ix. where stars dwell

When the final letter came, Elara was ready to go.

The benefit of practically being raised in the shadow of a pulpit was the exhausting linguistics preparation that went into teaching jaded orphans how to read and interpret the puzzling language of the bible. The inhabitants of St. Giles' spent an abundance of time with their necks bent over stuffy passages, fighting the urge to yawn, lest they wanted to feel the back of a ruler slap their hands. Elara excelled at her coursework—if only because she loathed being struck or touched. She could recite whole pages of Matthew or Mark or the Epistles without much thought, and when she sat down to write Minerva McGonagall, she had the literary prowess necessary to ask the right questions without receiving the wrong reactions.

She thought her handwriting would have been neater had her wrists not still been aching from Father Phillips' treatment.

Elara Black knew how to read Latin and how to sing psalms and how to forge acceptance letters to religious boarding schools on the other side of the country. She knew the right words to say and knew when to be quiet, knew when to keep her eyes down and when to bluff. She wrote questions to Professor McGonagall in the dead of night and let Matron Fitzgerald send an acceptance note to St. Katherine's School for Girls, a note that would go absolutely nowhere at all. Elara walked a thin line between outright deception and truth, letting neither woman know all the answers to the questions they asked, never letting them know just how desperately she wanted to leave that place.

Because Elara had decided to leave. Hogwarts or no, she would not stay at St. Giles' another day.

By stating that her guardians weren't familiar with the area, she managed to convince Professor McGonagall to send a brief series of instructions for where to purchase school supplies and how to access the "Wizarding" world, as it was called. The instructions included many words that were outside Elara's vocabulary—including "flooing" or "Apparating" or "Muggle"—but she understood the basic necessities.

When she asked about tuition, the tone of McGonagall's letters became more suspicious, pondering if something had happened to the Black fortune, if Elara or her guardians were being denied access to the Gringotts vaults, and so Elara quickly demurred until the subject was changed—but the words stayed with her. Fortune. Gringotts. Vaults.

Had Elara's parents left money for her? Perhaps McGonagall had the wrong Black. It wasn't a terribly uncommon surname, after all.

Or so Elara thought.

She left a week from the end of July. A final letter from McGonagall included possible temporary accommodations she could find in London, and a ticket for the train to school that would depart at exactly eleven o'clock on September first from Platform Nine and Three Quarters, Kings Cross Station. Elara gathered her satchel and her fare for the non-magical train trip into the city. Sister Abigail cooed about how proud she was of Elara, Matron Fitzgerald warned her there'd best be no problems from her at St. Katherine's, and Father Phillips pressed an iron cross on a chain into her palm, saying they would see her when the holidays came.

In a fit of vindictive pique, Elara threw the cross into the bushes once she was left at the station alone.

They would never see her again.

xXxXx

The name Black, she came to know, was not as common as she theorized.

No, Black was the name of traitors, of murderers, and of madmen—and Elara was the daughter of all three.

Her revelation began at the bank Professor McGonagall mentioned in her letters, Gringotts. Elara followed the instructions on how to reach "Diagon Alley" from the "Muggle-side" of London, and though she was suitably flabbergasted by her first real experience with magic, she managed to stagger along the alley's length until she found the goblin-ran bank. She almost collided with a bespectacled girl in rumpled clothes coming out of the foyer dragging a trunk, but once there, the goblins swiped some of Elara's blood—and her life started to unravel at the seams.

She was not the only Black alive. In fact, not only was Elara not the last of her name, she also wasn't in control of the family fortune the professor had told her about. That honor fell to the current head of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black, her father Sirius Orion Black—and his proxy, Cygnus Pollux Black the Third.

Well, she thought, sitting in one of the well-appointed meeting rooms off the main Gringotts' chamber. The celestial monikers would explain my name, at least. "Sirius," she asked in a breathless whisper, staring at the goblin—Sledgetongue—across from her. "My father, Sirius, is alive?"

The scrawny goblin bared yellow teeth. "If you can call being incarcerated in the Wizarding prison alive."

More letters were written. More owls sent winging off into the summer sky. Elara left to check into a quaint inn on neighboring Horizont Alley called "The Niffler's Nest," which she was assured often boarded Hogwarts students who lived far from London and needed to be closer to the station—though not usually quite so early in the summer. They charged a fee to Hogwarts itself, so she needn't worry about paying for that yet. Elara perched silently on the edge of her mattress, dazed, her satchel resting on the duvet at her side. She stared at the pinstriped wallpaper and told herself again and again that it didn't matter, that it didn't matter if her father was alive because he was in prison, for goodness' sake—.

Elara returned to Gringotts at precisely eleven o'clock. She expected to greet Mr Cygnus Black, her great uncle and proxy head of the family, whom the goblins had written earlier that very morning to arrange a meeting with—only for Elara to confront one of the ugliest creatures she had ever seen when she stepped into the second chamber again.

It was shorter than the goblins, hunched with gangling limbs, a bulbous nose, bloodshot eyes, and great sagging folds of flesh. If Elara were to be honest, it looked as if someone had held the scowling imp over a fire for too long and he'd started to melt like overheated wax. The creature dipped his head in the approximation of a bow after he looked Elara over from head to foot. The white hair sprouting out of his floppy ears shifted with the motion.

"The master sends his regrets for not being able to attend, but poor master is not well. Kreacher is here to take the blood-traitor's daughter to Master Cygnus."

Blood-traitor?

Elara wasn't sure she wanted to go anywhere with such a cantankerous little thing, but she wasn't given much of a choice. Kreacher, as he called himself, reached out a bony arm and took hold of Elara's wrist. She gasped at the resulting sting, and the breath disappeared into the sudden crushing pressure that consumed her. It was like being sucked through a narrow straw at high velocity without access to air, her insides churning, heart pounding—.

As abruptly as it had begun, the pressure abated and Elara landed on her knees, retching.

Kreacher twisted his lined lips, biting back a retort, and gave his fingers a snap. The sick splattered across the floor vanished.

"The blood-traitor's daughter will follow Kreacher."

Elara lifted her head and saw a narrow foyer, a black door with no knob at her back, a dusty corridor before her that led to a stairwell and another shut door. Flocked wallpaper peeled from the walls in curling strips, and Kreacher's little feet left smudged prints on the floorboards and carpet runner. Gas lamps flickered to life, putrescent yellow in color behind emerald glass globes, cobwebs thick as hair caught in the fixtures' curlicues. Kreacher turned to glare. Elara stumbled upright, dazed, and trailed after him.

Another girl might not have followed the pale little thing deeper into the house. Another girl would have been frightened out of her wits by Kreacher, by the decor, by the sudden relocation from one place to another—but Elara had lived for several years frightened of herself, of the Matron, of the Father, and compared to the orphanage, this place wasn't remotely scary. It certainly set her ill at ease, yet the grandeur beneath the grunge remained prevalent, and Elara was sad when she thought of what the house must have looked like in years past.

As they climbed the stairs, Elara could've sworn whispers bloomed at her back, yet a glance over her shoulder showed the landing as bare as it had been when she passed it by. She kept her eyes forward after that.

Kreacher knocked upon a door and opened it with a wave of his gnarled hand. He gestured Elara inside.

Breathing was the first thing she noted; heavy and wet, the pants came at a stilted intervals in the darkened room, little sunlight managing to crawl about the edges of the thick damask curtains on the windows, a fire all but dead in the filthy hearth. The man lay in his nightgown beneath several comforters and blankets with his torso propped up by fine, tasseled pillows, the silver and emerald hangings tied off to the thick posters of the bed. The room smelled of sweat and sick.

"Come closer, then, I'm not contagious."

Embarrassed to realize she'd just been standing on the rug staring, Elara stepped nearer, her hands folded before herself.

"Kreacher," the man called. His voice cracked at the end and devolved into a hacking cough. "More light, Kreacher. And a chair."

The little scowling imp hadn't followed Elara into the room, and yet a stuffed armchair appeared behind Elara—almost taking her legs out from under her—and the silver candelabrum on the nightstand burst into flames. Elara sat before she could be asked, mostly because she was beginning to feel a mite weak in the knees. Magic could be overwhelming when it happened so suddenly.

The man on the bed surprised Elara. She'd been expecting someone a great deal older, someone in their seventies or eighties—but the man looked barely fifty, aside from the wasting kiss of illness drawing his waxen skin taut and painting perspiration on his brow. In him she saw several of her own features: the black hair with the slight wave to it, the gray eyes, the sharp, symmetrical bones of his cheeks and jaw. He gave her a hard look as his thin chest continued to rise and fall. Elara noticed several letters laying on the duvet at his side, including the one sent off by the goblins.

At length, he said, "You look like him," and fell into a coughing fit once more.

Elara wondered if there was anything she could do and voiced the concern, but he waved it off with a slight flick of the hand.

"There's nothing to do. I'm dying. It's as simple as that. Whatever comfort can be brought to my body does nothing to stop the inevitable." He breathed in and out as he looked at Elara with his brow furrowed. "So you must forgive me for my lack of manners. I am Cygnus of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black, the proxy-Head of the family. It is a…relief to meet you."

Relief? An odd way to greet someone. Not that my entire life hasn't become decidedly odd. "I'm…Elara. It's very nice to meet you, Mr Black."

He tutted. "No. That's not how you introduce yourself to the Head of a pure-blood family. It's 'Elara of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black.'" He coughed again, briefly. "Heir to the Black family. And here I didn't think anything could surprise me at this point in time. Tell me, girl. How did you come to be here? Who has been raising you since Sirius got himself incarcerated?"

Elara bit back the urge to pounce on the first question that jumped into her head, wanting to know about Sirius, about who he was and what he'd done, and if that was why she'd been left at St. Giles' as a child. But why the non-magical world? Why? Elara had been taught not to interrupt adults, however. "I was raised at an orphanage in Wiltshire. I…I received my Hogwarts letter, and found out I'm a witch. I left. I'm not going back."

The lines on Cygnus' face deepened and Elara noticed there were threads of silver in the black hair of his brows, a tinge of gray marring the first shadow of a growing beard. "Muggles?" he demanded, voice rising. "They left you with Muggles?!"

"Yes."

He said something then beneath his breath, something about Merlin's pants that Elara guessed might be a magical euphemism, and looked more ill than ever. "The world's going to the dogs." By 'dogs," she assumed he meant 'Muggles.' His tone told her as much. "The Ministry can't even keep track of pure-blood magical children, let alone the rest of the rabble. They assured Sirius and Walburga that the premises was checked, but what can you expect from a fool like Millicent Bagnold? Of course, she barely lasted long enough to warm the seat for her successor." He paused then to breathe—or wheeze, more like. "But you wouldn't know anything about that, would you?"

Elara stiffened. "No, sir."

"It's not your fault," he replied, voice gruffer than it had been before. "You will be taught. I have enough strength left in this body to see the state of the family better off than it was left to me. You mentioned not returning to that—to that orphanage. That's quite out of the picture." Cygnus stopped speaking and cleared his throat, his eyes closing for a long minute of silence interrupted only by the faint crackle in the hearth. "Where are you staying?" he finally asked.

"The Niffler's Nest. It's an inn in Horizont Alley that boards Hogwarts students before the term begins."

"I know of it. You can stay there or you can reside here, if you wish. Merlin knows I could use better company than the house-elf." He wrinkled his nose in that dignified way rich parishioners always screwed up their faces when confronted with a particularly scruffy orphan. Cygnus eyed Elara again, taking in her proper—if worn—attire, her clean shoes, her washed face and cut fingernails. "As I told you, Miss Black, I am dying and it is inevitable, but I won't see this house crumble or fall into the hands of fools like my own children, pledging themselves to madmen or Muggles. Toujours pur, do you know what that means?"

"No. I was taught Latin, not French."

"At least you recognize the language. It means 'always pure.' Remember those words. It's the motto of this family, and while some will tout it as a slogan galvanizing hate and the agendas of lesser wizards, that is not what it is. Not originally. Toujours pur means to always be loyal to blood, to family—to magic. You are, or will be, the last free member of the House of Black, a family that has existed in Britain since before the Ministry came into being—before the Conqueror even set sail for the Isles—and it will be your responsibility to carry on our noble name."

Elara felt wide-eyed and silly listening to her great uncle speak. Why, just that morning she dressed in her modest bedroom at St. Giles' hearing the morning sermons echo from the adjacent church, and while she'd been exchanging letters with Professor McGonagall for a week now, it hadn't been real until now, until she sat down at the bedside of a dying relative and he regaled her about lineages and house mottos and magic.

"Please, Mr Black," she asked softly. "Can you…can you tell me about my parents?"

"I don't know much," he replied, sighing. He began to cough again and struggled to control it, one hand plastered over his mouth as his reddened eyes watered. "Th—that potion there—."

Elara lurched to her feet and followed his pointing finger toward the dusty sideboard. There were several "potions" sitting there in a line of various crystal vials, their contents luminescent and churning at Elara's inspection.

"Th—the pink one."

She grabbed it and brought it back to him. Cygnus drank the infusion, sputtering, and instantly his fit subsided into a grateful gasp of air. Elara took the empty vial from his hand as he slumped against the pillows, clearly exhausted. "I don't know much," he repeated. "Your grandmother, my sister Walburga, was some thirteen years my senior, and so we were never really close. You can find her portrait on one of the landings, howling about blood purity like a Gryffindor who can't string more than two words together." He sniffed. "She married our second cousin Orion—don't make that face at me, girl—and had two sons, Sirius being the eldest. No one's quite sure where his brother, Regulus, got off to."

Elara nodded along, and though she forced her face to remain composed, she still didn't like the idea of her paternal grandparents being related, for goodness' sake. It was technically legal, being second cousins and not first, but still.

"As far as I know, Sirius rowed with Walburga and Orion sometime during his Hogwarts years and she had him disowned, but when Regulus disappeared in 79' and Sirius returned with the promise to marry a pure-blood heiress, Walburga had little choice but to accept him back into the family. I actually don't know who he married, though I heard she died early on in 81'. Walburga and I were hardly speaking at the time, differences in political opinions being what they were—but I digress."

"And what happened to Sir—my father? I know he's…incarcerated. For how long?"

"The goblins tell you, then? Oh, he's there for life." Cygnus' eyes gleamed hard like cooling quicksilver. "He killed twelve Muggles and an old school-mate of his with a Blasting Curse. The Hit Wizards found him in the ruins, laughing like a madman. Took him straight to Azkaban with the rest of the Death Eaters they rounded up that day. He besmirched the whole of our house with his idiocy, and you'll bear the brunt of his treachery for years to come. Trust me when I say this, Miss Black; the only part of Sirius that will ever see the outside of an Azkaban cell is his rotting corpse, and even then I have my doubts."

Elara shuddered and shut her eyes. She wished she hadn't asked. She really wished she hadn't.

"I think his punishment fitting," Cygnus said as he sank farther into the pillows and his tired gaze roved from Elara to the far wall, focusing on the empty portrait frame there. "He doesn't know about you, after all. He gets to sit in that prison every day, gets to wake up every morning on that dismal island, and gets to remember again that his only child is dead."

A/N: I always wondered if Draco's lack of mention of the Black side of his family was an oversight, written that way for simplicity's sake, or because some kind of family row kept his grandparents distant. In this work, Cygnus is 100% pro pure-blood, but he believes in a little thing called subtlety. Looking at you, Walburga. In canon Bagnold was Minister for Magic from 1980-1990. She was replaced early here by a familiar face….