Archive of Our Own

“Nice one!” shouted Sirius, forcing Harry’s head down as a pair of Stunning Spells flew toward them. “Now I want you to get out of —”

They both ducked again. A jet of green light had narrowly missed Sirius; across the room Harry saw Bellatrix Lestrange fall from halfway up the stone steps, her limp form toppling from stone seat to stone seat, and Tonks gazing down at her with a curious dazed expression...

“If you proceed downstairs into the Department of Mysteries, Cornelius,” said Dumbledore coolly, “you will find several escaped Death Eaters bound by an Anti-Disapparation Jinx and awaiting your decision as to what to do with them. In the meantime –” he motioned for me to come forward – “I believe you owe an apology to a man whom the Ministry has grievously wronged.”

“S-Sirius Black!” Fudge gasped. He whirled around to face the Aurors who have accompanied him. “Arrest him! And Dumbledore – you – in league with him –”

“Lay hands on him if you will, Cornelius,” said Dumbledore, “but I warn you I am prepared to fight in his defense – and win again. You have seen proof with your own eyes that you have been deceived for the past year, and Lord Voldemort has returned. I can provide further proof that this man is innocent, and has been persecuted unjustly for fifteen long years.”

Fudge looked around desperately at the nearest figure in Auror’s robes, realized that she was standing by my side and we both had our wands pointed at the Minister’s entourage, and proceeded to gibber helplessly.

“Well done, little cousin,” I whispered, but she didn’t seem to hear me.

* * *

Of course there were enquiries. The Ministry never reaches any conclusion without a lengthy enquiry, usually culminating in a formal hearing before the Wizengamot – unless, of course, the conclusion is actually wrong, in which case they generally leap to it as quickly as possible. It took them a matter of hours to send me to Azkaban after James died; I resigned myself to the fact that it would take them as many weeks to prepare for the hearing that would clear me of all charges.

What none of us had expected – though we probably should have – was that Tonks would spend several weeks suspended without pay before her disciplinary hearing for concealing the whereabouts of a fugitive, raising her wand against her superior, and general insubordination.

“It’ll be all right,” said Arthur. “Fudge needs a scapegoat – the whole affair was a tremendous embarrassment to the Ministry – and he doesn’t dare go after Kingsley. But Amelia Bones is the presiding Interrogator, and she won’t stand for any bullying.”

“Who’s the third Interrogator on the case?” Remus asked. “Not Umbridge, surely?”

“Julian Delaney-Podmore. Wealthy, pureblood, chooses his trials on the basis of how entertaining they promise to be. But he’s got an eye for a pretty girl, and I don’t think Tonks has much to worry about from him. It’ll be Amelia’s show.”

But Amelia Bones was murdered in the intervening weeks, and the presiding Interrogator on the case turned out to be Rufus Scrimgeour.

Tonks hadn’t engaged an Advocate. Most people didn’t; their fees were exorbitant and half of them were in the pockets of people like the Malfoys. But I didn’t much like the thought of her going in there without counsel of some sort, especially with Scrimgeour presiding.

I asked Arthur if he could pull a few strings at the Ministry and arrange things so that her trial took place after mine, and he said he would. Arthur’s a good bloke: he doesn’t ask questions, he just gets things done. I don’t think I could stand to be that sort of person, but God knows the world needs them.

The rest of us were so busy gathering evidence in my cousin’s defense and mine that we scarcely noticed that she didn’t seem greatly interested in defending herself. Her hair was her natural brown color, which I thought was a good, conservative choice for the courtroom; it was only later that I realized she was having trouble managing anything else. And if she seemed more snappish than usual, I put it down to nerves.

“By the way, what’s your middle name?” I asked on the morning of the trial.

“It’s bloody Diaphanta,” she said, “but if they call me that in front of the entire Wizengamot, I might have to kill them.”

“They’ve got to call you by your full name,” I said, “otherwise it won’t be legal, and I don’t advise killing them. That sort of thing makes a bad impression.”

“How do you know so much about the legality of it, anyway?” she asked.

I shrugged. “One picks up things here and there. I always did have a good head for trivia.”

Remus raised his eyebrows at that, and I was afraid he might spill the beans, but all he said was, “Is your middle name actually ‘Bloodydiaphanta’ or just Diaphanta?”

“Don’t be an idiot, of course it’s Diaphanta,” said Tonks.

“Well, I didn’t know. I thought perhaps Ted had tacked on the ‘bloody’ part to make it sound more civilized.”

She didn’t smile. I’d never known her not to smile at one of his jokes, and that too should have told me something was wrong, but my mind was on other things at the time.

“Moony,” I said, “if you go up to the attic, you’ll find a box labeled 'June 1980' with some of my old things in it. Bring it along to the trial, will you?”

“Will do,” he said. He didn’t ask any questions; I don’t know whether he had decided to do his best impression of Arthur or whether he had already guessed what I was planning. Probably he had. He’s cannier than he looks.

The courtroom was crowded that morning. The fifteen-years-delayed trial of the most notorious accused murderer in living memory was News in itself, but the fact that Harry Potter was there to testify in my defense meant that the lucky ones who got there early were standing three-deep against the walls, and what looked like the rest of wizarding Britain was lined up in the corridors of the Ministry, listening to the show on the wireless. Most of them cleared out after I was acquitted and awarded an obscene sum in damages from the Ministry, for the disciplinary hearing of an insignificant little junior Auror was not News at all, only a convenient opportunity for Fudge’s failing government to make a last grasp at authority. So it goes; for as long as there has been a Ministry, ordinary decent people have been sacrificed on its altars.

The first witness was Titus Dawlish, who said that Fudge had summoned him to the Ministry in the middle of the night, he had found Tonks there in the company of a known fugitive from justice (me, never mind that I’d just been cleared), and she had raised her wand against him.

“Well,” said Rufus Scrimgeour. “That seems fairly conclusive, and as the head of the Auror division, I must add that we take such breaches of professional conduct extremely seriously.”

“I do believe some measure of cross-questioning is generally the custom at this point,” murmured Julian Delaney-Podmore. “Does the accused have an Advocate?”

“Yes,” I said, pulling a wad of moth-eaten robes out of the box and putting them on over my regular clothing, “she does.”

It was the first time I’d worn them since graduation, because I’d never really meant to practice law. I spent three years studying at the Inn of the Wizengamot because it was what one did; the wizarding universities on the Continent were understandably wary about taking on an English student from a family of known Dark wizards in those days, and although my bloodlines were pure enough to satisfy the dons at Merlin College, Oxford, I don’t much care to join any club that will have me as a member on those grounds. I had literary pretensions in those days, and spent most of my time sitting in the back corner of the pub writing plays (go on, laugh at me – Moony does) – but I’d muddled through all right, and even done rather well on the exams. I think that’s one reason why Barty Crouch sent me to prison without a trial. He didn’t want to risk the possibility that I’d actually defend myself.

“Merlin’s beard, this is most irregular,” Cornelius Fudge was saying. He looked around at the other interrogators. “Is this allowed? I was under the impression that Mr. Black was stripped of his advocacy when he was convicted for murder.”

Delaney-Podmore, who had been leaning back with his eyes closed, opened them halfway. “Since he’s just been un-convicted, it would stand to reason that he’s also been unstripped. Besides, if we made a practice of banning every Advocate who had ever been suspected of criminal activity, there wouldn’t be any left. Question the witness, Advocate Black.”

“Auror Dawlish,” I said, “did Auror Tonks appear to have her wand raised in defense of anybody in particular?”

“Well – yes, I suppose she could have...”

“And who was the person she seemed to be defending?”

“Er – Albus Dumbledore.”

“Is there any particular reason why Professor Dumbledore needed to be defended from a group of Aurors and the Minister for Magic? He is not, I believe, most people’s idea of a Dark wizard.” (There was laughter from the benches at this, and I knew that I was playing to a sympathetic audience.)

Dawlish bristled. “He had defied Ministry orders and attacked myself and my colleagues earlier that year, and was at that time a fugitive from justice.”

“I see. And did you, by any chance, find any other fugitives from justice at the Ministry that night? Besides me, I mean?”

He shifted uncomfortably. “Well – yes. There were eleven Death Eaters in the Death Chamber, bound by an Anti-Disapparation jinx – and one corpse found at the bottom of the steps, which we identified as that of Bellatrix Lestrange.”

“And have you any idea how those Death Eaters came to be arrested or killed? Your own Aurors didn’t do it, for example?”

“No,” Dawlish admitted.

“Certainly not,” said Scrimgeour in much brisker tones. “Mrs. Lestrange was dead, and Aurors are trained not to use lethal force when apprehending a suspect. It is my opinion that we should inquire as to whether Miss Tonks” – I noticed the omission of the “Auror” – “should be imprisoned on wrongful death charges.”

I glanced over at my cousin. She was dead calm, but very white in the face, and I don’t mind telling you that I felt the same way myself. Scrimgeour was cleverer than I’d realized – dangerously so.

Auror Williamson gave testimony about the condition of the body; Mrs. Lestrange had gashed her head open and had been found in the middle of a large pool of blood. I wrung an admission out of him that the bleeding must have occurred before death, and the injuries sustained in the fall had probably been the cause of death rather than any deliberate action on my cousin’s part. Fudge, gaining confidence, suggested that perhaps Miss Tonks had dispatched Bellatrix with the Killing Curse and then used a Liquefying Charm to make it look as if the death was the result of injuries.

“Ah, Cornelius, you’re better fun than reading the Quibbler,” said Delaney-Podmore. Fudge looked distinctly put out.

“I call Remus John Lupin as witness for the defense,” I said, and added in an undertone, “Moony, Scrimgeour’s going to try to discredit you, so answer all the questions as precisely as possible and don’t let him rattle you. All right?” It wasn’t that I doubted his ability to remain coolheaded and logical – hell, he was better at that sort of thing than I was – but I knew precisely where Scrimgeour would hit him, and I also knew it would sting much worse than he let on.

“All right.”

“Mr. Lupin, did you witness the entire duel between Auror Tonks and Mrs. Lestrange?”

“Yes, I did.”

“What sort of curses was Auror Tonks throwing?”

“They were Stunning Spells. Red light.”

“Did you see any colors other than red?”

“No.”

“Thank you.”

“Mr. Lupin,” said Scrimgeour, “you are a werewolf, are you not?”

There was an audible gasp from the onlookers, and some of the witches and wizards around the walls stared openly. I was on my feet again in an instant. “I don’t see the relevance of this question except as an attempt to prejudice the Wizengamot against the witness. Of course, those of you who don’t happen to be bigots will kindly disregard –” The damage had been done, and Scrimgeour and I both knew it, but I hoped I could make them too ashamed to act on their prejudices.

“The relevance, Advocate, is that wolves are color-blind.”

“Werewolves aren’t,” protested Remus. “Not when we’re in human form, anyway.”

“The witness is out of order,” said Fudge. “Nobody asked him a question!”

“Well, why don’t we ask him, since he seems to be in a better position to know the answer than any of us?” said Delaney-Podmore. “Mr. Lupin, what color robes am I wearing?”

“Er...” Remus had been looking nervous ever since Scrimgeour brought up the werewolf thing, and now the color drained out of his face. “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I don’t know.”

Was he color-blind, and somehow I’d never known it before? I felt like the fates were playing a cosmic joke on us. “What do you mean, you don’t know?” I hissed.

“I mean, is that the color they call ‘mauve,’ or is it more of a ‘puce’? I never can keep these things straight.”

“Describe it!” I said in a furious whisper.

“Er ... greyish purple,” said Remus shakily.

“Thank you, Mr. Lupin, that will do.”

“Well, you said to answer as precisely as possible,” he muttered as he sat down again.

“If we were twelve years old again,” I said through my teeth, “I’d hex you within an inch of your life.”

The Wizengamot voted right after that. Things didn’t go as badly as they could have done – they dismissed the charge that Tonks had killed Bellatrix deliberately – but they didn’t go very well, either. Mindful that Scrimgeour was likely to be the new Minister in a matter of days, the Wizengamot found her guilty of insubordination and conduct unbecoming an Auror, and sentenced her to one year of suspension without pay.

She took it quietly. She didn’t say much or look directly at anyone as we left the Ministry, but I put it down to shame at being railroaded out of her job. I invited her to stay with me, knowing that she wouldn’t be able to keep up the rent on her flat. Besides, I like having guests – it not only makes the place livelier, but given the choice of company I keep, it’s like poking the ancestors in the eye. Remus had been staying for the better part of a year, of course, and Harry was about to come up for the summer again. Even Dung Fletcher camped out there sometimes when he needed to lie low, though we always had to count the spoons afterward.

Now that I think about it, I should have just lent her the rent money. I, of all people, should have known better. But she’d never seemed to mind the place before – she seemed to think it was great fun chasing ghouls out of toilets, and she always gave as good as she got when my mother’s portrait started screaming at her.

Perhaps Remus noticed something was the matter before I did. I wanted to get to know my godson properly, so he and Tonks were left to their own devices most of the time. (From what I’d observed of the two of them over the past year, I reckoned they wouldn’t mind that at all, except that a glacier on a slow day moved faster than Moony. Still, I’d very nearly talked him around to seeing that he wasn’t such a bad catch, if you didn’t mind kind, intelligent, witty werewolves who wrote treatises on the migratory habits of the hinkypunk.)

But as far as I could tell, she seemed to be the same girl she’d always been, until one evening after Harry had left to spend the last week of his holidays with the Weasleys. The three of us were sitting in front of the fire at 12 Grimmauld Place. Kreacher had just wandered in, tracking dirt and cobwebs into the carpet and practically blubbering over a tatty photograph of my cousin Bellatrix.

“Throw that away,” I snapped.

“Master will still be giving orders,” muttered Kreacher. “Master is the one who ought to be dead, not Mistress Bella. It is unjust. Kreacher is helping Mistress Cissy spring the trap himself. Kreacher is not understanding what went wrong.”

We stared at each other. We’d all grown so used to Kreacher muttering foul things under his breath that we tuned him out most of the time. Clearly this was a mistake. “What did you just say, Kreacher?” I demanded.

“Kreacher is a good house-elf,” he said unconvincingly. “Kreacher is silent and obedient.”

“We all heard what you said. Explain yourself.”

He looked at me mutinously.

“That was an order, Kreacher.”

“Kreacher is saying that Mistress Cissy set a trap for Master and Master’s filthy half-blood godson. Is Master surprised? This family is eating its own this hundred years and more. Ask her.” He stabbed a crooked finger at Tonks. “She is Mistress Bella’s murderer. Oh yes, Kreacher has heard. And Master Regulus destroyed his own self by drinking a bad potion.”

This last bit of information was new to me, but I knew in my heart that it was true. Tonks must have known it too. A dark abstracted look had come over her face, and she shivered.

“Let’s stick to your crimes for the moment,” I said. “What was your part in this trap, Kreacher?”

“Kreacher is only following orders,” whined the wretched creature. “Master is saying, get out of this house, and Kreacher is obeying. He goes to Mistress Cissy, because she is the next of kin, and then he is obeying her orders, because Master does not want him. Kreacher is a faithful servant to the true Blacks.”

Tonks sprang to her feet and seized the ceremonial sword that hung over the fireplace. “I see you are familiar with our family’s traditions, Kreacher,” she said in a chilly and terrible voice. “You must know what we do to traitorous house-elves.”

“Nymphadora!” said Remus, grabbing her by the wrist. “Don’t.”

He sounded genuinely shocked, which was about how I felt, except ... on some level, I wasn’t. Something in her face was darkly familiar. I think Remus had seen it too, or he wouldn’t have called her by her full name like that.

“Very well.” She put the sword down and eyed Kreacher with loathing. “But I’m sparing you for his sake, not for yours, and if you dare to lift one finger against Sirius again, I will do it.”

Kreacher obeyed every word she said from that day forward.

* * *

Remus left us shortly after that. Dumbledore had a tip Fenrir Greyback was recruiting again, and he volunteered to go on a spying mission that was, to my mind, a fool’s errand, but I didn’t tell him that. He’d always cherished the hope that he’d be able to talk some of the other werewolves around and turn them into the same sort of model citizens that he was, and you don’t argue with a man with a fond and foolish hope. I know that; God knows I’ve got enough of my own.

He and my cousin went up on the roof together, that last evening; I’d been looking forward to spending it in their company, but I reckoned they’d finally got around to saying a few things to each other that you don’t say in front of a third party. I poured myself a double Firewhiskey, then another, and after that things are fuzzy until I woke up at quarter to five in the morning with a splitting headache and a mouth that felt like it was full of cotton.

I dragged myself out of bed to see Moony off. He was already up and dressed, and he poured me a cup of coffee and didn’t ask how I’d come by the hangover. Wise man.

We didn’t talk a lot. You know how it is – you’d walk through flood and fire to spend that last half hour with someone, but because it is the last half hour, you hardly know what to say to each other. At last he drained his second cup of coffee, stacked the dishes neatly by the sink, and said, “Look after Dora, will you? I’m worried about her.”

“Of course, mate. Are you and she, er...”

“No. No, we’re not.”

“Well, why in God’s name not? Didn’t I leave you there long enough?”

“I was right the first time. She doesn’t need a stodgy old werewolf in her life.”

He might have bought this, but to me it seemed an unsatisfactory explanation. He hadn’t watched her change her hair a dozen times before each Order meeting, or heard her pestering me for minuscule details about his tastes and habits as if I were a professor of Remus J. Lupin Studies. “What did she say, exactly?”

“She said she’s too young for me – too unemployed ... too attainted, although I haven’t the foggiest idea what she meant by that.”

I had an idea, and I didn’t like it at all. “And what did you say to that?”

“I said I didn’t care. About a million times. It’s no good, she doesn’t feel that way about me.”

“I don’t know about that, mate. That sounds an awful lot like the sort of things you were saying not long ago.”

“But they don’t make any sense, in her case.” He raked a hand through his greying hair and gave me a half-hug. “Well, I’d best be off. Goodbye.”

“Good luck.”

* * *

The thing about Moony is, he’s so quiet and unassuming that you don’t notice, until he’s ill or absent, how much he does to hold things together. I found out later that he had told Tonks to look after me, in almost the same words, but at first we didn’t do so well at looking after each other, or even ourselves. We were used to having him there to sit up with us when we had nightmares, and make jokes when we were feeling broody. Without him, I spent a lot of time holed up with a bottle of firewhiskey, and she moped around the library reading, for some unaccountable reason, Nature’s Nobility.

“Why do you still live here?” she asked me one day, tracing the thin gold lines of the family tapestry with her finger.

“Because it pisses off my mum like nothing else I could do.”

“No, seriously. You’re a free man now – you could go anywhere – do anything. Why are you staying in a house you hate?”

I didn’t answer for a moment. I was thinking of stories I’d heard in Azkaban, of old, old men tottering out into the sunlight after their prison terms were up and finding that it was like a blow on their faces, falling to their knees and begging to be taken back inside. Was it like that with me?

Her hand moved down the generations from Sirius to Sirius, and ended at the burn hole that had been me, once.

“I reckon it’s in my blood,” I said at last. “Our blood. I could move out, but I couldn’t really leave, you know?”

“Yeah, I do know. That’s what I thought.” She went upstairs to the library and didn’t come out until after dark.

The sickly miasma of breeding dementors hung over London most of the time, but now and again a clear night came when you could see the stars. I went out on the roof, as I do sometimes. There was a nip of autumn in the air; it made me think of Halloween and death.

Tonks poked her head out of one of the attic windows after a while, and scrambled out onto the rooftop. “Can I sit with you?” she asked.

“Sure.” I passed her the bottle, and she took a long drink and coughed.

“What are you doing up here?” she asked.

“Talking to James,” I said with my eyes on the vast dark spaces between the stars.

“What does he say?”

“He hasn’t answered yet. That’s how I know I’m only half mad instead of all the way.”

“Oh.”

“Have you got anyone you’d like to talk to? This is a good place for it.”

“Yes,” she said, gazing up at the swelling moon, “but he isn’t dead. I hope.”

“Feel free to hex me, if you like,” I said, “but I’m going to be very nosy and ask you why you broke my best mate’s heart, if that’s really how you feel about him.”

I didn’t notice I’d said best mate until after it was too late. I made a silent apology to James, but as always, there was no reply.

“Oh, hell, Sirius – you must know – living in this place...” When she saw that I wasn’t about to let her hedge her way out of answering, she whispered, “I think it was fair for the Ministry to suspend me from work. I wanted Bellatrix to die.”

“Oh.” I waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t seem inclined to. “Is that all?”

“You don’t seem very shocked. That I’m a murderer, I mean.”

“It wasn’t murder, it was battle. I could easily have done the same. And Bellatrix would have done it to either of us in a heartbeat.”

“Yeah ... I know you could, and she would, but that doesn’t make it normal. What Kreacher said – it’s true, isn’t it? This family eats its own.”

“You can’t trust a word the lying little shit says,” I said sharply, though I had to admit that had been one of the rare occasions when Kreacher said something that halfway made sense.

“I didn’t take his word for it, I looked at the family tree. Hardly any of us have made it past ninety. They all killed each other. Or themselves.”

So that explained her new interest in genealogy. I knew the family history as well as she did: madness, alcoholism, Azkaban fever, murder. It occurred to me that I had been expecting to go one of those ways myself, ever since I’d got out of prison, but it hadn’t troubled me as much as it seemed to be troubling her. Honestly, I didn’t care enough for what remained of my life to be bothered.

“So you see – I can’t. It wouldn’t be fair to Remus. He deserves somebody who hasn’t got that shadow over her.”

“That’s ridiculous, Tonks. Just because you happen to be born into this family – that isn’t destiny. Look at me, for example.”

“I am looking at you. You’ve been drinking since midafternoon, and you’re a qualified Advocate and you haven’t done a thing these two months about getting a job or setting up your own practice, and I heard you tell Remus that you still wake up thinking you’re back in Azkaban.”

“Don’t forget talking to a bloke who’s been dead for fifteen years,” I said coldly. “May as well mention all the signs I’m cracking up.”

“I wouldn’t have hit that low.”

“Could’ve bloody fooled me.”

We glared at each other.

“Would you like to do me the honor of pushing me off the roof, or shall I?” I asked. “If Kreacher’s right and we’re bound to keep killing each other until there’s only one of us left, we may as well get on with it.”

She laughed shakily. “Well, when you put it like that, it does sound rather stupid.”

“Of course it’s stupid.” I threw the bottle of firewhiskey down into the street, where it smashed with a satisfying crunch of glass on pavement. (Naturally, I had several more in the house, or I wouldn’t have thrown the last of it away – but I thought it made for a nice symbolic gesture, all the same.) “We’re going to break out of this, you and me.”

She looked a little hopeful, but mostly skeptical. “How?”

“I wish I knew.”

* * *

“We are getting out of this house,” I announced the next morning. I dumped the contents of the silverware drawer into a packing crate and started pulling books off the shelves. “Tonks, come here and help me.”

“Where are we going?”

“I haven’t the foggiest. Just out.”

Tonks made a lackluster effort at stripping the walls of their ornaments, but became distracted, almost immediately, by the tapestry. “I wonder how Phineas Nigellus died,” she said. “It’s funny to think he would have been almost the same age as Dumbledore.”

“I was poisoned,” said a bored voice from the portrait on the wall. “At a staff meeting.”

“Poisoned?” I hadn’t realized he was that unpopular. “But – by whom?”

“Really, Sirius, I don’t know what they taught you at the Inn of the Wizengamot, but it doesn’t seem to have left much of an impression. The first question you should always ask is – cui bono?”

Tonks and I looked at each other. Phineas had been survived by five children, only one of whom had been disinherited, but none of them had gone into teaching and I couldn’t think of any reason why they would have been present at a Hogwarts staff meeting. That left only one likely suspect, and I couldn’t make it fit.

“But – but that’s fantastic,” said Tonks.

Phineas snorted. “My dear girl, if I had known that ‘fantastic’ was the only adjective my descendants would be able to summon up to describe my murder, I would have ended it myself years earlier.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean fantastic in a good way, just – absurd. Dippet was a murderer?”

“You seem to be under the impression,” said Phineas, “that villainy always cloaks itself in cleverness and beauty and Gothic trappings, or that all murderers belong to this house, which amounts to much the same thing. It is not so. A plodding old time-pleaser like Dippet can be as covetous and venal and amoral as any other man, and we are not all fated to be done in by each other. Incidentally, Nymphadora, since you seem to have romantic notions of having been born under a curse, let me assure you that you were not. If you decide to go mad, it will be entirely your own doing and I refuse to be blamed for it.”

She flushed, and I felt my own insides squirm a bit, because for all I’d been trying to put on a brave face and talk her round, I half believed it myself.

“Why didn’t you denounce him?” I asked, by way of changing the subject. Portraits, under certain circumstances, could give valid testimony in a court of wizarding law.

“Frankly, after twenty years in the position, I thought leaving him with the Headmastership was punishment enough. All in all, I should almost have preferred to be murdered by one of the children. At least they inherited something worth killing for.”

“But you weren’t,” I said.

“No. We are not better than other people – oh, I see that clearly enough now, whatever I may have thought in life – but you can both disabuse yourselves of the notion that we are a great deal worse.” Phineas cast a baleful eye over the packing crates. “You would, by the way, do better to change your souls than your house, although I don’t suppose you will listen to me.”

Tonks shrugged. “Whatever. I’m sick of packing. And I don’t think there’s any sense in it until we figure out where the hell we’re going.” She started transferring things from one of the boxes back into the drawer from which they had come. “Now what?” she asked as she placed the last of the Black silver in the drawer.

I looked around at the burn-marked tapestry and the books of Dark magic on the walls. “You heard Phineas. We change our souls. Change what all of this means.”

“That’s going to be next to impossible.”

“That’s why I reckon it’s the right thing to do.”

* * *

It was Arthur who finally gave us a purpose. He was in the habit of stopping by on Friday afternoons to catch Tonks up on the latest news from the Ministry. He didn’t pry and he didn’t fuss, but he also kept coming around and talking to her as if he was sure she would care what was going on in her absence, even when she was doing her best impression of somebody who wasn’t interested in anything.

“You’ll never believe the latest,” he said. “Scrimgeour’s been under pressure to produce some Death Eaters after this last round of attacks, so who does he arrest? Stanley Shunpike, the Knight Bus conductor.”

“What’s the evidence?” Tonks asked instantly. A couple of weeks ago she would have just looked brown-haired and abstracted, so I took this as a hopeful sign.

“Thin to nonexistent, but Scrimgeour’s going to want to hold him until and unless he gets something better. Allegedly, somebody heard him discussing the Death Eaters’ secret plans with a young woman in a pub.”

“This is Stan Shunpike we’re talking about,” said Tonks. “He’d tell a girl he was You-Know-Who himself if he thought it would impress her. He told me he’d been recruited to play Quidditch for the English World Cup team when we were at school. You can’t believe a word of it.”

I frowned. “What kind of girl would be impressed if he told her he was Voldemort?”

“Well, none of them now. Aunt Bella’s dead.”

Arthur and I exchanged a glance. This was the first time I’d heard her speak of what had happened at the Ministry as if it were not a grave sin from which she’d never be able to walk away, but an ordinary event, something that one could talk about and even joke about.

“I’m inclined to agree with you, Tonks,” Arthur said carefully. I could tell he was trying not to make a big thing out of it one way or another. “Stan’s no Death Eater, but convincing Scrimgeour and the Wizengamot of it will be another issue altogether.”

“The Wizengamot?” I asked. “He does get a trial, then?”

“Yes. They’re holding him in Azkaban, but they’ve set a trial date for next month. But without defense counsel I suspect it’ll be a formality, and he can’t afford an Advocate.”

I knew Arthur was dangling the bait in front of me on purpose, but I didn’t care. “He’s got one now.”

* * *

“Merlin, what have I got myself into?” I demanded of the walls and ceiling. “How do I get him off when Scrimgeour’s got it in for him, and I likely won’t even be allowed an Azkaban visit so I can speak to my client before the trial? Where the hell do I begin?”

Tonks sighed. “If I hadn’t got myself suspended, I’d probably be able to interview him, or at least access the records from the people who did. Oh, I wish I hadn’t –”

“You didn’t get yourself suspended, Scrimgeour did. And I’m glad you’re here with me, because I need your experience. Where would you begin, if you were investigating this case at work?”

She looked thoughtful. “You know, Sirius,” she said at last, “that was a very good question you asked a while ago. What sort of girl would be impressed if she thought the bloke who was trying to pick her up knew the Death Eaters’ secret plans?”

“A bloody daft one. Or a junior version of Bellatrix. Take your pick.”

“Let’s go with the ‘junior version of Bellatrix’ theory for now, because I hate investigations where everybody’s bloody daft. It’s too confusing.” She stretched out her hand and Summoned a quill and some parchment. “What can you tell me about how those people think?”

“What can’t I tell you? I lived with them for sixteen years.”

She grinned, and it was a genuine grin, the kind I hadn’t seen in months. “I reckon that makes you the ideal person to investigate this case.”

But I couldn’t have done it without her. She’d been through Auror training and she knew the right questions to ask, and slowly we built up a profile of the girl. She would have to be a pureblood whom Stan knew or guessed to be on the Death Eaters’ side of things, of course, and attractive enough to override Stan’s scanty store of common sense. Based on her recollections of Stan at school, Tonks thought this most likely meant dark, curly hair and large breasts, although she couldn’t be positive about that. Stan was twenty-one, so we put her age between eighteen and twenty-five. But the most interesting and salient fact about her was that she’d apparently chosen to go into the sort of pub Stan frequented and strike up a conversation with him, which was not the sort of thing I could imagine either Bellatrix or Narcissa doing without an ulterior motive.

“Right,” said Tonks, “so what would that motive be?”

“Recruitment,” I said promptly. “Stan isn’t a Death Eater, but I’m betting she is. Which is ideal, because it means all we have to do is scour the pubs for this girl. We’ll be able to give Scrimgeour the head on a pike he wants, and get Stan off at the same time. Everybody’s happy.”

I should’ve known right away that it wouldn’t be so simple, not where Scrimgeour’s Ministry was involved.

* * *

We couldn’t access the Ministry records that would have told us who had denounced Stan to the Ministry and which pub he had been in at the time, but we did learn from the newspaper accounts of his arrest that he came from Clapham, so we started at the wizarding pub nearest his home and worked outward. I’d asked Dumbledore to supply us with photographs from the last seven or eight years of school-leaving parties. We identified a half-dozen or so likely suspects and set about the tedious work of asking the staff and patrons if they recognized any of the faces. Direct questions didn’t get us very far at Stan’s local, as you can well imagine; paranoia was running high. We tried again the next day, after Tonks had changed her features and shed her Ministry manner, and I had transformed. There’s nothing like a friendly dog to break the ice, and Tonks had a million different tricks – betting the younger folks that they wouldn’t be able to name half of their own classmates, asking the older ones if they were related to school friends of hers, “accidentally” dropping photos on the floor. We found a warmer reception this time, but still no leads at the end of the day.

It took us the better part of a week to work our way around to central London, and a pub where, for a change, people seemed only too eager to help – half the patrons were from the Ministry, and they were used to cooperating and not asking too many questions. And we got an identification of sorts, from a photograph that had been taken in the Ravenclaw common room two or three years earlier. The barman didn’t recognize Bryony Parkinson, whom we’d put down as one of our suspects, but he did say that one of the other girls in the photo looked familiar. In fact, she’d been drinking there the evening before Stan was arrested, and he had a vague idea she’d been chatting up a spotty-faced kid and showing more interest in him than might be expected, considering that she was a good deal better-looking than he was. No, he hadn’t any idea what they'd been talking about. It had been a busy night.

I ordered a couple of pints by way of thanks, and we sat down in a corner booth to mull over this latest development. “She’s the right type,” I said. “Brunette and curly-haired. How come we didn’t have her down as a possible?”

Tonks shook her head. “I know her from school. Wrong bloodlines. Besides, I’ve got an idea she went to work for the Ministry after she left school. Why shouldn’t she stop in for a drink after work when the place is right around the corner?”

“An awful lot of Death Eater sympathizers are half-bloods, you know,” I said. “Sometimes the worst of them are. Self-loathing’s a poisonous thing.” (Which was a really excellent bit of philosophy about human nature, if I do say so, but I think Tonks and I could’ve both done without the personal applications. I didn’t point them out.)

“This girl isn’t a half-blood, she’s Muggle-born.”

“So was Peter,” I said. I didn’t know the girl in the photo from Eve, but I looked at her again and shivered, wondering if she was somebody else’s Peter.

“Fair point. But I don’t think the girl we’re looking for can be Muggle-born, because why would Stan think hinting at his Death Eater connections was the way to her heart?”

“You’re right. That’s the sticking point. Unless she was pretending to be somebody else?” I suggested hopefully.

“You’re just hoping we won’t have to interview any more people.” Tonks sighed. “I don’t blame you. So do I.” But actually she looked better than she had all summer, and she didn’t seem to be having trouble with the metamorphosing any more. It was good for both of us to get out and have a purpose, I thought.

I gulped down the last of my beer. “That’s all right. We’ll visit every wizarding pub in Britain if we need to. Stan needs us and we’re not going to fail him.”

* * *

We did visit every wizarding pub in Britain. Fortunately they were a lot thinner on the ground once we got out of London, but I’ll spare you the details of where we went and what we said, because it would be even more tedious to listen to the story than it was to do the work in the first place. All that matters is that we got nothing for our work but a handful of false leads and a small fortune in beer and firewhiskey. By the time we reached the very last pub, a little one-roomed, peat-roofed affair in the Orkney Islands, I felt like I was ready to swear off drinking for life.

“Now what?” said Tonks. She sounded almost as dispirited as she’d been over the summer.

I ran a finger round the rim of my glass of Ogden’s Old Single Malt. (No, of course I hadn’t really sworn off drinking for life; that’s what is known as hyperbole.) “I don’t know, but I’ve got a funny feeling we’ve been going at this all wrong. It’s like Phineas said, the first question we should’ve asked was – cui bono?”

“What d’you mean?”

“Well, think about it this way. What have the Death Eaters got to gain by recruiting Stan Shunpike? He’s not terribly bright, he hasn’t got any special skills or access to any important people. What was he meant to do for them, hit Harry with a bus? No, scratch that – he isn’t even the driver.”

“He might be useful as a spy,” said Tonks dubiously. “He probably overhears a lot.”

“And he’s constitutionally unable to keep his mouth shut, which isn’t exactly the sort of trait you look for in a spy. And he was arrested the very next day, so if they had recruited him, he wouldn’t have done them much good. So – who did benefit from this whole debacle?”

“Only Rufus bloody Scrimgeour, as far as I can tell,” she said, and then, “My God!”

“What?”

“You remember the girl that the bartender in London identified? Well, her name is Penny Clearwater, and she was Percy Weasley’s girl when they were at school. Maybe she still is. Which would make her, to all practical purposes, the Ministry’s girl.” She sipped at her firewhiskey and frowned. “Phineas was right about another thing. It’s the plodders and time-pleasers you have to look out for.”

I shook my head. “You really think Percy would send his girlfriend out to chat up strange boys in pubs and entrap them by pretending to be a pureblood fanatic, just so Scrimgeour could make his quota of arrests?”

“You’ve never met Percy,” said Tonks. “I have. I think he’d sell out his whole family if Scrimgeour told him to. He pretty much did.”

“Still – Oh damn, this is going to hurt Molly and Arthur. It doesn’t sound like the sort of thing a Weasley would do.”

She gave a shaky laugh. “And wandering all over the country looking for evidence that will get a bus driver out of prison doesn’t sound like the sort of thing a Black would do. Yet here we are.”

She was dead right, of course, and I was glad she’d been the one to say it.

* * *

We borrowed a Floo directory from the barman and learned that Percy Weasley and Penelope Clearwater lived together in a flat in London, not a mile from where we’d started. And here we were in the Orkneys. There was probably some sort of moral to that, but I didn’t care to think to deeply about what it might be. We went home for a few hours of exhausted and blessedly nightmare-free sleep, and set out again in the morning to catch them before they left for work.

Percy was already on his way out the door, looking very natty in his Ministry robes and eyeing our bleary-eyed and rumpled selves with some distaste. “What can I do for you?” he asked, in a tone that made it clear that he would prefer to do nothing at all.

“We’d like a word with you,” said Tonks. “It’ll only take a few minutes. We can talk out here in the corridor, but I think you may prefer something more private. Wotcher, Penny.” The girl had appeared in the doorway just as Percy was about to close it.

“Hello, Tonks,” said Penny. “You’d better come in.”

Percy didn’t look like he was any too happy about letting us into his home, but the two women had exchanged some sort of secret fellow-schoolgirl look, and we found ourselves being ushered inside the flat. “Coffee?” offered Penny.

“Yes, please,” I said. I had a splitting headache, and just because we were about to have a conversation that was likely to be extremely unpleasant to our hosts, it didn’t seem any reason to spurn their hospitality.

“None for me, thanks,” said Tonks.

Penny handed me a mug of coffee, and I said, by way of introduction, “My name is Sirius Black.”

“We know,” said Percy rather irritably.

“I’m an Advocate representing Mr. Stanley Shunpike.”

It was clear that they hadn’t known that. Penny bit her lip and looked at the floor, and I thought I saw a slight twitch in Percy’s normally impassive countenance, but he recovered quickly enough. “That’s very interesting,” he said, “but it doesn’t clarify what you’re doing in my flat.”

“You have no idea why we want to talk to you, then?” asked Tonks.

“None.”

“Have either of you ever visited a pub called ‘The Unknowable Room,’ which is around the corner from the Ministry of Magic?”

“Once or twice,” said Percy. “I haven’t got much time to spend in pubs.”

“What about you, Penny?”

“The same.” I could barely hear her. “Once or twice.”

“Were you there on the twentieth of September?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Somebody else does,” said Tonks grimly. “We’ve spoken with witnesses who overheard your conversation with Stan Shunpike and who are prepared to swear that you pretended to be a pureblooded witch with Death Eater sympathies, that you flattered him, flirted with him, and induced him to pretend that he knew more than he did about the Death Eaters’ secret plans, and, in short, that you entrapped him.”

I hadn’t expected her to attempt quite so bold a bluff, but she was showing the same streak of steel I’d seen with Kreacher.

“It’s not true,” whispered Penny.

“Are you saying that you do have Death Eater sympathies, then? Because based on the testimony of eyewitnesses, that’s about the only other explanation that would account for some of the things you said.”

Percy and Penny looked at each other. “Very well,” said Percy at last. “You’re right. Does that satisfy you?”

“We didn’t come here to be right,” I said. “We came here to do right. We came to ask for your help.”

“You said you’ve already got your witnesses,” said Penny. She was beginning to recover her composure, and, I thought, her skepticism. “What do you need from us?”

“Your testimony about who ordered you to entrap my client,” I said. “We aren’t trying to do you any harm. We’re going after the Minister.”

I hadn’t known until that moment that we were, but from that moment there wasn’t any turning back.

“At a time like this? You must be joking,” said Percy, although it was all too obvious that he knew I wasn’t.

“Is justice a joke to you, Mr. Weasley?” I said. “Do you think it would be funny if Stan went to Azkaban for something he didn’t do to buy people a cheap illusion of safety? Because if you do, your sense of humor must be more warped than mine. And frankly, that’s saying a lot.”

“It’s time to speak out, Percy,” said Tonks quietly. “Tell the truth before the Wizengamot. It’ll make your family proud.”

I could have told her that mentioning his family was a bad idea. Percy stood up abruptly and balled up his fists. “Who are you to think you can tell me what to do?” he demanded. “You’re suspended without pay, that’s all standing up and speaking out ever did for you! And I’m sick and tired of hearing about my family – I did my duty, and I don’t know why people keep making me out to be the villain –”

It was like I was hearing the voice of a ghost. I remembered another kid, younger even than Percy: Quit telling me which side I should be on! You’re disinherited, that’s what being a rebel did for you. And I haven’t even got a favorite uncle to see that I don’t starve. I did all the right things, but somehow people have always liked you better...

That had been the last time I spoke to my brother. I looked again at Percy and saw what I hadn’t seen then: the fear in his eyes and the freckles standing out against his white face.

“Percy,” I said, “what is the worst thing you can imagine happening to you? The very worst?”

He looked panicked. I could guess what he was thinking: the worst he’d been able to imagine was losing his job, but he knew exactly how silly and shallow it would sound if he said that out loud. (Perhaps it wasn’t all that shallow. Losing your place in the world is scary; my brother chose to lose his life instead. I thought he was a coward then. I’m not so sure now.)

“Whatever it is,” I said, “it’s nowhere near as bad as what happens to people in Azkaban. And I’m not saying this to lay a guilt trip on you about Stan. I’m saying it because I’m living proof that a man can survive Azkaban, and you can survive whatever it is that the world will throw at you if you speak out, if only you hold on to your integrity. I got out of that hellhole because I had the knowledge that I was innocent to keep me sane. Will you get out of the Ministry with that much?”

He looked at me, frightened and guilty, but I thought I saw hope dawning in his face.

The tension between me and Percy had been running so high that I’d almost forgotten about Penny, and it was a surprise to me when she spoke. “I’ll testify,” she said. “Only – does Percy’s name have to come into it? Because I was the one who went around to all the pubs and posed as one of – of them.” She swallowed heavily. “Minister Scrimgeour made it sound like it wasn’t really entrapment – we were just exposing what was already there – but I – I knew the kid was lying, and I said so when I gave my report to the Minister. But he said that was for the Wizengamot to decide – he had some other Ministry people stationed in the pub as witnesses, and if I wouldn’t denounce him, they would, and all I had to do was keep my mouth shut. But I’m not going to. If the Wizengamot’s going to decide, they have a right to know the full truth.”

Percy had shut his eyes and appeared to be going through internal agonies during most of this speech. “It’s all right,” he said when he opened them at last. “I’ll testify, too. She wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t asked her to.”

* * *

Well, you know what happened after that if you read the papers. Percy and Penelope’s testimony shocked the nation, and I gained a fair amount of notoriety as the Advocate who, at his second trial, not only got his client out of prison against hopeless odds but brought down Scrimgeour’s Ministry. A few people seemed to be interested in engaging my services after that, so I rented an office in League Alley, engaged a secretary, and settled down, at the age of thirty-seven, to the first proper job I’d ever held. But this isn’t a story about the Ministry, nor about my career. This is a story about family.

After the trial, Arthur reckoned some of the things he’d said to Percy hadn’t been fair. I’m inclined to think he was being more generous about the events of the previous year than Percy deserved, but anyway, it’s just as well that he was the one to apologize, because Percy needed some way to salvage his pride. Funny thing about pride: I was there to see the look on Percy’s face as he walked out of the Ministry for the last time, and I don’t think the kid had ever done anything he was more entitled to be proud of in his life, but I don’t suppose he’ll see it that way until he’s much older. No; I’m sure he was remembering the day he first took his Ministry oaths with the rest of the best and the brightest from his year at Hogwarts, all lined up in their fine new robes with the June sun shining down on a Britain that was at peace. He left in the autumn rain, and he went quietly.

He and Penny did join the rest of the family at Molly and Arthur’s place for Christmas. He didn’t talk much; he was looking a little dazed at how quickly his younger brothers and sister had grown into soldiers, and startled to meet his soon-to-be-sister-in-law. But he kept his chin up, and I respected him for that. As hard as it is to leave your family, sometimes it’s harder still to come back.

I never did move out of Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place. One thing and another conspired to keep me there; at first I was too busy setting up the premises in League Alley, and then the next summer, when Harry came to stay again, I learned that just about everything I thought I had known about my little brother was wrong, and we needed to search the house up and down for bits of Lord Voldemort’s soul. And for all I grumbled about how stray Horcruxes were just the sort of thing you would expect my family to have lying around the place and why hadn’t I thought of it before, by then I knew in my heart that the Black legacy was more complicated than that, and always had been.

And so I stayed. Not out of indifference or indirection, this time, or some perverse unwillingness to accept that I was a free man, but because some of the things that had come out of this house were worth fighting for and preserving, and my cousin and I were the right people to fight that battle.

I don’t believe that Tonks has fully forgiven herself for what happened at the Department of Mysteries. Killing leaves a mark on the soul, even when it’s an accident. But it helped a little when Remus came back to us, no longer an all-purpose dispenser of kindness and comfort, but a man who had been scarred and damaged in much the same way that she had. I shall never forgive Fenrir Greyback for what he did to my friend (or, to be more precise, what he made him do), but it did allow them to meet as equals and, in time, to be Healers for each other.

They’ve got a baby now. My godson, born here in this house. It took me a while to convince Moony that I wasn’t going to let him fall off, but I’ve just taken him out on the roof for his first look at the night.

“See the stars?” I whispered. “Your ancestors were named after those stars. One day I’ll tell you about them.”