Go Mad in Good Company

Disclaimer: I'm not muscling in on JK's turf - just gambolling on it, like a spring lamb, having fun working out the literary and psychological puzzles which she is having fun setting us

If you are seeing this text, your browser does not support inline frames: to select a chapter you will have to return to the <A HREF="../Sons_of_Prophecy.htm">title-page</A>

It's been more than ten years since I last updated my fanfics, but I always meant to get back to them in the end.

They were an eventful ten years, beginning with our landlady's sudden decision to sell our house, resulting in an unexpected house move which was then complicated by the ceiling of the house we were meant to be moving into collapsing, then that house being whisked away after six months spent restoring it, just as we were about to move in, leaving me with a couple of weeks to find a different new house.

Meanwhile my mother became increasingly ill and confused due to renal failure and I spent two years looking after her, then she died and I had to plan her funeral: then since I was no longer her carer I was obliged by the government to spend most of my time applying for jobs which, owing to my age, I didn't have a prayer of getting. I then developed cataracts which meant I could barely see to type. No sooner had the cataracts been fixed and new spectacles purchased so I could see again, when I caught COVID-19, followed by a bad case of Long COVID.

On top of that there was a review for this fic sneering at Snape for being stressed out by the class ignoring him, and jeering at anyone who is afraid of public speaking – despite public speaking being such a profound and common human fear that if psychologists want to induce stress in a subject, they tell them they're going to have to make a speech. Since public speaking is my own greatest fear, and one which has warped my entire career, I was unable even to think about fanfics for two or three years thereafter, even to read them, because thinking about fanfics meant thinking about this review, which meant thinking about public speaking, which meant having a borderline panic attack.

In addition, this arc, Mood Music and Sons of Prophecy, is now my least favourite of my long fanfics because it was the one I started first, before I became a canon expert, and it therefore incorporates elements from the films and from fanon, or which are canonically a major stretch. Lucius's long hair and the Death Eaters' silver masks are from the films, and the idea of the Death Eaters being as over-the-top as they are here, and holding revels, is fanon. So are Remus's amber eyes: the nearest thing to canon we have on this is an illustrated edition which includes an ID document for Remus, of doubtful canonicity, which says his eyes are green. Lucius as we see him in DH is probably nothing like as evil as I made him here. Placing Hogwarts in Galloway and having Trelawney start teaching in the summer term of 1980 (placing the job interview and prophecy in April) are just barely canonically possible: but I realise now that the West Highlands and the January term are much more likely, and also that it's virtually certain that in canon Snape never killed anybody (other than Dumbledore) even in self-defence.

However, it's still a good if slightly AU story worth finishing, I still like this take on Severus even if he's not as completely canon-compliant as the one in Giving Extras (and has not yet mastered broomless flight, unlike his canon counterpart at this point), and after nearly six years battling Long COVID I am finally getting back to the point where I can concentrate on writing. At least I am now a pensioner, and am no longer obliged to spend my life chasing jobs I'll never get. My intention at this point is to tackle each fic one at a time and finish this one, then Lost & Found, then Giving Extras – leaving Giving Extras till last because it requires the most chapters to finish it.

N.B.Most of this chapter was written eleven years ago, except for a few edits and minor additions, the final scene, and the one with the two Horcruxes and the way it segues into the long night that follows, about which I had a bad case of Writer's Block at that time. Despite the delay, it forms a single arc with the previous one, ending back at the harbour where the previous chapter began. As our story resumes, they are going fishing for Dementors.

"This is one of the best places to find them," Lynsey's professor said, his mouth tightening into a sour line as he contemplated the bulk of the psychiatric hospital looming in the early morning mist. "A place where Muggles are held together, suffering in waking nightmares, and there are no wizards to drive the things away. Possibly only a concentration camp or a – a torture chamber would be better. Worse."

He shuddered, his skin blanching to an even more deathly pallor than it usually had, and Lynsey understood that proximity to the Dementors was making him start to relive his own suffering. And she could not even try to drive the thing away, to make it better for him or try to comfort him, because he needed his pain to draw it closer. Useless to think that she could have helped him in any case, she would never truly be able to.... She bared her notional astral teeth at that brooding oppression, concentrating on how very happy she would be to fight it, and it backed off a bit – but, damnit, perhaps she should have allowed it to feed....

Harry, she noticed, looked hardly any better than her own man. As she watched, his lips formed the word "Mum – " and Severus winced visibly. Bill Weasley put his hand up to his scarred cheek, his eyes hooded and his breath whistling out in an audible hiss. Other members of the Order, Lynsey knew, stood further back, unseen in the mist, ringing the lawn and forming a kind of bag with its mouth pointing towards the hospital, and the four of them enclosed in its centre.

The fog had drawn in closer like a cloud descending to earth, clammy and chill even in June. Severus had told her that a substantial part of it was actually Dementor spawn – information which made her want to slink away and have a very long hot shower. Bill Weasley still seemed almost normal, although his lips were drawn tight against his teeth and his scars stood out lividly, but Harry was glassy-eyed and shivering, his breath hanging in visible puffs of condensation against the intense cold which was gathering around him, and her lover's face was searing to look at, now, although she would not look away. His expression was open and agonized, his mouth working, and even as she watched he fell to his knees and began to shake, his teeth clenched against a moan of distress

Harry's complexion was almost as green as his eyes and he swayed where he stood, as his former professor's face twisted into a mask of despair and he started to jerk and whimper, horribly, in time with the memory of the lash. Yet Lynsey's sense of Severus told her that this visible anguish which was on one level perfectly real was on another a piece of theatre, well under his own control and underlain by a carefully buried but iron-hard smugness, in which the consciousness of his own sexual prowess of the previous night played no small part. She felt the heavy breath of death pass by, freezing where it touched, saw her friend's pupils dilate as he stared wildly upwards at something looming over him, and started to scramble back....

She stepped in between the embattled wizards and the hospital, facing towards them as behind her, unseen, Moody and Remus closed the gap in the ring of Order members and she saw Severus lurch backwards out of the way of that lethal Kiss and back up onto his feet, wand out and raised in unison with Harry and Bill as they all pointed at the space between them and began to cast, as Luna materialised at her side like a wraith and pressed a wand against her arm and she saw the great pacing destrier that was Severus in war-mode, an eight-tined stag and a hunting osprey erupt into silver life and began to circle sun-wise. The freezing unseen presence surged towards her, reeking of decay but radiating panic rather than threat as it sought to barge free past her; the osprey glided past like a stealth aircraft, its substanceless wingtip brushing across her chest and Luna's cheek as she snatched at the thread of her professor's emergent smugness and wove it into a wall of fierce joy, a barrier made of her vast pride in him, in his resilience and courage, and the soul-eater turned back again, seeking to escape past Harry instead. The three wizards flicked their wands in unison, shouting "Protego claustrum!" and at that a cage made of glowing lines of light sprang into being, surrounding the area between them. As the silver spirit-beasts paced out their seven circles the glowing cage shrank down slowly to the size of Rover, of a beachball, a netball, an orange....

The Dementor, she supposed, being a creature of spirit, must have no real fixed size or shape, other than what was born of habit. Assuming, she thought dazedly, as Tonks appeared through the mist, her hair an electrified explosion of lemon-yellow spikes, and began to hand out steaming mugs of hot chocolate, that there was still anything inside that glittering sphere, and it hadn't simply escaped.

Severus clutched her hand so tightly that she could feel his fingernails digging into her palm, his breathing still ragged as they snapped back into being among the crowds in Trafalgar Square. The sharp pop of their own arrival was echoed by a second bang, located in the vicinity of a wino with a spinning blue eye. Mad-Eye, she gathered, had accepted his exclusion from the Horcrux team on the grounds that his expertise was needed to guard the doors of the bank and make sure that the Dark Lord's spies had not set an ambush for anyone who tried to access the Lestrange vault. The possibility that Riddle might have spies among the goblins could not be discounted, and could not be countered other than by being alert to any attack.

In through the dingy little pub and out into the yard at the back, which had been spruced up for the summer and now held a few rather scruffy tables and chairs and a droopy-looking potted vine of some sort, which sported purple flowers with actual tongues, which it stuck out at them as they passed. A drunk at a corner table made a razzing noise and waved at Moody, trailing behind them in his shabby coat, and Moody pulled a bottle of beer from his capacious pockets and waved back.

Evidently the public rapport with Scrimgeour had done Severus's reputation some good: some people still looked askance at him, but nobody spat at him, or obviously went out of their way to avoid him unless they were directly in the way of his sweeping progress. She understood that he had hated having the other Order members witness what he still thought of as his shame, his weakness, even if it had been his decision to let them see it and he had been using it for practical purposes; so he was over-compensating by doing his Terror of the Lower Fourth act, striding out in a billow of black like a personified thunder-cloud. Perhaps it had always been a compensation for his perceived humiliation.

Gringotts stood up stark against the rain-washed sky, a great white marble block which looked as though it had escaped from nearby Regent's Street, out there in what Lynsey still had to remind herself not to think of as the "real" world. She had seen banks like it on George Street in Edinburgh, diminished now and turned into pubs, and she wondered if it were true Georgian or Victorian cod-Georgian. It couldn't be much older than that – wizardspace or no wizardspace, she knew this area had been green fields and market gardens until the mid seventeenth century.

Bill and Ginny were waiting for them at the foot of the steps. "The transit carts will only hold five including the driver," Bill muttered to Severus, "and my masters will only agree to our using two carts, so I sent Harry, Remus, Hermione and Luna on ahead with Takrod and sent Ron and Neville to await us at Summerhaes – I felt they were the least essential." Lynsey privately surmised that Bill had chosen to keep his adventurous little sister in the same cart as himself, rather than let her go ahead to be supervised by a group of teenagers barely older or more responsible than she was herself – or even by Remus, who lacked the authority to deal well with Ginny's particular brand of mayhem.

Severus nodded sharply. "Very well. I can't imagine Ronald was very pleased about that, but if we survive this encounter it will be useful to have two people who are still fresh to help deal with the – other items."

"That's roughly what I said to them – plus, I told Ron that the other two, ah, artefacts" – a quick sideways glance suggested that it was eavesdroppers, goblin or human, from whom he wished to conceal the dangerous word "Horcrux" – "might react in some way to the destruction of this one, so we needed somebody experienced and able to keep an eye on them."

The older man inclined his head without comment, and they mounted the wide steps under the impersonal, glittering stare of two guard-goblins dressed in scarlet and gold. Severus's mouth tightened slightly, and Lynsey remembered that these were Gryffindor colours. Could Godric's adoption of a red and gold livery for his students have had something to do with his acquisition of a goblin sword? Behind them, the tramp sat down at a pavement café on the far side of the road, his eye spinning, and ordered a pumpkin juice.

The towering bronze doors stood partially open, enough to allow human-sized customers to come and go, but the hinges looked well-oiled and she was sure that they could be slammed to in an instant. Beyond lay a lobby and then a second set of doors, silver this time. As they passed through, she caught a glimpse of sinister, warning lines of verse scrolling across the metal:

"... the sin of greed ... pay most dearly ...
... been warned, beware
Of finding more than ...."

Beyond that was a great marble hall, longer she thought than the Great Hall at Hogwarts, although not as wide, and divided lengthwise not by a table as such but by a long solid-fronted mahogany counter, weathered enough to confirm that the building was at least genuine eighteenth century. On the near side of the wood, roughly two-thirds of the room's width, thronged customers of mixed species and an eye-watering variety of sartorial styles; on the other a hundred or more goblins dressed in shifting tags of coloured leather and fabric sat perched on high stools, poring over great leather-bound ledgers, or screwing in jewellers' loupes with which they examined precious objects which were then weighed on old-fashioned brass scales. She wondered for a moment at the hands-on, non-magical nature of the devices they used – then remembered that Severus had said that the Ministry denied goblins the use of wands, so that they had to hire human wizards to perform some forms of magic for them, although they had their own intrinsic gifts.

A small goblin whom Lynsey thought by their lack of moustaches was probably a female, although it was hard to tell, slid down from one of the stools, temporarily disappearing from view behind the closed front panel of the long desk. After a few moments she(?) reappeared in the distance, materializing around one end of the counter, and padded over to join them on long, clawed feet. "Weasley," the sharp, leathery little presence said in a dubious tone, and Bill inclined his head.

"Follow." It – she? – turned and walked towards one of many unmarked doors leading off the hall.

The transition was startling. On one side of the heavy door, there was polished marble; on the other, a crude-looking stone building which was either much older or, Lynsey suspected, more traditionally goblinish. Either way, it was clear that the white marble frontage was just a stage set designed to impress the humans. This older or cruder building had evidently suffered from the instability of the London clay, or perhaps from the shock-waves of the Blitz, even here in wizardspace – for a short distance ahead she could see a crack in the right-hand wall, large enough for a man to fit through and leading through into some unknown space.

As in the dungeons at Hogwarts, flaming brands lit the near end of the narrow passage, staining the walls with smoke, but the far end receded into shadow. Silver rails glimmered as they sloped gently downwards to vanish into darkness and distance. Gatrak put her(?) fingers in her mouth and whistled like a steam train, and after a few seconds a wooden gurney came rumbling towards them out of the dark.

They clambered awkwardly over the low sides of the cart, and ended up with Ginny and the goblin on the bench at the front, and Lynsey crammed in between Bill and Severus in the back, with the leather bag containing the Dementor-trap on the floor at Bill's feet. Things would have been less crowded had Bill sat in front and the smaller Ginny in the back, but Bill clearly wanted his sister where he could see her. It wasn't clear why they couldn't have taken three at the front as well, but Gatrak dumped a leather hold-all of her own, which sounded as if it was full of bells and chains, onto the seat between herself and Ginny, maintaining a wide space. Perhaps the goblin drivers didn't like to be crowded.

"Driver" might be a misnomer. Once Gatrak had released whatever was holding the cart in place, gravity seemed to do the rest. It began, slowly at first and then with gathering speed, to rumble down the sloping rails into the shadows. Their starting point had been about ten feet above ground and Lynsey knew there to be about thirty feet of topsoil to get through below that, and then... as Severus gripped her hand, whether seeking or offering reassurance she wasn't sure, a bubble of song rose up under her breath –

"... Fighting boys of Wexford County
Are driving a tunnel though the London clay.

Up with the shields and jack it, ram it –
Driving a tunnel through the London clay."

As they entered the London clay the walls changed, appearing to be ceramic rather than assembled from stone, as if some great heat or magic had been used to fire the walls. Down and down the cart lurched, gathering speed, into what proved to be a twisting complex of dimly lit tunnels through which Lynsey supposed they were being guided by railway-style points controlled by Gatrak's shrill whistle, barely audible above the thunder of the rails. The random weaving about must make it almost impossible for any passenger to work out their bearing in relation to their starting point, and dig down from the surface.

The cart clanked at every intersection, and Ginny whooped sotto voce like a polite kid on a rollercoaster. Her brother sat placidly, like a morning commuter on the Bakerloo line, his earrings jiggling in time with the rumble, but Severus looked both anxious and elated. It was impossible to talk without shouting, over the echoing roar of the wheels, but Lynsey squeezed his hand back and he glanced sideways at her and grinned.

They must be below the level of the Thames, now, and Lynsey wondered how they managed to ventilate the place – as they clearly did, since the occasional oil lamps hanging by the side of the track kept on burning – without it flooding. Watertight walls, she supposed, and watertight tubes leading to the surface, but there must surely be pumps as well, or a breach in a wall could flood the whole system.

Now they were into the chalk, nearly two hundred yards below the surface, and she wondered if they were going the whole quarter-mile down through chalk and sandstone and more clay to the true bedrock, to the London Platform, the lost continent of Avalonia stretching out under the sea to France – but their downwards plunge seemed to be levelling slightly. Instead of burrowing to bedrock, the tunnel was carrying them in some sense back to the starting point, she thought, back to where she had found her future lover hanging in chains of fire in the heart of the chalk.

The passage was opening up now into a succession of wide, low-roofed caves, the roar of the wheels was more echoing but less deafening in this wider space but now the track began to snake alarmingly, slaloming through a forest of stalactites and stalagmites, so that it seemed that at any moment it might jump the rails and slam them into a pillar, and Severus was beginning to look a little green around the gills. She supposed that the hard, limestone-rich water of the Thames was seeping down through the ceiling to form these gnarled columns, like the droolings of some enormous candle.

Down and down – they might be staying within the chalk layer, but that still gave them more than two hundred yards of extra depth to play with. Lynsey supposed that the upper vaults were either set into ceramic boxes in the clay or excavated from the top ten yards or so of the chalk layer, and the deep ones were down here at the bottom, close to the sandstone. Riddle had chosen to bury his essence in the bowels of the earth, as little as a hundred yards above Avalonia. Down and down.

They must surely have travelled two or three miles horizontally as well as close to a quarter of a mile down – impossible to tell whether they had circled round and were still somewhere close to Trafalgar Square, or whether they were now under Camden or Fitzrovia or the Isle of Dogs. Abruptly, the cart slammed around a hairpin bend which caused even Ginny to go "Yeeee!", rounded a great headland of chalk and crashed across a rattling iron bridge, a few feet from an underground cliff-face down which a narrow waterfall plunged before tumbling under the bridge and into a lake to their left. Severus was closest to the cliff and bore the brunt of the spray – as he yelped in indignation Lynsey was startled into exclaiming "What the fuck – ?" and Gatrak sniggered, her slanted, whiteless black eyes glittering in her dark face.

"If we had any doubt of you," she said, "I would have sent you on ahead – and opened the sluice-gates to let it wash you clean."

"It's called The Thief's Downfall," Bill explained, raising his voice over the receding rustle of the water. "When they open the sluice the body of the water comes right down onto the cart, and it washes off any enchantments so you can see if somebody is not who they're pretending to be, or is being controlled." Lynsey glanced sideways, surreptitiously, and noted that Severus's newly damp hair now had some grey streaks in it which hadn't been apparent a moment ago.

The cart rattled to a halt about fifty yards beyond the bridge, and they climbed out. Another, empty cart was already parked in front of them. The three back-seat passengers were as stiff and stumbling as if they had just disembarked from a boat after a rough voyage but Ginny, the Quidditch player, sprang out with annoying athleticism, her marron eyes sparkling, and the goblin might have been dismounting from a bus for all the concern she showed.

They walked for a short distance along another passage, this one without rails. As they approached a corner the wall ahead of them was suddenly illuminated by a burst of orange light, blinding in the half dark of the tunnel and accompanied by a breathy roar. Gatrak reached into her leather bag with long fingers and pulled out an iron ring from which hung a bunch of mushroom-shaped bronze objects resembling the bells from the tops of old-fashioned alarm clocks. She shook the ring, which made a sound like bolts falling onto a dozen enormous tin trays, and the roaring retreated and became something more like a moan.

Lynsey was starting to have a very bad feeling about this, but she followed the goblin around the corner anyway, to be struck by a horrible sense of déjà vu. Another cave in the chalk, another tormented prisoner – although this one rocked Lynsey back on her heels and caused her to swear in shock. A dragon!

It was as big as a smallish elephant, not counting the thick, spike-tipped tail – it must use magic for extra lift, there was no way the spiky wings, vast though they were, would be able to lift it unaided – and was making its own light, a trickle of fire still dribbling out with every anxious breath. This, she thought, must be what had fired the ceramic walls of the tunnel through the clay. It was shaped vaguely like an iguana, with a blunt head framed with ragged scales. Faint shading in the creases on its body suggested it might once have been a metallic iron grey with a rust-orange belly and red eyes, but it looked as if it had been down here in the dark for decades: most of its scales were dry-looking and pale, silver and faded primrose, and a milky film of cataract rendered the eyes more pink than red.

It occupied a large but comparatively low-ceilinged hall on the far side of which Harry, Hermione, Remus, Luna and the goblin Takrod could be seen standing by one of a row of five heavily reinforced wooden doors. Takrod was holding a lantern in one hand and shaking another of the rings of clanking bells with the other, and the dragon reared up to its full height and wavered back and forth as if trying to get away from each instrument in turn, trembling with obvious fear and swaying from foot to lethally taloned foot like a baited bear, unable to escape because of the heavy shackles around its hind legs, connected to huge pegs driven deep into the floor.

It didn't look as if it were gratuitously ill-treated – this far down the temperature was comfortably warm, even for a reptile, and it had room, barely, to spread its wings. The shackles were lined with leather and not uncomfortably tight, a stream of water trickled within reach and it was if anything rather over-fed. It wouldn't do to enquire too deeply into the pile of scorched bones in the corner, a few of which looked suspiciously human-like. "Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards," ran the old joke, "for you are crunchy and good with ketchup." But it must have been down here in the dark without exercise or amusement for a long time, to judge by its pallor, and was clearly terrified of the discordant music – the long slashing scars which criss-crossed its bath-tub-sized face suggested that it had been tortured to make it so, and she wished that she could free this prisoner as well. If she could not, she knew that it would ache at her like a sore tooth until she did, or somebody did. Luna, she saw, was watching the cowering dragon with a kind of abstracted concern.

Severus's face at her side was inscrutable as they edged around the side of the cavern, following Gatrak, and Lynsey wished that the goblin would stop tormenting the dragon with her clacking bells, but knew that if she did it might well burn them all up.

As they approached, Takrod – definitely a male, to judge by the long stringy beard and 'taches and the Adam's apple – pressed his palm flat against the wood and the door abruptly vanished, or perhaps turned transparent. Beyond was a medium-sized cave piled high with a hoard to satisfy any dragon, a buttery glimmer of gold shining in the lantern light. "Stand back!" Bill said sharply, as Harry started to move towards the door: "I need to check for curses."

Facing them from the top of a great heap of golden coins and drinking-vessels, glaring at them with empty eye-sockets, was a crowned skull which looked to be male and some centuries dead. Assuming it to be British, and not much older than it looked, and that it wore the crown by right, Lynsey suspected it of being the missing head of King James IV, the architect of Scotland's golden age, whose genius for science had sadly bled over into a passion for untried gadgets and gimmicks which proved to be disastrous in battle – or perhaps of Richard III, that well-meaning and much-maligned young man, but in his case there was no reason to think his head had become separated from his body, wherever that might be. Or was it perhaps the head of William Wallace, cut down from his pike on London Bridge and crowned in mockery? They were the only recentish British rulers she could think of whose skulls were unaccounted for, and wizards didn't seem to go in for royalty of their own. Had whoever-it-was worn one of those silver suits of armour which were ranked around the walls?

Or perhaps it was older than it looked, and she was in the presence of Saxon Harold, or of Alfred himself, greatest of British kings, still guarding his kingdom from the chill presence which lurked somewhere in this room, in this deep mine under the city. She touched the heel of her hand to her brow and bowed, whoever it was. As she straightened she became aware that Luna Lovegood was giving her a sunny, impartial smile.

As Takrod and Gatrak stood behind them, ready to fend off the dragon if it should try to attack, Bill and Severus muttered together in subdued voices, testing the magic of the place with their wands. She thought she heard the word "Gemini" and something which sounded like "in flagranté", which raised her eyebrows a bit, and made her wonder whether they were proposing to perform some kind of sex magic. Finally Bill passed his wand across the opening in a complex pattern, followed by a slashing downstroke, and something like a ripple of electric current fizzled through the room beyond the naked doorway, and then dissipated. Bill stepped forward alone and cautiously touched the shoulder of a gilded breastplate, half buried in coins: when nothing happened he inclined his head to Takrod and Takrod nodded back, his slash of a mouth tightening in what might possibly be intended to be an encouraging smile, and gestured for them to enter.

Once they had all crammed into the vault the door reappeared behind them with a bang. In the split second before it did so there was a breathy roar and a sudden flare of orange light, followed by a whoosh as a blast of flame splashed against the door on the other side. It was, Lynsey thought, the dragonish equivalent of sticking two fingers up at them.

There was just about room for them all if they spaced themselves out around the walls, but it was a close thing. As well as the piled-up heap of gold and the armour, they could see by lantern and wand-light that there were rank on rank of shelves around the room, piled with chains and shields and strange-looking helmets and little jewelled flasks of mysterious liquids at which Severus peered with interest. Odd-looking hides were propped up among the piled gold, taken from creatures with trailing wings or jagged lines of spines. Lynsey half heard, half saw Luna's mouth form the word "Chimaera" as she examined a particularly spiky specimen.

Harry – long-sighted, Lynsey gathered, as all the best Quidditch Seekers were – scanned the walls above them, and then pointed, quietly. There, high above them, on a shelf just a foot or so below the ceiling, was a small two-handled gold cup, glowing like a patch of distilled sunlight as the light cast by Harry's wand swept across it. "Accio cup" Harry said clearly and precisely, and precisely nothing happened.

Severus tsk'ed at him and started looking for something long enough to hook the cup down with, but the longest spear he could find was still a foot short. "May I?" Ginny asked politely, her eyes glittering, and Severus looked at her for a moment and then nodded curtly. Ginny spun round and flicked her wand, muttering something, and without warning a small bat began to crawl out of Harry's left nostril.

Harry said "Yeuurrgh!" and staggered backwards as more bats began to emerge, but nobody else seemed unduly alarmed. Ginny watched dispassionately until there were six or seven and then flicked her wand again, snapping "Finite!", before using it to direct the bats towards the cup on its high shelf. The little flying mammals began to pull the cup off the shelf between them but the gold was heavy and they were already beginning to fade back into nothingness. As the bats lost the struggle with gravity and the glittering golden object began to fall Ginny set her foot on the breastplate which her brother had touched and sprang up, catching it out of mid air. As she landed back down in a sliding cascade of coins and rubies, Luna clapped her hands in polite applause.

Ginny hesitated visibly between the three adult wizards, before handing the cup to Severus with a little flourish. He took it gingerly and set it down on one of the lower shelves, wiping his hands surreptitiously against his robes. Lynsey wasn't sure whether that was because of the possibility that it contained a fragment of his quondam lord and tormentor, or because he had just seen it being handled by magical creatures who were essentially made out of snot.

"This is the artefact?" Gatrak asked in a high, gravelly voice, as Harry blew his nose honkingly on a rather suspect-looking handkerchief.

"Yes." Severus said, sounding abstracted. At this range it could be seen that a rather stylised, Saxon-looking badger was embossed on the cup. "But at first touch it doesn't feel as... magically active as I would have expected."

Harry gave one final resonant honk and moved to stand beside Severus. "It makes my scar twinge at this range, a little bit, but I can't say I feel it pulling at me the way the l- ... the other infected items do."

"So you have dragged us here and violated our vaults for a phantasm?" Takrod said sharply.

It was, surprisingly, Remus who answered. "Sir," he said respectfully, "there is no doubt that a harmful presence was, um, deposited some years ago...."

"In a manner of speaking," Bill said smoothly, "or at least reduced in its effectiveness. But we could not know this in advance, and it was necessary to check it in order to ensure the safety of the bank."

"Perform the cleansing anyway", Gatrak said. "Better too cautious than not cautious enough."

"Very well." Bill bent down and opened the leather bag at his feet, then lifted out the glowing, grapefruit-sized ball of light, which buzzed like some vast insect trapped against a window-pane. Dark discolourations swirled within it – it made Lynsey feel queasy just to look at it, and even Gatrak leaned backwards away from it as it was carried past her. Wordlessly, Bill guided the sphere down over the golden cup where it stood on its shelf, his palms not quite touching it, and stepped back. There was a brief sizzle and an ozone smell, and Harry clapped his hand to his scar, wincing.

"Looks like there was still something there," Remus said, "even if it was just a, a taint."

"I thought", Hermione's voice said behind them, quietly, "according to those books that Professor Snape quoted, that you had to put the host object beyond magical repair in order to get rid of a H... um, thing."

"What is in the books, Miss Granger," Severus replied sharply, "is only what the author of the book probably believed to be true at time of writing. Too much reliance on the printed text may blind you to other possibilities. And I'm damned," he added under his breath, "if I'm going to destroy the Founders' relics if I can avoid it."

It was all embarrassingly anticlimactic, Lynsey thought – like investing time and effort in hauling a lame horse to the vet, only to have it trot out of the trailer with a perfectly sound, smugly elastic stride. As if echoing her thought, Luna beside her murmured "I'm sure Professor Snape is very embarrassed – he does get embarrassed quite easily, I find – but really it shows that he was right about a ... Thing ... being used up during each, um, incident."

After an exchange of eyebrow-semaphore with Severus, Bill guided the sizzling sphere with his wand, lifting it into the air and then back into the holdall. Severus picked the cup up, as warily as if he expected it to be red hot, and held it out towards Harry, who put a hand up to touch the lightning rune on his forehead, and then nodded. "Clean, as far as I can tell."

"How're you planning to get it back up there?" Remus asked, looking up at the high shelf. "It's too heavy for Leviosa and there's too much junk in the way to conjure a ladder."

Severus smirked. "If I wanted to, Lupin, I could get you to hold it and then lift you up with it using Levicorpus – feet first – but I don't think we need to conceal our presence here, unless our hosts object?"

The two goblins turned towards each other and began to rattle away in a harsh language like somebody vibrating a pail full of pebbles. Finally Takrod turned to them and made a little half bow. "We feel that the bank does not have a pressing need to conceal from the owners the fact that their vault was, ah, infested and required to be cleansed, especially since the infestation did not occur through any fault on our part. No decision has yet been reached as to whether it would be appropriate to notify them as to the infestation."

Bill returned the bow. "Thank you, sir. It would suit our own purposes if the owners were to be made aware of this... disinfestation."

"Your purposes are your own affair," Gatrak snapped. "The bank will not be swayed either way by these – considerations."

"Of course not, ma'am." Ah, so the slender, almost beardless goblin was female. "You have already been more than generous."

Gatrak wrinkled her oddly-shaped nose, like a parrot's beak with the tip turned up. "Be sure to replace the defensive curses. We will not have it said that we compromised a customer's security."

Takrod started ringing the Clangers before he Vanished the door, in case the dragon was poised to ambush them. They trailed behind him with a strong sense of anticlimax – at least, Lynsey felt it, and she thought the others did too. Once they were all outside, with the dragon cowering as far away from them as its shackles would allow, Bill pointed his wand back into the cave and said forcefully "Gemino!", sending a bolt of bluish light to crackle briefly over the surface of the gold, and Severus followed suit with "Flagranté!"

As Gatrak raised her hand to summon the door back into place, Lynsey turned one last time and bowed deeply to the skull in its circlet of gold.

Gravity might have got them down there but it was presumably magic, or perhaps some hidden engine, which propelled the little wooden gurneys back up towards the surface. There was no smell of smoke or petrol, and indeed anything which generated fumes would be disastrous in these winding tunnels, so far from the open air. Bad enough that there were oil lamps burning down here: Lynsey wondered again whether the tunnel system had its own wholly independent ventilation system, or whether it was parasitic on the London Underground. The light was too poor and the carts too low-slung for her to see what was going on underneath the one behind them but she thought she could possibly make out little notches on the inner side of the rails, such as might engage with cog-wheels, and she supposed that the goblins' technology might well be up to making, or buying in, rechargeable batteries, or their magical equivalent. This, perhaps, was why they had been restricted to five passengers per cart, as the tiny vehicles seemed to be labouring rather, rattling and juddering as they struggled to gather speed.

Up and up – once they were properly underway they seemed to be accelerating, but the carts swayed alarmingly and there was a sense that if anything went wrong gravity would suck them backwards, to hurtle back into the depths. Over the rumble she thought she heard Harry in the cart behind them say something about Hagrid getting cart-sick, and Takrod's answering snigger.

The way back seemed to take an age, long miles travelling precariously through the London clay, but eventually the carts grumbled to a halt in the torch-lit corridor with the cracked wall. They disembarked stiffly, stepped through the heavy door, and were back into the light and bustle of the long marble-faced counting-hall. It was like stepping from a hermit's cell onto the concourse of Victoria Station.

Taking their leave of the goblins, they trailed outside in a ragged gaggle, into the blinding light of early summer. A few small clouds like puffs of cottonwool hung in painfully sharp 3D against a brilliantly blue sky. As they reached the foot of the steps there was a rush, a bang, a sudden blur of figures and Alastor Moody shouting "Jump!" – as the crushing grip of Apparition took them Lynsey glimpsed the two guard-goblins in their scarlet and gold swiping with drawn swords at a witch and wizard who were struggling to keep their wands on the goblins and on Mad Eye at the same time, as the witch's wand blew apart in a shower of sparks....

"Shite!" Severus exclaimed with evident feeling, as they snapped back into being on the lawn outside the house where he had showed Filius his memories of torture, and the sharp rain whipped against their skin and ghosted in curtains across the face of the aqueduct.

"Here!" Bill snapped, shoving the bag which contained the Dementor trap into Harry's arms, and with another loud bang he was gone – back, Lynsey supposed, to defend the bank which employed him. As he did so Ron's head appeared around the edge of the front door, wand raised in case the hard bangs of Apparition had heralded an assault by enemy wizards.

"What're you doing standing out there like ninnies for, getting wet?" he demanded, and Severus growled at him.

"We were attacked, Weasley – we didn't have time for such niceties as casting Impervius before we left."

"Well, get in here, then." He held the door open for them, scowling with impatience. "Where's Bill? Is he – "

"He went back to make sure Gringotts was secured," Remus said, "but I don't think you need to worry: it looked as though Mad Eye and Gringotts' own security had the matter well in hand."

As they hurried inside into the warmth and dry Lynsey brushed up against Severus in the doorway, and felt the thin tremor in his muscles. She was more than a little queasy herself. He could so easily have been re-captured; they could all so easily have been killed, if not for Mad Eye and his practical paranoia.

Once they were all safely inside Ron ushered them through into the kitchen, where Neville was setting out tea and home-made soup. Severus's expression suggested to Lynsey that he was thinking about other food prepared by Neville; food which had saved him from starving in the cold and hunger of Azkaban. Neville watched him with a quiet concern which turned to a nervous, ingratiating smile when Severus caught him at it.

They had hardly begun to eat when Ron started and looked towards something Lynsey couldn't see. Severus quietly drew his wand and pressed it into Lynsey's palm, covering her hand with his, and she saw what the others were seeing – a wavering silver shape in the form of an osprey, crouched panting on the windowsill with half its body outside in the rain, and the other half through the glass and into the room. Even with the input from Severus she only half heard, half imagined it open its beak and croak "We are clear, here: Gringotts is secure; no injuries beyond our capacity to heal them."

As they stepped across the hallway into the front parlour, the rain rattled against the windowpanes and drummed like the hooves of an army on the skylight above the stairs, and Severus jerked his head up and stared at the hammering downpour beyond the glass. The parlour, Lynsey knew, would once have been reserved for special occasions, especially the laying-out of the dead. It seemed a fitting venue for the partial, piecemeal murders they were about to commit – this killing of what were, in effect, fragments of a prisoner.

On a console table at the far side of the room stood the marble bust of an old man which they had seen before in the Come-and-Go Room, scruffy wig still in place and crowned with a very early-looking diadem, decorated with enamel and garnets. Lynsey thought uneasily of the crowned skull in the vault. Around the sculpture's neck someone had placed a large gold locket decorated with a snake twisted into an S-shape.

In some ways it was the ghost girl all over again, since the others could clearly see what Lynsey could only sense. As Harry, beside her, went to open the bag containing the Dementor-trap and then staggered suddenly, clapping his hand to his forehead and exclaiming in a hissing, unintelligible language which sounded like an alligator swearing, she could feel a strong sense of presence, a buzz of words almost known-of at the very edge of hearing, yet could see nothing – not even when Ginny's eyes focused sharply on a point at head-height in front of the console, and the redhead's mouth tightened into a thin line.

"Get back Tom, you bastard!" Ginny snapped, raising her wand, her eyes tracking from side to side as if to follow two targets as Severus drew a shuddering breath and clutched at the space on his left arm where the Dark Mark used to be, then shook his head angrily.

"No! You betrayed me – us, you lied to us – " but Remus turned to him, snarling .

"What did you think they would be, you bloody fool, you knew what Lucius was – "

"If not for you and your fucking thugs I would never have fallen in with him – with either of them! And you" he added, rounding on Harry: "if your fucking father hadn't – and I was fucked by Lucius because of him, and stripped – "

"It's not my bloody fault, you always blame me for every bloody thing!" He clapped a hand to the scar on his forehead. "Ow!" In the corner of the room, Ron and Hermione appeared to be having a separate fight with each other.

"You do, you know." That was Neville, sounding plaintive rather than angry. "Always blaming us …"

"Shut the fuck up! Bastard!" – that was Ginny, and Lynsey wasn't sure whether the redhead was addressing Severus or the ghost of Riddle, with the Dark Lord's presence looming over all of them like a throbbing migraine.

"Don't you speak to me like that !" – and Lynsey was equally unsure whether he was addressing Ginny or Riddle, but Harry evidently assumed the worst because there he was, his hair standing up like a lavatory brush, shouting "Don’t you bloody speak to my girlfriend like that!", and Severus shouted back "Or what?", thrusting his face forwards like a mantling hawk. "Of all the cocksure, arrogant –"

Lynsey was just congratulating herself on staying out of it when Severus rounded on her. "And you! I never asked for your pity, your patronising fucking games – chopsticks!"

"I didn't ask for your fucking temper, your ingratitude – " – she knew dimly that their heads were being messed with but in a moment it would be too late, they would all have gone too far –

"Gratitude!" he snarled, his expression half-crazed, "When you let that – that – Nagini –" and she saw Hermione raise her hand as if she might slap Ron; Ginny was shouting something at Neville, haranguing him from the sound of it about his inability to stick up for himself, which only made him look as if he might fall apart on the spot; but Harry was staring at the diadem and looked more as if he might vomit … and then Luna's serene voice cut across them all in a sudden jolt of clarity.

"I know you don't want to die," she said gently to the marble bust and what was hovering over it, "but when we've killed all of you then you can all fit back together again, and you can start over. It wasn't sensible to break yourself up like this." She drew her hands apart, expanding the spitting sphere of energy until it was big enough to contain both bust and diadem, and dropped it over them.

Harry screamed, suddenly, shockingly, clutching at his forehead with both hands, and collapsed to the parquet floor and then Severus was on his knees next to him, pulling his hands away. "Potter! Let me see. Granger, Weasley – call Poppy."

Once Harry had been safely put to bed, with salve smeared on the angry red welt at his temple, the rest of them stood around in embarrassed silence, no longer sure where they stood with each other; except for Luna, who smiled on them all with a benign, impartial serenity. "Everybody has bad thoughts sometimes," she said placidly: "it's just your brain, um, trying out different scripts. But Mr Riddle knows how to magnify them, and Professor Snape had a difficult time with the Dementor this morning."

"Thank you for those pearls of wisdom, Lovegood," he said balefully. "But, um – " He ducked behind his hair before mumbling "Essentially correct."

"That's all right, sir." Neville smiled slyly. "We'll make sure Harry doesn't tell Dobby on you."

"I really don't want you to be grateful unless you want to be, that wasn't – not really me talking." She remembered what he had said to her in the caves, about feeling contaminated by contact with Riddle's mind: it felt as though some vital part of herself, some innocence, had been left behind at Summerhaes, and she might never get it back. "I hate that – that sappy New Age shit about always having to be grateful for everything. You were entitled to whatever I gave you, especially after….."

The professor sighed and turned to face her, in the half dark of a Scottish early summer night. "Don't concern yourself. He – Riddle – bores like a maggot into every weakness. And I fucking hate displaying my weakness it –" She could see memory and realisation catching up with him then. "Oh. Fuck." His eyes screwed shut, flinching. "Did I really tell Potter that Lucius – Fuck. It's too much to hope he didn't understand."

"But it's another reason to pity me, isn't it, and I can't even be rude to the little sod and make him hate me any more, otherwise Dobby…." He scrubbed at his eyes with the heal of his hand. "You would think I didn't have any dignity left, after – I can hardly bear – but I'm not ungrateful, to him or to you. I'm just not sure what to do with it: I never really had anybody to be grateful to, before."

His dark eyes glittered, catching the sliver of moonlight from the window, and she saw him draw a deep breath. "When I was – there – I was so... sick with shock and exhaustion, I suppose, that even if they – even when He gave me ten minutes without pain as a reward for spilling my bloody guts I still felt as if – as if my bones had turned to water, I couldn't stop shaking and I couldn't, I couldn't bear another minute of pain but I had to, I had to bear it, on and on, hours, days, I begged and babbled but He laughed at me, said said even if I spilled every secret I possessed my punishment was hardly begun yet and He gave me back to Macnair and there was nothing anywhere except cruelty, and then suddenly you were there and it – I still hurt, I hurt everywhere, I could hardly think for pain and exhaustion and bloody thirst but suddenly there was something else to think about other than pain. Having a companion, having somebody else care that I was hurt, having somebody treat me as if – as if I was deserving of consideration, having a laugh with somebody – God. It was just –"

He smiled at her crookedly and reached up to brush the pad of his thumb across her lips, and she turned her head slightly and kissed the base of his thumb. "I wouldn't have believed I could feel so ghastly physically and yet be as high as a bloody kite, or that I could go from – from one of the worst experiences of my life to one of the best, in the space of a few minutes."

"It was terrifying, but it was fun, wasn't it, stravaiging through the dark together?" She curled up against him, comfortably, and felt him put his arms round her and absentmindedly begin twiddling with a strand of her hair.

"Yes, and that was the oddest thing about it," he replied, and she could actually hear the puzzled frown even though she was at the wrong angle to see it. "I'm not used to people enjoying my company, unless it was as something to pick on. And especially not when I was so... when I felt so – degraded."

"Daft man. I was worried about your injuries, gods, yes, but you were much more interesting than just a – a patient, and I couldn't have asked for better company. Then or now."

Severus sighed and tucked his sharp chin down against her shoulder, so that his breath tickled her ear as she heard him murmur: "Neither could I. If anyone had told me," he continued sleepily, "when I was – in Lucius and co's literally bloody hands – that not only would I survive it sane but that soon I would have warmth and company and friends – a lover, even! – who actually thought that I was worth more than whatever use they could put me to, I would have thought that I was mad already, or they were. But thanks to you...."

"Ah...." She ducked her head, embarrassed. "That was just good luck, on both our parts. The Order – Minerva, Lupin – they hadn't given up on you: they just couldn't bloody find you. But they were trying hard, and they would have succeeded sooner or later."

"If it had been very much later" he said tightly, "there wouldn't have been enough of me left to have been worth saving."

"Even if I was incapable of understanding that I had been saved? Another week, I think – two at the outside – and my mind would have been shattered past retrieving."

"Yes." He rolled away from her, lying on his back in the half-dark with his prow of a nose pointing at the ceiling. "I was there, you know," he said grimly. "I witnessed the tail end of it, I even managed to alert the Order about it – but it was already too late to save their minds. I would have if I could, even though – I've never told Neville this, and I don't think I ever would, but Frank Longbottom.... When I was – when I was in Azkaban the first time, after I deserted Him and before Albus managed to convince the Ministry of my sincerity, the Aurors were – not exactly considerate hosts. As you know. When you consider that the Ministry actually employed Macnair....

"And I know, theoretically, that despite his apparently single-minded mission to blow up the entire wizarding world, Neville Longbottom is as kind and sweet-tempered and steadfast a young man as you could hope to meet. But like Potter he's too much like his damned father for comfort – not the face, with Neville, he has his mother's face and she was a sweet girl, but the stance, the build, the voice, even the walk, the way he moves – and whenever I catch sight of him unexpectedly something in me still thinks he's going to knock me down and kick me in the gut, or whip his wand out and Cruciate me. Quite apart from the fact that his carelessness endangers me and everyone else in the bloody classroom every time he gets near a cauldron."

"That's a shame, because he really is such a sweet kid: even though he was petrified of you he was still really concerned about you, when we were on the boat. If you could bring yourself to be nicer to him I think he'd follow you like a puppy."

"One bloody dog is enough, thank you so much, and it's really Minerva's job to be a parental substitute for Gryffindors – I have enough on my hands with my own bunch of Walking Wounded. But the boy is wounded, I can see that. His grandmother and uncles may not be technically abusive, at least by wizarding standards, but I gather they brought him up to think that he was probably a Squib, and that if he was they would reject him – and then tried to terrorize him into magic by endangering him. I didn't know at the time, but Minerva told me the other day... I might shout at the brat to stop him from blowing himself, myself and the entire bloody class to Kingdom-Come, but to hold a small child out of a window and threaten to drop him...."

"The good guys in your little world really aren't that much better than the bad guys, are they? But – you don't seem to react badly to Draco, even though he's the spit of his bloody father."

"I have known Draco since he was a babe in arms, I've watched him grow up – most of the time I just see Draco as Draco. I only occasionally see Lucius in him. But I am... tense around Crabbe and Goyle Junior, now, and they really don't deserve that – they may be a bit lacking in the intellectual department but they're not particularly bad lads, and they both probably have nearly as much reason to hate and fear their bloody fathers as I have. At least I try to help my students when their families ill-use them: even if nobody ever tried for me."

"It disturbs me to think that even your own side has consistently ill-treated you – I mean, not just leaving you with your family, but the Ministry, the Aurors...."

"But they didn't believe that I was on our side. You've seen Mad-Eye, and he's supposed to be one of the best of them: does it still surprise you, that the Aurors sometimes resort to – extreme measures? And Dementors aside, they weren't anything like as vicious as.... At least they let me sleep for a few hours between beatings, and when I blacked out under the Cruciatus they left me to come round in my own time, instead of using spells and potions to force me to be awake and alert so they could go on hurting me round the bloody clock." He sighed and ground the heels of his long hands into his eye-sockets again. "Please don't take this amiss, but – if it were not for the use I can still be to the Order, if it were only for my own sake, I would have to say – despite everything which I have gained since, if I had the chance to go back and change my own fate I would still choose to die, rather than go through – that. Rather than have my dignity flayed off me in bloody strips, and the whole fucking wizarding world knowing it."

"I – I understand, pet. And I'm not insulted. But nevertheless – it's a fait accompli, we have to go on from where we are, and things did turn out all right for you, didn't they?"

"Oh yes. And I will say – given that I did go through it and that the, the pain and humiliation were fait accompli, that they were going to happen whether I survived it or not, I'm glad that I survived." He propped himself up on his elbow and smiled at her, one of his bright, inscrutable looks that was more of a shield against emotion than an expression of it. "I truly am glad that you hauled me out of there in the face of all common-sense, and I no longer wish that you had simply done as I asked and finished me. And I suppose," he added, with that glittering smile, "that I ought to have more sympathy for my mother – seeing that falling for Muggles seems to run in the family."

She woke from deep sleep and struggled, floundering, towards the surface to find him kneeling bolt upright on the bed beside her, mother-naked and pale as moonlight with the moonlight falling across his bare back, still laced with scars as it was; his eyes wide-open and unseeing as his grating voice counted down the seconds of peace until his torture should resume – cursed under her breath, lunged towards him and took him in her arms, drawing him fiercely close. He collapsed back against her, swooning – and then, because some things did get better, and he did, cuddled up against her skin to skin without resistance – with, in fact, every sign of taking pleasure in being comforted and comfortable. She stroked her hand across his back and down his flank, as if he were one of the cats, and he half roused and turned to her, still three parts asleep but abruptly iron-hard and urgently amorous, and she welcomed him in.

Surfacing from a thoroughly sated post-coital drowse a few hours later to find the bed beside her empty and cold, she cranked her eyelids open to half mast and made out Severus standing silhouetted against the window, gazing south down the length of the garden towards the outskirts of the city. Without warning his lovely voice lifted against the dawn, softly and clearly, a tune familiar to both of them –

"And the sign said 'The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls,
And whispered in the sounds of silence...'"

Feeling her gaze on him he turned and gave her a tight little smile. "I suppose," he said quietly, "that St Andrew's is a bit – well, that song really needs somewhere... seamier. More like the dirty old dump Lily and I grew up in. The lyrics say 'Silence like a cancer grows' so I suppose the writer thought that a prophet of the tenements was a bad idea, but..." He sighed, looking down at his hands, and Lynsey smiled back at him.

"I'm with you, pet. The gods are in all places, in the towns and factories as much as in the ash-groves if you know how to find them; and a prophet of the tenements and terraces is just as good as from the mountains." Almost a year ago now, she remembered, she had been coming away from a seminar entitled Shamanism in an Urban Environment just before she first set eyes on Lucius – the beginning, although she had not known it then, of her contact with Severus's world. "And besides – St Andrew's may be a bit grand for subways, but they call the uni here ‘the singing university'. This is where the music lives, if you want it."

She woke early after a few hours' sleep to find him already up and in the kitchen, his purring voice intercutting with the distant, tinny whisper that was Dumbledore, speaking through the photograph. She thought she heard Severus say "… in the scar, do you think?", and then a few minutes later, "… but if you're right and it really is that cloak, that means that we…" but she was still exhausted and stiff from such a disturbed and sexually active night – one in which for once, she thought, they had made the tirelessly busy centaurs envy their energy and ingenuity – and the conversation was probably meant to be private, so she fell back into sleep until he came to rejoin her, bringing coffee.

"I had a dream," he said, frowning at her through a rising cloud of steam, and Lynsey, yawning, braced herself for some fresh catalogue of horrors – but in truth, he didn't look as if he was distressed. Bemused, more like it.

"I dreamed that you and I were sitting by the fire in the wood, eating trout sandwiches, when Lupin came out of the trees, dressed as a Mediaeval huntsman and with a brace of pheasants slung over his shoulder, and he gave me this – peculiar, eldritch smile, slung the pheasants down in front of me and said 'I thought you might enjoy this game.' And the birds didn't even turn into anything nasty, although I more than half expected them to."

He shook himself, his expression puzzled. "I can't remember the last time I had a, a pleasant dream – and to have one about Lupin which didn't involve his tearing me limb from limb was especially remarkable. I suppose," he added meditatively, "that this means he will no longer be my Boggart. I wonder who or what will be. Probably either Lily's death or – Macnair. Oh joy."

She had retrieved her scarlet robes from Tonks in order to look the part and he, she hoped, would pass for a don from another university. She had massaged his damaged feet and fed him an analgesic potion provided by Poppy in advance, since it wouldn't do for him to stumble: and let nobody ask why a rangy tabby would be wandering right out along the pier, padding along the walkway below them.

The first part of the wall was easy enough – wide as a car, except where a notch was taken out to accommodate a bench below them, and fairly level and at the outset barely higher than the walkway, although the going was rough and lumpy underfoot and had to be trod cautiously, and the cat below them got farther and farther below as wall-top and walkway drifted apart, until she was a tall man's height below them and a bit extra besides. The wind plucked at their robes in a desultory fashion, the late afternoon sun cast their shadows before them and the sea rolled by on their left, covering the jagged rocks she knew were there, twenty feet below. To their right the little boats bobbed in the deep water against the harbour wall, and the tide had overwhelmed most of the sand beyond the bar that sheltered that deep hollow.

Holding hands like children, they strode – or at least ambled cautiously – out along the great stone rib as it curved gently to the right, as a few people on the path below looked up and pointed, and one snapped a photograph. As her professor's large, warm hand enfolded hers he rubbed his thumb across the back of her hand, then smirked at her sidelong as she drew a deep breath, remembering their decidedly unchildlike activities of the night before. Finally after almost two hundred yards the difference in levels between the wall-top path and the walkway shrank back down to around four feet, at the point where two flights of steps led away: one back down to the walkway to the right, and the other straight in front of them and leading up, first to an intermediate landing and thence to the highest part of the wall: less than three feet wide and ten feet above the cat currently gazing up at them rather anxiously. Severus flashed her a slightly wall-eyed look, took a deep breath and began to climb.

The wind was getting up: how could it be otherwise? She took a deep breath and tried to concentrate on maintaining her own balance against the buffeting gusts, hoping, praying that Severus's damaged feet would hold out and he wouldn't stumble. Whose stupid idea was this anyway? She fell back a bit to widen the distance between then, so that if she fell she wouldn't take him with her. There was no way either of them could catch the other without both going over if either of them fell, although with luck Severus could use his concealed wand and fast reaction-speed to cushion the landing if they did. There was no point in expecting Minerva to do so: it would take her too long to transform back into a woman before she could wield a wand.

This modern part of the pier was much smoother, both the wall and the walkway, and she wasn't sure whether that was a good thing or not. Less to trip over, but also less to get a grip on as the wall curved slightly leftwards and the wind dragged at them in earnest, and she had forgotten how long this narrow upper stretch was. Eighty yards – seventy before she saw Severus just ahead of her almost hurl himself forwards and clutch at the railing that lined the outer edge of the last and highest ten yards. In her mind's eye, if not quite with the outer eye, she saw the ghost of the drowned priest lay a reassuring hand over his as he drew a deep and shuddering breath, before edging his way carefully to the curl of stone steps that led down and back to the safety and shelter of the lower walkway, out of the way of the wind.

Author's note:

[For those who still don't like having author's notes, please remember that many of my readers are not native English speakers. Just accept that you are not the intended audience for these notes, and move on.]

"Go mad in good company, find a good country, // Make a clean sweep or make a clean end." – lines from the long poem The Magnetic Mountain by Cecil Day Lewis

Stags are classed according to how many tines or prongs they have. A stag with twelve prongs or tines on his antlers, six on each side, is called a royal stag, one with fourteen tines is an imperial stag and one with sixteen or more is a monarch. However, I have given Harry's Patronus, which is supposedly a copy of Prongs, James's Animagus form, a mere four tines on each side. The reason is fourfold. James was a young man and so might manifest as a young stag. The first time Harry sees his own Patronus he thinks it might be a unicorn, suggesting that the antlers aren't very obvious. Aberforth is able to convince the Death Eaters that Harry's Patronus is a goat, suggesting its antlers are not very obviously branched. And if Prongs had had a big rack it would have been very difficult, perhaps impossible, for him to fit down the narrow tunnel under the Whomping Willow while in Animagus form.

Protego claustrum – "Protect the enclosure", from Latin claustrum: "a means of closing or shutting in; bolt, bar; an enclosure, prison, den; a barricade, dam, fortress", according to the University of Notre Dame's English-Latin dictionary.

The interval between updates has been so long that most readers will probably have forgotten that one of the things Lynsey overheard Harry and Severus muttering during the Klingon hunt at the castle, when they were discussing using Protego to form a stable bottle, was "seven times clockwise".

"... shrank down slowly to the size of Rover" – Rover was a sinister guard-robot in the form of a four-foot-wide, bouncing white sphere, which appeared in the cult 1960s science-fiction TV series The Prisoner.

Warner Brothers, for reasons best known to itself, decided to turn the goblins into a nasty anti-Semitic-cartoon version of Jewish bankers: wizened little old human men with big hooked noses, wire-rimmed spectacles, pallid skin and business suits. Rowling's goblins are about 4'6" with "swarthy" skin and thin and/or pointed beards, long spindly fingers, long feet, slanted black eyes with no whites to them and rattling, pebbly voices. Their clothes are not mentioned, other than those of the uniformed guards, but as their diet is that of foxes in the woods, they may wear some sort of hunting camouflage – the sort of thing you'd associate with folkloric goblins. Their facial features aren't described either, other than their eyes, but Rowling draws Griphook as having a round bald skull; tall narrow pointed ears; a very odd nose which is bulging and rounded at the bridge, then drops a couple of inches straight down, then turns up and out into a needle point, like a budgerigar's beak turned up at the tip; and with very long thin moustaches and beard that form dangling strings.

In Deathly Hallows the cart which descends to the Lestrange vault has two goblins on the front bench and three humans at the back, and they send Imperiused!Travers to go hide in a crack in the wall, because there is no room for him. Yet, the cart comes in one way and goes out the way it came without turning around, so it's probably symmetrical, with the same width of seat at either end. Goblins are smaller than humans so if three humans (or one half-giant: Rowling's own drawing of the trip to the vaults at the start of Harry's first year at Hogwarts shows Hagrid apparently occupying the whole back seat with his feet on the front seat next to Griphook, while Harry stands or kneels in the well of the cart between them) will fit on one of these benches, one human and two goblins certainly should. One must conclude either that goblins just don't like having to sit crowded together with humans, or that the carts have a weight limit. Bill, Lynsey, Severus, Ginny and Gatrak between them probably weigh about 45 stone, which is probably similar to Hagrid, child-Harry and Griphook, assuming Hagrid to weigh around 33 stone – about the same as a very large male gorilla. In DH, Travers is thin but he's tall, so assuming the weight limit to be around 45 stone, he may well weigh enough to push a cart already containing late-teen Harry and Ron, false!Bellatrix and two goblins over the limit. Griphook says that he doesn't have the authority to control the carts any more, and Bogrod then summons one by whistling for it, so they seem to recognise certain voices.

If you dig down under central London you find, first, about 30ft of topsoil, then 450ft of clay, then 650ft of chalk, then a thin layer of sandstone, then another 200ft of clay and only then do you hit a level of really hard rock called the London Platform, about a quarter of a mile down. This forms part of an ancient, now buried continent called Avalonia, and extends into France and Belgium as the London-Brabant massif. According to Hagrid Diagon Alley really does have some physical connection with the area around Charing Cross, and isn't just in wizardspace all the way down to the Earth's core ("Gringotts is hundreds of miles under London, see. Deep under the Underground"), so the passages under Gringotts cannot just be cut through living rock all the way, because the living rock is a long way down. They must be built things like the tunnels of the London Underground, with artificial walls at least until they get down below the topsoil, and probably down to the start of the chalk layer. The start of the passages, where they board the carts, is actually well above ground, since it is on a level with the main hall of the bank, which is reached by going up a flight of steps from the street. So the tunnel needs to descend about 40ft before it even reaches clay. I've assumed the tunnel walls are crude pottery where they pass through the topsoil and clay layers, made by plastering the walls with the clay dug out when boring the tunnels, and then using dragon-breath to fire it.

"Fighting boys of Wexford County" – from the song Tunnel Tigers by Ewan MacColl, about the rural Irish labourers who expanded the tunnels of the London Underground railway in the 1960s. The line in the original is actually "Sporting boys of Longford County" but the song has drifted and acquired many minor variants, and "Fighting boys of Wexford County" is the one which I know.

Marron is the French word for the edible sweet chestnut, but also the technical name for a kind of very bright, rich chestnut eye-colour sometimes seen in redheads.

We're not told what species the Gringotts dragon is but it seems to be large, has metallic scales which have become pale through living underground, milky pink eyes, a wide yellow belly, a spiked tail and wide spiky wings, an ugly head, a crawling gait and a powerful flame. Its scales are rough, but not so sharp along the back that the Trio can't sit on it bareback. I'm guessing it's a Ukrainian Ironbelly, which when healthy has red eyes, a big belly and metallic grey scales.

Regarding the crowned skull, James IV, probably Scotland's most educated and innovative king, was killed at the battle of Flodden Field in 1513. Because he was the brother-in-law of the English king, Henry VIII, a body believed to be his was gathered up by the English victors and taken to London for burial, but because he had been excommunicated there were problems organising his funeral and his embalmed body lay unburied at Sheen Priory until the Dissolution of the Monasteries some years later, when the body was lost. His head was later rumoured to have been salvaged and buried separately at St Michael Wood Street, but the church was later demolished.

Richard III was killed at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 and buried inside Greyfriars Church in Leicester, but the church was destroyed during the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the grave ended up being in somebody's private garden, and latterly underneath a council car park – famously, underneath a giant "R" marking a reserved space. He would have his little joke. We now know that Richard's bones remained there undisturbed until they were uncovered by an archaeological dig in 2013, but in 1998, when this story is set, most people believed that Richard had been exhumed during the Dissolution and his bones thrown into the River Soar.

William Wallace was a minor Scottish nobleman who was prominent in the Scottish wars of Independence and was briefly the Guardian of Scotland (a non-Royal head of state), before being captured in 1305 by a pro-English Scottish faction and sent to London, where he was sentenced to death for treason against the English overlord, and for supposedly having allowed his men to massacre civilians. He was hanged, drawn and quartered and his severed head was displayed on a pike.

Alfred the Great, the scholar king who first united England as a distinct country, was buried at Old Minster, Winchester in 899, then moved to New Minster four years later. When New Minster was demolished in the early 12th C, the bones of Alfred and of his son Edward the Elder were moved to a new monastery, Hyde Abbey, outside Winchester. The graves were lost when the abbey fell into ruins after the Dissolution, and the bones were scattered during building work in the 18th C, but in 2014 a pelvic bone found at the site of the high altar was identified as belonging to either Alfred or his son.

Having done extensive workings-out of the layout of Hogwarts' grounds, I don't believe that Gryffindor Tower can be much under 260 yards from the nearest edge of the Forbidden Forest. The entrance to Gryffindor common room is either on the third or seventh floor (it varies from year to year) and Harry's dorm room is several floors above that. In chapter #15 of PoA Harry, in the semi-darkness before dawn (OK, it's April or May in northern Scotland, so it won't be very dark, but darkish anyway), looking down from this great height without his glasses, is able to see that a smallish animal is walking across the lawn – and there's no suggestion that it's even right at the foot of the tower. Having put his glasses on he is able to see that the animal is Crookshanks, even though Crooks is now right at the edge of the Forest about 260 yards away and the light is still poor. There is also a scene in chapter #21 of OotP where Harry takes his glasses off and then lies in bed looking at the starry sky through a window which isn't even adjacent to his bed. We must conclude, I think, that Harry is not short-sighted but exceedingly long-sighted – as indeed you would expect a Seeker to be – and needs glasses to read because his minimum focal length is longer than his arms. The reason that he can see Crooks better with his glasses on, and there are scenes where he takes his glasses off and objects (the faces of other people in the changing room, fireworks seen through the window, figures at the far end of the hospital ward) become blurry, is because he also has an astigmatism, or perhaps because long sight causes the eyes to tire easily.

You can see St Andrew's pier here. Circa 1980, during an event put on by the Union of Jewish Students, a girl named Anne Hulman and I really did do that full-length wall-walk, in a highish wind, because we’d been told that "girls didn't have to do the high bit". The boys we were with chickened out.

If you are seeing this text, your browser does not support inline frames: to select a chapter you will have to return to the <A HREF="../Sons_of_Prophecy.htm">title-page</A>