Chapter Text
Chapter Fifteen
* * *
5 January 1992.
* * *
Vernon Dursley was not having a good week.
If the boy were home, he would have blamed him. The boy was not home.
The boy was at his freak school, which was the only thing about the boy that Vernon had ever found genuinely agreeable. He had sent him fifty pence over the Christmas break — he had remembered to do that, barely, which he considered sufficient — and then the four of them had enjoyed the first proper Christmas in years. Himself and his lovely, devoted wife Petunia. His handsome son Dudley. The house quiet and bright and unburdened. They had all felt it.
A lightness.
A rightness.
Dudley was excelling at Smeltings, which was entirely to be expected. Vernon had been a credit to Smeltings himself and his son took after him in every way that mattered. It had been a fine holiday.
And then the new year had arrived, and with it, the birds.
It had started on the second. Vernon had come out to find his car — his car, specifically, not the Polkiss boy’s car next door, not the Figg woman’s rusting heap, not the fleet of company vehicles parked along the road by the plumber three houses down — his car, covered in bird shit.
Comprehensively. He had cleaned it. He had come out the next morning and it was covered again.
On the third, a pigeon had crapped dropped directly onto his head. Not a grazing incident. Not a near miss. Directly. On the top. He had been halfway down the front path in his good suit, running slightly late for an important meeting, and had been forced to go back inside and shower and change and had arrived at the meeting forty minutes behind schedule with an explanation he found he could not make without his face doing something he could not control.
He had not been able to eat out since. Restaurant awnings. Park benches. The patio of the Crown and Anchor. Every time, without fail. Yesterday he had been eating Petunia’s shepherd’s pie on a bench in the park — she had packed it for him specially, in the good Tupperware — and had just opened his mouth for the first bite when it had happened again. He had sat there for a long moment with the shepherd’s pie in front of him and the birds on the wire above looking at him with what he could only describe as intent.
Petunia was having the same trouble. She had taken to wearing a hat when she left the house, which she hated, because she had very nice hair. She had also mentioned, twice now, that she felt as though she was being watched.
It was, he told himself, a coincidence.
A bad patch.
These things happened. There was nothing unusual about it and he was not going to think about it any further.
He thought about it constantly.
***
Little Whinging, Surrey.
***
The thermals above Little Whinging were not exceptional — flat suburban air, the grid of identical streets below, not the wide columns of rising warmth that he preferred over open country — but they were adequate, and he had been at this long enough that adequate was sufficient.
He banked left, adjusted, and sent a thought sideways to the starling holding formation off his right wingtip. The starling relayed it down the line with the efficient simplicity of a species that had been doing this for millennia, and the flock on watch over Privet Drive adjusted accordingly.
Good work, he thought, in the particular direction that carried.
The starling did not respond in words. It did not need to.
Below him, Number Four was exactly as it had been for five days: a semi-detached house on a street of semi-detached houses, indistinguishable from its neighbours in every visible respect and entirely distinct in one that was not visible at all.
He came lower.
The Bond of Blood charm was old — German in origin, older than most of the British wizarding traditions that considered themselves foundational. It had been developed in an era when magical clans were warring against each other, when the targeted erasure of a bloodline was not a hypothetical but a documented practice, and when the question of what happened to the surviving children of a murdered family was not an abstract legal problem but an immediate one. The charm was the answer that particular era had developed: as long as a blood relative, at least within three generations, took in the orphaned child willingly, and as long as the child called that place home — the location became something that could not be violated.
Not attacked.
Not penetrated by hostile intent.
It had been cast here with considerable power. Altair could see the array of it from the air the way he could see the bones of a building through its plaster — the charm had etched itself into the brick and mortar of Number Four Privet Drive over ten years of continuous residence and become structural. The lines of it ran through the foundation. The intention of it was woven into the walls.
It was, in his professional assessment, a genuinely beautiful piece of work.
It would also, he noted, prevent anyone not of the Evans bloodline from using magic in a manner that harmed or threatened the residents within. It was a protection built inward and downward, anchored to the building itself. Outside the building, it was useless. A child walking to school, or playing in the street, or sitting in a park eating shepherd’s pie, was not within the boundary of the charm.
He knew this because he had spent five days reading it.
He came to rest on the roof of Number Four — briefly, just long enough to confirm what he had been feeling since the first morning he had sat here. The same sensation he had felt at Black Manor, when the wards had recognised him and extended something that was not quite welcome but was not rejection either.
A conditional acceptance.
Grudging, perhaps.
But real.
He lifted off, made one final circuit of the street below, and opened the aurora curtain before him.
He flew through.
***
Bray, Berkshire
***
He came through lower than usual, close enough to the ground that he had to adjust his wings before transitioning, and the shift back to himself happened in motion, and he continued walking down the worn path between the hedges as though he had always been walking it.
The village was small, the kind that had been small for several hundred years and had no particular plans to change.
The lane curved past a post office that was also a pharmacy that was also, apparently, a small off-licence, and around a corner, and there was the cottage — decent-sized, stone-built, the garden going slightly wild at the edges in the way of gardens that had been loved and were now looked after by someone whose heart was elsewhere.
Lord Michael Macmillan was standing outside it. He had his hands in his coat pockets and the particular stillness of a man who had been waiting long enough that the waiting had stopped feeling like waiting and had become simply the shape of the moment
.
“Evenings, Lord Macmillan.”
Macmillan said nothing. He looked at Altair for a moment with the flat, assessing quality that Altair was beginning to understand was simply how the man’s face worked at rest. Then he opened the small gate.
“My father is upstairs.”
Altair nodded and went in.
* * *
The staircase was narrow and the cottage smelled of old wood and something medicinal and, underneath both, something that was simply the smell of a house that had held people for a long time.
He went up.
The bedroom was small and warm and very quiet, the curtains drawn against the January evening. The man in the bed was all angles — the specific thinness of someone whose body had been spending its reserves for some time and had come toward the end of what it had available. Balding, the skin of his face fine and pulled close to the bone. His eyes, though, were alert behind the glassiness.
“Well,” the old man said, in a voice that was considerably stronger than his body suggested it had any right to be, “come in, then, boy. I haven’t got forever.”
He paused. “Quite literally.”
Altair came in. He found the stool beside the bed and sat on it.
“Greetings, uncle,” he said.
The old man looked at him.
“Uncle,” he said, with the considering quality of a man turning a word over.
“And yet we’ve never met. Not once.”
“Apologies for that. My mother and the previous Lord Black preferred I not become too well known in Britain.”
“For whose benefit are you calling her mother?” The old man’s eyes had sharpened. “We never met, you and I. But I always knew of you. Little bird, she called you.”
The words landed.
Altair had not heard those words in thirteen years, not from anyone who had known her, not from anyone who had any right to them. He felt something in his chest do something that was neither comfortable nor unwelcome.
He smiled.
“Mumma talked about me?”
“Talked about you.” The old man made a sound that was both laugh and exhale. “Over her own children you became her pride. The child she raised with love and not duty — that was how she put it. Over and over.” He settled back against his pillows. “My sister was a prideful woman. A stubborn woman. She married a Slytherin and the whole of both families had something to say about it — a Hufflepuff and a Slytherin, the scandal of it. Half of the Blacks thought she couldn’t possibly raise proper Slytherins. She raised Orion and Cygnus, which I think answered the question, though not in the way anyone intended.”
He paused.
His breathing was measured, deliberate.
“She loved them. Of course she loved them, they were her flesh and blood. But she grew to dislike the men they became. Proper Slytherins.” He said it the way someone says something that has always been mildly funny to them.
“One with the ambition of a jackal — who might have been decent, I always thought, if his wife hadn’t been such an absolute cunt. And the other —” He shook his head. “Clever as a rock to the head and without a backbone to speak of.”
He looked at Altair.
“But you.”
He let the words sit for a moment.
“No one would have blamed her if she’d thrown you out a window. Raising her husband’s affair child, a bastard that wasn’t hers and that nobody could ever know about. I thought she was mad. I told her so.” He paused. “She punched me. Hard enough to loosen a tooth. Can you believe it? Over a bastard.” He chuckled, which became a cough, and Altair reached for the glass on the nightstand and brought it to him. The old man drank from it with the gratitude of someone who had stopped being particular about dignity. “Thank you, boy. Yes — she punched me. Over a bastard that wasn’t hers, that she’d known barely a month. And then she went and proved me wrong about it for thirty years.”
“She did,” Altair said.
“Your first words,” the old man said. “Your first steps. Your first question — she said you asked her why the sky was one colour when she’d told you it was another, and how was she to know which one it actually was, and whether words or eyes were more reliable. You were two years old.”
He shook his head slowly. “Your first accidental magic. I heard about every single one. She wanted to send you to Hogwarts, you know. Wanted to march you through those doors and show everyone what she’d made, what she’d done her way — not the Black way, not the Hufflepuff way, her way. But duty to the family stopped her. They sent you to Africa and she was inconsolable for months.”
“Until I wrote,” Altair said.
“Until you wrote.” The old man smiled. It changed his face completely. “Then she was insufferable again, which was considerably better. Your potions mastery while still in school. The Transfiguration and Charms masteries before you graduated. The apprenticeship under Flamel. She was proud of all of it. But what she boasted about most — and she boasted, I want to be clear, relentlessly, to anyone who held still long enough — was the spell.”
Altair was quiet for a moment.
“My aurora curtain,” he said.
“That’s the one.” The old man’s voice had softened. “She said you made it because you missed her. That you were on the other side of the world and you missed her so much you invented a door. She said you’d step through smelling like whatever country you’d just been standing in and she’d look up from whatever she was doing and there you’d be.” He exhaled. “She thought that was the most extraordinary thing anyone had ever done. Not the alchemy, not the wandless magic, not any of it. The door. Because it was for her.”
The room was quiet for a moment.
“That’s why I asked for you,” the old man said. His voice was even, but something behind it had shifted. “My body has decided it’s finished. That’s fine — it’s had a good run and I’ve no complaints. But I don’t want to end in this room.” He looked at the ceiling, and then at Altair. “There is a place, where I proposed to my wife. I’ve been trying to get there for months. I can’t leave this bed.”
Altair looked at him for a moment.
“Let me get your son,” he said.
* * *
Lord Macmillan came into the room with the expression of a man who had been managing things for a long time and had not quite allowed himself to stop. He looked at his father, and his father looked at him, and neither of them said anything that required words.
“Where are we going?” Altair asked.
“Dorset coast,” the old man said. “West of Lulworth. There’s a path that comes down from the cliff.”
Altair held the image in his mind. He had been there, once, years ago — the particular quality of that coastline, the chalk of the cliffs, the way the sea came in from the south-west and broke against the stone with the unhurried commitment of something that had been doing it long before anyone was there to watch.
He summoned the curtain.
It opened the way it always did — without announcement, a ripple of light that paid no attention to the walls or the ceiling or the difficulty of the situation — and the sound of it arrived first: wind, and beneath it, the sustained percussion of the sea against stone. The salt-laden air came through into the warm bedroom like a hand reaching in.
Lord Macmillan put his arm under his father’s and held him up. Altair took the other side. Together, the three of them moved through
.
* * *
West of Lulworth Cove, Dorset.
* * *
The coast came in from all sides at once.
The wind off the Channel was cold and clean and indifferent to January and human concerns. The sea was grey and enormous and entirely itself below the cliffs — which were pale, almost white in the winter light, the chalk of them catching what remained of the afternoon and giving it back in a colour that was almost warm. Seabirds hung in the updrafts above the cliff edge. The air tasted of salt and cold and something mineral that was simply the smell of the earth very close to the sea.
The old man stood between his son and the man his sister had raised, looking out at it. His breathing was slow. The wind moved through what remained of his hair.
“We’re here, pops,” Lord Macmillan said. His voice was entirely steady, which Altair suspected was costing him something.
The old man didn’t answer.
His weight had changed. Not dramatically, not all at once — it was the particular shift of something that had been present and then, very quietly, was not. His eyes were open, looking out toward the grey of the Channel and the pale line of the horizon and whatever was beyond it.
He did not see it.
He had already gone.
The sea continued. The birds continued. The cold continued.
Lord Macmillan held his father upright for a long moment, looking out at the same water. Altair stood on the other side and said nothing, because there was nothing to say and he had enough sense to know it.
Eventually, Lord Macmillan looked up. His face had done what faces do when they have decided that composure is no longer the priority and there is no one present who requires the performance of it.
Altair met his eyes.
“Thank you,” Lord Macmillan said.
Altair nodded.
The sea broke against the cliffs below them, again and again, the way it had for longer than anyone had been there to count it.