Part First: The Hart Assurgent: Chapter 13

Chapter 13:

Soon, he said.

Wait, he said.

The hormonal fever that accompanied oestrus had broken by the time the second term started, and Emily was glad of the ability to think clearly and behave completely rationally again. But by the time she had been back at Hogwarts for a week, waiting, and Lucius Malfoy had still not contacted her in any way – not even a note by owl post – she was in agonies of impatience. The time until she could see him again seemed like the bleakest stretch of frustration and ennui she had ever faced. It was so easy to be distracted by thoughts of cool grey eyes and platinum hair, that provocative drawl of a voice, the warmth of his hands on her skin, the lust that perfumed his every motion, the thrill of stealing kisses and conspiring to be alone with him, how it would feel to undress him, peel off that aristocratic armour of bespoke black – that the presence of her students and colleagues occasionally seemed like an unwelcome imposition on time that could have been better spent dreaming of Lucius Malfoy.

Very little could rouse her from the cloud of infatuated lust that had enveloped her since New Year's – and it was only the article about the Care of Magical Creatures teacher, Rubeus Hagrid, in the Daily Prophet, that appeared on the first day of term, that finally did.

She had been having a cup of tea in the teachers' lounge and glancing through the paper when she came across it – and by the time she finished reading the article, she was furious. So that's how one sold papers these days – by fostering intolerance for part-humans. She threw down the paper, pulled her notebook and a quill toward her, and began to scrawl down an angry letter to the editor. She offered first a character defence for Hagrid, and although she didn't know him that well personally, truth be told, the students here loved him so much that she could certainly attest to that as proof of his essential decency. Then she called Skeeter to task for muck-raking and for the very thinly veiled racism in her article in plain terms.

After her classes were over that day, she went up to the Owlery and sent her letter off to the Daily Prophet office, post haste.

"For what it's worth – it's not like they'll print it anyway," she said to the brown barn owl as she tied her letter to his leg.

"And to think, some of these people still don't know why we're reluctant to integrate," she ranted to the owls in the Owlery as her owl flew off. "Percy Fecking Weasley has the nerve to throw that firmly separatist shite at me – like we're supposed to woo them for the privilege of having water spouting from our ears in their bloody fountain."

What the owls made of such talk is anybody's guess.

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By the end of that week – still no Lucius.

But by the Monday of the following week, she was beginning to find a perverse relief in the unlikely outlet of arguing with Professor Snape.

He might have been totally impervious to apologies, civil conversation, and the way she looked in evening clothes, but one little offhand sarcastic comment set him off like a coiled bundle of raw nerves, and he was always up for a confrontation. And in some odd way that she suspected was not entirely healthy, she found the attention somewhat gratifying.

After New Year's Eve, their antagonism had escalated continuously. During the first staff meeting of the year, Professor Snape had suggested a new policy in which a Head of House could give students he found deserving unlimited access to the Restricted Section of the library. Madam Pince had opposed it, saying she preferred to review Restricted Section loans individually, and what he was proposing would more or less throw the Restricted Section open to whomever Snape thought worthy. Professor Snape pressed his case, his black eyes flashing, pacing the floor of the teacher's lounge so that his black robes swirled behind him, declaring that during term final exams, he often became so flooded with Restricted Section requests that he could not attend to all of them, and so his work and his students' suffered as a result.

Roused from her Lucius-filled reverie for once, Emily sat up and watched him work the floor with grudging admiration. He was the youngest Professor and Head of House on the staff, led the least popular of the Houses, and taught one of the most technically demanding subjects – yet he still seemed to be an effective presence in campus politics, probably through a mixture of notoriety and sheer force of personality. Yet, why he inevitably chose to channel all that charisma and personal glamour into such a negative direction, she still couldn't fathom.

While she was contemplating this, Professor Snape was still debating Madam Pince – and made the mistake of launching a very subtle personal attack on the librarian, something to the effect that if she opposed him in this policy, then it must be because she was not managing her time efficiently enough. Madam Pince wilted under the insinuation and much of the fight went out of her stance. Professor Snape, noting this, called for the staff to vote on the new policy.

That was all it took.

Emily had grown to like Madam Pince very much. They were both of them rabid bibliophiles, known to go into ecstasies over a beautiful illustration, fine bindery, or an elegant printers' font. When she had sought more friendly company among the staff at Hogwarts after the Malfeasant weekend, Irma Pince had been happy to sit beside her at meals, and take tea with her in the teachers' lounge. If she knew about Robinett, she didn't treat her any differently over that incident. So when Professor Snape insinuated that Madam Pince had to go along with his proposal in order to prove her competency, and she didn't oppose it, Emily bristled.

She put up her hand and made a polite but candidly disaffected little speech in opposition to Professor Snape's proposal, stating that in her opinion, his idea completely negated the notion of Restricting a certain Section at all. Then she lauded Madam Pince's good judgment in refusing to slacken security – in a way that subtly took Professor Snape to task for intimating that he knew the librarian's field better than she did. He flushed angrily, and retorted with some cutting remarks to the effect that certainly her own background had, of course, given her ample time to familiarise herself with library organisation.

Madam Pince's lips pressed together in a fury then – and she made a pithy little retort to him. A moment later, Professor Sprout spoke up, also in opposition, saying that if they did agree on his proposal, and such powers would then, she assumed, extend to her as another Head of House, she thought them rather troublesome – and Professor McGonagall supported her in that statement.

Emily was surprised, but realised that she was not the only person on staff who found Snape's manner abrasive at times – and she had definitely started something by openly opposing him. Madam Pince then agreed to the staff vote on the new policy, as Snape had just suggested – and not surprisingly, it was defeated.

As Emily was leaving the teacher's lounge, Snape cornered her by the door and made his displeasure known in no uncertain terms, in tones of silkiest ice. She smiled brightly, thanked him for being such a characteristically ripping good sport about not getting his way, and sauntered out of the room.

It had only gone downhill from there.

Snape was not one to forgive and forget, and he devoted himself to his continuing grudge with a fine fettle of indignation. Within days, everyone knew that Professor Swain could barely make a concrete statement but that Professor Snape sought to discredit it in some way. By the end of that week, Irma Pince joked to Emily over breakfast: "My dear, I think that if you announced that you stood firmly resolved to continue breathing in and out within Professor Snape's hearing, he would be blue and cold by lunchtime."

Unfortunately, it was not for nothing that English peasants had once set out saucers of cream to appease the ill will of the Faeries. Emily was not one to sit calmly and take such from anyone, glorious brooding black eyes or no. Once, after he had made a series of insolent comments about the "Pince-Swain library Mafia" at breakfast, he had turned back to his porridge to discover that the cream in his bowl had somehow odoriferously curdled since his last spoonful. A few days later in the teacher's lounge, after he had complained sarcastically about the havoc that her "precious Weasley twins" continued to wreak at every opportunity, a large and very hairy moth had flown down from the rafters and settled on his cheek, to his intense discomfiture. It then vanished completely before he could squash it with a rolled-up copy of the Daily Prophet.

Between these and a thousand other slights and discords small and large, by the start of the third week of January, it was common knowledge to the entire school that Professors Swain and Snape cordially despised each other, and when there were no students present, could be counted on to engage each other in spontaneous rounds of verbal pyrotechnics at the slightest provocation. This distressed the Deputy Headmistress so much that she finally complained to Dumbledore.

"I can't hear myself think when they get started on each other, Albus. She's quite pleasant when she's away from him, and he can be decent when out of her presence, but when you put the two of them together, they're both simply impossible."

"I actually find them rather amusing," Dumbledore replied, smiling benignly. "She does keep Severus at the top of his form as far as argumentation – I was starting to think that his usual store of sharp rejoinders were becoming rather stale and needed some updating. And it does Emily good to occasionally run into someone who won't give her her own way in everything. I sometimes think they both admire the other more than they let on, like Shakespeare's Beatrice and Benedick."

McGonagall had simply pressed her lips together in a thin smile and changed the subject. Later on that week, however, the Deputy Headmistress hurried up to Dumbledore, her green velvet robes flying behind her, as he was discussing a change in the Astronomy lesson plan with Professor Sinistra.

"Headmaster? I'm sorry, but Beatrice and Benedick have escalated to the point of open warfare. I believe you should interfere."

"Professors Swain and Snape, you mean?"

"Yes. No one dares go into the teachers' lounge."

"I will speak to them, Minerva."

He could hear them from some paces down the hall.

"I have had to help you with this time and again, and I tell you, sir, I am done with disciplining your classes for you second-hand. Surely you had some method of making them behave before I arrived here, so I suggest that you go back to using that and stop troubling your colleagues – "

"I assure you, madam, that if you don't think I'm a strict enough disciplinarian, then I can only conclude that you indeed must have spent the last eight years living somewhere other than Earth. I had no trouble disciplining unruly students for some years before you were so much as a student lecturer in the wilds of Cambridgeshire. Simply because another teacher cannot restrain herself from becoming disruptive does not reflect badly on me, and furthermore – "

"Oh please – I knew it was only a matter of time before you tried to play the seniority card. That's always the last refuge of a professor who can't come up with any real defence or justification for his criticisms – it all boils down to 'I've been here longer than you have, so I must be right, QED.' Now as I was saying – "

"I suppose you think your disruptiveness is terribly clever. You would probably call it unorthodoxy and spontaneity, like every other fuzzy-headed intellectual who thinks to reinvent the entire institution of teaching in one's first year at a new school. We are here to make them learn things, not to try to be their best friends – "

"Oh? Well, my kudos for definitely practicing what you preach, because I've never heard anyone accuse you of being any student's best friend – "

"Some of us remain loyal to slightly more elevated notions of scholarship than some populist idea of being universally adored by one's students. I make no apologies for being more interested in matters of science than in having my ego massaged by a bunch of – "

"Oh, do go get martyred somewhere else, you ruddy great misunderstood genius, you – "

"Silence!" Albus Dumbledore appeared in the doorway of the teacher's lounge, his blue eyes flashing and his purple cloak wafting impressively around him. Both Professors quailed, broke off in mid-sentence, and turned away from each other.

Emily cleared her throat. "I'm terribly sorry, Professor Snape. I shouldn't have lost my temper like that."

"You're absolutely right, Professor Swain. You shouldn't have lost your temper like that."

She spun around. "Why you – "

Dumbledore interjected again. "Severus – it is unbecoming to be so ungracious when you receive an apology. And Emily – if you believed your own words when you said that you should not have lost your temper, perhaps you should not be so quick to lose it again."

There was a long pause.

"Sorry, sir."

"My apologies, Headmaster."

"Now – perhaps the two of you should take some time after your classes this afternoon and try to calm down, because I think it's high time you got on with the instructional sessions I asked you to schedule over three weeks ago," Dumbledore said, very gently, but with a reproachful look over the tops of his spectacles. "And I won't have you skewering each other over some disagreement about teaching methods. I think this evening, in Professor Swain's practice studio from seven to nine p.m., will suit the both of you admirably."

"Perhaps that meeting should be put off for some time to allow my colleague to simmer down, Headmaster," Snape offered, in his most patronisingly mellifluous voice.

"Now, now, Severus. I do not think that putting off your first instructional session any further would be the best course of action. Actually, I am beginning to think that taking each other on for a few rousing bouts of fencing would be positively therapeutic."

"Capital idea, sir. I've always believed that duelling had its uses in conflict resolution," Emily offered helpfully. Snape glowered demonically at her. She threw him a twinkly smile in reply.

"Well then, what a lovely evening this promises to be. Do try to be on time for our session, would you, so I can get back to a more profitable and entertaining use of my energies? I have some toads to disembowel in my office," Snape said, in tones of dulcet loathing.

"I shall be almost as punctual to arrive as I will be to leave, sir," Emily replied, with equal malicious politeness.

"Until tonight, then, madam," Snape said, with a satirical little bow.

Emily kissed her fingers to him with a theatrical mmwhaa. "Endlessly looking forward to it."

Then they stormed out of the room in opposite directions. When the doors had banged shut behind both of them, Dumbledore looked at McGonagall and they both laughed till their eyes teared.

"Ah, Minerva. It's really shameless the way those two flirt."

"Now, now, Albus," Professor McGonagall said, dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief.

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The Headmaster set their appointment for seven o'clock, so of course Snape arrived at 6:53. Really, the man's fetish for extreme punctuality was just annoying.

"All right, I'm here," he called dourly, banging the door. At least he had dressed properly – who would have thought that he actually owned something to work out in. All black, of course.

"Good evening, oh inexorably cheerful one," she replied. She was already dressed in her usual swordwork instructor's outfit down to the chainmail, but was sitting at a table covered with parchment scrolls. Since grading end-of-term exams had interfered rather a lot with fantasising about Lucius Malfoy, she was woefully behind on them.

"Now let's get this over with," he said, planting himself in front of her.

"The Headmaster said seven, sir. So I'll be with you in – " she glanced at the clock – "seven minutes. Right now, I've got a bit of work to finish."

"I don't like to wait," he snapped.

"And I don't like to be rushed," she replied tartly. "If certain people would arrive when they're supposed to arrive, waiting wouldn't be necessary."

She bent back over her essays, but Snape decided to sit down in the only other chair in the room, directly across from her, and steadily stare at her while he waited, so she was becoming quite distracted.

"I just can't believe some of these," she said. "I asked them for one scroll's worth of essay on whatever topic interested them, and from both Crabbe and Goyle, I get back one gigantic paragraph." She held up a parchment scroll, which was covered with black scrawl unbroken by any kind of indentations whatsoever. "They're both in your House, aren't they?"

"Yes, they are. So you aren't finished with grading your end-of-term essays... yet?" Snape asked delicately. "And I see the honeymoon is finally over."

She threw him a hard look. "What are you talking about?"

"I see the same thing happen every year with you newcomers. You spend the first term larking about acting as though your students are the most adorable creatures on Earth and I should be locked up for ever losing my temper with them. Then after awhile, the more intelligent of you have wised up... somewhat."

"Why thanks," she replied with an acidic smile.

"By the middle of the second term, the more noxious of them have invariably started to wear on you," he said. "Take Longbottom for example. The first time you have to correct him, he'll give you that deer-in-front-of-a-train look. By the thousandth time he's given you that look, after apparently forgetting everything you've told him just ten seconds ago, you just want to hold his head under the unclassifiable mess in his cauldron and call it euthanasia."

Emily laughed before she could stop herself. "You really are a profoundly disturbed individual, Professor," she said, shaking her head.

"And you just haven't been teaching long enough," he retorted.

She laughed again at his reply – the bastard did have just about the best sarcastic delivery of anyone she had ever met, she had to give him that. But then... she remembered that there had been a similar bit of repartee between them on the first night she met him – he had gone off on a hilarious rant about some inept student who had managed to melt a beaker during an experiment in chemistry class, and how the substance that had spilled had reacted with the floor and made a godawful mess. When she mock-protested that surely it couldn't have been that bad, he had replied with almost exactly the same retort, and she had laughed till her eyes teared and she had to dab them with her napkin.

But that was before they discovered that they hated each other.

"Well. On that happy note," she said, getting up from the table, "why don't you find a fencing jacket and mask that fit, and grab one of those practice swords over there, and let's get started."

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"Did you read the books? Both of them?" she asked, pulling on her gauntlets.

"In their entirety, yes," he replied. He raked his black curtain of hair off of his face and fastened it at the back of his neck with a rubber band.

"All right. Then let's see fencer's first position."

He assumed fencer's first position as if he had done it a thousand times before.

"Good. Now the en garde stance."

Likewise with en garde position.

"Very good. Have you done this before?"

"No, but I noticed, while I was reading Barbasetti, that fencing stances are quite similar to those used in wand duelling," he said.

"You must have done a lot of wand duelling, then."

He glanced warily at her. "Some."

"You're a bit... rigid, though. Try to relax a bit more. Do you recall any of the attacks?"

"One through five in Barbasetti's system, one through thirty-two in the folio."

"Excellent," she said, surprised and a touch impressed. "Now this isn't going to be exactly the same course that I usually teach my students – this is more the quick and dirty, very practical version. I'm going to emphasise defence, because that's what the Headmaster thinks you're most likely to need it for."

"He's probably right," Snape said.

"You went over the footwork, then? Lateral and linear advance and retreat?"

"Yes, of course," he said offhandedly.

"Well. You have definitely done your homework, Professor."

"It was a somewhat absorbing subject," he said, as though admitting it had interested him was a confession of weakness.

"All right, then. Let's warm up with some parry drills. I'm going to take thrusts at you from different angles, and you parry them. We'll start with the Italian system – prime, seconde, tierce, and the rest. Then I think I'll show you the French system – it has three more parries and works well against low-line attacks. You're taller than average and probably won't be taking on any Orcs in your lifetime, so that would probably be useful for you."

"What about the Arcadian system?"

"Later." Then she slid on her mask one-handed, as if very much accustomed to the action.

He did well. Really quite surprisingly well. It was a joke among the bladework instructors of the Third Kingdom that most of the beginners they trained parried like they were chopping wood – this was not true of Severus Snape even from the first. He was still too damned rigid – she was going to have to work that out of him – but his parries were neither wildly exaggerated, overextended, nor laboured, as was the fault of most beginners.

After ten minutes of parry drills, she stopped the action. "You're doing pretty well for the first time, except for Prime. Here... " she put down her sword and came around to his right side, and took his gloved hand in hers to demonstrate. "Don't bend your wrist – bend at the elbow. You're using your forearm, not just the hand – your wrist should be rigid. See, it's a stronger motion. Can you feel the difference?"

"Yes," he said distantly, glancing down at her hand on his.

"Sorry," she said, letting go of him and pulling away. "Now let's try it again." Honestly, she thought, no need to act like I've groped you. I certainly know better than to try to grope you again. She picked up her sword.

During the second drill – he had corrected the mistake. Perfectly. No trace of forming a bad habit – he had simply corrected himself and was done with it. She wished for a second that every squire she trained could do that. After half an hour, she was certain that he had a solid grasp on the basics of parrying, so she moved on to disengages.

"All right – you're making the disengages too big of a motion... you only need to go around my blade." She caught hold of the point of his sword in her gloved left hand and demonstrated spatially. "Why do this – " she drew an exaggerated U around his sword with her own point – "when you can do this." She dropped her own point in a tight v that only just cleared his blade before going past in a straight thrust. "See the difference?"

"Yes – it's more precise."

"Try it yourself – take a thrust at me." He did, and she took a leisurely parry at his aggressive movement in tierce – whereupon he took a tight disengage around her blade and continued the thrust. "Beautiful – you've got it. Keep doing that and you'll be fine. Remember, you don't want to waste effort. In a combat situation, it's all about who gets there first – and the most economical movement is the fastest."

Again, he listened to what she said and had completely internalised it, and then applied it to what she taught him, almost immediately. The man was just a sponge for new information – by nine p.m., she had gone far beyond what she had initially planned on teaching him, into feints, binds, and beat attacks. If he was tired, he didn't show it. He also seemed so absorbed in the subject at hand that he forgot to add the usual sarcastic inflections and dire expressions to his every interaction with her – although he looked a bit surprised every time she expressed approval or complimented his efforts.

"All right then – you've covered a lot of ground tonight. Shall we try a practical demonstration next?"

"What do you mean?"

"I'd like to see how well you've absorbed everything." She saluted him with her sword and assumed en garde stance.

"Come on, Professor." She slanted a challenging look down her blade. "Fight me."

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"Pre – "

"Allez – "

And they had at each other.

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As she expected, it was over in seconds.

She had advanced on him, coming on with a swift lunge – but to her surprise, he managed to solidly parry her thrust in seconde, much faster than she would have expected. Broke off the confrontation without taking the riposte, however – she would need to talk to him about that – and retreated laterally, aiming a thrust at her left hip, which she parried easily. Then she riposted, binding his blade at a useless angle with hers, before disengaging and landing a direct fleché attack on his sternum, knocking the wind out of him and making him fall back again the wall.

He straightened up after a second, breathing hard, and threw his mask disgustedly aside. "Not one bit of a sadistic streak to you, is there?"

"If you think you'll get a better deal from a real adversary, you're mad."

"Now that you've had your fun and thoroughly humiliated me, shall we call this session finished?" he rasped, gingerly rubbing at his breastbone.

She pulled off her own mask, raking damp fair hair off her forehead, and regarded him with an attitude of cool respect, even a touch of admiration. "You shouldn't be so hard on yourself, Professor – that was hardly humiliating. You did very well."

He stared at her. "What?"

"Think of it this way – I once defeated a knight with twenty years' training in less than one minute." She said it unemotionally – a simple statement of fact. "So for you to have lasted about ten seconds against me after two hours' training... that's actually something you can be proud of.

"You have the potential to be very good with a sword, sir. You learn frighteningly quickly, almost to the point of never making the same mistake twice. You've got good instincts, and the beginnings of some talent. With years of practice – your sword arm could be almost as lethal as your tongue. Now – you'll want to take a hot bath and a couple of aspirin before you go to bed, or you'll be sore in the morning."

She lobbed a workout towel at him. "Good work, Professor. I am duly impressed."

"Don't flatter me," he snapped, deftly catching the towel. "I neither need it nor want it from you."

"I'm just being honest," she replied. "In my line of work, we can't afford to waste talent. But believe me, if you had humiliated yourself, I would have told you all about it in minute detail and enjoyed doing it."

He scrubbed the back of his neck with the towel – and she thought she detected just the smallest flicker of satisfaction on his face. "Same time Monday, then?"

"All right."

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By the Thursday evening of the third week since the New Year's Eve Ball, without so much as a postcard from Lucius, Emily was in a deeply foul mood, lying alone in her bedroom. She had taken down one of her favourite volumes from her final year at Beauxbatons, Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, and was trying to get absorbed in it again. Turning a page, her eyes stopped at a stanza:

"My sobs to smother, muffle, or compose,

There's nothing like the chasm of your bed.

Oblivion battens in your lips of red,

And Lethe's river in your kisses flows."

All right, that was enough of that poem. She paged through the book. Another passage leapt out at her:

"I worship you like midnight's vaulted sky,

My bowl of grief, my Delphian deity;

And most of all, fair one, when you take flight

From me, and seem, adornment of my night,

So mockingly the leagues to multiply

Between my arms and blue immensity."

Okay – that was just about enough poetry for the night. Les Fleurs du Mal was now lying tented on a pillow beside her on the bed. Usually she found this bed, with its feather mattress, down blankets, and deep blue velvet draperies, to be very comfortable, but now, it may as well have been a board of hammered nails.

Damn him. Where was he? Likely he was only playing with her, as punishment for her fickleness seventeen years ago. He didn't really want anything more from her, not now, with the crows' feet springing up around her eyes and the freshness taken from her face by cares and weariness – he just wanted to revenge himself on her for rejecting him so many years ago. He was the sort who would remember a slight like that, and if anyone would patiently wait for years in order to get his revenge, it was him, the bastard.

However, that didn't change the fact that she would have given just about anything to have him there in her bed with her. She turned over on her side with a miserable little groan and punched her pillow.

A faint sound penetrated through her black funk. She sat up.

Taptap... rustleflitterflitter... taptaptap...

She went to the window, and pulled the blue velvet drapery aside, to see an owl rapping softly at her chamber window – a large barn owl by the look of it, not one that she recognized as belonging to anyone she knew. When she opened the window, it lighted for a moment on the sill and dropped a package into her hands and then took off again in a moment.

Well – that was abrupt. Why would someone be sending her a package this late at night? Why not through the usual morning owl post?

The box was a simple, anonymous thing wrapped in plain brown paper. Her name was block-printed on the wrapping:

Emily Swain

Ravenclaw Tower

Fourth Floor Window

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry

Scotland

FOR IMMEDIATE DELIVERY

PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL – TO BE OPENED BY ADDRESSEE ONLY

There was no return address.

She tore open the package. Inside was an unsigned, handwritten note in Lucius's now-familiar archaic, calligraphic hand.

Darling,

If you still think my hair wants tousling, I can arrange that.

Tomorrow evening, go somewhere private and unbound by Apparition Protections.

Put on what you find in this casket.

Then Summon me, and I will come to you.

She let the note fall back into the box, her heart slamming painfully against the back of her ribcage.

There was a casket inside that box as well, made of smooth wood lacquered a fathomless black. She opened the lid, and gasped involuntarily.

A bracelet lay on a cushion of black velvet – a bracelet in the shape of a slender, coiled snake. The creature's body, made to coil around a woman's arm, was fashioned of what looked like platinum, with diamond eyes. Its body was set with what must have been thousands of tiny emeralds, varying in colour from pale to dark green, and set so close together that they appeared to blend into shimmering scales. Its pale underbelly was smooth metal, engraved with such realistic renderings of a serpent's scales that she half expected it to twine muscularly around her arm.

She slipped it onto her left arm – and was able to slide it up over her elbow and onto her bicep. She moved to the mirror and admired its green lustre on her skin, twisting and preening. Never had she been given such a rich gift, and her vain, mercurial Faerie's heart was deeply flattered.

But would she accept it?

There were obligations to be considered. To the Fae, if a woman accepted such an expensive and personal gift from a man who made it clear that he desired her – then such a gift bound her to him, at least temporarily. To accept such a token was to bestow her favour upon him in some way – and she knew what kind of favour that he wanted... that they wanted.

This was the kind of gift a man gave his wife – no, not a wife; here in the Second World, the snake was symbolic of temptation, of reptile desires for gratification.

It was the kind of gift a man like him gave to his mistress.

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By morning, a surge of horrified conscience had returned, and she had decided she was not going to meet him. Malfoy was married, even if the marriage did seem to be mostly one of passionless convenience, and she was now widowed. She would stay in her rooms that evening, safe from his designs on her. She would send the emerald serpent back, and that would be that.

At lunch, Professor Snape was especially cross about something and spent the entire meal berating her, no, not her, he was talking to Dumbledore, but it seemed as though he was railing at just the world in general for the cheekiness and inattention of his students. At supper, there was just more of the same. Monotonous waves of irritation were radiating off of him, making him smell repellent to her. After half an hour of such at supper, she was on the verge of shouting at him. Why did he teach if he hated teaching so much? Why did he not open an apothecary's shop somewhere and hire other people to deal with the Stupid Great Unwashed that evidently irked him so much?

He was obviously very angry about something to do with Professor Moody – her defection to the opposite end of the high table meant that Professor Moody became the one who most often took the last seat next to Snape – and obviously, something had recently happened between those two gentlemen that had been truly toxic. The looks they exchanged were of purest, baleful hatred. She didn't even want to ask anyone what had happened.

Her mind wandered.

Beltane Night, seventeen years ago. She could hear him chasing after her, no match for her speed, but his lust led him to great exertions. She slowed, let him see her, in front of the hay shed, sweating and coy, before darting inside. She could have taken the stairs to the loft in one bound, but instead she dawdled, made him follow her. Up in the loft, he caught her from behind, pressed his lips to her neck, and dragged her down into the fragrant hay. They threw off each other's clothes, and he forced her onto her back and covered her overheated body with his. Roused by the drums, the singing, and the wine, she was in agonies to be rid of her virginity, every muscle straining up to receive him. During their frantic coupling she tore off the band that restrained his long flaxen hair and lost her hands in it...

Lucius Malfoy, now a sedate husband and father, turned confidentially to her behind the hedges. "I can't lie to you...I have never forgotten what it was like... It's one of my favourite memories."

Lucius in the lush greenhouse at Malfeasant – looking regretfully at her over his shoulder. "Though when we hand out judgments on each other's morality, let us remember who amongst us has had their morality called into question more recently. And let us remember how I supported you in your decision to act as you did... "

Lucius turning to her after her blow killed the rampaging boar...tracing his bloody fingertips across her cheek, paying her tribute in the way of her people...the long, tender kiss in her bedroom at Malfeasant... his hand caressing the small of her back as they waltzed... "If anyone is an incorrigible flirt, Mr. Malfoy, it's you." The note he passed into her hand... "Meet me... "

And then their meeting in the gardens at the Ministry, which she couldn't recall without feeling a long shiver in the pit of her stomach. And the priceless emerald serpent, now in her room in Ravenclaw Tower.

Then Summon me, and I will come to you.

"Emily? Might I have a word with you?"

"Yes, of course, Minerva. How can I help you?"

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By Friday dinner, she knew what she was going to pack and had carefully made up an airtight story for Dumbledore. Every word of it was true – there were just some careful omissions. Besides, he probably didn't care one way or another as to whom she chose as a lover – she certainly didn't expect him to keep her apprised of his personal life.

She had walked into his office that evening on her way out, casual as you please. "Headmaster? I just wanted to let you know that I'm going to be staying in Hogsmeade this weekend, at the hotel next to Madam Rosmerta's. I'll be back for Sunday night supper. You can send me an owl if you need me for any reason."

Dumbledore looked at her over the tops of his spectacles. "Are your rooms here not sufficiently comfortable, Professor? If there is anything that can be done to make them more to your liking, please do let me know."

"Oh no, my rooms here are wonderfully comfortable. It's simply that I've got a great head of steam on for something I'm working on, and, well, once you've gotten used to composing on a computer, the old dip quill and parchment feels slow and unproductive. But here at Hogwarts, any electronics are no more than very expensive paperweights. I want to go stay somewhere where I can use my laptop writing programs, check my email, do some banking and such is all. That new hotel in Hogsmeade is wired for electricity and has telephone lines – catering to visiting Muggle parents of Hogwarts students, no doubt." Her answer felt wonderfully glib even to her.

"Modern Muggle science is a miraculous thing. I cannot recall who it was that said that any sufficiently advanced science would be indistinguishable from magic, but I can perfectly understand his meaning," Dumbledore said with a pleasant smile. "We will eagerly await your return on Sunday evening."

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The landlady showed her up to a room at the back of the hotel.

"Here we are, just a nice cosy space to work in, no chatty mirrors or pictures to distract you. There's a nice desk and easy chair, and the bed has a quilt I made meself – rose and scroll pattern!"

After Emily had duly admired the rose and scroll quilt, the china candelabra, the photos of Brisbane that the landlady had taken herself last holiday, she was left alone in the room. Then she took out her wand, of rowan wood and kelpie hair, which she found helpful for exact Transfiguration. Time for a little redecorating.

From animals into water glasses, it was an easy matter to Transfigure a homey rose and scroll quilt into a coverlet of deep green velvet, chintz curtains into long draperies of the same velvet that pooled on the floor and, most importantly, completely obscured the windows. The china candelabra with its painted blue flowers suddenly became a thing of spiralling silver. The fireplace of red brick became a black marble hearth. When she finished, the room looked like the sort of chamber where a man like Lucius Malfoy might be properly entertained. The framed photos of the landlady waving from in front of the sights of Brisbane, however, she simply hid under the bed.

She chose the shortest of silk chemises, cut low in front and in back. No elaborate lingerie, no jewellery other than the armlet he gave her – what this man most appreciated on her had always been her unadorned skin, as much of it exposed as possible. The dark was having its usual effect on her eyes – while she knew some people found the effect startling, but others found it both exotic and erotic. She left the room lit only with firelight.

Finally she took a seat in the easy chair (now a chaise covered in serpent-green silk) and slid the emerald serpent onto her arm. Her heart was racing; her breath was coming fast enough to make her feel light-headed.

"Accio Lucius Malfoy," she whispered, and then silently spoke a word.

A second later, she shivered slightly, clutching her upper arms in a fit of nerves – and silently spoke that word again. Had there been any mirrors in the chamber, they would have reflected a completely empty room.

She expected him to take his time about arriving, to wind her up with impatience, and then make a grand entrance. Instead, he appeared only a minute or two after she Summoned him, Apparating into the room almost silently. He was dressed for outdoors, in a long black woollen robe, his hair very slightly windblown. Snowflakes had settled on his shoulders. "Emily?" came the familiar drawl.

She didn't answer, watching him with her chin propped on one hand. He peered around the room curiously, then pulled off his gloves, outer robe, and scarf and dropped them on a low chair next to the bed. Took a moment to warm his hands by the fire, then peered impatiently around again.

"Emily?"

She smothered a giggle.

"Let's see, where could she be? Or is she right here, having a capital joke at my expense, using one of those coy little Faery magics she's so fond of..."

She did laugh at that, and he immediately turned in her direction.

"Yes, actually I am having a coy little joke at your expense, Lucius."

He threw her his most deliciously depraved smile. "Typical."

Then he had crossed to her and grasping her wrists, pulled her up and hard against his body. Her arms coiled around his neck as he crushed a heated kiss on her lips; overpowering, unembarrassed lust perfumed the air around him. Her muscles turned to water.

The grey eyes lit on the emerald serpent on her right arm. "Emeralds look just as perfect against your skin as I thought they would."

"As always, you have gorgeous taste and are far too kind to me. But, don't think plying me with jewels is going to excuse you for making me wait this long," she teased, brushing her lips over his neck.

"I'm sorry for the delay, love – it couldn't be helped. But now I hope to convince you that the wait was worth it... " His hand stroked down her spine to grasp the curve of her rump.

"I'm hoping you will too." She shivered. "This robe is freezing. Take it off."

His answer was to shrug the robe off and let it fall to the floor, revealing an impeccable black shirt and tie underneath, never letting go of her. She loosed the ribbon that restrained his hair and let that fall to the floor as well.

"You're still wearing far too many clothes," she said, drawing the perfect Windsor knot of his tie loose.

"I could not agree more, darling," he purred. "Where exactly is this?"

"The new hotel in Hogsmeade."

"A hotel. How delightfully tawdry."

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The situation in which she now found herself was unlike anything Emily had ever known before. She had friendly acquaintances with women who were also trees, and women who could assume the form of water, and counted talking, sentient spiders and tigers amongst her dear friends. She had fought enough hideous monsters in her lifetime to populate the nightmares of herds of impressionable children.

But the idea that she was now lying in bed with Lucius, despite the fact that he was now husband to Narcissa, father of Draco, helping him out of his clothes, was simply not to be believed. Even if she had been fantasising about it for the last three weeks.

She felt overwhelmed with both disbelief and aching suspense, like the moment before a broken bone is set, or the last second on a high perch before diving into deep water – even as she pulled the silk tie over his head and off. The dreamlike unreality of what was happening left her feeling unsure of herself, acquiescent, off balance. It was impossible that he was sliding the silk chemise over her head and off – impossible that she was lying in his arms, and then he had sprawled her on the velvet bedclothes so that the dancing firelight licked over her skin and tousled hair like so many voracious tongues. It simply couldn't be that she was unbuttoning his finely tailored shirt and caressing the pale flesh beneath, or that he was kissing her with such heat, the same way he had kissed her when she was a seventeen-year-old celebrating her first Beltane.

Sometime later, when a pile of fine black bespoke was lying discarded on the floor next to the bed, he reached for the black silk scarf, then pulled her wrists together above her head. In another second, he had tied her wrists to the bedpost, surprisingly securely, she thought. He noticed her testing her bonds and gave her a light but stinging swat on the inside of her forearm. A pleasant, prickly warmth suffused the area a second later, adding to her restlessness, making her wonder how she could provoke him to do it again.

She felt him slide down her body, drawing a line of kisses from her neck to her collarbone, then inexorably down, delicious friction of his hair brushing over her breasts and stomach. By the time he put a humid kiss on the inside of her thigh, her skin was so sensitised that she quivered under no more than the feel of his breath. He made her wait for a long moment, then parted her with his fingers, and tongued upward, found her erect clitoris rising like the beak of a small bird, and slowly drew the tip of his tongue across it. He gave a low, gloating moan – and was soon making her writhe so hard against the mattress that he had to pin her thighs down with his shoulders.

This man knew exactly where and how – she briefly wondered what diabolically sensual woman could have taught him to do that – but no one could have continued thinking under such delicate torture. A second later he had built the tension in her body to a painfully intense precipice and then pushed her over it, driving her into contractions. She buried her face in her pinioned right arm – the intensity of orgasm had her gasping, gnawing on her own bicep, hips nearly jerking off the bed until she finally subsided, shuddering.

Lucius slid back up to stretch out beside her, untying the silk scarf and releasing her boneless arms to encircle his neck. Took her chin in his hand and gave her a deep, salty kiss. You still taste like honey, came the satisfied drawl.

Then he lowered her limp body to the deep velvet bedclothes and draped himself over her, one hand wrapping her thigh close around his silk-fleshed hip – and she flashed back to how it felt to run her hands over his back for the first time and find that this young man had skin as smooth as a child's. Then she was clutching his shoulders and straining up to be penetrated by him. The insinuating drawl chuckled softly in her ear... So, my Lady's run off to a quiet little hotel... to get well and truly fucked by me. Gods, I love it...

Again, he was in no hurry, slipping down so slowly, infinitesimal fractions of inches at a time. The anticipation was agonising – but he was in no hurry, and he was having a marvellous time. She was clutching at his back, her deepest inner muscles clenching him involuntarily – then she wrapped her arms around his hips and tried to force him on. It was maddening, to be a hairsbreadth from orgasm, while her lover lay so luxuriously inside her, threading his fingers through her hair, kissing her with such excess of ease. He had all the time in the world.

You made me wait a very long time for this, came the velvety drawl in her ear. I don't want it to be over too fast.

"Lucius... please... "

That's right, proud thing – I like hearing you beg. Beg some more.

Oh, he wanted to be wooed with talk, did he... well, he was in bed with someone whose people were known for both their high-flown eloquence, and earthy ribaldry. She responded by praising all of his assets sacred and profane in melting tones and urging him to make use of her as he might his footstool – by the end of it she had worked him into a frenzy of rut any satyr would have envied. For a brief, endless moment she was seventeen again, weighed down deliciously by his body – the body of her first lover – and he was everything strong and male and endlessly comforting. Her senses were in a fog, her skin covered in his lust-sodden sweat, completely lost in the hard, slick intake and outslide of his movements inside her.

As he built the tension in her body toward inevitability for a second time, he pulled back on a fistful of her hair, pulling her throat taut, his open mouth moving over its length, then sank his teeth into the muscle between her neck and shoulder. A red flash of savoury pain accompanied the shuddering sweetness of orgasm like spice on honey.

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After some hours of the same kind of treatment, she was nearly fainting with satiety and adoration.

His shoulder was under her cheek – skin like silk velvet, comforting hardness of muscle beneath – and the warmth of his arms gently holding her. His lips delicately brushed her forehead. Shhhh, he whispered.

Then she drifted off to sleep clasped in Lucius's arms, and it was very, very good.

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It was still dark when she awoke.

Lucius was gone – but so recently that the other side of the bed still held the warmth of his body, and the pillow held the imprint from where his head had been.

There was a note on the nightstand beside the bed.

Darling –

You're lovely asleep. Dearly wish I could stay.

Next weekend? Don't make me wait another seventeen years.

Get some time off, and send me an owl at work.

Next weekend? Of course she would see him next weekend. And preferably, the one after that, and the one after that, too.

She stretched languorously against the velvet pillows, delightfully worn out, feeling pleasantly sore in all the right places, drenched in the scent of him, and still wearing nothing but the platinum serpent. Even in the early-morning darkness, the emeralds caught the light with a dim, green sparkle.

She couldn't wait to see him again.

End of Part First -

To Be Continued in

The Knight Errant Chronicles

Part Second: The Hart Rampant