Chapter 10. The "Ballad of the Prince from the Night"
The rain had just calmed its fury. Under the latest sparkling drops the world blinked to shake off the last stains of gray that had settled on its eyelids. The white mantle, of which before it seemed to boast as if the mantle of ermine of a king, had been swept away by rain. Its slender and strong fingers had snatched it off the trees' shoulders while the voices of those fairies of lead hissed angrily against the vanity of those creatures that were parading their new icy mantles. Their eyes were dancing shards of shipworm, their mouths filled with sharp teeth, their hands long and tapering had lashed the air as whips echoing their cracking. But now the hosts of heaven had receded. The army was back in its fog barracks and only the rear guard still lingered on earth touching with light caresses the marks and wounds, as if to ask forgiveness for the raging fury of its comrades.
The woman sighed loudly at the window while her blue eyes took advantage of the withdrawal of the rain running breathless beyond the glass.
"This is ridiculous." She let out from his lips in a whisper. Yes, it was really ridiculous. Minerva McGonagall let out another deep breath. She had a strange feeling on it, she could not say exactly say what was its real appearances nor where it came from, but it was there. An upsetting presence made even more unbearable by that waiting than covered her like an heavy cloak.
A noise behind her made her jump. She spun around making her eyes snapped toward the young man who had appeared in the doorway of the living room.
"In short, where could a baby end up? In China?" Professor McGonagall asked to the boy loudly expressing her doubts.
Severus looked at her in silence, then slowly approached his former teacher stopping beside her and letting his black eyes exploring the latest standards of the rain, analyzing every detail.
The young man felt the touch of the dress of the mysterious uneasiness who drifted around the teacher as a strange apparition.
"Is there something wrong?" Severus asked McGonagall. This placed a severe look upon him as a teacher who had just caught a student chattering for no reason.
The professor drew away her eyes with a sudden movement of the head.
"There is surely something wrong." She said objective with a little irritation in her voice. "I mean... he's a child. Where did he go?"
"Not far." Severus said, looking at her.
Minerva looked at her former pupil pulling down a little her glasses with one hand and peering over the lenses with a look halfway between concerned and puzzled... a look that seemed to get the words out of the boy before her.
"A one year old child doesn't owe a such magical power to throw him miles away. He didn't Apparate out of Godric's Hollow, that's for sure." Severus explained to the professor with a little pride in his voice, for once he was the one explaining something to Minerva and the thing pleased him greatly.
"I've read." Severus continued conscious that he has caught the woman's interest. "The greatest manifestation of unintentional childhood magic documented took place near York in 1706. A child of four years, Edward Tatch, has Disapparted from the barn on fire of his uncle's farm and Apparated in his parents' house a mile away."
Minerva looked at him concerned: "The story look close like that of little Harry." She remarked. "A child in danger Disapparates to save himself."
"Yes. But Edward was four, not one. And it was somehow attracted by the presence of his parents. The link between them has created a sort of channel." Severus said. Then he turned abruptly away from the window and went to sit comfortably on his armchair by the fireplace.
Minerva watched him take a hand to his chin thoughtfully, then said: "So it is likely that Harry is at Black's. Between him and his godfather there was a strong bond. "
Severus raised wearily his eyes toward her and took a deep breath before speaking.
"I do not think Harry is at that mongrel's." He said in a whisper, shaking his head and emphasizing the tone on the last word.
McGonagall looked at him scolding for a moment, then she joined him sitting on the couch in front of him.
"Why not?" The teacher asked.
"I don't think a so little child can establish a very deep relationship with someone who is not his parent." Severus said with a shrug of the shoulders.
"What do you mean?" McGonagall urged.
"With the parents there is always a stronger bond." Severus then explained with a hint of sadness in his voice when reminded of the unhappy memories of his childhood. He had never known that kind of relationship.
Minerva saw the veil that had obscured Severus' dark eyes as quick as a puff of wind, and quickly cut the thread of the speech, that was cutting deeply the spirit of the young man, and grabbed another.
"If he's not at Black's, where can he be?" She asked.
Severus looked up at her.
"I do not know. If Harry has Disapparated himself probably did not go far away. And if he did not go far away then probably the Death Eater found him." The young man said calmly.
"Holy Merlin! No!" Professor McGonagall exclaimed putting her hand her mouth with a quick movement.
"Minerva," Severus said quietly observing the professor's troubled eyes, "I do not know if Harry has Disapparated or if..." He paused like struck by an electric discharge. He had just had a thought... how could he not have thought of that before? Perhaps there was still a possibility before accepting that the child was in the hands of those crazy fanatics whom he himself had been one.
"Or if...?" McGonagall asked, hopefully.
Severus did not answer, still wrapped by the winding smoke of his thoughts.
"Lily..." He murmured while a spark flickered in those black wells that were his eyes, shaking like a small reflection of sunlight on the surface of placid water.
Minerva kept looking at him, irritated and curious at the same time. She sighed.
"Lily." Severus said aloud, bringing his eyes on the woman before him. "Perhaps there is another hope."
Minerva did not have time to ask for further explanations for Brix came panting into the living room clutching a letter in his right hand.
Severus and Minerva brought quickly their eyes from him to the letter, and then again on the elf.
Brix tried for a moment to regain control over his breath, then, panting, said: "Alastor Moody."
The two looked at him full of expectation, while Brix took another long breath. It was on the other side of the house when a small owl had delivered the letter. He had opened it in a hurry after reading the name of the sender. Perhaps they had found the child. Perhaps he was at Black's. He had run the hopeful eyes on the few lines written in the Auror's crooked calligraphy. He had sighed, then rushed to the living where he knew to find Minerva McGonagall. And now she was there, along with Severus, striking him with her eyes, trying to get some more word from the elf's throat.
"The child..." Brix muttered with broken breath.
"So?" McGonagall urged him "Have they found him?"
Brix took a long, long sigh. Then he looked down and only one, slow word left his thin lips: "No." He whispered.
McGonagall shook her head sadly while Brix approached her, offering her the letter.
Minerva grabbed it roughly and threw a glance on it. There were only sentences words written on that little piece of parchment. Two sentences. Only two. Yet the slanting and square handwriting made them hard and cold, frozen words that could claw the eyes of the reader and print those accursed words in depth, sinking them in the blue paper of the teacher's irises the blows of a merciless press. Fast, blunt, unforgiving like the lashes of rain, the cold wind blows.
We checked Black's house. The child is not there.
Two sentences. Nothing more. Two sentences that had broken all the hopes of some time before.
Two sentences. Two blades. Quick, they had broke the fragile, fatuous illusion vase with a shot with a disarming accuracy.
Severus jumped up making Minerva and Brix almost start. He hurried away, muttering something that sounded like "I must see Lily", he got out of sight in a moment while the elf and the professor watched him bewildered.
Severus stopped in front of the door of Lily's room. The feral ranks inside him trembled, lashing the gray dust of the desert with their snake tails causing hard earthquakes. Powerful tremors that shook violently the deep wounds of his soul clutching his heart in their unreal mouths. The monstrous dwellers of his ego were appalled by those powerful genes that enjoyed to demolish the ground beneath their feet.
Severus took a deep breath, forcing the air inside him, forcing it to drive away the unwelcome vibrations. The air web was stretched and the bestial thrills were caught in it, immobile and helpless. His heart regained its beat with a sigh of relief as the beasts went back in their dark nests.
There was music coming from Lily's Room. It reached the young man's ear weak and muffled through the thick wooden door, however, he could feel its warm fingers touch him, its eyes curiously peeking on him through the keyhole, its voice hissing kindly inviting him to enter.
Severus raised his hand and knocked three times.
There was a bump and a bit of commotion, then the door opened and Lily appeared smiling before him.
Strange. He seemed almost to have forgotten everything, beautiful Lily, it seemed that nothing had happened. She was there. In front of him, with a big smile which left uncovered the white teeth. For a moment he thought to be a child again when he visited her home and she always welcomed him cheerful, happy to spend the afternoon with him. It had been years since then, many things had happened, yet here she was, watching him with the same green eyes smiling and radiant.
"Severus." Lily said, almost laughing. "Come, enter."
The young man accepted the invitation and made his way into the room. He noticed an old turntable resting on the bedside table and a sparse set of LPs which occupied the whole bed. He knew very well that turntable, oh yes, very good...
"Is that Albus' turntable?" He asked while Lily was still shutting the door, a rhetorical question because he knew very well the answer.
Lily turned to him, still smiling: "Oh, I see you found the power of speech." She said. Severus snorted angrily.
"Yes, is Dumbledore's turntable." Said Lily approaching. "I don't feel good without music. The silence suffocates me, so I asked Brix if he had a radio or anything else to listen to music and he brought me this turntable and the LPs, of course. Mine remained in Godric's Hollow."
Severus looked at her coldly: "The LPs are Albus' too?" He asked as he took one analyzing the cover. He had never seen those. Besides, he had never even seen the turntable working... there always had been a strange silence in the house.
"Yes... well, not really my kind of music, but better than nothing." Lily said with a shrug.
"They are mostly chamber music and Irish ballads." Severus said, looking at some titles.
"I don't go crazy for chamber music." Said Lily. "But I rather like Irish music."
"Yes," Severus agreed thoughtfully. "Me too."
"Let's play it, then." Lily said, while lifting the arm of the turntable interrupting Mozart's notes that were invading the room just a moment before. She removed the disc and put it back in its case and then she grabbed the one Severus was still analyzing with interested eyes.
Shortly after the slow notes of an Irish ballad began to dance in the air, like the calm waters of a quiet lake.
The melodious voice of a woman was superimposed almost immediately to those notes tinkling like the keel of a boat gliding silently on the water without disturbing the course.
She sang in Irish, of course, language which neither Severus nor Lily knew. However, the music and words were so persuasive that just seemed to be part of the melody itself.
Lily was pleasantly surprised by the music. Those placid notes had the power to bring her back to the memory of other notes, deepest, darkest as coming from a strange dream. She could not quite remember the words that accompanied that other strange music, they were there before her, masked figures dancing on the edge of her eyes. But she remembered very well the voice that sang that weird ballad.
She turned to Severus. The boy was looking out the window, his gaze lost somewhere among his thoughts.
Tir na n-Og... The only words that Severus was able to catch ... the Land of Eternal Youth ... the Elysian Fields of Irish mythology. If that was the youth, for Severus Tir na n-Og corresponded to hell. All he wanted was that the time pass quickly, that the eager fingers of death would stop the beating of his heart. The Eternal Youth for him meant eternal pain but he would not stop fighting, he would not have stopped trying to wash his soul in boiling water of repentance.
"It looks like the ballad you've sung." Lily said making him jump. Severus looked at her and remembered the previous afternoon when he had held Lily close in his arms cradling her with his voice.
"Which were the words?" Lily asked.
"Don't cry my Fiery Princess,
I'm your Prince from the Night.
Do not cry, it will be all right.
Let me be a kiss, let me be a caress. "
Severus recited the chorus with flat voice, lost in thought, while the words overlapped with those of the song.
"What's the title?" The girl asked to Severus.
He bowed his head sadly: "I don't know." He murmured. Both were silent for a moment, leaving space to those arcane words that gained the field flooding over the abandoned flags of their last breaths.
"Brix sang it..." Severus whispered, "to calm me when I woke up screaming at night."
Lily looked sorrowful, feeling again that accursed knife piercing her chest and her heart shivered under that icy touch.
"For me it's always been 'the ballad'." Severus continued sadly, while cursed tears pressed against his eyelids. He did not want to think back to those moments... those days... when the night strange lame ghosts visited his dreams and punctured his eardrums with their piercing cries. When the night terrible figures with a silver mask on their faces surrounded him... And he came at night, with his bland smile, with that cold voice that ordered him to torture again, to kill again... the night he awoke suddenly, in the throat the scream of his gruesome ghosts, on the body the hot and sticky blood sensation.
Then he had learned to control those visions, to drive them away from his dreams, and lock them up in secrets chests, yet he had failed to capture the shadows that still roamed among his angry thoughts, whose chants still troubled him at night.
Lily looked at him shocked. It hurt her so.. seeing him like this.
Death Eater...
Those words echoed undesired in her head.
Death Eater...
How could someone like Severus being a Death Eater? No. She was wrong. It was her fault. She had forsaken him. She had forsaken him knowing that, for him, she was the only point of reference, the only source of affection and trust. She had abandoned him knowing his need for support and friendship. She had abandoned him knowing that he was repentant... she had refused to give him a second chance, she had refused to see... And now what had become the boy that had been her best friend? Others could not see sadness and pain looking out of the windows of his dark eyes. Always them, first one then the other, like an old couple peering at the world without interest with those strange grimaces and their repeated complaints. Those watery, begging eyes.
It was her fault. Only her fault. She had given him the final push toward the deepest darkness. Yet, for some strange reason, the tie that held her bound to Severus had never entirely broken. She had always thought of him, always. Her thoughts lingered on him in the evening and the morning when the memory of that wandering ghost of her dreams still knocked on the doors of her mind. Her thought of him, somehow, always returned to her accompanied by a strange weight on her heart. Always.
"Well," Lily said trying to break the icy chains of anguish, "it should have a title, shouldn't it?"
Severus nodded with a movement almost imperceptible of his head, and clenched his eyes shut to keep back the stupid, hateful tears.
"The Ballad of the Prince from the Night." Lily said, almost triumphantly after a moment of reflection. "What do you think?"
The boy in front of her did not answer. He opened his eyes looking at her through that pesky veil of tears, and one, only one elusive piece of that mirror fell off drawing a fine shining line Severus' face.
Lily was dazzled by the white flash of that tear. The heartache grew louder.
She walked slowly toward him and held out her hand. Severus looked at her confused and in his eyes discomfort melted with tears.
Lily caught very well the confusion that harbored the boy and grabbed his hand feeling the cold of it burn against the warmth of hers. She smiled as she took Severus' other hand in hers. The boy continued to stare at her in the middle between bewildered and frightened.
Lily began to wave her arms sweeping those of Severus in that curious dance that did not ask anything, just wanted to give.
Severus let himself be carried allowing Lily to draw him closer. A smile ran away from the dark prison of his soul to shine in a heartbeat on his lips.
The song continued to play, but neither of them heard it longer, lost both in each other's eyes. Lily got closer to the boy bringing a hand on his shoulder while Severus leant his on the girl's hip. They were not dancing. They swayed. The sea of each, black and green, rippled by the wind of the other. They swayed simply. Close to one another.
Lily brought both her arms around Severus' neck holding him while she felt his warmth envelop her and suddenly thought back to when he had cradled her, still unconscious, and he had sung that old ballad. He was her angel and he was there. She would never let him get away again, never ... she would never left him alone. She had found again her friend.
She hugged him closer leaning her forehead against his shoulder, lapsing into his warmth, and he did the same holding her.
The old turntable snorted croaking in font of the two lads who kept swinging in one another's arms.
It coughed a hoarse sound, and then interrupted the flow of the music with a thud pouring in the air just his mutterings.
The two lads awakened from a dream. They undid the embrace each one carefully avoiding to look in the other embarrassed eyes.
Lily reached to the turntable, where the needle was still flowing on paper in the center of the disc after have reached the end of the same, she raised the arm and put an end to that scratchy sound. The girl removed the LP from the plate and put it back in its case.
She cleared her throat.
"Why you came here, Sev?" She asked as she put the LP on the bed with the others without looking at the young man. "You wanted to talk about something?"
Severus looked confused for a moment, then he decided to be blunt: "Harry is not at Black's. I'm sorry, Lily." All the magic of the moments before was kidnapped by that phrase.
The girl turned towards him visibly taken aback and disappointed.
"Lily, I must ask you something." Severus said, looking at her seriously.
"Anything." She said.
Severus took a deep breath, then said: "Lily, if you wanted to remove Harry from the house... Disapparate him to a safe place... where would you have sent him?"
Lily looked at him curiously. Why that question? She had not dematerialized Harry.
"Why do you ask? I have not dematerialized Harry." She retorted giving voice to her thoughts.
"Not intentionally... but you could have done it." Severus explained.
"I do not understand Sev. You think I sent Harry away from the house?" Lily asked.
"Perhaps. I'm not sure, but this hypothesis deserves to be taken into account, doesn't it? "Severus said bluntly.
Lily nodded.
"Where would you've sent him?" Severus asked again.
"In Cokeworth, I guess." Lily said. "To my parents'."
Severus looked at her concerned. Yes... Lily's parents. No one had thought about them... The possibilities that the child was with his grandparents were minimal, but it was worth checking.
"I have to go to Cokeworth." Severus said determined.
"Are you kidding? You've heard Minerva: we can not get away from here." Lily told him then.
"I won't wait for someone to repair the damage I did." The boy said then. A strange light shone in his eyes.
"I come with you." Lily said, as much determined.
"No way!" Severus immediately stopped her. "You stay here. In addition, your wound is not yet completely healed."
"My wound is ok. Brix has checked it and changed my bandages: it is almost completely healed. And then I do not allow a Slytherin to do the work of a Gryffindor!" Lily retorted chilling him with emerald green eyes who threw thunderbolts against those dark of Severus.
"Besides," the girl continued with an air of superiority. "My house is under the Fidelius Charm." She concluded brushing a lock aside from her face on which was printed a deliberately haughty expression.
"Ah!" Severus said pretending to make fun of her. "And who is the Secret-Keeper?"
Lily smiled sly, narrowing her green eyes, "I am." She said.
Here, we already knew that those two would have end up plotting something. I wonder if they will manage to leave Dumbledore Manor...
Hope you enjoyed this chapter!