Father’s eyes flicked to Mother at that. His face was unreadable as ever, but there was something about it now that made Regulus feel slightly sick. He didn’t know why, but he almost expected him say they weren’t ‘safe’ at all.
But when Father finally broke the silence, all he said was, ‘Kreacher.’
Kreacher appeared with a loud crack, and bowed low.
‘Pack the boys’ things,’ said Father. ‘They won’t be staying here for some time.’
Sirius frowned. ‘Won’t be staying here? Then where –’
‘You’ll be staying with your grandparents,’ Father said. Before Sirius could ask why, he pointed at the mess they had made, the bucket with the wet socks still floating in it, the brooms on the floor. ‘This is why. Your mother and I have things to discuss, and we can’t do it if we have to keep you from setting the house on fire.’
‘We didn’t mean –’ Regulus started.
‘I don’t care what you meant.’
‘Orion,’ Mother said, ‘that seems rather –’
‘Clearly today only proves that they cannot be trusted,’ Father said, talking over her, voice rising slightly. ‘They fly indoors, they wander off. I won’t have them creeping about unwatched. Not now.’
Mother pursed her lips but nodded. ‘All right. Your mother always did –’
‘They won’t be staying with my parents. They’re in France until the summer. You know that.’
Mother’s face went very white in a way Regulus had never seen before, and it scared him almost as much as the Muggle-Boggart-thing had done. She drew him in against her chest. ‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘No. Not there.’
‘Walburga –’
‘No,’ she said, her voice softer than Regulus had ever heard it. He could feel her heart beating fast under her robes. ‘You know I don’t want them there.’
‘He’s their grandfather. He won’t hurt them.’
‘You don’t know what my father would – you don’t know what he –’ She stopped, drew a breath, and then she was almost begging. ‘Send them to Alphard’s. Send them to Dorea’s, or to Charis’, to Callidora’s, even – anyone’s. Anywhere but there. I won’t have them alone in his house.’
Father shook his head. ‘It’s either your father, or Cygnus.’
‘Cygnus?’ Her arm tightened further around him. ‘Absolutely not.’
‘Then that’s settled. I’ll send word –’
‘It is not settled.’ She wasn’t shouting, and she wasn’t throwing anything, but Regulus still found himself trying to wriggle away from her. Her arm only got tighter in response. ‘They can stay with me. I’ll watch them myself. I’ll –’
‘You know you can’t leave yourself out of this. Kreacher will take them within the hour. That’s the end of it.’
‘Fine,’ Mother snapped, in a voice that said it wasn’t at all fine. She held Regulus out at arm’s length and looked at him, then at Sirius. ‘Go and wait in your rooms,’ she whispered.
Regulus didn’t move at first. He wanted Sirius to ask what was wrong with Grandfather Pollux. He wanted him to ask why Mother had gone so white. But Sirius didn’t say anything, and Mother’s face was still all strange, so Regulus didn’t either.
They followed Kreacher up the stairs. Regulus kept looking back over his shoulder, though there was nothing to see. Mother and Father had already gone into the dining room, and their voices were too muffled to make out.
Back in his room, Kreacher pulled a small trunk down from the wardrobe and started folding things into it. Regulus sat on the bed and thought about Grandmother Irma’s house. He’d only been a few times, but every time she’d let him and Sirius play by the water, and every time she’d given them ice-creams. She’d always been very kind. So why was Mother so scared? Did she think they’d fall into the water? Did she think they’d eat too many sweets? Mother hadn’t been scared the other times they had visited, and Grandmother Irma and Grandfather Pollux had come to visit them plenty of times too. Mother had never once been scared, and Regulus had never once thought there was anything to be scared of.
He thought about Bellatrix and Andromeda and Narcissa, who’d lived with their grandparents for years when they were small. He wondered if they’d been scared. Maybe there was a monster hidden somewhere near the house, like the Boggart in the cloakroom.
‘Kreacher,’ he said eventually, ‘why doesn’t Mother want us going to Grandmother Irma’s?’
Kreacher stopped what he was doing, and looked at Regulus. ‘That is not for Kreacher to say,’ he muttered after a moment, his ears drooping a little. Then he went back to folding, and wouldn’t say another word about it, no matter how much Regulus asked. So Regulus stopped asking and just watched him fold instead. Kreacher seemed determined to pack the whole wardrobe. This was not going to be a short visit, then.
Kreacher was nearly done when Mother’s voice came up the stairwell, calling them all back down. Regulus hurried out onto the landing, Kreacher trailing after with a cloak still in his fists.
Sirius was already waiting at the top of the stairs – he might never have left it – and they went down together to where Mother and Father stood in the hall. It felt strange going down again, and it felt even stranger to do it on foot. Their pretend Quidditch match felt like it had happened ages ago, not that morning.
Father’s face was still unreadable, but Mother stood very straight beside him with her chin up, like she’d just won at a Quidditch game herself.
‘You’ll stay here after all,’ she said, before either of them could start. ‘Kreacher, unpack their things.’
Kreacher went off again, grumbling low under his breath.
‘However,’ Father said, before anyone could say anything else about it, ‘you will not leave the top two floors of this house. Not for any reason. You’ll do exactly as you’re told, and you’ll obey Kreacher the same as you’d obey us. If I hear so much as a whisper of you below the second landing, you’ll go to your grandparents’ with no more discussion. Understood?’
‘Yes, Father,’ Sirius said quickly.
Regulus said the same. After everything that had just happened, he had no wish to go anywhere near the ground floor for a very long time.
Father looked at them a moment longer, then turned and went back into the dining room without saying anything else. Mother rested her hand on top of Regulus’s head, just for a second, then followed Father, and the doors shut.
Regulus looked at Sirius. Sirius looked back.
‘We’d better go up,’ Regulus whispered, though he didn’t know why he was whispering. It just felt the right thing to do.
They picked up their brooms and climbed the stairs without talking. Regulus followed Sirius into his room, shut the door, put down his broomstick and sat down next to him on the bed.
‘I asked Kreacher,’ Regulus said after a bit. ‘I asked him why Mother didn’t want us going to Grandmother Irma’s.’
‘What’d he say?’
‘He said it wasn’t for him to say. And his ears went back, like he does when he wants to say something and can’t. So there’s something.’
Sirius didn’t say anything.
‘Do you think there’s a monster at Grandmother Irma’s? Maybe another Boggart,’ he suggested.
‘Probably not. It sounded like Mother’s scared of Grandfather, not the house.’
‘Do you think Grandfather ... did something?’
‘Dunno.’
‘What about Uncle Cygnus?’
‘Dunno,’ Sirius said again.
‘Bellatrix might know,’ Regulus said.
‘She wouldn’t tell us. She’d say we’re too young. Everyone says that.’
‘Not Bellatrix, though. Remember Easter? If we asked her –’
Sirius swung his legs over the edge of the bed. ‘We could write to her,’ he said, looking around the room. ‘We just need some parchment. Have you –’
‘We haven’t even got an owl,’ Regulus said. ‘We have to wait for her to come back from Hogwarts.’
Sirius’s face fell. ‘But that’s months from now.’
‘I know,’ Regulus said. ‘But it’s the best we have.’
They were silent again for a long time.
‘Father’s room,’ Sirius whispered, then, eyes shimmering. ‘He’s got Floo powder on the mantel. Big silver pot. I’ve seen it.’
‘But we’re not supposed to –’ Regulus started, and felt like a hypocrite even as he said it. He’d gone in for the Floo powder himself just last year. But he hadn’t actually gone through with it. That was what mattered; Father had said so himself.
Sirius was already up, moving fast and quiet along the landing, the way he had when the Ministry showed up, and he’d wanted to see what was going on.
‘Come on,’ he urged him. ‘They’re still downstairs. They won’t notice a thing.’
They crept down to Father’s bedroom. The door wasn’t locked, and it opened easily. It looked exactly as it always did. Very neat. Very Father. They hurried over to the fireplace. A soft fire crackled in the hearth, and the silver pot sat exactly where Sirius said it would, where it always sat, on the corner of the mantel.
‘You do it,’ Regulus said. ‘You’re better at it.’
‘I’ve never actually done it before,’ Sirius said, but he still took some of the powder, rolling it between his fingers. He was about to throw it into the grate when Regulus grabbed his arm.
‘What if someone hears us?’
‘Then we’ll hear them coming up the stairs first.’ Sirius knelt at the grate. Regulus knelt down beside him.
‘Slytherin common room,’ Sirius said quietly, rehearsing. ‘Right.’
He threw the powder in. It caught with a soft whump, and the fire turned green.
‘Slytherin common room!’ Sirius said again, louder.
Nothing happened for a long moment. Then, small and far away, someone shouted for somebody else to come and look, and a face swam up out of the green. It was a boy Regulus didn’t know, upside-down at first, then the right way round, squinting at them.
‘Er,’ the boy said. ‘Is this some kind of joke, or something?’
‘We want Bellatrix Black,’ Sirius said. ‘Is she there?’
The boy turned away and bellowed her name across what sounded like a very big room. There was a long pause, footsteps, somebody laughing, and then Bellatrix’s face filled the grate.
‘What are you two doing?’ she asked, obviously trying to hold back a smile.
‘We need to ask you something,’ Sirius said. ‘It’s important.’
‘It had better be.’ She glanced over her shoulder, then leaned closer to the fire. ‘Go on, then. Quick.’
Sirius looked at Regulus. Regulus looked back, and they silently decided it should be him, since he was the one who’d actually started all this, at Easter.
‘We’re being sent to Grandmother Irma’s,’ Regulus said. ‘Well, we’re not, not now. But we very nearly were. And Mother didn’t want us to go. She got all funny about it. She went white and held onto me really tight.’
Bellatrix didn’t say anything. The smile she had been holding back broke through fully.
‘Why doesn’t she want us there?’ Regulus asked. ‘Is it Grandfather? Did he ... do something?’
She looked at the two of them for a second, like she was deciding something, then said, ‘Grandfather Pollux is very ... strict. Your mother knows that better than anyone, because she grew up with him, same as my father did. Same as I did, for a bit, when I was small.’
‘What does he do?’ Sirius asked.
‘He ... shouts a lot. Sometimes worse than that And he says things you think about for a long time after. He never liked children under his feet, and he liked us less the more noise we made. Your mother made rather a lot of noise, when she was your age. So.’ She made a vague gesture, as if this explained everything.
Regulus thought about the socks in the bucket, and the Boggart, and the state of the sitting room, and felt his stomach do something strange.
‘So he shouts ...’ he said. ‘Like Mother?’
‘Worse than your mother,’ Bellatrix said. ‘Your mother shrieks a bit and then it’s over. Grandfather isn’t like that. It doesn’t stop when you’d think it would.’
Regulus considered this for a moment.
‘Your mother wasn’t being silly,’ Bellatrix said. ‘She was right to make a fuss.’
‘Father said we had to go to him or Uncle Cygnus, and she said no to Cygnus too, and –’
‘I should think she did,’ Bellatrix said, grinning now.
‘Everyone’s been weird all week, though,’ Sirius said. ‘Not just about that. Mother and Father keep saying they’ve got to talk. Alone. Like it’s a big secret.’
‘Yeah, ever since Easter,’ Regulus added. ‘Or maybe ... maybe since before then. We’re not supposed to tell, but –’ he looked at Sirius.
‘The Ministry tried to raid our house last January,’ Sirius said. ‘Everyone has been weird since then.’
‘Or maybe since we left on Christmas. We were almost eaten by a Muggle,’ he added emphatically.
Bellatrix laughed.
‘It’s not funny,’ Regulus protested. ‘I really don’t like it. Father said something about dragons and feeding them and they both look – I don’t know ... weird. Like something’s wrong. But nobody will say what.’
Bellatrix was silent, and Regulus had the odd feeling she was working out how much to say, the way a grown-up did. He didn’t like it.
‘There are things happening,’ she said slowly, ‘but it’s not really something I can talk about. Not right now.’ She caught the look on Regulus’s face and softened, just slightly. ‘It’s not bad, exactly. It’s just–big. Grown-up things. People are choosing sides about ... things. That’s all I’ll say about it; it’s more than I should.’
‘Sides of what?’ Regulus asked.
‘You’ll know soon enough. Everyone will, eventually.’ She glanced over her shoulder. ‘Look, I have to go, someone’s coming and this fire’s needed. Is that everything?’
Regulus nodded, though it wasn’t, not really. There were about a hundred more things he wanted to ask. But he knew she wouldn’t say much more.
‘One more thing,’ Bellatrix said, just as they were about to pull back, grinning again. ‘You’re doing this wrong, you know.’
‘Doing what wrong?’ Sirius said.
‘The Floo. You’re the ones meant to put your heads in, not kneel there shouting at the fire, hoping someone answers.’ She laighed. ‘Go on, now. Before someone catches you.’
And then, before either of them could say anything back, her face pulled away and the fire turned back to ordinary orange, and the room went quiet.
Regulus and Sirius looked at each other.
They could hear faint footsteps climbing the stairs outside the bedroom.
‘Someone’s coming,’ Regulus whispered, but Sirius was already moving. He grabbed Regulus by the sleeve and hauled him away from the fireplace.
‘Under here,’ Sirius hissed, and dropped flat, wriggling under Father’s bed.
Regulus didn’t want to. It was dusty under there, and dark, and it felt like exactly the kind of place you got caught, but there wasn’t anywhere else, so he dropped down and shoved himself in next to his brother, elbow to elbow, both of them breathing too loud but not able to stop.
The door opened.
Regulus went very still. He didn’t dare turn his head to look at Sirius, just as Mother and Father entered the room, talking to each other in hushed voices.
‘– can’t keep having this conversation where they might hear us,’ Father was saying, low, and Regulus realised with a jolt that this was exactly the conversation they’d been sent away to avoid.
‘They’re upstairs,’ Mother said. ‘I told them –’
‘I know what you told them. I’d still rather not risk it.’ There was a pause, and the sound of something being moved on the mantelpiece – the silver pot, Regulus thought, with a horrible lurch in his stomach, hoping the powder inside still looked the way it was supposed to, that neither of them would notice any of it missing. But neither of them said anything about the fire.
‘You still haven’t told me what you mean to do,’ Mother said.
‘I mean to do what I said I’d do. Nothing more.’
‘That’s not an answer.’
‘It’s the only one you’re getting tonight. I won’t have us caught out. Not with the boys in the house.’
Regulus felt Sirius go rigid beside him. He didn’t dare turn his head, but he knew that this mattered, that this was the thing Bellatrix hadn’t wanted to say. And from the stillness of him, so did Sirius.
‘But if it means –’ Mother started.
‘It doesn’t. Walburga. It doesn’t. And I don’t intend to discuss this again tonight.’
There was a long quiet after that. Mother and Father both moved towards the door. Regulus held his breath until the door clicked shut and the footsteps had faded away down the landing, and even then neither of them moved for a long moment, both of them lying very still in the dark under the bed, listening to nothing.
‘Did you hear that?’ Sirius whispered eventually.
‘Yeah,’ Regulus whispered back.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Sirius, and Regulus followed him, wriggling out from under the bed and coming up covered in dust, coughing a little before he remembered he wasn’t supposed to make noise and clapped a hand over his own mouth.
Sirius straightened up too. He brushed himself down, and then went still, looking at the mantelpiece.
‘Reg.’
‘What?’
‘Where’s the pot?’
Regulus looked. The corner of the mantel was bare. No silver pot, no Floo powder, nothing at all where it had sat not ten minutes before.
His stomach dropped all over again, worse than before, his worst fears confirmed. ‘They took it.’
‘Why would they take it? It’s always there.’ Sirius was staring at the empty spot like it might still appear if he looked hard enough. ‘D’you think he knew? D’you think that’s why –’
‘I don’t know.’ Regulus didn’t want to think about it. ‘Let’s just go.’
They didn’t wait another moment. Sirius went first, easing the door open and checking the landing in both directions before slipping out, and Regulus followed close behind, pulling the door shut softly behind them. They walked as fast as they could without quite running, up the stairs, until they reached Sirius’s door, and only then did Regulus feel like he could breathe properly again.
Sirius shut the door behind them and leant back against it.
‘That was close,’ he said.
‘Too close.’ Regulus agreed, sitting down on the edge of the bed, his heart still going fast. ‘What if he checks it? What if he sees some of it is missing? What if he counts it?’
‘You can’t count Floo powder, Reg, it’s not gold.’ But Sirius didn’t sound completely sure of it, and he turned around at the door as if Father might come through it any second.
They sat there for a while, neither of them saying much, both of them listening for footsteps that never came.
They neither saw nor heard from Mother and Father after that, not really. Their parents left with the rising of the sun and came home only long after the boys should have been asleep. Regulus knew this because more than once he woke in the dark and crept to his window and watched the street below, waiting for the flicker of a lamp or the crack of Apparition that would mean they were home, and more than once he fell back asleep before it came.
It ought to have been unbearable. For the first few days, it very nearly was. But there was something about having a house to themselves – or half of it, at least – that made the boredom curdle, after a while, into something that felt almost like freedom.
It started small. Sirius took his broom out onto the landing one afternoon ‘just to see,’ and when nothing happened, not even so much as a disapproving look from Kreacher, he took it out again the next day, and flew down the stairs, around the landing, and back up. Regulus watched from his doorway with his arms crossed and told him he was going to get them both in trouble. Sirius only grinned and said that was no reason not to come and play – if they were going to be in trouble either way, they might as well enjoy themselves first.
So Regulus fetched his own broom. It was every bit as fun as their pretend Quidditch match had been, and the brooms came out more and more often after that, looping through the air, skimming the banisters, until flying through the house stopped feeling like breaking a rule and started feeling like simply what they did in the afternoons.
When even that began to bore them, they turned to the attic, one of the few places still open to them, and there they found their old crayons. They decorated Sirius’s bedroom first, Regulus sitting cross-legged on the floor while Sirius sketched a dragon in careful black lines along a bare patch of green wallpaper, its wings spread wide enough to nearly reach the window. When he coloured in the fire, the little flecks of orange and red actually flickered, the way all his drawings did, curling and licking at the edge of the paper as though they might catch the curtains if given half a chance. Regulus reached out once to touch it and snatched his fingers back, certain for a moment it would burn him. It didn’t, of course. But it looked as though it should.
‘You’re getting better,’ he said, and meant it.
Sirius sat back on his heels to admire his work. ‘I know.’ Then, after a pause, trying and failing to sound as though he didn’t much care one way or the other: ‘D’you want me to do yours too? Your wallpaper’s all baby stuff. Hippogriffs and nifflers and all. You’re not a baby anymore, Reggie.’
Regulus nodded. He was far too old for them now.
‘Can we take it down properly? Not just draw over it?’
‘’Course we can.’ Sirius was already on his feet. ‘I’ll show you.’
It took the better part of an afternoon and left them both covered in fine dust, sneezing every few minutes, but by the end of it the red paper had come away from Regulus’s walls in long curling strips. Kreacher appeared briefly to see what all the racket was, took one look at the mess, and vanished again with a resigned little pop, apparently deciding it wasn’t worth the argument.
The bare walls looked strange. Too pale, too blank, like a room that belonged to no one in particular.
‘Well,’ said Sirius, surveying it with his hands on his hips, ‘what d’you want, then?’
Regulus thought about it properly for the first time. Not dragons, he decided. Those were Sirius’s. Nor hippogriffs, or he might as well have kept his old wallpaper. He wanted, he found, something that would still be there however long Mother and Father stayed away. Something that wouldn’t leave.
‘Us,’ he said. ‘We’ll draw all of us.’
So they did. It took days, on and off, whenever they grew tired of flying or of doing nothing at all, and by the end there were crayon versions of themselves chasing each other across one wall on broomsticks far grander than the toy ones they actually owned; a small drawn Kreacher scowling in the corner of another, arms folded exactly the way the real Kreacher folded his; and, near the window, a careful attempt at Mother and Father standing side by side, though Sirius gave up halfway through trying to get Mother’s scowl right and drew her laughing instead, which Regulus privately thought looked wrong, though he didn’t say so. Bellatrix appeared too, looking fierce in the corner nearest the door, with Andromeda beside her looking rather kinder. Narcissa took up rather a lot of space, her blonde hair glittering in the sunlight. Even Uncle Alphard made it onto the wall, drawn from memory and looking a good deal jollier than Regulus remembered him being that Easter.
‘There,’ Sirius said, when they’d finally run out of crayon and inspiration both. ‘Better than fwoopers.’
‘Much better,’ Regulus agreed, and meant that too.
They ate their meals in their rooms now, the two of them, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with Kreacher setting down a table and clearing it away again the moment the last plate was empty, muttering all the while about young Masters underfoot and how a house-elf was meant to get anything done with children forever in the way. It was after one such breakfast, a little more than a week into their parents’ absence, that Regulus first went looking properly at the notes on Father’s desk.
He’d wandered into the study half by accident at first. It was one of the few rooms still open to them, along with their own bedrooms and the attic, and he’d simply been curious to see it empty of Father. But once inside, he noticed the little scraps of parchment left neatly stacked at the corner of the desk where he usually sat for lessons, and once he’d noticed them, he couldn’t quite stop himself from reading. They were addressed to him.
What are the nouns in this sentence? Underline them. ‘The old wizard walked slowly through the crowded market, carrying a heavy sack of galleons.’
There was a second sheet beneath it, with sums that made his head spin a little just to look at.
He sat down in the chair and stared at the sentence until the words blurred a little. The. Old. Wizard. Was wizard a noun? He thought it probably was. A person, and nouns were people, weren’t they–though he could no longer quite remember how Mother had explained it, the last time she’d tried.
The door banged open.
‘There you are!’ Sirius stood in the doorway, entirely too pleased with himself. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere. Come on, I’ve thought of a game.’
‘I’m doing these exercises.’
Sirius peered over his shoulder at the parchment, unimpressed. ‘That’s not even hard.’
‘Then you do it.’
‘I don’t want to do it, I want to play.’ He tugged at the back of Regulus’s chair. ‘Come on, Reggie, it’s no fun on my own.’
‘I don’t want to.’
But Sirius, as ever, did not take no for an answer so easily, and within a minute Regulus found himself being physically hauled out of the chair by the sleeve, laughing despite himself even as he tried to protest, the sentence about the old wizard and his heavy sack of galleons abandoned entirely on the desk behind them.
This became, more or less, what happened every day that followed. Regulus would wake meaning to spend the whole morning on his exercises, certain that if he could only master them, Mother and Father might come home one evening and be pleased with him, might finally sit him down and explain what they’d been so busy with all this time. And every morning, without fail, Sirius would find some new game to drag him into before he’d got past the first line.
Regulus didn’t mind it, not really. Not at first. There was something to be said for having a brother willing to spend all day chasing gobstones down staircases or restaging the Goblin Rebellion of 1612 with cushions standing in for goblins. But as the days went on and the little stack of parchment on Father’s desk grew no thinner, something in Regulus began, slowly, to sour.
‘You never even try,’ he said, one such morning, when Sirius appeared in the study doorway for the third day running. ‘You don’t care if you get any cleverer at all.’
‘I’m plenty clever,’ Sirius said, wounded. ‘I just don’t see the point in doing sums when there’s no one here to make us.’
‘That’s exactly the point. No one’s making us. So if we don’t do it ourselves, nobody ever will, and then when they come back–’
‘When they come back, they’ll be too busy with whatever it is they’re busy with to even ask,’ Sirius said, not unkindly, but with a certainty that made Regulus’s stomach twist. ‘Face it, Reggie. I don’t think they care right now whether we know our nouns.’
It was, Regulus suspected, probably true. That didn’t make it any easier to hear.