Chapter Four

Author's notes: Any direct quotes from William Shakespeare's play "Macbeth" are in double quotation marks.

They had gone only fifty paces or so from their hurried coupling, when Severus heard the panting breath of an animal coming through the still foggy air. Bellatrix had stopped, and he could feel her casting her mind back to check it was indeed her kinsman, as if Snape could be so fortunate to meet up with another large black cur instead.

'You kept me waiting for long enough. Did you stop off for a fuck?' Sirius the Black snapped, as he materialised at their side, shaking himself from head to toe as though he were still a dog. 'By Merlin's tits, my balls are about to fall off.'

'May the gods be thanked for that much, and the maidens of Scotland preserved,' Snape replied. 'Speaking of Merlin's tits,' he said, 'the rest of him is here too.'

'Merlin? All of him?' the Black asked, as though perhaps just a few body parts had migrated north. 'The Fey too? Not the Fey, Severus... tell me that harpy is not here.'

'You tell him, Bella,' Snape said. 'You're a better liar than I am.'

'Hell's teeth, Severus,' the Black complained. 'What are they doing here?'

'Being difficult, at least Merlin is,' Snape replied. 'I am unsure of Morgaine's motives, thus far. Anyway,' he said testily, 'what was so grim a message that you had to see me tonight?'

'Well, I didn't know Merlin was here, did I?' the Black snapped back.

'Please get to the point, Black. I had plans for tonight that did not include walking across this last outpost on the road to hell.'

'Severus...' Sirius began, seeming to choose his words, and then changing his mind. 'What is Lucius de Mal Foi doing in Inverness Castle?'

'Who?' Snape pushed the word past the knot in his throat.

'Mal Foi... Lucius de Mal Foi. Narcissa isn't happy with you, Snape,' the Black went on. 'She had expected to be Queen of Scotland by now, with her lusty, victorious fighting-man of a husband at her side, and she's ended up in a draughty old castle, shackled to the man she thought she'd got rid of three hundred years ago.'

'Macbeth is Lucius de Mal Foi?' Snape asked. He'd stopped, barely noticing that he had begun to sink into a patch of bog, hardly even noticing that he had let his guard fall to the extent of letting someone else know that he didn't know half as much as he pretended to. He was catching up though, watching the fractured images in his mind coalesce into one horrible picture, understanding why Macbeth had been mysteriously absent of late whenever he had called at the castle.

'No, Lucius de Mal Foi is Lucius de Mal Foi,' the Black returned. 'Don't you have an idea of what is happening, Snape?'

'Yes... of course I do,' Severus replied, trying to get to grips with himself and the horrified thoughts running amok in his mind. 'I just had not expected Lucius to show himself so soon,' he lied; in truth he hadn't expected Lucius to turn up at all, after all, he had dropped from sight, if not memory, almost three hundred years beforehand. 'Has anyone else noticed?' he asked. 'Apart from Narcissa?' He pushed thoughts of Narcissa to one side; Narcissa being "not happy", as the Black had described it, wasn't something Severus felt equipped to deal with.

'I doubt it,' Sirius replied, giving him a shrewd look. 'He seems to have "lost" the real Macbeth somewhere along the line, possibly during his last trip to Europe, and taken his identity.'

'Does Banquo know?' Snape asked, just resisting the urge to ask if Banquo actually were his version of Banquo at all, and the complications that thought brought with it began to manifest themselves in his rather crowded mind.

Before the Black could reply, a breeze caused the mist to swirl for a moment, and Severus wondered if he had seen something just beyond them, just a darker shadow ducking below an outcrop of rock. He sent his mind to seek another presence, and could find none, just a soft black wall he knew was someone shielding their awareness from his, someone skilful, someone with the wiles of a woman. He wondered if Merlin had sent the Fey to spy on him, or if she were working to a scheme of her own.

The Black had shrugged in answer to his question, and Severus began to walk again, Bellatrix having furtively spelled his feet clear of the sucking morass. He raised his hand to his thin lips in a gesture of warning; it mattered little, the Black Grim was ever cautious, he knew as well as Snape that dangerous times called for careful measures. Snape satisfied himself that Morgaine would have heard nothing to interest her, but he hoped she had not seen the Black; she would have recognised either of his forms.

He had had time to compose his thoughts now, hating each one as much as the next. To appear to know everything would be folly, especially if that unknown to him should turn around and bite him on the arse. Yet, to back down to the Black, in any way, was unthinkable. He turned to Bellatrix, pouring promises of a another coupling, lewd beyond even her fertile imaginings, into her mind. He watched her part her lips as she let her little tongue run across them, wetting them with promises of other ever-moist lips ready to devour him again, and he had to drag his mind back to the problem on hand.

'Sirius,' Bella began, 'how has my sister not noticed Lucius before? She has, after all, lain with Macbeth the last three years and more, while he has been here at any rate, and yet only since his last return from France and the low countries, has she complained of him. In fact the lusty Macbeth had all but pinned her to the bed with his trusty dagger thrusts.'

'She does not seem to understand that herself, Bella,' the Black replied, as Severus walked slightly ahead of them, as though he had no interest in their family business. 'She told me he seemed to have changed, and yet she couldn't pinpoint what the change was, except for that fact that he no longer lies with her.'

'So, how do you know it is de Mal Foi?' she asked, keeping up with her Mage Lord's rapid enquiries. 'Not even Minerva sensed that earlier today, and she, above all of us, would have felt his magic.'

'I was at the castle two nights ago,' Sirius replied. 'I happened upon Macbeth in the corridors, and was surprised he seemed to recognise me. He covered his error by feigning wonder that anyone was abroad so late,' he went on. 'My curiosity piqued, of course, and I followed him in my other from to where he met with a young soldier of his guard.'

'And,' Bella enquired, needing no prompting from Severus now.

'The sweat of that particular doe when being rutted by a stag was, shall I say, familiar to me,' the Black said, his lip turning in a sneer of distaste. 'What I did not sense though was any magic.'

'Bound?' Bella asked. 'But by whom? Lucius was a fool, granted, but a powerful fool.'

'I could not tell, but I suspect that was why Narcissa failed to notice just who had replaced Macbeth.' The Black had stopped, and pulling his heavy cloak tight about him, he called softly to Severus's back. 'Was there anything else you wanted to know, Severus? Because I really ought to get back there to keep my eye on things. It would not do for our plans to go any further astray.'

Our plans, Snape thought sourly; he was willing to wager when the cat finally crawled out of this particular sack of rats that everyone would be happy to disown them, and they would very rapidly become his plans again. 'What of the Wolfman?' he asked, pretending he hadn't noticed the Black's insinuation, and resisting the urge to ask Sirius why he had seen fit to tell Narcissa just who her Macbeth had become.

'I've left him with James the Pot Peddler, but he is pining for Luna,' Sirius replied, as Snape's lip turned in disdain at the Pot Peddler's name. The Black let his eyes rise to where the fast waxing gibbous had begun to peep through the scattering mist. 'Will you send her to him?' he asked.

Snape wasn't sure; Luna longed for her Wolfman, he knew that, but it was safer, whilst Merlin was there at any rate, just to secure him in his own cave. He doubted Morgaine's sharp eyes would miss any wounds Luna might incur, even with Minerva's powerful charms to hide them.

Sirius didn't seem to expect an answer. He turned instead to the question that was troubling Snape more than the others. 'Why is Merlin here, Severus?'

'I am beginning to wonder that myself,' Snape admitted. 'I am beginning to wonder if the Fey convinced him to make the journey north, and if so, why?'

'Get rid of him, Severus,' Sirius replied. 'There are things going on at Inverness Castle that I don't like. I need you there, and Minerva too, they aren't things I can cope with.'

Snape frowned at the Black's unusual admission. 'What things? What else is happening?'

'Strangers hanging about the place. People who don't seem to be whom they purport to be,' the Black said, giving Snape an uneasy look, one that he didn't like at all. 'And I don't just mean Macbeth.'

'Who else?'

'A few peasants who don't seem to be Scotsmen, yet Inverness is far from the border, with slim pickings between it and the south,' Sirius replied. 'One in particular is a jester, who seems to keep Lucius entertained, although I've never heard him tell a joke, or seen Lucius laugh for that matter. Goes by the name of Thomas the Riddler.'

'Why should itinerant peasants concern us?' Snape asked, not at all sure he wanted to hear the answer, as something pulled at this mind. 'Or this jester?'

'Because he's a wizard,' Sirius replied. 'You might want to think about that while Bella's bouncing on your balls again on the way home.'

'Has he recognised you as a wizard?' Snape asked, ignoring the Black's inference that he had been indulging in a little voyeurism, as the small hairs rose on the back of his neck with the thrill of danger.

'No, but I have a feeling Lucius will have mentioned me.'

'Stay in your other form, Black,' Severus said, all thought of banter fled, to be replaced by concern for Narcissa and, he admitted reluctantly, the Black and the Pot Peddler, and any other of his rescued souls. Whatever had pulled at Snape's memory gave a sharp tug, demanding to be recognised; then it came to him, like a beacon fire on a foggy night. 'Do you remember Arthur's court jester?' he asked. 'The one who arrived just before the Sword of Godric the Great was lost to the Lake?'

'Yes.' Sirius nodded. 'His name was Thomas too, wasn't it. Thomas the Gaunt.'

'Yes, I believe it was,' Snape remarked. He turned to Bellatrix, who was standing demurely at his side. He raised his hand to her cheek, but all thoughts of fleshly pleasures had fled him as something cold writhed in his belly.

'Mage Lord?' she whispered, sensing his tension as she had sensed the shift in his mood the more her kinsman had spoken. 'Shall I send Minerva to you?'

Severus cast his mind around, but save for the three of them the heath was empty and still, the air thick with fog and expectancy. He nodded once.

'And what would you have me tell Merlin, should he ask?'

Severus thought for a moment. 'Tell him I happened across a woman of my acquaintance, and have gone to spend the night with her.'

'Seeing as you have no privacy in our own cave?' she asked, letting her fine black eyebrow arch. 'Shall I curse your name and your wayward cock to heaven and hell, and weep and rail, and beg my sister Minerva to bring you back?'

He nodded again, hoping once more that the Fey had not seen Sirius. 'Take your other form, Bella, my heart,' he said. 'And, Bella, my beloved, send Aricanthe too.' He watched her change to a raven and swoop into the filthy foggy air, before turning to where the Black Grim watched on.

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