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The Grey Knight's Tour

Chapter One: The Old Folly

The moon had begun to wane the night before.  It was hanging in the morning sky, a ghost of its gibbous self, when Vergil Lupin gave his young wife a kiss and set off across the North Meadow for Folly Wood to deliver a proposition to his cousin.

The old tower from which Folly Wood took its name had been built long ago by a Lupin ancestor in the picturesque fashion of his day.  It was a pocket Gothic fancy complete with gargoyles and a roof of green copper scales, attached to the artificial ruin of a medieval chapel—the sort of architectural extravagance that was called a folly because such things were only built by those with far and away more money than sense.  It had been a very long time since any Lupin of Cleve had had more money than sense, and the artificial ruin was now a ruin in earnest, its tumbled stones overgrown with mosses and catbrier, but the tower still stood. The path ran from the meadow’s edge and along an old ride that wound through the wood, lined with holly trees that snagged Vergil’s cloak and with birches whose catkins slapped his face as he walked. Last year’s leaves rustled under his feet, and he named the flowers to himself as he went:  coltsfoot, whitlow-grass, celandine.  Deeper into the wood the path became overgrown with wild plum and little beeches; he came upon the Folly with a start, as if it had suddenly sprung up from the forest floor.

Vergil forged his way grimly through the thicket, suspecting that it had grown denser since he had been here a fortnight ago, and stepped up to the door, avoiding an owl pellet on the slate sill.  When he and his sisters and cousins had played in the Folly as children, the knocker had had the face of a jolly satyr gripping the ring in his teeth.  Now that Remus had come home from London and had taken possession of the old tower, the satyr’s head had been replaced by that of a wolf.  It wrinkled its brass snout and growled at him as he grasped the ring, but he ignored it—it did that all the time—and struck the door a brisk rat-tat.  The noise seemed unnaturally loud in the quiet wood.  Vergil had time to wonder why his cousin insisted on reminding the family in this and other small ways of his abnormality before the knocker suddenly swarmed at him and fastened its teeth in his sleeve.

“Remus!” bellowed Vergil, as the brass wolf shook and worried his arm like a dog with a rat.  “REMUS, GET DOWN HERE!”  There was no answer.  The wolf had hold of his wand arm; he clawed his wand out of his belt with his left hand.  “Don’t panic,” he gasped to himself, “it’s a simple Mutandis charm—no problem—”   He brandished the wand. The wolf tightened its grip; he thought he felt a fang break the skin.  “Finite incantatem,” Vergil sobbed, “finite incantatem—”  No result. He tried again, shouting.  “Finite incantatem, finite incantatem—Remus, damn your eyes, you bloody little—”

His cousin had appeared at the dog-tooth window above the door.  He looked inappropriately amused.

“Dimitte,” he said to the wolf, which gave Vergil’s arm a last shake and abruptly let go.  Vergil fell backward onto the path in an undignified heap.  There were light steps on the tower stair; in a moment Remus Lupin opened the door and stepped out.  “Verte,” he said to the wolf, which shrank back into a knocker again. “Are you all right, Vergie?” he asked.  “You shouldn’t have panicked.  It wouldn’t have hurt you, it was only playing—”

“Playing!”  Vergil heaved himself to his feet, ignoring Remus’s outstretched hand. “I call that hostile behavior, very hostile.  Playing, indeed.  What in plague’s name did you think you were playing at, I should like to know?  Your idea of a joke, I suppose.  Well, if it is, it’s in very poor taste, that’s all I can say.”  He tugged gingerly at his torn sleeve.  “I believe my wand arm is injured, but I suppose that is my own fault, for having panicked.  The next time a wolf comes swarming at me out of a door and starts savaging me, I must remember not to panic.” 

Just listen to me, he thought, realizing that he was sounding like a pompous old fart.  He fell silent under the other man’s gaze.  His cousin looked haggard, bruised about the eyes, the way he always did after what the family referred to delicately as “one of poor Remus’s episodes.”  There they stood:  two wizards, one in bureaucratic gray flannel robes with a faint chalk-stripe (“your yuppie rig,” Remus had called them once) and a dark-purple cloak that had been immaculate before its wearer had fallen on his backside, the other in a mangy sweatshirt and ripped jeans.  One of them the son and heir of the manor, the other a poor relation with a bad attitude. One of us a yuppie prematurely developing into a pompous old fart, Vergil thought glumly, and the other one a werewolf.

“Here,” said Remus, “let’s take a look at that.”  His hands, peeling back Vergil’s sleeve, rubbing his forearm lightly, were very gentle.  “It’s all right:  it didn’t break the skin.  No harm done.  I’m sorry.” He looked about for the ring, which the wolf had dropped, found it at the edge of the path, and held it out to the wolf, which took it between its teeth again with a bad grace.  “What did you want, Vergie?  You do want something, I assume?”

“It couldn’t be because I’m worried about you, of course not,” Vergil said.  “You look bloody awful, Remus, do you realize that?”

“You want something.”  Remus sighed, ran a hand through his shaggy hair, which already, though he was not yet twenty-four, was threaded with gray.  “You definitely want something.  Come upstairs.”

It was inclined to be damp in the Wood.  The Folly hadn’t been built to be lived in, and it had no fireplaces, but Remus had conjured a bright blue fire in a large stone bowl on the desk. It did very little to take the chill out of the air, however, so Vergil prowled around restlessly with his hands in his armpits, trying to keep moving.  He suspected that his cousin, who had moved into the tower in November and refused to live at the big house even through the worst of the winter, had spent December and January more or less hibernating, under the mountain of old blankets and quilts and patched cloaks that were piled on the narrow iron bed.  The small square room was dimly lit and, by Remus’s standards, exceedingly untidy, which meant that Vergil, who liked a certain comfortable littering and stacking in his own digs, felt right at home.  No one would have guessed it to look at his person, but Remus had rigorous standards of order when it came to his stuff, as if he were making up for his monthly loss of self-control by clamping down on his surroundings.

Or he used to, thought Vergil.  The incipient mess told him that his cousin wasn’t himself.  There was a scattering of books and papers on the desk, plus a number of small parts of mechanical objects, and a conical wizard’s hat with mushrooms spilling out of it; there were a couple of half-empty teacups on the bedside table and another on the floor, with little rafts of mold floating in the dark liquid, and a pile of paper-bound books by the unmade bed.  (Ill Met in Lankhmar, Vergil read. The Dying Earth.  The Witches of Karres.  The Fellowship of the Ring.) He glanced at a reprint from the St. Mungo’s Journal of Magical Maladies (“Pharmaceutical Mitigation of Certain Behavioral Manifestations of Lycanthropy: The State of the Science”) and hastily put it down again in favor of The Incompleat Enchanter, which he tossed back on the bed when he realized that it was a novel written by a Muggle.  He thought of asking, purely as a way of breaking the ice, why a wizard would bother to read a book about wizards by a non-magical person who couldn’t possibly know what he was writing about.  Remus was leaning against the doorjamb with his arms folded, giving him no help at all.  Vergil sighed and decided to come straight to the point.

“You have to understand, Remus, our situation at the Ministry has become, ah, problematic,” he said.  On his way to Folly Wood, it had sounded like a good way to begin. The trouble was that here in Remus’s digs, it didn’t work.

He’d forgotten how impossible it was to talk seriously to his cousin.  Remus emitted a snort of laughter.  “Problematic? Is that you I hear talking, Vergie, or is it Geoffrey Mucker-Maffick?  Wizards never got in situations that became problematicbefore that old stuffed suit took over at the Ministry of Magic. Knowing him, he doubtless called Lord Voldemort problematic.  Not that he ever did a thing about the greatest Dark wizard in a century beyond convening a task force or two.”

Vergil shook his head, half in annoyance, half in admiration.  Wizards acknowledged no kings, and liked to think they paid homage only to wisdom.  But for eleven terrible years they had had an uncrowned, malevolent master.  The true ruler of their world for eleven years had been Fear, in the person of a Dark wizard of such monstrous power and cruelty that decent witches and wizards never spoke his name aloud, as if that might add to his power or bring his eye upon them.

Vergil and his sisters Marcellina and Clelia, his cousins Remus and Romilia and Marius, and all their friends and contemporaries, had finished their schooling and gone out into the world and come of age in the reign of Voldemort, the Dark Lord.  The experience had marked them all.  There was a solemnity that came from knowing that you might die young, as better witches and wizards than you had died; that before you died, you might suffer horribly or be tempted to purchase your life by some shameful act of betrayal; that whatever happened you must not be tested and found wanting. You could not, they said, live an ordinary life in such times, nor should you want to.  Ordinary virtues wouldn’t save you; not even courage was enough.  What mattered was to fight well, even without hope, and die well, when the time came.  They had talked a good bit, Vergil remembered, about what it was worth to die well.

But in Remus and his crowd from school—“the Whole Sick Crew,” as they had been known at Hogwarts, where they were famous as incorrigible troublemakers, marauders, and practical jokers—solemnity had turned to a sort of defiant flippancy.  Besides the Headmaster of Hogwarts—a great wizard, if a little mad, and so powerful that the Dark Lord himself was said to fear him—they were the only wizards Vergil knew who called Voldemort by his right name.  Like Professor Dumbledore, they refused to say “You-Know-Who” in the hushed tones used by everybody else—though James Potter had been known to speak of “Old Whosis” or “Whazzisface.”

Defiance had not saved them, though, any more than discretion had saved others.  Vergil himself, and every wizard Vergil knew, had friends who had died rather than join with Voldemort, or who had been killed purely for wantonness—because they could be killed with impunity, or who had gone over to him, whether from fear or for a share of his power.  James was dead now, and so was poor Lily Evans, who had married him, and Mary Hilliard and Jancis Butterworth, Peter Pettigrew and Nick Bones…the whole sick crew, in fact, except for Remus, and one other.  And that other, Vergil reflected, was arguably worse than dead.

“Wickedness is weakness,” Vergil remembered his mother saying more than once.  But that was mysticism:  in the person of Lord Voldemort, wickedness had been strength—had appeared to be invincible strength. Then, only last autumn, the unimaginable had happened—

“A year-old infant has slain the old fool’s dragon for him, hasn’t he?” said Remus.  “So what’s problematic at the Ministry now?  Unless it’s a move to make little Harry Potter Minister of Magic: he’d get at least as much done as Mucker-Maffick does.”       

Voldemort had at last met a wizard he could not kill, and his last curse had destroyed not its intended victim, but Voldemort himself.  He had cursed James and Lily Potter and they had died. He had cursed their little son Harry, and not only had Harry Potter survived, but that very night the Dark Lord had disappeared—his power, as far as anyone knew, broken forever, from the moment he had tried and failed to kill one small and to all appearances perfectly ordinary child.  His followers—the Death Eaters, as they called themselves—had been thrown into confusion and scattered. 

“You don’t know what it’s like these days,” Vergil said heavily.  “You’ve been out of the loop, not that it’s anyone’s fault but your own.  The Department of Magical Law Enforcement is out for blood.   They’re hunting Death Eaters and they aren’t dainty about how they do it.  They’ve granted the Aurors special powers, authority actually to use the Unforgivable Curses, if you can believe it, so long as it means bringing Dark wizards down…That’s Bartemius Crouch’s doing, up at Enforcement, you know what he’s like; it’s not just Death Eaters he’s after.  He’s always wanted the top job:  well, now he’s got a perfect excuse to purge everyone in the Ministry who’s ever so much as looked at him cross-eyed—he has only to say they’re standing in the way of rooting out the last of the Death-Eaters and bringing them to justice.

“Heads are rolling in the aisles, Remus.  Father’s in bad odor at the Ministry—seems he sat on a fair bit of information he should’ve passed to Barty Crouch, or so they say now.  Everyone’s pointing the finger at somebody else, you should know how it is. Father’s always been a champion finger-pointer himself.  First it was Mafalda Hopkirk he blamed, for blowing the whistle on him—he claims she has her eye on his job, which may well be true.  But now he’s saying people have it in for him because of his connection to you, and your connection…”  He resisted the temptation to look down at the floor and shuffle his feet.  “Your connection to the Death Eaters, not to put too fine a point on it. Through Sirius Black.”

The Potters hadn’t been the last casualties of the reign of Voldemort.  Days later, a whole London street had been blown apart with a single curse.  Thirteen Muggles, harmless people who’d done nothing worse than to get in the way, were killed.  So was a wizard, little Peter Pettigrew, whom Vergil remembered vaguely as a sort of hanger-on to the Whole Sick Crew at Hogwarts, tagging doggedly after James Potter and his friends like a small, clumsy shadow.  And the author of all this destruction was Sirius Black—Sirius Black, closest friend of Remus, Peter, and James, ringleader of the Whole Sick Crew, best man at the Potters’ wedding…and a Death Eater, people were now saying, one of Voldemort’s inner circle—second in command, some rumors had it, to Voldemort himself.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Vergil said, ashamed of the sound of his own voice. “I’m just the messenger.”

The crime of Sirius Black had horrified people as only the worst horrors of the Death Eaters still had power to do.  No one had suspected him.  He was trusted, he was beloved; he was known and pointed out as a young man with a brilliant future. His act struck everyone as a betrayal for which only sheer love of wickedness and power could account: Evil, be thou my good.   And for reasons Vergil didn’t understand and his cousin wouldn’t discuss, Black’s crime and the deaths of his friends also seemed to have broken Remus’s life apart.  He had left London, where his prospects had been brighter than a werewolf had a right to expect, and come back to Cleve, where he had grown up, to live like a hermit in the Old Folly.

“Peter and James and Lily were Sirius’s friends too,” said Remus in an almost inaudible voice; “is anyone saying they were Death Eaters?”

“Yeah, but they’re dead and you’re alive, right? and de mortuis nil nisi bonum and all like that:  who’s going to speak ill of the dead?  And you wouldn’t denounce Black, would you?  Imputations were made, and you wouldn’t clear yourself under Veritaserum, when they gave you the opportunity—” 

“—opportunity isn’t exactly what I would call it,” growled Remus.

“But be that as it may, it was probably a bad idea on your part to tell them, and I quote, to take their Veritaserum and stick it where the sun don’t shine.  I mean, a werewolf should tread more carefully.  They didn’t have to grant you clearance to study at Aurors House; you were damn lucky to get it, and now they’ve revoked it and listed you as a security risk.  Well, this sort of thing reflects on the family, Remus, you can’t pretend it doesn’t.  Upshot is, Father worked himself into a major wax over the fact that you represent a, what did he call it? a significant professional liability to him, and that you don’t seem properly grateful after all he’s done for you. He’s decided you have to go. He’s giving you a fortnight to clear out.”

Vergil took a deep breath and waited for the explosion. There was none, which made him exceedingly uneasy.

“He wants you to go abroad.  He’s willing to place a reasonable sum at your disposal at any Gringotts branch, once a month—so long as it’s not in England.”  Silence.  “A remittance, you could call it. Think of it this way:  it’ll do you good to change your sky.”

Obstinate silence.  He identified the expression on Remus’s face just before it was replaced by a certain flat, closed, dead look he’d learned to hate.  It wasn’t anger:  that would have been reassuring. It was stark terror and misery, the look of a man getting what he knows he deserves, when his desserts are terrible.

“I mean, you can’t sit here for the rest of your life staring at the walls, pouring ashes on your head—”

“—I’m not pouring ashes on my head,” said Remus mildly, “or staring at the walls. I’ve earned my keep, as you know very well.  Security at Cleve is better now than it’s ever been:  I’ve built you a system it’d take a top-flight Auror to hack.”

It was true enough that Remus had a formidable talent for the concealment charms that were needed to hide a wizard house from the view of the unwelcome or the hostile, and that guided unwary feet away from the borders of Lupin property.  He had worked on them before, but since he’d come home from London, he had spent many patient hours upgrading them:  no one would find the place now who wasn’t meant to.

“Sort of locking the barn door after the horse is gone, isn’t that?  Anyway, it’s not what I’m talking about, Remus, and you know it.  You were an Auror in training; you can do that stuff in your sleep.  And it’s done now: what are you going to do next?  What are you going to do with your talents for the rest of your life? Alastor Moody at Aurors House told me himself:  you were set to qualify in less time even than he did.  You should be fighting Dark wizards, not hiding here like some troglodyte, some wild man of the woods. You’ve thrown away your shot at an Auror’s hood, but there’s always a future for a talented man, if the will isn’t wanting.  You’ve had long enough to rest your head.  When somebody has your gifts, he doesn’t get to abdicate.”   

He realized that at some time in the last five minutes they had both begun pacing about the room, circling each other  The air between them had begun to tingle and he wondered if they were going to end up fighting.  The few times he had taken on his cousin in practice duels, when they were both younger, Remus had drubbed him unmercifully. He was a stronger wizard than Vergil.  He was also faster, and meaner.

“Don’t lecture me, Vergie.” There was a dangerous glitter in Remus’s sidelong glance. “You’re a desk man, a Ministry wonk.  I was on the ground, getting my hands dirty.  ‘You were an Auror in training,’ you say, but you haven’t a clue what that means and if you don’t, I can’t explain it to you.  And in the end it did no good.  My friends are dead.”

“Not all of them.  Sirius Black was sent to Azkaban—and you know what that means, death would be better than that—to Azkaban, Remus, without trial.  And he’s not the only one.  Something is very foul here, in all these proceedings of Barty Crouch’s; you used to have a good nose for the smell of rat.  So why were you sitting up here weeping into your lap while your friend got packed off to the worst prison a wizard was ever locked up in, no questions asked?”

“My friends are dead.  And Sirius was the murderer of one, the betrayer of the other, no friend to any of us.  You’re right about one thing:  Sirius is worse than dead.” 

Vergil felt the tension between them as an oppression in the air, like that which comes before a lightning strike. He flexed his fingers experimentally.  He had no hope of winning a duel with Remus, or even forcing a stalemate, without beating him to the draw. 

“And I, Vergie—the best student Auror in my year—” his voice took on a vicious sneer—“Moody’s bloody wonder boy—I saw it coming.  And I let it happen.  That is who I am now, Vergie, that’s all that there is.  You talk about a future for a talented man:  that’s my past, present and future.  I’ll leave here by midnight; till then, get out. Or I’ll throw you out, and you won’t like that.” 

Vergil saw the slight movement as Remus reached for his wand, and snatched at his own.  Too late—Remus had turned on him. He spoke, almost casually, one word—“Expelliarmus”—and Vergil’s wand sprang out of his hand so rapidly and violently that the grip burned his palm.  Remus caught it on the fly and thrust it into the pocket of his jeans. He spun rapidly on his heel, pointing his wand to the four points of the compass, barking an incantation that Vergil could not catch.  A broad swath of blue flames shot up head-high in a circle around them both. The hiss and heat of them was at his back.  What, he wondered, was the point of enclosing them both in fire?

“Goodbye, Vergie,” Remus called over the rush of the flames, which was like a gale in the woods by now.  And he turned calmly and walked through the curtain of blue. Vergil thought he saw him stumble, but the heat made the air shimmer, distorting vision; he couldn’t be sure.  A moment later something came sailing back at him:  his wand.  He caught it.

“REMUS,” he roared.  There was no reply.  He did not expect one.  Sweat was plastering his chalk-striped flannel robes to his back.  A nasty, sophomoric practical joke, he thought, a piece of adolescent viciousness; Remus was reverting to his Hogwarts days.  He gritted his teeth and prepared to Apparate.  “To the foot of the Folly,” he growled.  Remus would be hanging about, waiting to see him in a rage. He blinked; when he opened his eyes he was still in the tower room, in the center of a circle of flame that seemed to be shrinking.  His cousin had warded the Folly—for heaven knew what reason—against Apparition.

He thought quickly.  To walk through the fire, Remus must have performed a Flame-Freezing charm, a stronger variant of the one their mothers had used to bring down their childhood fevers. He gasped out the words and stepped forward into the flames. Agony flung him back, sobbing with disbelief.  The charm had failed.  He tried another, a charm to extinguish fire.  Nothing.  Another.

Nothing.

The circle of flames was closing on him.  He would die here.  His cousin was insane, had gone mad here brooding through the dark winter on his griefs.  He could not draw breath.  He tried to think of a dying curse and instead he thought his heart would burst with longing for his dull, responsible, happy life. His wand half slipped from his sweat-slicked fingers—

His wand. Remus had thrown it to him through the fire, but it was intact; he himself had walked into the flames, but his robes were not even scorched.  Fire that burned only flesh?  Then he understood, but could not believe it, and he stood hesitating for moments that crawled like hours, his mind racing, the heat parching his eyeballs, breathing in fire and breathing out steam. If he was wrong…if he was wrong…

Vergil straightened his back and stepped forward again, from one terror into another, and this time he took another step. An atrocious pain, that seemed to be in the burning air or the stone under his feet, anywhere but in his insignificant body, wrapped him all about.

He took another step.

Then he was on the other side, breathing miraculously cool air that bathed his skin like water.  He turned around:  the flames were sinking, dying.  Not even the hairs on the backs of his hands were singed.  He leaned his hot forehead against the cool stone of the wall, his heart hammering.  Bloody Remus, he thought.  Damn his eyes.  What a trick.  When his knees had stopped wobbling he went downstairs.

Remus was sitting on the door-sill, holding what looked like one of the white sticks with glowing ends he’d sometimes seen Muggles put in their mouths, only this was tan and smelt even worse.  He stubbed it out and laid it carefully on the stoop just before Vergil grabbed him by the loose cloth of his sweatshirt, hauled him to his feet, and punched him on the nose. He shouted, staggering; as his fingers closed on his wand Vergil leveled his own and bellowed “Expelliarmus!” He caught his cousin’s flying wand as Remus lost his footing, sailed backward, and landed hard in what Vergil remembered was the biggest patch of poison ivy in Folly Wood.  Years ago, it had come in a shipment of exotic plants and had colonized the forest entirely; the strongest curses did no more than slow it down.

Remus lay where he had fallen, cawing for breath. Vergil thought of going over and helping him up.  Then he thought better of it.  He waited for his cousin to stir, covering him with his wand until he did.  Eventually Remus sat up, shook himself like a wet dog, and began to laugh.

Vergil tried to think of something scathing to say, and gave it up.  It was impossible to argue with someone like that.  Remus got to his feet, walked unsteadily to the stoop, and sat down, pinching his bleeding nose and muttering a spell to stanch the blood; then he picked up the brown papery thing and re-lit it with a word. Vergil’s curiosity overcame his annoyance.  “What is that?” he asked.  “It smells abominable.”

“It’s called a joint.  They’re a sort of Muggle intoxicant I’m rather fond of.”

Vergil sat down heavily on the stoop beside him.  “I never could, I never could win an argument with you.  Not when you got out your wand.”

“Nope.  Although you could usually even up the score when you resorted to your fists.”

“So do you eat the joint, or stick it up your nose?”

“I expect you could do either.  But Muggles smoke them.  Like this.”  He took a deep drag, then slowly exhaled.  Vergil watched the procedure with interest; he knew so little about Muggle habits.  After a while he said:

“So you won this one.  But I’m right, Remus, and you know I’m right.  And I know you know.  We’re a couple of knowledgeable blokes, we are.”  He heaved a great gusty sigh. “But I give up.  I wash my hands. I’m not going to go back and forth over this ground, one step forward, two steps back.”

“You don’t have to,” said Remus, mild as milk.

“Whatever your point was, you’ve made it.  On the level of magic, you’ve got me beaten, and you’ve always had me beaten.  But on the level of ethics—”

“On that level, you won.  You were the one who made your point.” Vergil opened his mouth and shut it again, unable to produce any sound.  “Were you or were you not about to tell me that it’s useless trying to anaesthetize yourself or defend yourself against suffering, it can only be lived?  And that despair absolves you of nothing?  And that even what is terrible and irreparable has got to be borne?  Were you or were you not going to tell me that the only way is forward, and the only way forward is through?”

He exhaled another small cloud of smoke.  “I was agreeing with you.”  

Vergil opened and shut his mouth several more times before he managed to say, “Did you have to half incinerate me to do that? It would maybe have killed you to say ‘You’re right, Vergie, I’m sorry’?”

“I hate doing that,” said Remus cheerfully.  “How long did it take you to twig that the fire wouldn’t incinerate you—wouldn’t so much as singe you?  Not long, right—but how much longer after that was it, before you could bring yourself to walk through it?”  He was suddenly very serious.  “So don’t judge me for being afraid, o.k.?  In case you didn’t notice, I walked through it first.  But I did think someone should make you practice what you preached.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re insane?”

“Certifiable,” Remus agreed.

“So pass the Muggle intoxicant.”

“It’s probably covered with poison ivy juice, you’ll get blisters all over your lips.”

“I’ll do a Shrinking Spell.  Hand it over.”  Imitating Remus, he put the joint to his lips and inhaled deeply. Noxious fumes seared his windpipe; he bent double, hacking and wheezing, dropping the joint on the stones, while Remus helpfully compounded his distress by pounding him on the back.  He waited to speak until he had reassured himself that he still had lungs.  “No thanks,” he choked.  “I’ll stick to Ogden’s Old Firewhiskey.  Better the poison you know.”  Remus rescued the joint, but let it smolder between his fingers. They sat in silence for a while.

“Remus…Black killed Peter, or anyhow everyone says so; I understand that bit of what you said.  But why did you call him a betrayer?  Who was it he betrayed?”

It was Remus’s turn to drop the joint.  “You didn’t know?” 

“I told you, all the proceedings have been secret. Only the charge was public—killing Peter, and all those Muggles. And the sentence.”

“Lily and James were in hiding when Voldemort came to them, up at Godric’s Hollow. He would never have found them if they hadn’t been given up to him.”  Remus exhaled a long shuddering breath.   “There was only one person who could have done it.”

“They performed a Fidelius charm?  They concealed their hiding place magically?”

“In the soul of the man they trusted most in all the world.  So guess who was the Secret-Keeper.”  Vergil could not speak.  “Who but their dearest friend, the best man at their wedding, little Harry’s godfather?  Who but Sirius Black, that great friend of us all?”

“I don’t believe it.”

“You didn’t see him before it happened.  Actually, I wasn’t seeing much of him either, by that time.  He was avoiding me, Vergie, and it started when I went to Aurors House to study under Moody, because he knew that the farther along I got with my studies, the closer I’d be to seeing through him. His thoughts were closed to me; he’d grown slick, armored, I couldn’t read him. That had never happened before.  His eyes had got like cold black glass. He didn’t trust me, because he was no longer to be trusted. I should’ve known what it meant, but I didn’t want to believe it, I turned my eyes away.”

“If you believed that, why didn’t you denounce him?”  Remus sat like a statue, hugging his knees; only his tears moved.  “Because in your heart of hearts you don’t believe it, not really.  You can’t possibly, Remus. I barely knew him, and I can’t believe it. He was a frivolous man, but his friends were as dear to him as his life, anyone could see it:  why would he do that?  Unless he was mad—but even so—”

“They were my friends too, but I didn’t save them; why didn’t I?  I was tested and I failed; that’s the part that matters.  Who knows why he did what he did?  What matters is that he did it. When a man served Voldemort he didn’t need a reason to do the Dark Lord’s will; that the Dark Lord wished a thing was reason enough. I don’t believe that he was mad, either, by the way.  And there it is.”

He bowed his head until his forehead touched his knees. There was nothing Vergil could say to that.  Presently he reached out and laid his hand on Remus’s shoulder. “If you didn’t save them and you could’ve, you have to understand why.  Maybe it’s not for the reason you think.  But you have to understand, so that you can do some good thing in the end….Um, Remus?  Apropos of absolutely nothing, when did you last eat?”

His cousin gave a shaky laugh.  “Good old Vergie, always down to earth.  Probably sometime yesterday…I forget to.”

Chapter Two - The Book and the Ring

Fifteen minutes later Vergil was frying mushrooms over Remus’s blue fire, and Remus was clearing the books and papers from his desk, and rummaging about for forks and spoons on the shelf above his bed (which also contained a telescope and astrolabe, an alembic and set of brass scales, and another stack of foxed and scabby books). He took down a couple of plates into whose cleanliness Vergil decided not to inquire too closely, sniffed at a crock of something and planked it down on his desk, and waved his wand absentmindedly.  The plates and utensils arranged themselves—rather sullenly it seemed to Vergil, as if they felt some embarrassment at their circumstances.  Vergil hacked a couple of slices off a loaf of bread he had just found, still warm, on the windowsill.

“There’s milk and butter too.  I see Tifty’s doing her best to take care of you.”  Tifty was the Cleve house-elf, a small magical person possessed of an overwhelming instinct to tend wizard houses and care for their inhabitants, and even in the Lupins’ reduced circumstances, boundlessly loyal.  “You ought to let her spruce you up.  It would upset her to see you looking like a scarecrow.  It’s bad enough that your mother never lets her in her rooms to clean.”

“De happy slave,” muttered Remus.  “I’d rather do for myself, Vergie.  I hate being a Marse.”

Vergil let that pass.

“And she’d be fit to be tied if she saw those grotty old books lying all over the place where you eat…Why would you want to read a book about wizards by a Muggle, anyway?”  

Remus tipped the moldy tea out the window and prodded the cups with his wand, decided they weren’t clean enough and tried again. “You never know when it might be useful to us to know what Muggles imagine us to be like.  For instance, one of those writers supposes that wizards spend a lot of their time conning over their spell-books so they don’t forget their magic from one day to the next.”  Vergil spluttered with laughter through a mouthful of bread and butter; cooking always made him hungry.  “On the other hand, there’s a quite good book that has a school for wizards in it—like a sort of mediaeval Hogwarts, only no Quidditch. And dragons—except the dragons talk.”

“Talking dragons?”  Vergil shook his head.  “And no Quidditch?”  Impossible to imagine wizards or Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry without Quidditch, the best game in the world—six tall goal posts, four flying balls, fourteen players on broomsticks.

“No broomsticks either, actually.  But I thought the talking dragons were done particularly well.  They only speak wizard language, the same all the spells are done in, and that only to certain people. The others they eat….Now there’s something you’ll find in most of these books—a wizard language, like what we use.”

“Well, of course…Vergil’s language,” said Vergil, inflating his chest a bit.  One Lupin in every generation had always been named for the great poet-wizard who had built the city walls of Naples by magic, who had designed the first Dark Detector—the Salvatio Romae—for his friend, the Emperor Augustus, and who (legend had it) had been the teacher of Merlin himself.

“Yes, well, the principle’s the same.  Though I mostly think the Muggle writers make them up.  The thing is, very few of these people imagine that magic can exist in the same world that they inhabit—or maybe, you know, they’d just rather not imagine it.  So when they want to write a story that has magic in it, they take care to set it in a place that’s quite imaginary, and if there are magical languages spoken in these imaginary places, those are imaginary too.  Some of them sound quite convincing, though.  For instance—”  He cleared his throat, pushed back his sleeves and recited, half-chanting:

Annon edhellen, edro hi ammen,

Fennas nogothrim, lasto beth lammen.

He added a flourish of his wand.  “It’s supposed to open things that are locked,” he explained.

“How is that gibberish supposed to open any—”  There was suddenly a loud clanking and crashing.  The doors of a cupboard that stood against the wall opposite the desk had sprung wide and out poured a tumble of old school spell-books, several brass tripods and candelabra, an owl cage, a couple of cauldrons, a battered briefcase, the parts of a broken orrery that no one had ever got around to repairing, and a number of other objects that had evidently been expected to come in useful some day.

Remus winced. “Back,” he told the mess.  Several books returned to the top shelf; nothing else stirred. “Go on, you heard me,” he said sharply.

With a vast reluctance, the pile began rearranging itself inside the cupboard.  “You shouldn’t have stuffed all that junk in there in the first place,” said Vergil.  “And I don’t think you should do any more spells in languages we don’t know. Are those cups clean yet?”

Presently they were breakfasting on fried mushrooms, bread and butter, potted ham, and strong milky tea.

“Barty Crouch is trying suspected Death Eaters in special tribunals,” said Vergil with his mouth full; “he’s created a form of hearing in closed session where there’s no legitimate sort of discovery, no counsel, no appeal, and no oversight.  Basic rights are being flung to the winds, I tell you, it’s an ugly business.  I expect it’s the sort of thing that might go on in foreign parts—” Vergil allowed himself a little grimace of distaste for the way wizards who had the misfortune not to be English conducted their affairs “—but it’s un-British, to say the least, if you ask me.  Though for a fact, Crouch treats our own people at the Ministry about the same—guilty until proven innocent, especially the ones he’s looking to purge for reasons of his own.  Rest of us keep our heads down, because who wants to be called an accomplice of Death Eaters just for asking a few questions?  Trouble is, we know You-Know-Who’s people infiltrated us from top to bottom, and I’m sure we’ve still got at least one ex-Death Eater fairly high up, maybe more. But when you’ve got everybody keeping their heads down, who’s looking—as opposed to just making accusations, I mean.  Accusations are flying around as thick as flies in a fen, but it’s not clear to me that they’re lighting on the guilty.  People make them to deflect suspicion from themselves.”

“If everyone’s sufficiently afraid for their jobs, maybe they’ll look harder for the traitors—or just decline to keep quiet about them—to keep Enforcement off their own backs.  That’ll be Crouch’s logic, I’d guess.”

“Not the way it’s working.  Crouch is obsessed with numbers, he measures success by the number of accusations and denunciations, the number of arrests, the number of kills, the proportion of accusations resulting in arrests, the proportion of trials ending in convictions.  What use is that unless the folk who’re accused and tried and sentenced are actual Death Eaters?  But that’s a detail old Bartemius can’t be bothered to see. Are the numbers up this week?  Oh, goody! Crouch calls that an achievement.  You might as well pick a suitable number of names at random.  Lots of people have been fingered, all right, but I’ll eat my old school hat if more than a handful of them are Death Eaters or collaborating with Death Eaters or even innocent dupes of Death Eaters.  More likely it’s just an opportunity for some folk to pay off old scores…or act on their prejudices.”

“Good old Vergil,” said Remus cheerfully, “the underdog’s best friend. You imagine yourself in their place, and of course your sensibilities are outraged:  you picture a just man in the dock, because you’re a just man yourself.  But you’d never be in their place, for that very reason.  You can’t operate from the assumption that a Dark wizard is the same sort of creature as a just man, and you give him an unfair advantage if you treat him like one.”

“But first you have to sort out the just from the Dark wizards, that’s the whole point,” said Vergil heatedly.  “Thepoint of a proper trial is to weigh guilt or innocence, and it proceeds from the assumption that guilt must be proved.”  He leaned forward in his chair, emphasizing his arguments by stabbing mushrooms with his fork.  “The point of these trials—as far as I can tell—is to secure a conviction, and they proceed from the assumption that guilt is self-evident purely from the fact that the accused is in the dock.”  A slice of mushroom escaped and shot off the plate, landing on the thick calf spine of a book called Ars Nova Mutandi and clinging there like a limpet.  Remus grimaced and scraped it off, and buffed the grease-mark with his sleeve.

“Lots of times guilt is self-evident.”

“Lots of times it’s not.  If it were, we’d have found the rat in our house a long time ago.  These trials are performances, for a limited audience—only I’m not sure whether they’re tragedy or farce.  And plenty of the accused don’t get even that. If a man is as obviously guilty as—” he realized he had been about to mention Sirius Black again and stopped himself just in time “—as Crouch insists these defendants are, then why not convict him in plain day?  If Crouch’s proceedings are creditable, why should they be secret?”

“You have to think about these things like an Auror, Vergie.  Do you realize that half the time, fighting the Death Eaters, we were fighting blind?  Enforcement will never admit this, but Voldemort had magic we didn’t understand.  We had only the sketchiest notion how his organization operated; we didn’t know what he intended—ultimately, I mean, beyond terror and carnage—and even now we don’t understand why he’s gone.  What we find out from these investigations could give us our best weapons yet against the Dark Side. How badly would you want that unbearable Skeeter woman to broadcast everything we learn to the world—and to any Death Eaters who might still be out there, thinking of taking up Voldemort’s mantle?  Whatever weapons we gained would be turned in our hands.”  Rita Skeeter was easily the most aggressive reporter the staid old wizarding newspaper, the Daily Prophet, had ever seen, a woman with an infallible nose for anything that would get her byline noticed.  If she had any journalistic ethics, or even journalistic scruples, Vergil had never observed them.

“Rita Skeeter scarcely needs inside information; she makes it up as she goes along.”  He was delighted to see Remus grin appreciatively.  “In any case, the press is admitted sometimes—when Barty Crouch wants to put on a show.  He controls what they see, and they report what he wants made public.  I’m not sure that means Crouch is thinking like an Auror, but he’s definitely thinking like a man who intends to be the next Minister of Magic.  He’s doing extremely well out of this—this sordid mopping-up operation.  Those of us who don’t like it, we’ve learned to keep our mouths shut. It’s just a matter of time until he replaces poor old Mucker-Maffick—and he acts as if he already had done.”

“It can’t hurt us to have a Minister who’ll fight the Dark side with some energy.”

He was arguing with more energy himself than Vergil had heard in his voice for months, which struck Vergil as a good sign—especially as he suspected that Remus was deliberately provoking him.  Remus as a trainee Auror had never been an admirer of Bartemius Crouch; Remus confronted with Enforcement’s guilty-until-proven-innocent policy had resigned from the Aurors’ College rather than cooperate.  It was probably also a good sign that he spoke of the Aurors as if he were still one of them, though barring something unprecedented, he never would be.  (Once Enforcement was down on you, you were finished; the Ministry would never look at you again.)  He had a three-days’ growth of beard, his light hair hung about his face in rat’s-tails, and there were still gray stains under his eyes, but he was eating with every appearance of hunger and pleasure, and even laughing at Vergil’s jokes.  It was a vast improvement over the past winter, when Remus had come occasionally to supper at the House and had sat at the long table without speaking, looking like the specter at the feast and pushing his food around his plate as if it were cold congealed porridge, returning to the Folly as soon as he decently could—to bury himself under the bedclothes, doubtless, with his Muggle books and his Muggle intoxicant.

“There’s no point in fighting the Dark side if we don’t do it with clean hands.”

“There’s no fighting the Dark side without getting our hands dirty.  Maybe,” said Remus, “clean hands are a luxury that we can’t afford.  The ultimate sacrifice may not be our lives:  it may be that some of us will have to give up even the right to consider ourselves just and decent, so that others have the safety in which to be just.”

Vergil laughed right out.  “Garbage, Remus!  What makes you think justice can subsist only in safety?  Or that it should be put aside in danger?  The only justification for fighting the Dark side is justice.  Someone should’ve dragged you into an argument a long time ago: you’re getting lazy.”

“That would be your specialty, Vergie, not mine. You’ve had more practice than I have—all those late nights in the Hufflepuff common room.”

“It was time well spent,” said Vergil grimly.  “Not my fault if you Gryffindors wasted yours marauding.”  For Remus and Vergil, each in his way, bore out one of the stereotypes of their old school Houses at Hogwarts.  And if Gryffindor House was famous for giving the wizarding world its adventurers and iconoclasts, Ravenclaw its sages, and Slytherin its overreachers, Hufflepuff contributed its workhorses, its organization men, and above all, its ethicists.  There was nothing a Hufflepuff liked better than a good vigorous argument about some large issue of morals or values—preferably over a hearty meal.

It struck Vergil that it might have been a bad idea to mention marauding to Remus, however, since it was likely to remind him less of clandestine excursions out of bounds, with feasts of stolen food to follow, than of loss and grief. James, Sirius, and Peter had been specialists in marauding, all of them, with sidelines in practical joking and general mayhem, though Remus had been as bad as any of them in his time.  A long silence fell that made him anxious to change the subject.

“Do you remember the time Romilia almost fell out that window over there?” he said at last. 

Remus smiled vaguely.  “You and I were storming the tower, and she was pouring boiling oil on us.”

“We used to play war up here all the time…or else it was Aurors, or vampire hunters.  And one time Marcellina decided she was Morgana, do you remember, and pretended to put us all under the Imperius Curse and we had to do everything she said?” Remus stared down into his tea as if he were reading the leaves; Vergil was warming to his subject, though, and didn’t notice.  “It was right after she’d finished her first year at Hogwarts, and she was insufferable, ’cos even if she wasn’t allowed to do magic over the holidays, she knew how and we didn’t yet, and she never stopped reminding us.  And she liberated one of Mother’s scrying bowls and made Marius look into it, ’cos he was supposed to be this like very chaste virgin knight, and he actually thought he saw things in it and started crying, because he said there was a dark wood with wolves and pigs in it, in the water? He wasn’t even five years old, and you were maybe eight.  Then you decided that the Imperius Curse didn’t work on you, and the rest of us decided it didn’t work on us either, and Marcie was so hacked off she knocked over the bowl and it broke into smithereens, and Mother made Marcie collect every least tiniest piece and sent her back three times to get them all, so she could put the bowl back together.”

Remus shook his head.  “How on earth do you remember all this stuff?” he asked.  “I remember Marius looking in the bowl, but that was because he was right.  He didn’t think he saw; he really did see. A couple of months after that, Mother and Father took us to Romania.  And there was a dark wood there, all right, and wolves and pigs in it too. It was his first true showing.”

With a feeling that he’d fallen out of the frying pan and into the fire, Vergil noticed that his cousin’s eyes had acquired that absent look he remembered from silent dinners at the House.  “I’m sorry,” he said.  “We used to be happy here.  I assumed that’s why you moved in here when you came home from London, because, you know.  Because it belonged to the time before.  Before all the bad things happened.”

“It was more that you get to belong to a place,” said Remus reflectively.  “It gets to be part of…of your skin, I guess, and in a way it takes in some of you.  I’m used to this place and it’s used to me; it would never reproach me the way some places might, however unhappy I was.”

“Remus. Do you know how weird you sound?  The place is used to you? Are you sure those mushrooms—”

“You wouldn’t have known; you were away at Hogwarts most of the year, and Uncle Gracchus took you visiting in the summers.”  Remus studied his tea.  “That was the last summer we ever played here; after that fall, no one ever came up here who didn’t have to.  It was my place.  I was always locked up here at the full moon.”

Vergil stared at him.  “Here?”

“Yeah, here, Vergie; don’t look like that.  I mean, I was a werewolf, they had to put me somewhere.  There’s a staple in the wall, in the room above this one, and a chain with a collar and Unbreakable charms on it.  Mother used to bring me here—and stay while I transformed, sometimes, and come and collect me afterward, but after a few years of doing that every month, she got melancholy and left the job to Tifty.  You know how she was:  by your last year at Hogwarts she wasn’t even leaving her rooms anymore.”

“We could have managed something up at the House,” said Vergil, all his considerable powers of moral outrage enlisted on behalf of a terrified child chained to the wall to await the rise of the moon.  He looked down at Remus’s hands and saw old faint scars where his cousin would have bitten and clawed at himself when he changed.  How had he never known about this?

“Uncle Gracchus wouldn’t have it.  And even I could see he had a point.  Lycanthropy and magic are a dangerous combination.  I was dangerous even when I was little…you forget how much so.  He didn’t trust any wards of Mother’s to hold me; he didn’t even trust the collar, even with the charms on it.  And you didn’t know about it because he didn’t intend you to find out.  No one was meant to find out.”

“Oh hell. Oh bloody damn plague and pox.”  A few things about Remus became self-explanatory to Vergil.  His remoteness and self-containment; his imperviousness even when he was small to the kind of minor adult stupidities and injustices that Vergil, a child with a highly developed sense of fairness, had found insufferable.  The disproportionate importance of his friends in his life, and the ruin that was their loss.  And the blunt stupidity of casting him adrift without a purpose, however willing to go he seemed to be.

One of the candles had shed a long trickle of soft wax over its saucer; Remus had scooped it up and was kneading it into a little ball. Vergil watched him at it for a while. He remembered that those wax trails were called winding-sheets.  “Listen, Remus,” he said at length,  “if it’s still too…if things are….What I mean is, if you still want to stay, I’ll get around Father, I’ll make him see reason.  Do you want to stay?”

“There’s no good reason to do that.”

“Then why don’t you come to up to the House.  There’s something there that I think you ought to see.”

Remus pushed back his chair hastily.  “It’s not about Mother, is it?”

“Of course not,” said Vergil.  “Don’t you think I’d have told you at once, if it were?”

“I’m not sure.”  Remus began gathering up plates and utensils.  “After all…I have been behaving like…well, as if I wasn’t all there.  It wouldn’t have been your fault if you started treating me that way. I mean—”  He turned one of the mugs round and round in his hands as if he had forgotten what he intended to do with it.  “I never even asked!”

“Relax. Auntie Ragnhild is fine.  Or as fine as she ever is, anyway.”  Vergil stood up and took the mug away from Remus.  “Leave this stuff for Tifty.  Everybody’s fine. And, erm, Remus?  Bring your Dark detectors.”

South of Folly Wood and the Meadow, the ground fell away more and more steeply toward the little stream, the Stourbrook, that marked one of the boundaries of Cleve. The House stood halfway up the slope, its chimney pots and battered slate roof visible between beech trees now just touched with faint green.  Down they went, through the Wood and across the Meadow, past walled kitchen gardens, across terraces where herbs and flowers would bloom in summer, between twenty-foot sheared yews that rose up like massive blackish-green pylons—they had been old in the first Elizabeth's time.  Remus and Vergil each carried a stout leather- and brass-bound case containing Remus’s Dark detectors, devices for the sensing of deceit, concealment, ill-will, and Dark magic. Building them had been part of his training, a job that had taken him more than a year of patient research, seeking after materials, designing and constructing, testing and experimenting, all under the fierce direction of the Auror Alexander Slaughterboard, a tall, rawboned, red-haired and purple-faced wizard for whom the building of precision instruments seemed all too tame a specialty. It was, Slaughterboard claimed, the only way both to understand how they worked in principle and to achieve good results in practice: an Auror’s Dark detectors should be as personal to their owner as a wand.   They were also heavy. When they had set out, neither Remus nor Vergil had bothered to use magic to lighten the cases.  After walking nearly half a mile with them, Vergil was puffing and Remus was sweating, but neither, out of sheer bloody-mindedness, would pause to charm his burden—at least, not until the other did.  

“You should do an article on those Muggle novels for Proceedings of the Magical Literary Association,” Vergil said to distract himself from his aching arm.  “Maybe I could get you a small grant.”

“For a fact, I’d prefer that to a reasonable sum from Uncle Gracchus.”

Vergil gave a gasping laugh.  “My cousin the remittance man. You thought about where you want to spend your exile?”

“Not yet. Maybe the Balkans:  it would be great to get back to the Vojvodina.  I could dust off that proposal I wrote years ago, on the social anthropology of werewolf clans; the climate’s totally different now, someone might be interested….Or Nepal or Ladakh…I’ve wanted to see that part of the world ever since Si—for a long time. Los Angeles might be interesting. There’s a little bit of everything in L.A.—probably even a werewolf or two.  I could stop by Isle Royale on the way and surprise Mary Sue.”

“Ah.  Your American wildlife biologist…from Idaho, right?”  Vergil corrected himself.  “Ohio.”

“Iowa.  And Rose Owlglass is thinking of taking a year’s leave and assembling a team to do windigo research in the Yukon.  It’s a big world.”

“I don’t believe Gringotts has a branch in Iowa….Seriously:  are you in such a hurry to shake the dust of England off your feet?”  They crossed a paved terrace and climbed down a stone stairway to a long strip of tended lawn that had always been called “the Bowling Green,” though to Vergil’s knowledge nobody had played bowls there for years; still, Tifty stubbornly kept it weeded and sheared. The customs of the House must be observed.  Vergil looked across the neatly clipped turf, toward the smooth-skinned gray beeches with broad swathes of daffodils and cowslips strewn in the rough grass about their feet, and toward the tame garden beyond, with its laurels and its gravel walks and great magnolia tree.  Beyond this garden, partly enclosing it between its two side wings, stood the House, solid and comfortable, stoutly built of gray-yellow local stone, its diamond-paned windows winking in the morning light, simply and dependably itself. Vergil had never looked at it without a pang of love that had nothing to do with heirship.  Shake the dust of England off one’s feet? he thought.  Ridiculous.  Impossible.

“Well, no, not in a hurry exactly,” said Remus.

Vergil sighed, wondering how much he should tell his cousin.  In the end, all he said was “Good.”

They hurried through the long passage from the back of the house, through a low arched door to the stone entrance hall. Two staircases, mirror-images of one another, rose up on either side of the arch, leading to the second floor gallery.  They passed below the portrait of a grim-looking Lupin ancestress in a sulfur-yellow gown, gripping the neck of an archlute almost as tall as she was; then a picture of a harsh rocky landscape in which several centaurs were hurling rocks at one another under a lowering sky; then an unknown Lupin cousin who had been painted in the romantic fashion of the seventeenth century, with folded arms and open collar of cobweb lace and broad-brimmed hat, and a background of flames to show that he was burning with love. A mirror in an elaborate carved frame reflected Remus and Vergil as if they were sitters in a double portrait.  Side by side, the family resemblance between them was obvious in the molding of forehead, orbits, cheekbones, in their light brown hair—though there was more ash in Remus’s, more red in Vergil’s—and gray-gold eyes. The difference lay in the impression Vergil gave of substance and stability, a matter less of breadth of shoulder, girth, or tailoring (or of the incipient double chin only partly disguised by his neat little Doctor Faustus beard) than of something in his level gaze and good-tempered mouth.  Beside him Remus looked slighter, vaguer, obviously younger despite the gray in his hair and the lines about his eyes.  Remus caught Vergil’s wince and wondered if it was caused by the double chin, about which Vergil was absurdly sensitive, or by his own scruffy appearance. When the mirror called after him, “You’d be cute if you bathed, sweetheart,” he decided it must be the latter.

“I can’t imagine the subject of all this mystification.”

“Patience,” puffed Vergil as they climbed up to the gallery, “patience.”

“Where are we going?”  Rows of tall windows threw bars of pale spring sunlight across the polished floor of the gallery; their footsteps seemed very loud in the long bright quiet room.

“In here,” said Vergil, unlocking a door near the end of the gallery with a flick of his wand and a word.  Remus set down the brass-bound case he was carrying and looked around curiously:  this room had been his father’s study before it had become Vergil’s study a few years before.  There was the same linenfold paneling on the walls, same Turkey carpet on the floor, the fireplace built of the same local stone as the house, with a good fire on the hearth and a picture above the mantel of several masked gentlemen and ladies examining a rhinoceros.  Across from the fireplace, a broad bay window rose from floor to ceiling, flooding the room with light; between the window and the fireplace was a worktable piled with books and papers. As far as Remus could see, the only change since his father’s day was that there were far fewer books—and, of course, that everything was shabbier.  There were threadbare places in the fine carpet, and the hangings at the windows were splitting at every fold.  There was only so much you could do, even magically, to mend old silk. 

“If I’m going to set up the Dark detectors on the worktable, I’ll need to clear away some of this stuff.”  He observed, with a sinking of the heart, that several of the books were ledgers with what seemed to be a great many notations in red ink.  “They need to be solidly balanced to function well.  We may even need to shim up one of the legs of the table…apparently not,” he said, satisfied that the surface was quite stable. He knelt and began to release the clasps on the cases.

“I want to see what you make of this.”  Vergil took a key from a chain around his neck and opened a locked compartment in his desk.  “Arthur Weasley brought it to me—you know, chap over at Misuse of Muggle Artifacts.  He and old Perkins found it in a shop in one of the Muggle streets near the Leaky Cauldron.  Weasley thought there was something funny about it and brought it to the Misuse of Magic people, who basically told him to run along and not waste their time.  Then he took it to Enforcement, and Enforcement as good as accused him of trying to draw attention to himself in order to get promotion and a pay raise, and drum up more funding for his department. Which is a joke, if you like, because nobody is less ambitious or more honest than Weasley, but that’s Enforcement for you. In the end, they threatened him with a reprimand if he pursued it.”

 “But he’s pursuing it anyway, this misused Muggle artifact. So why’d he give it to you?”

From the locked compartment Vergil took another key, four inches long, with delicate silver wards.  “Yeah, he’s pursuing it anyway. Strictly sub rosa.  Because it bothers him, you know.  And he would’ve taken it to Alastor Moody, for choice, but Moody was in hospital at St. Mungo’s, at the time.  So he brought it to me because…well…not to put too fine a point on it, because of you, Remus.  He knows you were Moody’s pupil, he knows Moody thought highly of you.”

“I’m flattered.  Me, the next best thing to Moody?”  Remus kept his tone light, but he felt a familiar ache under his thumbnails, a familiar tightening in his chest, the awareness that if he was alone with Dark matters, he was out of his depth.  It was flattering to be spoken of in the same breath as a great Auror, but he had lost, early on, any real hope of emulating his teacher, no matter what encouraging words Moody might have given him, no matter what strings Moody had pulled to get him his clearance to study at Aurors House.  His doubts had only been confirmed by his dealings with—no, he thought fiercely, I won’t say his name; may his name be blotted out; may he take years dying, there in Azkaban, and keep his wits to the end of it; may the ground he’s buried in heave him up again, may crows eat his eyes.  And then he had to stop what he was doing and cover his mouth with his hand as if that could stop the evil thought from getting out into the world to do its work, though he couldn’t understand why his own voice in his ears kept crying no, no, no, I did not say that, I did not will that.  It was to silence thoughts of this sort that he had become so devoted to those useful anodynes, sleep, hemp, and fiction.  Six months of them, he suspected, had dulled what edge he’d had.  And now, evidently, he would have to find that edge again in a hurry, or risk loosing Dark forces in Vergil’s study.  He was glad that his back was to Vergil and his cousin couldn’t see his panic in his face.    

“The next available thing, anyway.”

About a yard apart near the center of the table went the Secrecy Sensors, two pendulums of copper, silver, and iron, suspended from rigid brass supports, each constrained to vibrate in a single direction, each attached to a metal arm, slight as bird’s bones, that held a celluloid ink cartridge with a steel nib.   Remus tested the heavy brass bases of the suspensors to be sure their footing was solid, filled the cartridges at Vergil’s inkwell, then lifted two hollow wood and vellum drums from the case, spun them on their axles to be sure they rotated freely, and set about covering the circumference of each with a strip of parchment.  He paused in setting up the drums to watch as his cousin bent down and stroked one of the carved panels to the right of the fireplace and spoke to it, and a keyhole appeared where none had been before.  Behind this door, which he unlocked with the silver key, was another which he unlocked with a word and a touch, revealing a cavity from which he took a bundle wrapped in gray silk.

“Can you actually get a useful readout from those things?” he asked.  Remus sighed.

 “It’s more for a record than anything else.  Although Slaughterboard thinks it possible to draw conclusions from the tapes about the nature of the concealment—the presence of fear, hostility, mischief, malice.  It helps to get a sense of the dimensions of the perturbation—especially when you have a single source, a known center.  Which I presume we do?”

“You’ll see in a minute.”

“You can calibrate the floats for a fix on just how much disturbance is taking place—the turbidity, the intensity, the turbulence of the emanations—based on how slowly or quickly they sink, and how much they drift, but I’m mostly relying on the color changes of the vapor and just a qualitative impression of their movements.  If, for instance, we’ve got a source or a sink—an object that gives out, or one that takes in.” 

 “I like the floats.  They’re pretty.” Vergil grinned.  “Harriet would probably like them for party decorations.”  Harriet was Vergil’s wife, a charming woman but, in Remus’s opinion, rather frivolous.  Mechanically he went back to work, reflecting that each thing he did brought him closer to the thing he dreaded.  All too soon the Secrecy Sensors were ready,  and a score of glass floats (fragile as soap-bubbles, filled with white vapor) had been tethered with silk threads to their brass weights and placed about the table. Four more floats, at the four points of the compass, were tethered not only to weights but also to conical nets of fine close-woven silk in which hung, suspended on thin gold wires, four polished tears of amber.   He nodded to Vergil, not trusting himself to speak, and Vergil began unwrapping the object from its gray swathings, and something turned in Remus like a key in a lock:  the understanding that he had done rightly all that he had done here, that his instruments were ready to his hand to reveal what he needed to know, and that he would not fail at this because the consequences of failure were insupportable.

He spoke to the instruments and the drums began slowly to turn, the pens scribing a single flat line on the parchment tapes; the glass floats rose gently in the air to the limits of their tethers and began, slowly and randomly, to drift in mid-air.

The object Vergil held out to him was a book the size of one of their old school spellbooks, bound in old tarnished brass like a missal.

He drew a long breath, knowing better than Vergil did that certain books were potent magical objects in their own right, and that some possessed dark powers better not spoken of.  He took the book as gingerly as Vergil offered it, laid it on the table, and opened it.  The yellowing and spotted pages exuded a powerful smell that made him gasp:  a smell of mold, rotting wood, rusty iron, stagnant water sliding in dark places over stones.     

Then he read the title and couldn’t help himself; he felt the laughter rising up in his chest like a belch after too many fizzy drinks. Honorii Papae Grammatica:  he felt the same surge of irresistible hilarity he remembered from the time he’d first dealt with a boggart, which had risen before him as the full moon so that he’d felt for a moment the terrible aura that preceded his transformations enveloping him, the knowledge that something was about to happen to him over which he had no control, before he remembered to cry out the countercharm and the creature turned into a round of moldy cheese and hit the floor with a splat.  Honorii Papae Grammatica.  This was more than anticlimactic, this was ridiculous.  Splat.  He had to lean on the table, sobbing, holding his ribs.

“What’s so funny?”  Vergil sounded aggrieved.

“This is: it’s a Muggle artifact, all right.”  Remus controlled himself enough to speak.  “It’s a standard-issue Grimoire of Pope Honorius—late seventeenth century, I make it by the type.  One of the few grimoires to circulate in print—in fact, there are no known manuscript copies, not so much as a reference to it anywhere, before 1450 and the Gutenberg press. That alone should tell you something:  real Dark wizards don’t publish. There were five Popes named Honorius, all before 1300, plus one pretender in the eleventh century, and our best guess is that it’s the pretender the book is named for. There’s no evidence that he was a wizard, and he probably didn’t even write it anyway.  I mean, an antipope makes a lot of enemies, and if you wanted to blacken the name of your rival for the highest office in Christendom, you couldn’t accuse him of anything worse than practicing black magic and necromancy.  Later on, when the book was written—or compiled, more likely—Honorius’s name got tacked onto it to make it sound more authoritative, and his reputation made the attribution believable.  Whoever did put this thing together wasn’t a wizard either. The stuff in it is garbage, except as documentation of how magic figures in the Muggle imagination.  It’s not even functioning folk magic:  more like wishful thinking.   There have always been Muggles who wanted to be Dark wizards.”  He flipped through it, declaimed in the sonorous mock-pompous voice he normally reserved for Ministry press releases:  “‘Ayos, ayos, ayos Tetragrammaton’—now that really is gibberish.  ‘Sint mihi Dei Acheronti propitii; valeat numen triplex mfflefluggh…’ ”

Vergil had reached out and covered Remus’s mouth with his hand.  “Nice lecture:  you ought to be a professor, Remus.  Maybe you could also explain why your Dark detectors are doing, like, the Watusi…but I don’t think you should read any more of that.”

A faint tinny creakling and humming was coming from the instruments Remus had built for himself under Auror Slaughterboard’s dour tutelage.  Both Secrecy Sensors had sprung to life, the pendulums striking out in a series of spasms that translated into jagged scrawls on the parchment covering the drums. The glass floats were bobbing, straining at their tethers, and the vapor in several of them had changed its color from white to the dark red of old blood; the silk traps were bellying out like the sails of a frigate in a high gale.  Remus closed the book and laid it back on the table.  He felt the little hairs stand up all along his arms.

“Not to mention why it’s so cold and dark in here all of a sudden..”

“A cloud over the sun?”  But standing so that Vergil couldn’t see what he did with his right hand, he made a quick gesture of closure and whispered “Averto” under his breath.

Vergil’s good-natured face had gone from florid to pallid.  “Please tell me that wasn’t what I think it was,” he whispered.  Remus nodded.

“It’s meant for a spell to summon demons.”

“So if it’s garbage, then why are you muttering counterspells under your breath?”

Remus realized that he was going to sound extremely stupid, but it couldn’t be helped. Vergil deserved an explanation, even though the explanation in this case was that he, Remus, didn’t have an explanation.  “Because this isn’t supposed to be happening,” he said at last, “and I don’t understand it.  I know what spells for summoning and binding and banishing evil powers are like, and I know the Honorius grimoire.  Those words are not capable of summoning or binding anything that doesn’t want to come on its own.”

“How about banishing something that does want to come on its own?”  Vergil managed a sickly grin. “Don’t tell me they didn’t have some power, Remus.  I felt it.”

 “Only the power of malice to attract Dark creatures, and they don’t come to it under compulsion.  They come the way gulls come to a garbage scow:  because they smell their food.” Remus frowned over the brass pendulum, which was now subsiding; the floats were slowly sinking toward the table.  “I’d have said that was all the power there is in the Honorius grimoire…except that at least in this particular book, there’s evidently something else….Weasley was right; someone has tampered with it.”

“Death Eaters?”

“Not necessarily.  We’ve become so obsessed with—with You-Know-Who,” he said, feeling Vergil’s shaken state warranted a concession to his sensibilities, “we’ve forgotten there are other Dark matters in this world.  Aurors House should deal with this.  We can take the book to London, or have someone from the College come and collect it.  Now that Moody’s recovered, he’d be the one to set a proper investigation on foot.  And Slaughterboard would probably have some ideas about it too.”

“But what about Weasley—when this gets round to Enforcement—” 

“Maybe it doesn’t need to.  I can take the book to London myself; we probably don’t need very elaborate precautions.  If it’s not Death Eater business, the Aurors may assign one of their own to deal with it—strictly off the record.” Since the Department of Magical Law Enforcement had been created in 1871,  Aurors House had technically been a branch of it, but Aurors House had been around since the 11^th century (or the 13^th—depending on whom you asked) and had never fully yielded its independence to Enforcement’s parvenu quill-pushers.  Enforcement’s arm was long, but when they cared to, the Aurors could usually keep their business out of its hands. Remus grinned.  “Moody might even let me work on it.  For old times’ sake.”

Vergil felt an unworthy lifting of his spirits at the thought of getting the book off his hands.  He himself felt an oppression in the atmosphere just from having it locked up in his office, though maybe that was his bad conscience about helping to launch an investigation that was flatly clandestine and possibly illegal.  He drew a deep breath.  “Remus…I don’t suppose I need to tell you exactly how off the record this has to be. You know as well as I do, if there’s anything in it, Enforcement will want it for themselves.  Never mind that they told Weasley to bugger off and not waste their precious time.  They’re perfectly capable of grabbing it with one hand and delivering a reprimand to him with the other.  And Weasley can’t afford to have a reprimand in his file, he’s got six little kids and another on the way, and a salary that wouldn’t keep a family of mice in cheese.”

“Relax, Vergie.  I know who Weasley is:  he’s a good friend of Moody’s.  Alastor actually owes him a favor or two.  And I think I can vouch for Slaughterboard—he’s never been one to do things by the book.  But if it turns out to be Death Eater business, that’s a different story.  If it’s Death Eater business, we have no choice but to bring Enforcement in, and let the chips fall where they may.  If you don’t want to risk that, maybe we should just find some way of disposing of the book—case it up in lead, drop it out to sea—something like that.”

Vergil looked horrified.  “Remus!  That would be…totally unprincipled.”

“Not really. It’s just a matter of which principles have more weight in which circumstances.”

“And Weasley would be the first to agree with me.  If it means involving Enforcement, we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.”  He shook his head.  “Sometimes I wonder what they taught you at that Aurors’ school….No, don’t take the instruments down yet.  There’s something else as well.”

Vergil opened another locked compartment of his desk and took out a small bag of purple velvet.  “The bookseller had a glass case of curios in her shop as well—brooches and bangles, little figurines, incense-burners, those crystals Muggles think are magical, gewgaws like that.  Weasley and Perkins bought this off her for a song:  she didn’t think it valuable. Or maybe she wanted rid of it in a hurry.  Take a look.”

Remus held out his hand.  Something cold slipped out of the velvet bag:  a large golden ring.  Very smooth and cool and heavy it was against his palm.  He held it up to the light.  Some cunning goldsmith had made it in the shape of a snake, its coils delicately patterned, each shining scale perfectly wrought, its head heavy and wedge-shaped, its eyes brilliant chips of red stone.  Its jaws, Remus saw, were clamped about its own tail.

“Amazing,” he whispered.  You would not have thought it had been made out of metal and stone, but transfigured from living bone and flesh and scale into gold.  It was a lovely thing.

Vergil bent closer.  “It’s brighter than I recall it being.  When Weasley gave it me, it looked like a bit of pot metal.”

“The serpent Ourobouros,” said Remus dreamily.  “I remember it from Mother’s old emblem-books.  She was heavily into them for a while—something about a symbolic language. You can see, it’s biting its own tail …it’s an allegory of immortality, of everlasting life.”  He reminded himself that he was here to investigate, not to marvel, and laid the ring on the table between the instruments.  It was not until a minute or so had gone by without a sign from them that he realized he had been holding his breath.

“It’s not an object-magical…just an ornament.  At most a sign, an emblem of sorts.”

“Yeah, well…look at this.”  Hesitantly Vergil approached, hanging back from the book as if it were a snake, then opened it to the flyleaf.

“The Very Reverend Dr. Seagrave Winters, his Book,” Remus read.  Around the words the coils of a snake formed a triple circle; the snake was biting its own tail. “Finis meus est initium meum.  By my hand, Seagrave Winters, Roodmas 1933.”  He bent nearer, squinting at the writing.  “Not just by his hand….He drew this in blood.”

“‘My end is my beginning.’ Who in plague’s name is the Very Reverend Dr. Seagrave Winters?” asked Vergil.