Part Third: The Hart Subvertant, Chapter 35

Chapter 35:

Severus awoke alone the next morning, but found a note on the night table beside his pillow:

S –

It's finally stopped raining. I woke up very early & couldn't get back to sleep, so I went for a walk on the beach.

I'll meet you at breakfast around nine-ish.

– E

Severus glanced at the bedside clock – 7:37 a.m. But rather than wait to meet her, he quickly showered, then dressed in black trousers, a grey lambswool pullover, and stout walking shoes, and made his way down to the beach.

He found Emily sitting on a mussel-encrusted boulder, in black jeans and her black leather pea coat, her arms loosely gathered around her knees.

"Good morning." He took a seat next to her.

"Hello." She glanced sideways at him almost shyly.

"Something wrong?"

"Severus... I didn't mean to upset you last night," she said softly. "But I still owe you a tremendous favour, and the roof was leaking and it had been annoying you all day, and... well, offering to fix it seemed like a good idea at the time."

"I've told you already I don't like to have other people beholden to me," he replied. "You don't owe me anything."

"But I do," she insisted. "Downplay it as you will, your assistance probably saved Liria's life – Catherine told me she probably wouldn't have lasted much longer if her addiction had gone untreated. Heroin withdrawal is even more traumatic for Faeries than it is for humans – you saw how sick she was. Not only that, but you did it because I asked you to, despite the fact that you felt wronged by me. And I'm sorry, we Fae honour our obligations. Read the books, love – that's just how we are."

He glanced stoically out toward the crashing whitecaps before them. "Be that as it may, the offer to put a whole new roof on the castle is a favour of a much higher magnitude than anything I did for Liria. The figure on that cheque was probably overestimated to begin with."

Emily paled and turned away from him. "I guess I'm still not quite current on what's expected when it comes to money. Troublesome stuff, really. When I'm here in the Second World I'm never sure whether it's something I should never talk about, or all I should talk about. I'm always a little behind everyone else on what things should cost, and such... " She shrugged.

"Yes, I noticed. For example, some of us might consider giving each of our colleagues a ten-Galleon bottle of wine at Christmas to be a trifle extravagant."

She blushed all the worse, then got up from the boulder and bent over a tiny sea urchin making its way through a rock pool a few paces away. "Well... we don't have money at home. I didn't even know what currency was until my father brought me here to the Second World for the first time when I was seven years old. Then it just seemed so static and dull of a system to me, to have this bit of paper or metal that allowed you to obtain things, and not to have to work for them, not to have to gather or grow something to exchange for them, and not to get to haggle for goods yourself. To me, having a vault full of gold isn't at all satisfying. It's just metal sitting in the dark."

"The goblins at Gringotts could no doubt tell you all the ways in which your gold is doing a great deal more than just sitting in the dark," Severus observed dryly. His mouth tightened as he watched her bending over the pool, the wind off the water blowing her wavy red-gold hair around her pale face – the idea that any one person could be both so clever and experienced and so damned naïve at the same time filled him with a strange kind of reproachful protectiveness.

"Yes, you're right. But no matter how much gold I have in the bank, I can't eat it or drink it, and I can't live on it or grow things on it, can I," she retorted. "You should have seen Swaincroft, my father's ancestral home in the Cotswolds – it was so beautiful, this giant Tudor mansion covered with wisteria, with all kinds of orchards and gardens and little brooks. Now, if I set foot on the grounds, they'd probably have me arrested for trespassing." She turned away from the pool, picked up a rock, and threw it viciously out into the waves.

"Yes... I'd heard some evil-minded gossip of a woman say that there had been some unpleasantness between you and your father's first wife's children," Severus muttered.

Emily laughed bitterly. "I don't doubt you heard more than that, if you know the same Felina Rosier I do."

He scowled. "All right, I heard that some acrimonious dealings went on when your father parcelled out all his assets and relocated permanently to Arcadia. Apparently your half-siblings were quite hateful over the whole thing."

"Yes, that's it in a nutshell. If I may be so vulgar as to transgress the pureblooded aversion to ever talking about legal proceedings or money, what happened was this – Father gave a fourth interest in Swaincroft and all of his real other estate to each of my brothers and sisters, and then he gave an equivalent fifth share to me in shares, liquid capital, and interest-bearing accounts, along with the Second-World publishing rights to his books. He thought it was only right to give them the house they'd grown up in, and that they would be interested in tangible assets, whereas I'd prefer liquid cash since I was always running thither and yon on various assignments for Gwydion. And of course, as had to happen, I really would have liked a house and a bit of land to call my own, and all they wanted was my big pile of money. Funny how this sort of shite always happens like that, isn't it." She picked up another rock and hurled it after the first.

"So what did they do?" he asked.

Emily turned back to him with a harsh little laugh. "They did what any civilised person would do – they sued me. First they tried to pressure me into signing some papers I hadn't read, but I wouldn't do it. It was the four of them, two sisters-in-law, and seven children all putting the thumbscrews to me, and this went on when I was twenty, mind," she said, scowling ferociously at the memory. "When the high-pressure tactics didn't work, they questioned Father's dispersal of his assets on some grounds that still barely makes any sense to me. Now – I took my degree in Classics, I can read Shakespeare in the original folios' text and understand it, but I couldn't grasp what those legal documents were getting at no matter how hard I tried."

"Probably because they didn't make any sense at all," Severus observed.

"Probably," she agreed grimly. "So that first attempt got thrown out of court. Then, they tried to claim I was a bastard daughter who wasn't entitled to a fifth share of Father's assets and his royalties – I had to go to Gwydion's royal scribes and get them to draw up these documents saying that my parents were in fact married according to Arcadia's laws, and they had a daughter after that marriage. It was ridiculous – hundreds of people including an entire royal family attended my parents' wedding and my naming ceremony, and what, they aren't married and I don't exist unless it's written on a special bit of paper? I just don't get that – how can a person be illegitimate?"

Her voice had risen angrily, and she took a moment to calm herself before continuing. "And they of course filed the lawsuit in a manner that gave me a deadline to produce these documents, otherwise I would lose everything in a default settlement. Of course they cleverly timed that deadline around days when the Third Kingdom portals wouldn't be open, trying to make the trip impossible – I can't bring documents back from Arcadia if I can't get to Arcadia, naturally. I had to go to France and take a portal into the First Kingdom, and then jump on a broomstick and fly like hell for two days, and then go to the Sixth Kingdom to get back. When I actually turned up to the hearing with these papers in hand, they were so surprised it made me sick – they weren't even pretending any of it happened by accident. So anyway, I gave them their documents and a written statement from my father – and that written statement included some scorching language, believe you me."

"I can imagine," Severus said, nodding grimly.

"So their complaint was overturned and I kept everything, but it wrecked the family – they all completely disowned me. My father said that if they wouldn't accept my mother and I as his legitimate wife and child, then they didn't need to have anything to do with him, either. When I came home and told him I had to get these documents because they were suing me – oh by the Mother in heaven, I'd never seen him so angry. Father's the kindest man alive – he never gets angry. He's never been angry with me, and the Mother knows I was the most headstrong and aggravating child that ever was. And of course, all of this was going on over something I didn't really want." Another rock went flying after the other two.

"So, the point of all this is, what upset me last night was just that... I'd love to have a castle like you do, with beautiful green lands and oak trees on a cliff overlooking rock pinnacles on the North Sea, with waves crashing and Selkies singing on the beach below. To me, that's what's worth possessing. I'll be honest, I'm insanely jealous of you for having it. When I look at Hogwarts or Greenbarrow Castle, yes, they're beautiful and I love living in them, but they'll never be mine, will they."

Severus watched her in silence. It had never occurred to him to feel wealthy or privileged because he owned the manor on the cliff above; having been told from boyhood that the house was a crumbling eyesore and inherently inferior to the homes of his family and peers, he had come to regard it with more shame than pride. To hear now that Lady Emily Beauregard Swain-Tumnus, noblewoman and heiress to one-fifth of the Swain family's fortune, envied him because he owned Snape Hall was a chill jolt of lucidity to match the salt breezes now blasting him in the face from off the water. He tried to think of some kind of diplomatic reply, but failed.

"And you know what's funny, is ever since we got here, you keep apologising for the place, acting like it embarrasses you, though I can't imagine why," Emily said, glancing over her shoulder at him. "So the roof leaks, so fecking what, that can be fixed, silly thing. Don't you realise how fantastic that place is? I mean – I want an enormous library with thousands of books and room for another few thousand books and one couch in the middle of it," she grumbled, hurling another rock.

"There used to be a lot more furniture and books in that library – some good antiques and rare editions, too. But my father sold them," he muttered, with an eloquent scowl. "The library ghost used to throw papers and candlesticks around whenever they took anything out of there – he practically turned into a poltergeist. My father used to swear he'd have him exorcised."

"Smart ghost," Emily declared. "If that was my library, I'd have a tantrum too if someone sold my books."

At that point, it was just too much – Professor Swain was now on the verge of having a tantrum herself because she wasn't the possessor of his bare library full of dusty old books – the thought was too absurd to be borne. His head inclined into his hands with a fit of ironic laughter.

"Stop laughing at me! I would!" she insisted, glaring at him.

"I'm not laughing at you," he assured her, quieting himself. "I'm just laughing... at all of it."

"Severus... damn it all to hell, don't you know what you have here? In those libraries, you've got first editions by Brontë, Shaw, Stevenson, and my father, among others – any number of rare books, and you don't even take pride in them! Up in your Mum's library, you've got all that gorgeous old Art Nouveau silver that used to belong to her, and it probably hasn't been polished in decades. How can you not admire all that?" Emily kicked peevishly at the gravel in front of her. "I was thinking this morning about how you said it's not opulent like Malfeasant the other day, but please, darling, fuck Malfeasant, it's an over-decorated blip on the historical map compared to this place – they probably didn't dig the first root cellar of it until the Renaissance. I don't claim to be an expert on Scottish history, but if the foundation of Snape Hall was dug around the same time Canute the Great was born – Severus, it's got to be one of the oldest castles in Scotland."

"I do know it's probably the oldest Wizarding castle still in habitable condition in Orkney," he said, averting his eyes. "About three kilometres east there's a Norwegian castle that belonged to a Muggle warlord named Kolbein Hruga, and there are palaces in Kirkwall, but they're all in ruins."

Emily stared at him in disbelief. "My dear – now, keep in mind that everything I know about castles and architecture came from that long-ago class I took at Cambridge, but to my untrained eye this castle isn't a mishmash of gothic-Norman-Romanesque-Tudor-gothic revival like Hogwarts – the oldest wing is almost pure Anglo-Saxon, and only a few examples of that remain anywhere in the British Isles because of all the Viking raids in the ninth and tenth centuries. The Muggles don't think that any secular examples of that architectural style exist above ground anywhere, and here you have a whole fortress of it... don't you realise how historically significant that is?"

Severus got up from his mussel-encrusted seat and joined her at the water's edge. "Yes, the Muggle Vikings never raided Snape Hall because they didn't know it was here, it's Unplottable. The wizard Viking lords didn't raid us because we were related to half of them by marriage or whatever – Orkney's always been as Norse as it was Scottish. Viking raiders probably stopped by here to say hello and catch up on their gossip before they sailed down to terrorise the coastline further south."

"Your western, central and eastern wings look like pure early gothic, every stone and recessed arch of them, and not the over-ornamented gingerbread-house later style of gothic, either. If work on the first building began in the late tenth century, then it's a smaller contemporary of Glamis Castle, where the Douglases lived," Emily pointed out.

"Yes, I read about the Douglases in History of Magic class," Severus said quietly. "I do recall they were one of the few English noble families who turned out a lot of wizards and witches, and Shakespeare based Macbeth on their medieval ancestors."

"Exactly. And in my opinion, Snape Hall is far more beautiful than most of the castles of that era, and built on more elegant sort of lines. Most of the time castles just got slapped up without any sense for the overall balance of things, it would be like, we need some space here, let's put up a tower or a new wing. But whomever designed Snape Hall had a real genius for proportion and symmetry, and the masonry work is first-rate, all of it."

"Well... we're isolated up here. Oftentimes there's nothing to do but study or pray or work, or perfect your craft at something. If a mason knows he's going to get to work on the one church and one castle that his village possesses, all of his life, I can imagine that might lead to... a certain pride in the work, especially if he's getting decent wages," Severus said quietly.

"Come on, love, the care they put into it is obvious. Centuries have gone by, and it's still beautiful, especially the interiors – it wouldn't have held up this long if it wasn't superlatively well-built in the first place. That great main entrance hall is just a work of art, truly – "

"For a room full of cobwebs I can't afford to light properly," he grunted, also picking up a rock and flinging it out to sea with an impatient gesture.

Emily turned on him in a fine fettle of annoyance, her finger jabbing into his shoulder. "You know what – fuck all that. If Michelangelo's David was put in a dark room and cobwebs were allowed to gather on it, guess what? It would still be a Michelangelo, my love – the second someone got it out and dusted it off and lighted it properly, its artistic worth would be undiminished. I know my opinion probably isn't educated enough to mean much, but I still think that entire castle is a dusty, cobwebbed, leaky Michelangelo, my dear."

For a long moment, they just glared at each other – but then Emily gave him a challenging look, and turned back toward the steps leading up to the top of the hill. "You want to see the entrance hall lit properly? Come on."

Severus scowled deeply, but hurried after her. "Mind telling me what you're talking about?"

"Just come on."

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Emily decisively threw open the front doors and stalked into the centre of the main hall when they arrived back up at the castle.

"You're right, this hall doesn't make full use of the available natural light, with all these high ceilings and south-facing windows. It was built by someone with a huge budget for wax candles and brazier coals, who didn't mind showing off his wealth," she said, craning her head back to gaze up at the ceiling.

"Yes, that sounds about right," Severus said grimly.

"Well then – allow me to demonstrate one of the first caltrops a Faery child learns." She raised her arms above her head like an orchestra conductor signalling for Fortissimo –

"LIOHT!" she shouted, her voice reverberating faintly off the stone walls -

And a brilliant greenish-silver light climbed the walls... starting at the floor, outlining every detail of the intricate stone carvings with pockets of luminescence... until the entire hall glowed softly, like some otherworldly cathedral.

"Well... then," Severus murmured, wandering forward to join her in the middle of the hall. "What do you call that?"

"In English, it's just called Faery Light," she said, shrugging. "It's the equivalent of a Lumos spell, really, only it's not confined to your wand, so you can play with it a bit – "

She gestured in his direction, and Severus saw his hands lit up with a glowing nimbus that blazed silver for a moment, then was gone. "Light, but no heat," he murmured.

"Exactly, so you don't end up with smoke residue on the ceiling, and there's no chance of fire. If you want to light an actual fire for warmth or to cook with, you'll need firewood and a different incantation, just like in wizard magic. But this charm is still very useful and a lot of fun – for example, if you want to get fancy, you can even draw and make pictures with it – " She waved her hands delicately over her head, and a cascade of greenish-white snowflakes fell from the hall ceiling, disappearing as they fell toward the floor.

"But to get the best view – come here." She sat down in the middle of the floor, then lay down on her back, pillowing the back of her head on her hands.

"Oh come, don't be ridiculous – "

"Don't worry, love, no one will see you, just look at it."

"All right, if you're going to insist on this absurd thing... " He lay down beside her, and for a long time just lay there gazing up at the ceiling. After a moment, she rolled over on her side toward him and put her head on his shoulder, one arm around his chest.

"See?" she murmured, nodding toward the softly glimmering, timelessly beautiful ceiling. "It's gorgeous."

And it was.

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Severus had so long thought of Snape Hall as a liability, an old pile, a constant annoyance with a leaky roof and mildewed wallpaper and shabby furnishings, inherently inferior to the homes of his relatives and friends – that its historical value and great beauty had long been lost on him. Now... some of her admiration and enthusiasm for the castle were beginning to rub off on him, allowing a previously unknown pride to be kindled in a part of him that had long felt worthless.

But then his scepticism reasserted itself – "Well, it's still awfully bare, hardly full of antiques and ancestral portraits like Malfeasant – "

"Trifles," Emily scoffed, completely dismissing all of Narcissa Malfoy's decorating efforts with a single wave of her hand. "You've been listening to the Malfoys pontificate about how great their place is for too long. If you want some paintings on the walls, it would be easy enough to get you some. If there aren't a million ancestral portraits lying around, then landscapes would be nice."

He chuckled softly, caressing her slim forearm where it lay across his chest. "You don't have to do that, it's all right."

"Well, my point is, pictures can be obtained. Architecture like this is a lot more impressive."

"Especially when it's lit up like the Hogwarts Great Hall at Christmas," he observed dryly.

"Oh, why not light it up like Christmas – this effect doesn't cost a damned thing, or leave soot on the walls. If I use another incantation to make it stay like this, it'll last for a whole day. As for the cobwebs – "

She sat up and aimed a hand at one of the thick skeins of dusty cobweb on a veined stone arch – "Waskan líon damháin alla – " The web vaporised.

Severus sat up behind her, his brows quirked at the ceiling. "Where did you learn that?"

"It's the world's easiest magic, really – the twisty incantation just means Clean Spiderweb in Old Arcadian. My best friend Bill's mother was a Greenbarrow Castle housekeeper, so you can bet she knew a lot of spells to get cobwebs out of high corners," Emily explained, scanning the glowing ceiling for more cobwebs. "She and a crowd of her friends could get the King's huge audience hall sparkling in fifteen minutes, it was really fun to watch them zapping the dust and smudges away. Plus we've got all these unpaved roads and dirt paths around the castle, and you have a crowd of folks living there who run around on their bare hooves half the time, so we track mud in like nobody's business. Nonetheless the cleaning staff keeps the place positively beautiful – you should see it."

"Really?" Severus said, keenly studying her animated face as she continued decimating cobwebs. "So... you're the king's great-niece, and the First Knight's daughter, and your best friend was the son of a castle charwoman? And your parents let you learn some of her housecleaning magic?" he asked, surprised. He couldn't imagine what the Malfoys, or his own father for that matter, would have said if he had done something similar as a child – it would simply have been unthinkable. His father wouldn't even let him associate with respectably middle-class village children, much less the children of domestic labourers. He could only have imagined the hiding he would have gotten if he'd ever asked one of the house-elves if he could help with their work.

"What sort of a pampered princess would I be if I couldn't clean my own bedroom, eh?" Emily scowled deeply and half-turned away from him. "And Gwydion isn't the sort to emphasise class distinctions every hour of every day in his castle – he's not like that. His head steward and any number of his knights are commoners, he's... he's just not like that. Bill and I started playing together when we were both about one year old, and by the time someone pointed out that he was considered to be rather lower down than I was in the castle pecking order, I liked him too much to stop talking to him. He was more fun than anyone else I knew – I wasn't going to start... hating him like some people did because my Mummy was a noble knight and his Mummy cleaned the castle for a living. Housekeeping is honest and necessary work – I'd like to see what the castle would look like if we didn't have a cleaning staff," she said, rather more defensively than necessary, Severus thought. He intuited that this was a sore point with her, and that she had defended her friend Bill to many people, over many years.

"Besides, I didn't give Mrs. Blake much choice in the matter," she continued, defiantly blasting another blowing cobweb off the wall. "I was the pushiest child alive – if I saw someone doing something interesting, I pestered them endlessly until they explained it to me. If you ever sit across from my Mum at supper long enough, she'll tell you all about how I tried to get her perfumer friend, Mrs. Peaseblossom, to take me on as an apprentice when I was about eight. It hadn't quite occurred to me at that age that all Mum's fencing and archery lessons meant she was grooming me to be something other than a middle-class merchant."

Severus chuckled, putting an arm around her shoulders. "Emily Swain, the perfumer... I can't even imagine it."

"It could have been worse," she said, grinning mischievously as more cobwebs disappeared. "My friend Victoria is the worst clotheshorse you ever saw, and when she was little she wanted to apprentice with Mrs. Peshka, one of the pookas who make spidersilk. Now Vi wasn't taking into account that the spider pookas make silk by secreting it from their own bodies, you see, and Vi is a sidhe, so her chances of becoming a silk weaver were... kind of unlikely. Mrs. Peshka is incredibly nice, so she was sort of at a loss as to how to explain this – "If you ever grow a set of spinnerets, sweetheart, we'll talk about it... " For years, Vi and I had no idea what she was on about."

She continued blowing cobwebs away for another minute, but Severus finally took her hands and stopped her. "Thank you for the effort, but just leave it for the elves. I didn't ask you up here so you could clean house for me."

"It only takes a second," she protested. "And something as wonderful as this deserves to be cared for." Her eyes alighted on his face a second later, and lingered.

"I know," he said, feeling his face heat under her gaze. "But this place is my responsibility, not yours."

"All right. Sorry. But... perhaps you could apply to some historical society for a grant. There's got to be some group of wizard academics out there with a budget who would have an interest in preserving it, darling. Or maybe you could apply to the government to have it declared a historical monument, like Hogwarts is, and then maybe they'll give you something toward its maintenance – I'm not sure how either of those processes work offhand, but I could check into it for you, if you don't have time."

"You're not going to give me any peace over this until I let you do something to help, are you," he muttered. "First you wanted to help the Malfoy elves with their ironed hands, then it was Liria, then the Order of the Phoenix, then Cecile, then Molly – and now it's my old castle. You're just not happy unless you have some cause to champion, are you."

"Severus... that's just how I am," she told him. "I owe you a major boon for what you did for Liria, and here's something you could use my help with. If you don't let me do something for you I'll be in your debt forever, and just saying you don't want me to be beholden to you isn't enough. Wouldn't it drive you mad to know that you had unfinished business with someone that he wouldn't ever let you finish? Wouldn't you hate knowing that you owed someone everything, and he wouldn't ever let you get square with him?"

Severus gave a long resigned sigh, his head inclining into one hand; for perhaps he knew all too well what it was to owe a binding debt of gratitude that could never be discharged. "All right – would you finally be satisfied if I deposited the cheque you gave me and put it toward repairing the roof?"

She nodded vigorously. "Yes. Very much so – please promise me you'll do that."

"I suppose I could, if it means you'll finally be able to sleep at night, and I'll finally have some peace from your guilty conscience," he growled, but his practicality was finally winning a rare victory over his pride.

"Yes, it would. And then for your next birthday or Christmas or whatever, I'll have another part done and then – "

"No, I said we'd talk about that in five years, and I mean it," he insisted, putting an immovable end to that line of reasoning with a touch of the old sinister eyebrow. "Now, you have to promise to not have been killed by some ruddy great Orc in five years."

She smiled gratefully. "I'll do my best, love, I promise you that at least."

There was nothing to do after that sort of resolution besides pull her into his arms and kiss her, at length.

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Afterward, Severus nudged Emily and asked, "So... this first caltrop every Faery child learns, and the world's easiest spell for getting cobwebs out of distant corners – are those classified by the Arcadian monarchs, or can you actually teach them to someone else without penalty of court martial?"

"I could," she said. "I couldn't formally instruct my students in their use, but there's nothing preventing me from informally teaching them to my lover, if I wanted to – " She slanted a wary look up at him – "and if he wanted to learn them?"

He fixed her with a look of his own. "I don't know where you're getting the idea that I have some aversion to learning Arcadian magic, my dear – did the rate at which I started devouring your father's books mean nothing to you?"

"You certainly seemed averse to it at the beginning of the school year – 'neat little tricks,' and all that – "

He felt his skin heat, and glanced away from her. "And neat tricks they've turned out to be, especially when one is fighting a lot of hired thugs in an alleyway."

She kept looking at him, large brown eyes fixed on his face, lower lip perhaps quivering for just an instant.

Severus grimaced. "Ah, I see I've made this a sore point for you, and there's no way I'm getting out of this without making some kind of abject apology, is there?"

Emily silently shook her head No.

"All right... I suppose it might have been a bit tactless to lay into you with other faculty around, especially when you had just moved into a new community and a new school. And it probably wasn't fair to hold you responsible for a lot of classroom pranks when your curriculum was dictated by your government and not you yourself."

She just kept looking at him, and he flushed all the worse.

"And I suppose it wasn't fair to blame the antics of those Weasley hooligans on you, either. I do know bloody well that no one can control them, not even Minerva. I didn't mean to denigrate your people's magic... I was just angry because my cauldrons were getting Dungbombed and you weren't talking to me." He averted his eyes self-consciously, feeling himself blushing horribly. "So yes, I shouldn't have lost my temper with you and insulted your people's magic. It was boorish of me."

An instant later, she threw her arms around him and kissed him effusively. "But you've gotten awfully interested in it since, haven't you?"

"Well, yes, of course, did the rate at which I was studying it tell you nothing? I had plenty of other work to do, but I spent every spare second absorbing – " These heroic protestations only resulted in more kissing, which did much to assuage his discomfort over having to apologise. A bloke could perhaps own up to his imperfections more easily if he knew that such confessions would be accepted with a brilliant smile and lusty bouts of kissing.

A tiny piping voice suddenly sounded to their right – "Mistress? I thought I is hearing you out here, breakfast is ready in the dining room – " Cecile then got an eyeful of her Mistress engaged in said lusty bout of kissing with Mr. Professor, yodelled Ooooh! Sorry! – then turned and scurried back in the direction she had come. Severus was painfully embarrassed, but Emily only fell on his shoulder laughing again.

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Today's breakfast consisted of bacon and cheese omelettes with a sizzling pan of mushrooms sautéed in herbed butter. Both Severus and Emily had scarcely dug in when she said – "You know what would go really well with this?"

She got up and vanished into the kitchen, then came back a second later with a bottle of beer. "Mmm – cheddar and bacon omelette, mushrooms, and a cold beer. Just like home."

Severus chuckled, his eyes widening. "You've got to be joking."

"Don't laugh until you try it. Here, have a bite... " She fed him a fork of omelette and mushrooms, then a swallow of beer. "Pretty good, eh?"

He chuckled again. "Positively decadent. So that's what you have for breakfast at home?"

"Well, not always. For breakfast at Gwydion's table, you'll get lots of exotic gourmet sorts of things and champagne. In Rivendale, you'll get fresh bakery sorts of things with fruit and hard cider. At your average country pub, you get bacon and eggs and small beer."

"Small beer?"

"Low alcohol content beer. We didn't always know about water purification, so someone noticed that if you drank mostly beer, you wouldn't get as many stomach ailments as people who drank still well water. And the early Fae liked to drink, so they got very good at winemaking and beermaking and such. By the time we discovered that you could boil water and make it safe, or purify it magically, we had gotten to where we liked drinking liquor so much that we just kept right on having it with every meal."

"And now it's been going on for so long that you're all born with a huge tolerance for it."

Emily laughed. "Exactly. If you're ever with me at Court, don't worry about trying to drink all the booze that you'll get offered."

"Yes, I quite remember what Catherine said about the best food and the worst hangover of her life. If I ever travel in the Faerielands, I'll have to ask her to prescribe me some of that hangover cure to bring with me." He kept his eyes on her face, as though waiting to hear more about this notion of visiting the Third Kingdom with her in the future, but Emily had gotten absorbed in her breakfast again. "Did you want to do some more fencing today, perhaps?" he asked, pouring himself more tea.

"We can do that, sure. Right after we get back from the village, where'll you'll have deposited my cheque into the new Snape Hall improvement fund account and made appointments to get estimates from all the local roofers," Emily said, with a sweet, twinkly, utterly stubborn little grin.

"There already is a Snape Hall home repair account," he murmured down into his teacup.

"Of course there is." She grinned all the worse. "Have I ever told you how sinfully attractive that practical streak of yours is?"

Severus rolled his eyes. "Now you're just shamelessly flattering me."

"I prefer to think of it as positive reinforcement."

"All right, you've gotten your way and made your point, but I'll not stand for any gloating, understand?" He turned the full effect of the sinister eyebrow on her in a manner that brooked no disagreement.

"Yes, Mr. Professor, sir." She brought his hand to her lips and kissed it.

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To her credit, Emily made good on her no gloating promise to the letter. She could sense that the house's state of repair was a very sensitive and personal issue for Severus, and it would be easy to wound his pride again on the matter. So when they went upstairs to get ready to go out, she kept her attention carefully averted and avoided any mention of the cheque her lover had just tucked into his pocket. On the walk down to Nornsay, she kept up a round of bright conversation about what sorts of shops and restaurants were in the village, never once touching on the reason they were making the trip.

Nornsay turned out to be a charming, sleepy, picturesque little village of snug white clapboard and brick buildings set around a winding inlet of the bluest sea imaginable. A few fishing ships were tied up to the dock, unloading their catch; and a group of children were kicking a football about on a wide village green. The high street was made up of any number of cosy shops, cafés, offices, and the occasional pub.

Emily spotted the small Gringotts branch down at the end of the street, then tactfully excused herself, telling Severus she wanted to pop into the bookshop across the street for some local history books, and asking him to meet up with her at the little café next door when he was finished with his errands. He readily agreed to this plan, with what Emily thought was a touch of relief.

When Severus met up with her perhaps an hour and a half later, Emily was sitting at a cosy table with a mug and tiny pot of peppermint tea beside her, poring over several new selections from the bookshop's Local Interest section. She looked up with a bright smile when he approached the table. "There you are, love. Listen to this:

"The men spoke for the most part in a slow deliberate voice, but some of the women could rattle on at a great rate in the soft sing-song lilt of the islands, which has remained unchanged for a thousand years... It is a soft and musical inflection, slightly melancholy, but companionable, the voice of people who are accustomed to hours of talking in the long winter evenings and do not feel they have to hurry; a splendid voice for telling stories in." "

"Ah, yes, that's Edwin Muir," he said, taking the seat beside her.

"It reminded me of you when I read it," she said smiling, and handed him a teashop menu.

Severus began poring over the hot beverage selections. "So – I spoke to three different contractors, and they're going to come look at the central wing's roof at different times this week, then submit bids," he said, keeping his eyes on the menu.

"Excellent," Emily said with a satisfied smile.

"Do I need to show you the deposit slip?" he asked archly.

"You most certainly do not."

"Tell me why I did that again?" he muttered.

"Because you earned it," she said, fixing him with a very deliberate look across the table. "Because you put in so much time studying Potions that your expertise is valuable, and anybody who's been dragged out of his own bed at an instant's notice should charge time and a half for his trouble."

"You keep acting as though it was a simple matter of a Potions consulting job," he muttered darkly.

"It was a simple matter of a Potions consulting job. Think of it this way, love – imagine there was a sudden epidemic, a new strain of Mad Thestral's Disease or some such, and you got a late-night Floo call from a former student at St. Mungo's begging you to come help them get more medicine ready, saying you could bill them for whatever you thought were reasonable fees after the crisis was averted. So you do the work, you send them an invoice, and thirty days later, they pay you. Would you have any problem whatsoever with depositing that cheque?"

He thought about it for a moment. "No, I wouldn't. I'd probably find someone in hospital accounts to vent my spleen upon if they took a day longer than thirty days to get it to me."

"So why do I deserve any more consideration than they do? Really, my dear – " She lowered her voice and leaned toward his ear – "What happened in that callbox was a damned good shag, not a pledge to do my bidding for the rest of your natural life, gratis. Honestly, talk about situations to make a bloke feel taken advantage of," she said, with a dire shake of her head.

"I'd say there were quite a few extenuating circumstances at work on the night we went to the hospital," he countered.

Emily shrugged. "Like what?"

"You know very well what I mean."

"No, sorry – " she leaned toward his ear again – "an appalling little black frock doesn't count as an extenuating circumstance. I hired you as a legitimate independent contractor in that situation, and for me, that's where it ends. To be brutally honest, I think you would have been entirely justified in blowing the whole damn cheque on taking some sweet young thing to Tahiti for a week, myself, but no, you're putting a snug roof over my head for when I stay here with you. Your wholly admirable prudence is matched only by your extreme generosity, my love."

He gave her a look that somehow managed to be withering and flirtatious at the same time, then shook his head. "I'm going to take every one of those remarks out of your hide later, you irreverent minx of a woman."

She sighed. "Mmmm, I can hardly wait."

Just then, the waitress who had earlier taken Emily's order for tea, a tall, lightly freckled woman with long dark braids twisted behind her head, appeared at their table. "If it isn't Master Snape o' the Hall, hallo! Didn't know you were in town, then. Just dilderin' about the village for a spell?"

"Yes, running errands and such," Severus said. He studied the woman's face for a moment – "Let me guess, you're one of the Erlendssons."

"Aye, I'm Martha, Will's eldest. I'd met you a few times down at the Narwhal, a-playin' at chess with me Da."

"Ah, that's right. How is your father? I'd heard he competed in Cyprus last year, how did that go?"

"He placed in the top fifteen, and they had six Russian grandmasters, too!"

Severus and Martha Erlendsson chatted about the Cyprus competition for a few minutes, and while Emily wasn't sure what they were talking about, it sounded as though placing in the top fifteen in such a contest was a noble effort indeed. Then Martha took their orders for another pot of mint tea and a cup of black coffee.

Their waitress collected their menus with a grin. "I'll tell me father you're in town, he'll be wantin' a game at the pub come Saturday. Will you be about, then?"

"Possibly, we could try to make it, just so Will isn't deprived of the chance to give me a thorough thrashing the way he always does," he replied wryly, making the woman laugh merrily.

The fresh tea and coffee appeared shortly afterward, and Emily had her usual reaction to the proximity of fresh coffee and what she considered to be its oily, acrid smell. Severus noted her distaste with curiosity. "What? What is it?"

"Nothing, I've just never been wild about the way that stuff smells."

Severus's forehead creased. "Oh, come, how bad can it smell from three feet away?"

Emily grinned at him. "Darling, keep in mind that I can smell the starch from your shirt and the shaving lotion you used yesterday. Fresh brewed coffee from three feet away is like to incinerate my nose hairs right off."

He looked at her in disbelief. "I've no idea why you object so much to a simple beverage – "

"I don't object to it, I simply don't like the way it smells is all."

"This, from a woman who thinks nothing of having a beer first thing in the morning. Have you ever even tasted coffee before?"

"No, but I don't need to taste pond scum to know that it's probably rather vile as well. You wouldn't want to be around me if I tried some, believe me."

"Why?" He looked at her sceptically. "What would happen?"

Emily gave him a sinister-eyebrowed look of her own. "All right, fine, I'll show you why I can't drink coffee." She waved Martha back over to their table. "Could I have a single cup of espresso? Thank you."

Their waitress returned shortly with a tiny white china cup and saucer. Emily picked it up and blew on it for a moment, then downed the entire cup in a single swallow, holding her nose and making a face as though she had just taken some vile medicine indeed, then chased it with a large gulp of mint tea.

"Now, was it really that bad?" Severus asked.

She grinned at him. "You'll see."

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From then on, there was absolutely no stopping her all day.

They walked from one end of Nornsay to the other, and she was a non-stop font of questions and gay chatter about everything, as energetic as a hummingbird. Then they took the path back up to Snape Hall, and Severus had to hurry to keep up with the pace she set. She was as distractible as a child on the way back, wandering from the path to look at anything that caught her eye for even a second, with a new, hectic brightness to her manner.

The elves were finishing up with their lunch preparations when they returned. Cecile happily told her Mistress that she had found a thicket of wild raspberries during her treks in the woods, and the elves had spent part of the morning in berry-picking. Cecile had then devised a lunch menu around the fruit: roast chicken with a salad of field greens and raspberries with vinaigrette, and a hot berry cobbler. When Cecile told the story of her find, Severus would have been hard pressed to say whether elf or Faerie twittered more excitedly.

After the meal, Emily mentioned Severus's earlier suggestion that they do a bit of fencing that day. "You know what, though, let's do a bit of work in the Arcadian style instead of the European linear style, because what with all that varied terrain outside it would be a good learning experience for you. After all you can't expect to always meet up with someone who's coming at you head on and most of the ground is dry now," she chirped, all in one breath, then took the steps up to the bedroom to change as though gravity had loosed some of its hold on her.

"You weren't joking about not being able to drink coffee, were you," Severus muttered as he followed.

Nonetheless, once they both got dressed for combat practice and into canvas jackets, fencing masks and gloves, and met each other in a grassy forest clearing that afternoon, he couldn't complain. It was like a day left over from the idyllic far past, with the restless seas below them and the golden sunlight slanting through the trees, when the young heir to the Snape family's tribal earldom had met with the medieval knights loyal to his clan for training with the sword and the bow. Both the Norwegian Viking lords and Scottish wizard earls from whom he had descended had held their lands through force of arms, and their sons would have been expected to do the same. He doubted, however, that any of those heirs had ever been trained by a knight such as this one.

"All right, squire." She tossed a wooden practice sword to him, and he caught it deftly. They saluted each other, and assumed en garde position.

Emily gave him a wild, mad-doggish sort of grin through the mask, slanting a challenging look down her blade.

"Defend yourself."

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She came on immediately with an attack at his left shoulder – Severus felt a breathless instant of fear and suspense in the pit of his stomach before he reacted, but then his well-drilled response to such provocation kicked in, and he parried her solidly, using the momentum of his blade against hers to force her back a step. This successful defence to her first attack sent a charge of visceral confidence through him, adrenaline racing through his veins as all his mammalian fight instincts came to the fore. He retreated to the right, for he knew his opponent was right-handed and thus felt more comfortable with attacking toward the left.

This combat on the uneven terrain of the grassy field felt much different than any of his previous experiences on a polished wooden floor, but he was adjusting quickly to it, to the springy leverage of the grass beneath his feet and the give of the dirt beneath the grass. This compensation came none too soon, for she aimed another attack at his right, a slash that would have bisected his collarbone had she connected with an Orcleofian in her hand – but he brought the practice blade up and countered in a manner that brought a spontaneous exclamation of "Good!" from his instructor.

He still wasn't able to get past her defences and land a solid hit on her, try as he might; his opponent had decades' worth of experience on him and he knew it. But he also outweighed her by about forty or fifty pounds and had about six inches of height and reach on her, and as such, was starting to be able to move her around a bit using his greater mass, and had noticed that it took her longer to recover for the next action if he could force her off balance. He had been learning to use this advantage during their hand-to-hand grappling sessions, and had actually been looking forward to their next session after Midsummer so as to continue working on that style of combat. Maybe later he could persuade her to take that sort of training up again, to make up for the session that wasn't.

They spent much of that afternoon in such practice, and Severus noticed to his considerable satisfaction that even if he couldn't land an attack on her yet, she was landing fewer and fewer attacks on him, and working harder for the ones that she did get. This made her resort to new tactics in order to maintain her advantage – he wasn't accustomed to low-line attacks just yet, so she started a campaign of feints to his upper torso followed by wickedly fast jabs to the knees that forced him into some frenetic footwork to dodge. Perhaps five minutes later she tried this tactic again, and he made the mistake of trying to chase her blade with his and parry rather than dodge – which meant that she landed a solid knock to the side of his knee before he could force her blade away.

"If that was a real combat situation I'd have just taken your leg half off at the knee," she threw out, circling him.

"This is what you're like at home, isn't it," he said, taking up position opposite her again. "You don't lavish encouragement and back massages on your squires in the Fianna, do you."

She shrugged. "There's the public school teaching style and the military teaching style, darling," she replied. "The kids at Hogwarts will never have to go up against three-hundred-pound Orcs – what they need to know is how to defend themselves against Dark Wizard sneak attacks. Can you even imagine what would happen if I stood in front of my class and knowledgeably discoursed on the best way to hack someone up with a sword?"

"I think most of the Slytherins and half the Gryffindors would hungrily lap that kind of knowledge up, but yes, the parents might be a little uncomfortable with it."

"Would you be uncomfortable with it?"

He fixed her with a look through the fencing mask. "When I said most of the Slytherins would lap that up, I was including myself among their number."

She gave a depraved little laugh, assuming en garde stance again. Yes, Severus was starting to know his opponent well, and was quite aware that she had become a soldier not just to defend her country, but as an outlet for the aggressions seething beneath her professorial propriety. Whether it was the unaccustomed stimulant in her blood, the fact that she had finally paid him back in kind for the great boon he had done her, or the splendid isolation of Snape Hall, she was in fine mettle of savage competitiveness that day.

"Someone's feeling forceful today," he said, after barely evading another feint-disengage-attack combination.

Emily laughed. "Sorry."

"Don't stop. I rather like it."

"This is nothing," she scoffed. "You should try taking me on in my other form."

"Fine," he snapped back, without a trace of fear. "Kick the trainers off and have at it."

"Oh yes, right," she replied, as though that was the most preposterous notion ever conceived.

"No, do it." He dropped his en garde stance and leaned the sword against the ground. "I'd rather like to see that."

"My dear, it's been well established to me that what's normal for my people is not normal for yours," she retorted. "There are a lot of people here who aren't at all comfortable with me unless I'm passing for human. Hell, even my eyes and ears are barely acceptable to some."

"There's no one here but us."

"Oh, please, I saw the way you reacted to me at the hunt," she shot back, an edge in her voice.

"There you go equating me with the Felina Rosiers and Druella Blacks of the world again. I'd quite appreciate it if you stopped that, because it's damned irritating. You're a teacher, Emily, such sweeping and unfounded assumptions are beneath you," he reproved her.

She paused, then yanked off the mask to face him directly. "Come off it, you looked shocked beyond belief when you saw me, I remember it quite clearly."

Severus pulled off his own mask as well. "Was I surprised to discover that I was personally acquainted with a shapeshifter the like of which I'd never seen before? Bloody hell yes I was, I'll not deny that."

"Do you know what would have happened that day if I hadn't been able to dodge like I did?" she demanded hotly. "I would have died, Severus, there was no way I could have gotten clear of the boar's rake attack unless I switched forms at that instant, I would have ended up with my entrails hanging out like that poor horse – "

"You don't have to defend that decision to me – it's always been obvious why you used the tactics you did. And if you'll remember, I tried to help you up after you had killed it. While you were still in your hoofed form, mind."

She paled deeply, staring at the ground for a long moment before she finally glanced back at him. "I'm sorry," she said. "I guess I don't really remember a lot of what happened afterward with perfect accuracy. I was very upset at the time."

"I noticed." He waited, his gaze holding hers.

She took a deep breath, then took off her shoes and socks and put them aside, facing him across the clearing on her bare feet – and in another instant, he was facing an otherworldly new opponent, a creature with enormous brown eyes, dainty cloven hooves, and whisking cervoid ears. "All right, but don't say I didn't warn you. Ready?"

"Yes."

And then they had at each other.

He came on with a swift lunge to her right hip – and in an eyeblink, she simply sprang past him and wasn't there. His attack connected only with air.

Nimble little minx, aren't you, he muttered.

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Perhaps half an hour later, Severus fell exhausted onto the grass and put his mask aside, then downed most of a bottle of water. "I'm afraid I'll have to admit defeat this time, my dear. And yes, you did warn me."

Emily took off her own mask and crouched beside him, gathering her hooves beneath her with her arms around her haunches. "Well, you did put yourself at a bit of a disadvantage."

"So I see."

"Don't feel too bad about it, really. I have a vertical leap of about six feet in this form. It certainly helps with avoiding attacks and getting that apple high up in the tree."

"Vertical leap of six feet? Straight up?" he asked, mopping his brow with a towel.

"Straight up. Measured it and everything – when you've got a bunch of soldiers with free time on their hands, they do a bunch of stuff like measure how high they can jump and how fast they can run and who can beat who in swordfighting."

"I can imagine – we did much the same thing in flying class when I was a boy." He closed the space between them, peering intently into her face, then hesitantly stroked her hair back behind the deerlike ear, and traced its outline with his fingertips.

"No need to be so reverent about it, darling, it's still me, I just look different," she pointed out.

"Of course," he whispered, stroking her ear with more familiarity.

A moment later she pulled off her gauntlets and got out of the fencing jacket, then got out of the cotton jersey, fencing knickers, and sports bra she was wearing under it, her eyes averted, arms clasped modestly over her breasts. It was a picture he remembered from Swain's Encyclopaedia, the woodcut of the slender nude female faun, only breathing and alive, in full sunlight and close enough to touch.

Then her eyes met his; a wary gaze through windblown fair hair. "Well?"

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Well indeed.

Her eyes and the pose made her seem much more a wild thing of the forest than a noble lady; almost a child, carnal and lawless. How magical her kind must have seemed to human beings of centuries past, who thought that a good harvest must be due to the goodwill of a panoply of fertility gods. And how eerie and demonic she would have seemed to those who personified their religion's force of ultimate evil with horns, cloven hooves, and a tail.

"What does the transformation feel like?" he asked. "Does it hurt?"

"No, not at all. I barely notice it."

"Do you... if you change forms spontaneously, do you have to adjust to the different anatomy?"

She shrugged. "No, my mind just seems to know how to compensate for the physiological changes automatically. I don't have to adjust to it any more than you would have to re-learn how to stand up if you'd been sitting for awhile."

"Interesting." He pulled her into his arms, one hand caressing the curve of her delicate haunch – it felt like stroking a gazelle. "You're not terrifying," he said softly. "Really rather graceful, in my opinion. If one is at all familiar with Greek sculpture, this form is very classical. Although I'll admit I'll need some time to get used to it."

"Severus, stop it, don't worry, you're hardly alone in that," she said, her arms twining around his neck. "My husband was a sluagh from the Sixth Kingdom, and he had never met any shapechangers or pookas until his platoon was deployed to the Third Kingdom. Any time a person meets a whole new race of people, it takes time to get accustomed to how different they are."

"Well, speaking of getting accustomed to the ways one's lover is different... I don't know any delicate way to put this, but I do have a preference for your other form in, er, intimate situations. It's simply that – "

Her head fell onto his shoulder with a merry laugh. "Of course you do. You're not a male faun, so you're not biologically hardwired to find this form sexually attractive – it's just too different from your own physiology. Having hooves and a tail isn't like having a different skin tone, to you that would be akin to bestiality. And yes, my husband felt the same way and it didn't offend me. But... " In another second she had morphed from the elfin hoofed form to soft, bare skin, oval knees, pale, high-arched feet – "how about this body?"

"Not that your saucy white tail isn't charming in its own way, but I do enjoy this form the most." He raised her face to his and kissed her softly. "Now, I'm afraid the sight of all this pretty naked female flesh has chased all thoughts of fencing practice from my mind, so what do you say to another interlude in bed before supper?"

"Only if you promise to take all my irreverent remarks out of my hide, just like you said earlier," she murmured, kissing him back.

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Emily put on her knickers and jersey for the walk back up to the castle, tucking everything else under her arm, and when they returned to the bedroom, she wasted no time in getting them off again. "All right, I think I'll go have a shower, then – "

"Don't bother." Something about the fierce competition of that day had gotten Severus's blood up, and now the scent of her exertion and the aggressive energies still racing through his veins were going straight to his head. All he wanted was to subdue her even more primally, to make his lover and opponent capitulate to his wishes in the most direct way possible. He caught her around the waist and lowered his lips onto her shoulder.

"The elves are going to be expecting us at dinner," Emily pointed out, but was swiftly becoming distracted.

"Let them send it up like they did before." He scooped her up over his shoulder and tossed her onto the great four-poster bed in a manner that many a young tribal chieftain's bride would have recognised immediately. Forget showers and dinner, no, he wanted her now, with the barely cooled sweat on her hairline and back and between her breasts.

"You liked throwing me to the mat all those times, didn't you," he growled into her ear, dragging the sweaty cotton jersey over his head.

"You're damned bloody right I did." She drew his throat taut by a fistful of hair, burying her lips in the salt of his neck. "I wasn't going to pass up an opportunity to touch you, oh thou totally unapproachable man. You drove me absolutely crazy sometimes – every week I had to see you all riled up and sweaty and totally unwilling to give an inch – "

"If you wanted to actually do something about that situation, never for an instant would I have been averse to a little honey-tongued begging, preferably after you'd very fetchingly thrown yourself at my feet – " From the rate he was divesting himself of clothing, and the predatory way he lowered her to the mattress, it was very likely that he was feeling substantially less unapproachable and unwilling at that moment.

"Thrown myself at your feet begging?" She gave him another of those challenging, mad-doggish smiles. "Maybe in your dreams, love – "

"Then I'll just have to show you what you missed, proud little – "

She resisted as he pushed her down on the bed, meeting his strength with hers and letting him feel just a touch of opposition for the aphrodisiac intensity it provoked in both of them – but he forced her back down onto the mattress, roughly parted her thighs with one knee, and sheathed himself deep inside her. This intoxicating show of force met with remarkably little further resistance; her body recoiling under his in violent welcome, teeth sinking into his shoulder, nails raking lightly down his back. She gave another of those feline little yowls of pleasure he remembered from the callbox as it began, hard and deep and frenzied, and he met it with a growl of his own.

Would that all conquered opponents surrendered so lusciously. As that act built toward its lusty climax, it occurred to him that he could face anything, even the stresses of a new school year and whatever lay ahead for the Order, if only he could always have this waiting for him of an evening when it was all over.

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The elves did send supper up to the bedroom after it became clear that their respective master and mistress were not coming down to the dining room; a lamb, pancetta, and vegetable stew with lightly buttered wild rice and mugs of Irish beer, from a menu Emily recognised from a collection of Arcadian recipes she had shown to Cecile.

Severus soon dropped off to sleep after supper and a hot shower, wrapped around her from behind, and Emily lay for an hour or two just entwined with him in the darkness, listening to his soft breathing and enjoying the feel of his limp relaxation nestled beside her. But her heart was still racing along at an alert pace thanks to the espresso she had drunk that day, and the hours of combat practice had done nothing to fatigue her. She got out of bed, faintly lighting her way with an unobtrusive Lioht spell, and pulled on a long white nightgown and robe of dark green velvet, then stepped into a pair of flat black slippers. Finally she silently let herself out of the bedroom, taking care not to disturb him.

During this time of year, the castle was only shadowed, not in full dark even this late at night. Out in the hallway, she held up her cupped hand, concentrating her Lioht effect into a ball of bright green light, which then rose to light the way before her, flitting about like a mischievous will 'o the wisp. She went down to the kitchen, poured herself another mug of ale, and finished off the last cold leg of duck in the icebox. Then she rummaged in the cupboards until she found some Mrs. Scower's Magical Tarnish Remover and some soft rags, and retraced the way upstairs to Eileen Snape's tower library, lit a few candelabra, and then spent twenty minutes thoroughly cleaning and polishing all the intricate Art Nouveau silver on the little antique desk, using a Waskan spell to animate the polishing cloth. Severus would probably never even notice, but the caffeine left her so full of nervous energy that she wanted to work at something, and it was intensely satisfying to see such beauty emerging from under all that neglect. She examined the silversmith's mark on the bottom of each piece – Wurttembergische MetallwarenFabrik 1906. She had never heard of the metalworks, but something about the heavy weight of the silver and the graceful, swirling intricacies of the pattern made her think that perhaps these pieces were of some value.

After the desk set was done, Emily turned her attention to the hurricane lamps and candelabra in the room, all of which also bore the same maker's mark and were in similar states of tarnish. When she was finished, Eileen's library looked a fraction brighter and less forlorn to her, and she felt well satisfied with her work.

Then she remembered the bare, dusty main library downstairs, and the notion possessed her to perhaps go down and visit that room as well. She made her way down into the main library, lighting the single lamp on the little side table to create an oasis of light in the centre of the room, then turned her attention to the stacks.

Emily couldn't remember a time when she had not loved libraries. During her childhood, Lady Elaine's duties as First Knight meant that she had often been off on military assignments for Gwydion, and Buckminster Swain had undertaken to give his daughter her primary education himself, rather than entrust her to a tutor. As a result, Emily had spent much of her childhood in the king's personal library, learning not only the lessons her father taught her, but also acquiring his deep and abiding love for books, and an appreciation for the highly skilled work that went into printing, illustration, and bindery. Now, as she perused the shelves of the Snape family library, great smudges of dust and cobwebs were left on her hands, and now and then she found rare volumes dated from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with water-damaged covers, or with bindings so old that entire clumps of pages fell out when she opened them.

It struck her as an absolute sin and a crime that such books should be allowed to moulder away from neglect, so she extended a hand and carefully removed some of the dust from the volumes on the shelf with a Waskan spell. She spent a moment judiciously surveying the entire collection, and decided that what this library really needed was for each individual volume to be taken down, dusted, and the leather covers wiped with a cloth lightly dampened with lanolin and castor oil. It occurred to her that perhaps she could get some supplies from the village and teach Cecile and the other elves how to properly maintain the books – but then her eye was drawn to the clock on the mantelpiece, which read 1:47 a.m. All right, maybe she could talk to the elves later.

She took up a single volume – Keats's Complete Poems, a gorgeous old illuminated edition with swirling pastel drawings after the style of Alphonse Mucha: Isabella with her pot of basil, the Grecian urn, Lamia in all her serpentine glory. The endpapers still looked beautiful and the leather cover was in very good shape after she wiped the dust away, but the binding was nearly worn out; clumps of pages fell out into her hand when she opened it. So, she took the book over to the table by the sofa, and set about with a few Biblio Reparo spells.

After a few minutes' work, she muttered, "Damn it, the glue is all gone, can't do much more without getting some adhesive." She considered for a moment – this late at night, nothing in the village would be open. Perhaps she could go back down to the kitchen and rummage about again –

Then something touched her hand, she looked up – to find a bottle of spirit gum sitting on the table beside her, where it had most definitely not been a moment earlier, and she was still entirely alone in the library. Emily nearly jumped out of her skin, staring wildly around her.

After a moment, she calmed herself, remembering that Severus had told her that an invisible ghostly presence inhabited this library. This ghost was notably protective of his space – Severus had said that he had become hostile when any of the books or furniture had been sold. As such, it did logically follow that perhaps he would be favourably inclined toward someone who came into the library, dusted the books, and began restoration work on one of them.

She gingerly picked up the glue bottle, murmuring "Thank you," to the air around her, and began work again. After some careful gluing and half an hour of painstaking Biblio Reparo spells, she thought the book was rather nicely restored. The pages flipped easily when opened, and due to the deckle edges of the pages, a person would really have to look to find where they had been reinserted.

"Not bad, if I do say so myself," she said, then addressed the air again – "Is there perhaps any castor oil about for the leather covers?"

When she glanced back down, there was another leather-bound book sitting on the table, and a bottle reading Old Anodyne's 100% Pure Castor Bean Oil. Emily smiled, looking around with wide eyes. There was still no one there, but from somewhere nearby, she detected the companionable scent of pipe tobacco.

"Well, Mr. Prince – I'll assume you're a Prince – you're a very helpful fellow," she said to the empty room. "I'm Emily Swain, by the way. I'm here visiting your descendant Severus Snape, the current owner of the castle. It's really a shame Severus doesn't have more time to maintain your library, because you've got some wonderful books here. I'm having a bout of insomnia tonight, so I thought I'd poke around a bit, and as it turns out, you've got some books that could use a going-over. Why don't you just keep bringing them to me, and I'll see what I can do. While I'm at it, do you think you could do something about the dust and cobwebs? I know you were probably pretty depressed when some of them were sold, but that's no reason to just stop looking after them, don't you think?"

When she glanced down again, her stack of books on the table had grown by two volumes, both of which had been nicely dusted.

"Thank you very much," she said.

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Severus woke early, as per his usual habit, and was surprised to find himself alone. He got up, dressed, and went looking for Emily.

When he couldn't find her in the bathroom, dining room, or any of the sitting rooms, he started to get a bit worried, but then it occurred to him to check the libraries. He found Emily in the large main library, sitting on the sofa. She had pulled the side table in front of her, and now it was absolutely covered with books, cleaning rags, and little bottles.

"Hello, love," she called when she saw him. "I couldn't sleep so I came down here but then I noticed some of the books were losing pages," she said, all in one breath, raising her glassy eyes to him. "So I fixed a few of the books that were falling apart. The ghost kept bringing them to me, he was really helpful. Nice fellow."

She indicated a stack of books on the table, about thirteen or fourteen of them in all. Severus glanced at the stack of volumes beside her, then picked up the one on top, his mother's treasured old illustrated edition of Keats's complete works – and for the first time in years, none of the pages fell out when he opened it. She had put it back together so well that he couldn't find the mends in the binding.

"Emily... you did a fine job of this," he said, glancing up at her in surprise. "Where did you learn it?"

"My father's a library curator, darling," she said, shrugging. "The King is a huge book collector and oftentimes he would acquire these incredibly old books of poetry and ballads or magical grimoires or whatever, and my father would have to restore them. When I got big enough, I started helping him. Second-World bound books are actually really easy by comparison to Arcadian books because the modern binderies manufacture them all the same standardised way and... " Then her head was nearly split in half by an enormous yawn.

"And you've been up the whole night doing this?" he asked, one eyebrow arching toward the ceiling. He came closer to her, and noticed that while her eyelids were heavy and her face very pale, her hands were shaking slightly, and she was talking a mile a minute. "Shouldn't you perhaps go to bed?"

"There's no way I'd be able to sleep, dear. I'm still far too wired from that coffee I drank yesterday."

"But that was yesterday."

She shrugged helplessly, hands jittering. "And three glasses of Seventh Kingdom absinthe would just give me a nice giddy high for a few hours, whereas you were convinced that the inconsiderate walls of the Knight Bus were breathing too loudly... ?"

"Ah. I see." Then he helped her up off the sofa, and put his arm around her waist, and started out of the room.

"Where are we going? I still have more books to work on!" she protested, with a touch of uncharacteristic irrational peevishness, no doubt the result of a night of sleep deprivation.

"You can get to those later. Right now, we're going to have a bit of breakfast, and then you're going upstairs and taking a nice dose of Dreamless Sleep Potion."

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Emily went out like a light after she took the sleeping potion, and Severus covered her with the bedclothes and drew the bedroom curtains. Then he went downstairs to meet with the first of the roofing contractors he had contacted.

When the man arrived, the two of them got on broomsticks and flew over the roof of the castle, and the man gave Severus his opinion of what work needed to be done, a timeframe of how long it would take, and a cost estimate, which was, not surprisingly, for a very large amount of Galleons. In order to restore the roof of the Anglo-Saxon wing of the castle where the roof had rotted and fallen in, the contractor thought the structure would need some strengthening so as to be able to take the weight of new construction, which would require large-scale Reparo spells to the rafters and beams from a crew of trained construction wizards. "This would be a major renovation job, and that's for certain, Mr. Snape. This place is so old, you see, I'd need to hire some specially trained sort of engineers and construction wizards, the sort who work on historical cathedrals and castles like Hogwarts, and that kind of skilled labour doesn't come cheap."

"I understand," Severus said. He noted down the figure quoted, and thanked the man for his time.

The second contractor came by an hour or two later, and had much the same opinions of the scale of renovation required as the first fellow had, and quoted a very similar price to undertake it. The third contractor, who turned up not long afterward, had much the same opinion as well.

However, even though it would be years before Severus could save enough to undertake a full-scale renovation of the castle's roof, what with Emily's consulting fee, he now had almost enough to have the central wing's roof replaced. Once the coming school year started, the work could commence by the following spring. Well – he had done a strange Faerie a good turn, and as a result, he was going to get rid of his leaky roof over a year ahead of schedule. This made his steps feel a great deal lighter as he mounted the stairs back to their bedroom.

When he arrived, Emily was out of bed, and the room was deserted, so he again went in search of her. Downstairs in the dining room, Philomela told him that Emily had already been down for an early lunch, and had gone outside onto the northern castle grounds afterward, taking Cecile with her. Severus then had a quick lunch himself, got back on his broomstick, and went looking for the two of them.

From the air, he spotted a familiar red-gold head and pair of big, droopy ears within the walls of his mother's old rose garden. Emily looked up and waved when she saw him – Severus, we're down here!

When he touched down in the centre of the garden, he saw that Emily had put on Muggle jeans, a light woollen pullover, and an old pair of rubbers, and had garden shears in her hands. The flagstones of the garden path had been swept clean, and she had raked the dead leaves and effluvia out from under the rose trees and bushes in one entire quadrant of the garden down to the rich, bare black earth, and piled them into a bin she had found or Transfigured up from somewhere. She and Cecile were now clipping off the dead canes and branches of diseased leaves on several of the plants, and had been piling the clipped blooms on the nearest stone bench.

"Do you see that?" Emily asked Cecile, holding up a rose branch. "That's called blackspot, it's a rose disease. When you see leaves with these black spots, I want you to pluck them off if there's only a few of them, but just cut the branch off entirely if it's really covered with it."

"The roses, they is sick, then?" Cecile asked.

"Yes, they're sick and need our help to get better."

"You didn't sleep very long, did you," Severus said, propping his broomstick against a bench.

"Sorry, all that caffeine is probably going to get me up bright and early for some time now," Emily replied, shrugging.

"I'm sorry I even brought up the topic of coffee," he said, with a dire shake of his head. "What have you two gotten up to, then?"

"Cecile kept going for all those walks around the castle, and she told me at lunch today that she had found the prettiest little garden down here, all these white rose trees and rosebushes. It's the perfect spot for roses up here, all sheltered from the sea breezes by the house and that big stand of oaks all round," she said, nodding out toward the woods. "But it's all overgrown, and some of the plants have a horrible case of blackspot, and there were enough aphids to choke whales. So I told the aphids to get lost and picked up a rake and shears. I've just got a lot of energy to work off due to my least favourite beverage, and I thought it would look so pretty with a bit of care, and I like roses, so there you go."

She bent over the drift of flowers on the bench and selected a single full-blown blossom, then brought it over for him to see. A slender, graceful form amidst a bank of blooming plants; a woman's slender hand offering him a white rose. Suddenly Severus's throat had closed completely.

"Darling? Are you all right?" Emily was watching his face intently. "Was this, er, someone's garden?"

"It was my mother's garden," he whispered. "She planted the roses herself. We used to sit out here, when the sun was up... "

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to... I'm sorry. I guess I'm turning into a bit of a Little Miss Fix-It, aren't I, it was just that... " She turned away from him, embarrassed. "I'll leave it to your elves, then – "

"No, no. Thank you, it looks like you've been working hard at this." He swallowed hard. "I just haven't been down to this part of the garden in rather a long time, is all, I haven't told the elves to maintain it, really... "

"I don't blame you – roses are really high-maintenance, they're more of a hobby than just a plant. You've got to have a bit of a passion for them, I suppose," she said with a touch of false gaiety, putting the shears aside on a bench. It seemed to him that she was making excuses to cover her embarrassment, and wanted to be gone from here before she offended him any further than she thought she already had.

His hand closed around hers, brought the white rose to his face, and inhaled deeply. "Did you have a rose garden at home, that you had a bit of a passion for?" he asked.

Emily paled, eyes downcast. "Well no, not like this. Just some plants in pots – I liked a few varieties that smelled nice. But I gave them away when I left to come here. Just one of my momentary crazes, really... "

She started to turn away, but he drew her back and kissed her cheek, until she relaxed against him and he felt her worry and self-consciousness fading away. Then he tucked her white rose behind one of her ears, and smoothed her windblown hair.

"Would you like some help?" he asked.

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The raking and pruning-back continued apace, and with three people at work, that neglected, overgrown little garden was starting to look quite well-manicured and shipshape. Cecile was too small to reach the rose trees, so Emily had her pulling weeds and pruning the smaller bushes.

At first the elf was loath to cut off too many dead canes and diseased branches, especially on when it left a plant looking much more bare than before, but Emily assured her that pruning roses was good for them and encouraged them to grow. "Even if you cut it nearly bare, it'll grow back in a few months – roses are tough, they can bounce back healthy after all sorts of things." Cecile nodded, and fell back to work.

"So you told the aphids to get lost, eh? How did you manage that?" Severus asked.

"In English, it's called Fauna Ken, the art of commanding animals. The general rule of thumb is that the less intelligent the creature you're trying to influence is, the more surely you can order it to do your bidding. Let's see – " She glanced around for a moment and spied a sparrow in the trees above them, then silently spoke a word – and the little bird glided off the branch to alight fearlessly on her open hand.

"How did you do that?" he asked, pausing in his work to watch.

"Put the idea in his mind that he would be unharmed and get a nice head-scratch out of it if he came over and said hello," Emily said, lightly scratching the sparrow's head and neck with a delicate fingertip. "And now that I have his attention, I can use a bit of Deceivre and have a chat with him – how are you today, Mister Flitterhop?" she asked the bird, again silently speaking a word.

The sparrow twittered for a moment, and Emily nodded. "He says he's having a good day, because he's been finding a lot of food, and the weather's been nice. These are all very important matters to a sparrow, you see." Again she addressed the bird with a silent invocation of her True Name – "Well, I'm pleased to have made your acquaintance, sir. Please convey our good wishes to your mate."

The sparrow took his leave of her with a jaunty bob of his speckled brown head, spread his wings, and darted away – and Emily turned back to Severus. "See? That's all there is to it."

"Interesting," he murmured, his eyes following the sparrow as he alighted back in the tree. "How did it work with the aphids?"

"All right, consider the common aphid," she said, falling to work with her rake again. "It's a slow-moving, soft-bodied insect that feeds on plants like roses and violets. What do you think motivates it?"

"Let's see... food, of course, and safety, and the wish to reproduce, I suppose," he said, shrugging.

"Right, it's not a very complex creature, so that's probably all it's capable of thinking about. So you've got this aphid contentedly living and laying eggs on a rosebush. What do you think would motivate it to take its eggs and leave a situation like that?"

"Hmmm... " He paused, considering. "Fear of being eaten and all its young wiped out, I suppose. One would have to somehow convince it that it and its eggs were in danger of imminent death, that it was being threatened by some predator."

"Exactly," she said, smiling at him. "What I did was convince them that if they didn't leave this garden forever, a plague of mantises and ladybugs would devour them and all of their eggs, but if they left this garden alone, there was a feast of wildflowers for them far away in the woods where they would be safe. And wouldn't you know it, they started picking up their eggs and trooping away into the grass. See, there some of them go now," she said, nodding toward a cluster of slow-moving green and brown insects, each carrying tiny white eggs as they made their way across the flagstone and out of the garden. "Then I used a Weard spell to create a barrier around this garden, so that any parasite thinking to feed on the roses would be possessed with the fear of predators, and leave."

"Weard spells – I think I might have read about those in your father's Encyclopaedia. Magical wards, right?"

"Right," she said, nodding. "It'll fade eventually, so I'll need to refresh it every so often, but until then, you've seen the last of any parasites on these roses."

"So you've put an invisible insect-repelling barrier around the garden, then?"

"Just against parasites. The bees and such can come in and pollinate like before."

"So... do Fauna Ken and Deceivre fall under the heading of that which you can teach your lover?"

She turned to him, smiling, holding a fragrant white rose to her lips. "They surely do," she said.

Eileen Snape's white rose garden had years before served as a classroom, in which she had taught her child to read and write three languages, to work out mathematics and how to study the natural sciences, and to comprehend centuries of diverse literature. That afternoon, the garden became a classroom again, as more of the Faery magical canon was thrown open to its newest acolyte, Eileen's son.

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Three hours later, the garden's paths and grounds were entirely clear and they were well into the pruning, and Cecile was in ecstasies over the perfect raft of fresh-cut white roses covering the bench, and already full of ideas as to how she was going to arrange them.

Emily had been instructing Severus in the first form of Deceivre all afternoon, discovering that as she suspected, he already had quite a bit of natural facility with the second form of Deceivre, the ability to see through magical verbal deceptions. "I'm not surprised, really – if I have any talent there, it's no doubt the result of listening to thirteen years of students lying about everything and anything," he said, shaking his head.

"I've heard from any number of students how difficult it is to put anything over on you. Just think how much harder it'll be now," Emily said, with a mischievous smile.

"If they'd all only listen and pay attention, study hard, do their homework, and arrive punctually to class, none of their prevarications would be necessary," Severus replied, snipping a dead cane off a rose tree with a particularly vicious snap of the clippers.

"And of course the chances of that ever happening are about roughly the same as the Malfoys giving a tremendous contribution to Miss Granger's Society for the Protection of Elvish Welfare," Emily said, laughing. "You know what, now that I'm staying for another year, maybe I'll have to accede to her requests that I become the faculty advisor for that."

"Society for the Protection of Elvish Welfare – oh, is that why she went about with a badge reading 'S.P.E.W.' on her uniform this year?" Severus asked, with a sarcastic chuckle.

"Yes, the acronym is kind of unfortunate, I'll grant you – but it's nice to know a teenage girl who's interested in something more than boys, clothes, and hairstyles."

"I'll say the acronym is unfortunate – it sounds like an advocacy group for bulimics."

Emily threw a bundle of leaves at his back. "Come on! If one of the Slytherin girls had started it, you'd be commending her for her civic virtue."

"Possibly – but I can't help but think how becoming that's going to look on your curriculum vitae – 'Yes, during my time at Hogwarts, I was the faculty advisor of S.P.E.W.'"

"Oh, you... little... " She pelted him with more leaves, and if the woman honestly thought having this kind of giggling, spluttering, childish tantrum was going to discourage him from teasing her in the future, she was daft. "You behave – or you can figure out Deceivre for yourself, you," she declared.

"All right, all right, you can involve yourself with whatever campus organisations you wish next year, and I will only applaud your community spirit," he replied blandly. He turned away to prune another branch, muttering "Advisor of S.P.E.W." as he did so. Emily groaned.

"Well then, let's get back to your lessons," she said, continuing to clip dead and diseased leaves and branches from the tree before her. "Like I said, you can use Deceivre to understand other languages and communicate with animals. Now I'm going to sing a song in another language, let me know when you can understand the words – "

"So I focus on the tone of your voice, what the words sound like they mean, whether they're declarative, imparting information, or interrogatory, questioning me for information, and then invoke my True Name, and see if I can find the meaning behind the inflections... " His fine black brows were deeply creased in concentration.

"Right. I'll start now – "

She began softly singing a tune as she continued her work; they were now almost finished with the third quadrant of the garden. Her voice betrayed the huskiness and imperfect phrasing of an untrained singer, but was nonetheless a sweet soprano –

"Siúil, siúil, siúil, a rúin

Siúil go sochair agus siúil go ciúin,

Siúil go doras agus éalaigh liom,

Is go dté tú mo mhúirnín slán... "

Severus paused in his work, listening closely. The words were unintelligible... but there was something so imploring about the first words, repeated three times, like someone begging someone else for something, or to do something, such a tender, reverent inflection to the word rúin... the only word he knew of that was pronounced like that was, of course, "love"... what did one implore one's love to do...

"Severus?" The song was over.

He shook his head impatiently. "Sing it again, I didn't quite get it. What language is that?"

"It's an Irish Gaelic traditional ballad." She cleared her throat and began again... Severus closed his eyes and silently invoked his True name...

and this time he picked out a word.

Come...

A woman asking her lover to come to her? Yes, somehow that sounded right – and then it was like someone in a distant room had finally gotten close enough to make out what she was singing –

"Come, come, come, O love,

Quickly come to me, softly move;

Come to the door, and away we'll flee,

And safe for aye may my darling be!"

"And safe for aye may my darling be," he whispered, opening his eyes and turning to her.

Emily put aside her pruning shears with a delighted laugh and threw her arms around his neck. "You're brilliant, my love," she said, kissing him soundly. "Absolutely brilliant. And it'll just get easier the more you use it."

Cecile had been heaping white roses into a pair of willow baskets as this lesson went on, and now she cut her eyes away with a little squeak when her Mistress had embraced Mr. Professor for yet another effusive bout of kissing. After a moment, she murmured, "Er, Mistress Emily? It is getting on supper time, and I am wanting to make up some of these roses into decorations for the, er, the special thingy tonight. May I be taking them up to the kitchen?"

"Yes, that's a wonderful idea, Cecile, go right ahead. I can't wait to see what you come up with – your bouquets are always so pretty."

Cecile grinned happily. "Thank you!" Then she took the two absolutely enormous baskets in each hand, and vanished with a puff of grey smoke.

Severus turned a quizzical look toward Emily. "What's that about a special thingy tonight?"

"Well, seeing as how I completely missed the feast of Lughnasadh this year due to extenuating circumstances, I thought I'd throw a belated one," she said, smiling at him.

"We're throwing a feast tonight, are we?"

"We are." She only grinned all the worse. "All you have to do is put on your summer dress robes, and meet me in the grand ballroom at seven p.m. tonight."

"Really. And how many guests are we expecting, may I ask?"

"Just two."

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Emily took herself off to another stateroom to wash off the sweat and mud of her afternoon's gardening and prepare for whatever she had planned for that evening, so Severus showered, shaved, and dressed in their bedroom alone. At exactly a few minutes after seven p.m. (he decided to forgo his usual extremely punctual habits in deference to his hostess) he made his way down to meet her.

The ballroom looked absolutely magnificent – Severus finally realised exactly what mysterious project she had had the elves working on in the evenings previous. The formerly dusty and cobwebbed crystal chandeliers had all been taken down and cleaned to a prismatic shine, and the whole room was lit to an ethereal glow with Lioht spells and new wax tapers in freshly polished silver candelabra. The marble floor had been polished to a buttery shine, and the stained glass windows were outlined in silvery-green light. As he entered, someone put a victrola's needle to a record; he recognised Vivaldi's Four Seasons.

Every available surface held a bowl or vase or ewer of prettily arranged white roses – clearly Cecile had gone all out with the decorations. The supper table was set with an abundance of dishes: roast pheasant on a bed of wild rice, a small roast of what he thought might be liver of some kind, field greens and all manner of summer vegetables, fresh-baked wheat rolls, honey cake, a raspberry and blackcurrant tart, and several bottles of wine chilling in a silver basin.

And finally – the smiling girl he remembered from the Malfoys' wedding, the fair-haired one in the little silvery-green dress, was waiting there for him – and she smiled rapturously when she saw him arrive. Then she wafted up, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him as though he was the one person she loved most in all this world. "There you are, love," she said. "Happy Lughnasadh."

He kissed her back, his arms finding their now-accustomed cosy place around her waist. "Now tell me, what exactly is Lughnasadh?"

"It's one of the four great feasts of the Arcadian calendar – the others are Imbolc, Beltane, and Samhain. It has other names too, Lammas, Lammastide, and Latha Lunasdal. We have some minor feasts too, like Midsummer, Yule, and Ostara as well. Lughnasadh is a harvest festival, the first one of the year; there are three of them in total. It's now that we bid farewell to summer, and it's thought that the Mother will change her aspect from the Maiden, to the Mother, and then when winter starts, she'll become the Wisewoman, or Crone."

"That's right, I recall reading something about that. The Morrigan is a Crone aspect, isn't she?"

"One of the main ones, yes."

"And exactly how would you be celebrating it at home?"

"We'd have a big feast, with lots of things made with fresh butter and milk and honey, and mead, and the brewers usually bring out a special seasonal beer around this time. A lot of the time people go berry-picking, and it's thought that the more berries you find, the better the harvest will be. And then there are traditional dances that are usually performed at this time of year at sunset. Then we'd all eat and drink and dance ourselves into exhaustion, and everybody would take the next day off to sleep."

He chuckled, then nodded toward the table. "That's quite a supper."

"Thanks, I showed Philomela a collection of traditional recipes from home, and she spent all day shopping and cooking," Emily said gaily, bringing him to the table and pulling out his chair for him. She then took a bottle from the ice bucket and filled his wineglass with a pale, amber-coloured wine. "It's customary to drink mead at this holiday, and wouldn't you know it, the wine shop in town actually had some. Have you ever tried it before?"

"No, never." The mead, a wine made from fermented honey, was like nothing he had ever tasted before, tangy, mildly sweet, and faintly spicy. It paired wonderfully with the food, especially the pheasant and dark brown bread. Emily busied herself with slicing the liver – after the first melting, delectable bite, she told him it was lightly seared foie gras, her King's favourite dish. "This is all wonderful, my dear."

She blushed. "Well, most of the credit goes to the elves, I just gave them the menu, recipes, and a shopping list."

"No matter who's responsible, I'm certainly not complaining. You're spoiling me this holiday – the only time I ever eat this well is during the first and last feasts of the year at school, at Christmas, and the occasional wedding."

Emily turned toward him, her eyes keen with curiosity. "Speaking of weddings – you said something to me when we were at the Mushroom Circle that really stood out in my mind. I don't know if you remember it, but you asked me: 'Why don't you wear green anymore – didn't you wear green to Lucius's wedding?' I didn't really think anything of it until I was packing to come here, and came across the exact frock I had worn," she said, smoothing her skirts. "How did you know? I don't recall anyone introducing us."

"No, no one ever did – you were too busy dancing with everyone, and I was too busy wishing I was somewhere else. I suppose I remember it because... you and your family were the only cheerful part of the whole wedding," he said quietly.

"You're absolutely right, love, was that not just the most lugubrious affair you ever saw? I never saw a bunch of wedding guests look so grim – we have wakes at home that are more cheerful than that. And then the highlight of the whole thing was when my parents made me get into this big crowd of women so Narcissa could chuck a floral arrangement at us, and it nearly bounced off my forehead."

Severus smothered a laugh in his hand. "Oh, yes, how well I remember that. You caught the bouquet, and then you threw it back up in the air and stepped away from it like it was contagious."

"It was coming right at my head – I only caught it in self-defence," she pointed out. "First I thought, 'What's this for again? Oh wait, it means I'll be the next to get married,' and my next thought was 'Bugger that, somebody else take it!' Then this ungraceful cow of a girl practically incurred a rugby foul trying to get the damn thing from me. Honestly, she was welcome to it, no need to stave my ribs in, really."

Severus recalled the tableau Emily and Bellatrix had made at the wedding: Bella's discomfiture, and Emily's cheerful, rude smile as she left the dance floor. The thought was enough to make his smothered laugh turn into a real one.

His companion watched him across the table with shining eyes. "I love it when you laugh," she said.

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After supper, Emily got up from the table, crossed to the victrola, and put on another record – waltz music began playing softly. "So tell me, do you remember asking me to teach you the waltz at the Mushroom Circle?"

He got up and joined her. "Vaguely. Though from what I saw in the Pensieve, we did make a rather good show of it."

She laughed merrily at the memory. "Absolutely we did. Would you like to give that another go, then?" she asked, holding out her hand. "It is traditional to do some dancing after the feast on this holiday."

"Well... perhaps that would be all right." He took her hand and drew her out onto the open ballroom floor. "Let's do this properly, shall we?" He made her a courtly bow, fixed her with another velvet-black gaze, and asked, "My Lady, may I have this dance?"

And as before, whenever he looked at her like that, everything between Emily's heart and knees turned to water. "Of... of course, sir."

Then his arm was around her waist, and hers around his shoulder, and she gave him a very quick refresher course as to the box step waltz, which, conveniently, he seemed to recall rather well. Before long, they were off in a fluid, stately waltz, and the rest of the world seemed to melt away to the edges of her memory. As she remembered from Midsummer, he was a pleasure to dance with, courteous, graceful, and light on his feet, and this time, he genuinely seemed to be enjoying this without the dubious benefit of a great deal of Seventh Kingdom absinthe, which did nothing to dispel the liquid trembling from somewhere in the vicinity of her heart and knees.

He leaned toward her ear – "And as I recall from the Pensieve, you said that next time, it would be my turn to lead?"

Her head fell onto his shoulder with an indulgent laugh. "Of course it is. Really, my love, you're doing fine. Better than fine. Whomever told you you couldn't dance definitely needs to be spanked."

"Oh no, no one ever told me I couldn't dance – it was that the more people pestered me to do it, the less I wanted to. After I'd gone to enough of those dreadful Wiltshire cotillions, the very idea of it was excruciating."

"Well then." She drew him closer into her arms as that dance continued, holding him in a manner that would have scandalised many a Wiltshire society hostess into an attack of the vapours had it been observed in her ballroom. "Perhaps we'll have to find a way to make the idea less excruciating for you in the future."

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Later that evening, after much wine, waltzing, and banter, the candles had burned far down and dancing had largely become an absent-minded sway to accompany a series of lengthy and extremely intense kisses. Not long afterward, both decided by some familiar mutual telepathy that what had been started on the dance floor would be best finished in bed, so they made their way upstairs. It was a slow, leisurely progress, their arms around each others' waists, and stealing kisses at every staircase landing.

Severus wasted no time in hanging up his robes, undressing, and getting into bed. He leaned contentedly against the pillows to watch his companion getting out of her clothes, his chin propped on one hand, and with a decidedly humid look in his black eyes.

She sat on the edge of the bed to remove her dancing shoes and stockings, then reached down and lifted the green dress over her head. Underneath it, she was wearing a filmy silk chemise and little boned corset bodice, both in a pale pink perhaps three shades off from the colour of her skin. Pale V of downy neck, spine, and shoulder blades just above the back ribbon ties of the corset, soft sinewy arms. Just a slightly dishevelled woman in her lingerie, but she was sitting on the edge of his bed, preparing to make love with him and then sleep next to him; so now her every curve and line, every gesture, seemed timelessly and eternally female, a tableau of sensuality from a painter's canvas. She raked her hands through her soft, mussed hair, then glanced back over her shoulder at him.

"What is it?" she asked, smiling faintly.

"Just looking at you," he whispered.

She paled, her eyes downcast almost modestly, a lock of hair falling over her cheek. "You're always looking at me now."

"I looked at you not infrequently before now as well."

"Yes... I have to admit I've spent a bit of time looking at you when I thought you wouldn't notice," she murmured, unlacing the front of her bodice. "Like at the New Year's Eve Ball. You looked positively scrumptious that night, really."

He smiled faintly, then took her hand and drew her into his arms. "So did you. And then afterward I went to bed thinking about how I would have liked to watch you slip out of that silver dress and get into bed with me."

"I'll not lie to you, I'd had more than one shameful little fantasy about bedding you even when we were arguing about library policies," she murmured, punctuating each word with languorous little kisses.

"It all seems so stupid now – on the day you arrived at school, I wish I'd just Flooed you a map to my quarters, reading 'Let's retire at ten tonight. Dress code is something black and appalling, please... ' You would have taken me up on such an invitation, wouldn't you... "

"In a heartbeat, love. My word, it's no wonder we spent so much time in such a foul mood with each other. Nothing could have been worse than having this phenomenal shag with someone, and then having to see that person every fecking day without the possibility of ever getting to have another phenomenal shag with them. Just think of it – all that drama, all due to an appalling lack of sex."

"Yes, it was just unforgivable of us. Let's make a pact never to let that happen again, shall we?"

"Absolutely."

His hands were buried in her hair, tilting that neck back to be devoured; and from the way her hand was caressing him under the bedclothes, it appeared highly unlikely that anyone in that bed would be suffering from an appalling lack of sex at any time in the near future.

Then she had slipped out of the chemise and joined him under the covers, easing him down onto his back as her full lithe weight stretched over him, and... oh, could anything have felt better than this, to be so hard and eager and then feel himself taken deep and snug into the warmth of his lover's body. His hands sensually caressed down her back, curving over the sleek arse and thigh muscles clenching as she breathlessly worked herself on him... yes, love, just fuck me like that, oh sweet Merlin yes... No breath of shame in how much they both wanted this, nothing to hold back.

Is this what you wanted? he whispered, his lips brushing over her damp neck.

Yes, darling, yes, my love...

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Perhaps they had dispensed with celebrating on the proper day of Lughnasadh, and dispensed with the usual madcap folk dances in favour of the sort of stately ballroom dancing with which Severus felt more comfortable, but the customs of eating, drinking, and making love until all celebrants were exhausted were well and thoroughly observed that evening. For just the final touch of perfection to their night, the Selkies started their crystalline arias up again just as the two of them were drifting off to sleep, cosily nestled in each others' arms. It sounded as though a huge group of them had gathered on the beach just below the western tower.

Severus closed his eyes and concentrated on the music, feeling the familiar goosebumps coming out on his arms at the sound of their voices, unable to imagine a more beautiful soundtrack to lull him to sleep on a night like this. But then an instant later, he threw his head back with a gasp, his eyes dilating –

Stay...

for suddenly the Selkies' voices had resolved into words –

Stay with... me...

Come to me...

Swim to me...

Sleek one, strong and lovely one, come to me...

"You can hear them now, can't you," Emily whispered, her arms tightened around him.

"Yes," he said. "The words... this must be mating season."

"So they're singing love songs," she said. "Trying to attract a mate."

Come...

to...

me...

Stay...

with...

me...

Emily drifted off to sleep soon afterward, her head nestled in its usual place on his shoulder, but Severus's mind and heart were racing. He had been here once before in his life, in this state of narcotic bliss brought on by his first experience of kissing, of lovemaking, of holding and being held, of gazing into his beloved's eyes as they lay on the same pillow; when all he wanted was one particular woman, a room with a bed, and perhaps food and water now and then.

Now, as he re-discovered this state of being, he found that it had lost none of its charm or significance.

And now... the woman he desired felt exactly the same about him, purely and openly.

He watched her sleeping beside him, that lovely profile pillowed on his shoulder. For some measureless amount of time, he just held her and listened, his scalp prickling and goosebumps shivering on his arms, as the Selkies sang their immortal longing and need.

I love you, he whispered, his lips barely moving against her forehead.

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Severus watched his lover sleeping beside him for a long time that night.

He almost couldn't stand the idea that anyone else's eyes would ever rest on this face, this body, ever again; just the fact of her existence seemed like something too precious to share with the rest of the world. The walking symbol of his vulnerability and need, with a mind, will, and agenda of her own. He now knew what motivated men like Emmitt Parkinson to chase away anything in one's woman's life that might interfere with her devotion to him, and knew that he had it within him to become the most jealous man alive like Emmitt, or pathologically possessive like Lucius.

But he was also quite certain that Emily would never allow that sort of thing. He knew of two men who had tried to subvert her will to their own, and completely control her – she had killed one, and was doing her best to get the other sent to prison for life. He was sure she would leave him in a moment if he tried it, and that was enough to make him keep such tendencies at bay.

He also couldn't have said why this was going so well, either. It wasn't as though he considered himself such an expert on how to sustain a relationship – indeed, with the father he had, all the precedent would have pointed to him treating her dreadfully, and making her leave him as fast as possible. But impossibly, arguments over roofing and money aside... she seemed happy. Very happy. Falling asleep beside him every night with her head on his shoulder happy.

Severus was perhaps not taking into account the fact that he had always been able to learn at a frightening pace, or the fact that he once had a spectacular example of how not to treat a woman, and many occasions to vow to himself that he would never become his father. Perhaps now, this was serving him quite well. It also helped that she was so encouraging, always ready with the brilliant smiles and caresses and If you please, dear, What do you think, love, Thank you, darling. Under such positive reinforcement, courtesy was very easy.

Plus, there was the fact that they simply could not get enough of each other in bed, which certainly didn't hurt anything, either. And not long ago they had had their first real argument since starting this erstwhile relationship, and afterward had kissed and made up and she had fallen asleep in his arms again, just like she had the night before, seemingly without any hard feelings.

Yes, he was not in the slightest used to having someone like this around him, but like most people who receive an unexpected windfall of some kind or another, he was adjusting quickly to his changed circumstances. It hadn't yet been a week since their first night together, but already he was coming to expect her to be with him, to require her presence for his continuing happiness; even coming to expect some degree of happiness derived from her company to be his regular lot in life.

He couldn't have said that he trusted this relationship absolutely, not yet, even though she had quite literally prevented his death on two separate occasions. It wasn't that he didn't trust Emily herself – in many ways, he had never trusted anyone more. In a crisis situation, there was no one who he would preferred to have at his side, or watching his back. It wasn't anything that she had done to unsettle him – their argument had been somewhat understandable, given the circumstances, and it didn't seem to have done any lasting harm.

But... there was still the matter of Lucius. Wonderful as this time alone with Emily was, Severus could still feel his cousin's subtle menace always looming in the background, a constant reminder that he hadn't always been the only man in his lover's life. He knew he had it within himself to become as jealous and obsessed with Emily as he had been with Bella... perhaps on some level, he couldn't believe in this new relationship because he was waiting for that Bella-ish moment when he felt secure enough, trusting enough, to be stabbed in the back once again.

To give proper credit though, that just didn't seem to be happening with Emily. He now felt a touch anxious if he woke up and found no mussed fair head on the pillow next to his, even if she had just awakened earlier and gone into the bathroom for a shower, or gone into the sitting room with a book.

It was just... he didn't quite trust what he felt for her. It felt too good, and he wanted it to continue far too much.

As that brief night continued, the Selkies raised their voices in their eternal, lyrical quest for love and companionship; and Severus lay with his lover beside him in bed, and pondered how best to sustain the love he had.

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Severus had a pleasant lie-in the next morning, and found a note on the night table when he awoke -

Good morning, my love -

The Selkies are practically rehearsing "Carmen" down here! Come on down to the beach!

He quickly showered and dressed, then made his way down to the seaside. The Selkies had gathered in a little hidden cove just beyond the cliffs, and they were in fine voice that morning, singing their impassioned love songs like a choir of angels.

But now there was another figure ahead of him on the beach, blowing fair hair and a black cloak, a lonely soprano adding itself to the Selkies' chorus like a folk tune woven through a symphony –

Full fathom five thy Father lies,

Of his bones are Corrall made:

Those are pearles that were his eies,

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a Sea-change

Into something rich, and strange

Sea-Nymphs hourly ring his knell.

Harke now I heare them, ding-dong, bell...

And then the horizon somehow whitened in his sight, her image before him becoming dreamy and surreal... and he could see them, the two of them, in years, decades, well over a century later, himself older than Albus, grey, wizened, retired from teaching, perhaps the writer of innumerable tomes on magic, the creator of any number of beneficial and much-needed potions, and her with him... having had his vindication and seen his cause through to the end, the old wizard gives up his responsibilities to live his twilight years peacefully alone with her, for the only way to keep such an airy sprite is if she chooses to stay with you...

No lightning flashed above, no celestial choirs sang, but he felt a mysterious bone-deep certainty that this one, and no other, was to be his.

He wondered how long it was traditional to court a woman in the Faerielands. Perhaps they had a set custom for such somewhere, and a ritual by which one asked for a woman's hand – he resolved to consult Swain's Encyclopaedia on the subject when they got back up to the house.

But these pleasant musings were cut short by the cry of an owl. He looked up to see a large brown barn owl that he recognised as a long-time veteran of the Hogwarts Owlery circling above him, buffeted unsteadily by the strong sea breezes. He accepted the bird's message, recognising the purple seal and monogram of Albus's personal stationery:

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Dear Severus,

Hello, my friend! I do hope that you and Emily are enjoying a delightful holiday up there in Orkney, and she is finding the observance of the Selkie migration as diverting as you hoped she would. She's always been an avid naturalist, so I don't doubt that she's finding all the rockpools and sea creatures up there quite fascinating. I quite remember how when she was a little girl, she was always catching tadpoles and looking for wildflowers and racing about on her pony. The pony was, I believe, named Pony.

Someday when we can all sit down and have a quiet drink together I'll have to tell you all about how she used to scoff at my tall tales about the Second World when she was six – she didn't believe me at all when I told her that Muggles could fly in aeroplanes in the sky. "Albus Dumbledore, you are a very wise wizard and your beard is very white, but you are trying to trick me!" the little Miss Swain would say. Then I'll have to tell her all about how you used to try to walk and read at the same time when you were in school, and very cleverly managed to misjudge the locations of doors and walls only occasionally.

During your absence, I've taken over reviewing Cecile's memories in the Pensieve – and I see now that your description of them as "somewhat unpleasant" was yet another example of your tactful and endearing tendency to stoically downplay the atrocities you've witnessed for my benefit. It will be a monumental day indeed when our friend Tom Riddle, the fine Mr. Malfoy, and their various cronies can be held accountable in a court of law for the cruelties they have inflicted on the sensitive and nurturing little creatures we call house-elves, but I fear that a great deal of social change must come about before that day of reckoning. I applaud your generosity in allowing Cecile to accompany you and Emily on holiday, and hope that Miss Cecile is enjoying her vacation as well.

I have now examined all the material available to us and come to the end of Cecile's recollections, and wish to let you know the results of my observations. (And I believe I have finally worked enough Reparo spells on my office wall to get rid of all the char marks I inflicted after witnessing that meeting between Mr. Malfoy and Mr. Macnair, wherein the fate of a certain dear friend and colleague of mine, who I am damned bloody pleased is still with us, was discussed. Yes, you don't need to remind me that I'm a firm believer in the policy of catching more flies with honey and have sermonised to you for years about the virtues of keeping one's temper in check, but I'm sure that you can understand that sometimes a fellow needs to fire off a few hexes in private to relieve his feelings. I trust that you will tactfully refrain from noticing the scorched ends of my whiskers upon your return.)

At any rate, I'm afraid I have bad news for you.

Firstly, I know you've reviewed most of the same memories that I have, so no doubt you are already aware that you need to be extremely wary of Lucius Malfoy at this time. His suspicions of you are obvious, and fuelled not a little by jealousy. As I sensed what lay beneath the constant conflict between you and Emily, so has he, and he isn't the sort to tolerate the presence of a rival. My advice to the two of you is to be very cautious, and secret, and wait until we have Malfoy safely behind bars before the two of you appear in public together or otherwise let your relationship be known. While I am certain that both of you wouldn't be the least ashamed if the entire world knew about your intentions toward each other, to do so would be to greatly escalate the conflict with Malfoy. Please, my friends, be careful.

Secondly, the last few meetings Cecile recalled were worrisome indeed. Severus... they're talking about ways to gain access into the Department of Mysteries, and Riddle and Malfoy seem especially interested in the Hall of Prophecy. And Malfoy has enough Ministry contacts that he will in all likelihood figure out a way to gain entrance before long. I am greatly afraid that Sybil's prophecy could be in danger.

Lastly – I'm afraid I have some even worse news as well. Harry Potter and his cousin Dudley Dursley were attacked by Dementors while still at his aunt and uncle's home on Privet Drive in Little Whinging. Mundungus was on duty at the time, and swears to me he was only gone for five minutes, but apparently that's all it took. Harry's Muggle cousin was very nearly Kissed by one of them, but Harry fortunately managed to drive them off by means of a Patronus. Unfortunately, however, he is being called up for a disciplinary action, and a Wizengamot member named the Honourable Theophilius Solon seems to be agitating for his expulsion from Hogwarts.

I hate to ask you to cut your holiday short, my friend, because I know that you and Emily more than deserve some peaceful time together – but I would appreciate your counsel in this matter. Could you please return to Hogwarts by, oh, Sunday morning?

Yours truly,

Albus

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Damn, Severus muttered.

Emily loped gaily up to him a second later, her hair blowing in the breeze, not a care in the world. "Darling? What is it? Who wrote you?"

He wordlessly handed her Dumbledore's letter, watching as she first chuckled – and then her blonde brows tensed with concern, then horror. When she finished, she looked up at him, silently questioning – and he nodded grimly to her.

"We have to go back," he said.

---

Author's Notes:

The song Emily sings in the garden during Severus's Deceivre lesson is the Irish Gaelic traditional ballad "Siúil a Rúin."

The song Emily sings during the final scene on the beach is "Ariel's Song" from Shakespeare's "The Tempest." ~ GS