Kreacher was already waiting at the door and pulled it open.
Regulus came down the hall behind him.
Lucius stood on the step in a travelling robe. He held himself straight, gave a nod, a hint of a smile at his mouth. "Good morning, Regulus."
"Good morning, Lucius."
Regulus stepped aside and brought him into the entrance hall.
Lucius was a man of manners. Having come this far, he could hardly leave without greeting Orion.
Regulus led him through to the drawing room.
Orion sat in the chair at the head of the room with the Daily Prophet in his hands, a half-finished cup of tea on the small round table in front of him.
He raised his eyes. "Lucius."
Lucius bowed slightly, correct in every degree. "Mr. Black."
Orion nodded, said nothing further, and returned to the paper.
Lucius waited a moment. When it became clear there were no instructions coming, he glanced at Regulus.
"Father. We're leaving."
A short sound of acknowledgement, nothing more.
Lucius bowed to Orion again and followed Regulus out.
The two of them passed through the front door of 12 Grimmauld Place and stood on the steps.
Before they set off, Lucius ran through it briefly.
"Northern Yorkshire. An abandoned mining village, down in a valley, hills all round it. Greyback's been holed up there with thirty or forty of them for the better part of a year."
He drew a small pouch from an inner pocket, palm-sized, dark brown leather, drawn shut with silver cord.
He weighed it in his hand. "Supplies. Everything's in there. Food, household goods, potions to take the edge off the transformations."
Slipping the pouch back into his robe, he added, "They know someone's coming today. What sort of mood they'll be in, we'll find out when we arrive."
That was the whole of it. He gave Regulus a look, and Regulus nodded.
Lucius laid a hand on his shoulder.
A crack.
The steps stood empty.
They landed on open moorland. He hadn't taken them straight into the camp.
"We walk in." Lucius released him and straightened his robe, and something crossed his face that he made no effort to hide. Distaste. "Gives both sides a buffer."
He tipped his chin toward the valley. "Werewolves are savages. No rules to them. Apparate into the middle of a den like that and it's the same as treading on the tail. They attack first and think about it afterward."
Regulus nodded. A short walk cost him nothing.
The arrangement was interesting, though. This was how an ordinary wizard treated werewolves.
Contempt on one side. Filthy things, brutish, untouchable.
Caution on the other. Never hand them a chance to misread the situation.
The contempt was real. So was the fear.
There was a certain method in it. Look down on them all you liked, but every step of the procedure got followed, and you avoided drawing a wand if you could.
Voldemort's people had likely dealt with the pack this way from the start. Keep them, use them, never get close, and swallow the disgust each time.
Werewolves weren't wizards. They didn't run on wizarding rules. To make them obey, you couldn't let them feel slighted. Even if you did slight them, you kept it from showing too plainly.
The country here was bleaker than the south. Northern Yorkshire in February ran colder than London by a wide margin.
Dead heather covered the ground, yellow-brown, rustling underfoot. The hills stood bare. No trees, and the shrubs came in thin scatters.
The soil had gone hard and dry. It gave nothing back under a boot.
They walked in, and the deeper they went, the more ruined it looked.
Heather turned from yellow-brown to grey. In places the turf had been ripped up in whole sheets, exposing loose stone and dried mud beneath.
Low bushes further off had been snapped, the breaks ragged, torn rather than cut.
Further still, bones began appearing in the grass, picked clean, scattered, all sizes, nothing identifiable among them.
The smell changed too. A faint rawness on the air, scattered by the wind and gathering again, thickening the further they went.
Regulus spread out his magical perception.
Dozens of living signatures in the valley ahead, spread across it.
The texture was coarse. Nothing like a wizard's.
Wizard magic, however violent, carried order. Consciousness held the reins. It had been woven, it bore the grain of incantation, the marks left by will.
Not this.
Every one of these signatures churned on instinct alone. No direction. No restraint.
Bare, unworked, primal, inhuman, bloody, and threaded through with a chill like moonlight.
Sorting more carefully, he found two broad kinds.
One was chaotic, the magic still unsettled.
Two things fought inside it, one human, one animal, tearing at each other, neither able to hold the other down. Those were the worst. The signature came through twisted, full of pain and struggle, a mess of frequencies jumping in his perception.
Recently turned. Still refusing it. Still fighting what they'd become.
The other kind ran smooth. Settled.
The animal had won out. The human had folded in underneath and stopped making trouble. Absorbed, perhaps. Humanity and beast no longer pulled against each other. They'd begun to merge, the border between them blurring, and in his perception the result had an unsettling harmony to it.
Turned long ago. They'd accepted it, quit resisting, and some had come to love what the animal gave them.
Neither kind lived anything like a person. But the smooth ones, at least, weren't at war with themselves.
A hundred yards on, watchers appeared on both flanks.
One behind the scrub on the left hill, another further out on the right. Neither came close. They simply followed, hanging back.
Unfriendly eyes. The look given to prey, tracking every step.
Regulus felt nothing at all.
Weaker in raw magical strength than an average fifth year at Hogwarts. Pitiful. Not worth attention.
Lucius walked beside him with the cane carried in one hand.
Regulus caught him adjusting his bearing.
At Grimmauld Place, in front of him, Lucius had been contained and relaxed. Something close to friendly, the Malfoy hauteur deliberately held down.
All of it had come back now, and heavier than usual.
Chin lifted a fraction. Shoulders set. The cane gripped upright, every stride carrying a note of looking down from a height.
That was the posture he wanted in front of werewolves. These things needed to know from the first glance which of them stood where.
The pace stayed easy, elegant enough for a red carpet, but Regulus could feel Lucius's magic sitting in an active state, primed, a spell one breath away.
Alert. Watchful. Ready for something to come out of the rocks at him.
Regulus noticed and said nothing.
Neither spoke. They followed a path that had long since stopped looking like one, down into the valley.
Behind them, werewolves began falling in, trailing at a distance, in twos and threes.
At a narrow point where rock walls pinched the ground in, the bones grew thicker and the stench sharper.
Three figures blocked the path. Ragged clothes, scarred faces, no friendliness in the eyes, though not quite hostility either. Just waiting.
Regulus looked them over.
Mature werewolves. Long since reconciled to what they were, the magic no longer tearing at itself, fused into one thing.
Past the moonlit cold and the blood-hunger came something else, a reek of slaughter too thick to disperse. Marks left by killing. They'd killed often, and grown used to it.
Lucius produced a silver badge from an inner pocket and held it out.
Voldemort's mark was cut into it, glowing faintly green.
The one in front took it, glanced down, glanced at Lucius, then moved his eyes to Regulus and stared.
A wizard whelp. Grey eyes, not tall, dim magic, thin as a stick. No credentials. Nothing on him marking him as one of Voldemort's.
Regulus met the stare, his face unchanged.
He'd come along as a presence. Nothing had been declared in advance.
Lucius swept the cane across and pushed the lead werewolf aside with it, without much courtesy.
His tone came out cool and detached, as though he were addressing a house-elf. "Move."
Teeth showed. A low growl rolled up out of the throat. The feet stayed planted, the body leaning forward, eyes locked on Lucius.
Lucius raised the cane and put the tip against the werewolf's chest.
"A Malfoy, here to see Fenrir Greyback. You're standing in the way. Do you intend to intercept the Dark Lord's message on his behalf?"
Another growl came, lower still, malice all through the eyes as they went back and forth between Lucius and Regulus. Then he stepped aside. The other two moved with him.
Lucius withdrew the cane and gave Regulus a graceful nod.
Passing the three of them, Lucius didn't look. Regulus gave Lucius a second look instead.
They entered the valley.
Past the mouth lay the abandoned mining village.
Stone houses, twenty or thirty of them, scattered across the valley floor. Most roofs had fallen in. Dead moss covered the walls, shrunk to a hard brown-grey crust. Weeds lay flat against the corners, dry and yellow.
Some windows had lost their frames entirely and gaped black at the world.
In the middle of the village was an open patch of ground with the remains of a fire, a ring of blackened stones around a heap of ash. Things were piled beside it without order. Timber, rags, wreckage that gave no clue what it had once been.
The ground was hard, but there was a tackiness to it underfoot, the kind left behind when something soaks into soil over a long time.
Not poverty. Poverty was a different matter. Poverty at least kept things tidy.
This was wild in the true sense.
A crowd of creatures that didn't care in the slightest where they lived had come together, found somewhere out of the wind, and stopped there.
The smell peaked here.
Raw meat, and under it something rank. Droppings everywhere, at the wall corners, beside the stones, the way animals mark territory.
Other things too. Rot, damp, fur, secretions, all of it stirred together and working its way up the nose.
Werewolves were spread throughout, crouched in the ruins, sitting on broken walls, pacing the open ground.
Most wore rags. Sallow faces, scars running shallow and deep.
Some scars had healed to white lines. Others looked fresh, red new flesh under scabs.
Their eyes came round toward the arrivals.
Regulus spread his perception again.
Dozens of signatures mixed together, every one of them carrying that duality.
Even in human form, the beast bled into the magic, in varying proportions.
In some the human still led, the grain of wizard weaving preserved in the patterns. Educated. They'd used wands. They knew how incantations were built.
In others the beast had all but buried the human. The magic lay bare and coarse, no weaving left in it, nothing but instinct and impulse.
He matched what he sensed against the eyes.
They didn't look at a person like a person, and they didn't seem to see themselves as one either.
One of them, crouched behind a broken wall, wasn't old. Early twenties, maybe thirty. He was looking toward Regulus, and something flickered in his face.
Something like a plea. Or like recognition. It withdrew almost at once, and his head went down.
Recently turned. The man in them hadn't finished dying, and now and then it surfaced through the animal.
The ones turned long ago had entirely different eyes. Sharp, savage, aggressive. They looked at a person from the angle a predator uses on food.
This was the werewolf world as it actually was, the face of it nobody in the magical community cared to examine.
Far from civilization. Far from the Ministry of Magic and its clean divisions of black and white. Far from the lamps and hot tea of Diagon Alley.
Only two groups here. People the magical world had shoved out onto the moors, and people who no longer wanted back in.
They'd gathered in an abandoned mining village to wait for something to define what came next for them.
Voldemort's orders, perhaps. Or the next full moon. Or the next batch of new members with fresh bites in them.
Bitten, changed, pushed out by society, washed up in a place like this and living as half man, half animal.
He'd never been this close to this many of them before.
The theory he'd talked over with Dumbledore outside the Shrieking Shack now had specimens to sit beside it.
An idea took shape.
This much material laid out in front of him, and going home empty-handed would be indefensible.
Then again, every one of these werewolves counted as Voldemort's property. Moving on them without a pretext would be awkward, and equally indefensible.
No matter. He could simply drive them mad.
With brains like these, one pass of Light Source Magic, a few things planted inside, and hardly any of them would hold out.
Whatever came after, they'd be the ones going mad. Nothing to do with him.
The corner of his mouth moved, and he put the thought away.
No hurry. Let Lucius finish what he'd come to do first.