Devetashka Caves, Bulgaria (Part 1)
“Welcome, mes enfants,” smiled a woman’s voice.
Lily dragged her eyes down from the great pole of twined metals—copper or rose-gold and silver or platinum, she couldn’t be sure—that stretched from the edge of the large sand pit on the banks of the river to the mossy lip of the enormous hot blue sky-hole above them in the cavern’s roof.
Of the women standing on either side of the pole, the one who must have spoken was quite small, with hair too crystal-white for her round little face, wearing a simple set of formal dove-grey roves thickly hemmed in black. She had a merry look; it was the other who was really dove-like.
This second witch looked a bit older except for her hair, which, unlike Blakeney’s, was a true ash-blonde. She had on an anxious wanting-to-please-everyone look, which went very badly with her robes. They were of the same cut, with simple brown bands in place of the first witch’s black, but instead of the soft, pearly grey they were a burnt orange that flashed tawny and cream where the light hit. Where the white-haired witch had beamed invitingly at Lily and Blakeney, this one smiled anxiously, as if to say, well, here we are together, let’s try our best.
“Hullo, Mrs. Prince,” Evan said from behind Lily’s shoulder, “and you must be Severus’s Madam Nell.”
“But yes!” the tiny witch smiled, holding out both hands to Evan. Her eyes—blue, and a lovely clear blue, but a blessedly normal blue—sparkled mischievously as he stepped forward to take them. “I am of all things the most pleased to finally meet our adorable Severin’s great friend. You will not mind that I call him this, I think? My name also is a great stone, you see, because it comes from Petronilla—little girl Peter, yes, the rock? My husband, he thinks it is so-amusing to have married a stone—such fate! he says. Of course, my father only wanted for me to be a good woman, so virtuous, so serious.”
She pulled a somber face, eyes dancing, and slyly confessed, “Alors! I will not say to you he was a terrible father to think he must instruct me, no, I cannot say this thing.” She shook her head sadly at Evan, resuming her conspiratorial smile. “But does our good friend need to be told he must be so plain and so fierce whenever he is spoken to? I am thinking that he knows this already, me!”
Evan smiled, still holding her hands, and drawled, “I don’t think he’s going to forget, but almost all of his friends do grasp around desperately for something else to call him. It’s an awfully hard name to feel friendly about, unless you’re naturally stuffy.”
He straightened, and bowed a little over their joined hands. Sounding, to Lily’s surprise, deadly serious, and not sleepy or even lazy at all, he said, “You’ve already helped him so much, and now you honor us beyond what I could ever have hoped.” Relaxing again, he told her with an amused look, “I mean, of course he’d have killed for the chance to apprentice with your good husband. But he does okay in that field on his own, I’d say.”
He let go, and turned to the woman called Mrs. Prince without bothering to explain his mysteriousness to Lily or Blakeney. With a much more polite and less enthusiastic smile, he said, “Mrs. Prince, how good of you to come.”
“I’m so glad you invited me,” she said, not just earnestly but urgently. “It was clever of you boys to have Dumbledore ask me to tea, and so on. I’d never have thought of it.”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to make him some lace for real, to keep your husband wondering what’s taking so long,” Evan said, not really apologizing.
She shrugged, smiling in a habitually-anxious way. “I’m sure he’ll really use it, too, knowing Albus. Since his hair went white he’s been playing up the Traditional Old Wizard look something dreadful. Well, I suppose… that is about the same time he was promoted in the Wizengamot, so maybe he felt…”
“Quite,” Evan said, and Lily wasn’t at all sure whether he was cutting her off or rescuing her.
“There’s nothing I can do about your inquiry,” she pressed at him, full-on anxious now.
He was looking the way Slytherins always thought they looked, as opposed to the way they usually did look to Gryffindors: not nasty or cruel or sneaky, but rather cool and remote. Not completely unapproachable, but giving the sense that you were a suppliant. That human feelings were the last thing that might move them to help you, whatever else might do it.
He didn’t usually. Lily hadn’t thought he could look like that, not that hard sort of distant. Apart from everything, yes, but not above everyone. He hadn’t even come at her that way when he was at his most exasperated with her about Severus, and she was just itching to know what it was about!
His voice, though, wasn’t unkind, when he repeated, “Well, it’s good that you’re here. At least,” his gaze honed sharp, “we’re nearly trusting that it is.”
“No, I understand,” she said hastily. “I’ve already agreed.”
Evan nodded, and turned back to the French witch. He beckoned to Blakeney, and then sort of gently shoved her forward with his hands resting on her shoulders. “Madam Nell, there aren’t a lot of people I’d trust to look after Severus for as long as five minutes, and there aren’t a lot of kids Severus is happy trusting with power over other kids. This is Perry Blakeney, who we’ve called Cleo because ‘staff of Aesculapeus’ is too long for a nickname. Er, and because we thought we’d better do something preemptive before her classmates who think they’re funny thought of something else.”
Blakeney blushed, half in happy embarrassment and half in anticipatory mortification.
“But that is wonderful!” Madam Nell exclaimed, holding out her hands again. Blakeney took them, still blushing. “Usually they are harder names that such children as you are given, is it not so?”
“It’s not a weak name, ma’am,” Blakeney said, shy but solid. “It’s just not a mean one.”
“I knew Marguerite St. Just before she married your family, you know,” Madam Nell confided. Lily frowned; there was something a little familiar about that name, although she couldn’t place it. “She was a silly girl at a time when it was easy to do great harm in a moment of folly, and you would think now that she was not so great upon the stage as they say, for at that time, enh. The acting, it was not so natural. But even silly children can become wise and great, if they can learn from trouble, no?”
“What if they’re not allowed to learn from it?” Blakeney asked intently.
“What is your family’s answer?” she asked.
Blakeney’s eyes darted nervously. Finally, slowly, she said, “See to it they live under different teachers.”
“Alors,” Evan said softly, with a rueful little smile, and Blakeney let slip not only a nod but a tiny grin that Lily thought might have been just a bit smug. Or, at least, so satisfied that it looked smug in contrast to how she’d been acting so far.
“My little Miss Cleo,” Madam Nell smiled, “do you know why you are here?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Blakeney said, looking as if she would have liked to wriggle or bounce. She did let her eyes shine, but that was it.
Lily, who had by this point given up hope that Dumbledore had asked her to babysit a Ravenclaw prefect, sighed to herself. Clearly she was the only one who didn’t know what they were all here for. She wondered whether her newly-recovered friendship would survive beating Sev around the head with Tuney’s etiquette book.
“I will change your robes until you leave, if it is agreeable?” Madam Nell asked. Permission given, she tapped the girl’s light, summery, nearly-a-real-frock of a robe with her wand.
It turned the same cut as the other two, in a fresh, bright spring green with pearl-white trim, and Blakeney laughed. “Naj will like that,” she told Evan.
“Naj will think it’s twelve times more symbolic than you do,” he informed her, and poked her pointy nose. She seemed to gather from the poke that she was supposed to go stand next to Madam Nell, on the other side from Madam Prince and the pole.
Summoned by Evan’s beckoning hand, Lily tightened her grip on Harry, although he was snoozing quite happily and quite securely in the sling-thing the woman in the inn or tavern or whatnot had made for her, and stepped closer.
“Madam Nell,” Evan said, markedly less enthusiastically than he’d introduced Blakeney but less like a carrot-topped marble statue than when he’d spoken to Mrs. Prince, “this is Lily Potter.” He looked at her, rather skeptically, and extremely lamely ended, “Er.”
She rolled her eyes as far as she could at him, and extended her hand to Madam Nell, saying firmly, “I’m Sev’s friend, and I’m here because Sev asked me to come. Other than that, I’ve no idea.”
Madam Nell’s eyes sparkled at her—almost like Dumbledore’s, except less sedate and more gleeful—and she’d just opened her mouth to reply when there was the CRACK of apparition, followed by a howling shriek of soprano fury and Sev, more than half laughing, protesting, “Ow, ow, ow, stoppit, people!”
Lily heard the female voice occasionally rising over his attempts to placate her, saying things like Do not care! and Never agreed! and Utter harridan!
“Who’s a harridan?” Evan asked with great interest and very loudly.
The woman rounded on him, snarling, “AND AS FOR YOU, EVANDER ROSIER—”
It took Lily until the woman had stopped, stared, taken in the scene, taken in a few calming breaths, returned to a less brick-red color, and re-arranged her hair to recognize Narcissa Black-as-was.
“I did say you’d probably like it once you got over wanting to murder us,” Sev said, so meekly Lily barely recognized him.
Black turned calmly to look at him. Tentatively, hopefully, he held out what might have started out as more or less the same sort of basket Evan had made for Lily and Blakeney’s flowers, before she’d used it to assault him. It must have been charmed, because the flowers had stayed in it, and looked fine. Black smiled forgivingly, and moved to take it.
Before Lily could think to wonder why Sev had cringed into a braced position, the Slytherin witch had spun on her heel and, in a whirl of robes, kicked Sev squarely in the chest, plucking the basket neatly from his hand as he doubled over.
Lily and Mrs. Prince exclaimed—in outrage and distress, respectively—but Madam Nell just blinked quizzically, and Evan folded his arms in barely concealed amusement that coincidentally placed his own flower basket over his bits. Blakeney outright giggled.
Narcissa ignored them all, sailing unconcernedly over to hold her hands out to Madam Nell. “Magistra,” she greeted her, making a courtesy that Lily couldn’t quite make out. It wasn’t exactly either a curtsey or a bow, suggesting both but being done just with her head and shoulders—Lily thought.
“Ah, but you must call me Nell, ma petite,” Madam Nell told her, smiling, still a bit quizzically. “I thought, when you came in so fiercely, that you are our warrior-bride, but perhaps it is that you are our matron, is it not so?” She turned the quiz to Evan.
“Well, that’s what I thought,” Evan agreed. “Technically in our family it’s her mum or mine, but there are a few problems there either way and no one’s in much doubt where the trust and duty will resolve in the end. Madam Nell, this is my cousin, Narcissa Malfoy, who likes to call Severus her sister for reasons unbeknownst to Merlin or muggle.”
“I will not ask you if you know why you are here,” Madam Nell dimpled. “May I change your robes, until you leave this place?”
Narcissa made the same absurdly graceful gesture (Lily noticed, this time, that her elbows moved just a little, too), and stood still while what looked like the wizardly equivalent of a stupidly posh hiking frock in colors that were begging for grass stains were transfigured into, yes, exactly the same robes as the other women’s. These were wine-red, with deeply blue-purple trim, and they made Narcissa look paper-white with hair too yellow to be real. It actually wasn’t a terribly good look for her, although Lily thought they would have been good colors for Sev’s sort of pale.
She bent to give Blakeney a warm hug and nodded a cold, “Potter,” at Lily, getting a mocking, “Malfoy,” in return. Then she moved to stand next to Mrs. Prince, and Lily only just saw the start of some quiet introductions. If she hadn’t been to school seven years with the snooty porcelain bint, she wouldn’t have seen how strongly those introductions affected her. Mrs. Prince clearly didn’t notice a thing, but Lily watched her throat recoil under her smiling face, and watched her eyes narrow, and watched her consider whether or not to claw the woman’s face off before deciding on a charm offensive. It would have been terrifying if Lily hadn’t seen Slytherins operate before, or if she’d had any reason beyond simple humanitarianism to care about Mrs. Prince. As it was, it just made her even more wildly curious.
“And now, my little mother, it is of all things the most unfortunate that we are so distracted in the middle of our hellos!” Madam Nell smiled contritely at Lily, holding out her hands again. “There is no need for you to be distressed because this is for you a new ceremony, no! You see,” she gestured around the circle of the sand-pit, “we are five, and you will always be fourth, or you will act together with your schoolfellow.” Sadly, the schoolfellow she indicated was Black. “It will be so-clear, what you are to do, and if it is not so clear, bien! I will tell you.”
“But my baby,” Lily began helplessly.
Madam Nell got an expression a lot of people got around Sev, Sirius, and James, and Sev got around almost everybody. It said I would roll my eyes, but then I’d be doing it constantly. “It is only for me to look at him before I see that my silly bee has charmed him with sleep,” she said, in a tone that was only one personality away from dryness and probably-fond disgust. “I do not think he will wake before we have finished, me.”
It took Lily a second to realize she could only mean Dumbledore. “…I’ll kill him,” she decided. Dumbledore almost certainly knew what he was doing enough that a sleeping charm wouldn’t hurt Harry, but he hadn’t asked her.
“When he is so wrongheaded, I turn him into a frog,” Madam Nell suggested, dimpling conspiratorially. “It is the only way to tell him he has done wrong, you see, because when he is a frog he must eat flies instead of sweets.”
As much as she didn’t want to mock her old Headmaster in front of all these Slytherins, Lily couldn’t keep a sporfle in. That would be cruel.
Madam Nell raised her wand inquiringly, and Lily nodded gamely, even though she still didn’t know what was going on. The robes her peasant blouse and jean skirt turned into probably clashed badly with her hair; they were red with black trim. Not wine-red like Black’s, but distinctly flamelike. Mrs. Prince’s were, too, a bit, almost as fiery as they were autumnal, but it was somehow a different sort of fiery.
Lily had been Sev’s friend for a long, long time, if you counted the times when she wasn’t, and had sat all of Ancient Runes with him even when they weren’t talking, and for a shorter time she’d been friends with Ravi Patil, who’d had the barefaced nerve to name her twins for goddesses. For whichever or both of those reasons, it made her think of the difference between longing for Hestia’s warm hearth and praying that one of the more fathomable forms of Kali was out storming the world, licking up the blood of evil before it could multiply. Both meant wanting to be safe, but it was different.
The witch in grey motioned Lily to the spot between Black (ugh) and Blakeney, but Lily veered off to see if Sev was all right and say hello and possibly hit him herself. He’d straightened up and got his breath back, and was now examining his waistcoat in bemusement.
She planted her hands on her hips (bless that woman in the inn, hands-free was definitely the way to carry a baby) and demanded, “Severus Snape, what have you dragged me into?”
“You’ll do fine,” Severus dismissed her vaguely, holding his waistcoat out to look at it. “Good grief, I don’t even think these will come out.”
“Of course they won’t,” Black called in a cross voice that was trying to be a gay one.
“My trousers didn’t do this when you kicked me in the shins,” he complained.
“You’re wearing your Quidditch boots, Spike,” Evan called helpfully, hand plastered over his face.
Honestly, Lily could understand why he was preoccupied. His waistcoat had sprouted all sorts of words. The ones that stood out most were THIEF! and CAD! and DESPOILER OF PURE YOUNG LADIES!
In a similarly helpful voice, Black informed him, “If you take it off, it will start crying for the Aurors.”
Severus shot her a narrow-eyed look of hatred and death. He sighed, flicked his wand, and held out his hands. A number of vials flew out to fill them from pockets Lily hadn’t noticed. and then the waistcoat went up in flames. It was very fast; they’d gone out before Lily could scream. “I liked that waistcoat,” he said mournfully, brushing the ashes off his shirt and redistributing the bottles.
“It was pretty ugly, Naj,” Blakeney said apologetically.
“All his clothes are ugly, darling,” Black informed her sadly.
“Couldn’t you fix his taste?” the girl asked, wide-eyed, as though all her illusions were shattering.
“There’s nothing wrong with his taste,” Black explained irritably. “He simply chooses not to exercise it.”
Now Sev did acknowledge that Lily existed, by way of ruefully crossing gazes with her as they exchanged the thought that rich people did not understand the concept of making sensible choices while shopping, much less preferring durability and practicality to style when one couldn’t have them all at once.
“The girl’s posh, too?” Lily asked drolly.
“Her family doesn’t let it go to their heads, particularly,” Sev said judiciously, “but raw-ther.” She smiled, and he said, seriously, “Thank you for coming.”
“I said I would, but Sev, what is going on?”
“You’ll work it out,” he said, his shoulders tightening. For just a moment, he looked afraid to his bones, in a way she hadn’t seen in years and years. Maybe not even then. Then he forced his shoulders down, chased the emotion out of his face, and strode past her.
He strode past everybody as if no one existed, except for brushing his fingers across Evan’s wrist, until he was facing Madam Nell, and then he went down on one knee. “Mea magistra. The honor you do us is beyond outrageous, and my gratitude is beyond words.”
“Mon appareil de fumée,” she laughed, raising him up and hugging him.
Lily, by this point, had come close enough to have a good view of Evan’s face, which was a study, and hear him mutter, in a tone that clearly hadn’t decided how it felt yet, “A device of smoke?”
“Will you enrobe him, Magistra, and befit him for this circle?” Black asked. There was some friend-mocking in it, despite the nicety of the words. That made Lily feel a little better about taking her place between the two Slytherin witches.
Madam Nell raised her wand, quite ready to oblige. Severus turned to Evan, though, all bones in his ashy shirt, and said gravely, “She will not.”
He tapped his shirt with his wand, and the dull mossy-slate of it, along with his grey trousers and summer mantle, all faded into what Lily could only call the shadow of her periphery: the uncolor that ringed her vision, that she could notice around the edges of her sight but never, never look at. He declared, “I come as I am.”
Evan passed Lily the flower basket and unpinned his outer robe, kicking it behind him out of the sandpit when it had slithered to the ground. Thankfully, he was wearing trousers, too, although they were the light and swishy wizarding sort that were really made to be worn under robes, that the older folks thought couldn’t decently be considered anything but underwear. They clearly went with his waistcoat, both being at the level of the base fabric a satiny blue so dark it was fighting to be called black that flared bright where the sun hit it.
The waistcoat was a profusion of embroidered peacock feathers, though, rustling coyly, and Lily could just make out a thicket of dark vines woven into the trousers. Really woven in, too, not sewn in on top. She couldn’t tell for sure and she didn’t particularly want to stare at Rosier’s trousers even to practice for writing fashion pieces (seeing as she didn’t want to write fashion pieces), but she thought they were rather spiky vines.
His silk shirt didn’t have buttons close enough to the collar for decency, in Lily’s opinion, and she felt as though he was mocking her House, between its tawny color with the sunny-lemon shimmer and the red-gold of his hair. She hadn’t minded that her own hair wasn’t a good match with her robes until he was standing there in his extremely showy shirtsleeves. Now, even though she was wearing the same robes as all the other women and had the possibly unique experience of suspecting she looked at least a bit better than Black in their respective colors, she felt violently underdressed.
Possibly seeing her face, or maybe Black’s sour one, he murmured, with a blithe unconcern she suspected of being defensive, “Your colors are traditional; that’s nothing to do with me.” He moved up to sling an arm over Sev’s shoulders, and told him, “I come as I am.”
Severus turned to take him by the elbows, looked him up and down with no expression whatsoever, and blandly declared, “Absurd.”
That must have been some sort of private code, because Evan instantly melted into a mostly-vertical puddle and tried to turn Sev’s face inside out using only his mouth.
Black flicked her wand, and a blindfold appeared around Blakeney’s head. “I’m sixteen!” Blakeney complained.
“You’re not seventeen,” Black said firmly, “and I am your prefect.”
“Once a king in Narnia?” Lily asked, but the only person who might have answered her instead of giving her a blank stare or a curling-lipped ugh-muggles look was being attacked by a six-foot human hoover in silk.
Eventually, Sev did pry the giant remora off his face. In a tone of rather softer exasperation than Lily had ever heard from him, he demanded, “Are you done?”
“Never,” Rosier blinked, eyebrows up, as though it was a silly question whose answer he knew Severus already knew.
He must have been right, too, because Sev’s mouth quirked just a little, and his eyes dropped in his version of I could make a smart remark but I won’t, and he didn’t fight it when Evan appropriated his arm and made grabby-fingers at his hand. He just turned them, alone in the center of the sand-pit before the great pole of braided metal, to face little Madam Nell with her smiling young face and white hair and grey robes.
She held out her hands, and they each took one. It seemed, to Lily, as if the dust you always saw floating in sunlight was suspended. Maybe it wasn’t, but the breeze didn’t stop flowing and the birds didn’t stop chirping, the stream trickled on and everything felt suddenly stilled anyway. Madam Nell’s accent was usually less Obviously French than the way she used her words, but it was suddenly more pronounced, turning her words liquid as she recited:
I sing Taliesin, I sing perfect metre, which will last to the end of the world.
I know why there is an echo in a hollow
Why silver gleams, why breath is black, why liver bleeds,
Why a cow has horns, why a woman is tender,
Why milk is white, why holly is green
Why a goat is bearded, why the cow-parsnip is hollow,
Why brine is salt, why ale is bitter,
Why the linnet is green and berries red,
Why a cuckoo complains and why it sings—
I know where the cuckoos of summer are in winter.
I know what beasts are at the bottom of the sea,
How many spears in battle, how many drops in a shower,
Why a river drowned Pharaoh’s people,
Why fish have scales,
Why a white swan has black feet.
I have been a blue salmon.
I have been a dog, a stag, a roebuck on the mountain,
A stock, a spade, an axe in the hand,
A stallion, a bull, a buck,
I was reaped and placed in an oven.
When I was roasted, I fell to the ground
And a hen swallowed me.
For nine nights was I in her crop.
I have been dead, I have been alive.
I am magic.
The chilling thing was that she didn’t look ceremonious, or as if she were enjoying the poetry or letting the words flow through her or, least of all, trying to be impressive. She looked a little sad, a little rueful, and Lily believed her.
She let go their hands, and they stepped back without releasing each other. Lily didn’t know what was expected, but she did wonder if that was what made Black let out a breath that was probably as close as Black got to snickering.
Turning to Black, Madam Nell asked, “Witch of Evander’s House, how far back do you trace your blood?”
“To the thirteenth century, Magistra,” Black said promptly.
Turning to Mrs. Prince, Madam Nell hesitated, and then asked carefully, “Witch of Severus’s blood—”
Lily’s head snapped around to stare at Mrs. Prince so fast she almost gave herself whiplash. Okay, she’d never known Ms. Ellie’s maiden name, fair enough, Sev’s mum had never wanted to talk about her side of the family at all, but the woman looked nothing like any Snape Lily had ever met.
…Although, when she looked very closely, the eyes…
“—How far back do you trace the House of your daughter’s birth?”
Mrs. Prince blushed in what looked like shame to Lily, and murmured, “Records aren’t entirely clear before Dangereuse de L’Isle—er, Eleanor of Aquitaine’s grandmother.”
Lily looked at Black to see if that stuck in her craw. Disappointingly—maybe?—Black actually looked thoroughly vindicated, as though she wanted to bop Sev over the head and tell him see?!
When she looked back, Madam Nell was winking at her. “It is less frivolous than a coin flip, no? We must have some way to prevent them fighting, these old houses, when they come in less goodwill, is it not so?” Lily chuckled a little and shrugged, not sure if she was supposed to answer more than that, and Madam Nell turned back to the boys. “Then, Evander—”
“Evan, please,” Evan broke in, with more than a hint of begging. Lily saw Sev’s mouth quirk again.
“Ah! Then, Evan, we start all things with Severin’s side, if it is agreeable?”
Lily was just barely distracted from the budding suspicion that ‘Sev’s side’ might mean something in particular when Evan airily waved, “Oh, let shabby old black cede to the royal colors, absolutely.”
“I will kick you,” Lily heard Sev mutter, although she didn’t see his mouth move. Evan grinned.
“Evan, you have been the leader in bringing here to this place you who love S—” She looked at Sev’s face, which had its crushed-eyebrow resigned look on, and sighed, “Who love Severus, whose name was made to twist the tongues of poor Frenchwomen.”
Sev shrugged, looking happier.
“What,” she went on, “are the wishes those you have led bring to this circle?” She hesitated, and then said, “Little Miss Cleo, are you liking to show our good Severus how well you know your flowers?”
“Too right she is liking,” Sev answered for her, turning with one of his sharklike smiles. “Do not hope for an E, Miss Blakeney: expectations are high.” Lily thought that was unfair and might have said so except that Blakeney grinned back at him, clearly exhilarated.
“You, my Lily,” Madam Nell said, “will take the flowers and ring the circle with them, bud to stem. Little Miss Cleo will do the rest.”
“It’s a big circle,” Lily noted.
“Yes, yes, it is so,” Madam Nell agreed. “You will only come part of the way.”
Try as she might, Lily couldn’t hear what Blakeney said. Instead, she put down a ferny sprig with a little yellow ball she’d barely have called a flower and was swamped with remembering Sev and Remus and Mike Goldstein all shouting gleefully over each other in Arithmancy while Rosier kicked back with his feet on Mike’s desk and smiled muzzily in his sleep. She put down a bright scarlet geranium, and remembered Sev very awkwardly forcing himself to give her a one-armed hug, much less awkwardly and far too viciously abusing Petunia for what hadn’t even been a very clever dig, but had cut extra-hard for some reason.
She put down a bluebell and was rocked by competing waves of warmth and sadness and the ghosts of old betrayals as she heard Sev telling her he’d meant to sleep outside Gryffindor all night, he absolutely would have. A gorgeous blossom of night-purple leather-flower, and she flashed onto a thousand memories of Sev playing around with his cauldron and ‘the really good Greco-Roman dictionary’ in the school library, as he always called it, and a few of Evan humming absently to himself in windowseats, staring off into space with his quill scribbling away on a big notepad or some piece of thick parchment he’d set to hovering next to him.
And on, and on.
And it was just the same when she was done, and had, as instructed, handed her basket to Mrs. Prince (!) and gone back to stand between Black and Blakeney. Because Black started putting her own flowers down.
A perfect, delicate, starlike perfect purple and white columbine, with its trailing ends, and Lily remembered Sev up all night until he was greener than his school tie trying to get a recipe right, up in the air flying around Sirius to keep everyone’s attention away from Slytherin’s seeker and its other chasers. A twig laden with juniper berries and she saw something she didn’t remember: Evan flying past her own bright hair, his face a perfect mask, swinging his wand down to blow James’s up.
A sprig of something white and delicate that smelled gloriously of jasmine but didn’t look quite right, and she didn’t have any memories, exactly, at all, but her whole body pulsed warmly, craving Jamie like mad just for a moment, even though she was obviously quite glad he wasn’t here. A branch of bright acacia, and she saw them twined around each other in a shadowed corner of the school, not snogging, but so close and with such a charge between them that no one would even have wondered—and, the moment someone turned the corner, very clearly nothing but friends again, Severus at about the level of skeptical sarcasm he reserved for people he tolerated who were talking absolute nonsense, and Evan grinning sleepily as if poking the Sev was the funnest game since throwing quills through Binns.
Finally, Black stood, the circle almost closed, with just some blue and white violets and a twig of elderflowers left in her basket. “Severus picked these himself,” she informed Madam Nell.
“Severus,” Evan said, drawing a sprig of mistletoe and a spray of heliotrope out of his breast pocket (it must have had a cushioning charm in), “can be invariably trusted not to keep his opinions to himself.”
Sev scowled at him, and rammed him with his shoulder, but not really as if he meant it. In fact, once he’d rammed him, he didn’t actually move away.
“Toss ‘em over, Cissa,” Evan said blithely.
“You don’t make it, idiot,” Sev hissed at him.
“Oh, right, sorry,” Evan agreed without contrition, and handed his own plants to Madam Nell. Narcissa did the same, and passed Mrs. Prince the basket.
Eyes dancing, Madam Nell made a mistletoe-and-heliotrope coronet, like the ones Lily and Blakeney and Black were wearing, and gave it to Evan, and an elder-and-violet one for Sev.
Rather uncomfortably, Sev pried himself away and told Evan, “While you stand at my shoulder, I know that you know you will always have more truth than you may want.”
Evan’s mouth curled into a smile that was just a touch ironic.
Lily didn’t understand what was behind that, but Severus tilted his head sideways in equally ironic acknowledgement. “It’s my hope that…” he hesitated. “That you need never doubt, either, nor will, those truths that are failed by voice, or how ardently I mean them.” He touched a blue violet, looking rather as if he felt he’d failed himself a bit but wasn’t going to let that stop him, and shoved the coronet ungracefully at Evan.
“No, you git, you put it on me,” Evan laughed, and directed his hands.
“It’s not my fault I can’t reach, you goon,” Sev grumbled, but let himself be pulled around.
“You don’t even know what short is,” Blakeney muttered, very quietly, but she was smiling. Lily caught her eye and nodded emphatic agreement. She wasn’t as short as Blakeney still was, either, but Sev was definitely just complaining out of congenital Sevness; Evan didn’t have more than couple of inches on him. He only looked bigger because Sev was so skinny.
“Well,” Evan said, rather more casually, “while you’ve got me, you’ve always got devotion, but while I’m not a Ganesha-worshipper myself, I’d quite like all the obstacles swept away for you, and I’m game to try it. I s’pose Loki’s more our sort of god-saint-thingy, anyhow. I might have to take this out; did you have to tie your hair back so high?”
“Yes, I did,” Sev said indignantly. “You’ve got to have loads of it to tie it low, I see no reason—”
“Well, I see Cleo’s sitherwood flower wish is already being fulfilled,” Black remarked dryly to the hole of the sky.
“I just wanted them to make room to have fun,” Blakeney explained.
“That’s all right, darling,” Black comforted her slyly, “you needn’t worry—”
Lily couldn’t help finishing for her, “Everyone makes room to make fun of our Sev.”
Black stared suspiciously at her with at least three kinds of suspicion, at least two of which were quite sharp. She winked, and turned angelically back to Madam Nell, who winked back and asked, “Severus, what do you bring us?”
Sev reached into a cloak pocket and brought out a black pouch and what looked like maybe a pewter flask. “I bring earth from the Forest of Bowland, and water from the Black Lake of Hogsmeade.”
“Not from Sherwood?” Evan asked in surprise.
“I like the Sherwood,” Sev explained without rancor, “I’m at home in it. I’m not from it.”
“Oh, right,” Evan agreed comfortably as Lily smiled, and he twined around Sev’s arm again.
“You’re going to need that,” Sev reminded him, looking amused. Evan made an uninterested noise.
“I am so sorry, my good friend,” Madam Nell was trying not to smile too hard, “but yes, I must ask you, too, what you bring, and ask you now.”
Evan sighed, sounding put-upon, and let Sev go. In an I’m cooperating, look at me cooperating voice, he pulled out his own pouch and flask and said, “I bring earth from the garden of Rosier Hall, and water from our flat in Dye-Urn.”
Without a word, Sev grabbed him and pressed their foreheads together, mistletoe cutting into violets. He didn’t kiss him, or try to speak, but Lily could feel his eyes blaze even without seeing them. Evan reached up quietly and touched his face.
“Mes petites,” Madam Nell eventually prompted them, not unsympathetically.
Evan sighed and Sev got his barely-refraining-from-glaring-at-someone look as they moved apart, Evan to stand by Narcissa and Sev by Lily.
“Old friend of Evan, old friend of Severus, hold out your hands in a cup,” Madam Nell told them.
Black, Lily was annoyed to note, did it very prettily, but Lily thought she’d better not make a fool of herself trying. Sev’s eyes were amused along with her, and he said quietly, “Let the peacocks preen, we’ll just get on with it.”
“Too right,” Lily agreed, grinning, and made grabby-hands.
What he did with them was tip a pile of dirt out of his pouch onto them, about half of what was in there, and then cover it up with his own big man-hand and trace something in the air over the whole business with his wand. Lily had a strong sensation that heat and pressure and time were all boiling together in her hand without any of them quite touching her skin, and then it seemed she had a few small things instead of a pile in there.
The small things, when Sev lifted his hand, were dully shining black marbles, which they both regarded quizzically. “Did you know it was going to do that?” Lily asked.
“Not exactly,” Sev hedged. “I didn’t know the stone would be jet.”
They looked over at Black and Evan, who were also looking down bemusedly, in this case at some rainbow-shimmery marbles that potions-classes past told Lily were almost certainly moonstone. Eventually and rather sardonically, Evan said, “Ouch.”
“I think you needed the cushion, darling,” Black comforted him, giving his arm a rub and then pushing him and his marbles away towards the pole.
“What does that mean?” Lily asked, nodding at the black marbles, but Sev just looked uncomfortable and moved off with them. She sighed, hard.
The boys both gave Madam Nell their marbles, and Ev held out a hand for the rest of Sev’s dirt. His expression after Sev had done the wand-drawing thing was just like Lily had felt. When Sev took his hand away to reveal a few softly-rounded chunks of malachite, Evan burst out laughing and, ignoring his sour expression, hugged him. “P-p-protection for children!” he sputtered.
“Oh, shut up, it’s good for all sorts of things,” Sev groused.
“I know, I know, but Spike!”
“I’m not giving them to you,” Sev told Madam Nell, still very sour. “I need them to relieve my stress.” Lily didn’t blame him: Evan was nearly crying with laughter into his collar. Which, she suppose, said a lot about the stress Evan had been under, but she was ready for Sev to follow through on that kicking-him threat at any moment.
With a Buddha-smile, Madam Nell just accio-ed them away, but this didn’t really make anything progress, because Evan was howling, “Self-destructive romantic tendencies!”
Severus looked extremely cross, and then rather thoughtful in an exasperated-beyond-bearing sort of way, and then he bit Evan’s cheekbone.
Evan peeled away from him immediately, eyes completely round, and gushed, “Spike! Did you just bite me in public?!”
“Debatable,” Sev said haughtily. “Are you doing this or laughing at me?”
“Can’t I do both?” Evan appealed with enormous blue-ish puppy eyes.
“Not both at once,” Sev said, yes, severely, and thrust out his hands in a most chastising manner.
“Oh, well, that’s all right,” Evan decided, and tipped the last of his own dirt out.
He got rose quartz.
“I, too, shall laugh at you forever,” Severus informed him solemnly.
“I knew that,” Evan explained, perfectly cheerfully, and held out his pouch to Madam Nell. She tipped all the stones in, and then raised her wand.
The first thing that happened was the birds shutting up, and the buzzing of the insects. Then Lily’s skin felt odd and tight, and her ears popped. The flowers on the ground went completely flat, as if they’d been pressed in books.
Slowly, Lily noticed that the air in front of Madam Nell was sort of… shimmering. At first it was almost a normal shimmer, like the hot air over a smooth road, but then it began to take shape and color. First it was a pale blue liquid, and then it solidified into a metal-shiny red quaich—which, if Lily hadn’t been 90% clear on what was going on by now, would have brought her the rest of the way. The first and last time she’d seen that sort of shallow cup with it’s two straight handles sticking out, she and James had each been holding one of them, and sharing the wine between them. That one had been carved of gorgeous red stone, with his family crest in gold.
With one last twist of Madam Nell’s wand, it was transparent again. It could almost have been cut crystal, but it was less there than that. A cut crystal glass was opaque in ways that were hard to describe; this only had presence where the sun hit it exactly right. Lily knew, she knew that it hadn’t been transfigured, only charmed solid: the cup was only air.
Madam Nell took hold of the cup and sheathed her wand. Evan tipped the pouch with all four types of pebbles into it, and he and Severus both emptied their flasks in. Madam Nell took a drink, and passed it to Mrs. Prince. She drank gingerly, as though it were very precious, and passed it to Black, who gave Sev and Evan a warmer smile than Lily thought she was capable of and took a very deep drink.
Sev staggered backwards in Great Shock (at her willingness to drink muggle-forest dirt, maybe? Lily couldn’t think of any other reason), and Black stuck out her tongue at him so viper-fast Lily almost didn’t catch it before passing the quaitch to her.
It had no weight at all. It was very cold, but not cold like ice—like the breeze one might consider killing for during the worst parts of the summer. When she drank, there wasn’t anything like what had happened when she and Black put the flowers down, but there was a regrettable briny tinge of flavor that she couldn’t help but identify as eu de Giant Squid.
When Madam Nell had got the cup back from Blakeney, Lily thought the boys would drink. She did hold it out as if to give it to them, but before they could move to take it, she said, “If anyone would lay a challenge, mes petites, you must cry it now.”
She looked hard at Lily—as did Black—and then at Mrs. Prince. But it was Evan who raised his hand.
“Not funny,” Sev snapped, going very nearly blue-white.
“Not joking,” Evan agreed. He unaccountably had not caught fire from the force of all the incensed witches’ glares sizzling through the air at him. Lily knew him well enough at this point to suspect he had at least noticed them, whatever he was pretending, but they didn’t seem to be the reason his hand had shot down to grab Sev’s, so hard both their knuckles went yellow. “I challenge in your name.”