Wizard's House

WIZARD'S HOUSE - 4

Snape walked slowly back up the stone stairway which led to the upper levels of the ancient keep, half cursing himself for being a fool and listening to the old madman. When he reached the kitchen level, where the piping chatter of the house elves filled the halls like the twitter of sparrows, he doused the light of his wand with a murmured "Nox!" and tucked his wand away in his sleeve. He continued up to the ground floor and strode rapidly across the large square hall to the grand staircase, his boot heels rapping out their sharp click-click on the polished stones.

It was inevitable, perhaps, that he would meet his cousin on the stairs. With a rather melodramatic sense of metaphor, he noted that he was climbing up the stairs while Jovian Carrow was coming down them. How high could one climb before the inevitable fall, he wondered moodily, and how rapid would be the descent?

They stopped on the first floor landing, surveying each other.

"Well, well, if it isn't the family school master," Jovian observed, looking Snape up and down. "Oh, that's ex-school master now, isn't it?" he tittered, brushing some invisible lint off of the embroidered fronts of his robe. "I'm surprised that you're here. Not surprised that you left the school of course, the reason for that is plastered all over the Daily Prophet, but I thought you would be with..."

Be quiet!" Snape interrupted him. "Where I might, or might not, be is no concern of yours, or of anyone else's, and I am in no mood to bandy words with you."

The other wizard shrugged. He was fair haired, with a ruddy complexion, and was about the same age as Snape, but a head shorter. His face was fleshy and his sleek gray-green robes did not disguise the fact that he was running to fat. He glanced around, checking to see if there was anyone above or below them on the stairs.

"What's the matter?" he asked, speaking quietly, but with a hint of a sneer in his voice. "You're the favored one now, aren't you? The one who disposed of that Muggle-loving old fool for him?" Jovian smiled, and ran the tip of his tongue over his wet lips. "I wish I could have been there to see it. Tell me, did the old man whine and moan for his life? Did he beg?"

"No," Snape said shortly.

"That's too bad," Jovian said, his lips in a pout and his pale eyes glistening. "I wanted to hear that he was humiliated before he died. I wanted to hear that he pleaded and groveled. The stupid crooked-nosed old fool! Always interfering, always pushing people to do the right thing."

"He will not push anyone to do anything any longer," Snape said dryly. "I suggest that you be content with that."

Jovian moved a step closer to Snape and lowered his voice, continuing in a tone that was as intimate in its closeness as it was lascivious in its husky syllables. "Were you there when the Malfoy brat was punished for failing in his... assignment? I hear that the kid piddled himself, he was so scared. They say he screamed so much before our Lord finished with him that he was coughing up blood."

"It is no concern of mine," Snape said coldly. "Nor of yours."

Jovian Carrow pursed his wet lips, drew back, and surveyed the black-clad wizard critically. "You haven't changed much in the last three years, have you?" he observed finally. "You're still as close-mouthed and sour as ever. Hook-nosed, pasty-faced, and looking like a black weed in someone else's flower garden!"

He laughed loudly, brushed by Snape, and trotted on down the stairs to the main floor and into the dining room. Snape gazed after him for a long moment, his lips compressed, and then took a long, deep breath as if centering himself again, and resumed his climb up the winding stone staircase.

His mother's rooms were in the original section of the ancient keep, deserted now except for herself and the house elves that brought meals to her and cleaned her chambers. She had lived there, alone, for many years. Snape sometimes wondered if she chose the cold and desolate rooms as some kind of penance for her disastrous marriage to his Muggle father, or if she had merely wandered into them one day and stayed. Perhaps the silence suited her.

The tall age-darkened door was closed as usual. Snape did not knock, knowing from experience that she would not respond. When he released the latch and pushed the door open, he saw a room dimly lit by candles that flickered wildly in a draft from some unseen source. The smell of hot wax and old dust filled the air. He stepped inside, closed the door silently behind him, and considered the gaunt, angular, woman who was seated in the high-backed chair, bent over the large square table in the middle of the room.

Eileen Prince had been eighteen and newly graduated from Hogwarts when she married his father, Tobias Snape. She was nineteen when he was born. She was in her late fifties now, the prime of life for witches and wizards. She might have another hundred years of life ahead of her.

To what purpose? he wondered. She seemed to have lost interest in everything except her eternal divination. Perhaps that sort of obsession ran in the family, he reflected, thinking of his grandfather's endless preoccupation with those old war memoirs. Snape watched impassively as his mother's hands moved in a restless dance across the table.

She had not gained any weight in the years after she left Hogwarts School. If anything, she was thinner now than she was in the old pictures he had seen in the school's library archives. The flickering light picked out threads of gray in her long black hair and threw back a gleam from the high cheekbones of her pale thin face.

She had never been a pretty woman, even when she was young, but now age and the locking away of her emotions had given her a certain austere presence. Shoulders hunched in a dull, dark-gold robe, her attention was fixed on the cards that she was laying out, one by one on the dark polished table top.

It was a whole-deck spread, Snape noted abstractly, the one she once told him was called Rahdue's Wheel. The researcher in him wondered who Rahdue was, but he had never cared enough to investigate the matter.

"Mother!"

She looked up at him slowly, one thin blue-veined hand still poised holding a card, her obsidian-black eyes so much like his own that he felt for a moment as if he was looking into a mirror.

"Severus."

She acknowledged him calmly and without any surprise in her voice, as if they met every day for breakfast; as if there had not been three years, without a word between them, since their last meeting. She murmured that one single word, the three syllables of his name, and then her attention returned to her cards.

At least she still did remember who he was, he reflected sourly. Every time he left her, he wondered if the next time would find her so completely lost in her mystic realms that she had given up the world entirely.

He walked forward until he was standing at the edge of the table, folding his black-clad arms across his black-jacketed chest, and looked down at her as she resumed placing her cards on the table.

"Have you discovered the fate of the world?" he asked, trying to keep his voice calmly conversational. There was no point in sarcasm or accusations. She responded to none of it. All she did was lay out her endless wheels of cards.

"Perhaps you should apply for a position at Hogwarts School," he continued silkily. "Sibyll Trelawney has lost herself in her sherry bottles, and I doubt that she has many years left ahead of her. You would undoubtedly have to learn crystal-gazing and the art of reading tea leaves, though. Or maybe the new Headmistress will change the curriculum and reduce Divination to the study of cartomancy, in view of your dedication to your art." He could not keep a note of sarcasm out of his voice. "How expert are you? Do you see my future in any of this?"

He started to reach for her arm, to force her to pay some attention to him, but before his fingers touched her, she looked up at him again, staring at him with those fathomless black eyes. He stopped, taken slightly aback by the intensity in her gaze, and remembered what old Gustave had said about her having a Gift of foresight.

With a sweep of her hands, Eileen began gathering up the cards that she had laid down. She shuffled them together carefully, squared the edges with deft fingers, and then held the deck out to him on the flat of her hand.

"Are you afraid of what I will see?" Her voice was calm, but there was a hint of mockery in it.

He sneered and his hand shot out to cut the deck. He turned his hand palm upward, so that they could both see the face of the exposed card. It was the eleven of trumps, a seated, crowned, man holding a sword.

"Justice," she murmured.

Snape snorted and dropped the cards delicately back down onto the remainder of the deck. Impassive, his mother reshuffled the cards and held them out to him a second time.

He would have spurned the offer and walked away, but for some reason he felt bound to try again, perhaps to look for a second chance. He cut the cards, and once again turned his hand over. He displayed another seated, crowned man, holding another sword.

"The King of Swords, bringer of justice," his mother said.

Snape laughed coldly, and dropped the cards back on the rest of the deck. "I do not dispense justice nor do I hope for it. That's enough of this foolishness."

"Thrice for life," she said softly, reshuffled, and once again held the cards out to him.

Her words seemed to invoke some compulsion in him, and where he would have turned away, he reached out instead. His hand was steady, but it seemed to him that his fingers trembled.

"The Hermit," his mother said, studying the picture of a man with a lantern and a staff, which he turned up for both of them to see. "He is always searching. Have you found what you have been looking for?"

With that, Snape tossed the cards he still held onto the table, where they slid apart in a mosaic of color. "Goodbye, Mother!" he spat. "I am so happy that we have had this little conversation!"

With that he turned away, and strode rapidly back to the door. He glanced back over his shoulder as he pulled it open and saw that his mother had taken up the cards he dropped and was using them to lay out another of her never-ending wheels of possibility.

He walked through the door, pulling it shut behind him with a dull thud, and found a thin blonde woman in blue robes leaning back against the stone wall on the other side of the hall. Her pale eyes flickered over him, a half-smile hovering around her lips.

"Good morning, Severus. My dear brother said that he met you on the stairs and I guessed that you would come here. Has Aunt Eileen told you what your future holds?" she asked in a mocking voice.

"She assures me I will have justice," he said, falling into step beside the woman as she pushed herself away from the wall and started off down the hall. "That's not a prospect that fills me with much enthusiasm."

His companion laughed softly. "What is justice anyway? I'm glad that you're here. I had hoped to see you long before this. When was the last time we met? Nearly six months ago, I think."

"My commitments kept me busy. I had no time for..."

"Dalliance?"

"Whatever you want to call it," he said dismissively. "Why are you here, Sabina? I cannot believe that this place holds much in the way of entertainment for you."

"Perhaps I was hoping to see you," she said, eying him sidelong from under her long lashes, as she twisted a lock of honey-blonde hair around one forefinger.

"Forgive me if I find that unlikely," he said. "I understand that Travers and Dolohov have been quite assiduous in their attentions."

"You keep yourself well informed about my affairs."

"It's a matter of self-preservation."

"Which you have developed to a fine art," she said wryly. "Very well, if you must have the truth, I came because Jovian insisted."

"Indeed?"

"Mother owled him to say that you were expected at the keep and he insisted that we come here. I think he has plans of some sort, but he has not shared them with me."

She stopped abruptly at the intersection of another corridor, catching Snape's arm so that he was forced to stop along with her. He turned to face her with a politely questioning look on his sallow face.

"I am telling you this for old time's sake, Severus. My brother is jealous of you, very jealous. You have the Dark Lord's favor."

"I believe I have earned it," Snape said shortly.

"So I understand. The Daily Prophet is full of it. Does your grandfather know about it?"

"He prefers not to know. That has always been his way of dealing with life. He remains safe here in his citadel, oblivious to the world."

"Jovian was full of the news, trying to find out all of the details."

"I don't doubt that. Jovian has always had, shall we say, exotic tastes.

"Don't underestimate him, Severus," she said sharply. "He will bring you down if he can."

"And he brought you here as part of some undisclosed plan for my destruction?" Snape's voice was calmly polite. "You kept him informed of our past... alliance, I suppose."

She started to speak, but he cut her off.

"I expected you to do so. The politics of our relationship made it inevitable. I never flattered myself that it was anything else," he added with a hint of bitterness.

"Severus... " she began.

"Does Jovian intend to call the Aurors? I assure you that the wards on this keep are more than sufficient to keep them out. Perhaps you should plan on staying here yourself. Your own position is not exactly unassailable. You were seen with Emmeline Vance shortly before she was murdered, were you not?"

"You are a real bastard, Severus," she countered. "Do you know that?"

"I do, my dear cousin. With so many people around who are only too happy to vouch for the fact, I am surprised that it took you this long to figure it out."

Sabine caught her breath and released her grasp on his sleeve as if it burned her. "Do whatever you want, then. You always do, don't you! I'll leave you to your own devices. Just remember that I warned you."

She tossed her head and walked away briskly down the intersecting hallway. After a moment or two he heard a door slam some distance away.

Irena Candy Wizard's House - 4 5