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"Have you ever heard the saying, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned?" Her voice is very flat and calm. It has not been so calm in a very, very long time. Not since she was wading knee deep through blood and conjuring nightmares on battlefields.
She is standing by the French windows looking out onto the rolling grounds of Potter Manor. The late afternoon sun is shining through them, reducing her to the mere outline of a woman with a flat piece of paper in her hands, limmed in light so bright it is painful to look at. She is as still as if she is merely a statue of a famous figure, put in her own place for a laugh. But that is not the kind of thing Charlotte Riddle would do. It is her. It could only be her.
"Of course." Hermione says, to which absolutely no one expresses surprise. The day that Hermione admits to not knowing something is the day that they are truly, utterly done for. Neville keeps his silence, and so does Ronald, which to Neville is usually the sign of a Muggle saying. He gets the gist of it. Charlotte's hands tighten upon the innocuous piece of paper, tight enough that Neville's ears catch the sound of it tearing.
"This counts as scorning, wouldn't you think?" Her voice is light, easy, lilting even. The last time that Neville heard her sound like that, she was killing a man piece by piece for hurting Luna. He wonders what she will do this time and then wonders if he wants to know. None of them speak, but Charlotte doesn't appear to need them to, for she continues on in that terrifying light voice. "Scorning me and our children and our vows and our peace. That's quite a lot of scorning." Her head rises from her hands at last. Neville cannot see her eyes, silhouetted by the setting sun as she is, but he can feel her attention turning to the three of them nonetheless. "I gave him my titles, my gold and my lands. I gave him my body and my loyalty. I gave him six children in ten years and for what?"
"What do you want to do?" Neville asks after a long, long silence. Someone has to.
Black shadow against the sun or no, he can see the answering flash of white teeth that garners him. Oh dear. "I'm going to get divorced." Charlotte's voice is still light and pleasant. It is what he had once, when they were all children together, heard her describe as peppy. He just calls it ominous.
"I suppose you want a lawyer then." Hermione says briskly, already Conjuring parchment and quill while Neville and Ronald are reeling from her blithe announcement, her mind clearly going in a different direction to theirs . "What do you want the terms of divorce to be? Which assets do you want to keep? What-"
Ronald interrupts his wife's flow of questions with another, more pertinent one of his own. "Are we going to war again?" Neville's question precisely. They have been at peace for ten years, yes, but it has been a fragile peace. Tensions have never really settled, to the point that military law has nearly been declared several times. There had only been one thing keeping them in peacetime. And now Thomas Riddle has gone and stamped all over it.
(He supposes some people will expect Charlotte Riddle to swallow the insult and soldier on with the marriage because it is the only thing stopping a war. Unlike those people, he has known her since she was a half-starved little thing who could still count her age on two hands. Lottie Potter will never let such an insult go and he knows she's still there, somewhere under the elegant veneer of Charlotte Riddle.)
"Well, I should hate to never give the Order another battle to win." She says lightly. "We're all spoiling for a good fight." And if the Order have disregarded their official disbanding in favour of secretly continuing to train and recruit, then they can be damn sure the Knights will have done the same. None of them need to say that, of course. They have been friends for nearly twenty years by now. They know each other better than anyone else in the world.
"I'll start rounding people up." Ronald says, standing from the loveseat and cracking his neck obnoxiously. "I know you're a match for him any day of the week, Charlotte, but I'd feel better if you had guards when he finds out."
"I'll start looking for the marriage contract." Hermione says, flicking through the notes she's already made. "I know there was a fidelity clause in there, but there was also one allowing for coercion and/or framing if I remember correctly, and Riddle will employ Malfoy Sr. who is definitely going to try and use that to wiggle out of it if our only evidence is a photograph."
"I'll alert Headquarters." Neville says in turn. He's no strategist or lawyer, and no great politician though he's not sunk the Longbottom name in disgrace yet. His use in war had been on the battlefield, throwing around enough power to match even Lottie. He doesn't mind doing more dogsbody tasks as they wait for the oncoming war to ramp up. "No one wants Sirius to find out in the paper."
Charlotte's silhouette doesn't change, but he thinks she's smiling at them. "I'll speak to my children." She says, the manic cheer leaving her voice for the first time since she was handed the terrible photograph. "He's not taking them from me."
It's the same way she had promised little Dennis Creevey that he would live when she was elbow-deep in blood trying to keep his guts inside his body, a few hours before she had fought her way into Riddle's camp and proposed a treaty with Dennis's blood still staining her hands. Neville is silent for a moment. It has been so long since he heard her like this that he almost isn't sorry Riddle finally crossed the line. He's missed Lottie.
"Fuck the bastard up." He says at last, and is rewarded with a flash of teeth as he Apparates away to break the news to Sirius Black. He doubts he'll have time to get Headquarters properly set up, not the way Sirius is likely to react, but he has hope.
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"I don't get it." Ginevra Malfoy says, sitting on the enormous four poster in the lord's chamber of Peverell Castle (lady's chamber in this case, she supposes). She's got her legs tucked under her to avoid crushing any of the ridiculously expensive clothes strewn all over the room like some sort of priceless snowstorm in rich colours.
Charlotte is standing in front of her mirror in a shift, holding a vaguely familiar ice blue gown and a slightly more familiar crimson one in front of her. "Don't get what?" She asks, clearly more focused on the two dresses, swapping them around every few seconds. All Ginevra can see of her outside the reflection is the waterfall of her long dark hair. Both of them are silent for a long moment. Charlotte casts aside the crimson gown and catches up a rich green robe in its place, the exact shade of her famous eyes.
It feels almost like the old days, when Lottie Potter and Ginny Weasley were young girls together in Gryffindor Tower as they giggled over gowns and hair and jewels and tried to forget their scars and nightmares for a while. Almost. "She must have been young." Ginevra says at last.
Charlotte doesn't turn away from the mirror, frowning thoughtfully as she weighs the green robe against the icy gown. "Who?"
"Riddle's girl." Ginevra says. That gets Charlotte's attention. Her eyes snap to Ginevra's in the mirror, lips pursing like she's tasted something bad. Something rotting, Ginevra thinks, the hurt and betrayal festering inside her friend and being bottled up until it poisons her. She knows what Charlotte is like. Better to lance it now, before it can take too deep a hold. "She can't be richer or more beautiful or more powerful because you are quite frankly obscenely over-achieving at everything you set your mind to and we would have heard if someone was out-achieving you. But men seem to like corrupting youth and innocence."
"It makes them feel powerful." Charlotte says softly, letting the green robe fall to the floor without seeming to care where it lands. "I'm not naive enough to fall for his games anymore. I'm too much."
"What do you mean 'too much'?" Ginevra splutters indignantly, trying to emulate the indignant righteousness of her teenage self even though she's thirty-two with scars that ache like she's sixty two. "There's no such thing as too much! We could do with more! The world would be a better place with more!"
It gets a weary little smile from Charlotte, at the very least. "I'm too much for him." She corrects herself. "Or at least, that's what he said. I imagine it had more to do with me kicking him out of my bed than anything else. He never does admit when he's the problem. Probably because then he'd never get anything done." That's more like the Lottie Ginevra remembers. Spiteful, quite literally, full of spite. Brimming over with it. Spiteful and brave and wonderful, the kind of woman for whom the world moved aside.
"He's not enough." Ginevra says firmly, with the confidence of a woman who has had her own tangles with the fickleness of men and come out the other side. "Men like him always blame other people for their own failings."
Charlotte smiles, a wry little twist of her lips. "I know." She says sadly, and the smile slips away again. "Doesn't make it sting any less when you get turfed over in favour of a younger model after six children." She twists to pick up a dress that looks like it's woven out of pure gold.
"The blue one." Ginevra says, deciding to leave the subject for today. She can pick away at the rot little by little instead of all at once, and she's finally placed the vaguely familiar ice blue gown. "That was your engagement dress wasn't it."
Charlotte nods silently. Yes, Ginevra remembers now. She'd worn it to sign the marriage contract, twenty-three and blazing like she was going to live forever simply because death wouldn't dare to take her. It had been one of her grandmother's gowns, taken from the closets in Potter Manor because they had no time to find her a new dress, old-fashioned enough to be lovely instead of out of style. Lavender had wrestled her hair into braided coils which had been held by Sticking Charms and a mine's worth of Conjured hair pins. Ginevra had Charmed away her spots and coloured her lips and eyelids and given her the illusion of healthily flushed cheeks instead of the bloodless ones of a soldier who had nearly bled out one too many times. Parvati had dug through the odd corners of Potter Manor and pieced together abandoned odd gems in a way that made them look almost like an intentional set, bemoaning her lack of jewellery making tools alternately with her inabiity to access the vaults in Gringotts. And Hermione had sat in the corner as they had tried to make Charlotte look like a queen, scribbling away notes as she went through the latest draft of the marriage-contract-cum-peace-treaty.
Charlotte had been harder then, a slip of a girl who had won a war and used the victory to force through a peace treaty instead of hunting her opponents like animals. She's softened in the years since, curves coming in and colour returning to her cheeks. Three meals a day and six children will do that to someone. She's learned to do her hair and makeup herself instead of relying on her friends' knowledge of beauty charms. She's regained access to Gringotts, and the fabulous wealth and ridiculous jewel collections of her ancestors. Her hair is always sleek and smooth now, knotted at the nape of her neck or piled high on top of her head. She is always perfect and put together and fashionable.
But when Ginevra looks at Charlotte Riddle, she can still remember twenty-three year old Lottie Potter in her grandmother's dress, signing away her life on the off chance that it would save even one person from death. She would have followed that girl anywhere. She will follow the woman she became into anything.
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Lily's daughter is wearing the same dress that she had the day she had signed the contract binding her to the Dark Lord. If Severus were another man, he might shift uncomfortably at the pointed reminder. It is not one intended for him, of course, he doubts Charlotte Riddle thinks much of him these days. It is meant, with all its barbed glory, for the Dark Lord. To remind him that they had made peace, and sworn vows, and he had spat on it like a bored, spoiled child. The hit has landed on Severus, but he doubts it has affected the Dark Lord. Perhaps it is reminding him what he tossed away in a purely physical sense, but Severus thinks the deeper meaning is lost on him. A waste of a gesture, really.
Much like calling him out of his delightfully reclusive retirement had been for the Dark Lord, seeing as Lily's daughter hardly seems to notice him sitting uncomfortably beside the Dark Lord. She is poised, as she had not been when last Severus had seen her. She had been whip-thin then, sharp and brittle as a blade, graceful in the way of a feral beast about to pounce. She is taller now, put together, perfectly composed in a way that reminds him of Narcissa. It is only the eyes that remind him of the savage girl who had forced the Dark Lord into a war of attrition before she reached twenty and held him there for more than half a decade. They are as sharp and hard as ever. No, this will not be easy for the Dark Lord. Severus hopes she makes him squirm - very quietly, somewhere that even active Legilmency would struggle to find.
She takes a seat directly opposite the Dark Lord, head high and graceful and turned away from him. The diamonds at her throat glitter like tiny hard stars, waking sparks of light from her pale gown. "Baron Malfoy," she says evenly, "please remind your master of the infidelity clause in the contract we both signed. I do not see the need for today's meeting when the marriage was dissolved as soon as he broke the contract. There were provisions in it for such a scenario and I expect them to be followed."
The Dark Lord seems surprised that Lily's daughter surrendered to the inevitable so easily. Severus wonders at that. Surely her vanishing to Potter Manor with her children should have been a warning sign? Perhaps he had not thought that Charlotte Riddle would have let go of the peace she had fought so hard for. Severus would have warned him if that was the case - he remembers teaching the girl. Charlotte Potter had never let an insult slide in her life and he cannot imagine Charlotte Riddle is so different in this respect. Neither Lily nor Potter had been able to let insults to their pride go either. It is a family trait and a pervasive one. He wonders if her children are as proud as their mother and grandparents.
"You really return so easily to war?" The Dark Lord asks smoothly. "I thought you had wanted this peace, Charlotte."
"He can keep what is his." Charlotte Riddle says to Lucius Malfoy. "That was the agreement. I am keeping my titles and my lands and my gold and he will keep what is his." Unlike the general public, Severus knows the state of the Dark Lord's vaults after generations of Gaunts followed by two wars. It had been a well-hidden secret how destitute the Dark Lord had been, but he had not quite succeeded in keeping it from his inner circle who had been funding the entire war by the end. Severus doubts, no matter how collected he seems, that the Dark Lord is at all sanguine about the prospect of losing access to Charlotte Potter's vaults.
"And the children?" The Dark Lord asks, in the way of one who has found a loophole. Severus mentally marks a check beside his private bet - his wife's vaults must be worth a good deal to the Dark Lord if he is willing to scramble so to keep anything. Not enough to give her the basic respect and decency necessary to keep even the coldest marriage alive, but Severus would be lying if he said he had expected anything near that much from a Dark Lord faced with a woman who could outmatch him any day of the week. He's only surprised it took so long before the Dark Lord went looking for a power trip elsewhere, or that it took so long before he got caught. "The children can hardly be cut in two to satisfy your sums."
That does it. Charlotte Riddle leans across the table and smiles her mother's worst smile at the Dark Lord. "The children are mine."
"They are my blood." The Dark Lord sneers back at her.
Charlotte Riddle's smile widens, and Hermione Granger puts a restraining hand on her arm. It is Granger who speaks next, not Potter. "Women are born with all of their eggs." She says, crisp and unhurried. Rather unlike the hasty floods of words he remembers tumbling from that mouth before. "Men create new sperm on a two month cycle. Arguably, Charlotte entered into the marriage with the children already inside her and Thomas did not."
"Isolde was born precisely nine months after the wedding." The Dark Lord argues.
"Isolde is my heir." Lily's daughter replies, challenge in her eyes. "You will not take the Peverell heiress from me, Tom."
"Yet you will take the Slytherin, Gaunt and Marshall heirs from me, Charlotte."
"Yes, because you are a soulless bastard." Lily's daughter says sweetly. "And because the law has moved on from your day. They ask the children where they want to go now, and the children will choose me."
The meeting devolves after that, and Lucius and Granger visibly come to a silent mutual agreement to break it up before it comes to a duel. Severus is sure Charlotte Riddle has been aching for a chance to curse her husband since the scandal came out, and he's equally certain that the Dark Lord has never passed up a chance to curse anyone in his life. The lawyers call an end to the meeting before either trigger-happy powerhouse has a chance to reach for a wand, and they all scatter to the four winds as fast as possible in the vain hope that it will prevent a public duel in the Ministry atrium.
Severus follows Lily’s daughter from the room, because he cannot ever help himself. "Potter." He says quietly. She turns to look up at him and, for the briefest moment, he is struck as if with a blow when he meets her eyes. She looks more like her mother now than she had ten years before, softer in the way of people who can count on regular meals and seeing the sun rise in the morning. The sharp edges of her bones are softened, but her eyes are no less bright.
She looks at him for a moment, with Lily's eyes and Lily's thoughtful half smile and a presence all her own. She has become a queen in the last ten years, Severus thinks, but she has not lost the general the war had made her. "I have children now." She says in answer to all the things he has not said. "You should meet them some time. Diana has the look of my mother."
A rather unsubtle attempt at recruitment. He supposes she doesn't have to try too hard, not when she knows why the links of an Unbreakable Vow are burned into the flesh of his hand.
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The day the divorce goes through, Charlotte returns to Gryffindor Castle. It is the least familiar of her estates because it is old and grim and not at all hospitable. It is not the fault of the castle of course, even magic can only do so much against six hundred years of neglect, but she still spends as little time there as she can.
It is a great mountain of a building, all cold grey stone and ominous little arrow slits and even more ominous stains that have never quite been gotten out of the stonework. It looks like the kind of place people go to on dares and are never seen again, unless one thinks the picked clean skeleton might possibly resemble the lost. It sends shivers down her spine whenever she has to visit it.
Tom knows it is her least favourite estate. He knows she rarely spends time there, even when she is away from him - she spends the most time in lovely, airy Potter Manor whenever she gets out of Slytherin Castle. He knows that it is a drain on resources and hardly manned at all, just an elf or two to stop the place from tumbling down entirely.
Charlotte knows that he knows this. She had made sure he knew it. She walks in through the frowning gates without pausing. Why would she? This is her castle, on her land, bound to her blood. She knows it better than she knows any of Riddle’s estates. She knows it down to her bones, had known it even before she walked inside for the very first time.
She strides through the empty, echoing corridors, not starting as the torches light of their own accord. It is a little creepy, she supposes, but she’d rather this over Slytherin Castle any day. The stones know her. They make her feel safe, powerful, here in the seat of her ancestors where Riddle can never touch her.
If she didn’t intend this to become Headquarters, she would bring her children here. They’d used Potter Manor in the last war, and Grimmauld Place in peace time, but the Order has grown in the ten years of peace. They need more space, proper space, and a defensible position.
What better place than the seat of one of the greatest warriors ever to live? Gryffindor Castle has seen out hundreds of sieges and dozens of wars over the century
She slips into a side passage and then down a set of twisting stairs, down, down, down, until she is in the deepest, darkest levels of the bowels of the castle. There is a door at the end of the passageway, oak bound with iron, heavy and rusted and ancient, gleaming with the ancient wards set so deeply into it that one cannot tell where the door ends and the magic begins.
Charlotte pushes it open as lightly as if it is a curtain, slipping through into the vault beyond. The room beyond is filled with jewels and armour and all manner of rare and priceless things hoarded away by her ancestors. She makes a note to add to the horde, just in case Gringotts falls again, as she makes her way to the end of the room.
And there, on the wall, is the gleaming armour she had set aside when she was married. It looks just as it had the last time she wore it, to cut her way through Voldemort’s forces and hold him at sword point until he agreed to a truce. The blood has been sponged off, and the scratches buffed out, that is all.
She looks at it for a long time. She has not so much as touched it for ten years, not since Riddle signed the contract agreeing to a truce bound by their marriage. She had hoped never to have to touch it again, never to have to see her hands covered in blood again, never to know the sound and smell of a battlefield again.
A fool’s hope, nothing more. She’d known that going in. A leopard cannot change its spots no matter how prettily it promises to try.
Ten years of peace. That was all they got in the end from her desperate, stupid gamble. Ten years of tense, watchful peace. Better than nothing, she tells herself, and reaches for her armour.
She got a break from war, a good long one. More than she had thought she would going in. Well, now the break is over and she’s back in the game again like she had always known deep down that she would be.
She takes down the sword first, unsheathes it in a single swift motion that hisses like the very air is being cut by the keen blade. The sword of Godric Gryffindor gleams bloody in the dim light, though she knows it is clean. Her hands know the grip as well as they ever have. She buckles the sword to her side.
Time to be Lottie again.