Chapter Twenty-One

The Three Brothers

It was getting dark again. Hermione didn't know how long the sun had even been up for, but it hadn't seemed long. Snape wasn't even back yet. She'd stayed at the library until closing, wearing out several guest sessions on the computer. "Sorry," the librarian said as she turned off the lights without warning, "but I'd really like to go home. Need to stake up my apple trees before they blow away."

"Erm," Hermione said. She pushed herself back from the computer. "Okay."

She'd loitered outside the library for a few minutes after the librarian locked up and stepped into the street, hanging back for a second, as though she was about to say goodbye and had thought better of it. It was growing cold again, the rain having stopped but the sky still clouded over. The wind was bitter. It was going to snow.

"Welcome back," the sleepy barman said to her as she trod back into the pub, tracking damp footprints across the 80s-pattern carpet. "Kitchen's still open. Fancy a late lunch?"

Hermione was the only person there. She wondered if he might be lying, and was, perhaps, trying to chat her up by offering favours. She didn't know if it was Scotland, or not-London, or how she was forgetting to be self-conscious about her front teeth, but she seemed to have been getting more lingering looks lately, more long glances from the male species (even if they were thirty years her senior). Or maybe it was that she was seeing (was that even the right word?) Snape.

Regardless, and despite the angry scratchiness of her throat, her stomach was rumbling.

"Just a cheese sandwich?" she said.

"Right up," the barman said.

She was staring numbly at her mobile phone (cycling between no signal and one bar) when a plate slid in front of her at the bar and the stool next to her groaned as the barman lowered himself into it, sighing as he rested his weight on the seat.

"Where's your friend?" he asked.

Hermione realised she probably should have asked if he had seen him. Her brain felt fuzzy, and she couldn't quite remember what she had spent her entire day doing, except staring at a computer screen and gleaning little information. She kept expecting her mobile to light up with Dean's name, but she wouldn't here, not unless she stepped out and headed back toward the rundown shack at the top of the hill.

"Is he not back yet?" she asked. She picked off the crust of her sandwich. "He went to the castle."

An odd silence settled, and Hermione thought she saw him shiver out of the corner of her eye.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Bad weather for it," he said.

"It could be worse," she said. She watched him for a moment; his ruddy face was still, his little eyes fixed on his hands that sat folded on the bar. "Something else is bothering you," she said.

His crooked teeth appeared as he grimaced.

"I don't believe in ghosts," he said.

"You think it's haunted?" she replied.

"No!" he rushed to correct her. "It's just — you hear stories, you know?"

"What was it?" Hermione asked. "Before. The castle."

"Old monastery," the barman said. "I've heard, anyway. Probably a fortress first, then the monks moved in at one point. Weren't there for long, though. Plague got 'em in the end."

"How do you know this?" Hermione asked, surprised.

He shrugged. "Just somethin' you know."

"So they died."

"Every last one." His hands stretched, his knuckles popping. He looked distinctly uncomfortable. "Close quarters, stuff spreads. Can't have been pleasant."

"What happened after that?" Hermione asked. Her stomach gave another angry grumble; she had forgotten her sandwich part-way through the first half — soft white bread and chutney stuck to the roof of her mouth.

"Don't know," he said. "Became a ruin, must've. No one tends to go there. Kind of pretend it don't exist. Don't usually have people coming in to look for it, either."

"No one?" Hermione asked, for some reason surprised.

"Not that I can remember."

She played with the other half of her sandwich, tapping the diagonal corner against the flat of her plate.

Then her phone lit up and rang loudly, making both of them jump.

Dean.

"I don't have enough signal," Hermione said. She scrambled to her feet, grabbed her phone, started to rush for the door. "Excuse me. I need to take this."

"Take your time," the barman said, and slid her plate away as though the smell would make him sick.

#

Severus Snape's hand curled around nothing, the red shimmering, then vanishing between his fingers.

"Lily?" he found himself saying aloud, and his breath plumed out in a mist.

He took a step forward and his stomach plummeted out from inside of him, his feet feeling light, heavy, sinking down. He reached out, grasping at air. Inhaled. Tried — no air seemed to come.

Cold.

He tried to open his eyes but his eyes were already open. Opened to blackness, to deep black pits.

He blinked.

Quiet. So quiet. The cold consuming and damp, the silence all-encompassing except for a thick and languid drip…drip…drip.

#

"There's two of them," Dean said.

Hermione stopped for a moment and sniffed as she kicked at a chunk of remaining ice on the side of the road. The yellow light from the sweet shop window cast her fidgeting shadow on the pavement, long and stretching out onto the stone of the cottage across the street.

"Two of what?" she asked. She stepped on the ice and crushed it with the toe of her shoe.

"Stories," he said. He sounded disconnected, robotic, almost, but he was talking, his voice fuzzy with distance and bad reception. He was also refusing to answer Hermione's questions on how he was doing, how was his stay, if his sister knew he was ringing her. "Two called The Three Brothers," he continued.

"Similar ones?"

"Kind of," Dean said. "Different, but with the same characters. Or at least they're called the same thing: the three brothers, and Death."

Hermione looked up at the sky, blinking. Tiny cold raindrops were beginning to fall, sporadic and sharp and icy, stinging her cheeks. She backed beneath the awning but the rain followed her.

"Did you read them somewhere?" Hermione asked as she ducked inside the sweet shop. The door chimed, and the bored shop girl looked briefly up from her magazine as Hermione ducked behind the jars of humbugs with an apologetic smile and a lift of her mobile phone as explanation. She turned toward the window, hushing herself and trying to keep from coughing in an open jar of sherbet lemons.

Dean continued, his voice a little more staccato with the depleting signal. "No," he said.

"Someone told them to you?" Hermione asked, her scratchy voice threatening to cut out with excitement. "Who?"

There was a dry sort of silence, the vague sound of Dean shifting and the squeal of springs.

"Hermione," he said. "You're the one who told me. It was you."

#

The mist amassed, cleared.

Snape was in a bedroom — his parents' bedroom, vignetting in the edges, darkening into despair. Crimson splashed across the floor, pooling in the indents in the patterned carpet, the bed, splattered across the walls. The silence of his mother's still white face, eyes open and blank, looking straight at his father as she had never done in life. As she would never look at him again.

#

"I—I don't remember," Hermione said.

"You're the one who told me," Dean insisted again.

"We're closing," the shop girl said.

Hermione jumped and whispered, "Hold on," into the receiver, then approached the desk and guiltily slid two plastic-wrapped chocolate frogs across the counter.

"Herm-o-ne?" Dean called at the other end of the line.

"That everything?" the shop girl said, and Hermione nodded and handed over her last five pound note.

"I'm back," Hermione said as the sweet shop door swung shut behind her, the OPEN sign flipping to CLOSED. Her voice lowered to a harsh whisper, nearly a hiss. "What do you mean I told you?"

"I—I—" Dean began, taken aback. "You don't remember?"

She didn't know what to say. Only, "No."

"You had the flu," he continued. "I came over to see you. Do you remember that?"

Hermione remembered. It was shortly before she'd been in hospital, and she had never been so sick in her life. She hadn't been able to move from her bed for days, her bones heavy with fever, her muscles shuddering and shivering the very second that the paracetamol and ibuprofen her mother had given her wore off.

"I remember," she croaked.

"Okay," Dean said. "Well, it was when I was about to go so you could sleep - you asked if you could tell me a bedtime story."

Hermione snorted, but Dean only said, "I'm not kidding."

"I was delusional," she said.

"Didn't stop you from telling me a bedtime story," Dean said. "Twice. And they weren't exactly cheerful."

"What were they?" Hermione asked, voice small.

"The first one…," Dean began. "Three brothers come to a river and build a crossing, and Death shows up, angry because they deprived him of their three souls. So he gives them gifts—"

"I remember," Hermione said wonderingly. "The sword, the stone, and the cloak."

"Yeah," Dean said, "and two of them end up dying anyway because of the gifts that Death gave them."

"I forgot about that," Hermione said. She thought of it now, trying to remember lying prone in her bed, sweating and feverish, of rasping those words to Dean, but she couldn't. She couldn't even remember where the story had come from, how it formed in her mind and wormed into Dean's. Her face burned with sudden hot shame, wondering if this was where it had come from, his obsession with death, his insistence that it was the way out, back to their true selves, whatever form their true selves might take.

"Is that the one you were looking for?" Dean asked.

Hermione shook off those vestiges of guilt, closed her eyes, and thought back to the book taking up significant space in her bag, digging into her back as she walked to the village from the train station. In her head she pinpointed the exact passage, could see the typed words surrounding Bagshot's reference to The Three Brothers.

"No," Hermione said.

"You sure?" Dean asked.

"It makes no sense in the context," she said. She hated to ask, because for some twisting reason, she was sure she didn't want to know the answer. "What was the second?"

There was another strange silence, and for a second Hermione panicked that the line had gone dead, the grey, rolling clouds overhead and the freezing rain taking down communication, stranding her here forever.

"It's about the end," Dean said. A sudden gust tore down the street, scattering leaves, pulling at the awning above Hermione's head. Dean's voice shook as though he felt the wind, too, and it had chilled him to the core. "You said that the story, Hermione," Dean continued, his voice fading, unsure, "was about the end of the world."

#

Snape inhaled the coppery scent of blood. His parents' bedroom spun, faded to white, then the bright blue of summer. The bright blue of a world upside down.

The blood was in his head, weighing him down, making his vision go lopsided. He saw feet, odd upside-down faces, and his mouth suddenly tasted bitter, terrible, like frothing soap.

"Filthy little mudbloods—"

He fell, though he did not know what from. The air swept out of him, leaving him crumpled, winded, again in pressing darkness.

Lily? Severus tried to say, but couldn't. Then a whisper: "Hermione?"

There was nothing: no Lily, no castle, no light. There was only stone, blackness, and the cold reaching out, edging into the dark. Grasping with long fingers.

Closing over his bones.

#

"Still not back," the barman said as Hermione walked back through the front door of The World's End, a name that if she weren't in such a sickened mood would have made her laugh bitterly. "But someone rang for you,"

"What?" Hermione said. "Who?"

The barman was carefully not looking at her, instead fiddling with the buttons on a remote control and flipping channels on the one television set, getting nothing but static.

"Your mum's looking for you," the barman said.

Hermione sighed.

"In trouble?" he asked.

"Not anything for you to worry about," Hermione sniffed, but the barman looked uncertain. She wondered how much her mother had told him.

She knew it had been days since she called her. She was waiting for her voice and energy to come back, the patience to put up with the pestering questions and the insistence that she come home. There had been a text message when they were on the train yesterday, but it had bounced back. She hadn't talked to her except to tell her the name of the next village on their itinerary. "Scotland!" Mrs Granger had said. "In January! With him! Why aren't you telling me anything, Hermione? What did he do?" Hermione had protested, tried to allay worries with assurances that Snape was safe, but Mrs Granger wasn't having any, and was instead promising that if Hermione wouldn't tell her, she would find out herself. "And don't stop talking to me. I don't want to have to set the police after you."

She was indeed Hermione's mother.

"Are you sure it's not anything for me to worry about?" the barman said. "She sounded a wee bit frantic."

Hermione ignored him and went up the stairs to her room, at least pleased that he didn't follow after. Her feet felt numb, a bit pinched in her boots and frozen. Her coat was wet. She still had Dean's voice in her ears, ringing in the hollow places. It was you.

She dug into her rucksack and left two twenty pound notes on the chest of drawers, just in case. Packed her few things back into her bag and stuffed Snape's half-empty pack into the front pocket of hers. Left the door unlocked and the key on the bedside table. Then sneaked out when the barman was loudly lamenting the failure of the television to pick up one single channel.

It was raining harder now, and Hermione's throat stung as she inhaled the freezing air, turning up her collar against the stinging wind. She was starting to feel unsteady on her feet again, a bit dizzy, but she placed her focus on her legs, making them move, up, down, forward, ever forward, up the hill of Torcmeadh, past the darkened shops, her hands sliding over the chocolate frogs sitting wrapped in her pockets.

The abandoned cottage looked foreboding in the stormridden dark, grey and looming and swallowed in thorns. She looked at it as she hung on the stile, catching her breath, something odd twisting in her stomach. Dean's words still in her ears, in her head, with that shiver of strangeness, of deep-down recognition: There once were three brothers who commanded Death.

"They're not the same three brothers," Hermione had said.

"They're not?" Dean said.

"They can't be, not at that point," Hermione said. "Two of them would have already been dead."

"Right," Dean had said. "I don't know. It's your story."

The rain grew louder in the trees, the night darker. Hermione's phone was dying but she had no choice but to use it, to light her way with the feeble torch. The wood was thick, the path sodden and blocked with branches. She tried to keep her wits, to be on the alert. See if Snape had wandered from the path, was curled somewhere to protect himself against the night. She had been too distracted to panic before but she was starting to now, his terrible fate playing out across her fevered eyes. "Plague got 'em in the end," the barman had said, and Hermione imagined a castle littered with rotting bodies, skeletal remains. Snape among them, lost. "Every last one."

Dean's voice had been so smooth on the phone, clear despite the interference, as if he were reading aloud: In a world of magic, the three brothers ruled. But there was still conflict in the land, over power and place, and Death was kept busy gathering the souls of their friends.

"Magic," Hermione had breathed.

"Magic," Dean had confirmed.

Pigeons startled and took flight from the branches overhead, and in the distance there was the shrill barking of a fox. Hermione coughed, choked, stumbled over a root, braced herself on a tree.

It was the stillness of battle, the silence after the plunge of the knife. The brothers had come across a body of a friend, but Death was late, still roaming the battlefield, harvesting souls into his bulging sack.

"We cannot let Death take him," one brother said to the others. "Not this one. Not after so many are gone."

"We must," said the youngest brother. "We have no choice."

"We have a choice," said the oldest. "We have control."

The forest thinned. Hermione's phone chirped, dying. The wind had gone deathly still, like it was holding its breath.

"Snape?" she called out, and in the distance a darkness loomed in the red night, a craggy shape of fallen stone.

The castle.

But Death is not easily commanded. When he came for the soul, as he always would, the brothers pleaded for their friend, fatigued with loss and plagued with the weight of their magic.

"Snape?" Hermione called out, then, "Severus?" There was no answer except a low whistle of wind and the screech of an owl. Her steps were growing slower as she approached the castle, more careful, an odd, heavy feeling sinking in her stomach, like disappointment in having come home to find it raised to the ground. This is what they had been looking for? The grey stone ruin, this memory of greatness, now a shadow, a blot.

Dead.

"Severus?" She couldn't even hear the raw sound of her voice as a gust of wind struck so strongly that it swallowed the word whole. She tried again, but her voice cut off after the first syllable.

She pointed her torch at the ground, searched the dead clumps of grass. There were slick, sliding footprints in the mud. She swallowed, followed them, picking her way, trying not to fall.

So they bargained. The brothers wagered and Death listened, but Death was cunning. He would not release his souls without a trade — nor, in the end, would he release them at all. Because what the brothers didn't know, is that the bargain they made would place the world in his hands.

"I don't believe in ghosts," the barman had said, but in the wind and the flicker of red light, Hermione could imagine them — pearly shapes sliding across the stones, wisps soaring through arrowslits and doorways. Mist gathering, taking form, hovering above the slick grey stone.

"Snape?" she said again, her voice a whisper, and her foot hit something soft.

Her torchlight fell on a large bundle at the foot of the stairs, curled in on itself, wrapped in black wool.

Hermione's breath hitched, trembled, and the mist seemed to lift, dissipate, until there was only her and her rapid, raspy breathing, the cold of the night.

And Severus Snape at her feet, silent and unmoving on the ground.