"I have never engaged in grave-robbing before," Snape said, brushing himself off with visible distaste and driving his spade into the earth. "What in Merlin's name is the rule about Muggle graveyard soil — why can wizards use spells everywhere except here, but necromancers can?"
"Perhaps because your inclination toward necromancy is precisely zero?" Hagrid muttered. "A necromancer would probably sort this out in a few minutes."
"It's not me — it's my homeland's inclination toward necromancy that's zero."
"I'd say actively negative. Can't find one among British wizards, and you can't lure one over from the continent either."
"True. Even Lady Black's summons got nothing but apologies — it really is bad. Someone's tracking them. You should ask Rookwood, shouldn't you."
"You're suggesting I interrogate a Department of Mysteries employee on the subject of those particular secrets?"
"I can brew you the Veritaserum."
"I'd prefer to manage without that for now."
"Afraid he'll take offence?" Snape turned and swore under his breath. "There are bloody Riddles all over this cemetery — and half the dates have been worn away!" He cast a Scouring Charm and gritted his teeth.
"Well, we did find a fresher one. Thomas Riddle, 1943," Hagrid said, driving his crowbar into the frozen mound beside the headstone in question.
"And what's this?" Snape waved at the date he'd just cleaned.
Andrei came over and stared at the stone. He swore as well.
"Right — Tom killed both of the Thomas Riddles senior. Remarkable lack of imagination."
"Which one's the grandfather, which is the father? How do we even tell?"
"By the skull. The grandfather's bound to have fewer teeth."
"What if the younger one had a sweet tooth?"
"Really. They weren't struggling financially — the younger one must have had his teeth seen to, otherwise the locals wouldn't have remembered him as such a handsome man."
"Fine. That means we'll have to open both. Ugh. Why didn't we just hire Muggles — too cheap?"
"And then Obliviate them and leg it while the Aurors are already on edge? Besides, there's no guarantee a Muggle is allowed to touch the bones. Be grateful we at least know the proper procedure for obtaining the 'bone of the father.'"
Hagrid took the spade from Snape, spat on his hands, quickly scattered the tidy little mound, and leaned over what remained of a ribcage, shattered by the spade's impact.
"The bone must be whole and free of active magical influence," Snape quoted. "Whoever thought that one up."
"Not 'whoever' — Mervil the Malicious. Have you forgotten?" Hagrid grunted from inside the grave. Something crunched, and he swore.
"Let me — my fingers are more sensitive," Snape offered, steeling himself.
"Why only 'Malicious' and not 'the Gravedigger'?" Hagrid climbed out of the hole. "Rhetorical question."
"I imagine he assumed ancestral bones would be preserved in family crypts," Snape dropped down into the excavation and immediately sneezed. "The idea of someone venturing into a Muggle cemetery presumably never occurred to him."
He sneezed again.
"What — you do realise what might be resurrected if your saliva is on those bones?"
"Something venomous. We'll rinse them with water. Plain, clean water. Unless that's also prohibited?"
"Nothing is said about water."
"Pass me the trowel — I'll crack everything if I'm not careful."
A few minutes later Snape emerged from the grave looking pleased, holding a small red garden trowel and a somewhat grimy skull.
"Look — nearly all the teeth intact. This can't possibly be the grandfather's."
"Lucky. Which bone are we taking?"
"The skull itself? And be done with it?"
"In the hope that something soaked in from the brain? Though actually — that's not bad. Only a skull has a lot of individual bones, and we need just one."
"Meaning many?"
"They never did teach you anatomy, did they."
"Take the one with the brains."
"The cranial bones, they're called. Look — you can even see the sutures."
In the bright moonlight, two men bent over the unfortunate skull, and from the direction of the larger of them came:
"Frontal, two parietals, two temporals, occipital, sphenoid, ethmoid—"
"Whichever comes out easiest is the one we take!" his partner replied. "We can use magic to fill it back in, I hope?"
"What if we need another bone?"
"Then let's just take several while we're here. Would a rib do? I found an intact one."
"Dig up an arm too, at least one — the bones there should separate easily."
"It's crumbling."
"Never mind, just take what's whole."
***
"And that was the simplest and most idiotic part of the ritual preparation," Severus Snape reported to the assembled company in the Blacks' drawing room. "Also the least interesting. Everything else will be considerably more absorbing. Have you all worked out how we're getting the Headmaster's blood? And which of the Dark Lord's servants do we dislike sufficiently to remove something from? Incidentally—who actually counts as a servant? Those who served willingly, or everyone who was Marked?"
"Those are two very different things," Sirius said drily.
"More than two," Regulus added.
"Well, you're the experts, clearly. How do we choose a servant?"
"Wormtail would have done, if this had all happened a couple of months earlier," offered Sirius, who had been quiet until now.
He still hadn't quite recovered from Snape's wry account of the night—self-deprecating humour from Snape was the last thing he'd expected. And there was genuinely nothing to take issue with: Snape had lampooned the whole idiotic spectacle of their graveyard expedition himself, himself included. Even mentioned the little trowel.
"I don't think so. Have you looked through the memories? Do yourself a favour some time—educate yourself about your old school friend."
"He is not my friend."
"Go ahead and say he never was—"
"Severus. Stop baiting Sirius," Hagrid rumbled, bringing a palm down on the table hard enough that the unfortunate furniture nearly lost a leg.
"No mistress of the house to keep you in line," Black senior snorted. "You can fix it yourself."
"Hardly a problem," Andrei smiled. "Speaking of which — where is the lady?"
Both of the wayward sons simply shrugged. Well, their mother certainly didn't report her movements to them. Walburga Black had never reported to anyone — not in living memory, one might say.
***
A rather large bird — thick black bill, glossy black above and snow-white below, something like a conductor in miniature — beat its narrow wings rapidly across the steel-blue waves. Away from the accursed island. Away.
Landing on a long sandbar, it paused to catch its breath, stepped behind a small cairn of stones assembled by no one in particular—and did not emerge from the other side. In its place, a woman stepped out from behind the pile of stones, wearing an old-fashioned fur coat, with a spine as straight as one rarely sees even at a royal court. She swept a glance across the desolate shore, drew from her sleeve a wand the length of a forearm, and vanished.
***
"Well? How did things go?" Walburga Black asked, stepping into her own drawing room.
"My lady, perhaps some Strengthening Solution?" Snape noted her deathly pallor.
"Mother, where have you been?" both sons nearly asked simultaneously.
Hagrid stood silently, drawing back a chair for the lady. She smiled faintly as she sat, and gave Snape a dignified nod—he was already rummaging in his pockets for the familiar vial, which he held out to her. Walburga sniffed it carefully and drank it to the last drop. The colour returned to her face slowly, gradually, and a silence settled over the table.
"As painful as it is to acknowledge that I was the one who raised you," the lady began, placing her hands on the table's edge, "only these two—" she nodded toward Snape and Hagrid "—behaved appropriately and with some degree of decorum. As for where I've been."
She reached into an inner pocket of her robes and extracted a small bundle—black, with deep red-brown streaks that didn't merely suggest but plainly proclaimed what was inside.
With a flick of her wrist she unwrapped it, and everyone present opened their mouths: on the table lay a neat row of carefully labelled items.
"Well. The witch's fingers biscuits," Hagrid said. "So that's what they look like."
"You were in Azkaban, Mother?" Sirius breathed, with genuine horror.
"No, I baked them myself," Walburga said. "It's not the first time, for your information. Where do you think that woollen blanket of yours came from?"
Sirius was briefly struck dumb, then pressed his lips together and lowered his head.
"Hm. Bella, Barty, Rudy, Rabi, Dolohov," Snape catalogued the lady's acquisitions with professional detachment. "So he was imprisoned too. I didn't think he'd let himself be taken. Is this everything?"
"I chose not to take the Carrows and some others," Lady Black said, with a slight shudder of distaste. "This is sufficient. Bella was practically offering her head—the foolish girl. No matter; they'll all have a bite of the porridge now, and perhaps it'll help."
"Or make things worse," Regulus said.
"Or make things worse," Walburga agreed. "The important thing is that it gets their minds working. And if anyone has objections, we can always borrow a finger of theirs instead." She fixed her gaze on Snape.
"Fair point," Regulus said, to everyone's surprise. "Skele-Gro, Flesh-Knit, and everything grows back within a month."
"Flesh-Knit? That's new," Snape said, interested.
"I had some time to look into it — apparently all sorts of things have been regrown over the centuries. There's even a charm that works, I found. The result would be metal or stone, but I find that interesting. Shall we experiment?"
"With me it's pointless," Snape sighed.
"Why?"
Instead of answering, he extended his left forearm for the benefit of a frowning Regulus, and then the entire assembled company.
Completely clean.
"How?" Walburga nearly stood up.
Everyone else was simply speechless. Except Hagrid, who got in ahead of Severus's answer.
"More or less by accident. But to repeat it, we'll need basilisk skin. It can be shed skin."
From Walburga's expression, she was ready to set off this very moment to find the Headmaster and rearrange his nose. But her elder son drew her attention away, hunching slightly as though from a chill:
"Mother—how are they?" he asked, his voice hoarse—apparently not noticing Snape's surprised look. Sirius Black worrying about someone? Unheard of.
"Managing. They have the minimum necessities. They'll survive. And if they start using their heads, they won't go mad either. Is there someone specific you're worried about?"
Sirius shrugged silently and pressed his lips together. His memories were still too fresh—not exactly haunting his sleep, but they surfaced sometimes. When they did, he had to go to the laboratory for a potion. And there was Snape. Despite everything, Sirius still preferred to see him as rarely as possible. The ingrained, reflexive aversion faded slowly.
"Right, so," Andrei announced, and everyone looked at the half-giant in collective bewilderment. "Dumbledore — I'll give it a go. Safer for me than for any of you. We just need to work out how to get him to come to me. Or better yet, into the Forbidden Forest. Actually, Severus — might there be anything useful for potions in there?"
"Possibly quite a lot, but I don't imagine the Headmaster will be collecting it personally," Snape replied.
"Who does brew his potions, I wonder?" Sirius asked. "Slughorn?"
"Absolutely not!" Regulus and Severus said in near-unison, and Severus continued: "Slughorn — what you see is what you get. Either does it himself or commissions. He worked with Flamel, after all."
"What about something—oh! What if it were unicorn milk, hand-milked by the person themselves? I mean—frame it as something that only works if done personally," Sirius suggested.
"Then we'd have to reveal the porridge recipe," Walburga said, with a slight grimace.
"What about the water?" Snape clearly felt protective of Hagrid's recipe.
"He already knows about the water—remember the Colt-tails?" came the objection.
"No, not the milk—too much would follow from it," Walburga concluded.
"Wait—I sent a whole cauldron to St Mungo's!" Hagrid suddenly remembered. "They have—"
"Medical confidentiality, have you forgotten?" Snape said. "It's all in the agreement. Not a soul will breathe a word."
Andrei shook his head. He had forgotten, truly. Good thing there were several heads here rather than just his. On his own, he'd have made rather a mess of things by now.
"Then we can reveal my treatment to the Headmaster, can't we?"
"He'll want to examine you."
"In my presence," Lady Black smiled—a smile that sent a chill down the spines of those who witnessed it.
"All right. Let's try it. Only we need to rehearse the whole thing so he can't catch Rubeus out on anything."
Andrei blinked:
"Well, I mean, I'm… I've thought about it a lot, that is, a fair bit. You probably know what I, you know, cured Sirius—the dog one—with? This porridge I make, a strengthening one, on unicorn milk."
"That needs cutting," Lady Black said firmly. "He'll wave you off after the second sentence and simply leave."
"Fine. Then just the porridge and the milk first, then that seemed to help Sirius. And that St Mungo's is asking, and the unicorns let me near them but won't let me milk them."
"Ah, so you'll be asking Dumbledore to serve as your milkmaid?" Sirius burst out laughing, and the others couldn't entirely suppress their own wry amusement.
"Well, I'll mention the price—"
"And he'll send some girl. There are plenty at the school. Grandfather will propose the project and they'll all come running for the honour."
"Any sensible girl won't go without a project supervisor."
"Tonks will go. The whole family's under Dumbledore's wing," Andrei remembered.
"What?" Walburga exclaimed. "So he's the one who has my niece—" the voice dropped to a hiss, from which everyone present quickly gathered that the Headmaster's blood would soon be in their capable hands, and that no grandmother—even of a halfblood grandchild—was about to hand a child of hers over to any Supreme Mugwump.