Devetashka Caves, Bulgaria (Part 2)
“I thought,” Sev said tightly, his hand unenthusiastically half-open in Evan’s crushing grip, “that you wanted to remove obstacles.”
“Remove them,” Evan agreed implacably, with a faint and amiable smile that Lily didn’t think meant anything at all. “Not pretend they’ll go away if they’re ignored.”
Sev turned his head to look at him, like a rusty robot, and had a silent argument with a bland mask that wasn’t arguing back.
The silence stretched painfully, and Lily could almost hear the snap when Black broke it. Gently, she asked, “To whom do you think you should bring Severus’s complaint, Evvie?”
A bit relieved-looking, Evan turned to face her. “Mostly you, I think, Matron. But maybe also to Evans, here.”
“And you think I’m going to be on your side?” Lily asked, eyebrows raised. Her arms were already tucked under Harry, supporting his weight and keeping it off her neck, or she would have crossed them.
“Everyone’s on Spike’s side,” Evan said. “But only you know about…” he hesitated, and carefully finished, “what it means to him and what it’s done to him, being the child of his father’s people.”
Sev flushed furiously, and Lily beckoned him over. He wouldn’t let her pull him out of the circle of flowers around the sand-pit to put an arm around his waist, but he did let her take his arm. It was a bit awkward, because he wouldn’t let her step into the circle, either.
Speaking to Black, Evan said, “It’s taken me two years to get him to agree to this, and I don’t want to have bullied him.” He looked at Sev’s Face Of Flat Disbelief, and amended, “We can’t be in it because I bullied him.”
Sev nodded You May Proceed with Oozingly Sarcastic Grace.
If Evan was hurt by that, or rolling his eyes, he hid it well, doggedly re-addressing himself to Madam Nell. “He only agreed after we settled it that the Ministry wouldn’t have to know, that we’d only do what would make it real without making any display, that it would be strictly need to know.”
“Well, thank you, darling,” Black said dryly.
“Well, we’re not suicidal,” Evan said, just as dryly, and her silvery eyes glinted in amusement. “Cissa, part of that is just Spike being paranoid, which is not entirely unjustified, and although I really do feel it’s a bit over the top under the current set of circumstances, I can’t blame him for wanting to keep information in reserve. And I do know he’s always liked to keep private, and that’s fine with me.”
“No, it’s not,” Sev muttered.
“I can’t help it if it’s hard not to show you off,” Evan replied, unabashed.
Sev scoffed, and Ev threw out a there-you-have-it hand. “See? The big part is that he still thinks he’ll drag me down, and he still thinks I ought to be ashamed of him. He won’t admit it, but it’s true. We can’t let that lethifold hide under our bed, Matron.”
Lily poked Sev in the side and raised an eyebrow at him.
“Potter, nobody here reads minds,” Black said irritably.
“HA,” Sev declared, and Evan looked as if he might have laughed if he hadn’t been feeling so strung-out.
“Little mother, bright warrior,” Madam Nell said kindly, after shooting Severus a repressive look (those almost never worked), “you have something to say to this challenge, yes?”
“Well, yes,” Lily agreed. “Sev, I don’t know what you think your problem is—well, actually, yes, I do. Are you going to make me say it?”
“I’m not making anyone say anything,” Sev growled.
She narrowed her eyes at him, her temper rising. He’d claimed to be truth. “Fine. You asked for it, Sev: Jamie didn’t have any problem marrying a filthy little Mudblood prole like me.”
She didn’t even have a chance to see whether he’d had any reaction to that at all before Evan had ripped him away from her, pressed him down to kneel on the ground and curled all around him, as if he was trying to be a blanket pulled over Sev’s head. He was talking to Sev, but too quietly for Lily to hear.
The speed of his reaction, and, to a lesser extent, the way that Mrs. Prince was moaning, “This is our fault,” made Lily think that whatever the blazes was going on with Sev, she was going to be blamed for not having expected it. Therefore, she looked challengingly at Black.
It was a coolly bored blue gaze that met her eyes, though. “I’m so glad you understand,” Black said pleasantly, and Lily glared. It made Black’s smile cinch even more charmingly sweet. Condescendingly, she said, “But don’t you see, Mrs. Potter, Severus’s case is nothing like yours. No one who meets him doubts that he is anything less than a power in his own right, no matter how hobbled, and will come to be at the very least a full partner to anyone he allies with, whatever his title. Nor does he have…” Her gaze swept Lily up and down, rather dismissively. “…Your particular advantages. It’s not only outside his nature but out of his stars to be either a trophy wife or a broodmare.”
Lily smiled back, just as sweetly. “I suppose you would know,” she agreed. “How is little… Darko, was it? It was such a big announcement in the Prophet, I’m afraid I can’t remember all the details.”
“Lucius is quite a proud papa,” Black acknowledged demurely. “He wants to be quite sure that his son grows up knowing that he was always wanted, and never hidden away like something to be ashamed of.”
“The occasional show of human emotion would do that better than any display flashing one’s gold about can manage,” Lily supposed with wide-eyed thoughtfulness, “but well done bringing the topic back to Evan’s concerns, I suppose, Malfoy.”
Black lifted her eyes to the heavens in expressive disgust, and murmured, “Salazar save us all from Gryffindor grindylows. Evvie?” she called, louder. “Is he with us?”
“Perhaps,” Madam Nell began, stepping nearly to where the flower-ring wasn’t quite closed.
“I don’t need help,” Sev spat, cutting her off.
Next to Lily, Blakeney flinched, but she was ignoring that. She needed one hand around Harry and the other on her wand. It wasn’t that Sev with his hackles up didn’t care who he hurt, it was that he had to prove something stupid about what kind of caring it was. He didn’t usually lash out to do physical harm without being threatened that way first, but then again, he didn’t usually have to.
Sev sort of folded himself out of the Evan-blanket, his face still very white and set. “All right,” he snarled. “You wanted to prove something, Ev—go ahead. Be tried.”
“I will,” Evan said, not letting go of his knee, “but Spike, I didn’t think she’d, after—”
“That’s because you’re spiteless space alien who does not understand normal human monsters,” Sev snapped, glaring at him. “Neither time nor bandages stop wounds festering. Don’t open them without antiseptic.”
“I was trying to apply antiseptic!” Evan protested, his eyes open so wide Lily sort of half-thought he was flapping his hands in distress, although he wasn’t.
Sev crossed his arms and glared even more, although that should not have been possible. Menacingly, he demanded, “Did you bring enough for everybody?”
Evan sat back on his heels a little, and his mouth and eyes both went sideways.
At Lily’s right, Blakeney burst out in a mostly-quiet explosion of giggling contained only by the hands she’d plastered over her face. When she saw that everyone was looking at her, she gave a little wave, and gasped, “Hi, Naj. Um. We missed you!”
Sev sat back on his heels, too, and slumped into his mournful-bloodhound Why Life Why look.
“Sev, I wasn’t trying to talk about me,” Lily said—earnestly, if not gently. “I meant—if Evan’s right, that’s nonsense. There’s nothing wrong with us. Anything some idiots say is wrong with us, I’ve got more of that than you do, and the bloke who married me is from a family that’s held in very high esteem by the same idiots.”
“First: considerably less so since he married you,” Sev told her bluntly. “Especially since he wasn’t disinherited for it. That’s the usual remedy.” Everybody, Lily noticed, carefully avoided looking at Mrs. Prince, whose face had gone far too withered-apple for the 40-ish Lily would previously have pegged her as. “His parents are given some social leeway since they’re too old to for starting a new heir to have been an even semi-reasonable option, but I think you’ll find the name commanding less value in the circles of greater power as time goes on.”
He held up a hand, and added, “I don’t tell you to care, only what I think you may expect. Second: Narcissa is quite right about how much may be forgiven those who are attractive and charming and willing and able to extend their spouse’s bloodlines. I meet none of these criteria shut up Ev.”
“As long as my objection is registered,” Evan said mildly.
“Noted, denied, and ignored.”
“Oi!”
“Third, you do not have more of ‘anything’ ‘some idiots’ might say is wrong with us than I do. Your father, before his retirement, was a very well-respected and high-ranking judge, and I only met you because he owned a summer home.”
“We had a summer place because he was an Assizes judge, Sev,” Lily protested. “We didn’t go north on holiday, he was assigned to be there.”
“Nonetheless, you can say ‘my father was the equivalent of a wizengamot sorcerer who owned multiple residences,’ and any wizard will correctly divine your social class, whether or not he cares that it’s a class-amongst-muggles. That is an advantage, and it comes across to anyone who talks to you, whether or not they understand what they’re seeing, and it isn’t one I have.”
“That’s true,” Black said, to Lily’s surprise. She wouldn’t have thought Black would admit muggles had gradations of class beyond scum and better-armed-scum. “But, darling, if Evans had told me her mother was a Prince,” she nodded to Mrs. Prince, “even if she’d been in Slytherin, even if we’d been friends, I wouldn’t have believed her. I believed you immediately because it made sense.”
“Well, yes,” Sev said drolly, “there was a wincing little announcement in the Prophet and everything.”
“No, darling,” Black said, tilting her head sympathetically. “Do you happen to recall what everyone found strange, our first Welcome Feast?”
Sev shot her a you’re-odd look. “Well,” he said slowly, “I think I should begin with ‘gorilla, aardvark, dormouse, donkey,’ and perhaps go on to—”
“Somebody setting the Hat on fire?” Lily suggested, grinning at him.
“I was going to say candles positioned so as to drop hot wax on everyone’s hair and food,” Severus replied with dignity.
“I assumed that was showing off,” Lily told him, “since they didn’t. Burn people, I mean.”
“I’m not sure it’s showing off when Flitwick decides it’ll be fun to do something pretty,” Evan said, for all the world as if he didn’t know he was in disgrace and on thin ice.
“About the feast itself, children,” Black said long-sufferingly. “Which is to say, the food.”
“Oh, the humbugs on the table with the proper food,” Lily said at once, at the same as Sev, lips curled, distastefully answered, “Dumbledore’s ridiculous fetish for boiled sweets.”
“Yes, exactly,” Black nodded, pleased with them in an ever-so-slightly-smug way Lily’s hand itched to slap. “We all grew accustomed to them, of course, but what did you find odd about it at the time, Potter?”
“This is to embarrass me,” Lily declared the obvious, glaring at her, then shrugged when no one seemed surprised, chagrined, abashed, angry on her behalf, or even impatient. Giving in with a sigh, she declared the also-obvious: “Sweets come after the meal, and the only reason for mint to be on the table is if it’s in tea or in jelly for lamb—what?”
Sev was looking at her funny. “Er… no, Lils, it was odd because the mint wasn’t fresh. That is,” he fumbled over himself anxiously, just as if he were nine and afraid she’d never meet him at the park any more, “yes, I suppose you could say it was because sweets come after the meal. It really is the same thing, I suppose.”
Black shot him a disgusted and despairing must-you-embarrass-yourself look and shook her head a little. When she spoke, though, it was kindly. “Tell Evans why the mint belonged there, Severus.”
He blinked suspiciously at her, but told Lily, “It’s a palate-cleanser. At informal feasts like that, where all the food except pudding is put out at once, you always put out bowls of something like fresh mint leaves. It could also be iced cucumber salad or a dry sorbet or granita. The idea is to enjoy each dish in whatever order you like, without getting all the flavors muddled. But the mint oughtn’t to have been in humbug form; sweets leave an aftertaste. Entirely counterproductive. The man’s sweet tooth is the size of a smilodon’s; he makes it so obvious it’s a wonder he bothers with the pro-forma pretense of passwords. Although I suppose having his visitors shout the entire contents of Honeydukes at his gargoyles at least gives him a few moments to refill the sherbet-bowl.”
“And that was what you complained about at the time,” Black began triumphantly.
“I didn’t complain, I noted,” Sev objected with his most mulish face.
“And that,” repeated Black, this time pointedly, “was what you complained about at the time, and the pumpkin juice being ‘sticky and overspiced.’ And you ate dish by dish and took water between like everyone else, and, darling, if you’d been watching the rest of us to check our table manners, believe me, I would have noticed.”
“I believe you,” Sev and Evan and Blakeney chorused, one more drily than the others.
She stuck up her pinchy nose a bit, and went firmly on. “Everyone else with whose surnames I was unfamiliar just loaded a bit of everything on their plates and troughed through it all at once. They either acted as if the humbugs might bite them or were pleased about getting sweets with their meal.”
“I acted as if the humbugs might bite me,” Sev said warily. Lily’s eyes felt crinkly, and Mrs. Prince looked oddly eager and glowy.
“Yes, darling,” Black said patiently, “but you thought they were odd because you were a wizard, not because you were a muggle.”
“What does that mean?” Lily asked sharply, her eyes uncrinkling and narrowing instead.
“It means,” Evan put in firmly, “that Spike came to Hogwarts missing a lot of things that would have helped him, but he was raised by his mother. And even if he didn’t come to Hogwarts with anything resembling manners—”
“I beg your pardon.”
“—He did come with perfect etiquette. The kind that if it’s normal you don’t bother with it except at exactly the times you’re supposed to, except the bits that never stop, and trying to fake it is a constant and confusing strain. The kind that’s never going to come naturally if you weren’t raised with it from birth. You’ll always come across as,” he hesitated. “Well, as not quite… not quite quite. Trying too hard.”
“Lucius,” Sev coughed innocently into his hand, clearly hoping only Lily would hear him.
Evan looked more as if he was kindly humoring Sev, possibly as a reward for being funny, than as if he really hadn’t heard. “And once he was using words people could understand and started standing up straight—”
“Oh, shut up.”
“Everybody could see it, just as clearly as they can see you grew up without being allowed to doubt how good you are,” he said. Now he was talking to Lily, but he’d put his hand back on Sev’s knee. “I don’t mean you should doubt it, Evans. I mean everyone’s given different advantages, if they can use them that way. Advantages different people recognize. And care about.”
“You are such a Slytherin,” she said, but she said it almost fondly.
“People who try too hard get things done,” Sev told Evan neutrally.
“I know, Spike,” Evan said. “I didn’t say he’s useless. Lucius is just the best way we’ve got to explain something indefinable.”
“Mm,” Sev hummed, instead of the two or ten snide remarks Lily could see he would have made if she, a Gryffindor, hadn’t been there. He looked very tired. “When can we go home? Oh, wait.”
“Spike,” Evan said helplessly, and scooted over to side-hug him. He didn’t let go, and eventually Sev sighed a little, and leaned in. “We can go home when you know you don’t have to go anywhere to be home. And you don’t feel guilty about it. And you don’t think I’m going to start resenting you for it.”
“Aargh,” Sev uttered, utterly frustrated, and ground his eyes into Evan’s shoulder. Whose owner shrugged, still helplessly, and looked beseechingly at Madam Nell.
“You didn’t warn me you would do this, mon petit,” she said reproachfully.
“Our fer-de-lance never warns anybody about anything,” Black said long-sufferingly. “He probably thought of it while he was opening his mouth.”
“I plan things sometimes!” Evan protested.
Sourly, Sev asked, “What about this time?”
“I plan… when we make dinner reservations,” Evan insisted.
“And this time?”
“And I make sketches for landscapes and everything.”
“And this time?”
“And I go on site and look at people’s wardrobes and talk about their pets with them and we go through their jewel-boxes and all over their grounds or wherever else they think they’d like, and—”
“That would be a ‘no comment,’ then,” Sev told Black dryly.
Just as dryly, she replied, “Well, Nimue’s oak, darling, that could just mean, oh, anything.”
“If anybody had warned me to think of such a thing,” Madam Nell continued as though just continuing her previous sentence, “perhaps I could have thought of a thing mon appareil de fumée might like even a little bit that would convince him. But in this way? Bah!”
“Well, Sev’s never cared if he liked anything as long as it worked,” Lily told her.
Madam Nell pursed her lips, and then concluded, “Matron and sorceress and old friend of Evander. Bright warrior, old friend of Severus. Come to me and we will speak.”
“She could use our names,” Lily grumbled, half to Black and half under her breath as they walked around the ring of flowers.
“It’s not her fault Severus insisted on such a small ceremony that those titles only mean she’s called over two celebrants instead of five,” Black replied almost civilly and definitely resignedly. “Which, I feel quite safe in assuming, is why we’re only seven including the boys instead of all of Evvie’s family and firm and most of Slytherin and half of Ravenclaw and the entire research floor of St. Mungo’s. He’s such a goose.”
“My god, we agree on something,” Lily gasped, grinning.
Black sniffed and put her nose up. “Don’t let it go to your head, Potter.” She exchanged a look with Mrs. Prince, as they passed her, that was so fleeting that Lily would have missed it if it hadn’t left Mrs. Prince sagging and hangdog and flushed.
“What was that about?” Lily hissed.
“The magistra should have called over the witches of their blood to this conclave,” Black had the courtesy to say quietly, “but Severus’s grandmother doesn’t know him at all, so what could she have to say? Evvie’s still trying to determine whether she had any choice in that.”
“Maybe he isn’t still,” Lily suggested, “if they invited her.”
Black leveled an honestly, can even Gryffindors be this naïve look at her. “Really, Potter, it’s called rope.”
Lily frowned and would have asked another question, but at this point Madam Nell’s amazing nearly ground-length kimono-sleeves were folding her and Black (and Harry) into what Black would probably not have called a football-huddle. She’d thought their robes were all the same cut, but she didn’t have sleeves like that.
When they’d heard her proposal, Black said firmly, “Absolutely not.”
“No, I did not think he would like it,” Madam Nell agreed, “but—”
“Like it!” Black repeated, eyebrows arched. “Magistra, when one suggests that he’s a clever enough wizard to attempt animagery he throws an actual tantrum and accuses one of accusing him of not being a real human being. And animagery, I need hardly point out, is under one’s own control.”
That might have made Lily feel a little queasy, not to mention indignant on her boys’ behalf, except it was just Sev being odd. “Besides, it wouldn’t work,” she put in.
Madam Nell smiled at her. “No?”
She shook her head. “He isn’t worried about Rosier. He’s worried everyone will think he’s fed him amortentia or just wants him for his money or something equally dim, and then they’ll sneer at Evan and eventually Evan will notice and hate him and also maybe lose business.” She didn’t have to ask him to know.
“That does sound like Severus.” Lily wasn’t sure whether Black’s annoyance was for Severus or for her, but she did sound most aggrieved, especially when she sighed. “What you’re saying, Potter, is that the Magistra’s plan only needs to be reversed.”
She winced for Sev, and even for Evan, but nodded.
“I agree,” Black said reluctantly, but her nod was sharp. She didn’t wait for anyone else to have anything else to say, but drifted lightly back to her place in the circle.
Lily didn’t go back straightaway. First, she pointed into the quaich, and asked Madam Nell, “Can I use two of those?”
“Only two? Yes, this will be all right,” the witch agreed, looking curious. “Evan? Evan, will you look at me, my friend? No, no, I do not ask you to come up to me, only meet my eyes.”
Lily didn’t pay too much attention to that, because she was busy bespelling the pieces of moonstone and rose quartz she’d fished out of the cup as she walked back to her place.
“Stand, if you please,” Madam Nell requested. “Evan, we have listened to you, and it was your intention to challenge yourself in Severus’s name, is that true?” Evan nodded, his hand still tangled with Sev’s. “But once we have heard you, we find that you are giving voice to Severus’s challenge to himself, not to you. Severus, is this wrong?”
“I wasn’t challenging anybody,” Sev said, exasperated.
“You did say ‘be tried,’ Sev,” Lily reminded him. “You said if Evan wanted to prove something, it should be proven.”
“That is not—”
“False to the spirit of what you were feeling,” Black cut in sternly. Sev shut up, and shot her a betrayed look. “And as much as I adore you, darling, you aren’t wrong to want armor against old cats who don’t know you and could hurt him. You’re right to think it can’t come easily or painlessly, of course, but quickly is another matter.” She gave him a pitying look, and said, “This trial would be no trouble for my husband, of course, but still, your sort of cobra might at least have a chance…”
“Narcissa, what the hell—”
Lily cut him off by whistling—just a few lines of Steeleye Span. She didn’t know if he still remembered it. He’d got so bored with them once she’d made him take her to a Gravy Train concert and started him on a frankly crazy-eyed hunt for music that didn’t drive him mental by being almost alive enough to brew to, whatever that meant. But there had been a year or two when they’d listened to the old ballads and tried to work out how likely they were to have any truth in them.
So now she just gave him a couple of lines of warning, because this was supposed to be a test, wasn’t it? It wasn’t supposed to be easy. So she whistled:
She’s away to Carterhaugh to flower herself a gown
She had not picked a rose, a rose, a rose but barely twa…
And he was quite bright, was her Sev, because he whipped away from Evan at once, his dark eyes rounding in horror, and he whispered, “You have got to be fucking kidding me, our Lils—”
She smiled at him, and tossed him the enchanted pebbles. When he caught them, the rose-quartz turned into a red and white rose, the moonstone into a bright yellowy-orange one. He yelped as his hands closed around the stems, but that was just surprise; she unfortunately knew that a few thorn-pricks were nothing to him. When his wide eyes jerked up to hers again, she advised, “Hold on.”
“Evans,” Evan said irritably, “What on earth—?”
But then he couldn’t say anything else, because Sev had tackled him to the ground and knocked the breath out of him.
Madam Nell quietly touched her wand to the earth, to the last gap between the flowers, and a little zip of light ran from it to hit Evan’s heel. She immediately filled the gap with an X of vervain lightly tied over a juniper sprig, enchantment over protection, and everyone felt pushed back a step as the ring silently thrummed.
Everyone also wanted to take a step back, because Evan had turned into a giant mass of writhing, thorny vines that were beating all around themselves. Lily couldn’t see how much damage they were doing, because the thrumming had resolved into a swirling dome of translucent petals. She could see past them, but not in detail.
Panicking with guilt, she looked at Black, and managed to bring herself to start to ask, “Um, did I…?”
“It’s the sigil of his House, Potter, don’t be stupider than you can help,” Black answered tersely, busy straining her eyes in.
Unless Lily was very much mistaken, Severus had just unhinged his jaw like a starving anaconda and crunched savagely down on a vine like a bloody-minded terrier.
The writhing stopped, possibly in incredulity (she wouldn’t have blamed it), and then Severus was holding a sodding enormous brown snake with a very pretty diamond pattern, bright black eyes, and the biggest, curviest, nastiest, pinkest fangs Lily ever wanted to see, ever. They were so big she could see they had hand-length clear needles dripping poison angling into the snake’s mouth, because the snake was so big it took up the whole sand pit.
Lily was fairly sure nobody was going to tease Sev for the yipe that escaped him (which was, to be perfectly honest, more than a bit squeaky) when he realized what had happened. Especially because he made it because the snake was trying to bite his head off, and his other reaction to that was to swing behind the damn thing’s head and cover it with a) a full-bodied neck-hug and b) a coating of frost, all without letting go of either rose.
She was starting to feel really guilty about those; she’d just meant them as a clue, for god’s sake.
The snake started swaying, going sluggish, and then it slumped into…
Into ick. That was the only word that occurred. It was just a… a great, big, slimy, reeking black ick that Sev’s arms slowly sank through, and… and turned him pink, and started steaming holes into his clothes…
“Oh, who’s the diced flobberworm with no ego now?” Sev bellowed, incensed. “If I’m not allowed to get away with this shite, neither are you! Stop it atonce or I’m burning every single one of your waistcoats immediately we unpack! And don’t think I won’t have Linkin on my side, because when I tell him about this insult—!”
Then he, nearly in the same instant, disappeared into a mound of snarling grey-brown fur and screamed in pure panic.
Lily nearly stopped breathing. She wasn’t alone in being plastered to the dome of petals; Black and Blakeney were both right next to her. Black looked as though confusion was making her terror worse, but even though Lily thought she knew what this was about, she couldn’t have helped her yearmate out even if she’d wanted to. She didn’t know how Madam Nell knew, unless it was because she and Sev were clearly close in a way he hadn’t been with his Hogwarts teachers, but this one wasn’t about Rosier at all.
That was why they both saw the wolf pulling away with a whimper when Sev started smacking it on its giant nose with the yellow rose’s stem, and failing to get away because he’d used the red and white one to tangle his fist inextricably into its chest fur.
And then the petals faded, and Madam Nell was cutting the trumpet flower away from the valerian, leaving the circle closed. And it was Evan’s human nose that was scratched up, and Sev had at least succeeded in destroying one of the poor man’s waistcoats. Sev himself was all cut up from the thorns, and the black goo had not helped there. As if that weren’t enough, he was an unaccustomed pink all over and the ordinary shirt and trousers he’d turned all elegant were in utter tatters. The mantle had been half torn off him, and was hanging down his back in quite the wrong way.
“—are those for?” Evan finished, still irritably. And then, in surprise, touching his nose, “Ow.” And then, his eyes just about falling out of his head as he scrambled closer, “Spike?!”
“I’ve got you,” Sev mumbled, “you idiot.”
“What happened?” Evan demanded. Lily thought he was patting Severus over in a panic or feeling him up, but then he fetched a vial out of Sev’s shirt and started dabbing at him with the stopper.
“What did—stop that—what did you think was going to happen?” Sev growled, batting his hand away and trying with great dedication to burst the yellow bloom over his head. Lily had made it out of stone, though, and hadn’t made it to be fragile: it didn’t. “If you meant the sacrifice to be of mere time and effort, you should have introduced the idea before the ceremony!”
“Sacrificing was the opposite of the point!”
“You have to put in to get out, you—you—you dunderhead! Theory of Magic Zero-oh-One!”
“I am getting you out of the Balkans, it’s doing terrible things to your vocabulary,” Evan decided.
“That was English!!!! If it is between Scotland and London it is STILL ENGLAND, YOU BACON-FACE PONCE!!!”
“Cleo,” Evan said, ignoring the face-thwapping he was getting as best as one could with the occasional mouth full of rose petals—which Lily thought was fair, since it would have been easier for Sev to get him with the thorns than not, and it was 100% not, “I don’t suppose you’d like to fill me in?”
Blakeney looked across Lily at Black, and then told Evan, “You’ve got a pensieve, Lance.”
Sev stopped hitting Evan with his rose to look at Blakeney with approval. “Cruel, Blakeney. However, I am not currently authorized to assign points.”
“Are you going to be?” she asked with interest, while Evan gaped at Sev with giant tragedy eyes of apprehension and betrayal and clutched at his tattered shirt-front.
“Professors Dumbledore and Slughorn and I will jointly determine the details of my role once I’ve got back to Hogwarts with my research from this trip,” he explained, sliding his arm down to Evan’s shoulder.
“Wait, I thought you said—” Lily started.
Evan stopped trying to guilt Sev (who that never worked on, and hadn’t been looking at Evan anyway) to shoot her a quizzical look. “It’s called being less than over-generous with information in front of someone who hates him, Evans.”
Black cleared her throat gently. “Severus, darling, may I ask a question?”
“Certainly, Narcissa,” he replied, absurdly graciously for a man tangled up on the ground in effectively rags, looking like he’d been dragged backwards through a hedge with a sunburn.
“The next time that my sister, say, makes a not-terribly-clever remark about how Evan ought to clean his shoes after he steps in the mud, what do you plan to say to her?”
“SOD OFF MINE,” Severus snapped instantly, his hand snapping closed on Evan’s loose, low collar. Lily wondered, through the hand she’d stuffed in her mouth, whether that was why Evan wore a loose, low collar. Sev followed this with a look that said a sheepish er, but he didn’t actually say it. Instead, in fact, he hunched his shoulders and glared at everyone—including Evan, presumably for looking too happy.
Black’s eyes went all sparkly and her mouth got rather strained. “In that case,” she said in an equally strained voice, “once you’ve apologized for using atrocious language in front of ladies and children, I think we may proceed?”
“I need to fix Spike up,” Evan said.
Sev shook his head dismissively. “After.”
“Spike…”
“After.”
“May I fix your clothes?”
Sev considered. “You can fix my half-cloak. It might be damaged enough to compromise the spells on the pockets.”
“You’re ridiculous,” Evan told him, but since he put his arms around Sev to fix the mantle, once they’d levered each other up, instead of turning Sev around so he could see what he was doing, Lily didn’t think he had any room to talk.
When they were leaning on each other in front of her, Madam Nell asked, “Are there any further challenges? I must warn you, mes enfants, it is of all things the most possible that if someone says that there are,” she gestured behind her, “I will hit them with this very pole.”
“I think it’s lovely,” said Mrs. Prince (who still, it turned out, existed), sounding very upset. When Lily looked at her, she was still wringing a handkerchief that she’d reduced to such a tight rope Lily couldn’t even tell what color it was. Sev and Evan looked at each other, but they were facing Madam Nell and Lily couldn’t see their expressions.
“Yes, Miss,” Blakeney said kindly, after a moment. “That’s right.”
Holding out the quaich, Madam Nell told the boys, “Then come and drink.”
Dubiously, Sev held up his roses. He’d got the thorns off them at some point. “Should I put these back?”
Evan started laughing, a touch hysterically, clutching him tighter, but Madam Nell just smiled gently. “No, mon fumèe, it is not a necessary thing.”
“Can I put them down at some point?” he asked plaintively. Evan nearly doubled over. Scowling, Sev tucked the roses into his wreath (his own had survived in much better shape than his clothes), and preemptively scowled at everyone, “I’m holding him, it still counts.”
Lily decided that not only didn’t she dare tell him the roses had just been an added flourish at this point, but now she didn’t even want to.
While the boys helped each other drink, Madam Nell said something about where people came from and mingling and wellsprings, and something else about mead, but Lily tuned out a bit. It was the first quiet moment she’d had in a while, and she needed to check the baby. It wasn’t that he’d been out for longer than you might expect someone to be under a standard sleeping spell—even a silent one, when it had been Dumbledore doing the casting. But normally people did their sleeping under rather quieter circumstances.
Harry was perfectly content, though. He’d dribbled down her front rather a lot, and now he had his thumb in his mouth. Her shirt was baby-proofed, though, and even though Tuney and even her mum would have gasped in horror about letting a baby suck his thumb, all the wizards she knew had been totally uncomprehending when she’d asked where she could get a dummy. She’d gotten her hands on some in the end, of course, but the wizarding world had drawn a collective blank. She thought it might have something to do with the respective costs of teeth charms and dentistry.
When she’d finished checking him, and boosting him up for a kiss-over to make herself feel better and give him good dreams, the boys were feeding each other slices of apple and what looked like either acorns or, hopefully, hazelnuts. The food looked a bit drippy, in a honey sort of way, and there was an argument with lots of grinning from Evan about whether or not they were going to lick each other’s fingers in public before Severus did an accio on the quaich and used it as a washing-vessel. (Evan pouted.)
Then, to Lily’s surprise, they both turned to Blakeney. They didn’t go so far as to look at her, though, instead exchanging eye-talk of the you-no-you-no-you variety. Evan must have won, because it was Sev who addressed her, very formally.
He said, “We come to you, Peregrine, soul of potential, and pray the gift of the Rock Dove’s Flight.”
“What do you ask?” Blakeney asked, a bit unsteadily.
Evan pulled a box out of Sev’s mantle (which, Lily supposed, explained why he cared if it was damaged), and opened it. Sev pulled out a pale grey ribbon, and held it out between his hands. Evan said, “The homing pigeon can always fly to her own nest. Let us be able to call, and to come when called, and to call out ‘let me come,’ and to say ‘Here I am, come home,’ and if we both agree, let one come home.”
Blakeney nodded very fast, and put her wand and other hand on the ribbon.
Madam Nell put out a hand and stopped her. “Do you have words for these, Severin? For the coming, and for the welcoming? You know that they must be words not often said, I think, so that the other will not be alarmed, or come at a mistaken time?”
Sev nodded, and said, “‘Lighthouse silver’ for the beacon—or the welcomer, as you prefer,” he added tolerantly to Evan, who nodded in what might have been an attempt at sternness. It did, at least, succeed at being moderately firm, or at least buoyed with casual conviction.
Sev rolled his eyes tolerantly and went on, “‘Salmon owl’ for the one who’ll move.”
“Salmon owl, darling?” Black asked dubiously.
“It makes sense to me,” Severus scowled. “Owls know where they’re going. Salmon are always coming home. And then there’s the Salmon’s Leap, which most likely was short-range apparition.”
“Okay,” Lily told him kindly, “you were making sense up until that last one.”
“We’d been reading about the apples-and-hazelnuts-and-honey bit,” Evan explained, “and he went off on a side-track about the hazelnuts and then we were reading about Ceridwen and Fionn and Kooky-kill—er, you know the one, and all that sort of thing for three days. You know how he gets.”
When Madam Nell had nodded at her in satisfaction (Sev was still looking at Evan in pain over what Lily thought might have been his attempt at Cuchulain), Blakeney said, “Here I stand, a maiden and a student, to say, in the name of Brigid, be blessed.”
It turned out that the ribbon was embroidered in white runes, because they started to shine and didn’t stop.
They glanced at each other, and instead of turning to Lily as she’d expected, or even Madam Nell, they went to stand in front of Mrs. Prince, who looked astonished. This time it was Evan who said, “We come to you, Julilla, soul of the Wheel, and pray the gift of the Cavern Echo.”
Black and Blakeney both made a noise. They might have denied that it was an awwwww noise, but it definitely was.
Mrs. Prince also looked distinctly melty, and it was clear that she only asked, “What do you ask?” as a formality.
When it was clear that Severus was capable of holding out a ribbon of crimson velvet but not of saying anything, Evan said, “Severus is being very selfish and saying he’s being nice to me. He wants to feel my pulse in his body, but he says I shouldn’t feel his because it won’t have the same kind of calming effect mine will have on me and could possibly give me ulcers or even a heart attack.”
“I didn’t say ‘could possibly,’” Severus corrected, “I said ‘would.’ My adrenaline goes off fifty times a day without living amongst children or supervising any classes. I see no reason for it to do to your digestion and nerves what it’s already done to my own. Your body isn’t even habituated.”
Evan sighed heavily and made a there-you-have-it gesture.
Mrs. Prince dimpled, a bit timidly, touched the ribbon in the same way, and said, “Here I stand, an exile and a seeker-of-paths, to say, in the name of Brittania, be blessed.”
When the embroidery started glowing red, before they could start to turn away, she called, “Severus?” They paused, and she jerked her chin up with a resolution that suddenly made her eyes look a lot like Sev’s, despite her face. She reached across the circle and grabbed his wrist.
After a moment—Lily knew his eyebrows were raised—he asked, “Yes?”
She said intently, “Here I stand, a mother and a grandmother and a finder of ways, to say this: there are things I can’t do, and making bequests to anyone named Snape is one of them. Someone who did a particular thing on a particular day and doesn’t have any legal or magical attachment to that name—” she hesitated. “Er, and hasn’t killed my husband or anything like that, no offense, I hope, but one can’t be too careful… why are you laughing?”
“Because it’s very funny to him that the only wizarding citizen he knew growing up is the only person in his family who doesn’t have a Slytherin bone in her body,” Evan said, in a rather less chilly and standoffishly-polite tone than he’d favored Mrs. Prince with all day, with a good half a smile. “Can’t think why, he knows his mum’s Gryffier than all-get-out. Don’t worry, he wouldn’t even take money you wanted him to take when he really needed it and you tried to sneak it into his bag. Come on, Spike.”
“Can’t be too careful!” Sev sort of howled quietly. Lily was extraordinarily sorry that she knew he was thinking that Mrs. Prince hadn’t thought to say any caveats about his friends killing her husband out of solidarity, with or without being explicitly asked to, or anyone at all killing her.
She was so sorry she knew that. She also knew he was thinking it because he was a Defense nut, but she also knew that nearly everyone she knew would expect him to think it on the grounds that he was a nasty piece of work.
“Yes, darling, I know,” Black said patiently. “Now pull yourself together or I’ll kick you again.”
This was not productive.
“Sneak it into his bag?” Mrs. Prince asked—apparently bewildered, but since it had the effect of making Sev’s stifled man-giggles start to taper off, Lily had to wonder, just a little, if she was really as bewildered as all that, or being sneaky to help Evan again.
“Oh, yes,” Evan said long-sufferingly. “Spike has this earning-things thing. I’m going to have enough trouble when he realizes he has to use my money, I really don’t think you need to worry about him scheming to hurt anyone for yours.”
“What do you mean, I have to use your money?” Sev asked sharply.
“Well, Spike, there’s this concept known as ‘ours,’ you know. Family vaults and all. The goblins are rather more keen on them than on sharing records with the Ministry. Saves them space, saves wizards fees. We’ll discuss it later.”
“Evan…!”
Blithely ignoring him, Evan said to his cousin, “We come to you, Narcissa, soul of arrangement, and pray the gift of the Mirror of the Rose.”
Sev growled a little, but he got a hold of himself and pulled out another pale ribbon, this one a glossy, neutral blue-green, like glass or still water. He even managed to show Black a face that wasn’t really too ominous or resentful at all.
“Thank you,” Black said primly. “What do you ask?”
“Again,” Sev said, “only when asked, only when welcomed: to see through each other’s eyes.” He paused, and said, “I’m probably going to regret this, but actually, we agreed, in the interests of fairness, just mine.”
Black frowned. “I’m not sure this is at all equivalent to feeling one’s pulse, Evvie,” she said.
“We know,” Evan said. “But having the option would drive Spike crazy. He’d want to use it for an escape and be too ethical to let himself, he’d get all paranoid about me being nice to clients and be too ethical to let himself and fly himself absolutely around the walls. Whereas Spike is generally only looking at either books or boring things when he’s not looking at me—” Sev elbowed him, which he seemed to have expected, “—and since I don’t expect to be able to get him to look in a lot of mirrors because he’s ridiculous, we both believe this will stay an emergency measure.”
“Besides,” Sev said smugly, “if he tries to abuse it or apply emotional leverage, I shall now be able to apparate to wherever he is and smack him with a newspaper.”
“If Lucius had even dared to suggest this before our wedding, it would have been off,” Black told them. “For at least six months, and only on again if he agreed to the sort of pre-nuptial agreement that would have made his father and his vault manager cry.”
Lily nodded vehemently.
“That’s because Lucius ought to be trusted with it even less than I should,” Sev agreed, charitably ignoring Lily. “The only reason Evan can is because he’s capable of leaving things alone and my life is incredibly boring.”
“Except when it’s not,” Evan corrected.
“Yes, but you know I dislike when it’s not and am delighted at the idea of a spotter,” Sev explained. “A particular spotter. I shouldn’t care for, say, one of the Carrows.”
“Right,” Evan smiled, and cinched his waist tighter.
Black sighed, and lifted her hands in a too-graceful shrug, landing on the ribbon. “If you’re sure, then. Did you already weave an activation word in?”
“A gesture,” Sev said, more than a bit smugly.
“Please, you will let me see it,” Madam Nell put in firmly. “You will not be offended, I hope? But, you know, this is not such simple runework that it is wrong to say, well, let some second eyes look who are full with many years, yes?”
Sev shrugged, and took the ribbon over to her. When she smiled, he said, in the same smug tone, “Ev’s a Magister Memoria. He’s not some Knockturn sketch-portraitist.”
“And the dye on the ribbons is colorfast and everything,” Evan laughed, knocking shoulders with Sev as he came back.
Black rolled her eyes and said, “Yes, darlings, you’re both brilliant. If you’re done?”
“Yes, mum,” Evan said, pretending to be chastised.
“Commendations from the NEWT review’s Runes and Arithmancy boards with his Os,” Sev stage-whispered at Blakeney. “And everyone knows he’s dim and loony, so beat that.”
Blakeney giggled, but also looked a bit intimidated. Lily, who’d gotten a couple of those congratulatory letters herself, knew Jamie and Sirius had each gotten one for Transfigs, and was sure Sev had at least two squirrelled away in a drawer pretending he wasn’t fiercely proud of them, resolved to tell her that they weren’t as impossible to come by as all that, if you applied yourself.
Black gave Sev a look that wasn’t really scolding, but did perfectly convey you are done now. “Here I stand, a bride, a sorceress, a matriarch, to say, in the name of Hecate, be blessed.”
Sev put the glassy and now-shiny-pink ribbon back in the box, and they turned to Lily. He gave her one of his tiny smiles as Evan pulled out a plush, deep purple ribbon, more blue than Black’s hems, and said, “We come to you, Lily, soul of protection, and pray the gift of the Wellspring.”
“What do you ask?” Lily asked curiously. Up close, she could see the embroidered runes on the ribbon before they started shining—or, at least, she could see the threads, but she couldn’t quite read them.
Evan told her, a bit tersely, “It lets you share.”
“I’m noticing a distinct lack of ritualistic overexplaining,” she remarked.
“When they’re hurt,” he said, not much more elaborately.
“We’re a bit less comfortable with this one,” Sev said drolly, “because we’re under the delusion that it’s somehow slightly plausible that with the indoor painting job who is universally tolerated when not liked and admired is more likely to get hurt.”
“And since hurt people are sometimes unconscious, the spell is made so you don’t need consent, and while ‘we’ don’t think the scenario under discussion is terribly likely,” Evan glared at him, “what we do think is extremely likely is that if it should happen, some of us are very likely to explore the way the books don’t say what the limits of sharing are.”
“Suck it up,” Sev instructed him.
Evan looked like he would have flung his hands up if he hadn’t been presenting the ribbon in a very formal gesture. “That’s what I’m afraid of!”
“Is this a failsafe you wish to forego?” He clearly didn’t give, as he would have put it, one single damn whether the answer was yes, no matter how unlikely he said Evan was to get hurt.
Looking altogether too sullen for a tall and handsome blond adult in a peacock-feather waistcoat with a scratched nose, Evan muttered, “Not in a million years, you maniac.”
“Well, then.”
Once Evan had sighed and nodded at her, Lily asked uncertainly, “Is there a spell, or do I just touch it like that?”
“You just touch it like that and… you’re activating someone else’s enchantment, it’s that sort of lighting-a-spark will-forcing,” Sev explained.
“Is there a particular name I’m supposed to in-the-name-of?”
“No, my little Lily,” said Madam Nell, “only one for which you have reverence, or respect, who you think, well, I have always put my trust in them, or I feel they watch over me, or I believe we do not too much disagree. But you will remember the things that I have called you today, yes?”
“Bearing in mind that Cissa didn’t mention being my friend,” Evan stage-whispered, eyeing her to see if she needed more hints.
She nodded an okay at him, and touched the ribbon like everyone else. “Here I stand,” she said, only a bit uncertainly, “a wife—“ Sev’s eye twitched, but it was true, “—a mother, and a warrior,” which was more than pushing it, she felt, but that was what Madam Nell had called her, at least twice, and she did want to make Sev remember she was a Gryffindor caring about him, even if she couldn’t in conscience talk about Godric like a saint or anything, “to say, in the name of God, be blessed.”
The ribbon, thankfully, started shining immediately, even though she didn’t really know what she was doing. Even though she’d used probably the only name a witch who did know what she was doing here wouldn’t have. But Sev just nodded reassuringly at her before they turned to Madam Nell.
This ribbon was undyed, and Lily thought it might just have been unembroidered. It was Sev, who spoke, again, but this time he went down on his knee again. “We come to you,” he said, “Perenelle, soul of experience, and pray the gift of your wisdom.”
“…Perenelle?!” Lily squeaked. Black stepped sideways in silence and, in silence, firmly stepped on her foot.
CAD! Lily’s socks embroidered themselves. She noticed that through the eye-watering (but thankfully brief) sensation that every bone in her foot had shattered only because she was so stunned by who was standing in front of her that mere agony couldn’t completely capture her concentration anyway. THIEF! DESPOILER OF PURE YOUNG LADIES! SCOFFLAW! BARBARIAN! OIK! CRIMINALLY RUDE PERSON!
(When Lily’s brain had reset itself into thoughts that were thoughts, she decided to leave her socks alone. Telling Jamie that some pureblood prig had stepped on her foot with obviously always-on enchanted shoes while she was out would be perfectly honest, and she could even refuse to tell him who on the grounds that she wasn’t upset and he would completely overreact in such a sweetly horrifying way that she would rather reward him for the impulse without dealing with the consequences.
Besides, nobody was going to take a mum and her baby seriously as a despoiler of young ladies. Which rather invalidated the rest of it. And Remus would think it was funny, and she didn’t want to walk around with one sock and a shoe full of ashes even if Sev did feel like obliging. She certainly didn’t have fire control that precise.)
Madam Perenelle!!! smiled conspiratorially at Lily, and possibly at Black, and then kindly down at Sev. “Mes petits, I have been married to the best of men for oh! Such a long time, I do not try to remember the years, they will only embarrass me. There is only one gift too hard to learn in the first short years which are all that too many have in hard times, I think.”
She touched her wand to the undyed, beige-ish ribbon, and it turned a shining gold. “This is the gift of renewal,” she told them. “To spend much time together, it is to learn to not to see the things that are done again and again. To take them for granted, as it is said. Some things, yes! We wish to not to see them, we do not wish them to pluck at our nerves, they will not go away and we do not wish to become the fishwife only so the beloved heart will perhaps remember three days out of ten to take off his muddy shoes, no?”
Sev and Evan glanced at each other. “Teapots?” Evan asked, half sheepish and half with shining innocence.
“I was born a fishwife,” Sev declared, lifting his chin. Evan very obviously very nearly failed not to snort.
Madam Nell—Perenelle!—succeeded better. “So, yes! Some things we wish the thoughts to pass over. But when we are young, when the love is new, we think, so! It will always be this strong feeling, so vivid inside our hearts, how can it be otherwise? My friends, we are not made that it should always be so. To see the beloved always with vividness, the eyes must be sometimes refreshed. So I give you this: the gift of renewal, which will sometimes wash the eyes of your mind in these kind ways, when they are falling sleepy to each other.”
“…Mea magistra,” Severus eventually breathed. Evan, eyes just as wide, didn’t even manage that.
She smiled, and touched the ribbon. “Here I stand, an old lady who has seen many born and buried. In the name of Athena and her little Nike, in the name of Hermes Trismegistus who sprang from the wings of Thoth, be blessed.”
Lily thought that was going to be the be-all, if not the end end-all, barring maybe some nonsense with the pole. It looked like everyone else did, too—or, nearly everyone. Black looked depressed and headachy under her haughty patrician nose-in-the-air thing.
But then, Madam Nell held up her hand to draw Sev to his feet, and asked, “Well, then, although perhaps it is late to ask with these ribbons in your hands, is it that you will have the handfastings of bone, of breath, or of blood?”
“Of breath,” Evan said, in an of-course sort of way.
“Of blood,” said Sev, shoulders going nervous and defiant under his blasé face.
Evan said, “…Er?”
“And well may you say ‘er,’” Black said crossly, not even pretending to be a refined young lady who would never shoot Severus the stink-eye.
“What happened to ‘with this ring I thee wed’?” asked Lily, nauseated and rather worried.
“That’s the handfasting of bone,” Evan explained, giving Sev a funny look. “Possibly at one point it was not metaphorical.”
“It’s still not metaphorical; the ring holds fast the bone of the hand by encircling the finger,” Sev said in his ever-so-reasonable tone. “Obviously I intended us to do breath too,” he added ‘reassuringly.’
“You’ve just lost any right to complain about challenges,” Evan said, amiably enough.
“Oh, I have not.”
“Mmmm-mmm. What’ve you done, Spike?”
Sev with the blank face that meant he was feeling edgy and might spook if you poked him, pulled red glass swan out of some pocket.
“…You conned me into making that!” Evan accused, delightedly suspicious.
“You did need a distraction,” Sev said loftily. He opened it, and touched Evan’s sleeve with his wand. Softly, “May I?”
“You probably should, darling,” Black called, “but do be sure you kick him up and down the local Main Street for me later, will you? No—make it Hallow Way, so all his Northern friends will ask why. The wretch put his heart’s blood into that, and all he needed was a thumb’s prick.”
“Spike, you idiot,” Evan said softly, and stood still to have his sleeve cut off. He had a tattoo of two trees twined together taking up most of his forearm, grown together over a hearth full of green and silver fire. Lily wasn’t close enough for detail, but she thought it had a bit of an impressionistic look. Severus hesitated, and Evan pressed, “Hurry up. You get my pulse, it’s not fair!”
That startled half a laugh out of Severus. He hesitated, raised Evan’s arm up to kiss the picture of the hearth, and pressed something from out of the red swan into that same place.
Evan’s eyes shot open as the tree’s leaves exploded all over his arm and the fire blazed huge. It all subsided when Sev jumped back, but the fire kept flickering and the leaves stirred in a way that matched the breeze Lily felt. Evan grinned at Sev—
—and then raised his eyebrows, because Sev was, very unhappily, taking off his shirt. He had a vest under, but that would barely matter to Sev.
Or maybe Evan was raising his eyebrows because he, like Lily, had never seen the criss-cross pattern that looked like wood. It wrapped up and down his arms and over his shoulders and under his wand-sheath, ending wrapped like bracers at his elbows. He offered Evan his wrist, where there was a pink spot about the size of a wand-tip, and shook something out of the red swan into Evan’s palm.
“Spike,” Evan said shakily, reaching out to touch the pattern. “Spike, is that—”
“Yes of course it is what else would it be will you please look you can yell at me later just I would like to put my shirt back on in front of PEOPLE do you mind.”
“I’m not going to yell at you,” Evan murmured, now openly caressing Sev’s upper arms, his face unwatchably open and rapt. The arms in question were acceptably wiry, Lily supposed, jerking scorched eyes respectfully away from Evan’s solemn captivation, if you liked your boys skinny. “Here?”
And then, just like the leaves, Sev’s arms exploded in—no, not green snakes. The inked vines grew up from his wrist, taking hold at the bracer. The snakey lower vines faded away, and new ones started to bloom through the wooden diamond-slats. Up, up, all the way across his shoulders, his neck, down to his other elbow, budding and blossoming until the grid—the trellis—was invisible under the leaves and roses. Red and white ones, glowingly silvery-blue-white ones, royal blue ones, black ones with shell-pale veins coming up from their hearts, giant shimmery pink ones like peonies.
“Viviane du Lac,” Evan whispered. his face gone completely wobbly, brushing one of the big pink ones. It shivered. His tree had taken over his arm again. “Spike. Trellis. Severus.”
“Got you,” Sev told him, just as quiet but fierce, cupping his face.
“Ok,” Evan gulped. “Got you. Ok.” Getting control of himself, he aimed a cockier smile at Sev and said, “Sorry I laughed at the possibility of self-destructive romantic gestures.”
“Gah,” Sev uttered, and shoved him dramatically away. All the roses and even the wood-pattern faded. Completely. Only the taciturn, elegant knotwork of the bracers brushing his elbows was left, and even that was only the subtlest of shadows against his skin.
Evan stared at him.
“It’s not for other people,” Sev spelled out in his talking-to-idiots slow voice, annoyed, his arms crossed and one thumb stroking the pale remains of the knotwork. Lily would have bet sickles to scones he didn’t know he was doing it.
“Oh, sweet Salazar,” Evan said, starting to laugh in a way that had turned nearly hysterical almost before he’d finished talking, “the roses are sub rosa. Spike, you are awful.”
Spike turned his substantial nose up and reminded him, “Teapots. Are you going to move the s—the stupid pole, or am I?”
“I think you’d better,” Evan wheezed, sitting down.
Sev made a tcha noise, and did what looked to Lily like a carefully plotted-out Banishing charm—the same kind that got one’s laundry into the hamper, only on a rather larger scale. When he was done, the pole was in the center of the sand-pit. He tugged on it, and when it didn’t move too much he swarmed up to the top.
“Mine wasn’t like this,” Lily commented to Black, wondering who had bespelled Sev to forget he’d left his shirt off. In a crowd like this, she wasn’t even betting on Evan, even if he was the only one in the ring with Sev. “Was yours like this?”
“Oh, Merlin, no,” Black shuddered. “Only five guests? Mama would never have forgiven me. Evvie’s mum will never forgive him, I daresay. And to be quite honest, this is a bit more traditional than most people find necessary these days. Severus always does think he has something to prove, although goodness knows to whom, since he only behaves that way when no one he ought to make an effort for is watching, and what can you do with an artist, really.”
What Sev could do with an artist, apparently, was shout at him to float the box of ribbons up to the top of the pole so Sev wouldn’t hit himself in the face (read: in the nose, Lily heard everyone she’d ever met thinking) with an accio.
Black was saying with distaste, as Sev tied the ribbons up there through some complicated arrangement of rings Lily hadn’t noticed from below, that left the ribbons woven loosely enough to sag before they dropped,, “I suppose you had yours in some muggle ‘church’?”
“We did, as a matter of fact,” Lily said placidly. “Jamie said if that made my mum happy he didn’t mind, as long as they could get some things in to make his mum happy and it all ended in rings.”
“Was that what you wanted?” Black asked, with the first spark of real curiosity about Lily that Lily remembered noticing in her.
Lily raised a wry eyebrow. “Since when were weddings about what anybody but the mums want?” And where was Ms. Ellie, anyway? It must have been selfish of Sev to leave her out, and Evan’s mum, because it couldn’t have been thoughtless. Unless they didn’t know at all, in which case, times a million. “I’ll get to think about what I want when this one’s old enough.” She petted Harry’s cheek.
“Hmm.”
Lily didn’t know if that was a good hmm or a bad hmm, but then again, she didn’t much care. And not just because she didn’t actually care, but because the same ribbon she’d touched had come rolling down the pole, far longer than it had been before, to land with the untied tip at her feet.
“Lance!” Sev yelled sharply. “O Captain, my Captain, get your lazy arse up here before I shoot a snitch through your ears.”
“You are too high, we don’t have brooms,” Evan yelled back sharply. “And if you brought a snitch to this pitch I am having your head examined.”
“I’m high enough to grab the lip of the cave if the pole’s not sturdy enough,” Sev said impatiently. Lily genuinely couldn’t tell whether his magnificent ignoring of the return threat meant he did or did not have a hexed attack-snitch tucked away somewhere, Just In Case. “It’s safest highest. Move!”
“What?” asked Lily, becoming aware of unmalicious but very weighty eyes on the side of her head.
“You have done a Maypole before, haven’t you, Miss?” asked Blakeney dubiously.
Lily sighed. “I was Head Girl, you know.”
“This isn’t the same steps as at Beltane, though,” said Blakeney, remembering to pretend to be timid again.
Lily pointed at her. “Don’t bother, kid, I’m onto you now.”
“Well, it’s not.”
“I will call the steps,” Madam Nell said firmly. “Are you ready, my friends up there?”
“Yes?” said Evan, in a voice that meant no, absolutely not, in no way, not this week try again next year.
Madam Nell put her wand to the flower ring, and cast, “Geminus.” The flowers swarmed inward, until they’d piled high against the pole. “Have you all your ribbons in hand?”
Lily heard two voices cast wingardium leviosa, and only the profound desire not to kill anyone (and the lesser desire not to wake the baby) stopped her screaming as she saw the boys floating above, not exactly rock-steady, their wands pointed at each other, clasping their other hands on the top of the pole with their arms twined into the slack weaving Sev had made up there, pulling it tight.
“This is unutterably stupid,” Lily breathed. “And I say that as a Gryffindor. As one Griffindor in a cave with four Slytherins.”
“But it’s so beautiful,” protested the Hufflepuff, smiling shiningly up at her grandson.
Tightening her free arm around Harry, Lily said, “That’s no excuse!”
“It gets stupider,” Blakeney assured Lily, grinning a little. “Wizards who aren’t good at charms usually go for the rings.”
Lily didn’t bother answering that. She was more than good enough at Charms to make Professor Flitwick happy and impress Sev, and Jamie was more than fine, too, and there was no way she would have floated over everybody in her wedding dress. None.
No sooner had they started floating but Madam Nell set the flower pile on fire. Really a lot on fire. And then she started very calmly calling the steps of the pole dance.
She was in no hurry whatsoever.
Clearly in no hurry.
Lily didn’t know about anybody else, but she was sweating and not very happy about the herbal smoke situation, even holding a fold of the sling-shirt over Harry’s mouth and nose with her free hand, wetted with a dash of water from the completely unemptied quaich the moment she passed it, and she didn’t think this ‘breath handfasting’ was clever at all.
Finally, the pole was wrapped, and at a nod from Madam Nell, Mrs. Prince and Blakeney each took a handle of the quaich and they tossed it over the really quite large bonfire. This shouldn’t have worked, but it did. Not only did the fire go out, but all the leftover flowers and ashes just melted away, leaving a pool of glass where the sandpit had been.
“Come and tie it off, mes petites,” Madam Nell said, and when they had, the ribbons just vanished.
Sev and Evan carefully lowered each other. As they came into earshot, Lily heard Sev saying, “That’s it, right? We can go to home-enough-for-the-moment now? I’m sure I have smoke residue in my ears. Which means it must be completely throughout your hair. I dictate a two-hour bath, are you going to argue with me?”
“Not a whit. I’m just choosing the bath salts, the food, and the wine,” Evan said agreeably. “None of which you will be spending time tonight making. And you’re not spending all night scratched up and sunburned or whatever in Merlin’s name that is, either, no matter how pleased you are about it. You may pick the book.”
“You are out of your mind,” Sev growled warmly, executing a successful tug-in.
“I like starting with books,” Evan protested, grinning down at him.
“…Oh. Well. All right. But none of your damned rakia.”
Lily marched over, hugged Evan briefly, and then squeezed Sev until his skinny ribs made a noise. Then she smacked him, although not hard enough to hurt, and just on the arm. “That’s for your mum,” she told him.
“She would have felt obliged to tell Da, and I didn’t want to make him start drinking again,” Sev explained.
She shook her head and rolled her eyes. For her money, he’d just tried to imagine kissing someone in front of his mum, or being ceremonious in front of her, and shrivelled into a little pile of blanched humiliation. Everyone was a coward about their own mum sometimes, though, and Sev’s was not the crying-at-weddings sort. She had to admit she wouldn’t have wanted to risk one of Ms. Ellie’s debriefings after hers, either, and had only felt safe inviting her because she and Jamie had gone away after, and shehadn’t had to risk anything on Snapean notions of How One Behaves As A Guest.
Sev gave her the little dismissive smirk he used instead of admitting he was ashamed of himself like a normal person, then peered at her seriously. “I don’t want anyone told, Lils,” he said intently. “Too much trouble of all sorts follows me to let Evan’s name be attached to mine until the national situation’s less fraught. Until he’d only have to be bothered with the sillier sorts.” His gaze wasn’t exactly menacing, but it was piercingly intent. “I won’t have it. I can’t risk it.”
“You’re not obliviating me, Severus Snape,” she accused, putting her hand in closer proximity to her wand but not backing away yet. She didn’t really think he meant to, but you never could quite tell with Sev.
“No, but I will have to put a silence geas on,” he said holding out his hand implacably, and writing a runic sentence into her palm with his wand once she’d sighed and turned it to him. “You knew I would,” he informed her, a bit teasing now he’d gotten his way even though he clearly meant what he was saying. “You couldn’t even keep a bonehead like James Potter from getting suspicious when you were properly afraid about it.”
She scowled at him, but let that pass today. “I don’t know why, though.”
“Call me as paranoid as you like—”
“I will,” she and Evan chorused.
“—I do not want the Ministry knowing more than they need to know about… anything. Even before what you told me, I am not comfortable about them Lils. Something is rotten, and Denmark is not far enough away.”
She sighed. “You are a nutter, but fine. Sev? If it’s too personal…”
He raised dubious eyebrows at her.
“I understand the Tudor rose—”
“The English rose,” he scowled inaccurately. “Red and white is the rose of joined families. I have the Plantagenet one—that is, the York one—look.”
Every history class she’d ever taken told her he was completely delusional, but she supposed everyone was allowed to be delusional about their own family history. “—And I know blue roses mean magic,” although to muggles they more usually meant folly, although she wasn’t going to mention that, “and I could see the pink one meant something to Evan—”
“Blue roses are also the sigil of his House,” Sev told her.
“Whose House?” Evan demanded.
“I don’t think we can settle that one, at least legally, let alone overtly, until things have sorted themselves out in Britain, Ev. I’m game to file papers in a Swiss bank for a House Schwartzrosiger next time we’re at IAMB, if you like.”
“Fürstrosiger,” Evan proposed. “Rosenkönig.”
“I unequivocally refuse to be named Prince Rose.”
“Well, but Spike, as a surname it would be more like The Rose Prin—”
“That’s not better.”
Instead of making a creeling bird noise out of crushed-adorable-overwhelmedness and hugging them, like she would any normal couple, “...I’d say something about lilac, what with all the the red, white and blue flowers, but Lockhart was in your House, poor boy.”
“Poor me indeed,” Sev said solemnly, and Evan grinned in a clearly restrained snicker.
She crossed her eyes at them. “But the black and white ones?”
Sev touched one, carefully. “I don’t consider myself capricious,” he said at last. “But I was born under Janus as well as the goat, and him I understand a little, I think. Enough to know that there’s nothing simple about looking in two directions at once, and nothing straightforward about black and white, and to have two faces is nothing like so uncomplicated as to be divided down the middle.”
Lily felt deeply uneasy, but her instant, urgent, childish desire to remind him he was supposed to be on her side had an easy, easy answer, springing immediately to the front of her mind the moment she thought about ‘sides’ at all. “I… think I see? Oh, but Sev, before I take Blakeney home, Dumbledore wanted me to give you something. You’re not to unshrink it, er, until it’s where it ought to stay, I think he said.” She dug out the packet and handed it over.
He and Evan looked it over curiously, and looked at each other. “Did he say not to open it?” Evan asked.
“No, just not to unshrink it.”
After a few moments of tugging unsuccessfully on the string and then trying to cut it with a penknife, Evan made a frustrated noise, and said, “It must be enchanted. Here, I’ll just— finite Dumbledore incantatum.”
She felt the spell wash over her, and groaned. “Oh, thanks.”
“What? I limited it,” Evan said defensively, cutting the string more successfully. “—Oi, Spike!”
“Yes, he said he was going to,” Sev said calmly, looking at the miniature wardrobe. “Common practice among the staff, apparently.”
“It’s nice,” Evan said, holding it up to admire some detail Lily hadn’t noticed.
“’What,’” she said, glaring exasperatedly as Harry started to shift on her front, “is: Dumbledore’s the one who put the baby to sleep, and he’s got to go through an apparition and two floos to get home.”
“…Oh,” Evan said, a little sheepishly. “Oops—hey, Spike, knotwork!”
“He might be slightly high,” Sev said apologetically. “Depending on the flower combinations. I did a bubblehead charm, but he didn’t want to try one while floating me.”
Lily rolled her eyes tolerantly, and called, “Can somebody sane take us home? The baby’s starting to fuss.” He was, too; twisting and turning an unhappy red. Lily hoped unhappily that breaking the sleeping charm hadn’t broken some sort of protection against the smoke that was still drifting about. And that he wasn’t having a bad post-reaction to the sleeping charm, or to having one broken.
“But of course, my little Lily!” Madam Nell came up, smiling.
That was a mistake.
The air seemed to freeze again, in such a much more horrible way.
“Oh my god, I am so sorry,” Lily wailed. Amidst the whirl of cleaning charms and trips to the stream and reassurances and Black being snide, she couldn’t help but be most conscious of Sev sitting down and dropping his face into his hand and, in the worst and hollowest way laughing himself, not to put too fine a point on it, sick. “Sev, this is not funny,” she cried, very nearly really crying.
“This is hilarious,” he countered, sounding very nearly like crying himself. “This is… this is exactly what I should have expected.”
“I’m sorry!”
“It’s Lance’s fault,” Blakeney assured her, more practical than reassuring, which was, to someone who’d grown up with Sev, the most reassuring thing possible. “No, I tell a lie—it’s the Headmaster’s fault.”
But there was Sev, telling a slightly dazed-looking Evan, “Of course at my handfasting my husband gets stoned on the sodding ceremonial bonfire and an infant throws up on the officiant. Of course my oldest friend’s offspring projectile vomits all over Perenelle fucking Flamel.”
“I’ll take you girls back to the inn in Sofia and we’ll floo to Hogsmeade from there,” Mrs. Prince said, suddenly almost firm in their direction, despite her anxious glance back to where Evan was sympathetically patting Severus’s shoulder and trying to pretend he wasn’t doing it solely to watch the flowers bloom and fade. (She didn’t think he was stoned at all, the sneak. He hadn’t looked like he was before Sev suggested it)
As Mrs. Prince let the youngest three witches out of the enchanted place under the open sky-window in the cave, the last thing Lily heard was Sev, at his most flatly, melodramatically despairing, declaring, “That boy was born to make my life a farce.”