Archive of Our Own

(linger)

Under any other circumstances, Druella suspected that Harry Potter would have been more reluctant about her presence, but at the moment he and his teenage companions displayed simple and sheer relief. Dru had stepped through the Floo (which was now connected, for some reason, to the kitchen fireplace), picked up the sobbing baby Cassie from the kitchen table, and swiftly begun walking her around the table. She sang, meanwhile, and entwined it with a touch of magic to reinforce the comfort, in a tactic she had been taught by Orion, back at the beginning. Swiftly the tears slacked off, and not too much time later Cassie fell asleep.

In the meantime, Andromeda was explaining things to Harry Potter and the others, an improbable but thematically satisfying assembly of exactly the two teenagers captured with him during the war. They were regarding Andromeda with a certain skepticism. But just then Harry Potter said, "No, I remember that, Kingsley went over the list of people decorated in the war with me before it was finalized. Druella Rosier, right?"

"Yes, although I normally use my married name," said Druella, stroking Cassie's hair. She hadn't seen her granddaughter in over a year, and already the two year-old Cassie was so much more recognizably Bella's daughter, with just the same curly black hair. Her eyes were still light. Druella spared a moment to pray they would not darken to match her father's original eye color. The more like Bella she looked, the better, all things considered.

"You saved a lot of people by passing information, Kingsley said."

"I should have done something before that," said Druella, brusque and suddenly uncomfortable. "Don't praise me for it." She looked up. The kitchen was dark and empty without the activity of the elves; undoubtedly the changes in the rest of the house would be worse. "I don't believe we've been introduced?" she said to all three of the teenagers. Presumably Harry Potter was thoroughly sick of people thinking they knew him.

"Right," said Andromeda guiltily, starting out of where she had been staring, blankly, into the stone wall. Frighteningly often, Andromeda drifted into that emptiness when nothing demanded her attention – but she was still alive, so far. Druella would do everything she could to keep her that way, not that that had ever been enough before. "Mother, please may I introduce you to Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley; and this is my mother, Druella Rosier Black."

The teenagers shuffled with social uncertainty. Druella refrained from rolling her eyes, shifted Cassie to one arm, and strode forward to shake hands, one at a time. "A pleasure to meet you all. Are we settled about the house?"

"Er – yes," said Harry with obvious hope, before he looked at his friends. Ron shrugged; Hermione nodded. "Yes," said Harry, now decisive. "Do you need help packing things? Er – you probably know the house better than we do..."

"Undoubtedly. Let me take a look at it before we start. I'm sure she'll wake up as soon as I set her down, anyway." Both of Druella's naturally born daughters had hated to sleep through childhood and beyond, and the Dark Lord was almost as bad as Bellatrix as an adult. Before anybody could argue, Druella turned to the kitchen door and pushed it open, and tried to steel herself against reaction.

She failed immediately, because Hermione said, "That staircase is new," looking at the stairs down from the service rooms below the house. Druella blanched, and turned.

"The family crypt," said Druella when her composure was restored. "I don't know if it's opened for me, or for Andromeda." On the basis of the expressions of the children, Druella did not mention that they had additions for it. Bellatrix had had Ted's body released to Andromeda, and the two of them had claimed Bellatrix herself, and Dora and Remus, after the Battle of Hogwarts. There were four processed and neatly labeled skeletons packed into separate cedar boxes in Andromeda's muggle house, currently lined up in a row in the sitting room. It would be a relief to place them somewhere permanent. "Let's go upstairs," she suggested, turning to climb.

"The crypt isn't..." said Hermione, "Dangerous?"

Having apparently witnessed Grimmauld Place in its unvarnished state, still full of its years-long tantrum over Arcturus's return to power, this was a reasonable question for her to ask. "No," said Druella. "Unnerving, perhaps, if you aren't accustomed to such burial practices, but the magic is harmless and it keeps out pests. I understand the house was in quite a state when Sirius moved back in?"

There was another little shuffle behind her. Druella wasn't sure of its source until Harry said, voice hoarse, "You – how well did you know Sirius?"

Ah. Druella hadn't been sure how well Sirius and Harry had known each other, if indeed they had, but she had heard a few things. Among them was a rumor that Harry Potter had madly pursued Bella through the Ministry after Sirius's death, screaming curses and performing the sort of feats usually motivated by intense emotion in the unpracticed.

"Never as well as I felt I should have," she said carefully, "But I lived in this house for his childhood, until he ran away." Then they reached the first floor and Druella fell silent, clutching Cassie to her shoulder.

It wasn't as bad as it could have been. She could sense, still, the accumulated magic in the walls and the windows and the great carved staircase, and most of the architecture had been left intact. It was, however, disconcerting to see that entryway without the portraits, or the bones hung shining on the wall.

"Do you know what was done with the portraits?" said Druella after a moment, starting up the stairs.

"Storage," said Harry, following her. She heard Andromeda talking below, and saw that the other two teenagers had stayed downstairs. "I think they're in an attic or something, but we couldn't find them. It's – er – hard to find the same place twice, sometimes."

"The house probably didn't trust you with them. Mind, most of them are deeply obnoxious people, so that isn't a complaint." The library door shimmered into view from a blank wall, leaving Druella both relieved and nervous: she would be upset to see that room disturbed. She ignored it for now and kept climbing. "It had been throwing an increasingly escalating fit since Orion's death, as it disliked his father, and after Walburga died – here we are," she said, seeing the door to her own, long-ago rooms. Slowly she grasped the handle to pull it open.

Yes, here they were, and clearly undisturbed. Druella had left this room for the final time when she felt Orion's presence snapping suddenly and definitively out. The broken teacup she had dropped lay still in two halves on the now-stained carpet by her desk. The portrait of poor, murdered Hesper Gamp Black hung still between the windows, occupant sleeping or pretending to.

"There," said Druella to Harry, and pointed at the broken cup. "I dropped that when Orion killed himself."

She had been certain that Arcturus, hiding from both the war and his furious son in France, would know. There was nobody left who could hold the family against him, and no clear legitimate heir with Sirius run away and Reggie dead and the girls married. Druella had run from her room to make sure that Orion could not be revived. When she was sure, she had notified the Ministry of his death and taken his body down to the crypt to process herself, that she might grant Orion one last favor of stopping his father from touching him one last time. Then she had left the house before Arcturus got there, and gone to Pollux. She had not come again, but asked the house elves to bring over what things she needed.

"I'm sorry," said Harry, hesitantly, and while she tried to summon the words to reply, "But I don't remember – Sirius showed me the family tree tapestry, once, but we were looking at his cousins..."

Half-formed offense died abruptly. Of course Sirius had been looking at his cousins. "Orion was Sirius's father," she said. "He killed himself in 1979, after Regulus died."

"Oh," said Harry, who clearly hadn't known this. The pause stretched out before he said, falteringly, "I'm sorry."

"It was always going to happen one day," said Druella, which was the only peace she had ever found for herself over the whole thing. She dug her fingers into the doorknob, and thought again of the last conversation she had had with Orion, over – something trivial. She thought it had been a letter about baptismal fees, but she might have made that up later, just so she could have something specific to remember. Orion had been – shaken, certainly, by Reggie's death, and she thought he had made some attempt to contact Sirius that had failed, but as Druella hadn't asked, she couldn't be sure. He had been reckless, for a while, and he had certainly been drinking. But he had seemed, if not fine, well enough. He had seemed to be handling it and preparing for the future: turning the family around politically, writing legislation instead of research articles, taking an interest in life. She remembered that on the last night, Orion had kissed her cheek when he rose from the dinner table, set for only the two of them. He had bid her goodnight, and that was the last time she had seen him alive.

Undoubtedly he had been careful to seem fine. If he hadn't, she wouldn't have left him alone.

"What do you mean?" said Harry, whose voice was uncertain and very young.

Druella went further into the room, and flicked her wand to float the pieces of cup off the carpet. "Andromeda said Kreacher was retired? Ah, well, let me see..." She crouched and dubiously attempted a cleaning spell on the rug, a subject she had had to refresh herself on lately, as Andromeda had no servants. The stain lightened but did not disappear. She sighed, and straightened, and turned back into Harry's worried face.

She could have said something neat, like, Well, his father raped him, but it would be untrue and unkind to make an inevitable connection between those things. Anyway it was true of most or all of the children in the house, and for that matter Druella's eventual Head of House and adult cousin Evan Rosier had tried to rape her when she was twelve. Successfully fighting him off had sealed her fate. None of them had died by suicide, although Bellatrix and Andromeda had both tried, at times, as teenagers, and been stopped.

None of them had died by suicide yet, anyway.

"There was a time when things might have been different for him, but that had passed long before his death," said Druella. "You have some idea what we were like--? Violent, constantly, not as an unhappy family but as an ongoing civil war; murders in the House were quite common. Orion made a bid to change things and lost it, and had to keep living as Head, responsible for everything his enemies did thereafter. It destroyed him by inches. He... did not have a happy life."

It occurred to Druella that one might say quite the same about Sirius, framed – as she now knew – for a spy and murderer just as he turned twenty-two and therefore consigned to nearly twelve years in Azkaban, followed by not quite three years on the run, then killed in a duel with Bella at thirty-six. The last was appropriate in a terrible way, for Bellatrix and Sirius's lives had revolved around each other from the moment of Sirius's birth, in joy and in sorrow and in brilliant, Black family anger. It amazed Druella at times that her eldest daughter had lived a full two years past killing Sirius. Certainly Bellatrix had not wanted to live anymore, afterward, if indeed she ever had wanted to live. She had anyway, to the detriment of many, and she had died in battle just shy of turning fifty-one.

Druella, at sixty-seven, was older than either of them ever would now be, and older than Orion, who had killed himself, too, at the age of fifty; and older than Cassiopeia Black, who had seemed destined to live forever and had died, too, at about fifty – was there something cursed about that age, for Blacks? Sirius had not even made it close. Most of Dru's contentment had been found after that age, as the war had only just ended in 1982. She had found peace and security living in Pollux's household as never before. As a witch of some considerable power Druella could live another hundred and fifty years now, assuming she avoided being murdered, as was the usual hazard of her class. Happiness perhaps lay in outlasting both your problems and your familial obligations.

"Sirius hated his family," said Harry, although not in a hostile way so much as like he wanted to test a preposition.

"Every one of the Blacks hated their family," agreed Druella. "If you asked Andromeda she would agree. If you, for some reason, asked Narcissa, she would agree. The extinction of the family name is the removal of a blight and a curse from this earth and must surely please God."

Though it wasn't quite extinct, after all, thought Druella, and stroked the baby's hair.

Harry's gaze followed her fingers. "Narcissa gave her to me because she's a Parselmouth, and she wanted us to pass her off as mine."

Druella had not quite reached that question in her mind. "We will not be doing that," she said now flatly, stroking the soft skin of Cassie's forehead. "She's my granddaughter and I'll raise her as such; the rest of magical Britain can go hang."

"Yeah, okay," said Harry, and looked much cheerier. Perhaps the mood had been anticipation of claiming he'd had a baby at the age of – what – sixteen, after all. Which was probably fair enough. Druella had been a year younger when Bella was born, and actually married, and would not recommend the experience in the slightest.

There was a flurry of activity necessary to actually move house with young children, of course. Druella made Andromeda do as much as possible in order to distract her. Honestly, there was plenty to manage so it wasn't hard.

Druella's rooms had to be rearranged, and an adult suite outfitted for Andromeda, and a new nursery chosen and the house persuaded to move it closer to them. The original purpose of sealing off the family's children in their own wing had been to keep them away from the curses scattered everywhere until they were old enough to see and avoid dangerous magic on their own, and this was no longer necessary as of the professional sterilization job (and the tossing out of any number of artifacts, some of which Druella frankly quailed to think of amok loose in the world. But until Vitalianus’s Horcrux actually possessed somebody, for example, it was neither her problem nor a presently repairable one).

Aside from Grimmauld Place, Andromeda's house had to be sorted out, belongings packed and moved or stored correctly, utilities turned off, and the like. Teddy's baby things were added to those for a second and slightly older child. While Grimmauld Place had plenty of old children's things, these needed quite skilled and iron-stomached sorting: a quite beautiful carved wooden crib with climbing roses painted on the bars was one thing, various pictures book about – Andromeda sighed – muggle hunting or ritual sacrifice another, and that was before one ventured into the sort of toys her husband's ancestors had deemed appropriate and desirable to give to children.

These things were obvious, but Grimmauld Place was also opening up rooms in response to Druella and Andromeda's return and that posed its own problems and obligations. It was not just a matter of the emplacement of those family members who had now died in the crypt. The library was in reasonable shape except that the wide altar to the ancestors in the entry had been almost completely smashed, whether by action of the house or the ancestors or Kreacher or something or someone else. So Druella and Andromeda had to clean it up – mostly by hand – and get rid of everything that had been destroyed, and replace it, which in addition to the generic and simple, like the crucifix and the vases for flowers, meant combing through the resorted house for pictures of dead family members and small personal tokens to be arranged. A certain number of portraits did have to come back out, with the family in residence, which meant determining which of them would, to be blunt, behave around the current occupants. Also, it was necessary to negotiate with the house over more dangerous rooms, like the sealed-off laboratories, given that the children – all five of them – were not really equipped to handle that sort of thing.

"I thought Harry had this house cleaned?" said Hermione, one day, when Dru stopped her coming through the threshold of another suddenly-appearing door. Hermione was not asking indignantly. There was a wary curiosity in her gaze. It was also clear she hadn't been sleeping again. With her daughters, Druella knew the signs.

It was something of a pleasure actually to note that Hermione was not being stuck with the housework by the two boys, although this might be because she had sleep and work habits nearly as bad as Bellatrix: as now, she wandered out of rooms at random intervals (with or without questions for Druella), changed her clothes and ate haphazardly, and was prone to start telling you about the book or political pamphlet she was working on if you spoke to her about anything, prompted or not. Her dark circles were quite severe. On the other hand her friends, who must know if this was normal, did not seem concerned.

"I'd really have to check the details of the contract, but I would guess they went through the open areas, the public utilities like the kitchen, and whatever else the house presented to them or you specified existed, like your bedrooms. That would make the house habitable, and a dwelling like this knows what it's worth to be cooperative and would probably have kept you shut out of everything else until it had an owner who could either force their way in, or it thought would handle things... appropriately." Druella shrugged. "Besides which, it's been very unhappy for a long time, and correspondingly uncooperative. The family knew about these rooms and would demand access, but you didn't, and wouldn't."

This resulted in a question about sentient magical buildings, which Druella happened to know were not often described in detail in conventionally published books. She was therefore soon able to get Hermione to sit down in a parlor while she went to get a few things from the library, and dallied intentionally so that by the time she had come back, Hermione had fallen asleep sitting up. Druella had played that particular game often enough. She placed the books – all safe enough to handle – on the coffee table in front of the couch, dimmed the lights, and left. Druella would have liked, also, to adjust Hermione's hair pins, which looked rather uncomfortable in that position, but all three of the teenagers had come too recently from war and were not safe to touch when inattentive. Certainly, they had no reason to instinctively trust Druella.

Nevertheless, Druella was coming to know them, and they had begun to know her. Ron Weasley, who did most of the cooking in the absence of a house elf (and the apparent unwillingness of the teenagers to do as Druella frequently had with Andromeda and order food for just about every meal) knew by now how she preferred to take eggs and coffee in the morning. Hermione knew she could ask Druella questions like that about the house. Finally and at last, Harry came nervously to the room when Druella was watching the children, and asked if he could help with anything.

"Come sit down," said Druella, currently being climbed on. "It isn't complicated, you know, many generations of people both uneducated and quite stupid have managed—"

"Yeah," said Harry, voice twisting in a way she had not heard at all in the weeks she had lived here, and known him, "I'm aware of that."

Druella looked at him, and looked down at Cassie, who thankfully seemed quite oblivious, and Teddy, coloring on the rug nearby. She said, "Come sit down. Cassie, dove, here we are," and swung Cassie up into the air for a moment before setting her firmly down, thankfully laughing and not upset to be dislodged. She didn't ask any questions of Harry, and he did not seem interested in volunteering answers. But she noticed, many times afterward, Harry iutently watching how she interacted with the children, and copying her.

Druella didn’t find it too hard to make Hermione sleep, or thank Ron when he became insecure without seeming to notice, or distract Harry when he was on the verge of drifting into a sort of destructive restlessness that reminded her painfully of Bellatrix and Sirius both. Andromeda was harder, because she knew what Druella was doing and she knew Druella, in general:

“Stop worrying about managing us, Mother, and manage yourself for a change,” she tossed off one day.

“Darling, you’re drunk at ten in the morning,” Druella said patiently. “It’s earlier than even I used to start! Of course I’m worried.”

“I’m drunk because I’ve lost my husband and my daughter, and I actually liked them both,” said Andromeda, unfortunately correctly. “You should be celebrating losing everything! All of it was terrible.”

“At least have some water, love,” said Druella, and achieved the paltry moral victory of standing over Andromeda righteously until she complied.

It was true that she didn’t quite know what to do with herself, when Harry was confident enough or Andromeda sober enough to take over watching Teddy and Cassie. Everything was so... quiet. It wasn’t the temporary peace of her rooms in Poll’s house, either.She wasn’t waiting until Arcturus or duty demanded her. It was only quiet. It was maddening.

The children would give her some respite from larger decision-making, until they reached the age for Hogwarts, at least – although in just a few years they would already require much less supervision at home. She was trying not to think about that, and the inevitability of that rest of her life. Druella was too old to have more of her own children and forestall that problem, and too old to be particularly desirable for marriage, by the same score. The system she had given her life to learning had just been dissolved by civil war and fiat. What else was there? Her mother had trained her for a lab assistant once, and she’d honed the skill for Orion, but she felt only a creeping discomfort when her thoughts turned to the contexts of her old books and notebooks, still quite accessible in the rooms she had reclaimed, and filled with details of experimental blood sacrifice and death rites. All of had been quite legal, the Blacks having special licenses for their ancestral traditions of magic, and using prisoners sentenced officially and officiously to death by the court system under their own legal jurisdiction. Druella did not wish to reconsider how much that excuse mattered to her now.

Putting Grimmauld Place to rights was either an actually productive thing to do or a plausible distraction. So Druella kept up with the uncursing and repairing and pest-dispersing in the private rooms, when she took breaks from childcare. In the process she accumulated a store of objects that needed repair, nonfunctional clocks and ripped tapestries and the like, which was a useful secondary distraction. Andromeda had worked for her husband’s enchanting business, so Druella could dump broken magical objects on her to keep her sober for the occasional afternoon, carpentry and silverware and such gave her a reason to look at the paper’s classified section and write letters, and the textiles, she fixed herself.

This also, eventually, forced Druella to go out shopping for materials that could only be purchased in the magical world. Owl order was all well and good when you were buying pedestrian stuff, but anything someone might cheat you on had really better be seen in person. Anyway a lot of routine orders had been going wrong lately, with shortages and the economic issues from the war. Diagon Alley was a depressing place, not so bad as under Voldemort’s occupation, but still with many shuttered businesses and empty shelves.

Further, when she returned home, she found Teddy in the midst of a serious tantrum while Harry and Ron tried ineptly to distract him, Cassie miserably awaiting a meal they had been distracted from feeding her, and Andromeda passed out drunk. Druella had long ago been broken of the reflex to shout – one didn’t throw one’s own tantrums at the bottom of the power hierarchy – but she was grateful that the sobbing drowned out most of her initial caustic remark.

When Harry said, “What?” she had her temper back under control. “Go and feed Cassie,” she said firmly, “And get food ready for him, too. I’ll take Teddy, give him here. Hello, love,” she said, boosting her grandson to her hip while he wailed and tried, hard, to escape. “What’s the matter? Oof, how many tears do you have in there? Are you going to fill up the house and swim?”

It wasn’t really a notable day as parenting went. Druella had theoretically had the house elves to hand things off to when none of the human staff or family members were available, before, but apparently unlike Walburga, she wouldn’t have trusted Kreacher with a baby when she was sober enough to think about it. On which subject she had no room to lecture Andromeda for being unconscious throughout this episode, though it did annoy her. She distracted Teddy and took him up to the nursery to change his tear- and snot-soaked shirt, traded him and Cassie to change her diaper, and finally could sit down to compose a blistering reply to a cousin who had finally written to ask Druella for money (backhandedly insulting her for being a slut all the whole; you would think in fifty years everyone would have found better gossip) at which task she was occupied when Harry came up and knocked on her door.

“Yes, come in,” said Druella distractedly, and found herself listening to an extended rant about how terrible they all were with children, which she largely ignored while selecting the most efficiently cutting adjectives for her letter. It was rather nostalgic: she had done more or less this in this very room when Bella was young, though she had better not tell Harry that. She let him rant while she finished the letter, and only then found a strategic time to cut in:

“You’re doing fine, Harry. I told you before that nearly everyone works parenting out, and that’s mostly true, but in the minute it’s exhausting and hard and you’re sleep deprived and don’t know what you’re doing wrong, because they can’t tell you. Don’t worry so much about single bad days. I’ve just got to post this, but you can come up to the owlery with me if you’d like to keep talking?”

Fortunately, the restocked family owlery was a setting that would contain Harry from shouting. She had already witnessed that he flatly would not risk it around the children.

Andromeda also came to knock on Dru’s door about six hours later, presumably when she had just woken. It was by now nearly eleven o’clock. The children were in bed – both sets, disregarding Hermione – and Druella had gone back to the exhausting task of sorting her personal notes and library, which she had been handling off and on for weeks. There were references she still needed on a regular basis or thought she might. There were works she wanted to keep for personal reasons or intellectual interests. There were notes that should probably be copied and indexed somewhere. Aside from the mundane disposal of what was no longer of great personal interest, there was, cross-cutting all of the above, that which was on reflection reprehensible. Druella was still trying to decide what to do about that.

Talking to Andromeda wasn’t, in the end, lengthy. Andromeda said, carefully, “I heard the kids were having a hard time earlier.”

Druella considered trying to be tactful. She looked down at the papers in front of her, containing detailed notes from a vivisection she had attended as Orion’s research secretary thirty years ago, done (of course) under anesthesia because the potion being tested hadn’t required consciousness or pain, and Orion hadn’t thought of himself as a monster. She still didn’t know what the hell to do with the notes, so she put them down in her lap, and decided to skip to the point: “I am the last one who has any right to judge you or be angry with you about this, but you don’t seem to be having a particularly good time with it, either, dove.”

“Am I supposed to be? Would I have a better time sober?”

“Sobering up is not going to bring them back,” said Druella, baldly, “But neither is falling into a bottle, and I don’t think Ted wanted you to spend the rest of your life like this if something happened to him.” Andromeda’s face twisted, and Druella said – perhaps with unnecessary cruelty, but what else was the story of her life – “You do realize that you aren’t proving anything by destroying your life for him? Nobody who would take notice of whether you were behaving like a widow is paying the slightest attention to you in the first place.”

She meant it for Andromeda and she meant it for herself. Druella had loved, unfortunately, Orion, who had treated her very badly in a position with few choices, himself. She had, in a different sense, loved her father-in-law Pollux, who she had really spent the most time with of anybody in her life. She might briefly have loved Alphard, who was of course Bella’s real father. All of them were dead; two of them, Druella could have helped, if she had been a little smarter, a little faster, a little more decisive.

It was unfair to think it, but at least Andromeda could mourn cleanly. At least Ted had been a good man.

“Thanks,” said Andromeda. “Thanks very much, Mother. Morgana’s knickers, why do I even talk to you?” and she turned around and left.

Druella put her head in her hands. After a while, she put the notes back in their file and got up to pace.

Andromeda only missed her entire life: the husband she had eloped with at the age of eighteen, the business she had run with him for the duration of their marriage, the adult daughter they had raised and the son-in-law they had acquired recently in the midst of the war. This was not to mention various friends, acquaintances, cousins and leaders, and those groups and places in which they had met. The adult Andromeda had struggled to relate to people outside the Blacks, socialized mostly on the edge of Ted’s friendships, stayed at home most of the time in case of assassination attempts and worked in their business’s back end. Of course she was devastated. How couldn’t she be?

Druella only missed the life she had never had, and might have if something had gone differently: if Evan hadn’t tried to rape her or she hadn’t fought him off and made him hate her more than passingly when she was twelve, if the first engagement her parents had found had been acceptable, if she hadn’t been caught in the Blacks’ crossfires and made to marry Cygnus as consolation prize, if she had managed to do something about what he’d done to her daughters... She’d never finished school, never had her own career or independent scholarship or control over her children’s lives. She had spent her life as an administrative worker on the Black House’s estates, which had been dissolved as a legal entity, learning a system which had just been wiped from existence, and all of the people she had worked with were dead.

What was she even trying to do now? Raise the children, yes, because Andromeda was in no shape to and the older children had no idea what they were doing. Druella probably had the clearest legal claim of anybody left alive to Bella’s bastard daughter, anyway, and it was either her or Andromeda for Teddy. But why bother with the rest of it? Why restore heirlooms in rooms the house wouldn’t let the current owner see? Why restore the shrine, make offerings to ancestors and add bones to a crypt that would die in one generation and slowly wane, unattended and without a family to advise and watch? The children were growing up here, but that didn’t mean they would be allowed to belong. The house was owned by Harry, who knew and cared nothing of their culture and had no reason to. His experiences with it had mostly involved attempted murder.

Druella left her rooms, inattentively as she never would have dared before, sober. She knew the house would watch the entry against anybody else here, at the moment, and no one resident was inclined to lethal duels or amusement by torture spells. She paced up and down the stairs, thinking and denying that she was thinking how nice it would be to have a drink or twelve. She’d hardly abstained, recently or ever – being sober in a house presided over by Voldemort would try Jesus Christ or Merlin both, and Druella made no pretense at equaling either – but there was a difference between drinking at dinner when everybody else was, or sitting down for drinks with one’s stressed and abused daughter, and going on a maudlin bender alone at night when everybody else was asleep.

Just as she was thinking this, she heard a footstep on the stairs below, and looked down to see Hermione jump, hard, and nearly fall. Druella’s wand was out by reflex and a spell in her throat when Hermione caught the banister and arrested her momentum.

“Fuck,” said Hermione, panting.

“Are you quite all right, dear?” Druella said. She had been pacing a while, and it was now well past midnight, according to the clock the house had just obligingly provided on the wall to the side.

“Fine, you just startled me,” said Hermione shiftily. She looked bad, Druella thought critically, like she hadn’t been sleeping again, and possibly hadn’t washed her hair in a while (although Druella was unclear if Hermione’s usual hair management was some sort of fashion statement or a sign nobody had taught her curly hair charms, and unwilling to risk her offense by asking).

Oh, what was the use of being an allegedly competent adult around young adults if you never said something about anything, thought Dru in despair; and am I really going to make all the same mistakes again merely because the problems appear to be different; and she said, “Forgive me, but you look a fright, dear. Let’s go and sit down? You can’t be in a hurry for anything at this hour.” She put out her hand, and in a friendly manner, like the lonely creature it had become, Grimmauld Place gave her a doorknob.

Hermione was taken aback, but she said, “Okay?” That was enough for Druella to imperiously gesture her into – a sitting room, apparently; not one of the standard awful ones, something nearly normal looking, ringed with stained glass windows and a set of matching floral tapestries through which wandered peacocks.

“This looks practically inoffensive,” said Hermione, stumbling a bit on the extremely plush carpet as she followed Dru in and sat down on a love seat.

Druella perched on a nearby chair and nearly caught herself out with a Kitchens? before she remembered there were no elves nor servants working. “I think this was Melania’s parlor,” she said after a moment of searching her memories. “Orion’s mother, but I didn’t know her very well; she stayed in the house until, let me see, that must have been 1951? 1952? Bella was four.” She winced herself at the start Hermione made at the name. “That was when the legal divorce went through. I always wondered what was the last straw then, when her son had been head of the family for six or seven years. Also what it was she did that made her parents engage her to Arcturus Black in the first place. It’s difficult to understand what could be bad enough for that instead of a nice, clean murder.”

Hermione blinked several times. “I think I might be too tired to understand you properly, er, Ms. Rosier,” she said.

“Please call me just about anything else,” said Druella, who was at the end of her own rope about Hermione’s usual awkwardness around her.

“You don’t like the muggle title? Or is it too modern?” said Hermione politely.

Druella, eyes raised to the ceiling, lit upon what she was nearly certain had been Melania’s own private liquor cabinet and got up with relief. “First of all,” she said, “While practices do differ between families, I have not used the name ‘Rosier’ since I was thrown out of school at the age of fourteen for getting pregnant, and my darling cousin Evan told Orion that he would really prefer to kill me for it, but if Orion absolutely insisted he’d sign off on one of the Blacks marrying me instead. It’s very possible that if I did somebody would sue me. I was never entirely clear on whether Evan went through with a formal disownment and I’m not sure my relatives know, either. I am a Rosier only in a very technical and limited sense, so in my case the correct family name is certainly ‘Black.’” This was the liquor cabinet, but there was an unfamiliar locking spell on it. Druella unfocused her eyes to examine the magic.

“Second, nobody has ever really used that for me, either, because I’ve spent my whole life as a minor administrative aide in a family with several senior women actually of the blood. It’s generally been ‘Dru’ or ‘Druella,’ ‘Aunt Dru,’ or ‘Madam’ nonspecific. I’m absolutely not a ‘Miss’ after my age, widowhood and children, but ‘Mrs.’ seems to imply an actual marital relationship that never materialized. I am truthfully the next best thing to a whore, and everybody in pureblood society is aware of that.”

“That’s the entire point of the title ‘Ms.,’” said Hermione, though with a certain tone of argument by route. “And which of those are you suggesting I use for you?” and then a moment later, “I think I have a lot of questions about the rest of that, and none of them are appropriate for a near stranger.”

“We’ve been living together for months and I’ve helped you wash baby vomit out of your hair,” said Druella dryly. “There is a point for standing on formality and we’re past it among all but the truly insufferable. Druella or Dru will do, thank you, and ask me whatever impertinent questions you please. I could do with some impertinence instead of all of you tiptoeing about me.” There, she had it, and a flick of her wand unlocked the liquor cabinet. “Oh, good, Melania did leave some things here. Scotch? Or – let me see – cognac?”

“Whatever you’d like will be fine,” said Hermione apparently by habit. “Er – I’m sorry. That was rude.”

“I only just told you to be rude.” Druella brought down the scotch bottle and two glasses concealed also in the cupboard. She cleaned them with a couple of flicks of her wand before pouring, courteously, Hermione’s glass first. “We hardly know each other, and it’s getting ridiculous.” Druella of course was in part at fault for this for the way she had been floating through day after day, but she’d done that her whole life, really. No use getting upset about it at this point.

“Fine,” said Hermione, sampling the scotch with more appreciation than Druella would expect of a girl her age, let alone one who had spent much of her late adolescence running a series of armed resistance groups. Then again, there could be a lot of alcohol involved in the social aspects of treason, as Druella had reasons to know. “What I’m really confused about, and this will mark me as a stupid muggleborn but I can’t help it, is how old any of you are. Bellatrix Lestrange was your daughter? But she’s old enough to have been a married adult when she went to prison in 1982, and Andromeda’s her younger sister and had Tonks, and you look, I don’t know, thirty-five? A very young forty? Your hair’s not gray at all. I know magical aging is different, but I’ve seen pictures of Dumbledore from the sixties where he’d gone entirely gray...”

“It’s not consistent across individuals,” said Druella, cutting in when she worked out what the question was. “If you’re trying to come up with a rule you’re going wrong there. Nobody really understands how it works in full, but it seems to be a combination of natural ability with magic, how you use magic in practice, and external stressors, aside from not getting killed violently before you’d be old in muggle terms anyway. Dumbledore’s aging was widely rumored to have been caused by a curse. I’m now sixty-seven, if that’s what you’re trying to ask, my birthday will be in the spring, and I was extremely young when I had Bellatrix and Andromeda. I was fourteen when I got pregnant and fifteen when Bella was born.”

“Oh. And you got kicked out of school?” said Hermione, looking rattled. “Wait, how long will I live?”

“Nobody really knows until you die,” said Druella wanly, “And it’s hard to say because so many of us die unnatural deaths, and so many who don’t are rumored to use magic in artificial ways, but it seems like natural lifespan is a couple of centuries for the magical, absent complicating factors. I think the longest widely-believed claim for a natural lifespan without deliberate attempts at immortality is five centuries or so, but to be frank I don’t believe that one. It’s totally uncorrelated with blood status, also. Although you can sort of tell which of the allegedly muggle lines in our villages are squibs because they live that long pretty regularly, too.”

Hermione was clearly struggling to absorb the idea of living two hundred years, which Druella sympathized immensely with. at least for Dru that lifespan was about forty years further gone. Hermione eventually settled on the remark, “So it wasn’t that you were arranged to marry that young?”

“Oh, it’s complicated,” Druella said, and made a bit of a face, moving to refill her scotch glass. “I was, but it was to somebody else, and I didn’t want to marry him for reasons which are no longer important at this juncture. So I intentionally got pregnant with Alphard Black’s baby instead. Stupid thing to do, really, but I was caught in a pretty bad position all around and I was fourteen.”

“I thought Bellatrix Lestrange’s father was Cygnus?” said Hermione, frowning like somebody who was mentally examining a page they had memorized.

“Legally, yes, but she’s genetically Alphard’s. Was genetically Alphard’s. I’m getting there. Like I said, I got caught pregnant too late to easily hush things up, I was expelled and the engagement was broken, and darling Evan declared that if I was sent home to the family he’d ensure I was properly murdered for it but if Orion really wanted to take me into the Black household he was welcome to do so and dispose of the Rosier whore as he pleased—”

Hermione made a sickened noise.

“That was the nicest thing he ever did for me,” said Druella dismissively. “My parents engaged me that young to a widower because they were trying to get me out of the household, becauseEvan tried to rape me when I was twelve. I made the mistake of stopping him, so he wanted revenge afterward forever. Orion – at least, then – didn’t go in for that kind of thing, so I was sent home to – well, here – instead of my parents and there proceeded to be a two week long row about who was going to marry me. Then Easter break was over.”

“Alphard Black didn’t agree, then?” said Hermione.

“Everybody else agreed it was his baby and his job, and he sulked his way back to school and vanished off the platform when they came home for the summer,” said Druella. “Never came back from France after that. So Orion made Cygnus marry me instead, even if he was even younger than me. He’d just turned thirteen. In retrospect I should have said I wanted Pollux, even if he was divorced already and forty-ish. And possibly sleeping with his sister. Much nicer man, and not a child rapist, so there was that going for him.”

“I think I might need more scotch for this conversation,” said Hermione, and finished her glass before she reached for the bottle to pour more. “If he’d have married you at – fourteen? – when he was forty, wouldn’t that make him a child rapist?”

“Not if I was willing, but I doubt we’d have had sex. Cygnus and I never did. Anyway Pollux wouldn’t have raped the five year old daughter attributed to him legally by the marriage, is my point.” Hermione’s eyes flashed. “Say it,” said Druella, wearily, “Whatever it is in your head, let’s get past it.”

“Is that why Bellatrix Lestrange was mad, then?”

“No, and she wasn’t mad, or at least if she was it wasn’t in the way you mean,” said Druella bitterly. She loved all of her daughters and had a tolerably peaceful, supportive relationship with Andromeda under normal circumstances, but she harbored closely the terrible thought that Bellatrix was the one of the three of them she’d really liked, who she might have been friends with without the blood relationship. “People didn’t generally join Voldemort out of insanity, it’s only comforting for others to think so.”

“She tortured me,” said Hermione flatly, drinking more of the scotch. “We were captured briefly at Malfoy Manor, and—” Hermione stopped, obviously discomfited. “Wait, you were in the house then, weren’t you? I read the sealed report on your Order of Merlin.”

“I was,” admitted Druella, staring now fixedly at the table where the glasses rested.

“Luna and Mr. Ollivander said that you snuck things to them,” said Hermione. “Like the nail we used in the basement. Extra food. Medical supplies.”

“I did what I could,” said Druella, and did not raise her eyes. “It wasn’t enough.”

The truth was that she had been reasonably courageous that last year of the war, quite respectably so all things considered, but it had been easy because things had been so clear: there had been a war, and sides, and somebody to receive passed information, and a particular outcome to hope for. Against it were all the years before, which had piled up the files Druella was sorting in her rooms, and the bodies that had not been interred in the crypt but thrown out, or returned to families more as a threat and a means of creating terror than as a mercy.

Druella wasn’t selfless or good or particularly nice. She wasn’t going to mention those things to the new Ministry to be absolved by punishment. But to be praised for the last year of the war by people ignorant of her life’s work before it invariably made her feel vaguely sick.

Then she thought about what Hermione had just said. There was something a little off, there, and Druella felt sorry at the idea of picking at it, given the topic. She also had this strange feeling that it was important, and a lifetime’s experience telling her to pay attention when her mind caught at something. “Your capture was over very quickly,” she said, picking up the scotch glass, “And Bellatrix did torture you, for most of the time you in particular were there. We all heard them go over it repeatedly when the – when Voldemort arrived, so I heard Bella’s account of the night ten or fifteen times. You were never in the cellar; Harry and Ron broke out of it and came up after you and Bellatrix. Why say ‘we’ used the nail?”

Hermione was silent a moment, and Druella lifted her gaze. She thought she might see stricken pain, a flashback, something worse – Morgana knew, memories of trauma could get confused. Druella prepared to feel very bad. What she saw was worse: a gleam of something alien in Hermione’s eyes, a shimmer of something very wrong in the magic Dru was urgently now searching, and shaky, pale-lipped guilt.

“Hermione,” said Druella, more urgently than before, and with a different kind of guilt, because she had raised Bellatrix and Narcissa, and lived in the Blacks’ household for decades, and been raised in her turn by Vera Bones Rosier, notorious researcher in blood and sacrificial magic; Dru had been lab assistant for her mother since she was about six and sometimes believed it was the only reason her mother had had children. Hermione hadn’t been sleeping, and she spaced out oddly and didn’t always answer comments, and she stayed locked in her room with vague excuses for days. Her friends didn’t seem worried and the aftermath of combat could be like that, but Druella knew, she knew what it looked like when someone had buggered up the Dark Arts or been cursed and was trying to hide it. “Hermione, what is it?”

Hermione put down her scotch again and put her face in her hands. She said, “I made – not a mistake. It might have won the war – I’d do it again – but I think I fucked up really badly.”

“Tell me,” said Druella, grim and urgent. She was struck horribly by a memory of Bellatrix in the late seventies, head in her hands in just the same way, wild curls falling about her face, saying ‘Mother, I think I’ve made a mistake.’

Bella had clammed up after two more sentences, changed the subject, and icily pretended not to know what Druella meant later. If Druella let it happen again...

“There was a book,” said Hermione, and stopped. “This sounds insane. This is insane.”

“Magic,” said Druella grimly, “Can be like that, and I am well aware. Do you have the book? Or can you tell me the title?”

“I found it here, in the library,” said Hermione, and got up. “The house showed it to me again when we came back in. It’s in my room now.”

“Show me,” said Druella, somewhat dazzled by the information and the situation shifting under her feet, and followed Hermione out of Melania’s forgotten parlor. They climbed several flights of steps to the small bedrooms in one of the safer parts of the house, where Grimmauld Place had apparently allowed its unwanted guests. Hermione hesitated a moment, glancing back over her shoulder, before she opened the door.

Druella looked over Hermione’s head at her bedroom, currently doubling as a positively classic example of somebody who had driven themselves to a breaking point with Dark Arts, and consciously did not sigh.

It was immediately obvious why Hermione had not been letting anybody inside. The single window had been covered with several layers of curtains plastered shut, and to the walls, with sealing charms, and the door taken off the wardrobe, probably so that it did not feel like a threatening hiding place. The outside door stood open now, but there was a strip of material fastened to the inside of each edge, presumably to block the cracks when closed. Small jars of smokeless, heatless flame were placed throughout the room in such a way that they eliminated all shadows. Further there were runes everywhere, written in neat, frantic circles about the window and – when Dru stepped further inside and turned to look – the door, and especially about the bed: on the floor boards and climbing the wall about the headboard, inscriptions written in different inks and languages and degrees of shakiness of the hand, probably added to regularly when they stopped working, or failed to work.

The space about the runes, further, was clear, but otherwise the room was wrecked. There were books stacked against the wall or scattered on the floor, clothes strewn about like flowers or rushes, dirty dishes piled in teetering stacks held up hastily with magic, and food wrappers in haphazard heaps or spilling out of temporary waste containers. There was a private bathroom, probably courtesy the house’s concern, although Hermione had also taken its door off, and the threshold and frame were also scribbled over. She didn’t look inside: it felt unkind.

“Right,” she said instead to Hermione, who was flushed and shifting in obvious humiliation at the state of the room. Druella, who had seen worse, didn’t comment. She should have thought better than the long and obvious visual inspection, but she was out of practice. “Show me the book, please. And shut the door if it will make you more comfortable.” Druella was starting to feel unnerved at the dark and empty door at her back, subject to this atmosphere.

Hermione bit her lip and did it, casting what was clearly an automatic series of locking spells behind her. She then went and took a thin manuscript from the writing desk below the covered window, and brought this back. Druella glanced at it with magic to be sure it was safe to handle, and then took the book and flipped it open.

Her breath caught therein, less at the ominous title – Magic of Necessity – or the graphic illustrations than the hand by which it was written. This was familiar to Druella like the trailing fingers of a lover, the constant companion of decades of administrative memos and correspondence and notes, and gone from this world for twenty years. Orion had, at least, copied the book. Druella checked the back and found no colophon, turned the pages and skimmed a page or two of the introduction, and recognized Orion’s dry, skeptical voice as writer, whereupon she had to close her eyes a moment. She wasn’t sure if what she felt was grief or love or rage. Lord above, she missed him. She hated him, and she missed him.

“What is it,” said Hermione in an appalled, frightened whisper, and Dru got a hold of herself.

“Sorry,” she said. “I just miss him. --The author, I mean.”

“It’s not attributed,” said Hermione, slightly desperately. “I looked for references—”

“There wouldn’t be, it’s not the sort of thing Orion would have sent out, but this is his work. And his handwriting.” And it was certainly Bella’s work on the illustrations, but telling Hermione that most probably would be very cruel. “Right,” said Druella. “Tell me what you used from this.”

Hermione hesitated, and looked for a moment like she wanted to argue. Then she took the book back and started to turn pages.

(interlude)

Hermione had honestly not given that much thought to Druella Rosier Black before tonight, which was, arguably, insane. In Hermione’s defense, first of all, she was barely sleeping again. The nightmares came in waves, and they were particularly bad now. They left her even more exhausted when she gave up and slept. She saw the shadow-self, the nightmare of what was allegedly the original, sacrificed Hermione from the first and fixed timeline, not only in her dreams, but in the corner of her eyes when she was awake, in shadows and in mirrors.

That might have been the sleep deprivation, to be completely objective about things.

Anyway, Druella was convenient in a strict sense: she took care of the kids so Ron and Harry didn’t expect Hermione to know how, and she was fixing up bits of the house none of them could really deal with, and she mostly otherwise left them alone unless asked questions. Hermione hadn’t wanted to think too hard about her being Bellatrix Lestrange’s mother (and Andromeda Tonks’s, and Narcissa Malfoy’s), as she might have stopped being okay with Druella’s presence and there still would have been the children. But Druella, when Hermione crossed paths with her, seemed very much the woman Hermione had constructed from the notes Kingsley had kindly sent: opposed to Voldemort and at least hypothetically liberal on blood purity, brave, and able to quietly pass information to the Order of the Phoenix and Potterwatch precisely because she had never drawn a second glance from anybody as a submissively feminine pureblood widow with no career, no interests and no independent life. She drifted through the house, cleaning and fixing things, sewed in the evenings, and minded the children uncomplainingly. The only definitive opinion about anything she’d given was that they would not lie about Cassiopeia’s identity.

It was only now, having turned to her for help after being caught out, that Hermione spotted the resemblance to Bellatrix Lestrange, and her sisters. Druella had snapped into focus, and now there was intelligence and a strong will visible in her face. Hermione saw in her Lestrange’s expression as she curtly snapped orders, or Narcissa Malfoy picking a fight in Madam Malkin’s.

“Right,” said Druella, scanning the pages of A Second Chance. “So. It’s a sacrifice that is supposed to grant you a chance to redo the last day with better circumstances. A temporarily fatal sacrifice of the self. And you did this at Malfoy Manor, which you remember differently, hence the comment about the nail, because at least from your subjective view of events, it actually worked how this describes. Including the part where you’re being tormented now.”

“You remember something?” said Hermione, torn between complete horror and hope. On the one hand, it would mean she wasn’t crazy; on the other it would mean she wasn’t crazy.

“No, I don’t, and if this is remotely accurate I wouldn’t, I’m only guessing on the basis of your mistake just now. And that I was there, and your escape then should have been impossible if everybody in the house hadn’t promptly lost their bloody minds. More. I am correct?” She waited for Hermione’s nod. “Right. This was meant as an instruction manual for the heirs to the family or he would have cited his fucking sources, this is useless for finding enough to fix the consequences... Bleeding Blacks. I’ll have to ask him directly.”

“I thought you said he was dead?” said Hermione. “And wouldn’t you want to know how to fix it in an instruction manual?”

“If it was for research he’d have included that sort of thing, or if there was a straightforward way of undoing it he would have said so. But let me tell you something about the Blacks, Hermione,” said Druella, putting the book down and fishing a small pad of paper out of her sleeve. “For a thousand years they dedicated new family properties – the important ones, mind, not new tenant villages and the like – in the same way, with only small improvements. Nobody ever worked out how to break it, because nobody else would fucking cast it so there weren’t many opportunities to experiment. Do you want to know how?”

“I’m sure you’re about to tell me,” said Hermione, who for once in her life was too exhausted to want to figure it out on her own. She had not been aware, before these past months, that you could be so sleep deprived that being conscious hurt.

“They’d exempt everybody with an essential role in the House that required too much training, and then they’d draw lots. Just members of the Blood, mind. And whoever drew the proverbial short straw would be sacrificed on the new foundation, and their soul bound into the property protections as a self-aware ward.”

Hermione thought despite herself of Sirius falling through the veil and was aghast. “You – how recently?”

“Not since I married in, they hadn’t had any new construction projects in that time, but it’s quite well documented, and besides you can go and talk to the bloody things and they’ll confirm it. Not Grimmauld Place, it’s too old and... weird.... I think something else was done, but Orion would never let anyone else see the documentation on this place and I think he hid the notes somewhere before he killed himself, or burnt them or something. My point is that this is the sort of thing they would expect any family member in a dire enough situation – for the House, mind, not them personally – to roll their sleeves up and get to, and nevermind the supposed eternity of suffering after. That’s just part of the job.” Druella sounded irate, but not particularly horrified.

Hermione... did not really want to know anything else about that right now, she discovered. “But how can you ask him?”

“We just have to call up his spirit,” said Druella. “The crypt anchors them, they’re – don’t argue, it’s not resurrection and there are all kind of academic debates about what’s actually happening, but you can get information out of them, usually. You’ll see. All I’m going to do is ask him for his sources, anyway.”

Hermione absorbed this. She supposed that at worst they would still be stuck. The library had sh
own her other books when she returned to Grimmauld Place with Harry and Ron, and she had tried to understand the relevance. But everything was so difficult when she couldn’t sleep and she kept seeing and hearing things and she couldn’t talk to anyone about it, because they’d think she was insane and the book was undoubtedly highly illegal anyway. She had actually met some people she’d thought about asking, because she really was working on Beings’ rights campaigns and sometimes she was well enough to get out of the house and go to meetings, but – she wasn’t sure she could trust them, or who could really help, and all of their problems felt so much worse and more urgent than something that seemed imaginary when Hermione was doing well.

At least Druella had taken that question out of her hands by figuring it out herself; and Druella wasn’t in particular legal danger, or impoverished, or desperately in need of Hermione’s support.

“Okay,” said Hermione, and took a deep breath. “Let me show you what else the library pulled out for me when I came back and started looking for help.”

“The library pulled this out?” said Druella, raising her eyebrows.

“Er,” said Hermione, feeling, again, insane. “Yes. I came into the library when we were staying here – before – and it was sitting on a table that I’d left empty, with a book of library magic. When I came back, after the war, it was out again along with these,” she said, and went to search out Alternate and Additional Selves in Practice, along with the specialist sleep magic book.

Druella snorted at the latter, the title of which explained it was written by and for Black relatives, and took the first. “I’ll read this, then, and the rest of the other if you don’t mind. But first we’ll go and call up Orion, unless – no, you’re too tired for this. Has the sleep magic been any help at all?”

Hermione had an entire separate notebook for that, full of sleep magic she had tried and results, which she went to retrieve for Druella. Nothing worked for long, though sometimes a choice helped for a while. Sometimes she was too afraid to experiment: the worst results happened when she used strong sleep magic and was trapped, indeed, asleep, and unable to wake up from the supernatural nightmares, tortured for what felt like days. Hermione did not actually believe in afterlives. She was nevertheless increasingly terrified by the idea she would one day close her eyes for the last time, die – and wake up in that place forever, just as the book had suggested.

Druella flicked through her notes without a comment on the muggle-made paper, spiral binding and plastic cover, which Hermione had grittingly avoided in efforts to assimilate over the course of Hogwarts. After the war she had stopped bothering. It hadn’t seemed worth it to struggle with quills and ink bottles, and writing was so much easier this way. At the end of the filled pages, Druella set the notebook down and said, “I have some thoughts on this part, if you will listen, and I’d like you to try them. When you’ve slept something halfway normal for a bit, we can call up Orion; or when you’ve failed a few things I’ll give that up and do it without you present. It’s not really dangerous to call spirits of the house, but doing it in your mental state is asking for trouble.”

“If you think you can help me sleep normally like this I’ll try it,” said Hermione, and the open desperation in her voice appalled her.

“What I want to try first is actually putting you into a trance-state by magic, and observing. I should be able to tell if you’re distressed and break it, but if you aren’t it will give you some benefits of resting, and either way I’ll know more. Please go and get ready to sleep, and I’ll come back in a half hour once I’ve checked some things?”

Hermione wasn’t sure she liked the thought of this alert, Bellatrix Lestrange-like Druella pointing a wand at her. But Druella hadn’t done anything except say horrifying but true things, and Hermione wanted so badly to sleep. “Okay,” she said, and steeled herself to bear solitude again. She had to pretend to be normal, so she hadn’t been able to seek out much comfort from company at the worst points before. But it had been so nice to have the distraction, and to feel she wasn’t alone with what she still half-believed was only madness.

(direction)

Problems sleeping were something of a hazard of the Dark Arts and pureblood culture both, for various reasons. Druella’d built up her own substantial repertoire, like any experienced adult practitioner. This was specialized for her own psychological makeup and her children’s, and tailored to the reasons they tended to need magic to sleep.

In this case, she didn’t know Hermione nearly as well, and the problem was frankly weird. She wanted to check a few references, half to help better, and half so that what she tried might be more useful as a diagnostic tool. It would have been nice to question Hermione more thoroughly about her symptoms, but that would plainly require more trust. And, probably, sleep, for the sake of coherence. Hermione already had the family reference book on the subject, but Druella had a few more volumes, kept in her old rooms on a shelf above the bed...

She looked some things up and made some notes, and noticed with some small disgust her own relief. Here was a problem for her, not just for any competent adult woman. Here, also, was a problem difficult enough to really take her mind off things. If she took some of her other reference volumes upstairs, she could make a start on research while she waited to see if Hermione was able to sleep...

The first thing to try was not exactly sleep, but an induced trance state that would block outside influences and avoid normal sleep stages both. Neither externally projected nightmares nor the mind’s reaction to psychological trauma should factor in, as Druella explained, so whether or not it worked, they would learn something about Hermione’s current condition. It was not as good as real, restful sleep, but might be an improvement over nightmares that left one in a state of exhausted vigilance. If Hermione could lie down in the bed...

This sort of trance spell was basic for any number of purposes, and for that reason it wouldn’t be included in the book of specialist sleep magic. There were, Dru thought wanly, reasons to learn Dark Arts from somebody else who already knew them (and had demonstrated their ability to remain a largely sane and functional human being), but of course that often wasn’t possible. Hermione slumped back on the bed, and very shortly was unconscious or close to it.

Druella picked up one of the books. Then she set it down again and took up the fresh sheet of notes to start organizing what Hermione had told her and what she had already read, as it was very unlikely Hermione knew the normal countermeasures and diagnostic approaches to have exhausted them. Druella could simply look at her magic and the magic upon her – distinct things – right now, and note down what she saw, but it wasn’t very helpful. There was still that strange filter, or haze, but it wasn’t quite like anything Druella had seen before, and so she could not easily identify it...

Not fifteen minutes after Druella had induced the trance state, Hermione began to show signs of severe distress: heart and breath picking up, sweat, little twitches. Druella cast a couple of medical diagnostic spells to confirm it, and verified she didn’t see any external magic working now. She then frowned heavily. She did not wake Hermione immediately, but cast a second, different charm, one that projected a specific dream or vision instead of preventing them. Druella set this to the vague prompt of a visit to the seaside, focusing more on the emotional content she wanted (peace, relaxation) than the details, which Hermione’s mind would provide. Then she settled to wait.

The effects were nearly immediate and strong. Hermione relaxed again, and entered a truly restful trance. Druella largely returned to her notes. When forty minutes passed with no real change, Druella cast a couple of new spells, as agreed, to transition from the trance to real sleep, and did not disrupt the implanted dream. She waited long enough to be sure Hermione’s agitation did not return, and then quietly left the bedroom, locking the door behind her.

Two possibilities: either due to the nature of the curse or something intrinsic about Hermione, the blocking of normal dreams or external influences had failed; or if not, there was no such dream, internal or external, but rather Hermione was perceiving something real and internal to herself.

Not the best news, under the circumstances; but potentially helpful in its distinctiveness.

The next morning, Druella woke in her old bedroom in Grimmauld Place with a feeling of sparkling excitement, like being alive again. She struggled to remember what she had to look forward to for a few moments, staring at the ceiling mural of painted lace. Then she recalled her new project.

“Flattering, Dru,” she muttered to the room. “Excited about a child’s suffering because it gives you something to do with yourself that feels meaningful.”

Nobody answered her, and she didn’t feel any lessening of her eagerness, so she got up. Downstairs, Ron was cooking scrambled eggs, toast and bacon for breakfast, while Harry got food into the two toddlers. Hermione had not made an appearance but that wasn’t really a surprise, any more than Andromeda. Druella asked absently after Ron’s father, who worked in the reconstituted Ministry in some capacity and was greatly hated by her third son-in-law; and expressed a positive response to Harry’s plan to take the children to the local muggle library for story time later.

“What if she starts, you know, hissing?” said Ron.

“They’ll just think she’s playing pretend,” said Druella. “Nymphadora was awful, mind, Andromeda tried to keep her in hats and blankies to hide changes but she’d just take them off, we had to give up until she was old enough to mostly know to behave. Even then she couldn’t be sent to a muggle school. But I don’t imagine anyone will mind the Parseltongue.”

There was an awkward silence.

Harry said quietly, “I didn’t realize you’d known her,” and Druella, who for one moment had somehow forgotten, flinched. Breakfast took a sharp turn toward a cliff and was nearly irrecoverable. But Druella took a breath:

“Yes, though never as well as I liked, because my visits had to be a secret and once she was old enough to tell someone we were afraid she might... But I was there when she was born. And when she had Teddy.” That had been a tragic necessity and not a gesture of support: Druella seated in the doorway, prepared for a Death Eater or her own eldest daughter to appear, in which case she would have to stand up, make enough noise for a warning, and refuse to get out of the way.

Instead they’d lost Dora at Hogwarts, in battle, like so many others. Druella took a breath. “Did you two know her well, then?” she said, and listened to stories about “Tonks” changing her nose into a pig’s, and undercover with the also-deceased, notorious “Mad-Eye” Moody, and coming to smuggle Harry between residences and breaking dishes in the process. (“That does sound like her,” said Druella, and sighed.)

It was among other things because of this reminder – of Dora; of times she had or hadn’t tried to intervene during the war; of childhoods past – that Druella established Harry was all right with Teddy and Cassie for the day, and went out. This time she had no errand in Diagon Alley. She went directly out on the street, in muggle clothing she had not worn in just about two and a half years, and found a payphone. This, Druella used carefully with reference to a memorized routine, dropping in coins she kept with the clothing, and hung onto the phone while it rang.

She wondered if they wouldn’t answer. Unlike Andromeda and Ted, before, they had no reason to wait for calls from a random public telephone. But after not too many rings, the phone picked up, and Marius himself answered by repeating the phone number before he said, “Black household?”

Of course that would mean something rather different – or rather, nearly nothing – in the other world.

“Hello,” said Druella, and put her forehead against the glass. “It’s Druella. I wasn’t quite sure how else to get in touch.”

“Druella!” Marius was very surprised. “Are you – all right? If you need anything – or somewhere to stay, you know we have room here—”

Druella was violently and startlingly touched by this immediate offer. She, like all of the magical Black family members – and Rosiers, too – was dangerous as a pit viper and ought not to be casually handled by somebody who couldn’t defend himself. But there were times and places when the offer would have saved her. “No, I’m all right, thank you, I’ve been with Andromeda. But I thought we might catch up some time? I’m not sure what you will have heard, officially or unofficially, and I was hoping to confirm you were all right.”

“I hope Andromeda is well,” said Marius, and the words she realized she had been hoping for on some level: “I have some time today, if that’s not too soon?”

“Today would be lovely,” Druella said. “Shall I meet you somewhere? Wherever you’d like is fine, just as long as there’s an Apparition point nearby.”

Four hours later, Druella walked into a muggle cafe to meet Marius for lunch.

Marius looked, more than anything else, tired. He would be in his eighties, now, which Druella thought was quite elderly for a muggle, but the Black squib line was long-lived, like the magical. He was quite well for his age in the muggle world, with salt and pepper hair and a face lined but not papery or sallow. Nevertheless there was that certain exhaustion to him and his demeanor.

“Are you all right?” said Dru at once when she had sat down. “I confess I know what Bella told me, but not much else about how all of this has affected you, and that was before this last turn.”

“Oh, we’re fine in every practical sense,” said Marius. “The Ministry may have abolished House tenure over the magical world, but I’m not sure they even knew the muggle side properties existed, let alone how to get legal title to them. I’ve meant to try to work out who I should be giving account details to, but in present circumstances... I am glad you called.”

“I’m not demanding the money,” said Druella quickly. “There’s plenty of private property in the family name and not the House on the magical side, too. In any case, Sirius left everything to Harry Potter and he isn’t hurting for it; and Andromeda and I have moved into Grimmauld Place with them and the grandchildren.”

“Then there are children,” said Marius, and looked just a hair relieved.

Of course, if Druella had spent her whole life caring for the family as a junior wife, Marius was older and had spent longer working for the Blacks as a half-disowned, half-enslaved accountant.

“There are children, in a matter of speaking,” said Druella, and tried to figure out what Marius probably knew. She found herself floundering at an administrative problem for the first time in a while; she should know at least what Marius had been told before the coup in 1997, but all of their meetings had been constrained in topic and half the time watched by someone else, and so much had happened, and her normal administrative duties had fallen apart in 1993, when Poll – God save him! – and Arcturus died, and then Sirius escaped, and the House was officially under a Ministry administration that couldn’t get into any of the properties to administer. “Sirius left everything he had personal control of to Harry Potter, as I said, and of course you’ll have heard the Wizengamot’s traditional hereditary divisions are gone, now.

“Of which, Harry’s a nice kid, decent sort, but no real connection to the culture or idea how to handle Grimmauld Place alone. Andromeda is... not handling things well... Her husband and daughter were both killed, and her son-in-law, I don’t – I’m not sure if if you saw that anywhere in the casualty lists. They had a baby son, Teddy, and then...” Here, Druella hesitated.

“My condolences, and God rest and keep them. And then?” said Marius, carefully controlled and emotionless. She forgot sometimes that he was Cassiopeia and Poll’s younger brother, great uncle to her own daughters, and had been raised in that nightmarish house for long enough to draw the Black adult control over himself as he had to.

“Bella had a child with the – with Voldemort before they both died,” said Dru, a bit shortly, because how else could you say that? “She’s two and a half. They named her Cassiopeia.”

“Dear Lord,” said Marius, and took his glasses off to clean them, as though this would somehow help.”—She’s with you?”

“Now, yes.” Druella sighed. “Our daughter, I’m afraid to say, is being an idiot again.”

‘Our daughter:’ Narcissa Black, born Nerissa, a name that had been changed possibly out of sheer pettiness. Druella hadn’t been given a choice about any of it, only handed a young baby who could almost pass for her natural child, being a much paler blond, and only a year and a half old at her first accidental magic. This is now your daughter, had said Orion, and Druella had swallowed and nodded and reached out for her, not yet understanding.

Of course, with the way Narcissa’s hair had failed to darken and her bright blue eyes, it was generally supposed Druella, notorious slut, had done it again. This was believed even by Narcissa herself. Druella’s mother had considered Narcissa especially her grandchild for that reason, unaware that Narcissa was in fact of practically no blood relation to the Rosiers. Usually, such children of squibs adopted back into the Black line were told in their adolescence, and introduced to their birth parents, but by then Narcissa had sworn herself to the cause of radical blood purity and had been obviously unsafe to tell.

Surely Bellatrix, over six years older and so nearly eight at the time of the adoption, and further having eventually met Marius and his wife and discovered how much Narcissa resembled the latter, had known. If so, as far as Druella was aware, she had never spoken a word of it.

Druella had loved Narcissa and, despite her current frustration, loved her still, and did not really regret being her mother. But nonetheless it was flagrantly obvious Marius and Annabelle Black would have given her a better life, even including the necessary attendance of Hogwarts as a muggleborn.

“Dare I ask what she’s done now?” said Marius, resigned in the way of somebody who’d never had any real choice about anything. “I had hoped when I heard she was pardoned for saving Harry Potter she might have reconsidered some life choices.”

“I don’t know about that, I haven’t been speaking to her lately, but she had custody of Cassie, after the war. She dropped him off on Harry Potter saying he should pretend she was his, as another Parselmouth, because she’d be safer that way. Getting me involved was a complete coincidence by way of Andromeda.”

Marius put his face in his hands. “And are you going to do that?” he said into them, unmindful of the muggle waitress coming over to bring their drinks.

“Absolutely not,” said Druella when the woman was gone. “She’s my granddaughter and this family has had enough lies.”

“I wasn’t sure... how you’d felt about it,” said Marius, picking his face out of his hands with evident exhaustion.

Immediately Druella felt terrible for her righteousness. “I love Narcissa,” she said, and took the paper slip off the top of her drink’s straw for something to do with her gaze. “I loved her at once. That doesn’t change the fact that she was stolen from you. And Annabell. I’m sorry for my part in that, though it wasn’t my idea, and if there’s something I can do to fix that now...” Although if he asked her to tell Narcissa she would be in a very awkward spot.

Marius shook his head though, slowly. “I – appreciate that you say it. At this point... At least Graeme is safe.”

Graeme was Marius’s magical grandson. It was the fight over Arcturus trying to claim him that had killed Poll, and in all likelihood, in that fight was also cast the curse that killed Arcturus six months later, though Druella could not be sure.

“So he is,” said Druella. “In any case, if the muggle side accounts are maintained, that’s all for the best. I think, in all honesty, the person they belong to now is you.”

A look of profound apprehension crossed Marius’s face and was smoothed aside. “That’s – me and my children and grandchildren, you as Cygnus’s widow, Andromeda, and Bella’s illegitimate daughter in the family, and you’re supporting Andromeda’s grandson as well? And a couple of elderly aunts; I have to confess I’m not sure what would have happened to the corporate family accounts paying their stipends when the Wizengamot House was dissolved, with Harry Potter inheriting from Sirius and out of the family.”

“Ugh,” said Druella. “I suppose I had better work that out myself. It’s possible they’re under Aunt Yarrow’s control or something. It’s going to be a headache to find out who even knows, though.”

“I did rather have that impression,” Marius said with a certain delicate disdain for the current chaos. “I’ll look into setting something appropriately corporate up on this side to hold the family assets in the muggle world – no, don’t tell me otherwise, you have two young children to raise who will need it eventually, not to mention you and Andromeda. I assume at a certain station the Ministry will sell off the Wizengamot seats again, too, and we’ll want to be in a position to take advantage.”

“I don’t know, I have the impression they’re going for something rather more radical, although the news does give the sense they’re still trying to work out what got looted and by whom, and make everybody turn over their newly-enchanted slaves,” said Druella wearily. She could defend herself well enough with a fortress like Grimmauld Place to return to, but any number of people in their society couldn’t. “Anyway, how thrilled they’ll be by the Blacks trying to buy our way back into power...”

“I think if you’re brokering the sale they’ll tolerate it,” said Marius in a different tone, and she looked up to find him studying her. “I did read the lists of awards handed out, and for what.”

Oh. Oh, no. “I don’t want to talk about it,” said Druella quickly.

Marius regarded her for a long moment through his glasses, then nodded once, as though coming to some conclusion. “Then I hope you’ll come over and see us at home at some point. It would be lovely to meet the children.”

That was as obvious a test as any Druella had ever seen. “I would be delighted,” she said. “I’ll make Andromeda come, too, and get her to stay sober past three PM for once... Not that I can really talk... Oh, I wanted to ask you something, although I understand if you’re not comfortable with it. I need to call up Orion’s spirit in the house to ask him something, but I’m not a close blood relation and I think I’ll unnerve Hermione if I suggest using Cassie. Could I have a bit of your blood?” She did not raise all of the reasons she would not wish to involve Andromeda in this, not the least that she and Orion had loathed each other. It was probable that Andromeda would not agree, and Orion, called with her blood, would refuse to come.

Marius looked at her, then laughed. “I suppose you can, at that. Why does unnerving Hermione matter? That’s – Miss Hermione Granger, from the newspapers?”

“She’s got to be involved. She did something stupid to herself in the process of winning the war and I’m trying to fix it, and I need Orion’s expertise, unfortunately.” Druella sighed. “This would be easier if I was speaking to Mother just now, but – in any case, you don’t mind? I only need a small amount, I’ve got a glass vial for it in my purse.”

“I remember how that spell works,” Marius agreed, and neither of them mentioned that Druella hardly needed to ask to take it from him, should she wish.

When lunch was over, Druella walked to the Apparition point. There was a faint dusting of snow on the ground, and it was an unusually clear night. Families were out with children, and couples young and old, and people hurrying through their holiday shopping...

Druella ought to figure out who she was meant to give gifts for Christmas, come to think of it, and whether the children (collective) wanted to do anything at Grimmauld Place. There was obviously Andromeda and Teddy and Cassie, and she ought to at least get something impersonal for Harry, Ron and Hermione, and Marius and his wife, and... she would probably have to ask him about who would appreciate it, but he had two adult children – not counting Narcissa – one of whom was still married. They had five children between them. Some of those were old enough to be married themselves, though Druella had not really been in regular contact for a while. She hoped none had been killed in the war, but then Graeme was the only magical one, and she knew he was safe.

Damn Bella.

Nearly Druella’s first thought over the Muggle-born Registration Commission had been Graeme, but she hadn’t been sure it was a good idea to bring it up in case she reminded Bellatrix of a Black family quasi-muggleborn’s existence when she’d otherwise forgotten. Marius was wealthy enough to handle a lot with bribes. Druella had instead been trying to work out how to get a message directly to Marius with the least chance of being caught, particularly when it had just become very dangerous to change money to muggle, when she came in on an argument among the Death Eaters related to Bella walking into the Ministry to register a descendant of the Black squib line as a halfblood. Coeus Mulciber and Adhara Rosier had been performatively disgusted by her hypocrisy, while Bellatrix herself was vaguely contemptuous of the whole subject; “Obviously he has known magical ancestry,” she had said, walked straight past an ostentatiously shocked Narcissa, and asked after some vaguely-coded military objective from her husband, who had cooperated with the topic change at once.

But that was over with. Druella ought to send something appropriately passive aggressive to Narcissa for Christmas, and a real gift to Draco. Her mother was another one for the passive aggressive side of the list... On that note, Druella ducked into the tree cover of a small city park, rounded the side of some sort of outbuilding, and Disapparated.

In the house, Druella went virtuously up to her rooms to put the vial of Marius’s blood away in a box nobody else could open, with a dated label. She wouldn’t be able to use it for a bit, assuming Hermione kept wanting her help, and the combination of sleep and dream projection enchantments kept working. Harry still had the children. Druella thought longingly of the rest of Melania’s liquor cupboard, and the various other similar stores in places in the house, and told herself off for it. There was nothing even really wrong, no threat to her and no imminent disaster, except that practically everybody she had ever loved or even particularly liked was dead except Andy (already drunk) and Cissy (on seriously provisional status in the category).

That wasn’t going to change any time soon. And just as she had told Andromeda, being drunk forever wasn’t going to be much fun, either, and it wouldn’t bring them back.

Morosely, and in lieu of drinking, Druella got up and wandered vaguely in a certain direction she had up to this juncture avoided. She really wasn’t sure if the house would let her in or not, as the doors had been only intermittently present for nearly twenty-five years. But when she reached the appropriate landing, there they were, three in a row, doors originally matched, but differentiated by carved runes and spellwork and artistic endeavors: the bedrooms of Bellatrix, Andromeda, and Narcissa.

Druella grasped the left-most door and opened Bella’s room for the first time since the end of the first war.

Inside was white: white ceiling, white woods, and a certain amount of white paper, scattered on the desk and the floor and the bed. That last mess was new since the last time Dru had come in. Dru frowned. Well – Orion had been alive, then, and it had been before Bella’s arrest, so it was always possible that she had come back at some point looking for something when everyone was out. Druella thought Orion would have mentioned it, but the wards had never been set against Bellatrix. It was even possible Regulus had been in the room to search it before his death twenty years ago.

Over the white was color in the form of floral scrollwork and skulls painted on the ceiling and the furniture, a pattern Bella had drawn herself when she was ten and never had changed. Standing inside, looking at the room, Druella realized the desk was still the school desk they’d bought when Bellatrix started Hogwarts, proportioned awkwardly for the tall woman she’d become. Bellatrix had commanded half the war from this room, at least half the time, as far as Druella could trace. Sitting there must have been terribly uncomfortable.

Druella put her face in her hands in that thought, and collapsed onto the bed atop the papers, and laughed for some time.

It was such a stupid thought. It was such a stupid problem to have put up with. Nobody had really thought about the fact that Bellatrix wasn’t a child and hadn’t been for some time in relation to the bedroom arrangements or the furniture, because she hadn’t been married yet. But she could have mentioned it at – virtually any time, or for that matter bought herself a new damned desk without anybody so much as noticing the transaction’s cost. But everybody had been walking on eggshells around each other, all the time. Probably Bellatrix had been afraid to draw attention to her adult, unmarried status in the clusterfuck the family had turned into then.

Finally, laughter turning to hiccoughing that threatened to become sobs, Druella sat up, wiped her face, and got control of herself.

She wasn’t sure what she had come in here for, really, but it was aside from the wreckage largely untouched. Bellatrix had taken very little when she left. Presumably the private papers had gone, but little of her clothing and basically nothing of the jewelry, except for – Druella had searched carefully to confirm – gifts from Sirius and Andromeda, who couldn’t replace them. Bellatrix had taken the rare books in her personal possession, but none of those that could be purchased readily, and none of her art supplies nor hair tools nor her damned toiletries, and not a single piece of underwear. She’d never so much as accessed the marital bank account Orion had set up, either. Druella had had a chance to ask later, and confirm it: Rodolphus Lestrange had replaced everything she’d owned.

It was a dramatic statement, and almost childish, except that Bellatrix had quietly refrained from drawing their attention directly. Druella had had to admit she’d looked to ask. Presumably, Orion never had.

So the residue of Bella’s life had lain since the December of 1975, and might lie forever. Druella was not certain concepts like entropy applied to Grimmauld Place, nor what the house did with rooms the residents no longer cared to enter and the house chose not to display. While Bella lived, there had been some remote chance she would come back – leave the Dark Lord, leave her marriage and take up residence again. No more, now.

Druella knew intimately how many people Bellatrix had killed, at least as well as anyone who was not a Death Eater, and better than many of those. She hated herself, but she missed her eldest daughter anyway; her chosen daughter. Her one chosen daughter, conceived on one of the last occasions Druella had had consensual sex, at the age of fourteen.

Besides, Druella’s own hands were not clean.

She got up from the bed, and went to the mirror. The vanity was also a mess, but it was harder to tell if it had also been wrecked, or searched, or only left in its state from when Bellatrix had dressed here the last time, before her wedding. Tucked into the mirror and abandoned, too, were photographs – presumably Bellatrix had taken or been content in her ability to make copies – of a variety of faces, some quite old. It looked as though Bellatrix had only ever added them and not taken them away. Druella felt faintly ambushed at the sight of the teenage Bellatrix in Hogwarts uniform arm-in-arm with an equally young Amelia Bones, still possessing a long yellow braid, in one photograph stuck into a distant corner. Not much better was a candid photo of Sirius braiding Bella’s hair, which Druella thought dated from just about a year before he had run away.

Druella had seen these photos before, though not since Bella’s death, nor Sirius’s. She still wished Andromeda had told her what Dumbledore had said about that, secrecy of the Order of the Phoenix be damned. Druella had still had plentiful connections in 1993 or 1994. She might have seen Sirius pardoned before his death.

She took her eyes from the mirror and stared down at the top of the vanity and its half empty and expiring cosmetics, a bent hair pin discarded, a comb that kept several strands of Bella’s hair between its teeth. Druella put a hand to the magically-protected string tied around her upper arm, where she hoped nobody was going to see it, braided from Bella’s hair, taken from her corpse. Then she sighed, left the hair in the comb, and turned away. She wasn’t sure what she expected to see that she hadn’t before, or what could possibly help. Nevertheless she walked to the desk slowly, turning in a circle. She looked at the open wardrobe with once-fashionable robes spilling out, and the bedspread, embroidered with a geometrical pattern of long bones by Andromeda before she left. Bella had never stopped using it, apparently.

Druella’s boot heel hit something that gave in the floor boards, and there was a distinct click.

She froze. Surely, no, she had seen no such obvious compartments before – but perhaps Bella’s death had undone the spell, whatever it was. Cautiously, flicking her wand from her sleeve into her hand, Druella crouched. She moved the rug completely aside, and saw at once the floorboard, or rather compartment in the floor, that she had just uncovered.

What point was there? What possible revelation could change anything, now?

Druella pulled up the top of the compartment and flipped it over. There were runes carved in the underside of the board, and the compartment, which was expanded a small amount in space and yes, concealed, and limited deliberately to the life time of the caster: Bellatrix as an adolescent – for this was plainly a school girl’s work – making sure the house would fully return the room to its next occupant. Druella stared at those runes, and slowly, only slowly, slid her eyes down to look inside.

Romance novels. Those were romance novels. Druella let out a slightly wild laugh and reached inside, still watching carefully for a trap. These were not literary romances, either, and in fact her impression of the covers was confirmed by a mere brush of the cheap paper: muggle publications, and – she thought they were called bodice rippers, books about being kidnapped and ravished. Bemused, Druella stacked several on the floor next to the compartment and saw that underneath the top layer the books changed genre, now. She found the first couple of covers less obvious until she got to World Without Men.

Ah.

Druella pulled several more of these from the compartment, and considered whether reading them to gain some new additional insight into Bella’s taste in muggle fiction would help a damned thing, when her fingers noticed an oddity in the texture of the last. More photographs, there was a thin stack of photographs stuffed into the center of the book. Without so much as reading the cover, Druella flipped it open – though she had just been thinking that she had seen Bella’s photos before – and looked at the first; and froze.

She certainly hadn’t seen this photograph. The setting was mostly dark, taken outside at night, with a thrown-open door above the threshold where two girls sat. Bright light from inside the building illuminated Bella’s face. She had been in perhaps her late teens, face turned to the side as she lit a muggle cigarette cupped in her hand. Nose to nose, almost kissing the other side of that hand, was another girl Druella had never seen in her life. The girl wore a muggle skirt, so short it showed the edge of the knees, and a jumper. Bellatrix in the photo had on blue jeans.

Slowly, Druella put the photo to the side and looked at the next, which contained a group of women and girls clustered around a table with muggle-style notebooks and mugs. Bellatrix was there again, to one side and smiling at the photographer. There was no helpful context except that the lighting was also electric. The next photograph held Bella and the girl from the first again, in different clothing, and this time they were kissing.

Slowly Druella paged through all of the photos – not quite ten in all – again and again, studying details of a double life she had never known: Bellatrix at a typewriter in what seemed to be the same room as the meeting, twisting around to look at the camera behind her; Bellatrix and that same girl with a cat, in an unfamiliar muggle apartment; Bellatrix behind the wheel of a muggle car, for the love of Merlin. There was some progression of time in the photos, not very much, but at least a year’s worth, perhaps a few. That and the car helped Druella make a guess at placing it: Bellatrix between graduating Hogwarts and 1968, when Andromeda had run away and Orion had calculated the political situation, and turned Bellatrix over to Voldemort as a student. She confirmed it only when it finally occurred to her to check the backs, and read the label on what seemed, to her uncertain ability to gauge Bella’s age, to be among the last: C & B May 1968 was scribbled in blue ink.

“Druella?” said Hermione’s uncertain voice from outside the doorway, “Are you – all right?” and only then did Druella realize she was weeping.

“Don’t come in,” she said thickly, “Don’t – you don’t want to see this.” It would not help Hermione to know her torturer had once been someone else – someone else with, probably, a muggle girlfriend, whose muggle flat she visited, who perhaps had taught her to drive and let her name their cat? Bella had been – not quite twenty-one. She had spent her twenty-first birthday locked in her bedroom while Orion, Pollux, Cygnus and Arcturus argued her fate for presumed collaboration with Andromeda.

Nobody, not even Druella, had suspected Bella was already doing just what Andromeda had, and first. But she hadn’t gotten away clean. That had been the mistake.

“Mother?” said Andromeda behind Hermione, “Don’t be absurd, we’re coming in, what are you doing in Bella’s room?”

Hermione made a noise of startled displeasure at that revelation, but Druella couldn’t muster a response. Andromeda had just dropped to her knees nearby, staring at the books, which might be shocking enough for her. Druella, unlike Andromeda, had known Bellatrix the Death Eater, who had, for example, the ability to buy Gauloise cigarettes competently, and to do it openly as an affectation.

“I found—” Druella said, voice shaking, and extended the photos just as Andromeda’s eyes lit on them. Andromeda made a soft noise, like she had been punched. She brushed her fingers over the top of the stack, the photo of Bella sitting in the driver’s seat of a car with the door open, smoking again.

“What—?” said Hermione, coming over despite them, and stopping as she took up a photo and saw the right side: Bellatrix at the typewriter again. Druella had eventually spotted, going over it repeatedly, the tiny Women’s Lib button on the jacket thrown over the chair’s back. Of course, she didn’t know the jacket had been Bella’s.

“They’re from the years leading to 1968,” said Druella hoarsely, mostly to Andromeda, who paled at the significance of the date. “From ‘65 to then, I think, just after she graduated. I don’t know – the backs of the photos call the other girl C, and her B. I don’t know. I never knew.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Andromeda, sat down hard, and put her face in Druella’s shoulder.

Druella put her arm around her second daughter, and stared blindly into the painted ceiling. Just a few minutes ago she had wondered what revelation could possibly matter, and now – but did it in fact matter? Bella was still dead. Druella could only hope the mysterious C was alive, and that Bellatrix, the Death Eater, hadn’t murdered her. She was aware of Death Eaters assigned similar tasks to prove their loyalty.

“It could have been different,” said Andromeda, small-voiced and mostly into Druella’s hair, and that was it, wasn’t it?

It hadn’t had to be this way. None of it had to be this way.

Druella let herself think something that had been waiting for a long time, then: imagine the law being different. Imagine the law protecting you. She didn’t have to go so far as to imagine Evan punished for raping her. Just suppose that when she got pregnant, and Alphard wouldn’t marry her and her family threw her out and threatened to kill her, there was somewhere to go, some little Ministry office that would at least give her muggle identification if not shelter, directly, so that she could walk into the muggle world and be anonymous...

She didn’t actually think women’s shelters had existed then, but she wasn’t sure. All of her familiarity with the muggle world had come later. Imagine they did, just like the law protecting you in your imagination; imagine being pregnant not here in this house, but some utilitarian dormitory or convent-like house where people would encourage her to study, to try to find work, and some job thereafter, secretary or shopgirl or whatever it would have to be. Imagine Bellatrix born in that world, still magical, still receiving a Hogwarts letter, growing up poor, and intelligent, and at least free...

Parts of it might have been awful, would have been awful. Perhaps they all would have died in the war, or even before that, Druella or Bellatrix discarded like so many pretty adolescent girls chewed up by either world. Perhaps the end of the story would be Druella writing to Orion Black to beg him for justice for an illegitimate daughter of his family, or appearing in tears on the doorstep of this very house... But perhaps not. Perhaps Bella would have gone to school alleged a halfblood with no known father, and found some place for herself – gone to university in the muggle world – met this same girl, C, whoever she was, or somebody else...

It could have been different. Bella could be alive now, looking at these photographs, showing them to Druella deliberately. They could have been together, and alive, and the end of the war could have made them safe.

The door shut softly as Hermione retreated, and Dru thought faintly, fuck. She was going to have to fix that later, if she wanted Hermione to let her help.

She didn’t do it immediately. Instead, when the weeping had dropped off, she put a hand on Andromeda’s shoulder and said, “Still sober, dear? Why don’t you join me instead of getting started. I have some more needlework to repair tonight.”

“Why even bother,” said Andromeda, and looked down at the photos spread across their laps. “You’d rather have Bella than me, if you had to pick the last one left with you.”

Oh, fools, them all. “So would you,” said Druella tartly and without thinking.

Andromeda, fortunately, laughed. “Fine. I’ll sew with you. What are we doing with these? --The books were in there, too?”

“Yes. I’ll put the room to rights... eventually. I found it like this, I don’t know what happened. The books can stay here. But let’s keep the photos?”

So the two of them went and sat in the parlor of Druella’s rooms, with the latest stack of repairs, embroidered wall hangings with tears from curse damage. Druella had not sat to sew with Andromeda for a good thirty years. There had never been that kind of time to waste on visits, and Druella hadn’t brought her work with her. But Andromeda, after a few false starts of recollection, was as good as she once had been and it was not unpleasant. The hanging Druella had depicted a starry night over a stormy ocean, nothing too grotesque, while Andromeda had chosen of her own will some hideous didactic hanging of a saint’s death.

After a while, thought, Andromeda said, “Why spend all this time fixing these things? Nobody’s going to use them, I don’t think most of them have been hung since before we were born.”

“I’ve got to do something,” said Druella. “And I don’t mind, I like sewing.” She’d never had what felt like enough time for it. Either she was drunk and too nonfunctional or she was better, and had a million more pressing administrative problems that couldn’t be foisted onto a servant or hired out.

“Then why not make something new, at least?” Andromeda said. Her needle flashed in and out, laying new threads over the unraveling edge of a decapitated head. “Why sit here, fixing others’ work, if you’re just sewing to sew?”

“I suppose I haven’t had any new ideas, dear,” said Druella. If she couldn’t picture what use the repaired textiles would be to Harry Potter’s household, still less could she envision what she might do with something new – or what to make for that unknown future.

Andromeda stopped asking difficult questions then, thank Morgana’s Black Arts; when she spoke again it was to comment on a recent news story involving yet another case of enslavement of muggles by enchantment during the Dark Lord’s coup, when basically all muggle protection laws had been ignored, recently discovered. Half of them had been killed in the resulting fight, and MLE was still claiming it as a victory.

“We’ve always been a fractious lot, darling,” said Druella at length, after she had agreed with the general thrust of Andromeda’s comments. “It’s why the Wizengamot was designed as it was... reward the most ruthless with political control over the rest, and segment us enough that we could mostly keep track... We’ll see what Shacklebolt comes up with to replace it.” Privately Druella was not optimistic. It was hard enough to keep magical Britain from murdering each other wholesale when you rewarded those most capable of preventing it with money and horrifying amounts of power. But what did she know, really, about political alternatives?

Andromeda went to bed, finally, at eleven o’clock, but she did it sober, or claimed she would. Druella was nearly done with the ocean hanging and she stayed up, laying new stitches, covering the repairs in the fabric with the addition of splashes of water, or clouds, or shooting stars. She was beginning to like this hanging, and thought she might put it up in her rooms; she hadn’t changed the decor since 1979, or actually several years before that. Probably Andromeda was right and she should make something new, but she still didn’t know what it might be. Something for one of the children, perhaps... She ought to find out what the older children, Harry and Ron and Hermione, liked...

Footsteps sounded on the stairs, and Druella rose, sticking the needle through the fabric so she didn’t lose the thread, and went swiftly to her door. “Hermione,” she said, opening it. “Won’t you come inside?”

“I – I suppose I had better,” said Hermione, who had plainly been steeling herself to knock. Got you, thought Dru, and stepped back.

“Were you... sewing?” said Hermione, looking blankly at the supplies; Andromeda had taken the gory saint’s death with her, but there was still the ocean hanging, and the pile of work yet to be repaired, an embroidered table cloth with a death’s head border pattern on top.

“Fixing things, again,” said Druella. “Sit down.”

Hermione sat down. She watched, for long moments, apparently having no idea what to say, which was fine with Druella. Druella herself repositioned the embroidery frame and went back to stitching shooting stars.

Eventually, Hermione said, “I understand that she was your daughter.” Her tone rather conveyed the opposite, but who could argue?

“I would not have inflicted my grief for her on you by intention,” said Druella, and kept her eyes locked firmly on her embroidery.

“I just...” Druella suspected that Hermione was on the cusp of asking why, but perhaps fortunately, she did not. Druella might not have been able to hold in her temper. Hermione finally said, “So she hadn’t always been... like that.”

Druella bit her tongue on saying that Bella had practically never been as Hermione had seen her, even at the end. What would the point be? “I ask that if you don’t want to discuss her in depth, you do me the courtesy of leaving it. She’s dead.” Unwisely Druella’s fingers strayed to the braid of hair worn on her arm, under her sleeve, but Hermione plainly had no idea what the gesture might mean. “I am very sorry for everything my family has done to you, and your friends.” Please, not Hermione’s family, too – plenty of muggleborn fighters’ families had been slaughtered, this war and the last – but Druella didn’t quite dare to ask.

“...Thanks,” said Hermione, and sighed. “So... I slept well enough last night...”

“We can call Orion tomorrow, if you do so again tonight,” said Druella, and stifled her own feelings about that, too. Naturally, Hermione, who knew nothing good of the Blacks and was presently tormented, thought of it only as a utility.

Druella could always call Orion again later, if it went well. She could use Cassie’s blood – carefully drawn – herself with no fear of disapproval. What she feared was more that it might go badly.

The ritual to call on the dead was not particularly dangerous. It had once been a routine part of the family’s private life among the Blacks, and – Druella thought, sighing – was again now, since Andromeda called on Ted regularly. The Rosiers had something similar but weren’t quite as dedicated to living among the dead as the Blacks, and in any case Druella’s mother was not exactly the sentimental kind. In the morning, Druella had a leisurely breakfast and coffee, made sure the children were all right for the next few hours, and brought Hermione back into her sitting room. Given this magic required no special containment, it was the easiest place to lock everybody else out of.

Hermione, naturally, knew of ritual magic only by incomplete written description, and was agitated and frightened besides, though she hid it fairly well. “First, we wash our hands,” said Druella, taking the water pitcher up, “While concentrating on the idea of stripping foreign magic from them...” She had to stop and explain details repeatedly through the process of setup, but she didn’t mind that so much. It was how the children of the house learned the basics under normal circumstances, though of course Hermione was quite old for these first details.

Finally, though, Druella brought herself cross-legged to the floor and settled her skirts. “Next to me, facing the same way,” she said, and situated the mirror accordingly. “We don’t bind the spirits of the family, as it’s disrespectful. We purify to avoid calling something else,” she said, and began casting the dried herbs over the mirror and surrounding carpet: rosemary and yarrow and dog rose.

Then, delicately, she took two of Orion’s metacarpals and placed them on the mirror, took up the bowl, and raised the first of the vials had prepared from the edge of the neighboring coffee table. “Salve, Orion!” she said and continued in Latin: “Dead of my House, spirit of my ancestor, blood of my daughters’ blood and of my marriage; drink wine, and live again,” she said, and poured the wine out into the bowl. “Drink water, and know again!” was similarly accompanied by a draught of water, and finally, of course, “Drink blood, and speak again,” she said, and tipped Marius’s blood into the bowl.

Then she waited; and put up a hand gently to stop Hermione from speaking, when her mouth began to open.

“Druella?” said Orion’s voice, somewhere indeterminately behind her, as though he spoke from the couch or the place the bookcase sat.

There were tears on her cheeks, unfortunately. “Hello, Orion,” said Druella, and closed her eyes so that she would be less aware of Hermione, or the strangeness of the source of his voice in the room. “It’s been some time.”

“So it has,” he said slowly. Obeying some impulse from Merlin knew where, Druella put her hand up to her shoulder. At once she felt Orion’s fingers upon hers, as though he had taken her hand in his from behind. “Dru,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

“I think that’s my line, isn’t it? You’re the one who’s dead,” said Druella, and was unable to prevent the words from coming accusatively.

“That’s my fault, too, isn’t it?” said Orion, and Druella winced.

“I didn’t blame you,” she said. “Not for that. --I didn’t call you for this. I’ll do it again later if you want to have it out.”

“I did wonder about the girl,” Orion agreed. “Well?”

Druella glanced at Hermione, who was seated tensely, jaw clenched hard. Druella half-expected her to start asking questions about whether Orion was really speaking to her from the dead and what it was like and how his memory and perceptions worked, but instead Hermione said, “I – er – my name is Hermione Granger. I was sort of desperate and I did something with a spell from a book Druella says you wrote, and now we’re trying to fix it, er—”

“Did you really?” said Orion with characteristic and immediate enthusiasm. “Which spell? Which book? I can see something’s slightly off—”

“Magic of Necessity,” Druella said, cutting in. “The self-sacrifice spell under the heading A Second Chance. I don’t expect you can tell us how to simply undo the effects, but your sources would be appreciated, at least.”

“Oh! Did you really?” said Orion, fascinated. “What problem were you trying to solve? How well did it work? Would you mind describing—”

“Orion,” Druella said, “Your sources, first, please?”

“Oh, yes, of course, you have something to take notes with?” Orion listed several texts of varying and quite dubious accessibility without pausing for breath, then said, “Now, if you’ll describe the symptoms, please, Miss Granger? --And the circumstances of the casting? Really, it’s been nearly a century since a well-documented case and in that instance suicide proceeded so quickly it was hard to get any information out of the records—”

“Orion!” said Druella, half-laughing, “You could be slightly less enthusiastic!”

“Why shouldn’t I be?” said Orion. “It’s rare that you get a new research opportunity after being dead.”

“Not for the Black scholarly ancestors, it isn’t,” Druella said, “And you’re scaring her.”

“I’m not frightened,” Hermione protested immediately, as Druella had expected. “And if we can ask for your sources after your death, why not – this other person?”

“Oh, if Ebenezer Fenwick were a member of our family and we had his skeleton entombed in our family crypt I imagine we could,” said Orion, matter-of-factly, “But if the Fenwicks had anything worthwhile out of his spirit they weren’t saying so. I don’t think they’re religiously traditional anyway, so they wouldn’t be able to.”

Hermione mouthed this phrase, evidently baffled. Druella said, “He means they don’t maintain the infrastructure behind it – the crypt, the enchantments, and our... maintenance of the relationship to them.”

“That’s such a Rosier way of putting it – or no, it isn’t,” said Orion, “It’s a Vera Bones way of putting it, I might as well be talking to your mother.”

“She’s not much for sentimentalism, no,” Druella agreed, and fought back tears again. He had said that to her any number of times when alive. “Look, Hermione, you don’t have to go into detail about why, but if you can tell him what you’re experiencing...”

“How did she get the book, anyway?” said Orion. “I suppose everything was pillaged after all of the deaths... Damned Ministry leeches. I’m glad you’re back in the house, Dru.”

“Er, no,” said Hermione. “I – the library let me into it, when the... when we were staying here with Sirius.”

“It let you in?” said Druella, who had of course known Hermione had found the book in the house, and attributed the discovery to the library’s actions, but hadn’t supposed anything else much. Sirius had still been living here then, and could get into the library perfectly well.

“I found the door when I was out of bed, one night, but no one else seemed to be able to,” Hermione said uncomfortably. “Mrs. Weasley and Harry both didn’t know anything about a library.”

“Sirius knew perfectly well where the damned library was,” said Orion irritably in an echo of Druella’s thoughts. “But yes, now that you mention it I do recall vaguely that someone was shown in. Not really up to my individual discretion. That was you, I suppose.”

Druella swallowed. “You, er – know Sirius is dead, then,” she said cautiously. Sirius’s body had vanished, of course, and so he had never been formally joined to the ancestors. She wasn’t sure how much difference it would make.

“Bella knew the details, and Theodore Tonks,” said Orion unhappily. “Anyway, we can tell some things about the family, so we knew when if not how... Dru. Cassie’s alive.”

“Cassie’s what?” said Druella.

“You mean baby Cassie?” said Hermione, baffled.

“Her namesake,” said Druella. “Cassiopeia Violetta Black. She died in 1960 – or not—” Druella had bitten her tongue over that affair so many times that the words now leapt out without consulting her: “Orion, you damned fool.”

“I know,” said Orion, and sighed, and the gas lamps fluttered with the sudden sense of wind. “I know, Druella. What happened was my fault. But she is alive. We knew when Sirius died, even if he did not join us.”

“Well,” said Druella, staring at the soft shadows of the room and struggling with the potential implications, which would overwhelm her if she allowed it. “That’s one more problem on the list. For now, though, Hermione?”

Hermione stumbled her way through a description, not admittedly very compelling on its own, of nightmares and sleeplessness and hallucinations, sometimes, and the fixated compelling sense of presence of another her with malicious intent, waiting for Hermione to join her in torment after death. Druella chimed in here with experimental results on her test charms, and also on the range of sleep-related spells she had performed, which demonstrated that Hermione was perceiving something that was not blocked by removing external influence or preventing normal dreams, but could be replaced or simply distracted from by adding influences. Hermione had not seemed too unnerved by this before – probably because she had been too sleep deprived to follow it – but now she gave Druella an anxious look, face pale, at the recitation.

“I will, of course, look into the books you mentioned, but if you have any thoughts on how to proceed...” said Druella.

“Hm,” said Orion. “I do have a few ideas, as it happens. You’re looking into the soul magic angle?”

“Indeed, but it’s not really my area of expertise, so I’m having to get caught up. I’m afraid I can’t think of any experts that made it through the war,” Druella said. Ironically, Bellatrix would quite likely have been very useful for this purpose if she had been alive, and somehow persuaded to cooperate.

In theory, Druella could call her daughter up, with her bones laid to rest downstairs, and describe the situation to her. But she would probably want to leave that to a last resort. She hadn’t called Bella up at all, though she could use her own blood easily. She still didn’t know what to say. She was still too angry, or sad, or – tired. The feeling that came to mind when Druella envisioned arguing with Bellatrix again, now absolutely and definitively too late to change anything, was mostly that last one, tired.

“Hm, no, it’s never been common,” Orion agreed. “But we happen to have a family ritual that could probably be adapted for the purpose; it’s from Lord Draco’s hunt for Vitalianus.”

“Oh, that,” said Druella with a faint groan. “I think your son chucked the thing out, you know, and I’m not sure if I want to congratulate him for having the courage or I’m petrified of finding out when it inevitably causes some sort of disaster. He’s too well-known to be our trophy, someone will immediately recognize him and come and find me to make me fix it.”

“Sorry, what is this?” said Hermione.

“It’s a Horcrux,” said Druella, groaning, “You probably haven’t heard of them—”

“I have,” said Hermione in a weird, stilted tone.

“Right, well, self-styled Lord Vitalianus was a Dark Lord centuries ago – Orion, you explain, it’s your family’s stupid melodrama.”

“As if your family lacks stupid melodrama!” said Orion. “But, yes, Vitalianus murdered a daughter of the House, and the head of the time, Lord Draco, hunted him down and imprisoned him, found his Horcrux, and bound his life to his – ah, remaining – supply of blood, decanted into a glass jar, which he preserved and made unbreakable and inescapable. Allegedly. It’s quite rare that things really are either, but Lord Draco was concerned his descendants might get bored of his vengeance and burned the relevant notes so we couldn’t just dispose of it. I can’t believe Sirius threw it out,” he said, and laughed, long and hard, as Druella had not heard Orion do, at the time of his death, in some time.

“But – he didn’t destroy the Horcrux?” said Hermione.

“No, no, he didn’t want to,” Druella said. “Destroy the Horcrux and the user dies. Keep it and they’re trapped eternally as a wraith... in this case, a wraith bound to a glass jar of blood that used to be in display in the drawing room... I always did loathe your wife’s taste in decor,” she said to Orion.

“When it came to Walburga, there was a lot to hate,” said Orion.

“Why did you marry her?” said Hermione.

“I had to, she was my older cousin and we were betrothed from birth,” said Orion.

“You absolutely did not have to,” said Druella, who had been on the spot and in the middle of her own life being destroyed in a fashion only half as self-inflicted at the time. “You’d already become head by right of arms, it didn’t matter that she was supposed to inherit, you could’ve thrown her out. You could have slit her throat and announced it in the paper and everybody in society would have sent congratulations!”

Then she winced at her own tactlessness.

“You’re probably right,” said Orion after a long silence. “But in any case it’s too late now.”

“So it is.” She wanted to laugh, herself, or weep, but she pressed it back. “So, what’s this you think would be useful, since we haven’t got Vitalianus to run any comparison?”

“No, no, it’s the ritual Lord Draco used to find the Horcrux from Vitalianus. You should be able to use it to look for any additional or extraneous pieces of Miss Granger floating around. You’ll need a Welsh translator, mind, I don’t recall that you read Welsh, but—”

He cut himself off because Hermione had given a small shriek. Alarmed, Druella turned and found she had her hands pressed to her mouth and was pale and shaking – but no, that was laughter; Hermione, too, was only fighting laughter.

Mystified, Druella wished she could make eye contact with Orion. She knew if she looked back to where he seemed to speak from she would see nothing. She could only wait until Hermione, at last, pried her hands from her face and said:

“All along! This very house! You had a spell to find Horcruxes!”

“Well,” said Orion, who also sounded mystified, “It’s the sort of problem we were accustomed to encounter.”

“You – you really have no idea how right you are,” choked out Hermione, and refused to explain.

Nevertheless the thread of magic that tied Orion to consciousness from Dru was growing thin with time, and draining to hold, so she deemed it best to bring things to a halt. She quickly got the description of the relevant volume from Orion and wrote it down, and where he thought the series of diaries had been left in the library last he knew.

“Call me again, won’t you?” said Orion at last, voice soft and now uncertain, where earlier he had been eager.

Druella closed her eyes. “I will,” she said. “I miss you. I suppose you can’t do the same, of course.”

It was unclear how themselves spirits called this way were, as opposed to constructs painted over the memories added to the magic by each death, but in any case they were not normally living or in time when uncalled.

“Not exactly,” Orion said. “But.” He stopped, and she thought for a moment that would be all, until some moments later he said, “I love you. I always did.”

“I know,” said Druella. “You, too – you and Alphard. Tell him, if you can, will you?” Alphard’s body had been returned after his death.

“He knows,” said Orion. “Goodbye, then?”

“For now,” said Druella, and let the magic die.

Hermione had been quiet throughout this, and Druella could not quite think of speaking to her. She closed her eyes instead, and put her face in her hands, and counted her breaths until her pulse was quite calm. Then she straightened and put back on the interested, polite look of her more professional days. She said to Hermione, “Well! We’ve got a plan then, haven’t we?”

“Yes,” said Hermione, and smiled tentatively, though she was still pale and uneasy in face.

“Let’s get started,” said Dru, and knelt to sweep up the spell ingredients from the floor.

Find the diaries; find a Welsh translator; find Cassiopeia, apparently; and find the rest of her life, at some point. Druella lined up the series of problems to solve in her head, and knew herself to be committed, and therefore, at the moment, content.