Severus shrank the girl's trunk, Scourgified the cage (although even that didn't improve it much, it was so filthy), and told her set free the owl.
"Why?" she asked, Lily's eyes wide behind the most hideous spectacles Severus had ever seen. Round and enormous, with clear plastic frames—Petunia must have picked them for her precisely because they were so ugly.
"I'm not Apparating with your familiar," he told her. "She can find her own way to Hogwarts."
The girl hesitated but then did as she was told, stroking the bird's snowy feathers and whispering to it. The bird treated him to a yellow-eyed, impertinent stare. Then it nipped the girl on the ear, spread its wings, and took off into the gloaming sky.
"What's Apparating?" the girl asked.
"You'll soon find out." He held out his arm. "Hold on."
Lily's eyes flickered from his arm to his face, and then the girl rested her fingertips so lightly on his forearm, it was little more pressure than a butterfly's weight.
"More tightly than that," he ordered. "My arm doesn't bite."
With an expression that said she was only doing this because it was better than being locked up in her bedroom, she gingerly wound her fingers in his sleeve.
He sighed, shook her off, and gripped her wrist. Then without a word of warning, he Apparated.
Hogwarts slammed into sight like the rushing tide, the golden light of the setting sun knifing long across the grass, burnishing the towers and turrets. The girl gasped like she'd been underwater for too long.
"You could've warned me!" she said indignantly, but then darted a wary look up at his face. "Sir," she said, a bit sulkily.
He probably could had. "This way," he said, ignoring her glower, and strode toward the gates. At the motion of his wand, their locks slithered open like vines growing in reverse.
He felt her annoyance with him draining away as they climbed the path to the castle. He had to force himself to slow down and not leave her behind. She looked excited, hardly daring to hope, but also sickly and exhausted. He thought of the cat flap in the door, the rank smell of the room, of bird droppings and unwashed bodies, and had to recite the instructions for the Draught of Living Death step-by-step so as not to outpace her and descend upon the Headmaster's office to rip it apart from carpet seams to vaulted ceiling.
Severus, if anything had happened to Miss Potter, I would know—
Oh, how Dumbledore owed him for letting those human shitstains live . . . for walking out of the house without doing anything worse than freeze and terrify them. . . Locks on the door, bars on the windows, and that little cat flap for pushing food through—
The Draught of Living Death wasn't complicated enough. He tried to remember the Wolfsbane, a werewolf prophylactic whose preliminary findings had only been released last month. He'd been following the progress of that one ever since the early stages were announced ten years ago. It was fiddly and dreadful and potentially lethal, and took three days of brewing to complete. Once he had the ingredients' list and instructions memorized, he'd have minutes of anger management on hand.
He glanced down at the girl to make sure she was still following as he mounted the great staircase. Would Pomfrey be in the staff room trying to prescribe Minerva analgesics, or would she have retired to her infirmary in a huff after Minerva refused them like an angry cat?
The former, he found when he swept the girl into the empty infirmary.
"In," he said shortly when she lingered reluctantly in the corridor.
"I'm not sick," she said.
"That is for the matron to decide." When she replied with a look that mingled obstinacy and uncertainty, he said, "Tell me what was the last full meal you had, and when."
"Er. . ." She looked down at her hands, clearly intending to count on her fingers while trying to be subtle about it. A Ravenclaw might as well try to say three sentences in a row without using "thus."
"That should not have been a difficult question to answer." He pointed inside the vacant hospital wing, with its rows of pristine beds glowing white and gold in the light of the setting sun.
The girl flushed. "It wasn't my fault," she said, but she slouched into the room and sullenly permitted him to stare her to a chair close to Pomfrey's office.
No child deserves to be starved as a punishment, he thought, but he didn't say it. Instead, he said, "House-elf."
The girl's eyes widened before one of Hogwarts' elves answered. When it appeared, she stared as if fascinated. She was surprised but not shocked. He filed this unexpected discrepancy away for mulling over later.
The house-elf bowed to him without speaking. All the Hogwarts' elves had quickly learned that if Severus called them, it meant he wanted something and they didn't need to ask pointless questions or deliver empty greetings.
"Bring me a bowl of rice gruel, adding no spices or flavors but salt. And fetch Madam Pomfrey—and Professor McGonagall—from wherever they might be. Tell them why." He considered asking the elf to bring Dumbledore as well, but he wanted to rage at the old man in private before he saw the girl, to maximize the impact. If Dumbledore could be made to feel guilty. Sometimes, Severus wondered.
The elf bowed again and cracked away.
"I told you, I'm not sick," said the girl, but she was staring at the place the elf had stood and seemed more curious than mulish. "There's a house-elf at Hogwarts?"
"There are over a hundred," Severus said. "Even a magical castle doesn't clean itself."
Now she was frowning at the spot the elf had stood. "Are any of them named Dobby? The elves, I mean."
Severus stared. "Dobby? You've met a house-elf named Dobby?"
Her eyes flickered up to his face again, and he saw the moment her curiosity retreated behind a shield of wariness, like a film of ice spreading across a pond. She shrugged, an overly nonchalant motion.
For the love of—children were so bloody annoying, whether they were Lily's or not.
A small platter winked into existence on one of the little swinging tables meant for bed-ridden patients. Although it seemed outside the realm of possibility for house-elves not to adhere to the letter, he conjured a spoon and tasted the gruel. Adequately tasteless, although they'd included a pink and white orchid in a vase.
"That's nice," the girl said, touching the orchid.
"Drink that," he said, vanishing his spoon, "and if you can keep it down, you may eat again in a couple of hours."
She glowered but reached for the bowl. As he'd suspected, she couldn't finish half of it.
"Don't force it or you'll be ill," he told her as the infirmary doors clattered open and Pomfrey rustled in, followed by Minerva, who had her mouth pressed into a line so thin and hard, it could have cut diamond.
"Severus," she said, undercurrents of wrath in her voice, "there had better be a good explanation for . . . "
She trailed off as she got a good look at the girl. Pomfrey had already swooped in, diagnostic spells unspooling from the tip of her wand in red and blue trails.
"Gracious Rowena," Pomfrey said, taking the girl's pulse. "You're not fevered, at least," she added, peering into the girl's red, mortified face.
Since Minerva wouldn't be likely to pack her off without a due injunction from Dumbledore, Severus figured the girl would be safe enough in the infirmary. "The Headmaster?" he said shortly.
"He left for Hagrid's after dinner," Minerva said. "I needn't ask where you were."
"Clearly not," he said, and left them: Pomfrey grimly officious, the girl protesting that she really wasn't sick, and Minerva presiding. Hagrid would have been a better comforter. Both Pomfrey and Minerva were too no-nonsense, the sort to fuss with glares and sharp orders . . . rather like himself.
Dumbledore was indeed at Hagrid's, sitting outside on a sort of crude lawn chair that was about five times too big even for a man of his height. They were both smoking pipes, the sickly sweet smell curling into the descending twilight.
"Ah, Severus." Dumbledore's mustache moved in a way that suggested he was smiling, though his eyes did not twinkle at all. "How did you find Miss Potter?"
Severus had to count to ten in fractions of a quarter before he was able to answer. When he did, he could barely unclench his teeth.
"Pomfrey will no doubt be able to tell you when she's done examining her."
"Wha'?" said Hagrid, inhaling a wad of pipe tobacco. "Harry's here?" he asked once he'd cleared his nose and wiped his streaming eyes.
"In the infirmary," Severus said, his gaze fixed on Dumbledore, who stared back at him through a curling haze of pipe smoke.
"Miss Potter has come a bit early to school this year," Dumbledore said, his voice smiling now. "I'm sure she'd be delighted if you went up to say hello, Hagrid."
"Righ'!" Hagrid pulled himself out of his chair. He spent a few moments crashing about inside his hut, and then re-emerged, his sleeves pulled down and sloppily buttoned, and loped off across the lawn.
"Won't you have a seat, Severus?" Dumbledore asked, as if he was genuinely concerned.
Severus just watched him, feeling his fingers curling into claws like Minerva's.
"I knew the moment you took her, of course," Dumbledore said, peering over the top of his spectacles.
Severus had no doubt about that. He was fairly certain, too, that Dumbledore had been surprised, though not unprepared.
"Do you know what a cat flap is, Headmaster?" Severus asked softly.
Dumbledore didn't blink, but a slight crease appeared between his bushy white eyebrows. "I'm afraid I don't, dear boy."
"Muggles install them in their doors to allow their cats access to closed rooms. They're quite small."
"Large enough to allow a cat to pass?"
"Precisely," Severus said, even more softly. "Miss Potter had one into her bedroom—so Petunia could push the food in to her without undoing the five bolts on the door."
Dumbledore did not move at first. Then he slowly lowered his pipe. Finally, finally, his eyes held a glint of something cold, like fury.
But "I see" was all he said.
"I told you." Severus could feel his heartbeat in his throat, smell the room, hear the drip of the wine as it dribbled off the table onto the soft carpet. "All those years ago, Dumbledore, I told you—"
"Severus," said Dumbledore, in a voice that was somehow both gentle and final, with a hint of warning that it might not be gentle for long if Severus continued to push. "I remember, dear boy. And I remember what I told you—"
"Then go see her," Severus hissed, wishing he had the power to make Dumbledore flinch; but no one did, not even the Dark Lord. "Go up to that fucking infirmary and see her."
He turned to leave, and then stopped and snarled over his shoulder, "And ask her about a house-elf named Dobby. Maybe she'll tell you."
Then he left to find something to smash.
It felt good to have a bath.
When Madam Pomfrey had told Harriet the date, she realized she'd only been locked up in her room for five days. She said only because it had felt much longer than that. They had let her out to use the bathroom morning and evening, but not allowed her time even for a shower; just a sponge-bath with a bowl of cold water, a hard bar of soap and a flannel pushed through the cat flap.
Now Harriet wallowed in the enormous infirmary bath, big enough that if she stretched out her arms to either side she was just short of touching the rims, where the water was so hot it steamed the air and turned her skin pink. The shampoo smelled like mint and the soap like honey.
How weird that she owed her current happiness to Professor Snape.
He was an odd bloke, Snape. Odd-looking and odd-acting, and not just today. Of course, today he'd been extra odd, but he was never what you'd call normal. He was definitely the meanest teacher in Hogwarts, and a couple of older Ravenclaws were doing a research study to determine if he was the meanest teacher in the world.
He'd never been mean to Harriet, though. On the first day of Potions class, when she had already been unnerved by the cold dungeons and pickled animal fetuses floating in jars along the backlit walls, he had looked up from his roster and glared at her, his eyes dark and cold like empty tunnels, and she'd forced herself to keep staring back. And his gaze had hardened, then flickered, and he had glanced away, moving on down the list to Dean Thomas.
He'd never really looked at her again—not during that class, not for the whole year. Whenever he would swoop around the dungeon berating the other students for their lousy potions, he went right past her. The only thing he ever wrote on her homework was the letter grade, and he always dropped the parchment on her desk instead of handing it to her. Although he unpleasantly surprised the Gryffindors with pop questions during class, he never once called on her (and always ignored Hermione's hand, but with a different air than the one he used to ignore Harriet).
Harriet had been confused but grateful, though she'd also lived in dread of doing something that would confirm her as another Neville in his eyes, and then he'd call her a blithering worm-brain or an incompetent fathead and pick apart her failures. But Snape was never as nasty to the Gryffindor girls as he was to the boys. He had once told Lavender Brown that she would fail out of his class before the end of term if she couldn't stop thinking about Myron Wagtail for two minutes together, and if Hermione answered a question when she hadn't been called on he told her to stop being an overachieving show-off, but he let Harriet alone. She worked very hard to be let alone, using techniques she had perfected at the Dursleys to appear meek and insignificant. Of course, at the Dursleys' her temper always spoiled it, and a time or two some of the things Snape said to Ron or Neville had made her steam, but Hermione always kicked her under the table before she could open her mouth and bugger things up.
And really, Snape was scarier than Uncle Vernon. Uncle Vernon was just mean and stupid; Snape was clever and really mean.
He'd also saved her life by counter-jinxing her broom when Quirrell had tried to kill her, and then refereed the next match to stop him from trying it again. But all the while, he'd barely seemed to care that she existed.
Now he'd shown up at the Dursleys', hexed them immobile, and brought her to Hogwarts. It had a pretty strong flavor of rescue to it.
It was as weird as that visit from Dobby.
This was turning out to be a weird summer. It must be the Hogwarts influence, she thought contentedly. She was all right with her life being weird as long as it was connected to magic.
She checked her toes and found them very pruney. Also, the water was now only warm, not steaming hot. It was probably time to get out.
Someone had hung a nightdress and dressing gown from a hook on the wall and laid out a fluffy white towel stitched with the Hogwarts crest. A house-elf, maybe?
That's right: Hogwarts had house-elves. If Dobby didn't work here, maybe one of them would know how to find him. Harriet still had several things to ask him. Like what at Hogwarts could possibly be so dangerous to make a lifetime of imprisonment at Number Four worthwhile.
Especially when Dobby had said it didn't have to do with Voldemort . . .
She pulled on the nightdress, wondering why Snape had been so surprised that she knew a house-elf named Dobby. He'd seemed specifically shocked about the name. Was it a weird name? A bad word in house-elfish? Or did he know a house-elf named Dobby?
Outside the steam-thick bathroom, the air in the infirmary felt thin and chilly. She shivered. Castles in the highlands weren't exactly warm in summer. The stone was clean but cold beneath her bare feet.
It was nighttime now, and the high windows that lined the ward were black and glimmering. In a wide pool of lemony lamplight sat Professor Dumbledore, reading a book with a brightly painted, moving cover that showed a boy and a dragon sailing a boat on an ocean.
"Professor?" Harriet said in surprise.
He looked up at her, bright-eyed and curious, and smiled. Or at least, she assumed he did; it was a bit hard to tell behind all the beard. But it moved in a smiling way.
"My dear girl, good evening," he said, marking his place in the book and setting it in his lap. "Madam Pomfrey told me you were enjoying a much-deserved bath."
"Yes, sir," Harriet said. Her eyes went to a tray of food sitting on a table next to him. She wondered if he'd conjured it: the table had curling griffin's feet, a blue tablecloth embroidered with shooting stars, and a centerpiece of yellow flowers that chimed softly like little bells.
"I don't remember that being in the hospital wing before, sir," she said, pointing at the table.
"Ah, no." His smile widened. "I went a little overboard passing the time. I used to be the Transfigurations professor, did you know? Before the unparalleled Professor McGonagall joined us. I do miss the constant occasion to transfigure all manner of things, so I occasionally find ways to indulge myself." He shook his long sleeve back from his hand, extending his wand. "What's your favorite color, my dear?"
"Green," Harriet said, surprised. Aunt Petunia hated it when she wore green. It was Slytherin's color, too, but green couldn't help that any more than her wand could help having the same kind of core as Voldemort's.
Dumbledore drew a shape in mid-air, and a real armchair formed like a starburst, upholstered in a beautiful dark green that reminded Harriet of the color of the Forbidden Forest in the sunset that evening.
"Thank you, sir," she said. The upholstery was the softest velvet she'd ever felt.
The smell of the food made her mouth water. More gruel (she grimaced), and rice, and thin strips of some kind of fish.
"Please," Dumbledore said, gesturing. "I'm sure you must be hungry." He smiled again, but Harriet thought she sensed something hiding behind it, as if there were several closed doors and a curtain between her and that extra emotion.
She felt awkward and embarrassed in a way she didn't understand, just like she had all evening, with Madam Pomfrey and Professor McGonagall looking grim and trading grown-up eye-messages over her head. The more she'd said she was fine, the grimmer they had looked.
"They feed me normally," she said to Professor Dumbledore.
"I am glad to hear it," he said, but somehow it made her want to hide. She busied herself with the rice and the soup, clinking her spoon noisily against the bowl to fill the silence.
"You might be wondering why I am here," Dumbledore said a few moments later, all traces of that unsettling emotion gone. "Besides the indisputable enjoyment of your company, of course."
Harriet paused like Dudley with her spoon stuck in her cheek. "I thought you sent Professor Snape to get me?"
"You are quite astute, my dear," Dumbledore said. Harriet was sure she'd imagined the tiniest pause. "But did you not wonder why?"
"I thought maybe Hermione had done something," Harriet admitted. "After Dobby told me he'd been stealing all my letters, I figured she'd know something was up, and she's . . . she's not really the do-nothing sort, Hermione, sir."
"Yes, I had a letter from Miss Granger—by Muggle post, in fact. I take it she doesn't have an owl? Surmising that our world has spies in the Muggle post is just the sort of redoubtable action I'm always delighted to encounter."
If that wasn't Hermione all over. Harriet wished she was one eighth as clever.
"Who is Dobby, by the way?" Dumbledore asked curiously.
"Oh—a house-elf. He came to warn me about some danger he said was at Hogwarts. Is he one of the castle elves?"
"I'm afraid I have never made the acquaintance of a house-elf named Dobby," Dumbledore said. "At Hogwarts or elsewhere. But he sounds like the sort of chap I'd be most interested to meet. Did he tell you nothing about himself?"
She described Dobby's ratty old pillowcase (which made the clothes she wore at the Dursleys look like they'd come from Harrods, although she didn't tell Dumbledore that), and that his wizarding family was apparently horrid.
". . . and he kept banging his head on things whenever he said something wrong, to punish himself," she said, remembering Dobby beating himself with her desk lamp. "He said he was always having to do it—he was going to have to shut his ears in the oven door for coming to see me, even, and warning me—and his family let him and even told him to do more."
She stopped, embarrassed again, but also hot with anger. But Dumbledore was looking grave and not smiling at all.
"The house-elf's way of life is a form of enslavement so binding that it shapes the core of their very being," Dumbledore said. "Many of our old families look upon it not as a sacred contract between wizard and elf, but as a right their magic grants them, and they abuse their power terribly. As a result, house-elves like this Dobby suffer greatly. You are right to dislike it."
Harriet's ears were burning. "He said it was even worse when Vol—sorry, You-Know-Who—"
"You may say the name, my dear," Dumbledore said, his smile glimmering again before fading away.
"Well . . . Dobby said it was worse for house-elves when Voldemort was in power. He was glad he's gone and came to warn me, he said, because he . . . liked me, I guess, for—you know," she mumbled. It sounded so self-important to say for defeating him when she'd been so young she couldn't even remember doing it—and in May, she'd just held on, literally, until the professors saved her.
"It sounds, my dear, that if Dobby risked detection and courted punishment to warn you, he must admire you greatly. And he would be right to," Dumbledore said, making Harriet's face and neck flame.
"He admired you, too, sir," she mumbled.
"And yet it was to you that he came. Although he had never met you, he cared enough for you that he put himself at risk for you. It was a noble action, worthy of the greatest of us. Remember that, Harriet."
Then he made a steeple of his fingers and gazed up at the dark ceiling, which Harriet was grateful for, because tears were prickling thickly at her eyes.
"Did Dobby tell you the nature of this danger?" Dumbledore asked, still staring into the shadows overhead.
"No." Harriet blinked several times against the tears. She wasn't going to cry, not today of all days, when she had everything to be happy about. "I asked him if it had to with Voldemort"—Dumbledore's eyes fixed sharply on her face—"but he was really positive that it's not."
"Not to do with Lord Voldemort," Dumbledore repeated. "He told you nothing more?"
"Well, he was acting like that was some kind of a clue, but he couldn't get anything else out. He started having a fit when he tried. Then he wanted me to promise not to go to Hogwarts, and when I said I couldn't . . . " She told him about the smashed pudding, the letter from the Ministry, and a very glossy retelling of her punishment. She wondered how much Snape had told him.
Dumbledore followed alertly along, nodding when she was done. "You do know how to live, don't you, my dear?" he said, eyes twinkling like the stars on his robes.
"Oh, no, sir," Harriet said. "I like the quiet life."
"In that case," he said, "perhaps I shouldn't have arranged for you to spend the remainder of the holiday with the Weasleys?"
Harriet was sure she couldn't have heard right. She held her breath. "You did? Sir!"
"In fact," he said, twinkling even more brightly, "Mrs Weasley was quite insistent that she have you in her sight this very night. She had a few suggestions on what she might to do me were I tardy, fates which put me rather in mind of your friend Dobby—"
Harriet dropped her spoon into her bowl. "I'm ready! I'll get dressed—it's not too late, is it? What time is it,s ir?"
"A quarter past eleven, but Mrs Weasley assured me she would wait all night," he said. "While assuring me what she would do to me, were I so remiss . . . "
"I'll be quick!" Harriet promised, dashing away.
Against all expectations, this had turned out to be a pretty wonderful day after all.
For the first time in a month, Severus wished there were some students around. In his present state of temper, he would have loved to terrify a few of them into tears and dock a few hundred points for illicit snogging.
But without the little cretins to bully into submission, he had to resort to other methods. He withered a whole field of dusk-blooming violets, frightened a family of innocent voles in their burrow, insulted Filch (though not his cat, since he needed the caretaker as an ally), got into a bolt-shooting skirmish with Peeves, and rounded off his juvenilia by upsetting all of the birds in the owlery.
The girl's snowy owl hadn't turned up yet. Well, it had several hours of flying ahead of it and was probably glorying in its freedom, if owls did such things.
With these stresses taken out on the undeserving, he retreated to his quarters to indulge in a good brood.
The air of his dungeon was less stale at this time of year than usual, seeing as he'd been there for most of the summer. With the Dark Lord's cameo in May, Dumbledore had asked Severus to be on hand for those times when he wanted to strain information from him. Severus got very little information in return, but he preferred a summer spent at Hogwarts with Dumbledore at his most cryptic to several weeks in dreary Cokeworth, even if it was much easier to get cigarettes at Spinner's End.
He brooded over to the mantle. Years ago, Dumbledore had handed him a box of old photographs and asked if he wouldn't deliver them to Minerva, as she had been asking after pictures of the Order from the old days. In it, Severus had found a recent photograph of Lily, sans Potter, Black, even her child. Of course, the box contained other photographs with her and some combination of the others, but he had slipped the Lily-only photo out before dumping the rest in Minerva's lap. He kept it framed on the mantle, although he'd spelled it so that nobody but himself could see it.
"Your child is an ill-mannered brat," he told her. She put her hands on her hips and gave him an arch look.
"But they all are," he said, "and she has more reason than most."
Far better reason than most . . .
The memory of Petunia's face when she'd seen him standing in her dining-room returned to the fore, clear and sharp as Technicolor. She'd hated him from the first moment of their meeting as children but had never looked at him that way before. Lily had told her about him, then, all those years ago.
But he remembered her darting glance toward her son, her hand flashing out toward him, a silent, frantic communication of No. The boy had been staring at the flickering television, stuffing his face, not even realizing what was happening until Severus had frozen them all and he hadn't been able to pull his spoon out of his mouth.
And Petunia's eyes, so full of agony as she watched Severus's wand . . .
There had never been much resemblance between her and Lily, but in that moment he'd wondered how similar their feelings had been in fear for their children. And then he'd gone upstairs and found the girl locked up, hollow-eyed and disbelieving, and even without Leglimency he'd wondered if her incredulity hadn't come so much from the sight of him as from the possibility that someone would come help.
Unless someone went and performed the counterspell, the girl's family would be trapped in his Immobulus until some time tomorrow, like mosquitoes in amber. It would be an uncomfortable and frightening time.
"They're lucky to still be breathing," he told Lily's photograph. It gave him an inscrutable stare and then looked away. Well, why shouldn't it? He was a cruel bastard.
Right now, he liked that about himself.
A small glass globe on the mantle glittered gold, signaling that Dumbledore was at the door to his quarters. "Come in," he barked.
The headmaster rustled in, his robes twinkling in the lamplight like the sky on a clear night in winter.
"Good evening, my boy," he said. "I hear you've been enjoying yourself. Was it you who dropped that old grandfather clock three stories onto Peeves's head?"
Severus pushed away the memories of Petunia and her son, of Lily and her daughter, like winding up a skein of yarn and putting it in a cabinet, shutting the door.
"He threw the axe," he said coolly.
"I believe that clock was over three hundred years old," Dumbledore said pleasantly. "A gift of Charles II to Headmaster Hyde."
"Neither of them has needed to tell the time for centuries." Then, because being rude had no effect on Dumbledore, positive or negative, he asked, "What do you want?"
Dumbledore conjured himself a seat uninvited next to the fireplace (because Severus only kept one armchair for a reason) and sat, and damn him if his eyes didn't skim across the mantle. But Severus was sure he couldn't see the photograph. He just guessed that it was there.
"I thought you might like to know that Harriet is safely tucked up at the Burrow by now."
Severus made no acknowledgment: only stared at him, flat and indifferent.
"And I wanted to tell you," Dumbledore went on, now examining a Muggle print that Severus had found years ago in an old re-sale shop, a woodland scene of an old man petting a doe, "that you did the right thing in bringing her away."
Severus hated the way his heart jumped with gratitude. He hated disappointing Dumbledore to roughly the same degree that he despised hating it.
But, coldly he said: "I knew that without you telling me."
Dumbledore smiled at the print of the old man and the doe. "Of course. Did you want to hear what Harriet told me?"
Yes and fucking no. "Did she mention the house-elf Dobby?"
"Yes." Dumbledore finally looked at him, expectant.
"Dobby," Severus savored it, "is Lucius Malfoy's house-elf."
Dumbledore blinked once, then sat up a little straighter. "Does he wear a filthy pillowcase and have green, tennis-ball sized eyes?"
Severus nodded. Dumbledore pressed his fingertips together, then against his mustache.
"Harriet said he came to warn her that there terrible danger awaits her at Hogwarts," he said, staring at a spot in mid-air. "A danger so great that remaining with her Muggle family would save her life."
Severus felt as if he had dropped straight through a hundred feet of ice into arctic water. His own eyes shot to the mantle, where Lily's photograph watched them, her eyes as bright and curious as her daughter's.
"Do you credit it?" he asked hoarsely.
"That depends," said Dumbledore, still staring at that spot in midair. "Anything is possible, but do you think it probable that Lucius Malfoy's house-elf would do such a thing unbidden?"
"You mean, is it more likely one of the Malfoys is pulling a prank, or that the family is involved with something Dark at Hogwarts?"
"Quite so."
Severus sank into thought. Although both he and Lucius had been sworn Death Eaters, Lucius had only ever congratulated Severus "on getting away so cleanly." Lucius didn't scruple to discard whatever loyalties he needed to in order to save his hide, but he respected the need in others to do the same. But Severus had naturally never told Lucius that his agenda had really changed. Lucius had always taken it for granted that he and Severus thought alike on the subject of the Dark Lord and extricating themselves from the ensuing scandal, but Severus was quite sure that, should the Dark Lord return, Lucius would be among the first to scrape back into his good graces, trampling any and all others in the mad rush to protect his own interests.
"Do you think it's likely that Lucius has been contacted by Tom?" asked Dumbledore, his eyes grave yet penetrating.
"No," Severus said with flat certainty. "The Dark Lord would not stoop to begging of servants who deserted him. If he returns"—and he felt a powerful surge of cold, burning hatred course through him at the thought of that creature walking the earth again—"he will only appear before the wayward when he's regained his former power. He'll want us to abase ourselves, those who escaped punishment. I'm fairly sure Lucius thinks the Dark Lord is dead for good."
Dumbledore looked straight at him. "Do you think you could find out?"
"Naturally."
The Headmaster smiled.