A line of figures stood in the pre-dawn darkness on the pier at the river mouth. Most of them seemed to be human, though it was too dim to distinguish friends from enemies, and either from strangers. Of course, Severus knew, there wasn't much chance of anyone on either side seeing him as anything but an enemy now. But then, it wasn't as if anyone had actually thought of him as a friend, even before. He was just a convenient tool.

A woman up ahead of him in the queue exclaimed, 'Oh, hello! What are you, anyway? Some kind of extra-terrestrial?'

'Of course not!' snapped a goblin voice. 'Can't you recognise a goblin when you see one? You'll be telling me next you've got no idea what a house-elf is! You witches and wizards think you own the world!'

'Witches? How dare you? I'm a decent woman and I don't have to listen to that sort of talk!'

'Oh? So you won't want to come on the boat with magic folk, eh?' asked the goblin. 'All the more room for us, eh, Ribby?'

'I didn't say that!' said the woman hastily. 'I just – hadn't met a goblin or a, a house-elf before, but if you exist, you must be God's creatures, and you've got as much right to be on the boat as I have. But I won't stand for being accused of witchcraft. I don't even read horoscopes in the papers!'

At this point, a boat drew up alongside the pier. The angel who was driving it dropped his wings so as not to catch the breeze, and reached out a hand to catch hold of the side of the pier.

'Good morning,' he said. 'Come aboard; I've got room for a dozen people – well, maybe thirteen, if one of the humans is willing to have the house-elf sit on their lap.'

At the head of the queue, the woman who had been arguing with the goblin stepped onto the boat, sat down, and spread out her skirt to make a seat for the elf Ribby. The goblin settled into the seat next to her, with the rest of the queue following. Severus, who was the last to board, found himself at the front of the boat, seated opposite the woman with the elf, and just behind the angel ferryman. The angel pushed away from the pier, opened one wing carefully angled to catch the breeze, so that the boat turned in a circle, and then spread out both, so that, as he sat with his back to the prow, facing the group of passengers, the wind blew him and the boat onwards. He never turned his head to see where he was going, but easily manoeuvred round any other users of the waterways, without their apparently even seeing that the angel-boat existed. Perhaps he was using some kind of super-sensory charm, or whatever the celestial equivalent was.

'Now,' he said, as bars of pink began to appear in the darkness of the sky, 'do you all know where I'm taking you?'

'No, I don't,' said the woman with the elf, not with a sense of confusion, but one who is confident that she can't know. 'We might be going to Heaven, or to Hell. I've done my best to live a good life, and it's up to God to decide whether my best was good enough.'

'I assure you, it wasn't,' said the angel. He paused to let this sink in, and then added, 'But the good news is that you're not going to Hell, and, eventually, you are all going to Heaven. But do you understand where I'm taking you right now?'

'Purgatory?' guessed a balding man with a dark, bushy beard.

'That's right, Martin; well done!' said the angel. 'And do you understand what you're going there for?'

'Punishment!' squeaked Ribby the elf, cowering as she said it.

'That's a good try, Ribby,' said the angel gently. 'That's what a lot of people think, isn't it? But it's not exactly right…'

'Wrong answer! Bad elf! Bad Ribby!' whimpered Ribby, smacking herself hard in the face.

'Doreen, can you look after her?... Thank you,' said the angel, as Doreen cuddled Ribby closer to her, holding the elf's arms to her sides to stop her harming herself, while whispering soothingly into her huge, bat-wing ears. 'Now, as I've said, this isn't about punishment – and especially you're not allowed to punish yourself, Ribby. So does anyone know what it is for?'

'To atone for our sins,' said Martin.

'No. Believe me, God had already forgiven your sins thousands of years before you committed them. There is nothing you either can do, or need to do, to earn forgiveness.'

'No, I know we've been forgiven, but we still have to be punished,' protested Martin. 'Otherwise, if we're not going to be punished for the bad things we've done, and rewarded for the good things, then the whole idea of good and evil is completely meaningless!'

'No. When you realise that the reason for doing the right thing is because it is right, not to earn reward or avoid punishment, is when goodness does have meaning,' said the angel.

'But there has to be balance,' protested Martin. 'If we've done something wrong, we have to pay for it.'

'Pay for it?' repeated the angel silkily, in the tones of someone leading his hearers into a verbal trap. 'Whom are you paying?'

'God, of course,' said Martin.

'And what are you paying him in?'

'Suffering.'

'Interesting. So, do you believe that God is a sadist who derives pleasure from the suffering of those he loves?'

'Well, no, of course not…' mumbled Martin.

'Then what do you think God does want, if not suffering? Anyone?'

Nobody seemed in a hurry to answer. Eventually, Severus, remembering the discussions he and Professor Dumbledore had had about Horcruxes, suggested, 'Repentance?'

'Well done,' said the angel. 'But what is repentance, exactly?'

'Saying sorry,' suggested Doreen.

'Saying sorry and meaning it,' added a young girl further down the boat who didn't look more than thirteen or fourteen at most, with a cheeky grin that suggested that she knew all about being ordered to apologise when you didn't mean it.

'Sorry's not good enough,' muttered Martin. 'There are some sins that just are completely unforgiveable.'

And I've committed them. Admittedly, it wasn't likely that Martin, who was almost certainly a Muggle, had ever heard of the Avada Kedavra curse, but the angel presumably knew that Severus had used it, and God certainly knew. So how can I not be heading for Hell? Or am I, after all? Phineas Nigellus had reported that Harry Potter had used the Imperius curse during his hunt for Horcruxes, and the boy had certainly used Cruciatus on Amycus Carrow. So is HE heading for Hell as well? I promised to protect the little brat, until last year I thought Dumbledore WANTED me to protect him, and even if he was planning to have the kid sacrifice himself, Dumbledore presumably wanted to protect Potter's soul even if he didn't care about mine, NOW WHAT HAPPENS? Oh well, Severus reminded himself, at least he was good at freaking out quietly. Probably nobody would notice how hard his hands were gripping the woodwork of the sides of the boat.

'It's all right,' said Doreen. 'God's justice won't be defeated. If we're the group who are saved, then the people whose sins are too bad to be forgiven, like practising witchcraft, couldn't be here, would they? I'm sure you haven't done anything like that, have you, love?' she murmured to Ribby, still cuddling her. She considered this, and added, 'Well, I suppose magic is natural for goblins and – house-elves, was it? Maybe it's only a sin for humans.'

I'm among enemies, Severus reminded himself. Stupid enemies, at that. There's no point in arguing about it, any more than there would be in shouting, "Support Harry Potter!" in the middle of a Death Eater meeting.

But the teenage girl who had spoken up before shouted, 'Oh, yeah? When I got my acceptance letter to Hogwarts, my parents dragged me round to all the conversion therapists they could find, to try to "cast the devils out of me" and make a Muggle of me! They came up with all these neat little theories about how I'd got infected with demon possession when I'd had my ears pierced, or inherited it when my mum had a blood transfusion when she had her appendix out, or from my mum's dad being a Freemason, or from my great-grandparents because they used to live in Golders Green so they were probably Jewish, or maybe it was my dad who was infected because he was a science fiction fan who liked playing Dungeons and Dragons! The only explanation they didn't consider is that maybe some people just are witches and wizards, and people should get used to it!'

'Your parents had a more – exotic approach to magic than my father,' remarked Severus. 'He just assumed that hitting me and shouting at me and at my mother would be enough to cure me.'

The girl looked intently at him in the pre-dawn greyness. 'Did you get that thing where the anger explodes out of you and hurts people?'

'No,' said Severus. 'But then, it helped that I knew what I was. I knew that my mother was a witch, and I knew that when I was eleven I was going to Hogwarts and that my father couldn't get at me there. In the meantime – he was mostly at work or at the pub, until he lost his job, and then he was either at the pub or passed out at home, so it wasn't too hard to keep out of his way. If he was at home and conscious, I could always go down to the park.'

'My parents weren't like that,' said the girl, sniffling slightly. (Magic wasn't the only thing she couldn't control, evidently.) 'They never hit me, and they didn't drink much, and when my dad had had a few glasses of wine, he just talked more. He used to tell stories. But – but sometimes I wished they were abusive, so that I could accept that they were my enemies and just forgive them. As it was, I – I didn't want to hurt them, so I locked myself in my room so that if I went weird I could only hurt myself, and – and I died.'

'How old are you?' Severus asked.

'Fourteen.'

That was impressive in itself. Most children in her position died by the age of ten.

'So,' said Severus, turning back to Doreen. 'This girl died because her parents' ignorance reduced her to the situation of an unmedicated werewolf, and she doesn't believe they abused her because they didn't hit her. If you think she's cut off from salvation because she happened to be born a witch, might I ask where you think they deserve to go?'

'No!' shouted the girl, horrified. 'Don't send them to Hell! It's not their fault! They just didn't understand!'

'Then maybe you need to forgive them for not trying to understand,' said the angel.

'Y-yeah, I s'pose,' said the girl. 'Am I allowed to pray for them, when I'm here?'

'Of course,' said the angel.

Severus didn't say anything. He wasn't clear about what 'forgive' meant. In his experience, if you did something that made people angry with you, and you were sorry and apologised, then either they slammed the door in your face and never spoke to you again, or, if you could prove that you were useful to them, they would tolerate having you around but never quite trust you.

'Are you thinking that you can't bring yourself to forgive your enemies?' the angel asked him.

'I was wondering why I'd want to.'

'Put it like this,' said the angel. 'If your father were still alive, and you had the authority to send him to Azkaban for the rest of his life, would you do it?'

Severus wondered if he would. He remembered taunting Sirius Black with the threat of being sent back to Azkaban and subjected to the Dementor's Kiss. He remembered being held in Azkaban, awaiting trial, and the horrible feeling when a Dementor passed by, and being surprised that they had the power to make him feel any more wretched than he already did, and wishing he could cast a Patronus in here, and hating himself for even thinking of that, because his Patronus had the same form as Lily's, and it was sacrilegious even to think of her when it was his fault she'd died…

'No,' he said eventually. 'A Muggle prison, maybe. But not Azkaban.'

'Well,' said the angel, 'given that Hell is for all eternity, not just for a human lifespan, and that God loves your father a lot more than you do, perhaps you can understand why God forgives.' He paused to let this sink in, and then added, 'On the other hand, God is angrier than you are about the times when people have ill-treated you or exploited you, because God loves you more than you love yourself, too.' He fell silent again, stretching his wings a little further to catch the breeze.

Severus thought, When he talks about love like this, he sounds like Dumbledore. And then, No. He's the sort of person Dumbledore would like to be, and maybe thinks he is, or maybe hates himself for not being.

He wondered where Dumbledore was now. Presumably he had gone on – or at least, his portrait-self had seemed to think that it was not the real Albus Dumbledore, nor a trapped soul-fragment like a Horcrux, but just a recording of his personality. In which case, was he in Purgatory, or had he reached Heaven by now, or horrible thought – was he encased in flame among the Counsellors of Fraud? What if Severus had not only physically killed him, but condemned him to be tortured for ever?

No. It was no good thinking like that. But, if they did meet again – would meeting Dumbledore, whom he had personally killed but only because Dumbledore had insisted on it, be worse than meeting Lily again, whose death he had caused without meaning to? And Dumbledore promised to protect her, and didn't, growled a rebellious voice in the back of his brain. He borrowed that Invisibility Cloak that might have protected her. Maybe he did it on purpose, so that you'd feel guilty enough to…

NO! This is stupid, paranoid thinking! He's an ex-would-be-Dark-Lord who's trying to be good, just as you're an ex-Death-Eater trying to be good.

Or maybe he isn't. Maybe he's lied about EVERYTHING, and the message you passed on to Lily's son that he needed to die in order to defeat Voldemort was just one more subterfuge, and you've sent a teenage boy to his death for nothing…

No. He needed to put a brick wall in front of that train of thought. After all, he'd know soon enough, one way or another. Even without thinking about Dumbledore, there were plenty more people he would have to face seeing again. Victims of the Death Eaters who had pleaded with him to rescue them, like Charity Burbage, for example.

He tried to think whether there was anyone he was looking forward to seeing. Lily, of course – but it wasn't as though she'd be rushing to meet him, as if they were still friends, still children and full of hope. Maybe, like the heroine in the book, she'd be waiting at the top of the mountain to tell him off for screwing up practically everything in his entire life, until he cried. And then, perhaps, like the heroine in the book, she would forgive him – but then again, remembering Lily Evans as the girl he had been at school with, and not as a godlike heroine, quite probably she wouldn't.

On the other hand, probably Regulus would be there. Even if he'd already completed his journey to Heaven, he might be willing to retrace his steps to guide Severus through it. It would be good to see him again.

'I should explain,' said the angel, 'that when we land, most of you probably won't immediately see all the people you knew in your earthly lives, even if they were people who died at the same time as you. Now, you don't need to assume that this means they were all either perfect or so arrogant that they won't admit that they've done anything wrong. It's partly that time works differently here from the way it does on Earth, but, more importantly, you're probably not ready to cope with meeting all the people you need to resolve damaged relationships with, all at once. But I promise that you'll meet each of them at the right time.

'Incidentally,' he added, 'I asked earlier what "repent" means. Has anyone had any further thoughts?'

Severus wondered. He had often felt irritated that Latin had been dropped as a compulsory subject at Hogwarts, so that most pupils couldn't guess from the names of spells what they might do. But in this case – he cast his mind back – most dictionaries seemed coy about where the word 'repent' came from, beyond saying that it came from Latin, but it seemed to derive from poena, punishment, and to be related to pain, punish, punch, and pine. They didn't suggest that it was anything to do with re-thinking your life. But perhaps etymology only told you where a word had come from, not where it was going. Especially when it was trying to do the work of a Greek word that meant changing your mind.

'I imagine,' he said, 'that it means learning what we didn't learn in our Earthly lives about how we should be living. And the process probably involves finding out that most of the things we thought we had learned were wrong.'

'Excellent!' said the angel, in tones that implied that he would have added, 'Ten House Points to Slytherin!' if there had been any point. 'Some of you may have been told that you were evil and nothing but evil, and couldn't desire anything except evil,' he went on. 'It wasn't true. All of you were born with the instinct to seek good, just as a plant is born with the instinct to seek light. But as you grew up, you were bombarded with confused messages, both from your own senses and from the people around you, about what was good or bad. People tried to reduce it to simple rules that a child could remember, and when you noticed that the rules didn't always fit with one another, you either tried to force your life to follow them anyway, or you gave up on them, or, if you were wise, you tried to understand what the real rules were that were the reason for the rules your parents and teachers had told you. Everyone who passes through life has to learn all this…'

'Even Jesus?' asked the young witch. Doreen impatiently shushed her, but the angel nodded seriously.

'Even Jesus,' he said firmly. 'He wasn't born knowing all the answers, any more than you were. And he certainly knows how you felt, being told off by people who didn't understand and just wanted you to be normal.

'Sometimes, people complete their journey to Heaven in their lifetime,' he continued. 'But all of you came up against barriers of one sort or another that prevented you from developing fully into the people you needed to be, and so there's something more you need to learn before you can become people who are able to appreciate Heaven.

'Incidentally, do you know what happens when you've completed your journey and reach Heaven? Anyone? Severus?'

'We discover that there's infinitely more to learn that we hadn't even begun to realise we didn't understand?'

'Exactly!' said the angel, looking, for a moment, very like Dumbledore at his most irritating. Most of the passengers on the boat groaned in tones ranging from despairing to ruefully amused at themselves. They sounded exactly like a class first being confronted with the horrifying truth that, even if they scored Outstanding in their OWL Potions exam, they would have to learn even more about potion-making to pass their NEWTs, and that, if they wanted to go onto a career in potion-brewing, they would need to serve an apprenticeship in which they would have to learn still more.

It was like being eleven and going away to Hogwarts for the first time, all over again. And Heaven would be like that, too. Except that this time, presumably nobody was allowed to bully him or try to murder him.

It could only be an improvement.