Diagon Alley looked different in the morning.
At night, it was a throat. A narrow, crooked thing that swallowed cloaks and secrets and men who did not want their faces remembered. At night, every window was an eye. Every shadow had teeth. Every footstep behind you might have belonged to an Auror, a thief, a drunk, or something worse.
But morning made liars of places.
Morning put gold on the shop signs and steam in the gutters. Morning filled the air with the smell of hot bread, owl droppings, cheap perfume, wet stone, and the sour metallic tang of cauldrons being scoured behind the apothecary. Morning made people careless.
They came out in twos and threes, wrapped in traveling cloaks, arguing over lists, squinting at prices, pulling children back from windows full of things that bit, glittered, sang, or promised to improve your complexion by Wednesday.
I walked among them like a bruise under skin.
No one looked at me for long.
That was one mercy I had earned, perhaps. Or one curse. People's eyes slid off me as if I were something damp left too long in a corner. A black cloak. A thin face. Hair like spilled ink. A mouth that had forgotten softness before it had learned speech.
A woman outside Flourish and Blotts laughed at something her son had said. He was small, round-faced, missing a front tooth, and carrying a stack of secondhand spellbooks tied with blue string. The books were nearly as large as he was.
"Mum," he said, very seriously, "if the Monster Book bites me, can I bite it back?"
His mother tried not to laugh and failed. "No, Adrian."
"But it started it."
"That won't hold up in court."
He considered this with the grave expression of a wizard deciding whether to duel a dragon or eat breakfast. Then he nodded, apparently satisfied with the law.
I kept walking.
A year ago, maybe three, I might have found that amusing. Not enough to smile, never that, but enough to store it away somewhere private. A child arguing with a book. A mother laughing like the world had not yet taught her to stop.
Now it only made something twist behind my ribs.
The boy in the barn had been someone's child too.
I saw his fingers again. Blackened with ash. Curled around blue cloth.
I stopped so abruptly that a wizard behind me nearly walked into my back.
"Watch it," he snapped.
I turned my head.
He was a clerk from Gringotts, or dressed like one. Ink on his cuffs. A silver chain across his waistcoat. Soft hands, soft belly, hard little eyes. His anger faded when he saw my face. Not because he knew me. Because men like him knew when a thing was hungry, and when it was only hollow.
"Apologies," he muttered, and moved around me.
I wanted to say something. I had no idea what.
The street shifted on without me.
A hag with a basket of shrieking mushrooms shouted at a fishmonger who had apparently insulted her sister, her mushrooms, or both. Two young witches in pale blue robes stood outside Madam Malkin's, whispering over a wedding veil charmed to snow tiny white feathers whenever the bride lied. A goblin in spectacles examined a cracked emerald through a lens and informed the sweating wizard beside him that calling it "slightly flawed" was like calling a corpse "slightly quiet."
Life went on.
That was the obscene thing.
You could stand in a field at midnight and watch men become meat. You could hear screams scrape the sky raw. You could come home with smoke in your hair and blood on the hem of your robes and the taste of cowardice under your tongue.
Then morning would arrive.
Bread would bake.
Children would argue with books.
Someone would buy flowers.
I had come to buy flowers.
The thought was so absurd I almost laughed. It rose in me like sickness instead.
There were three flower stalls in Diagon Alley. One was bright and vulgar and full of enchanted roses that sang love songs badly. One sold funeral arrangements to old families who believed grief looked best when expensive. The third sat wedged between a cracked brick wall and a shop that repaired self-stirring spoons.
That was the one I chose.
Its sign read:
MRS. STEMWICK'S GREEN THINGS, BLOOMING THINGS, AND THINGS BEST LEFT UNTOUCHED
Under that, in smaller letters:
NO REFUNDS FOR BITES, STINGS, RASHES, PROPHECIES, OR MILD POSSESSION
The stall itself was barely more than a lean-to roof and several shelves, but every inch of it lived. Roots twitched in glass jars. Vines crept along the beams and curled lazily around the hanging lanterns. Pale flowers breathed open and shut like little lungs. A row of black tulips leaned away from me as I approached.
Sensible things.
Mrs. Stemwick was not behind the counter when I arrived. Instead there was a girl of perhaps sixteen, with brown skin, tired eyes, and a green apron tied twice around her waist. A small bandage wrapped one of her fingers. It had already turned purple at the edges.
She was trying to wrestle a bundle of thorned stems into a vase. The stems were winning.
"Stop that," she hissed at them. "I've had a morning, and I'm not above composting."
The flowers stilled.
For a moment.
Then one pricked her thumb.
She swore under her breath.
"Venomous?" I asked.
She looked up sharply, then down at her thumb. "No. Just spiteful."
"Most living things are."
Her expression changed. Not softened. Not exactly. But she stopped looking at me as if I were a customer and began looking at me as if I were a person who had said something unfortunate in public.
"Can I help you?"
I looked at the flowers.
There were lilies. Of course there were lilies.
White ones. Long-necked and pure, with yellow throats and petals like folded milk. They stood in a silver bucket near the front, utterly innocent of what their name could do to a man.
My throat closed.
Not those.
Never those.
The girl followed my gaze. "Popular for apologies."
I looked at her.
She shrugged. "And funerals. Same flower, different levels of optimism."
Against my will, I almost smiled.
Almost.
"I need something for a grave."
She nodded once. Business, then. That she understood. "Fresh burial?"
"No."
"How long?"
Years, I wanted to say. A lifetime. Yesterday. Since before I knew how to hate properly.
"Long enough."
The girl wiped her hands on her apron and began moving among the buckets. She did not chatter, which I appreciated. Most people filled silence as if it were a hole in the floor. This one stepped around it.
"Do you know what she liked?"
The question was simple.
It struck harder than it should have.
I knew my mother liked quiet. I knew she liked sitting by the kitchen window when my father was out, her hands folded around a chipped mug, eyes on nothing. I knew she liked old songs and never sang them loudly. I knew she liked magic before life taught her to hide it like contraband. I knew she used to press dried lavender between the pages of books she no longer opened.
But flowers?
What flowers had Eileen Prince Snape liked?
What had she wanted, before the walls of that house leaned in and crushed wanting out of her?
"I don't know," I said.
The girl did not pity me. That was another mercy.
"Then choose something that can survive neglect," she said.
From beneath the counter, she lifted a bundle wrapped in brown paper. Dark purple hellebore. Rosemary. A few sprigs of asphodel, pale and starved-looking. Not beautiful in the usual way. Not cheerful. Not forgiving.
"They last," she said. "And they don't pretend."
I stared at them.
"They'll do."
She tied them with black thread. Her hands were quick despite the injured thumb. Outside, the alley clattered and breathed. Somewhere nearby, a cage of owls erupted into insulted hoots. A man shouted that his coin purse had legs. Someone else shouted back that in Diagon Alley, so did most things, and he ought to have known better.
The girl held out the flowers.
"That'll be three Sickles."
I gave her five.
She looked at the coins, then at me. "I can count."
"I didn't say you couldn't."
"This is too much."
"Keep it."
Her mouth tightened. "I'm not a beggar."
"No," I said. "You're bleeding."
She glanced at her thumb, then rolled her eyes. "It's a thorn."
"Today."
Something passed over her face then. A shadow. Small but real.
Behind her, in the dim interior of the shop, someone coughed. A wet, elderly sound. The girl glanced back too quickly.
Mrs. Stemwick, perhaps. Or someone else. There was always someone else, wasn't there? Someone in the back room. Someone sick. Someone waiting for money to become medicine.
She took the extra coins.
"Thank you," she said, stiffly.
I nodded and turned to leave.
"Sir?"
I stopped.
The girl hesitated, then reached under the counter again. She pulled out a single stem with tiny blue flowers, no larger than drops of rain.
"Forget-me-never," she said. "Bit obvious, I know. But people like obvious at graves. Makes them feel they've done something."
I should have refused.
Instead, I let her tuck it into the brown paper.
Her fingers brushed mine. She flinched.
Not much. Only a little.
But I felt it.
I always felt it.
I walked away with dead flowers for a dead woman, and the alley opened before me like a mouth full of gold teeth.
By noon, the sky had turned the color of dishwater.
I Apparated outside the cemetery because one did not Apparate directly into old graveyards unless one wished to arrive without some negotiable piece of oneself. Magical burial grounds had tempers. Old ones had memories.
This one lay beyond Upper Flagley, past the last honest cottage and the first dishonest hill. A narrow road cut through wet grass and bent toward a stone archway half-swallowed by ivy. The iron gate beneath it had been painted black once. Now it was mostly rust, held together by habit and several generations of stubborn charms.
Over the arch, worn letters read:
ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S REST
Beneath that, nearly hidden by moss:
CONSECRATED FOR THE OLD BLOOD OF YORKSHIRE AND THEIR KIN
The Muggle church had fallen in on itself sometime before Grindelwald. Its tower remained, jagged and gray, pointing one broken finger at the clouds. The wizarding graves lay behind it, not invisible exactly, but overlooked. Muggles walked past and remembered urgent errands. Dogs refused to enter. Birds crossed above it and changed direction.
Inside, the world grew quieter.
Not silent. Never silent.
Water ticked from yew branches. Wind worried at the long grass. Somewhere beneath the earth, something small scratched or burrowed or dreamed.
The Prince plot stood at the back, where the ground rose slightly and the soil turned dark. An old family always chose high ground for its dead. Even corpses enjoyed looking down on people.
The boundary stones were carved with lilies, serpents, and the Prince crest: a crowned raven with an arrow through its breast. Dramatic. Self-important. Entirely appropriate.
Many of the names had weathered badly.
AURELIA PRINCE
HECTOR PRINCE
MARIANNE PRINCE
OCTAVIAN PRINCE
So many Princes. So much stone. So little warmth.
My mother's grave was near the edge.
Not in the center with the proud dead. Not cast out beyond the boundary either. Half-accepted. Half-forgiven. The family compromise made permanent in granite.
The headstone was newer than the rest, though already stained by rain.
I stood before it.
EILEEN PRINCE
1930–1978
DAUGHTER OF THE ANCIENT HOUSE OF PRINCE
RETURNED TO HER BLOOD
No Snape.
Not even a trace.
My hand tightened around the flowers until the stems bent.
Returned to her blood.
As if blood had ever held her when she wept at the stove. As if blood had stopped Tobias's fist. As if blood had fed us, warmed us, protected us.
As if blood had been there at all.
I knelt because my legs chose to, not because reverence required it. The grass soaked through my robes at once. Cold climbed into my knees.
The earth above her was uneven. Someone had tended it badly but not abandoned it. Weeds had been pulled. The stone had been cleaned sometime in the last month. A small offering lay at the base: a sprig of dried rue tied with silver thread.
I stared at it.
I had not put it there.
The graveyard breathed around me.
For a long while, I said nothing.
Words seemed indecent here. Everything I might have said had sharp edges. Everything true was ugly.
At last, I set the flowers down.
"They gave you back your name," I said.
My voice sounded wrong. Too loud. Too alive.
The stone did not answer.
"Did you ask for that?"
Rain began, thin and mean.
"Or did they decide it after? Cleaned you up. Cut him away. Cut me away with him."
The forget-me-never shook in the wind.
I should have stopped. I knew that. Even then. Especially then.
But grief, once opened, does not bleed politely.
"You chose him."
The words scraped out of me.
"You chose a man who hated everything you were. Then you stayed. You stayed while he spat on magic, on you, on me. You let him look at me like I was something that had crawled under the door."
My breath trembled.
"And then you left."
Still no answer.
Only the rain. Only the yews. Only the old dead pretending they had never made mistakes.
I leaned closer to the stone.
"Do you know what that does to a child?" I whispered. "To be hated for what he is in one room, and despised for what he isn't in another? Too magical for him. Too filthy for them. Half of everything. Whole of nothing."
The word rose in my mind.
Half-blood.
Mudblood.
Prince.
Snape.
Names. Knives with handles.
I pressed the heel of my hand against my mouth until pain steadied me.
"You should have told me how to live with it," I said. "You should have told me how not to become…"
I could not finish.
There are words a man can speak aloud and words that wait behind his teeth like prisoners. Monster was one of mine.
A twig snapped behind me.
I was on my feet with my wand drawn before the sound had finished being sound.
An old man stood beneath the yews.
He wore a dark green cloak gone shiny at the elbows and a hat that had seen better centuries. He was tall despite the stoop in his shoulders, narrow as a wand, with a face carved from old bone and disapproval. Rain silvered his eyebrows. His beard was short, white, and sharply trimmed.
He did not raise his hands.
Either brave, stupid, or too tired to care.
"Point that elsewhere," he said. "You'll upset the dead."
My wand did not move. "Who are you?"
His eyes flicked to the grave, then back to me.
"I might ask the same."
"You're trespassing."
That earned the smallest lift of his brow. "In my family's burial ground?"
The rain tapped against the brim of his hat.
I looked at him properly then.
The line of the nose. The thin mouth. The gray eyes with too much memory behind them.
Something cold passed through me.
"No," I said.
The old man smiled without humor. "A fine beginning. Most family conversations improve once denial is out of the way."
I lowered my wand by an inch. Not because I trusted him. Because my arm had begun to ache.
"Corvinus Prince," he said. "Your mother's father."
The name entered me slowly.
Not because I had never heard it. I had.
Eileen had spoken it once when I was very young, half-asleep by the hearth. Not to me. To herself. A name shaped like a curse or a prayer. I remembered the way her mouth changed around it. The way she stopped speaking when she noticed I was awake.
"My grandfather is dead," I said.
"Many have wished it. None have managed."
I hated him immediately.
Not with heat. Heat would have been easier. This was colder. A clean hatred, sharpened by years I had not known I was carrying.
He stepped forward, slow enough not to provoke the wand still aimed at his ribs.
"I wondered when you'd come."
"I've been here before."
"Yes," he said. "But never angry enough to speak."
That struck too close.
My fingers tightened around my wand.
He looked at the flowers. "Hellebore. Rosemary. Asphodel. Sensible. Dreary, but sensible."
"I didn't come for your approval."
"No Prince ever does. We give it anyway. Usually too late."
A sound escaped me. Not laughter.
He glanced toward the ruined church. "There's a bench. It is uncomfortable, damp, and placed at an angle that suggests the mason was drunk or dying. But it is a bench."
"I'm not staying."
"No," he said. "You're brooding. Different posture."
I should have left.
Instead, I followed him.
The bench sat beneath a leaning stone angel whose face had worn away. One wing was missing. The other pointed toward the Prince graves as though accusing them of something. Corvinus Prince lowered himself onto the bench with care, not weakness exactly, but negotiation. Old bones making terms with the weather.
I remained standing.
He looked up at me. "You have Eileen's eyes when you're angry."
"I have my father's face."
"Unfortunately."
The answer was so dry, so immediate, that I almost missed the cruelty in it.
Almost.
"Did you know him?" I asked.
"Tobias Snape?" His mouth tightened around the name. "I met him once."
"And?"
"I found him loud, ignorant, and in possession of the moral imagination of a boot."
A bitter smile touched my mouth before I could stop it.
Corvinus saw it. Said nothing of it. That was something.
The rain thickened. It made dark beads on his cloak and slicked my hair against my face. Across the cemetery, a crooked little wizard in a caretaker's coat emerged from behind a mausoleum, dragging a sack of grave candles. He paused when he saw us, decided we were less troublesome than whatever waited in the sack, and continued on.
One candle rolled free. It bounced down the hill, sputtering blue flame.
The caretaker sighed the sigh of a man who had been betrayed by objects all his life.
"Come back here, you waxy little bastard," he muttered, chasing it.
The candle sped up.
Corvinus watched it go. "That one belonged to Great-Aunt Honoria. She never obeyed in life either."
The old man's face did not change, but there was something like amusement in his eyes.
It faded when he looked back at my mother's grave.
"She did ask for it," he said.
I went still.
"The name."
Rain slipped down the side of my face.
"She asked to be buried as Prince."
The words landed quietly. That made them worse.
"Why?"
Corvinus folded his hands over the head of his cane. The cane was blackthorn, polished by age, topped with a silver raven's skull.
"I don't know."
The answer was not enough.
I turned on him. "You don't know?"
"No."
"You were her father."
"So I was informed, on several painful occasions."
"You let her marry him."
His eyes hardened. "Let?"
The word cut through the rain.
"She was of age. Brilliant. Stubborn. Lonely in ways I did not understand until after she had gone. I forbade it, naturally."
"Naturally."
"I was proud. She was prouder. We made a fine ruin between us."
I looked toward the grave.
Returned to her blood.
"She chose him to spite you."
"At first, perhaps."
"And after?"
The old man's jaw shifted. For the first time, he looked old not in body but in spirit. As if some inner scaffolding had rotted.
"After," he said, "I think she stayed because leaving would have meant admitting we had been right."
I closed my eyes.
There it was.
Not comfort. Never comfort.
But something shaped like truth.
"She could have come back," I said.
"Yes."
"You could have gone to her."
"Yes."
One honest word. Then another.
I opened my eyes.
Corvinus was looking at his daughter's grave. Rain ran down his face and gathered in the lines beside his mouth.
"I wrote," he said. "Twice. The first letter came back unopened. The second did not come back at all. I told myself that meant she had read it."
"Did she?"
"I don't know."
"You keep saying that."
"Age provides many answers. Mostly to questions no one asked. The important ones remain where they are."
The caretaker finally caught the runaway candle by stepping on it. The flame hissed, turned pink, and shouted something obscene in a woman's voice. He picked it up delicately and stuffed it back into the sack.
"Every Thursday," Corvinus said, as if explaining the weather. "The Honoria candle makes an attempt for freedom. Last winter it reached the road."
I looked at him.
He shrugged. "Small ambitions are still ambitions."
I did not want to like him.
So I didn't.
That was safer.
"She made me alone," I said.
Corvinus turned back to me.
The words had come without permission. I should have stopped there. I did not.
"She married a man who hated her. Hated me. Then she died and let them carve him off her stone as if he had never existed. As if I had not been born from both of them. As if my whole life was some embarrassing stain the family could scrub clean with rain and Latin."
My voice was rising. I heard it and could not stop it.
"She knew what it was to be hated for what she was. She knew. And still she left me in that house. Left me with his name. His face. Her blood. Their contempt. Everyone's contempt."
The old man said nothing.
Good. Let him hear it.
"I spent my life trying to become something no one could spit on," I said. "Something no one could strike. I thought power would do it. Knowledge. Skill. Fear."
The barn came back.
Red light.
Green light.
A boy's split lip.
My hand tightened until the wand creaked.
"I was wrong."
The admission was small.
The thing beneath it was not.
Corvinus watched me as if I were a potion clouding in the glass, some unstable mixture he did not yet dare name.
"I failed her," I said.
The rain softened everything except my voice.
"I failed my mother. Failed…" I swallowed. "Failed the only friend I ever had. Failed every decent impulse that ever made the mistake of living in me."
The words were coming faster now. Too fast. Ugly, stripped things.
"I wanted to be better than him. Better than Tobias. Better than the men who laughed while others begged. But I stood there. I watched. I kept watching. I have done things no human being should do, and worse, I have survived them."
My breath broke.
"I don't know what that makes me."
For a long while, Corvinus Prince did not speak.
Then he shifted his cane, planted it in the wet grass, and stood.
It took effort. Not much. Enough.
He came to stand beside me, facing the grave.
"Do you know why we fail?" he asked.
I let out a humorless breath. "Because we are weak."
"No."
"Because we are selfish."
"Often. But no."
"Because some of us are born wrong."
He looked at me sharply then.
Not angry.
Wounded.
"No child is born wrong."
I almost laughed in his face.
He saw that too.
"We fail," he said, "because living is not a clean art. Because pride speaks louder than love. Because fear has quick hands. Because sometimes the thing that saves us for one year poisons us for the next ten."
The rain struck the Prince stones. Ran over names. Filled the carved letters until the dead seemed freshly written.
"And if we are fortunate," he continued, "if we are very fortunate, failure hurts enough to teach us where the floor is."
I looked at him.
His voice lowered.
"So we may learn the stubborn art of standing again."
The words should have been sentimental.
They were not.
Not in that graveyard. Not from that old ruin of a man standing beside his daughter's stone with rain in his beard and regret folded into every line of him.
"I don't know how," I said.
It was the most honest thing I had said all day.
Corvinus nodded once, as if honesty were a difficult potion and I had managed not to ruin the first step.
"No," he said. "Neither did she."
My eyes moved to the grave.
Eileen Prince.
Returned to her blood.
For the first time, the words looked less like an insult and more like a wound dressed badly.
"Did she hate me?" I asked.
I had not meant to ask that.
The old man inhaled slowly.
"No."
"You can't know that."
"I can know enough."
"How?"
Corvinus reached into the inner pocket of his cloak. His fingers, I noticed, trembled slightly. Age, cold, or memory. He withdrew a folded square of cloth, wrapped in oilskin and tied with a fading thread.
Blue thread.
The world narrowed.
He held it out.
I did not take it.
"What is that?"
"Something she sent me," he said. "Near the end."
My hand would not move.
The rain pattered between us.
Finally, with fingers that did not feel like mine, I took it.
Inside the oilskin was a handkerchief.
Old. Carefully laundered. Blue at the edges, embroidered with a small crooked flower. Not fine work. Not a lady's accomplishment. A poor woman's stitches, done by weak light with tired hands.
In one corner, there was a single letter.
S.
I stared at it until the cemetery blurred.
"She said," Corvinus murmured, "that you would not want it. That you hated soft things. She may have been right."
My throat hurt.
"She asked me to keep it anyway."
I folded my fingers around the cloth.
The blue was faded, but it was still blue.
Still there.
"Why didn't you give it to me?"
Corvinus's face closed.
"Cowardice," he said.
The word had no defense in it.
Only fact.
"I told myself you would come when you wanted family. Then I told myself you were better off without us. Then I told myself other things. Men can survive a lifetime on well-arranged lies."
I looked down at the handkerchief.
S.
For Severus.
For Snape.
For son.
The graveyard tilted a little under my feet.
Behind us, the caretaker cursed again as the sack of candles began to sing in harmony. Badly.
Corvinus sighed. "Honoria has recruited the twins."
I almost laughed.
This time, the sound hurt less.
Not much.
Enough to notice.
The old man looked at me sidelong. "Come to the house."
"No."
"You haven't heard where it is."
"I don't need to."
"Good. Suspicion keeps the blood moving."
I tucked the handkerchief into my robes.
He saw. Pretended not to.
"There are things of hers," he said. "Books. Letters. A ridiculous collection of cracked teacups she insisted were charming. A photograph or two."
I turned toward him. "Why now?"
"who knows.."
"And you thought you would answer instead?"
"No," Corvinus said. "I thought I would fail less badly than last time."
The rain thinned.
Beyond the arch, the road gleamed black. Diagon Alley already felt like something from another life: the laughing child, the bleeding shopgirl, the flowers that did not pretend. The world continuing. The world always continuing, whether men deserved it or not.
I looked once more at my mother's grave.
The asphodel bowed in the wet grass. The forget-me-never clung stubbornly to the paper, blue as a bruise, blue as memory, blue as the cloth hidden against my chest.
"I'm not forgiven," I said.
Corvinus rested both hands on his cane.
"No."
The answer should have angered me.
It did not.
"Can I be?"
He did not answer quickly. I respected him a little for that.
"I don't know," he said. "But you can stop adding to the debt."
Far away, thunder moved over the hills like furniture being dragged across the floor of heaven.
I stood in the rain beside a grandfather I had never known, before the grave of a mother I had never understood, holding flowers I had bought because I did not know what else to do with my hands.