Nine: Orava Castle to Zakopane

Newhaven to Paris. Paris to Brussels. Brussels to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Berlin, Berlin to Stockholm, Stockholm to Helsinki.

Except that they were nowhere near Stockholm. They were instead in the middle of the forest in the middle of fucking nowhere. So much for Severus's itinerary mantra.

And then, the Ministry had to go and send Lamotte, of all people—Merlin, if he'd caught even a glimpse of Severus's shadow, he would have recognised him on the spot, and then Severus was done: once news had spread that he'd been aiding and abetting Dumbledore's folly against Lucius Malfoy's schemes, what hope of credibility did he hold with the pureblood faction? The young Auror with Lamotte—Adeyemi, he'd called her—perhaps she's been there solely on the Ministry's orders, though even that much Severus could only guess. But it was entirely inconceivable that Lamotte, with his standing invitation to Malfoy Manor, would have joined in on Lucius's plot unaware of what Lucius's plot was. They were all of them so wrapped up in one another, the whole of the pureblood arm of the Death Eater and Sympathizers circle, that if Severus turned one against him, he was effectively turning them all.

No. There was no benefit to panicking. He didn't know if he'd been spotted. His future might be within his grasp still, not slipping through white-knuckled fingers.

'Where are we?' Potter's voice held only the hint of a tremor, eyes cautious on Severus as he removed and then folded the Invisibility Cloak. Impressive.

'I've Apparated us to Northern Slovakia.'

'Uh—why?'

He tugged on the boy's chin to get access to the back of his head, where it had struck against the lamp post. There wasn't any blood.

'You must visualise the location you wish to Apparate to, which can be near impossible if you have no real memory of the place. I don't know enough about Stockholm to attempt it, and that castle over there, that's Castle Orava, where I attended a potions masters' conference years ago. Give me the mirror, I must inform the Headmaster of what transpired.'

'I don't have it.'

Dread stuck thick in Severus's throat. 'You've lost it?'

The boy looked to the side. 'Yeah, they—when they grabbed me, they took it. Or maybe it fell, I'm not sure.'

A forest in the middle of nowhere, Severus's position as a spy compromised, Aurors on their trail and now no way of contacting Dumbledore. He turned from Potter, not wishing for him to see the expression on Severus's face.

'I'm sorry.'

'Yes, well,' Severus scrabbled for some thread of hope but was finding none. They were going to lose their way and die here, and then their bodies would be eaten by bears. 'Never mind. The important thing now is that we keep moving, some Aurors are trained in Apparition tracking. We'll get up to the castle and catch a bus there. Come on.'

The castle loomed overhead. They would have to climb up the mountain a good deal, and they were both sleep-deprived: they needed to get a start now, while they were still high on adrenaline.

Severus had made it maybe ten steps when he realised the boy wasn't following.

'Potter!'

Potter stood frozen to the spot, eyes blown wide.

'We have to go back!'

'What—'

'We can't go, we have to go back to Berlin, the lady—she took my knapsack off!'

'Your knap—Potter, for heaven's sake, we'll buy you a new knapsack. I have your wand and your cloak, everything else can be purchased when we—'

He realised his mistake a beat before Potter shouted it.

'No, we can't! I had my album in there!'

If there had been room in Severus for any more dread, that would have taken care of it. 'Potter—'

'No! I'm not going anywhere without my album, take me back!'

'I will not take you back—I'm sure your aunt has copies of the photographs—'

'No, there are no copies! They were my only pictures, I'm going back!'

'We can't go back!' Severus bellowed, and was struck suddenly by an ache so vivid, it nearly doubled him.

He did his best to breathe through it.

'Look, Potter,' he said. It sounded wet in his ears. 'I'll get you photographs when we're back in England.'

'Don't lie to me!'

'I'm not lying. I was friends with your mother and I still have some photographs of her somewhere. And your—your father, well, I don't have any of him, but I know someone who does. Now will you come with me?'

He was fairly certain writing Lupin ten years after they'd last spoken, only to request photographs of James Potter, would lay waste to any sense of dignity or self-esteem he'd developed over that time, but if it got the boy moving—

'You were friends with my mother?' Potter blinked owlishly at him. 'What was she like?'

A nightmare, he thought, like you. He was already regretting ever opening his mouth.

'I will tell you about her once we've got to a place where it is safe to do so.'

'You have to promise.'

'I promise,' Severus said, tasting acid.

The boy deliberated for a moment. Severus sincerely hoped he'd relent: he remembered well enough James Potter's toxic obstinacy, and had spent long enough teaching children to dread pre-teen tantrums, and then Lily, of course, Lily might not have appeared stubborn, but only because she would never have acknowledged any outcome in which she didn't get what she wanted—unless he got the boy on board, they would not be going anywhere. Potter was small, but not so small that Severus could carry him up the mountain kicking and screaming.

Birds trilled in the tall conifers above them, naturally disinclined to read the room. The air smelled like woodsmoke and morning dew.

'No,' the boy decided finally, a shadow over his face. 'You're just saying that because you need me to go with you.'

'I—what do you want me to do, Potter, vow an Unbreakable Vow?'

Potter bit his lip. 'Maybe,' he said. 'What's an Unbreakable Vow?'

Severus had an idea. 'It is a magical vow that once made cannot be broken, or the one who breaks it will be punished by death. The ritual is easy enough to perform.'

He waited as the boy reflected, eyes narrow and bleeding suspicion. Of course, Potter's doubts were entirely founded: the vow required a spell which they could not cast without triggering the tracker, and it needed three people. Severus was lying through his teeth.

'Okay,' Potter decided. 'Yes.'

'Very well,' Severus said. He kneeled on the forest floor. 'Take my hand. I, Severus Snape, hereby vow—'

'No, wait, stop!'

Severus had a feeling this was going to be a long day.

'What if something happens and you can't do it? Like, what if you get really hurt and have to go to the hospital, or—'

'That can be a clause of exception in the vow.'

'But we won't be able to think of everything!' The boy had gone right back to hysterical. 'And I don't want you to die!'

This wasn't working, Severus realised. It was time for a dramatic shift in approach.

'Listen to me, Potter,' he ordered. 'You have a choice to make. You can either accept the risk that I might not give you what you want, and come with me so we can find a safe place where you will eat, sleep and calm down. Or you can choose to stay here—'

'No, don't leave,' Potter demanded, which Severus understood was not a decision but merely instinct.

'You have a choice, but I do not, because I will not leave you. I would much prefer that we find a safe place to continue this discussion, but if you decide to stay, I will remain here with you. However, I will be displeased, and certainly not in the mood to fulfil any additional promises. Do you understand?'

'Yes,' Potter said, sounding rather disappointed about it.

'So, which will it be?'

'You don't have to make me say it!'

Any sense of victory he might have felt was soon undercut by the veil of upset descended on them both. Potter walked behind him in a sullen silence which he was somehow able to infuse with a huge volume of meaning. Severus hated that it was working. He was feeling more and more ill-at-ease with every tense minute that passed, and found himself searching for a neutral thing to say.

When they scaled a steep hill, torn up with gargoyle roots and pointed rocks, Potter refused to take the hand Severus offered to help him up.

Once they emerged from the thickest of the trees, the path disappeared into a field of tall grass spotted purple with flowers. Where Berlin had been heavy with clouds, the sun was vicious here, and only a few minutes in, the tip of Severus's head felt like it was on fire.

'Watch where you're going,' he told the boy, reminded suddenly of stocking up on a local potion ingredient the last time he was here. 'Adders like to hide in the grass. Their venom can be deadly.'

The boy said nothing.

'Did you hear what I said?'

'Mhm.'

'Then I'm going to need an acknowledgment of the fact.'

'I said I heard you!'

Severus supposed the shy child grace period was well and truly over.

They reached the castle by midday, having encountered no deadly adders or cannibalistic bears. They spent another hour sitting by the gravel road directly beneath the bus stop sign, nurturing their heatstrokes. Severus was convinced this would all end in another bout of sickness for the boy, this time coupled with fainting and fever, because that was precisely what they needed right now.

The bus driver complained a little over being paid in the wrong currency, but after a bout of strained arguing in two very distinct languages, he threw a glance at Harry and waved them to pass, refusing Severus's handful of bills altogether.

He wasn't even sure where they were going. That was likely for the best: he didn't know how exactly the Aurors had tracked them to Berlin, but a measure of erraticism would at least muddle the waters.

They got off in Zuberec some two hours later. Among maps showing hiking and skiing trails at the cramped tourist information across the road, Severus found one worn volume with road maps of Europe. Having little desire to argue over currencies again, he threw the cloak over himself and snagged it off the shelf.

'You stole it?'

It was the first thing Potter had said to him in hours. His tone alone spoke volumes on what he thought of such an act.

'No,' Severus said easily.

'Yes, you did.'

'You were outside, you couldn't have seen what I might or might not have paid for.'

'But—'

'Perhaps there is a lesson here about admitting to wrongdoing in the face of little evidence. If you'd learnt it a little earlier, maybe we wouldn't be in this mess.'

'You mean with Mrs Bones. But that's different, because she's a judge or something. I wasn't going to lie to a judge. That's—perjury,' Potter said, like a word of the week calendar. 'And it's wrong.'

The only bench in the tiny square was occupied by locals, gossiping loudly over their beers, so they lay the book open on the pavement below the bus stop sign. Severus traced lines over cities and towns whose names he couldn't pronounce, searching for a flash of recognition. Potter sat under the Invisibility Cloak: whether or not Lamotte had recognized Severus, they would be looking for an adult and a child, not a man travelling alone. Only this way, Severus couldn't see the boy either, and had to trust he was where he'd been told to be.

It only made sense to go north, Severus decided. They'd board the first bus to Zakopane, get off before the Polish border and cross it on foot, get on the following bus to Zakopane and hopefully reach it by nightfall. From there, they should be able to get a train to Warsaw, and Severus was hoping that all capitals were connected with one another somehow.

He had the distinct feeling that he shouldn't be making these decisions alone, that he hadn't thought of something essential and would inevitably fail, and that the consequences of that failure would swell and trickle into the future until he was costing Albus his war.

With Potter invisible, the minibus driver wasn't feeling as generous, and Severus spent much of his allotment of German marks convincing him he was worth a trip to currency exchange. With a mere seven seats altogether, the van was packed, and Severus had to distract the construction worker sprawled massively next to him with a dropped wallet, so he could make a grab for where he thought Potter was and set him in his lap.

A quarter of an hour in and he could not comprehend how he'd ever thought the boy small. He was trapped between one hot weight on top of him and another to his side—the minibus seat struggled to contain the construction worker, who was burning some sort of big-man-fever. Squashed against the window and breathless, Severus worked against every instinct that compelled him to jab Potter between the ribs or shake him or something, anything to make him sit still and ideally not ram any bony part of his body into Severus's assorted soft spots. The bus skidded over holes in the road until his heart felt like it had moved up to his ears.

When he thought of Lily, it was a desperate search for some old hurt, a drowning man's raft out of the present. He'd been reminded of Lupin, and so he followed that path, knowing already where it led yet feeling each turn as if it has been a novelty: when they returned to Hogwarts for their sixth year, Severus out of necessity spent more time with Avery and Lamotte, and said things about Lily that he could not believe—though he never referred to her by name. He felt like she knew. She had branched out of her usual circle of friends to include the werewolf, and she did not talk to Severus, only sent him looks, sometimes, through the crowd, and he would look back, and that felt like more than every conversation any two people had ever had, put together.

She spent much of the summer before seventh year visiting with the Potters, on personal invitation from Lupin. In September, she came back with a ring.

Severus told her she was out of her mind.

'You know how these pureblood families are,' she shrugged. 'Your dear friend Quentin's been engaged since last spring.'

But Lamotte wasn't a muggleborn girl from a poor family marrying into a legacy of wealth and prestige.

James Potter was ever so gracious about it, of course. Severus had heard him once, talking about it to Black and some Ravenclaws who'd come to congratulate him on the engagement. It didn't bother him that she was a muggleborn, it made no difference, he respected her all the more for it, actually. 'The duality of that experience,' he'd mused. 'Living in that overlap of two worlds, I feel like it makes for a richer personality.'

Well, bully for him. It was no hard feat, to respect Lily for her lack of status when you had status coming out of your nose. Severus, half-blood, rough-spoken and smelling of alcohol and canned food, was a mere step of the ladder ahead, and using her to hoist himself up had been a burning necessity. It was a luxury, he thought, being good to her, and Severus had been all out of spare change.

He told her she'd sold herself, as if he hadn't been passing his nights thinking of things to say that Lamotte would like. She didn't call kettle, but only because her eyebrows did it for her.

'What do you want me to do?' she asked. 'I can't join your little gang, and not just because I have a soul, but because they would all prefer me dead. So, what do you want me to do instead, Severus?'

'Try not marrying James Potter.'

She raised her chin. 'I'm in love,' she declared. 'It's made me stupid. And I'm still not even half the idiot you are, and you know what the worst thing is? It's that they're the people who've done this to you. These rich, pureblood families, they're the ones who've made you feel unwelcome in wizarding society, and then what do you do to fight back? You run straight to them. The illness and the cure—'

'And what's my alternative, Lily? Fuck another loose cannon kid with a pureblood family desperate to marry him off?'

'You know what, if you have to, yeah!'

She'd startled a laugh out of him. And then she laughed, too. And suddenly, they were talking again.

The boy had fallen asleep. Lost in thought, Severus had missed the moment his body had gone limp, but for a short moment now, he felt the steady warmth of shallow exhales on his chest, percussed by the construction worker's snores.

After that, he didn't really feel anything.

The trek across the border in the peak of summer heat was a fact of life, but he didn't experience it. The sweat on his skin didn't itch. The stuffy air of the evening bus to Zakopane was just air after all. He thought about Lily and Quentin and Valerian and James Potter, as he bought water in a grocery shop by the Zakopane bus station, as he lugged Potter up hill after hill and then back down, as the sun set and Potter finally pointed out a sign for free rooms written in half-baked English.

The room had a double and a small folding single for the boy. Severus was exhausted beyond belief, but when the owner, a tall woman with light-blue eyes and sun-weathered hair, told him where he would find currency exchange, he went without complaint, like the weight in his legs was not a thing that affected him.

He didn't even worry about Albus or Lamotte or Lucius anymore, and didn't so much as blink when he told the boy he was too tired to be pestered about the promised stories of his mother. None of it felt at all real in any case.

As he lay in bed, body half asleep but mind unrelenting, he listened to the hoots and the winds of the mountain, and barely heard them.

'Professor Dumbledore said it was my mum's love that killed Quirrell when I touched him.'

Severus peered at the folding bed set by the far wall. What did the boy want him to say? That Lily had loved him? Were those the kind of stories he expected?

'Because Quirrell had never loved anyone, he said,' the boy added.

Severus had never been much into magical theory, and he wasn't about to debate whether this was accurate. It certainly sounded poetic.

'Do you think that's true, sir?'

'Perhaps.'

'Then I have to be careful,' Potter whispered into the dark, 'so I don't touch anyone else I don't know very well, in case they've never loved anyone either.'

'He was trying to kill you, Potter.'

'I know, but it's just sad, I think. Because if he's never loved anyone, then that means probably no one's ever loved him, right?'

Severus wasn't particularly interested in waging a philosophical debate with an eleven-year-old, especially not in the middle of the bloody night, but he felt a stir of a reaction to this, hot and urgent, and found himself saying, 'Oh, did his mummy and daddy not love him? Does that give him a free pass on murder?'

'No, but—' the boy hesitated. He sounded painfully uncertain. 'Do you think if someone's parents don't love them, then they're going to grow up evil?'

'I think that research has found victims of childhood abuse are more likely to become abusers themselves, so if we extrapolate from that, then yes, Potter. I do think they're more likely to grow up "evil".'

'But you can still, I mean, someone can go and then find other people to love, like friends. That still counts, right?'

'I am not saying they are doomed, I am saying it is—harder, for those with any deficit, to be good people.' Severus stared at the ceiling. He could make out the faint outlines of leaves, drawn by the moon. 'Be it a deficit of money, of support, or of love.'

He felt the statement lock in his throat as he pronounced it. He was dangerously close to something raw and unhealed in him that he could not say.

'In any case, this seems like some instinctual reaction of your body to stress. That is usually the case with natural magic: our bodies reach for it when they are burning with adrenaline and desperate for defence. If you had touched Quirrell but hadn't been fighting for your life, I find it unlikely that it would have done anything at all.'

'Hmm, yeah,' the boy yawned. 'I've still got to be careful though. Just in case.'

The last thing he thought of before fading to sleep was the boy's chin, dug carelessly into Severus's collarbone on the minibus to Zakopane.

Thank you for reading! And an extra thank you to guest reviewers James Birdsong (thank you for the lovely review ;)) and Guest, Dec 13 (I'm glad you've been enjoying it, there is a lot more to come!).

We are in Zakopane again on Saturday, and some big revelations are coming...