Chapter Two

The banqueting hall was set out in a series of round tables to give the impression, I supposed, of intimacy, whilst affording the guests the opportunity of comparing their own finery to those around them. There were ten tables of eight people at each one, excluding the high table, and I noticed that the purer the blood the nearer the high table they sat. The Blacks, unsurprisingly, were seated right in front of where the Malfoys, the Dark Lord, and I, Severus Snape, looked over everyone. To say I was uncomfortable with the seating plan was an understatement; I was also still mystified and not a little unsettled. I knew I had talents and indeed powers that the Dark Lord needed and wanted to tap, but I had thus far managed to remain neutral enough in my allegiances to neither take the Dark Mark, nor incur Riddle's admirable wrath; perhaps that alone should have alerted me that he needed more from me than I would be willing to give. I had been walking a tightrope, but I had an uneasy feeling that the time for procrastination was over, and longed for an ally I could trust in whom to confess my fears, and perhaps even plan my way forward. This time in our history was not one for staying out of politics; they chased you around and harried you into a corner, until you either came out fighting for them, or bleeding. I had thought a great deal about how to avoid either option, but I was running out of time.

I knew it was Tom Riddle who had sat me at his side. Abraxas Malfoy might have fancied he was the host at this soiree, but if he believed that, he had fooled only himself, and few would fail to notice that whilst Abraxas sat on Riddle's left, with Lucius next to him, it was Severus Snape who sat on his right. That aside, whatever happened that night, I intended to stay as my own master and make sure everyone knew as much. I didn't care to be tarred by anyone else's brush, especially Tom Riddle's. I speculated about what would have happened had I declined, as I had originally intended, what I considered to be a summons; of course, that was before Lucius had let it slip that all of the Blacks had accepted their invitations.

I watched Sirius look over to me and then lean across the table and say something to Andromeda. She shook her head and smiled at him and then glanced across at me in a way that made me understand I was being discussed. I couldn't eat, not the truffles and foie gras, or whatever the soup was, or the rack of rare Welsh lamb, or the ludicrous concoction of a dessert that was placed in front of me, and each dish was removed by an uncaring house-elf, no doubt to be fed to the pigs. I was trapped between watching Andromeda whenever I could, and paying attention to Riddle's carefully prepared manifesto, worrying about just why he was taking such pains to pay me this court. By the time the pudding was removed and the elves brought around the cheese and grapes, Lucius had asked me four times, across the expanse of his father's well-fed gut, if I were feeling quite well. I was unmoved that he cared, but I was beginning to suspect that he was finding he had to inveigle his way into Riddle's favour, and it concerned me greatly that he should see fit to use me as a springboard, and why he should even consider me to be such.

As the coffee and petit fours were at last served, Abraxas stood from between Riddle and Lucius, and the assembled guests charged their already amply charged glasses and stood too. Only Riddle remained seated ... and Sirius Black, until Andromeda leant down to whisper urgently to him, and he hauled himself rather reluctantly to his feet. I watched him nod cynically to Riddle and thought he was playing a very dangerous and somewhat unnecessary game.

Riddle stood as the guests sat down from Abraxas's expansive and flowery toast to him. Even I have to admit that Tom cut a finely impressive figure. He was taller than me, but only just, perhaps six feet one or two, and whilst he was slim, his frame promised taut muscles. He had shoulder-length dark auburn hair, and the pale skin of a redhead without the pastiness that often accompanies it. His features were fine, but firm and masculine, and with the exception of the coldest, most power-hungry eyes I have ever seen, he was a handsome man. Instead of the hypnotic rallying call to the faithful that I had expected, he was modest in his thanks and effusive in his praise for the Malfoys. He sat down to prolonged polite applause, and as he lit a cigar it was as though that were a signal for the guests to move. Suddenly chairs were scraping and people were rising from their seats, mostly heading in the direction of the high table to fawn over Riddle like the sycophantic sheep they were. I stood up too, not wanting to be part of the charade anymore. Riddle caught my sleeve, and I know I didn't imagine the shiver that ran down my spine as his icy fingers brushed on mine, whether by accident or design I didn't know.

'Don't forget that I want to see you later, Severus,' he said, and then smiled his coldly un-amused smile. 'Go and enjoy yourself,' he added, and nodded to where the Blacks had risen from their table. 'I believe a certain raven-haired beauty is anxious to see you too. Don't get so involved with Bella's ample charms that you forget why you are here.'

I drew back in what I suspect he took for embarrassment. 'I shall try my best,' I concurred, and left him to make what he would of it and made my way out into the hall, to where men had already begun to light cigars, and ladies smoked coloured cocktail cigarettes and laughed their wine-soaked neighing laughs at nothing.

The Blacks had left the room before me and were just splitting up, Narcissa and Bellatrix heading, I supposed, to powder whatever ladies powdered. Sirius bent and kissed his hag of a mother's cheek, then followed Andromeda and the man who still seemed to patiently tag along behind them. I suspected he was a Muggle, and it surprised me somewhat that he had waited around that long. Surely Andromeda was safe enough with Sirius watching out for her the way he obviously was. Mrs Black watched them go, her sour features twisted in venom; the years hadn't been kind to her, and her bitterness wrinkled her face with furrows of hate. I knew she and her firstborn son barely spoke, and although Regulus was the younger son, he was the more favoured. I wondered which of Sirius's admirable string of shortcomings displeased her most, probably having been selected for Gryffindor when he was eleven.

I found myself thinking about my own mother for a moment, and what she would have thought of the circles in which I was moving. My mother, downtrodden and mean-spirited, which had been the result of the other, I couldn't tell for sure. I hadn't much cared until then, although I found myself pondering now. She had had a rotten life, tied to the pedantic bully who had been my father, and I wondered if she had ever been a young girl with hope in her heart for love, like I had on that night.

'Can we talk somewhere, Severus?' Andromeda asked as she reached me. She turned slightly to Black. 'Watch out for Ted, Sirius,' she said, absently laying her hand on his arm, and I felt a stab of unreasonable jealousy that she had spared another man, especially Sirius Black, that small touch. 'Don't let Bella anywhere near him,' she added, wasting one of the smiles I now considered mine on Black too.

I thought nothing of her remark as Sirius and the man called Ted headed towards the bar which had been set up along the wall of the ballroom, except for the fact that the two men obviously knew one another quite well.

'Let's go onto the terrace,' I suggested, as Andromeda and I followed into the ballroom. 'It should be quiet out there, and even if it's not, we can walk across the lawns. Do you want your cloak?' I asked.

'No,' she replied, and she looked at me in a way that made my breath catch in my chest. I don't think she had ever looked more beautiful; she seemed to glow from inside. 'We won't take long,' she added as I opened one of the doors leading from the quickly filling ballroom.

'Andromeda,' I said, needing to begin immediately before my courage fled. 'You know I love you dearly, don't you?' I was already lifting my hands to put them on her shoulders, and to this day I thank Merlin that a door opened behind us, and I dropped my hands and was spared at least that humiliation.

The terrace cleared again of the two older couples, Evan Rosier's parents and another man and woman I didn't know, as they strolled down the pathway between the illuminated rose beds. Andromeda had sat on one of the wicker chairs that overlooked the torch-lit rose garden, and I was about to sit opposite her, so I could watch her face, when she raised her hand.

'Of course I do, Severus, and I love your dearly too,' she said. 'It's the reason I have come here to speak to you.'

I must have frowned my misunderstanding, or perhaps my brain was beginning to catch up with what my heart was trying to deny.

'Let me speak first, Severus,' she said. 'This is too important.'

I felt something cold slide in my guts as I at last recognised something in her tone that wasn't that of a lover. 'What is too important?' I ventured in little more than a whisper.

'You must see what is happening, Severus,' she said urgently. 'Come away from this,' she said, nodding to the manor. 'You can stay with us if you like, but leave this ... this abhorrence.'

'Us?' I asked, as the cold thing writhed again. Maybe she meant Sirius and the rest of the Blacks, I tried to tell myself, clutching at whatever straws I could find.

'Didn't Sirius say?' she asked in an oddly girlish way for one as sophisticated as she usually was. 'Ted and I are getting married.' I must have paled, or drawn back, or showed my shock in some way because she added, 'I ... I thought you knew.'

'No,' I said, without knowing where I dragged the word from, whether it was answer to her remark, or denial of what I had heard.

She smiled up at me, and at last I saw it as a sisterly smile, one that turned my blood to ice and my heart to stone. 'You know,' she said, 'I always used to hope that one day you would ask me, before I met Ted, of course ... when I was younger, before things changed the way they have,' she added, glancing to where the strains of the orchestra beginning the first dance were issuing from the grand ballroom. 'But you never did.'

'No,' I said quietly, wondering if she had given me an invitation to try to salvage something, but she went on, and any attempt I might have made turned to ashes in my mouth.

'Actually,' she said, 'Ted and I are going to have a baby.'

'How nice,' I replied, only going through the motions now. I felt sick, sickened, and I wanted to lash out without restraint as I had done to Lily Evans once before on another day of wretched humiliation. 'Is it the Muggle you brought with you tonight?' I heard myself ask.

'Yes, yes it is,' she said, somewhat coolly now. 'His name is Ted, Severus.'

'A Muggle,' I repeated in a snarl, before I could stop the outrage overflowing at what I had allowed to happen. 'Is that the best you can do?'

'Definitely,' she said, standing and pushing past me. 'Especially when I see what else is around.' She spun back to me, furious now. 'I came here to see you, to try to make you see that there are better ways than what is happening here.' She seemed to try to moderate her tirade and turned to me again. 'Come to stay with us, Severus, for a while ... to let you distance yourself from this,' she asked, almost pleading with me.

'To watch you bring up a squalling Mudblood brat?' I asked, as the rage boiled inside me. I was beyond reason, beyond even noticing that her child would have the type of mixed blood as I had in my own veins.

She drew back as though I had struck her, which in a way I had, and I remembered again delivering the same insult to Lily a few years before, and how I had burned with shame for weeks later, and lost her friendship for a long time. What was it about me that when I finally set my reluctant tongue free, I delivered with such venom?

Andromeda began to walk away towards the door. 'I came here tonight to let you know that we thought you were a better man than those in there. I was wrong, Severus,' she snapped. 'I didn't know you at all.'

'No,' I replied. 'You didn't know me at all.' I drew myself up as the last vestiges of warmth seeped from me, and I pulled a black cloak of hostility around my shoulders as she opened the door to the ballroom. 'So why don't you go back to your cosy little Muggle and raise your Mudblood brats and see where that gets you?' I called after her, ranting now, bereft of any sensible thought.

'You bandy that type of remark around quite a lot, Snape,' a voice said from quite a bit further along the terrace.

I didn't know how long Sirius Black had been standing there or just what he had heard, but the last of my sanity fled, and I turned from Andromeda and stalked across to him and grabbed his lapels. 'Eavesdropping, you snivelling little nancy boy?' I snapped, and kneed him in the balls. 'You would be better employed looking after your little Ted Muggle, as you were told to do, than criticising your betters.'

As he fell gasping to the ground, another of the dozen or so doors from the ballroom opened behind us.

'Severus,' Lucius called from the doorway, and only when he had done so did I begin to calm down. 'Bellatrix wants to know if she should wait until after you've spoken to Tom. What shall I tell her?'

'Tell her anything you want,' I hissed, 'but keep the hideous harpy away from me. Tell her I'm homosexual for all I care. She ought to know what that means; it runs in her family.'

'Really, Severus, you could do a lot worse than a Black you know,' Lucius replied. He had stepped onto the terrace, and it was only then that he noticed Black, where he had sat upright, wincing in pain, with Andromeda's arm across his shoulders. 'Some Blacks at any rate,' Lucius added. 'Anyway, are you ready?' he asked, showing no interest in why Sirius was sitting on the stone floor, clutching his balls. 'Tom Riddle does not care to be kept waiting.' Lucius gave me a grudging up and down look, as though attempting to fathom out why the Dark Lord should want me at his side anyway. 'Are you joining us or not, Severus?' he asked.

'Of course I am, Lucius,' I replied, without looking back at the Blacks. 'What better offer could I possibly have for the rest of my life?'

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