Walburga went rigid.
Of course she remembered how Regulus had brushed her off at the dinner table before the Christmas banquet, and what had followed that promise to "talk properly."
She knew his closeness wasn't entirely genuine. At least, not genuine in the way she'd believed.
She wasn't a fool. That scene at the Christmas banquet had shown her too many things she'd never seen before.
Her younger son was colder than she'd imagined. Deeper. Stronger. More of a stranger.
She still watched her son, but she was no longer sure what she was looking at.
She'd thought about it for a long time afterward. At night, lying awake. During the day, over meals. Most of all when she was alone.
Some things she'd worked out. Whatever kind of person Regulus was, he was her son, and she was his mother. No glory outweighed that fact. No strangeness could bury it.
Some things she hadn't worked out. What stance she should take with this son. The old pattern no longer worked, and a new one hadn't been found. All she could do, it seemed, was be a mother.
What being a mother meant, exactly... she was still thinking about that.
So when Regulus's arm came around her, she froze. She couldn't tell whether the embrace was real or just another performance.
But the hold was solid. His arms drew tight, nothing like the loose, perfunctory hugs of before that ended almost as they began.
Then she found she didn't care. Real or false, so be it.
Walburga reached out and held him back, harder than he held her, fingers clutching the robes at his back, gripping tight.
She was trembling.... faintly. He wouldn't have felt it if they weren't pressed together.
The mistress of the House of Black would not let weakness show completely, even before her son. But the body was more honest than the will. She could control her expression. She couldn't control the tremor in her muscles.
She had lost her father.
Whatever her relationship with Pollux had been... distant, polite, each busy with their own affairs... he had still been her father. That white-haired old man holding a wine glass at the far end of family gatherings, a fixture that had existed since the day she was born, a constant taken for granted.
Gone now.
Neither of them spoke. The corridor was quiet. Winter sunlight fell through the window and laid their shadows on the floor, overlapping.
After a while, Walburga's fingers loosened and she stepped back. She smoothed her gloves, head bowed, and when she looked up her expression had recovered. Composed and still. Exactly what the mistress of the House of Black should look like.
Her gaze moved past Regulus toward the stairs.
Sirius stood there in his fresh black robes, motionless, hands in his pockets, watching them with no expression at all.
Walburga gave him a glance. No warmth, no coldness. A sweep of the eyes, confirming he was present, confirming he'd put on the robes he was meant to wear.
Sirius looked away and said nothing. That suited him fine.
Orion emerged from the study in black formal robes, the family crest pinned at his left side. He stood at the end of the corridor, looked at his two sons, looked at Walburga, and nodded.
"Let's go."
At the front door, Orion drew a slip of paper from an inner pocket and handed it to Regulus.
Regulus took it and glanced down. His father's handwriting. A single line. An address.
The instant he read it, an image bloomed in his mind. Hills, ancient yews closing off a pool of shadow, headstones ranked in neat rows under a dim sky. The picture was sharp enough that he could feel the texture of the ground and the temperature of the air.
The paper was charmed to convey complete spatial coordinates, imagery precise enough to give Apparition an anchor.
He passed it to Sirius.
Sirius took it, looked down, and blinked as the image poured into his head too. He blinked twice more, adjusting to the sensation of a memory that hadn't been there a moment ago, then handed it back.
His expression was complicated. Something like of course you Blacks make even an address this dramatic. But he didn't say it.
Regulus rubbed the paper between his fingers and it crumbled to ash, scattered by the wind at the door.
The family of four stood on the porch steps. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack. The porch stood empty.
Kreacher peered out from behind the door, looked at the vacant steps, and shut it.
The moment his feet touched down, the air changed.
The four of them stood on a gentle slope.
Regulus looked around. Low hills rolled away in every direction, the grass yellowed. February in England, too early for green. Dead grass spread from the slope all the way to the horizon.
He unfurled his magical senses and immediately touched several layers of protective enchantments stacked one atop another.
The Muggle-Repelling Charm was the outermost. Any Muggle who wandered close would abruptly remember an errand left undone at home, or decide this looked like a barren patch with nothing worth seeing, and turn back.
Beneath that lay an Unplottability Charm. Any pen that tried to mark this location on a map would drift on its own, and the ink would land somewhere else entirely.
Then a layer of anti-perception magic, interfering with the instincts of magical creatures. An owl flying overhead would lose its bearings and swing wide around the place. A Niffler passing through would sense nothing of value in the ground below.
Innermost was something older, an anti-divination ward. Anyone who tried to spy on this graveyard through prophecy or scrying would see only a blur of hills and an endless wall of yews.
Centuries of accumulation, layer upon layer. Old spells covered by newer ones, the new reinforced by newer still, from the first generation of Blacks who chose this ground as their burial place, every generation since adding to it.
The Black family graveyard. Within the family, it was only ever called "the old place." A name passed down through hundreds of years. Every Black knew where it was. No one outside the family did.
The graveyard sat among low hills in southern England. Judging by the terrain, somewhere around the border of Wiltshire and Somerset. The lie of the hills, the type of grassland, the humidity and temperature of the air, together they sketched a rough range.
Ancient yews surrounded it on all sides, trunks so thick it would take two or three people to circle them with their arms, bark dark brown, deeply cracked, crawling with moss. The canopies closed overhead, branches interlacing, blocking most of the daylight. Only stray shafts leaked through the gaps, falling on the ground in long, narrow bands of light and shadow.
The deeper into the graveyard, the darker it grew.
Headstones.
Many headstones.
They descended from the crest of the hill in neat, orderly rows, following the slope down.
The topmost rows were the oldest. Centuries of rain and moss had eaten the stone into shapelessness.
The middle rows dated from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, better preserved, harder stone, deeper carving. Names and years still legible. Every headstone bore the Black family crest, its size and style shifting slightly with the era, but the core elements unchanged.
In the bottom row, only one place had been opened. Pollux's.
The earth was already dug. A rectangular grave lay in the dead grass, dark soil exposed in cross-section, waiting for its new occupant.
Standing in the graveyard, Regulus spread his senses again, probing downward.
His brow creased.
Down there, in those coffins, things were radiating magic.
It came from the bones themselves, from the grave goods buried alongside them, from runes carved into the coffin wood, from residues of Dark magic that had seeped into the soil across centuries. Some had been buried for hundreds of years, the bones likely crumbled to powder, but the magic remained.
Heavy. Dark. Reeking of rot and curses.
Some of it wrapped around the coffin remains like a shroud. Some had bled into the earth and tangled with the tree roots. Some still coiled in the depths of its box.
Not every coffin held it. Some had gone completely quiet, their occupants departed clean.
But some burned fiercely. One coffin gave off an aura that could only be called horrifying. Buried less than two hundred years, perhaps. Whatever its occupant had done in life, the bones were still exhaling the afterglow of curses in death, an ominous presence nearly condensed into substance.
As his senses swept across it, his mental defenses shuddered on their own, his guarding will answering some form of hostility.
Regulus withdrew his perception and looked no further. He had no wish to disturb the ancestors.
The House of Black. A Pure-blood family stretching back centuries, a dozen generations and more, and in every generation someone had studied the Dark Arts. In every generation, someone had carried things into the coffin that should never have been kept.
Perhaps Dark artifacts they'd used in life. Perhaps half-finished cursed creations. Perhaps only a wand. Perhaps their bodies had been so saturated with Dark magic that the residue kept bleeding malice long after death.
It made sense, when he thought about it. Go back a few centuries and there had been no division between Dark magic and Light.
The Ministry of Magic wasn't formally established until 1692. Before that, wizarding society had far fewer rules. Medieval wizards used whatever magic worked, whatever was powerful, whatever could protect the family's land and bloodline.
Dark, Light... whatever won was good, and what was good kept being used. Use it and survive. Survive and pass it down.
Regulus understood now. This graveyard was itself one vast repository of Dark magic, centuries approaching a millennium of accumulation, layered and folded, wrapped in soil and yew roots, lying quiet beneath the ground.
The yews had likely been chosen deliberately. In magical herbology, the tree had a property rarely mentioned: it absorbed and suppressed Dark energies. Roots deep enough, canopy dense enough, and over hundreds of years they had pinned down everything below.
He glanced at Sirius beside him.
Sirius had his hands stuffed in his pockets, eyes resting on some headstone without really seeing it. Maybe thinking about something. Maybe thinking about nothing.
His magical senses weren't sharp enough to notice what lay underground. To him this was just a grim cemetery full of people in black robes and suffocating atmosphere, and he wanted to leave.
Regulus looked away.
Others were arriving.
The crack of Apparition carried in from beyond the yew wall, muffled, most of the echo swallowed by the canopy and the wards. Blacks filed in through the gaps between the trees, black robes in the dim light, faces hard to make out. Only silhouettes, nearly merging with the shadows of the trees.
Cygnus Black III walked side by side with Druella. Cygnus was Walburga's brother, both children of Pollux. He matched Regulus's memory: tall, thin, severe, as if cast from the same mold as their father. His expression was heavier than Walburga's, but only heavy. Not grieving.
He walked to the grave, looked at the open pit, let his gaze rest there a moment, then withdrew it and moved to stand beside Orion and Walburga, saying something in a low voice.
Druella stood half a step behind him, a dark veil hiding her face, gloves drawn up past her elbows, posture immaculate.
Arcturus Black III arrived, and the crowd parted for him without being asked.
He was Orion's father, the most senior living elder of the House of Black. Not a tall man, but he stood ramrod straight. Nearly eighty, white-haired, gaunt, the lines of his face carved as if by a blade. His robes were the oldest style of pure black, no silver thread, no subtle patterning, austere to the last degree. He leaned on a black cane.
He too walked to the grave, and looked at that place for a long time.
Pollux had been his generation. The two of them had occupied different branches of the Black family tree, but they were rooted in the same soil. Together they had lived through the Grindelwald era, the Second World War, the Ministry's reforms, Voldemort's rise.
Now one remained.
And one did not.
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