ll feel better.” Louder, remembering that she ought to defer to the man who’d just been knocked about in his own shop in his own country in which they were guests, she asked, “May he dress, Maïstor?”

“Oh, yes, yes, no problem, put the things on, please, Ilinov,” Mastilov agreed distractedly, looking around on the floor for something. “My wand, do you see it?”

Severus twitched his wand-hand silently, and the metal wand rolled out from under a cabinet.

“Ah! I find it,” Mastilov announced with satisfaction. “Now! We try again?”

“Thank you,” Severus managed to say with dignified rather than crawling humility. She waited until he’d finished dressing again and sat down, and rubbed his shoulders. He sighed, and leaned back dolefully into her hands while Mastilov fussed with the cloth.

Evvie must be used to it, but if Lucius’s shoulders ever felt like Severus’s did, Narcissa wouldn’t merely be annoyed with him for letting himself go, she’d be afraid he’d got as sick as his dreadful father. She was entirely pleased that Evan’s tastes were different from her own, of course, but still, she thought perhaps she’d better have a talk with her cousin. He was a bit too inclined to believe that Severus knew what was best and had a tidy mind and would only do absurd and unhelpful things like missing meals if he had a good-to-middling reason for it.

As opposed to I was in the middle of the chapter and I wasn’t hungry enough to faint yet. Which was an explanation Severus had actually given her once, very nearly in those words. To do him justice, it had been during fifth year and she’d quite understood why he’d wanted to avoid the Great Hall.

He still might have gone to the kitchens, if he hadn’t had anything stored away. Which he had. There had been an apple and a bunch of radishes in his pocket while he’d been saying that. She knew, because when she’d cast Accio food Severus should be eating this very minute they’d come flying out.

It was possible he’d forgotten he’d had it. Entirely, tragically, thoroughly possible.

It was less possible that he’d forgotten to button his shirt or waistcoat. She eyed him suspiciously. Ignoring her gaze, of which he was certainly aware, he suggested to Mastilov, “Perhaps the other first, Maïstor?”

Mastilov slapped him on the shoulder commiseratingly, and said, “Do not take it to heart, Ilinov. Every battlefield’s carrion-field hatches a liderc to prey on its victors.”

Severus blinked, and after a moment said dryly, “That may be the most disturbing thing I’ve ever heard, and that’s saying something.”

“Sorry, darling?” Narcissa asked.

He blinked again, seeming to come back into focus. “That’s right, you didn’t take Care of Magical Creatures,” he remembered. “In Hungary, all nightmares are attributed—folklorically, at least—to the liderc, which is a parasitic metamorph.”

“A metamorphmagus?” she asked, thinking of her adorable niece, who technically Did Not Exist At All and was getting the sweetest parasol for her birthday. It would change color with her moods—and, perhaps, help her learn that sometimes she affected things without controlling them. An especially vital lesson for a little witchlet with her gift, even if she didn’t seem to be getting raised as a Black witch. Which was dreadful, but the thing would have been impossible for Andi almost on her own with that stupid mudblooded lump for a husband even if she’d wanted to, Narcissa had to admit.

The parasol, of course, didn’t exist either. Formally speaking. But that was all right, as long as Father didn’t have to hear about it. And he didn’t, because Narcissa’s expenses now came out of Malfoy money. And if Twilfitt could be trusted to keep his temper for two years and not tell Severus ‘you are paying less than half-price’ to get one over on what was almost certainly one of the most aggravating and honorable customers he had, he could unquestionably be trusted not to make Cygnus Black apoplectic enough to decapitate the messenger.

“No, they’re not mages, not human; Kettleburn wasn’t entirely clear on whether they’re intelligent at all,” Severus explained. Mastilov had gone to the fireplace and was doing something careful with a tiny wand-operated bellows and a single glowing ember. “They’re hatched from certain eggs nested in, er, unpleasant warm places. I don’t mean unpleasantly warm. I mean you don’t want me to go into detail.”

“Don’t, then,” she agreed.

“There are two species, actually; one assumes several categories of shapes—leaves horse footprints, has been spotted as a firebird, that sort of thing. The other has only been spotted in humanoid form, but they’re both a succubus/incubus sort of parasite. The only-humanoid version may really be normal vampires that have got conflated with the other sort, actually; Kettleburn wasn’t sure, but they have a more symbiotic relationship with their victims. They take small amounts of blood over time and share hoarded wealth along with, er, themselves. Well, there’s talk of it looking like a chicken sometimes, but I have the impression that’s only because it’s supposed to have hatched from an egg, but then again—”

“I see,” she said primly.

“Yes,” he hurried on. “The other sort smacks a bit of the second brother’s downfall in the story of the Three Brothers: it takes on the shape of the victims’ beloved departed. And it’s a filthy, pyromaniac plague-spreader which is chased off by rooster-crow, so there might be some sort of race war going on there, one supposes.”

“One really doesn’t,” she told him repressively. “Severus, darling, will you please stop reading me a lecture in a class I chose not to take and tell me what your friend meant?”

Looking just a touch hurt before he turned it into grumpiness, Severus disgruntled, “He meant that the fortunate survivors of any sort of traumatic hideousness may forever find boggarts jumping out at them from the corners under their minds at any unexpected moment, and absolutely every expected one.”

Silently, she bent, clasped her hands loosely together over his skinny chest, and rested her chin on his shoulder. He didn’t move, except that he tilted his head a bit so that his cheek just touched her forehead. She squeezed lightly, and they watched the Hagrid-man blow careful plumes of flame over his ember, and sprinkle it with powders so it turned every color there was, and then pour something over it so that it went out with a sizzle.

He came back with it, and Narcissa looked with interest. It was very sparkly now. The roughness of the coal had gone so hard that it caught the light from the candles, not the usual dusty white-black of an ember at all. It was glowing from within, too, a normal-fire colored glow.

Mastilov placed the ember on Severus’s outstretched hand. Severus looked at it critically, and took a few deep breaths. By the end of the last one, he was breathing out white frost, and the air in the room smelled distinctly crisp, with that soggy-heat sag of winter battling it out with a fireplace over where Mastilov had been working with the ember.

First Severus closed his eyes, then the ember iced over, never losing its inner glow under the fuzzy-looking frost. Then the feathery little frost-tendrils cleared and hardened and grew, until the ember was encased in a diamond-clear cauldron of ice. All together, it was no bigger than the first joint of Narcissa’s thumb, and still glowing warmly inside.

Tipping it onto the blue cloth, Severus looked for Mastilov’s pleased nod. Then he pulled down the front of his vest, looking a bit white, touched his wand to his heart, and cast, “Micat sanguino.”

A spurt of blood fountained from his chest at artery-speed and splashed onto the ember and the cloth. Someone shrieked, high and terrified. Narcissa clawed into Severus’s wand-wrist and yanked his hand away from his body, spun him around in his chair, and slapped him with all her strength.

Then he was hugging her, hard, hugging her hands to her body (which was not subtle at all, the prat), talking a mile a minute into her hair in his most soothing and repentant voice about how it was completely over, how controlled it had been, how yes, yes, he never would do anything like that again because he absolutely never intended to have to, how he would have warned her if he’d thought for half a second she would have let him do it but really he’d had to and it had been at least 80% of perfectly safe.

At that, she tried to slap him again. Failing that, she kicked him in the shin as hard as she possibly could. She was out of practice, but her shoes were warded against cutpurses and other nuisances and he was gentleman enough not to guard against her when he deserved it.

Also enough of one to make a noise as if he wasn’t wearing his dreadful Quidditch boots and she’d really hurt him, and, once he’d been fool enough to try to explain himself (“I can’t take without return, Narcissa,” as though her problem with this was that she didn’t understand him) and get his foot stomped on for it, to keep embracing her until the shock had worn off and she could breathe almost normally again and dry her eyes.

When he did, warily, let her go, the Hagrid-man was watching them in only mild alarm, as though he’d seen worse at least a dozen times before. He remarked to Severus, “You could have only cut your hand.”

She kicked his foot again, viciously, and told Mastilov, “I’m sure your friend Ilinov knew that. It’s only unfortunate that he’s a manebrained, melodramatic prat!”

“Prince,” Severus corrected her gloomily. “I’ve lately been given to understand that I come by it honestly.”

She narrowed her eyes at him, and threatened, “If I break my shoes kicking you, you will replace them.” Merlin knew she wanted him to think himself all wizard, which did more or less mean all Prince, but he was not allowed to use it as an excuse for acting like a Gryffie fool! There were just as many ravens as lions in that line, in any case, or nearly.

He held up his hands meekly. She gave a satisfied nod, and, with a flick of her wand, pulled up the chair that was clearly reserved for the client-family’s matriarch to sit down in. She caught Severus stifling a smile, so she kicked him again. Which only made him grin outright, the prat, and, when he saw how irate she was, unapologetically catch up her hand and, still half-grinning, turn it so he could kiss her knuckle without hitting her with his nose.

She sighed, and only just caught herself before she slumped like a schoolgirl. What could you do with a boy like that?

Prepare, that was all. She demanded, “Is that all I’m likely to want to murder you for today?”

He looked shifty. “Er… that’s the only one you’re likely to want to murder me for that Evan and I haven’t planned together as a surprise for you that we at least hope you will, ultimately, like, once you’ve got over potentially wanting to murder me?”

Nothing. There was absolutely nothing you could do with a boy like that. She sighed again, and closed her eyes in despair.

“Er, Narcissa?” Severus asked hesitantly in his dripping-with-guilt-but-don’t-expect-an-apology voice. “This is the other bit you have to witness.” Hastily, he added, “We really do think you will like it in the end, honestly…” The trailing off had a sad, sagging little question-mark of hope screwed loosely onto the end, swinging in the breeze. Except that there wasn’t any breeze in the shop.

Crossly, she informed him, “You are the worst sister ever.”

There was a pause.

In his most awkward explaining voice, Severus said, “No, she knows I’m a wizard, and no, we’re not related.”

“Phineus Nigellus Black,” she reminded him ominously. “I have shown you the extent of his unofficial family tree that we know about. You have been in Dumbledore’s office, often, and seen his portrait’s nose.”

Severus ignored her, as usual. At least this time he didn’t bother arguing artistic malice. “It’s just that while we were at school, wizards were for, er, handling in a certain way, which is to say, as potential spouses who had to be firmly kept in their very specific place. And her female friends also had to be handled in a certain way—”

“Except Lucy,” Narcissa corrected, eyes still shut in sad despair.

“Well, Wi—yes,” Severus agreed. “She has to be handled in her own way.”

“Oh, as if you ever worked out what it was.”

“I did!” he protested, adding slyly, “Last month.”

Sighing gustily, Narcissa opened her eyes with Great Reluctance, and more than a touch of honest dread.

Completely dressed again, thank Merlin, right down to his cufflinks and cravat pin, Severus was looking at her anxiously (but not, as he ought to have been, because the cufflinks didn’t match). As soon as he saw that he was seen, of course, he pretended he hadn’t been, but she’d caught him, and tucked a little smile away.

Reassured, Severus brought the red swan out again, and tapped its beak with his wand. It split open and a little pile of what looked to Narcissa like bird feed spilled out onto the blue cloth, which was quite clean of both ash and Severus’s blood.

“So many!” Mastilov declared in surprise.

Severus shrugged, with a very faint curl to his lips that the Hagrid-man probably didn’t even notice, let alone recognize as a warm smile. He brought out the vial and asked her, “Are you satisfied that this is Evan’s?”

She raised an imperious eyebrow, because first of all he deserved it and secondly he deserved to have something he was this serious about taken seriously, without room for doubt. Just not to look as if it was being taken seriously. He didn’t deserve that in the least. “Do the test again, please, Maïstor. That’s a quite generic vial, after all.”

Severus gave her a dirty look, but didn’t protest. When the test was done and she had announced herself satisfied, Mastilov unstopped the vial and spilled her cousin’s blood over the little grain-pile. Narcissa wasn’t surprised at the smooth flow; it was more astonishing that Severus’ ingredients vials didn’t visibly glow with all the spellwork he had on them than that there should be a preservation charm in there that prevented coagulation.

Since no one including herself distracted her this time by squirting fountains of vital fluids out of their toast-racks or very-understandably screaming about it, she was able to see that the bird-feed did glow when the blood hit it. Or, rather, the embroidered runes and arrays on the velvet cloth did, and the glow seeped into them. It was swift, with a moment of moving light culminating in a bright golden flash. When it was over, Severus had two enchanted objects in his hand, both about the size of one of Narcissa’s thumbnails, both teardrop-shaped.

Only the ember, now cased in a glittering drop of what could have been crystal or ice, was emitting actual light, and that only from the heat in its belly. Both it and the now clumped-together heap of bird-feed, however, emitted the feeling of light: that unmistakable enchanted sensation that felt, in the pulse and bones of a witch, like looking at the air over a flat road on a day when the air was enough to burn an unsuspecting sitter.

Narcissa watched dubiously while Severus scooped them into half of the red swan, and sealed the other half over them. “Do you even know what those will do, darling?” she asked, squeezing her voice to drip out every last drop out doubt.

“More or less,” Severus said in his I make no promises but we shall proceed in any case voice.

Since, when you pressed Severus to elaborate on that phrase in that tone, it translated into nearly-English as ‘to a degree of 95% certainty, I know exactly what this magic will do, which is to say: exactly what I told it to,’ Narcissa sighed again and opened her hands in an if you’re sure.

As he recast his fifty-seven billion protective charms on the swan, Mastilov rolled up his blue cloth (which was perfectly clean again) and replaced it on the marble table with a great book bound in gold-chased burgundy leather, with pages of good, thin vellum (if she was any judge of parchment, which she was). He opened to a clean page for her, and gave her, to her surprise, a cuckoo-feather quill.  After a moment’s consultation, and a peek at what others had written before her, she wrote:

On this, the 25^th of August in the year 1980CE, I, N— of the House of B—, do attest as follows. That I have on this day visited this establishment named Dushata Stava Boyadisani and witnessed the enchantment of two blood-seeds.

That the first, intended for E— of the House of R—, was watered by S— of the blood of the House of P—: this done in my sight. That he gave of his blood full willingly before my eye, and that he is of the age of majority and that I know as fact that he need answer to no matriarch or patriarch. That he has given me the right and duty to be his witness.

That the second, intended for S— of the blood of the House of P—, was watered by the blood of E— of the House of R—: this done before my eye. That I am his first cousin, the child of his mother’s house and the heir to the line of my mothers. That as the heir to his mother’s line I may speak for his interests, and have and do give my consent to this use of his blood, so the seed be used solely by and for the aforewritten S—.

That I hold our names close because the alliances of my family are the business of my family and none other, and for no reason else.

So I have written, so I believe, and so I swear on my blood and by my wand.

She cast the same spell Severus had to ‘water’ the ember—but she, glaring at him, cast it on her thumb. Only a single drop of blood fell onto the parchment to sign her statement. Most of Mastilov’s other patrons had signed their names in ink, some in long lists of names, but her flip through the pages had shown a few statements signed only in blood.

Unabashed, Severus took the quill and wrote,

On this, the 25^th of August, 1980, I, the abovementioned S, swear my agreement with the statement of N of the house B as written on this page. I attest that she is indeed the first cousin of E of the house of R, and the heir of her mother’s line, and that I have asked her of my own will to be witness to all these things. I further attest that I have watered the seed intended for E of my own will, and intend that none other should have it, and will allow no other to have it while I can lift my wand. Nor is it my intention that any other but myself be seeded with what his blood has watered, and I will allow no other to have it without his consent while I can lift my wand. I finally attest that neither seed shall be planted without the concurrent mutual assent of all individuals named on this page. So I have written, so I believe, and so I swear on my blood and by my wand.

Without any acknowledgement that he had previously abused the spell in a way that Evvie was going to hate when he heard about it, he also restricted himself, this time, to a sane and sensible single drop from the center of his palm.

When Severus had paid, they all had to have a cup of celebratory smoky tea, which Mastilov had forced them to wash down with a long series of toasts. Narcissa and Severus had both surreptitiously switched the appalling fruit brandy out for the slightly less appalling tea, which Narcissa still suspected of being able to hold its shape without a cup. Then Severus finally let her gather up her own papers, picked up the woven basket of flowers, and led her out.

She gratefully breathed in the grassy, sunlit air outside, and turned to level a deeply accusatory glance up at him.

“Yes, I did really need to,” he replied imperturbably.

“You had better be sure I’ll like this surprise of yours,” she charged him.

“We think you will. Once, as I said, you’ve got over murdering me.”

Crossly, she demanded, “Where is Evvie, anyway?”

“Fetching everyone else.”

She frowned. “What do you mean, everyone else?”

He gave her his sweetest look, which wasn’t very. “Well, we thought we’d have a bit of a picnic, and once I volunteered to keep you occupied while it was being set up, he decided he’d better fetch everyone easier.”

Despite knowing that she shouldn’t, when he had that particular glint, she waited for it. She did, after all, have her wand.

Despite knowing that she had her wand, he let his face slide into one of his rare and demented hyena-grins, this one powered by extra anticipatory glee and what looked like a whole windmill of nerves, and concluded, “Like Evans.”

Forgetting everything, like her age and both her given and married surnames, she grabbed the lightweight, leafy basket and started beating him around the head with it. It had been that sort of a day. She didn’t even pay attention to the dizzying, unsettling twist of side-along apparition when it happened to her, because Severus just needed so very badly to have his obituary say his head had been bashed in with a flower-basket by a girl half his size.

[1] If this was not the real reason that pureblooded girls learned young to hold themselves still as lurking cats, it was in many cases the one that taught them that they wanted to. Hairpins could be spelled into place, of course, and were, but static electricity was murder on little charms that didn’t require house-elf fingers in one’s hair to get them out at the end of the day.