Facing Danger
Chapter 50: What Now Is Found (Year 6)
By Anne B. Walsh
Mare turned slowly to take in her surroundings, contrasting them with what she’d last experienced. The thick quiet of the manor house at night had been replaced with the cheerful chatter of birds and the soft rush of breeze through leaves. Instead of the cozy walls and ceiling of her nest, she saw open fields and meadows, with a few groves of trees scattered about and a line of them in the middle distance she thought might indicate a river. And directly behind her as she’d first become aware of this scene, now directly in front of her, was a house.
Not a terribly big house, but not a little cottage either. Mock-Tudor, I think they call the style. Dark wood and white plaster. She looked down at herself, discovering without surprise that she wore blue trousers and an off-white blouse rather than the black work robes in which she’d last seen herself. And I’m standing in the middle of the road in front of it. I should move if I don’t want to be hit by the next car that comes along.
“But which way do I move?” she wondered aloud. “Towards it, or away?”
Inside the house, a woman began to sing a bouncy little song, bragging about her good looks in a newly acquired piece of clothing. Mare stepped off the road to listen before she knew what she was doing.
I suppose that means it’s towards.
Swallowing her sudden attack of nerves, she walked briskly up the path to the front door and knocked.
The singer broke off in the middle of listing the various shades and tints of her latest garment, and footsteps heralded the opening of the door. Mare looked down at a woman about her own age, wooden spoon in her right hand and a smear of flour on the end of her nose, matching the streak of it across the side of her wild brown hair.
And why she makes me think of my “master,” I haven’t the foggiest.
“Welcome to the Marauders’ Den,” the other woman said with a smile. “I’ve been expecting you. Won’t you come in?”
“Thank you.” Mare set her foot gingerly across the threshold, then followed it with the other when nothing trembled, fell over, or blew up. “I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but I’d like to know exactly where I am. ‘The Marauders’ Den’ isn’t very reassuring, and I have work to do tomorrow.”
“Don’t worry about that.” The other woman looked unaccountably sad for a moment. “You’ll be back there in plenty of time. I’m Danger, by the way.”
“Mare. Is this your home, then?”
“Yes, it is.” Danger led the way down the hall into the kitchen. “Is that Mare short for Mary, or just plain Mare?”
“Just plain, I suppose.” Mare took a seat at the kitchen table as Danger returned to what looked like a piecrust she’d been rolling out. “Did you bring me here?”
“I did.”
“So you have magic.”
“I do.” Danger produced a wand from some hidden pocket and used it to levitate her piecrust into the waiting pan. “Not that it’s terribly strong, except where it needs to be. But that’s beside the point.”
“No, I think it’s very much to the point.” Mare got to her feet. Something about this house and this woman bothered her, like an itch inside her head. “Obviously your magic is strong enough to take me away from where I ought to be and bring me here. Which means it’s strong enough to put me back again. And I’d like it if you’d do that now.”
“May I finish my pie first?” Danger exhibited the crust, now with its edges trimmed to a neat inch past the rim of the pan. “It won’t take me long, and I’m certain to forget how much cinnamon I used on the apples if I stop now. I will take you back where you ought to be as soon as I’m finished, I promise.” Again that strange flash of sadness across her features. “Since it’s what you want.”
“Thank you.” Mare sat down again, ordering her skin to stop prickling as though she were being watched. “It seems like an odd name for a woman,” she said for lack of any other conversational topic. “Danger, I mean.” Belatedly her tone struck her as rude. “No offense intended.”
“None taken, though I hope you won’t mind my saying it’s no odder than Mare.” Danger skillfully poured sliced apples from a mixing bowl into the piecrust. “It was given to me at the age of eight by a friend, after a roller-skating accident.”
Mare smiled in spite of herself. “What did you do, fall down and knock over three other girls?”
“Onto a gravel driveway, no less.” Danger’s eyes left her pie and fixed onto Mare’s face, intent and brown. “My friend made up a rhyme about it, a silly little jingle, and since I’d always hated my given name—”
“That’s wrong,” Mare murmured.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your eyes. They’re wrong.” Closing her own, Mare summoned up the sense she’d discovered earlier in the day, while experimenting with the power she’d used first on her kitchen invaders, then later on Prince. If there’s something the matter with her eyes, her sight, I might be able to find out what it is and help her…
Proud of herself for the thought, she opened her eyes, focused them on Danger.
And barely managed to stop the scream.
“What in the world?” Danger dropped the scraper she’d been using to get the last of the apple juices out of her mixing bowl and hurried around the end of the counter. “Uh—Mare, what is it?”
“What’s wrong with you?” Mare held up a hand to stop Danger where she was, unsure if it was so she could keep looking at the impossible damage to the other woman or so that she wouldn’t have to touch it. “What could do that to you? What have you done to yourself?”
“Can you tell me what you see?”
“Your… self. Your soul, I suppose you’d call it. It’s torn. There are pieces of it, pieces of you, just gone. Missing. One here…” Mare touched the side of her own head. “And one here…” The hand moved down to her chest, in the approximate location of her heart. “And two more. Here and there.” She tapped her right hand with her left, then pointed to her left foot. “I’m sorry to make a fuss, but it was…”
“Startling?” Danger suggested. “Unexpected?”
“To say the least.” Mare blinked her eyes twice, returning them to normal sight and Danger to her non-mutilated condition. “Is it anything you can explain? A soul-eating monster of some kind, or a near-death experience?”
“Nothing quite so dramatic.” Danger ran her hand along the edge of the kitchen table. “I’m married, and my husband and I share a special bond, one that links our minds and souls. It also means I fall ill if I’m away from him for more than a day, but I never want to be, so that usually works out well. But a few days ago, he was badly hurt, and two of my dearest friends in the world were kidnapped. I had a chance of finding them, but only if I suspended my bond with my husband so that I could be away for the time required. I love my friends dearly, and I want them back more than anything in the world except to have him well again, so…”
“So you went for it.” Mare nodded. “Is that what I’m seeing, then? The suspension of that bond?”
“I think it must be. Head for mind, chest for heart, and hand and foot because that’s what it feels like I’m missing, not having him with me.” Danger pressed her fingers against the inside corners of her eyes. “Expecting twenty, thirty, fifty times a day to hear his voice inside my head, and having to remember every time that I won’t, that I can’t until this job is done and I can go home to him.”
“It sounds a bit invasive to me,” Mare said frankly. “Having someone else inside your mind all the time.”
“It could be. It probably should be. But when it first started…” Danger shook her head, not in negation but in wonder. “We were both in mourning—more than just ordinary sadness, our whole worlds had fallen apart. His dearest friends had died only a few months ago, and I had lost my parents a few months before that, so neither of us had anyone left to turn to. It was such a relief to have someone again that we didn’t care how strange it was to have it happen that way. Our souls really were torn then, I think, ripped apart with pain and grief and anger, and when the torn places came together…”
“They mended one another.” Mare looked around for a box of tissues, spotted one on a bookshelf behind her, and rather than get up reached into her pocket. A slender rod of rosewood met her fingers, and she pulled it out and waved it casually at the tissues. They lifted off from the bookshelf, soared over her head, and landed on the table beside Danger with a muffled thump.
“Thanks.” Danger extracted a tissue from the box and blew her nose. “And yes, that is what I think happened. Because we were both still wounded, still torn apart, when we came together, we healed as one, not two. Which makes it sound like a horror movie, like Dr. Frankenstein—”
“Frawn-kun-steen,” Mare corrected under her breath, then frowned. Where is this coming from? This isn’t me. I don’t like it.
“However you say it.” Danger laughed weakly. “It isn’t like that at all. I can see how it could be, how someone could use it to take advantage or to play some very nasty games, but when we’re so close, anything that hurts one of us hurts the other one as well, so we learned early on how to give and take, how to respect privacy and deal with problems. We’re far from perfect, but it works.”
“Good to know.” Mare discovered that she was still running the rosewood—wand, it’s a wand, I might as well call it one—through her fingers, and set it down firmly on the table. The warmth and tingling in her hand faded as she let it go, and she exhaled what she told herself was a sigh of relief, not of regret.
Any magic I’ve got is tied up in healing. And occasionally in hurting. A little thrill ran through her at the knowledge that she could defend herself now, could defend Prince, from the casual cruelties of the wizards at the manor. I’ll have to learn to regulate it better, maybe see if I can do it from a distance, but it’s my own magic and it doesn’t need any special tools. I don’t know how to use a wand, and I don’t see any reason I’d want to.
Her hand started to inch back towards the wand. She pressed it against her side and started around the table to offer Danger another tissue. “I don’t want to push you,” she said as the other woman took it, “but could I help you finish that pie by any chance? You did say you’d take me…” The word she’d intended to use stuck in her throat. “Back, afterwards.”
“Of course, I’m so sorry.” Danger tucked the tissue into her pocket and went to the sink to wash her hands. “Do you really want to help, or were you just trying to find a less rude way to say ‘would you mind getting moving on that blasted pastry of yours?’”
“More the second than the first,” Mare admitted. “I may work in a kitchen, but I’m no cook. I can reheat what the house-elves bring down, and that’s about it.”
“Understood, and there’s not much for you to do at this point anyway. It’s mostly just…” Danger reached for the rolling pin sitting beside her marble cutting board and knocked over a small dish of flour with her sleeve. “Botheration! No, don’t get up, I’ll do it,” she added, waving Mare back into a seat. “It’s my kitchen, I can clean up my own messes… oh!” As she started to go to one knee, her foot skidded on a patch of the spilled flour, and she landed hard on her stomach, turning her head enough that her cheek rather than her chin impacted the floor.
Mare’s first instinct was to leap to her feet, to check Danger for possible injuries, to make certain she hadn’t been badly hurt, and she was halfway up when she saw something that almost made her fall in her turn, saving herself at the last second by a clutch at the edge of the table.
Spilling out the open collar of Danger’s warm red blouse were the fine links of a gold chain, one with four engraved pendants hanging from it, each with a tiny gem winking from near its top.
Danger sat up laughing, brushing flour off her front. “How very graceful. No wonder every man at the ball asks me to dance…” Her face went still as she saw Mare’s. “Looking at these?” she asked in a carefully casual tone, hooking both sides of her chain on a finger so that the pendants dangled free. “They were a gift of sorts. Given to me, and to several other people I’m… involved with. Marvelous little toys.” She tugged at a section of the chain, and Mare stared as it grew longer between the floury hands. “And that’s just one of the things they do. If we both wore mine right now, we could speak silently, mind to mind. But there’s no need for that, since we’re the only ones here. And I should finish that pie.”
“Will that work on anyone?” Mare blurted. “The silent speech. Can anybody wear your chain with you and talk to you inside your head, the way you say you and your husband can all the time?”
“Yes, it will.” Danger had her head bent over the second half of her piecrust, rolling it out with sure, firm strokes. “Anyone who’ll stand still long enough to let you get it over their head, you can talk with. No words required, just a human mind, or human-equivalent, since you mentioned you know some house-elves.”
“Good to know.” Mare caught herself reaching for the collar of her own shirt and laced her fingers together in her lap. There was no reason for her to give away her own secrets, no matter how friendly Danger seemed.
The second piecrust, rolled into a neat circle, flopped into its place atop the apples. The edges were trimmed, crimped together, and fluted with the same sureness Danger had used with her rolling pin, and a knife darted in and out of the crust, poking holes to allow steam to escape. Scooping the pie up in one hand, Danger opened the oven with the other and slid it inside, shutting the door with a hip as she reached up to the stove’s hood to set the timer there.
This is her place.
It was Mare’s first clear thought since her shock over the pendants, and she fixed on it gratefully. Her place. Her home, but more than that, her domain, her center of gravity. The room in the house where she rules supreme, and others come only on her sufferance.
The conclusion had come to her full-fledged, but the pieces of evidence she had subconsciously collected showed themselves without fuss. All the equipment is placed where she can reach it easily from one place, or only a step or two away. She didn’t have to look around to open the oven door, or to get the towel after she’d washed up. The tools fit her hands, and she uses them like she’s been doing it for thirty years and expects to do it for forty or fifty more…
She looked down at her own hands. One of them was halfway across the tabletop, inching its way towards the rosewood wand.
That will be quite enough of that, thank you very much. Stifling a laugh at the ridiculousness of it all, she grasped the wayward hand by its wrist and returned it to her lap as though it were a naughty child. Whoever’s wand that is, she wouldn’t thank me for playing around with it—
“You can have it if you want.”
Mare whirled in her chair, both hands against her chest. Danger backed up two rapid steps, smiling sheepishly. “Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you. But I mean it. If the wand’s calling you, take it.”
“It isn’t mine. I can’t.”
“I know the owner.” The sadness rippled across Danger’s face once more, stronger than ever. “Trust me, she’d want you to have it. Please?”
Curse the woman, she does puppy eyes better than Prince. “If you insist.” Mare got to her feet, stepped around the end of the table, and picked up the wand. This time she couldn’t lie to herself—the little sigh that escaped was one of relief and comfort, and the warmth that spread through her hand and up her arm was welcome instead of worrying. Clearly some part of her liked this wand and wanted to keep it.
I’ll have to hide it well, but I don’t suppose there could be any harm in it. Prince might even be able to use it after I find out how to disenchant him.
Or he might teach me how to use it…
She tucked that thought away for further exploration at another time. Anything which made her feel excited and queasy in equal measure needed more study.
“So, my pie’s in the oven and I can take you back now if you want to go.” Danger brushed a last streak of flour out of her hair. “But if you’d care to stick around a little while, explore the house some, maybe get the guided tour… I brew a nice cup of tea, if I do say so myself, and pie is for sharing.”
Mare cast a dubious look out the back door, where the shadows were starting to lengthen. “I really should get back before I’m missed.”
“You won’t be.” Danger said it with such utter confidence that Mare found herself nodding before she knew what she was doing. “Would you like to start on this floor or upstairs?”
So I get a tour of a house. How can it hurt? “Upstairs makes more sense. Then we’ll come back here in time for pie.”
“An important consideration.” Danger waved her hand towards the tiled hallway. “After you, m’lady.”
Sweeping a grand curtsey and winning a giggle for it, Mare preceded her hostess through the hall and up the carpeted stairs. “So do you live here with your husband?”
“Yes, and with those friends I mentioned. It’s a long story, but the short version is we came together through circumstance and discovered we liked it. So we’ve kept it up, for our own sakes and for the c—kids.”
Was she just going to say something else there? “You have children?”
“We do, two boys and two girls. They came to us by varied and devious routes, but they’re every one of them ours now…”
Stories of trickery and jokes, of parties and games, kept both women laughing through the tour of the upstairs, until the last room into which Danger ushered Mare. It looked as though it had once been an unfinished attic, but had at some point been cleaned up and transformed into a cozy study. Bookshelves lined the walls, and a desk sat in one corner with an old-fashioned typewriter at its center, piles of typed papers on either side.
“My brother’s workroom,” Danger began, then chuckled once. “My friend, I suppose I should say, we’re not actually related, but we’ve been through so much together, and I miss him so much…”
Mare stopped listening in favor of moving deeper into the room, brushing a finger across the wheeled leather chair, the little spray of glass flowers that decorated one shelf, the dustless keys of the typewriter. This room gave her the same feeling as Danger’s kitchen, that of one presence, one person to whom it belonged, but even had Danger not mentioned her “brother” Mare thought she would have known the room was a man’s. Even the scent lingering in the air was masculine and subtly seductive, earth and musk and clean sweat—
And familiar.
Who do I know well enough to know his smell? And what is it still doing here if he’s been gone long enough that she misses him? She glanced uneasily at Danger, who stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame. There are things she’s not telling me. I don’t like it.
But two can play at the game of secrets.
“You must be proud to have a writer in the family,” she said, starting for the door. “Or does he prefer being called an author?”
“Either will do.” Danger tipped her head back and sniffed. “That’s starting to smell wonderful, which means we have another few minutes. Shall we head downstairs?”
A quick swing through the living room, then a small and fairly bare room Danger described as “what would be our formal dining room if we ever dined formally, which we don’t,” and they were back in the kitchen. Danger peeked into the oven and nodded in satisfaction. “We have just enough time to see the music room,” she said, gesturing towards the other corridor leading from the kitchen. “Do you play anything, or sing?”
“I… haven’t,” Mare temporized. “Not for a while.”
It sounds so much better than “I don’t know.”
“Well, if you’d care to try one of ours, feel free. No one’s used them…” Danger smiled. “For a while.”
I deserved that.
The short corridor gave way to the tall-ceilinged room, with its French window leading into the back yard, the fireplace in the far wall, and the grand piano in one corner with a violin sitting on its top. Mare let out her breath in a quiet hum of pleasure and started for the piano. She could almost feel the smooth, glossy surface under her fingers, ready to respond to her pressure, to make the sounds reverberating in her mind a reality—
Halfway there, she stopped, her eye caught by another aspect of the room.
“Where does that door go?”
“Door? Oh, that door.” Danger looked as though she’d like to edge in front of the door, but Mare gave her credit for having enough sense not to try it. “I don’t know if you want to go in there. It’s not always safe.”
“What is it, if you don’t mind?” Mare repeated, holding back her temper. You were quick enough to show me everything else in your house, you’ve almost shoved it into my face, and now you’re balking at one little add-on room?
“It’s—my sister uses it. She brews potions there. I don’t know if she’s left anything we shouldn’t disturb, or if she’ll be upset that we went in without her permission—”
“If your brother doesn’t mind us coming in where he writes, I don’t think your sister will mind that we look at her cauldron and ingredients.”
“Well, all right. If you’re sure you have to go in there, don’t let me stop you.” Danger stepped back from the door, her gaze on the floor, a small smile on her face that ought to have been demure and instead had Mare worried. What if this were a set-up? What if there really was something in that room she shouldn’t see? What if—
What if you waste all your time on stupid what-ifs and miss your chance to find out what’s in there that’s so interesting to you? Go open the door already.
She strode across the room and twisted the knob. The door swung open.
The space beyond was almost painfully neat, a squat iron cauldron hanging in the center, shelves of bottled and jarred ingredients lining the walls. Once more the sense of presence swept Mare, but this one shook her as neither of the others had. Whoever Danger’s mysterious “sister” might be, she was not a person Mare thought she wanted to cross.
Once she knows what she wants, she won’t stop until she has it. She can’t always see how to overcome obstacles in her way, but that’s why she has her friends to help her. For their sake, for their children’s sake, there’s nothing she wouldn’t do. Even give up—
She pulled herself out of the reverie with a shiver and looked down. Her feet had planted themselves beside the cauldron, and the fire in the brazier below it had sprung to life in response. In her right palm she held a silvery stirring stick, and her left hand was reaching towards a particular shelf. A shelf, she noticed with impossible calm, that was within her easy reach when she stood in this spot. As was every shelf in the room.
“No,” she whispered. “No.” Gently, deliberately, she set down the stirring stick on one of the countertops, then reached into her pocket and did the same with the wand. “This is yours too, isn’t it? I can’t take it.”
You can’t? murmured something, something which might as easily have been the presence in the room as it might have been her own thoughts. Not even if it’s—
“No.” Mare took a step back, lacing her fingers behind her back. “I appreciate the thought, but even if I can’t remember most of my own life, I won’t take another person’s. Thank you, but no.”
“As you like,” Danger said from behind her, making her jump. “That pie should be done. Would you still care for a piece, or do you need to get back?”
“I think I should go.” Mare left the little room as quickly as she could manage without making it look like she was running. “No offense intended to your baking or you, but this isn’t where I belong, and I’d rather be where I do.”
“None taken.” Danger picked up a small ornamental rock, drew her wand, and tapped it, mumbling a word Mare didn’t catch. “Here. This will take you back.”
“Thank you.” Mare held out her hand. “For everything.”
“You’re welcome.” Danger dropped the rock into her palm. “Until next time.”
Mare opened her mouth to say that there wasn’t likely to be a next time—
And discovered herself flat on her back, staring at the shelving ceiling of her nest.
Was it just another dream, then?
She reached inside the neck of her robes and drew out a gold chain, identical at first glance to the one Danger had worn. Though the light was too dim to show her details, she knew the gems on the pendants differed. Danger’s had a full rainbow of colors, red, green, blue, and yellow. Her own gems were three blue and one red.
But that may not make a difference for what I want…
Closing her hands around two pieces of chain, she tugged, and directed a thought at it. Grow.
The chain stretched like a lump of clay, and stayed stretched even when she let it go.
Well then. Mare smiled to herself, tucking the extra length back inside her robes and rolling over on her side. Assuming the rest of it holds true, I may have a way to talk with Prince after all.
But as nice a girl as Danger seems, I don’t think I’ll be going there again.
It would be far too easy to fall into that trap.
Alone in the music room of the dream-Den, Danger sank to her knees, then closed her eyes. “Oh, love,” she whispered, reaching out her hands in front of her. “If you were only here. If you only knew. You could have done something, you could have helped bring her back to us…”
But how? I heard her say it myself, she won’t take what she considers another person’s life. I should have expected as much, with her sense of honor. The more she wants it, the more she’ll fight against it, because she wouldn’t think it was right.
And she’ll never believe me if I try to tell her this life is already hers.
A solitary tear escaped her left eye, burning hot in its first inch and cold thereafter. She sniffled once and blotted it away with her sleeve. Tears wouldn’t help her now.
I have to think. I have to figure out what to do next. I have to… yawn, apparently. The sleeve moved over to cover her gaping mouth. What’s wrong with—oh. I didn’t think of that.
She opened her eyes, reluctantly. “It took energy to send the dreams without being linked up. Energy I’m not sure I had in the first place. And now…” Another yawn interrupted her.
Now I have to wake up in order to go to sleep.
If I have ever been in a more mixed-up situation than this, I can’t remember it.
Oh wait. That would be my entire life.
“Please let them come back to me soon,” she whispered, mentally instructing the dream-Den to return to this moment when she came back to it. “Those crazy, mixed-up, wonderful people called my Pack.”
Because without them, I don’t see any point in having a life.
One last longing look around, and Danger pushed herself out of the dream. She surfaced for one instant in her wolf body, long enough to notice that full night had fallen around her, then plummeted back towards sleep.
I hope I’m hidden well enough, was her last, hazy thought. I hope no one finds me…
Then there was nothing.
Padfoot—or should that be Prince now?—couldn’t get back to sleep. He’d awakened restless after Danger had finished dreaming with him, and his mind was busily constructing scenarios where her goal of contacting Aletha next didn’t work, or backfired in some horrible way.
I only wiped out Letha’s memories. What if Danger’s trying to dream with her accidentally blasts her mind? It could happen. If she’s not ready to accept shared dreams, not willing to believe that’s possible, it could conceivably—
He rolled over with a loud groan. I have to stop this. It’s going to drive me mad even faster than being stuck as a dog and cooped up in a little cage is doing it. Yes, bad things could happen, but bad things already have happened, and look, I’m still alive, relatively healthy, and in possession of all my limbs and senses. Certain people are not so lucky…
Danger had brought him the latest news from home (and, to his disgust, from the Dursleys’), as relayed through her brief dreams with Hermione and Draco. He was glad to hear Ron was back up and about, curious to find out what had Percy huddling in rooms with his twin brothers, and agreed with Danger that Draco wasn’t telling her everything about his and Harry’s situation.
But what can we do about it? Nothing, from here. Except think of them and hope things turn out well. He growled under his breath. And plan bloody, painful, satisfying fates for the people who got us here…
“Chasing cats in your sleep, Prince, or does that noise mean you’re awake?”
He shot upright and let his tongue dangle in a broad, happy dog-grin. Who could sleep through so much beauty coming to see them? And she’s got something in her hand—Merlin’s pointy black hat, has she figured out—
“I had the strangest dream, all about a girl named Danger,” Aletha said, sitting down beside the bars that divided them. “Some parts of it I’m not sure I cared for, but there was one very important thing I learned.” She allowed several loops of pendant chain to spill from her hand. “Do you know what this does?”
Oh, don’t I just. Put it on me, sweetheart, and—
The part of Sirius Black that had, however reluctantly, grown up in the last fifteen years chose this moment to assert itself.
Hold on a second. She said there were things in her dream with Danger that she didn’t care for. That means you aren’t going to be able to just tell her the truth and have her leap into your arms with a glad cry. Apart from the fact that you don’t have arms at the moment, there’s something else going on here. So play it cool. Keep it low-key. And for heaven’s sake don’t scare her off!
So instead of shoving his head through the bars or standing up on his hind legs, he nodded in response to Aletha’s question, then scratched at his own neck with a hind leg. I know what they do just fine. Used to have a set of my own.
Aletha slid her hand between the bars and took over the scratching duties, making him moan with pleasure. “That would make sense, for you to have them,” she mused aloud. “You could fit in that room she showed me, if you’re anything like I imagine you.” She chuckled, the low throaty sound that always made him melt a little inside. “And why am I sitting here imagining what you’re like, when I can find out for real with this? If you’ll let me, of course.”
In that moment, the master plan formed itself inside Sirius’ mind. It would have made, he thought, an excellent novel, and might still make one after this was all over.
With Letha’s permission, of course.
His first courtship with his wife had been tumultuous, full of wrong turns and roadblocks, the kinds of things two stupid kids did when they weren’t sure what they wanted out of themselves or their own lives, never mind another person. That they had eventually ended up together anyway, and lasted this long, he knew was due far more to Aletha’s forbearance and Remus and Danger’s mediation than to any contribution of his own.
But I’m older now. I’m smarter, I’m saner, and I’m a whole lot sneakier. And I know how to play all kinds of games. Especially the game called love.
He was going to court Aletha, or Mare if that was what she wanted to be called now, all over again, and do it right this time. He would turn his handicaps into advantages, using everything he knew about men and women in general and himself and her in particular, and he would win her heart starting from scratch. And when she was well and truly won over, he would reveal the truth, and then…
Then, I hope, we all live happily ever after.
He whuffed once in assent and stuck out his neck for the pendant chain.
Such strange things we do for friendship’s sake. Even relatively new friends.
Though it’s not like I have any older ones to compare it with.
Mare held the glowing basket of crystals one of the house-elves had given her a little higher, trying to see where she was going. The manor house had only a small clearing behind it, with the trees coming up quite close.
Perfect ground for Prince’s—no, no, Sirius’, I have to remember that—Sirius’ friend to hide in.
As she had suspected he would be, her “enchanted prince,” Sirius Black as he had introduced himself in the first few moments of their mental conversation, was both charming and witty. He had made her laugh a dozen times during their brief chat, joking about himself, her, the Death Eaters, the house-elves, and everything else under the sun. Once they had both settled down somewhat from the first flush of successful communication, though, he’d had a request for her.
I have a friend out there, in the woods behind the house, his mind-voice said hesitantly in her memories. She’s going to be in the shape of a wolf, like me with the dog, and she’s… she isn’t well. She needs care. Not nursing, she isn’t ill or anything like that, but she’s sleeping and she’ll be hungry and thirsty when she wakes up. I want to make sure she has water and food nearby, and that she’s well enough hidden that no one can find her on a casual walk in the woods.
Naturally, Mare had agreed to go out and find the wolf, to leave her a pan of water and a bowl of meat like the one she brought to Sirius every day. But inwardly, in the part of her mind she didn’t allow to show through the chain’s connection, she was putting pieces together, and she wasn’t sure if she liked the total she was coming up with.
Sirius is Danger’s brother, there’s no doubt about it. The room she showed me fits him perfectly, down to the scent I get from touching his mind, and he told me himself he writes for a living. So that’s solved. But Danger’s sister…
She angled the light to one side, straining her eyes. I saw every bedroom in that house, and only the ones for the children had two beds in them. Ergo, the two people she called her brother and sister are actually married. Which, as she made it clear they’re simply her very good friends, isn’t as disgusting as it could have been.
A sleek line caught her eye, and she turned to her left and picked her way through the underbrush. But I’ve heard bits and pieces from the Death Eaters about what happened to Sirius. How he was left stranded in his dog form, without the magic to change back. I know he was forced to do something to his wife, and that violated his marriage vow and lost him his magic. I just don’t know what that something was, or where his wife is now.
She went to her knees beside the curled-up form of a shaggy, tan-coated wolf.
But I think I can guess.
“You’re very lucky, you know,” she said conversationally, pulling the two metal pans out of the basket she carried on her shoulder and opening the canteen she’d filled with water in the kitchen. “He seems like a wonderful man. Probably a troublemaker when he was younger, but he’s grown up well. Thoughtful, caring, funny… everything an enchanted prince should be, really. If he weren’t already taken, I’d fall for him myself. But as it is…”
She dumped the bag of meat scraps into the second pan and laid the covers over both pans, twisting them to lock them on. A human in wolf form would notice the arrow she’d drawn on the covers pointing towards the release button on the side, and be intelligent enough to push that button with a paw, popping the covers off again.
“As it is,” she repeated, laying a hand on the wolf’s side and feeling it rise and fall, “I’ll take good care of him for you, and for Danger. You both deserve to get him back safe and sound. Sleep well, and I’ll see you in the morning.”
Standing up, she started back to the manor house.
Author Notes:
And the web gets more tangled yet.
You didn't think I was going to update this weekend, did you? Surprise! Routine triumphs even over a visit by the family. Which was quite nice, by the way, if a little crazy, as times with my family usually are.
But the chapter is finished now, and I must to bed. See you all on Saturday or Sunday with the next installment of our little saga!