The Spare
Ms. Euphemia Rowle of Hawberry Cottage, Inkling-on-the-Wye, was a strange and mysterious person, as such things are measured. Her nearest neighbors certainly had decided so. The whispers and mutterings of her curious habits, the stories and speculations on her innerworkings had been a delightful feature of local gossip in Tutshill as long as Ms. Rowle had lived there, which was longer than most of her current audience had been alive. Ms. Rowle, for her part, wouldn't have had it any other way. Beginning at very young age, Euphemia Rowle knew she was markedly and irreconcilably different from the rest of the world around her. And she had learned, from a lifetime of being stared at, of being whispered about, of being an object to wonder and fear, that her differences did not mean she was lesser than the ordinary people who made such judgements. On the contrary, she knew in her soul that her differences made her better, made her extraordinary.
Armed with courage and pride, Euphemia fanned the flames of her own infamy. Every mother in Tutshill had a Ms. Rowle story they frightened their children to bed with. She was said to speak in tongues, to read minds, to dance with fairies, and to eat unruly children with turtle stew. Everyone under thirty or so had a childhood anecdote of wandering off path in the forest near Hawberry Cottage, or daring one another to touch her front door, or peering through the high Victorian windows. What of Ms Rowle was encountered there, between memory and dreams, no one could agree upon, aside from that it was fantastical. They'd seen her levitate, throw fire from her hands, and boil live cats in a cauldron. They'd seen an upside down living room with the carpet and chairs on the ceiling, the skeleton of a seven-legged weasel, and Everett Mollison swore that once during a new moon he saw her transform into a silver heron. Gullible as ever, Ms. Rowle thought fondly when she overheard the surreal myths resulting from the alchemical transmutation of her life by way of the muggles imaginations. She was always surprised, and rather flattered, by the vile, bizarre, and beautiful things her mundane audience thought of her. Perhaps the ordinary folk of Tutshill, between maths homework and parish council meetings and nine-to-five work days, craved a bit of magic in their lives. Every sleepy west English village worth its moss and mushrooms needs a good witch, and Ms. Rowle served the role with aplomb. It helped, of course, that she actually was one.
Euphemia Rowle earned her credentials as a proper witch at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where she graduated in the top seventh of her year in her N.E.W.T. marks and Head Girl of Gryffindor House. Ms. Rowle made her living by venturing into the Forest of Dean, harvesting raw magical materials - adder's fork, fairy wings, frog brains, etc - and selling these to Apothecaries around the country. This earned her a steady income to fund her less lucrative pursuits in bookkeeping and alchemy. She had overcast blue eyes brimming with secrets, and a mouth that often smiled - assuring their presence - but loyally remained closed to preserve them.
Ms. Rowle lived alone - a characteristic that by itself in villages with lower standards would qualify her for witch hood - but this was not always so. In the half-century of her life, she had a considerable history of romantic partners - the most noteworthy being one Thorfinn McDougal. McDougal had been a noteworthy specimen in the eyes of Tutshill for his largeness, loudness, and Scottishness. To Ms. Rowle, he was even more significant as he provided her with the life and namesake of her only child. Thorfinn the Elder did not remain with Euphemia Rowle to witness his son's birth. When winds changed, he left Tutshill on the back of a Granian winged horse and, presumably, returned to the passage in the Vinland saga from whence he came. Seventeen years later, an adult Thorfinn Rowle followed his father's suit in leaving Hawberry Cottage to seek his own fortune. In his absence, Ms. Rowle had adopted a pet augurey, who she christened Volant. Assuredly, the Tutshill imagination embraced Volant and his melancholic laments, fuelling Rowle stories for years to come. It was believed, and for once both Ms. Rowle and the muggles were united in their superstitions, that his cries foretold death.
Now, Tutshill did claim a modest but vibrant wizarding presence outside Ms. Rowle and her ventures - not that any of their blinkered muggles suspected. Everett Mollison, who walked up and down Inkling-on-the-Wye every new moon in the hopes of catching a wayward glimpse of Ms. Rowle's magics, would no doubt have been astonished to hear that there was another witch two doors down from his house, and a family of five living in a bungalow the next street over. The presence of such a conspicuous witch as Ms. Rowle in Tutshill enabled the rest of her kin to pass unnoticed. Minor irregularities caused by magical children or mishaps went ignored by local gossipers in favor of Ms. Rowle's juicier rumors. The phenomenon of a single unusually eccentric witch raising the overall magical tolerance of local muggles beyond their typical threshold has been dubbed "Bagshot Blindness", named after the most renowned case in the late Madam Bathilda Bagshot of Godric's Hollow, who was so outlandish that nary a muggle eye batted at the second greatest wizarding population in the country surrounding them.
Like Madam Bagshot, Ms. Rowle unmistakably measured up to her credit as strange and mysterious. But all witches are strange and mysterious - ask any of them. What truly sets Ms. Rowle apart and makes her a subject in this particular tale was not that she achieved suspect from her mundane neighbors, but how she found herself a stranger even to her natural peers in the Tutshill magical community. It was from these comparably peculiar neighbors that Ms. Rowle kept her greatest secret these past few but dark years in wizarding Britain, the secret that her smiles concealed more than disclosed. Many of her fellow witches and wizards suspected her secret, many more of them guessed, and none of them could look at her the same way once they had. If she simply came out and admitted it, publicly denounced the association, they thought, Well, it wouldn't put matters to rest, but at least it would help them to trust her again. As it was, as ever, her closed-mouth was damning evidence. Sometimes, during hushed conversations behind darkened windows and muffling charms, a more sympathetic voice would speak up in Ms. Rowle's defense. Would you be keen to gossip about it, if your son was a Death Eater?
But on the bright, warm Saturday morning when our story picks up, all appearances gave that those desperate and divisive times had come to an end. The dawn that broke across the country seem be a clear promise from the heavens themselves that all would be well. It purged the long horrific years as if they had been but nightmares and a future shown across the wide open fields. Ms. Rowle was awake to witness this dawn. Volant's cries had roused her, and she watched the rising sun to the tune of the augurey's dirge.
A few hours later, over an early breakfast of cornish ham and eggs, Ms. Rowle received a letter. It was delivered by a haunted looking screech owl, laden with at least twenty other envelopes. Ms. Rowle untied the letter and, not in a hurry to open it, tried to share some of her ham with the owl. After a brief bite the owl took off in the clear sky again - it had many miles to go this day before it slept.
Ms. Rowle knew what the letter said; she had known since Volant had woken her. She finished her breakfast, cleaned the dishes, and brewed herself a pot of tea, before settling down in the kitchen to break the seal. Inside the envelope was hardly six inches of parchment, written with the impersonal slant of a handless quill.
Euphemia Rowle,
Your son, Thorfinn Rowle, is dead. The siege failed. The Dark Lord has fallen.
This message will destroy itself once read.
Already, the edges of the parchment began to smoke as Ms. Rowle finished the last line. She tossed the letter into the air, where it spontaneously combusted in blue flame. As the ashes fluttered down, vanishing before they touched the carpet, Ms. Rowle whispered, "Thank God."
As she spoke this prayer, a bolt light jetted up from the center of Tutshill to the sky. It burst in a shower of gold sparks over the old watchtower ruin. This firework was the pioneer for a multitude. Like a reverse meteor storm, the sky was soon covered in upward shooting stars of green, purple, red, and gold. A ripple of faces poked out of their windows, agog at the display.
Then the doors began to open again. First with tentative steps over the threshold, then bold strides, families left their walls of enchantments and safeguards to meet each other in the streets. Baffled muggles watched from their living rooms as as the wizards hugged, and laughed, and cried. They exchanged news of the dead and the living. They hailed their far away savoirs, and freely spat on their fallen tyrant's memory.
All this emotion was expressed in robes, wizard's robes. To wear robes among the muggles was reckless, against normal code, but few could care. Now that they needn't fear themselves and their loved ones being tortured and murdered any hour, every concern from before became comical. Muggles gawking and staring were hilarious, adorable in their ignorance. Many of muggles who came out to see what the fuss was were swept up, embraced by their wizarding neighbors, and then left alone to rattle as their world slipped off its sensible axis for a moment.
Within the hour, the jubilance of the wizards coalesced into a procession. First, they congregated at St. Luke's, the parish church. Under the serene auspice of saints and apostles, they lit candles in respect to the recent dead, and shared the news with the generations of ghosts who haunted the adjacent graveyard, some of whom had taken up residence as recently as April. Then everyone, in flesh and in spirit, filed under the peaked Gothic archways. Ghosts filled the gaps in the pews where the muggles would normally have sat, making a mirage of a full church. The wizards then held an impromptu mass, ministerless for it was in fact Saturday. Madam Rosie-June Chang, a gifted orator, took the pulpit in substitute. Her figure appearing Madonna-like before sun-strained stained glass window, Madam Chang told of how her daughter, Cho, had apparated into her parents' kitchen at dawn, bloody but breathing, having just come back from the battle for Hogwarts. Cho Chang was among the lucky - she reported that over forty had died on the side of the Order. Later, the full tally of the fallen would be counted at fifty, and these were but a fraction of the lives that had been taken over the past two years. Madam Chang thanked God, thanked the Order, thanked Dumbledore, and thanked Harry Potter for her daughter and the end of Dark Lord's reign. She then lead the mass in a soulful chorus:
Morning has broken like the first morning,
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.
Praise for the singing,
Praise for the morning,
Praise for them springing fresh from the world.
Ms. Rowle overheard the reverberant echoes of the hymn from her overgrown backyard, where she washed her laundry. Or, rather, she enchanted her laundry to wash itself and as it did so the witch sat motionless under the bough of the beech tree that Thorfinn the Death Eater had bounded to the top of when he was eight.
The congregation spilled out of St. Luke's and paraded towards the River Wye. The sombre tune gave way to a May carol of garland and posies. Children skipped in time, and even older folk found their feet itching to dance. The air shimmered like water, it was so thick with ghosts gliding and gamboling in the air alongside their loved ones. As the magic of Tutshill passed the backgate of Hawberry Cottage, Cho Chang saw the mysterious Ms Rowle under the beech tree, her back to the crowd. As her dutiful autonomous laundry fluttered in a cool spring breeze, Ms. Rowle's shoulders shook with what Cho thought to be either uncontrolled weeping or laughter. Neither Cho nor any of the wizards or witches stopped singing or dancing to invite Ms. Rowle to join them. But, like Cho, many of the merrymakers spared a thought for their neighbor's absence, and looked, and wondered.
The wizards and witches of Tutshill, and indeed the whole country, hadn't been at liberty to celebrate May Day properly the past two years. They had watched enviously from their windows as their muggles, oblivious to the war, drew up the maypole, performed the rites, and made merry without them. Sacrilege, it seemed, a magic-less May Day, and they wondered if the muggles had missed them at all. A few did. In Tutshill, the young Fairbrother couple called on the Cadogan wizarding clan the day after, wondering where the playmates of their children had gone. But aside from a few concerned questions here and there, the muggles of Tutshill seemed to get along perfectly fine without their wizards on May 1st, as they did on nearly every other day. They would have to, for the British wizarding calendar shifted with Voldemort's tectonic defeat. In the years to come, May 1st would be treated as a day of death, mourning and memorial, and May 2nd, or Victory Day as it became known, would become the annual bacchanalian celebration of life instead. Walpurgis Night, May Day's eve, of course, would remain the celebration for magic it has always been. The three-day holiday would be known as the Golden Trio, celebrating love - love in magic, love in death, and love in life.
This first Victory Day, many later beloved traditions - such as mock battles play-acting the final duel between Harry Potter and Voldemort and performances of the twenty one quatrain ballad "Voldy's Gone Moldy" - had yet to take hold. Victory Day proceeded much like a typical May Day, for wizards, as the magical folk of Tutshill exemplified. Once they reached the river Wye, pooling the power of twenty or so wands, they conjured a bridge of white oak and red quartz to cross. On the far side of the Wye, a low soft grassy bank wreathed with dark emerald lime and oak trees served as a perfect stage. The bridge was vanished as soon as old Madam Marsh had crossed the bridge, and the wizards formed a circle on the bank. Then, lead by Madam Marsh, wide technicolored ribbons streamed out of the wands to the center of the circle, where they bound together and struck the ground as a maypole. Everyone then took hold of their conjured ribbon, or took hands with someone who did. They danced 'round the maypole with purple, green, red, gold, and white bands of color fluttering in the air against the clear blue sky. As they went round, magic cast out from the center. Tables, chairs, columns, curtains, an outdoor pub, sprang up around them, with new additions and flourishes added on with every turn. In minutes, a complete gazebo had come into being in a patchwork of visions. No two chairs paired in shape or size, nor two tables with the same adornments.
About half the families then left their creation, to return home and raid their pantries for anything remotely edible that could be whipped up for a feast. When they returned, an hour or so later, it was with hot fleets of roast pork, flotillas of steak and kidney pies, salmon, trout, and whitefish with chips, barrels of pumpkin cider and firewhiskey. The gazebo that greeted them was so thoroughly festooned in wild flowers garlands that it looked like a enormous wedding bouquet with a few human heads poking out. Rich red, pink, and yellow hellebores, purple orchids, bluebells, and white wood anemones served as a backdrop to the dishes, which were made to hover around the edge of the gazebo in a slow circle as people helped themselves to what they liked. In the late afternoon, the remains of the feast's first wave were joined by the second wave of desserts. Cakes of chocolate, strawberry, and carrot, tarts of plum, apricot, and treacle, pies of blueberry, lemon meringue, and pumpkin, of course.
Dandelion wine and elvish ale, were brought out as the day danced into dusk, and fairy lights dappled the gazebo columns in between the garlands. Friends who were feast-hopping around the country apparated in to join the fun for a drink and a kiss, with new versions of final battle to share. These reports would within the night meld with the alcohol to crystallize as herculean tales of heroism smiting evil. Neville Longbottom slaying the Voldemort' snake with the sword of Gryffindor, was a favorite. It was said he did it while on fire, with one hand behind his back, wearing a lion's head hat, roaring "With love from Dumbledore's army, bitch!" Another good one was Molly Weasley besting Bellatrix Lestrange in a duel to the death. Many of the younger witches found that one a taller story than Neville's, but old Madam Marsh set the record straight.
"In the firs' war, the Prewetts were the finest duelists the Order 'ad," she opined to the Tutshill Tornados over her ale, "Now, Molly was never one fer war, she eloped with Weasley, an' seven children an' sixty pounds later leave people's mem'ries a bit 'azy, but I remember. I was there, at the Leaky Cauldron, '76, when the Prewetts stood down eight o' 'em masked maniacs. Tha's the one when Fabian died under the collapsin' wall, an' Gideon took a blastin' curse through 'is temple. Yeah, was awful, bloody 'orrifyin', top me off, will ye," she accepted a refill on wine from a wide-eyed Cho Chang, "Thas' a girl. But then Molly - an' I never forgot, never, the look in 'er eyes, like fire, when she faced the five murderers still standin'. She killed two, and the other three went to the dementors. An' Lestrange thought she could take Molly Prewett in a one-on-one? Well, they say she was a nutter..."
Innumerable stories and variants like that one were recounted, of heroes old and new. Rounds of toast punctuated the bards.
"To Neville Longbottom! To Harry Potter! To Granger and Weasley! To Minerva McGonagall! To Fred Weasley! To The Littlest Git Malfoy!"
All canonized with their own part to play in the climax of good besting evil. It was satisfying, justified, and happy to declare such an ending. All was well.
The muggles, bless them, had not the foggiest idea of what to make of this hullabaloo. Some of them at first presumed a local college had won a rugby game, or, if the national scope of the revelry reached their televisions and computers, that some people were simply celebrating May Day with unusual and prolonged exuberance. That explanation didn't go very far in rationalizing the owls swooping over their heads in broad daylight. Most muggles had never seen an owl even at nighttime, they pointed and gazed open-mouthed as owls of all shape and size, sped above them. The owls flew much too fast for the muggles to see the envelopes tied to their feet, of course, but the birds were still highly visible. A decent handful of curious muggles ventured from the Tutshill village, following the fireworks and the owls, to gaze across the Wye. What they saw was a vibrant concentration of joy which to them resembled a house-sized disco ball. It was most peculiar, but having no means to cross river they could hardly do more than scratch their heads. As the night deepened and darkened, and the strange and mysterious party didn't cease, most of these inquisitive muggles went home, content in not knowing its cause and feeling uneasy at being away from their clever electric lamps after dark. There was a witch who lurked in those woods after all, and you couldn't be too careful.
While the Victory Day party carried on in full brilliance on the bank of the Wye, on opposite shore just outside the dimming lamps of the muggle village, a shroud cast over the forest. The skies of that first Victory Night were not the clear ones of day. Winds in the east blew a gray mist over Tutshill and the lopsided smile of a crescent moon slipped in and out of sight. And in the forest, between the trees, the shadow of a hooded man with a small bundle clutched in his arms appeared.
For a moment, full silhouette of his broad figure was clear against the dazzling light from across the river. He flinched and cowed, like a wolf in headlights, and tried to quickly return to the shade. But it was too late.
"Jesus christ!" swore a voice, a few feet away, "How'd you do that?!"
The man hunched his wide shoulders against the witness and set off at a brisk walk away from the Wye.
"Oh, don't think so!" The witness jogged after him, her clear cutting voice carrying after him like a chainsaw through the trees, "I saw you. You-you teleported!"
She caught up to him quickly on young legs and grabbed his cloak, to force him to face her.
He didn't have the time for this. The man twisted around, drawing his wand in one hand while clutching the bundle to his chest with the other.
The woman's eyes widened in shock as she saw his apathetic white mask, with hollow slits cut for the eyes and the nose like a snake. He cursed her with all raw emotion of swatting a fly.
"Avada -"
"RODOLPHUS!"
Rodolphus Lestrange's wand wrenched from his hands mid-curse by a jet of red light, as if his name itself had disarmed him. He look around in time to see his wand caught mid-air by Euphemia Rowle. Undeterred by the Death Eater mask, she stalked toward him wrapped in a violet shawl and contempt.
"Even now, Rodolphus, after you've lost, after he's gone, and it's ended," she lectured, moral outrage smoldering beneath her words like magma, "You're killing and torturing with what liberty you have left -"
"Choke on yer bleeding heart, Euphemia," Rodolphus snarled, "Even yeh'd think this one's asking for it - she sneaked at my magic."
"I did!" the muggle agreed, "I saw you too - you, blasted him with red, from that stick -"
She struggled to articulate her astonishment, and pointed at Euphemia's wand. Euphemia smiled at the accusation.
"And what do we do with muggles who see too much?" she asked Rodolphus in the calm yet frustrated tone of a school teacher reprimanding a troublesome child.
Rodolphus did not answer her, but the muggle continued to speak with the conviction she would be heard.
"I know what I saw," she insisted, stepping forward, "And I've seen a lot of other crazy shit today, owls and flying cakes, and there's a party, and I know something's going on, you people are -"
She trailed off, becoming entranced as Euphemia waved her wand back and forth across her face. The inquisitive knot in her eyebrows undid itself and a placid look fell over her. Her heavy lidded eyes half-closed, giving her a vague bemused expression.
"Go back to the village, get some sleep. You've a had a long day," Euphemia instructed her.
The muggle nodded and obediently turned and walked, in the slow dazed shuffle, back to the yellow lamps of Tutshill, murmuring, "These aren't the wizards I'm looking for."
Euphemia turned back to Rodolphus, who rolled his eyes beneath his mask.
"So if you didn't come here only to terrorize muggles before the dementors find you, then -?" she started to ask him, but stopped when she noticed the bundle in his arms had begun to wriggle.
Rodolphus glared, and jabbed at the bundle with his wand. It froze.
"Rodolphus, what is that?" Euphemia asked quietly, not taking her eyes off the bundle.
Rodolphus glanced over his shoulder and up at the black sky, which showed neither moon nor stars.
"Inside," he muttered, to mean he would explain there, not taking his eyes off the clouds.
As Euphemia Rowle led the Death Eater and his secret through the back gate of Hawberry Cottage, deep throated thunder growled down their necks.
"It's not possible."
Euphemia cradled the child in her arms as she denied its existence. She had instinctively taken it from Rodolphus when he opened his bundle to revealed a baby, body-bound and muted. Euphemia then liberated it from the spells, fetched a bottle of milk and a cloth to feed the undernourished body, held it to her own chest so her heat might bring some color back into the parchment-pale cheeks, and rocked it sleep. While she was distracted, Rodolphus had raided her pantry. Then, between swigs of firewhiskey, he told her what exactly she was fussing over.
"Physically, it's not possible," she clarified, but summoned a basket to place the child in.
The basket usually housed unicorn hair, and Euphemia hastily cleared it out before depositing the child.
"Is it?" she asked, horrified yet morbidly curious at the answer.
"No, my wife didn't shag the Dark Lord," Rodolphus said drily, through a cough.
"Small mercies," Euphemia muttered, summoning an unopened bottle of firewhiskey for herself and sitting down at the table.
Rodolphus had exchanged the mask of his lord for the one Azkaban had given him, gaunt and skull-like. Beneath the national prison garb, a heavy jaw and high forehead of his own showed through. He'd never been handsome, Rodolphus Lestrange - handsomeness had been pruned out of his twisted family tree generations ago. But Euphemia could remember the bullish machismo that once animated his rough features which, combined with the Lestrange name and fortune, made him not uncompelling in his youth.
"She wasn't born; she was made," Rodolphus elaborated on the child after a long drink, "Though in a way, guess I was their midwife. The conception spell needed a third party, see, to combine the ingredients from the bonnie couple's - "
"Spare me, God, please," Euphemia interrupted, slugging down a quarter of her firewhiskey.
Rodolphus omitted the gorier details, but went on, as if by telling her what he'd done he could exorcise himself.
"We set up this… nest in the Malfoy's old nursery. Was the Dark Lord's idea, 'cause fuck the Malfoys, right? We called the thing she grew in The Egg, 'cause snakes and eggs, hardy-ha, but it was more like a cocoon. Sticky black thing, filled with this solution Severus brewed. Smelled awful, like horse piss, had to be changed by hand every couple days. Guess who was the most loyal servant on that job."
"You did this for nine months?" Euphemia stared at him, incredulously.
"Nope, forty days," Rodolphus said, "Was supposed to be eighty in total to mature it completely, but that got cut short. Not sure if the process was meant to go that quickly, but fuck -" he laughed like a cough, "what the shit did we care 'bout 'meant to' at that point? Had to accelerate, see. Incubating was eating up time of skilled Death Eaters. Only the inner circle - me, Rabastan, Bella, and Severus - the most trusted -" cough - "were, eh, trusted, and the thing required our constant care."
Euphemia felt shaky and sickened, as if she had just watched Rodolphus projectile vomit over the table, and the child crawled out of the muck. The baby didn't look like a unholy abomination. She had a nose. Her eyes were dark brown - a vast improvement on the red irises and slitted pupils of her late father. Black hair was already coming in thick ringlets around her scalp.
"How old is she?" Euphemia whispered.
"She was about equal to a year when I cracked the Egg, I think," Rodolphus said, "It ages normally once out of the -"
"Yes, I see," Euphemia cut him off.
They drank in silence for a bit, letting the rain and the augurey weeping in the next room numb their thoughts.
"Yeh know why I brought her to yeh, Euphemia," Rodolphus said, so softly that she could hardly hear him.
She did know, and was still horrorstruck by the suggestion.
"I can't," she breathed, staring at her bottle.
"Yeh spared that sow back there," Rodolphus jerked his head to the door, indicating the muggle from earlier, "You think her life is worth more than the Dark Lord's -"
"His what, exactly?" Euphemia demanded, "His daughter? You said it yourself, this creature is no-one's daughter, this is a - a crude imitation of a life. Nothing, nothing he or you, or any of your lot ever did compares… You created this... a child without love, without God, without - does she even have a soul? Did you ever stop while she was growing in your filth to ask? Did you ever think of what she would surely become?"
"That's how yeh see her, give me my wand, and I'll dispose of my filth," Rodolphus taunted, "Better yet - yeh do it. Scourgify should be the ticket. It's not killing if she's not alive, is it?"
As if on cue, the child snuffled in its sleep, and spit up a bit of milk.
Euphemia stared at it, pitying and repulsed, but did not move.
"I was meant to kill her," he said after a moment, "If he fell. I waited first, after I heard, for as long as I dared in case he came back, in her. That was the point of it all. He wanted a spare body on hand, in case his own was destroyed - again. Didn't want to go through eighteen years of disembodied hell, shitty host and snake venom and watching our invincible army of darkness lose its bloody mind -" Rodolphus scowled, and drank.
"The idea was," he resumed after a few seconds of heavy brooding, "that if the host shared his own blood, and the rites were performed, he could assume total control and the host could survive possession indefinitely. And, if he never died, then the spare could be a useful servant when it was grown. 'Course, now the existence of a spare is moot. He is dead-dead, this time."
Rodolphus ran a hand across his forearm, almost subconsciously. Euphemia remembered when he first did that in front of her, entirely consciously, thinking she'd be impressed.
"But, it's a girl," Euphemia tried again to logically prove that Voldemort could not have a daughter.
"We couldn't control that," Rodolphus shrugged, "Most terrifying fifteen minutes of my life, waiting to tell the Dark Lord 'it's a girl'. But he didn't seem to mind. A body is a body. 'Suppose he never had much use for his first wand anyhow."
Euphemia finished her firewhiskey and put her head in her hands as Rodolphus unwrapped this new layer to the onion-like hideousness of the child's existence. Of course they hadn't thought about her soul, or her life, or her self. She wasn't supposed to have one.
"Why didn't you kill her," she asked, baffled, "Filial love?"
Rodolphus hacked and wheezed through a laughing fit.
"I guess," he choked out, "I reckon for a creature like her, life'd be more fitting a punishment."
He regarded the sleeping baby with a kind of tender loathing.
"I won't be responsible for this," Euphemia rubbed her temples, feeling the alcohol slosh in her brain.
Rodolphus shoved a thick knuckled hand into his cloak pocket and pulled out a huge brass ring holding three mismatched keys. He held it out over the table delicately, on his forefinger, and waited for Euphemia to open her eyes again.
"These are the keys to Lestrange family fortune," he said, "The big gold one with the emerald is for the main vault at Gringotts, the silver with the lazuli fleur de lis is for the old vault in Paris, and the third," he jingled the keys and between the gold and silver two, was long impossibly thin obsidian key the width and length of a mouse tail that made a soft cooing noise like a dove when it knocked against the others, "Is to Castle Falling. If yeh take her, yeh take these too."
Euphemia stared at the keys and dreamed of what they unlocked. What she could do with that wealth, that knowledge, those sacred secrets. Those keys were everything about the Lestranges that had ever tempted her.
"Why would you barter these?' she asked, distrusting the Death Eater's intentions.
"Why not?" Rodolphus shrugged, "By tomorrow, the Noble and Most Ancient House of Lestrange is dead. Rabastan was blown up in the siege, and all the gold on earth won't pay off the dementors once the Order catches me."
Euphemia studied his eyes, for a hint of a trick, and he looked back at her openly. The alarming apathy to death that was always in them now turned inward. It seemed the only thing left in Rodolphus Lestrange's life which mattered anymore was ensuring his late wife's bastard duly suffered her cruel and unusual existence.
Euphemia took a deep breath and, concentrating on the beautiful keys and not the accursed child on the table beside them, gave in.
"All right. I'll take her."
With a smooth flick of his shrunken wrist, Rodolphus flung the keys at Euphemia, who caught them by the ring. Rodolphus stood up, intending to ask for his wand and leave. Then he saw, over Euphemia's head, in through the window, a ghostly pale face warped by the raindrops. He locked eyes with the apparition's for an instant, and her heavy lids widened.
"Shit, it's that muggle," Rodolphus said in flat surprise.
"What?" Euphemia spun around sharply, just as the face whipped from view.
Euphemia looked at Rodolphus, aghast, "Do you think she heard?"
Rodolphus shrugged and Euphemia apparated on the spot into the downpour.
The muggle was already half way up Inkling-on-the-Wye, slogging through soupy dirt so tractionless it might have been snow. Euphemia drew both her wand and Rodolphus from her robes. Dual wielding, she shot a pair of thick ropes at the runaway eavesdropper. The ropes wrapped around the muggle's waist and legs, interweaving and knotting together, and bound her arms and her satchel tight to her sides. She fell, but before her nose touched the muddy ground, the enchanted ropes yanked her through the air back to Euphemia's doorstep, where she skidded to a messy stop on soaked and filthy jeans.
Euphemia levitated her dripping and kicking captive into her home. The spy was very young, mid twenties, and built like a shetland pony - short and sturdy - with blonde hair the color of wet sand plastered over her face and neck. Euphemia sat the muggle at a chair on the fair side of the table from Rodolphus and the child. The child had woken when Euphemia apparated and was bawling furiously, though mutely - Rodolphus must have silenced it again.
In a silence of equal intensity, the muggle stared rapt at the interior decour of the witch's house. The room she was in was sort of a half-kitchen, half-laboratory. A cauldron bubbled away with some overnight brew in the fireplace. A hanging rack of spatulas and ladles also supported various dissection and extraction tools. Bottles and jars of squishy grey pickled things alongside actual pickles and beets and carrots lined the walls. The walls themselves covered with what she at first took to be television screens but on a double take were paintings and photographs. Their subjects peered back at her with judgemental curiosity, whispering quietly to each other, and crossing frames to gossip. The kitchen appliances were trapped in time around 1890 - no dishwasher, no toaster, and no fridge that could be discerned. There was no phone, mobile or home. An antique mahogany radio rested precariously on the rim of the sink - ie, the only place in the were kitchen your radio could potentially kill you. The radio looked like something the Jawas had dropped off - buttons, dials, and switches covering its every surface, including and especially those that had no business being on a radio. This contraption was only bested by the grandfather clock for incomprehensible functionality. A psychedelic steam-punk dream, its face had twelve hands, no numbers - only planets moving around the edge, and four separate chambers with interlocking chimes. From her vantage point, the muggle could see down the short hallway into a living room that had enormous cage housing vulture-sized dark greenish bird inside. She would have assumed this creature was some kind of puppet, or art project in vegetable taxidermy. But like the early naturalists who thought the corpse of the platypus was a hoax, she soon appreciated the true wonders of nature when the thing moved. It opened its beak autonomously and gave a moan that sounded like a depressed radiator.
"Going to give her a tour, are yeh?" Rodolphus asked snidely.
Euphemia ignored him, and pulled up a chair in front of the muggle, so their knees were an inch from touching. The witch rested her chin on her knuckles and looked steadily into the muggle's eyes.
"What did you see and hear?" she asked calmly.
"Nothing," lied the muggle promptly, whose anemic self-preservation instincts had at last kicked in, "the rain was too loud. I didn't see anything either. And I was only there for, for maybe a minute before he caught me,"
She nodded at Rodolphus, who did not acknowledge her.
"I see," said Euphemia, her blue eyes glimmering with amusement like a fish leaping out of moody lake water.
"Stop showing off. Yeh don't need fucking legilimency to tell yeh a muggle is a lying thief," Rodolphus said scornfully, "Yeh're too soft on them, Euphemia - even this sow shook off yer memory charm."
"Of course she shook it off - listen to her," Euphemia said with a wry smile, "she's American."
Rodolphus made a derisive noise between a snort and cough.
Even through her fear and discombobulation, the American muggle straightened her back and puffed her chest a bit with national pride. It was odd how his derision brought that out of her, she later reflected, since she was hardly a stalwart patriot. She had written her undergrad thesis on how the World Policeman foreign policy hurt more than helped now that the Soviet Union had collapsed. But with these strangers in their strange land, all she could feel about her country was fuck yeah, I'm American.
"And you're right, she did hear everything. But also she's heard more than everything," Euphemia went on, smiling, "She's been living in London for the past two years, going to uni, and since around last August, she seen magic everywhere. I suppose when you smash the ministry to bits, things fall through the cracks."
"We didn't do anything with the Obliviators," Rodolphus said defensively.
"Seems like you should have done," Euphemia said, "Most of what she's seen is your lot - Slytherin students muggle-baiting on holiday, Death Eaters in self-altering vanity masks, moving posters for the Undesirables outside the Leaky Cauldron - tsk, tsk - , and she's collected some of those insipid leaflets of the Undersecretary's that have been floating around. She seems to have actually witnessed a duel between a gang of snatchers and someone whose wand they were trying to steal, although it's been sloppily overwritten with a mugging."
"That's not much," Rodolphus snorted again.
"If it's an inch it's a mile," Euphemia scolded.
"Says the most obvious witch in the country," Rodolphus smirked.
"My muggles see only what I allow them to. My secrets are controlled, and so kept. This," Euphemia pointed at the defiant and inquisitive muggle, "is the opposite of controlled. She knows there's a secret community, a secret war, and secret people called wizards who can do extraordinary secret things -" Euphemia paused to rub her eyes, thinking this was far too much madness in one day -"She even has some idea of magical beings. She found a loose page of The Prophet in a wastebin that reported on Giants in the in the Forest of Dean, which explains what she's doing in Tutshill. She's got a camera she was planning to recording them with."
Euphemia flicked her wand, and the flap on the muggle's satchel unclasped and opened, revealing a shiny Hi8 Handycam. In the witch's kitchen, the digital camcorder might as well have been from another dimension.
"There's nothing on it," the muggle protested, hoping the wizards would be too behind on technology to find the hours of Victory Day recordings.
Euphemia regarded her like a puppy who'd piddled on the carpet. The witch levitated the Handycam out of the bag and over the table, where it hovered. The baby stopped crying and watched the strange and mysterious object rotate in midair.
And I would have gotten away with it too, seethed the muggle, forced to watch as with a twirl of her wooden stick Euphemia warped and cracked the couple hundred dollars in equipment beyond function or recognition. She then levitated the mangled corpse of the Handycam into a wastebin, which belched disturbingly after receiving it.
The witch lowered her wand and looked deliberately back to the muggle. The demonstration was clear. We can crush you.
"I'm expected back on campus next week," the muggle said in her first honest statement since entering Hawberry Cottage, "I have an advisory meeting Monday about my research - my economics degree research, not …
The wizards eyed her wolfishly, and she was horrified to find her voice growing shrill with fear.
" I- I have friends, I have family!" she flailed, "They'll be looking for me, the Embassy behind them, if-if I'm not back."
Rodolphus laughed his coughing laugh that sounded painful.
"Yeh're a muggle," he said, addressing her directly for the first time, "There's millions of yeh. What's one less?"
A cold lump bubbled up in the muggle's throat. She felt like she might cry and was terrified of the prospect. Euphemia gave Rodolphus a stern look. "We're not killing her," she said.
"Why not?" Rodolphus muttered, finishing off his bottle, "If not us, it've been the Giants, anyway."
"Cleaning this mess will take a good bit of scrubbing," Euphemia ignored him and looked into the muggles eyes again, trying to get a full measure of the damage.
The muggle sat silent. She'd figured out at this point that the witch could read her mind, and was in the unenviable position of trying to hide her secrets while simultaneously not thinking about them. Don't think about a pink elephant.
"She's got a whole sock drawer of maps and newspaper clippings that she'll have to be hypnotized to forget, burn, and then forget she burned them," Euphemia said with attempted smile, raising her wand to perform the baseline obliviation spell, "Lucky for the ministry we caught this one, eh? Imagine, if our world was revealed on the same week Voldemort -"
"Don't!" Rodolphus cut her off suddenly.
The muggle sighed in relief as the witch sighed in irritation.
"Are you really still hung up on the name?" Euphemia chastised, "He's hardly your immortal conqueror of death if he's dead, now is he?"
"Don't obliviate her, just yet," Rodolphus clarified through gritted teeth, "We can use her."
The women looked at him, beyond wary at his intentions.
Rodolphus stood up to his full height, clunking the bottle on the table. He slowly walked around the back of the muggle's chair, out of her sight, taking time to gather his argument.
"All I want is for her to live," he started slowly, indicating the child who was watching them all with big owlish eyes.
Euphemia nodded, slowly, still unsure.
"I have no doubt that he's dead, destroyed, and there's nothing that can bring him back," he looked into her eyes, to show her his sincerity, 'And I would know. I knew when it was a filthy lie, and I know now that it's a filthy truth -"
Euphemia then responded one thought ahead of his words, "You push too far, Rodolphus -"
"I need to be sure," he growled, "that yeh won't -"
"You're in no position -," she cut off his thoughts.
"Aren't I?" he sneered.
Euphemia broke eye contact, and glanced to the keys on the table.
"It's pointless, I wouldn't tell anyway," Euphemia looked back to Rodolphus, but didn't quite meet his eyes, "Unless, of course -"
"Yeh failed," Rodolphus answered her and she locked eyes with him, "Again."
Euphemia flinched back from his glare as though she'd been physically struck. Suddenly, it was as if the day hadn't passed at all, and she had just read the letter that morning.
"He.. He took him from me," she gasped, wounded, "You, whose nearest claim to fatherhood is this crisis," she pointed at the baby - "have no right to judge how in seventeen years of love and labor I failed -"
"Oh, I'm not the one judging," Rodolphus said, putting up his hands in mock defense, "But sure, let's say yeh're right. Yeh're right. But like I said, he's dead now, isn't he? So yeh should have no trouble from her."
He jerked a thumb at the baby.
"You can not compare that thing you've made to my son," Euphemia scowled.
"Sure I can," Rodolphus countered, "What's that line you said to me once? About how blood doesn't matter -"
"It matters not what someone is born," Euphemia repeated, hearing the great words more harshly than she ever had, "But what they grow to be."
"Right, right," Rodolphus put a hand on the back of her chair,"So… She'll be good."
"Yes," Euphemia agreed, defiant against her own sense of dread,"She will."
"And if she isn't," Rodolphus said, softly, "It's not 'cause of who her daddy was."
"No, it isn't," Euphemia agreed, even more quietly.
"If yeh're sure," Rodolphus hissed, "then Vow it."
Euphemia, cornered, reached into her pocket and withdrew his wand. She glanced to the muggle, who was both confused and thrilled by the semi-telepathic argument. Euphemia flicked Rodolphus' wand, and the bindings vanished from the muggle's body.
"What's your name?" Euphemia asked her kindly, while wiping tears from her eyes.
"You can't read that?" the muggle asked, shaking her arms to regain feeling in them, a touch annoyed.
"Oh easily I can, yes," Euphemia smiled, "But it is better manners to ask. And in turn, to answer."
She gave the muggle a expectant, chastising look.
"Rebecca," The muggle gave in, "Rebecca Hebenstreit."
"Rebecca, I'm going to need you to follow me," Euphemia said.
"Could just imperius her," Rodolphus muttered.
Euphemia ignored him and stood up, pushed her chair aside and knelt on the floor. She beckoned to Rebecca, indicating the space across from her.
This was some sort of rite, Rebecca guessed. She mimicked the witch and kneeled in front of her so they were at eye level.
"Give me your hand," Euphemia instructed, holding her right arm outstretched across the distance between them.
Rebecca hesitated, distrustful in the same way as she was when an online deal asked for her social security number.
"Don't worry, this isn't a contract for you," Euphemia chuckled, "You're just our third party."
Rebecca, feeling silly, reached her hand out to Euphemia and the witch grasped her tightly at the wrist. Rebecca felt a nudge of intuition and did the same to Euphemia's.
"I'll need a wand, Euphemia," Rodolphus said, looming over the women.
Euphemia handed his wand over with her left hand. Rodolphus found his grip and placed the wand tip to the top of the womens' clasped hands.
"Muggle," Rodolphus barked, to get her attention.
"It's Rebecca, sir," she corrected him as she met his eyes.
His eyes were sharp and bronze colored, like a hawk's. They pressed words that were not hers into her mind, along with absolute compulsion to speak them.
"Will you, Euphemia Rowle, raise the Dark Lord's - wait," Rebecca cut herself off, shaking her head to clear it, "Does Franken-baby have a name?"
Euphemia looked at Rodolphus expectantly and he rolled his eyes.
"Not a real name," he said, staring at rivulets of water running down a window, "We weren't supposed to name it, no point. But, ah, Bella did call her something, when she thought no one could hear. Delphini."
The Franken-baby stirred at her name.
"Aw, cute. Like the dolphin constellation," Rebecca said conversationally, as if she were at a relative's baby shower.
Bellatrix Lestrange gave Voldemort's daughter a cute name. Euphemia could hardly begin to believe it. This was far far too much for one day.
"Ok, so, that works," Rebecca shrugged, and resumed without Rodolphus' prompting, "Will you, Euphemia Rowle, raise Delphini Lestrange as your own child?"
"I will," Euphemia said, thinking the world had gone mad.
Rebecca suppressed a gasp as a thin tongue of red flame emitted from Rodolphus' wand and wrapped around the women' hands, binding them together. It was fiercely hot like a live wire - but Euphemia didn't seem to be bothered. Rebecca bit her cheek and endured.
"A- and will you tell no-one that Delphini is the bastard daughter of Bella Lestrange and the Dark Lord of the wizards?" Rebecca asked.
"I will," Euphemia said.
A second blistering tongue of flame wound around they hands. It now felt as though they were bound together with a tight scalding fishing line.
"And will you tell no-one of her being a Franken-baby?" Rebecca continued.
"I will," Euphemia said.
A third tongue of flame joined the first two, and it felt as though it would take a pair of semis speeding in opposite directions to ever pry the hands apart.
"And will you ensure that I, Rebecca Hebenstreit, retain my memories of the magic I have seen up to this moment?" Rebecca boldly spoke in her own words.
For a second, Euphemia looked at her with almost as much fury as she had Rodolphus during their argument. But within a breath her calm smile returned.
"I will," Euphemia said cooly.
A fourth tongue of flame red followed the first three, and it felt as though their hands had been melted into one.
"And you, Rebecca Hebenstreit," Euphemia stared into the muggle's earthy brown eyes, "Will you tell no-one of the magic you have seen up to this moment?"
"I will," Rebecca said, supposing this was as fair a deal as she was liable to get.
A fifth tongue of flame, blue instead of red, wound itself in the opposite direction as the other four. The women now felt as though they had two right hands - their own and each other's.
"That all?" Rodolphus muttered through gritted teeth.
Euphemia looked expectantly to Rebecca.
"Yes," she squeaked, fighting to keep her voice level through the pain.
Rodolphus withdrew his wand, and the flames burned hot white for an instant, like a branding iron, before sinking into the women's flesh. In a few moments, feeling started to come back to their fingers, and they unclasped their hands. Rebecca examined hers to see angry red scars crisscrossing the back of her hand and fingers. Euphemia sported similar, but paler, markings.
The witch rose, withdrew her wand, and leveled it at the muggle.
"Hey, wait!" Rebecca exclaimed, "Don't I get to -"
"Mind your tongue, dear," Euphemia cut her off, "You've just made an Unbreakable Vow to me not to speak to anyone of the magic you've seen. So long as I live, if you break your Vow, in that instant, you will die."
Rebecca put a hand to her mouth, to physically prevent herself from asking any of the many questions she had about how exactly the contract worked that might kill her.
"But yes, I also Vowed to leave you your memories," Euphemia sighed, "And so I shall. But, I have no obligation to assist the creation of new ones. Stupefy!"
A jet of red light hit Rebecca square in the chest. She wobbled comically in place for a moment, and then fell backward to the floor, unconscious. Delphini clapped and giggled.
"Yeh know, yeh could kill her now, and be off the hook," Rodolphus teased as Euphemia checked Rebecca's head.
"Yes, I could," Euphemia agreed.
But she didn't, as he knew she wouldn't. Euphemia performed the memory-sealing charm on the muggle, as per her vow, ensuring that Rebecca Hebenstreit's memory of the evening's events would never fade for the rest of her life.
"Well, that's my fate sealed," Euphemia said briskly when she finished, standing up to face Rodolphus, "Your mission here is quite accomplished, for all the happiness I'm sure it brings you -"
"Yeh know, it does a little," A shadow of a smile brought some life into the Death Eater's wasted cheeks.
"- Now get out of my house," Euphemia said, her own countenance stoney, "And face your own end."
"'Course," Rodolphus obliged, put up his hood, and his broad figure swept to the side-door. He opened it to face the heavy black downpour outside.
"I expect yeh'll be hearing of me soon, Euphemia," he called back to her, over the pounding rain.
And, God willing, you will never see me again, Euphemia thought. But she forced herself to remember that every life no matter how fouly spent deserved dignity and courtesy, and so she bade him, "Good bye, Rodolphus."
Rodolphus Lestrange walked into the silver sheets of rain, and vanished, as if like a stain he had been washed away.
As Euphemia shut and locked her door, Delphini began to wail. Euphemia steeled herself, and then took to trying to calm her down.
The child was inconsolable. No blankets, nor rocking, nor lullabies, nor nourishment eased her distress. It was as if she knew on some level that the nearest thing to a parent she had wasn't coming back, knew that there was no-one in this world who loved her, knew that she was cursed with a life that held no significance other than being an extraordinary mistake… She couldn't actually know these nauseous truths, of course, and how dreadful would it be if she ever did? But whatever disturbed her, Delphini Lestrange cried and fussed well into the early hours of Sunday morning. Meanwhile, beyond the secretive Hawberry Cottage, and outside this unassuming village, over this damp corner of a cold little island, the winds picked up.