The Pure-blood Prince

Poppy had known the village women for as long as she could remember. They were all the same. Aprons and head-scarves and rolled-up sleeves, with dead skin on their elbows. They queued with their ration-books for squidgy packets of sausages wrapped in brown paper. And they smelled of soap - always, even when you called on them first thing in the morning when their hair was still in curlers. Cleanliness had become a point of honour in Mapledurham. Poppy had once heard Mrs. Walker, the oldest woman in the village, explaining this to little Esther Johnson: "Stay clean and honest," she had said. "For them as died for you is keepin' watch, and they won't find us with dirty hands, nor faces."  

They mythologized their dead heroes. The soldiers who never returned had become village-guardians, and they watched over you in return for your constant, obsessive remembrance. It was because they didn't understand death, Poppy supposed. If they had seen what she had seen – if they'd seen humans cracked and leaking like broken bottles – the idea of them going on after death would have been laughable.

At the moment, she was queuing in the butcher's shop next to Mrs. Reynolds – a large woman with a swelling bosom and an air of self-righteous excitement, like a preacher in mid-flow. Poppy was gently quizzing her about her arthritis. Mrs Reynolds always boasted about her ailments as though they were war wounds, so she didn't need too much encouragement.  

"'Tisn't getting any better," she said happily. "It's spread all down my arms now. I can't get a wink of sleep, or do my sewing. And Sally has to dig up my potatoes. She's a good girl, but I don't know how much longer I can go on like this."

Poppy made sympathetic noises and asked, as casually as she could, whether Mrs. Reynolds had been suffering any dizzy spells.

There was pain in the village, and she couldn't find the source of it. Of course, there was always pain. The standard of medical care here was so poor. There were always twinges of toothache, stabs of gout, pricklings of conscience.

And then there was the ebb and flow of grief. That registered with her finely-tuned senses too. It was a kind of breathless, background ache, as though your chest cavity had been hollowed-out, and was bleeding unobtrusively while you went about your daily business. Dead husbands were bad enough, but dead sons… Sometimes, Poppy would wake up in the morning, to feel the pain of twenty women stirring in their beds, and remembering, after a night of blissful slumber, that their children were dead.

Even if she was allowed to perform magic, there was no way to help them. There was no magical method of laying grief to rest. It tore about like an unquiet spirit, until you leaned to tolerate it – until the haunting was no more extraordinary than the weather.

What with all that, it was impossible to locate this one discordant note amongst all the suffering. Its edge was keen. The owner of the pain was dying. But any of these stolid, staring villagers might have been dying. With the glaring exception of Mrs Reynolds, they never complained. They would suffer in silence until they dropped down dead.  

"Oh, it's awful," Mrs. Reynolds was saying, enthusiastically. "I nearly keeled over in the vegetable patch the other day when I was hanging out the washing."  

"And are you…" Poppy hesitated, flushing miserably. The question was necessary for a diagnosis, but it was not going to be received with good grace. "Do you still have… monthly bleedings?"

Mrs. Reynolds's open face turned to stone. She sniffed, flicked a speck of dirt off her handbag, and said: "I'm sure I don't know."

Then she turned back to the butcher's counter, signaling unmistakably that the conversation was at an end.

Poppy lapsed into silence. She wished – now more than ever – that she'd been allowed to train as a muggle doctor, but there hadn't been any time, or any money. And Mrs Reynolds would probably not answer a question like that, even if it had been put to her by the King's personal physician.

But she had to try. Because their pain invaded her mind and, anyway, they were her people – they had no business suffering in her village if she didn't want them to. So, miserably, the shy girl forced herself to talk to them, and pushed at the limit of propriety with her questions. Tentatively, at first. They hardly noticed she was doing anything unusual. But then the full strangeness of her line of enquiry dawned on them, and they would shut down. Sometimes, they even got angry.

Their cultural norms were sacred to them now. "Did my Ralph die face-down in the dirt in another country just so's you could ask me them kind of questions?"

Yes, they were angry, in spite of the limp shoulders and grief-hollowed eyes. Perhaps it was because not one of their fiercely-cherished customs and freedoms seemed to be worth what they'd lost. They looked around the village – at pub-signs and pillar-boxes, bicycles and postage stamps, and all the paraphernalia of old England – and thought: it wasn't worth it. Better to be slaves, sifting through the rubble, with your loved ones beside you, than to lie between silk sheets alone.

Other women joined the queue at the butcher's counter – Mrs. Walker, the landlady of the Guest House on the sea-front, and young Sally (who Morry insisted on referring to as 'dead-eyed Sally'), the barmaid of The Shipwreck. They chatted to her amicably enough, but Mrs. Reynolds was still exuding affronted silence.

Poppy excused herself as soon as she could. She grabbed the squashy packet of sausages offered to her by the butcher, and squeezed her way out of the door.

Morry was waiting for her outside. She would have known he was there even without looking, because Sally had been casting glances out of the window – glances that were half-hostile and half-lascivious. But that was Sally's way. She approached everything as though it was a military campaign. It broke her heart to be told she wasn't allowed to go to war. She always maintained, in a sullen voice, that she wouldn't have got herself blown up, like her husband did.

"Being tormented by the natives again?" Morry asked cheerfully, when she stepped out of the shop.

"They don't mean any harm," was Poppy's automatic response.

Morry shrugged. "In general, I agree with you, but I'm not so sure about these ones."

They walked along the road that led out of the village, towards the elder tree. By unspoken agreement, they always ate their lunch under the shade of its clustering branches. To Morry, doubtless, it was a gate-way leading out of the dream-world he insisted they were living in, but, to Poppy, it was just the farthest she could decently get from the village without running away.

But her sense of hearing was acute – and magically amplified by her gifts as a healer – so she could hear the conversation in the butcher's shop as she walked away.

"You know, we ought to get them a chaperone," Sally was muttering slyly. "We don't know as he can be trusted with her."

"Tush, girl!" exclaimed Mrs. Reynolds.  "It's good that Poppy Pomfrey's got her feet under the table there. She gets cold at night, don't she, like everyone else?

There was an appreciative silence from the women in the queue. They knew all about feeling cold at night. All the blankets in the world couldn't take the edge off that chill.

"Was 'e at the Front, though?" said Mrs. Walker, breaking the spell.

"Oh, 'e must've been," said Mrs. Reynolds airily. "Not in the rank and file, mind. 'E talks a sight too proper for that. But 'e could've been an airman."

"I thought the Dragoons were cavalry…" said Sally doubtfully.

"Well?"

"Well, we don't have cavalry anymore, do we? Nobody rode up the Normandy beaches on horseback."

There was a thoughtful pause.

"If he weren't at the Front," the butcher grumbled, "I'm giving 'im short weight the next time 'e comes in."

"If he weren't at the Front, short weight will be the least of 'is problems," said Mrs. Reynolds, with narrowed eyes.

Poppy forced her attention back to the present, with a growing sense of unease in her stomach. She knew her village. It was civilized, in a smouldering, resentful kind of way. There wouldn't be lynch-mobs, but there would be nasty looks and telling silences, if they found out for sure that Morry hadn't been at the Front.  

She wanted him to be more careful. He didn't understand what this place meant to her. Well, actually, he did, and that was half the problem. It meant misery to her, and he knew it. But it was also the place she belonged. It was the place she had been given to look after. She should have had a hospital ward or a healing practice, but that was all out of reach now, because the Ministry had snapped her wand and sent her into exile.

So now, she had Mapledurham. Healers had to have patients. Mapledurham was her hospital ward, and she couldn't be removed from it without surgery.   

He wouldn't take it seriously. He kept insisting that all of this was a dream, and that someone was coming to rescue them. Even now, he was smiling at her for no apparent reason, as though she didn't know how funny her frown was.

"Who's Headmaster now?" he asked suddenly.

"Professor Dippet."

Morry burst out laughing. "Armando Dippet?"  

"Do you know him?"

"I know he wet the bed until he was thirteen."

Poppy almost smiled, and then settled on a puzzled frown. "But you couldn't have been at school with him. He's about seventy."

"Is he, now?" Morry rubbed his hands together gleefully. "Does he still have that baleful look in his eyes, like a kicked puppy?"

Poppy thought about it. It didn't seem appropriate to compare the Headmaster of Hogwarts to a 'kicked puppy'. "I think you must be thinking about someone else," she said at last.   

Morry chuckled all the way to the elder tree. He was in good spirits, and the sight of the poppies clustering at the base of the tree seemed to cheer him even more. But he let her be silent while they unwrapped their sandwiches, perhaps sensing that she needed time to get the taste of village women and butcher-shops out of her mouth.  

"Are you going to sulk all day, Poppy?" he asked eventually, as he bit the crusts off his sandwiches.

She blinked, and looked round at him. "Am I – what, sorry?"

"Never mind."

They were silent again, and Poppy suddenly felt overcome with loneliness, in spite of the voices of the villagers and the insistent throb of their aches and pains.

"Tell me more about this dream we're supposed to be living in," she said primly, smoothing out the creases on her skirt

Morry blinked at her in surprise, but it only lasted a moment. He could never resist the urge to preach at her, and here was a direct invitation. He rubbed his hands together greedily and elaborated.

"You and I are the victims of a curse," he said, and he reminded her so strongly of Mrs. Reynolds describing her arthritis that she couldn't suppress a smile.

"It puts you to sleep, and weaves a dream around you, for reasons I haven't quite been able to fathom yet. There are other victims of the curse too – maybe thousands – maybe not more than an elbow's-length away from us right now. But, because we're wrapped up in the dream, we can't see them."

He leaned against the elder tree's mutilated bark and stretched out his legs. "You've got to think of it like a spider's web," he said. "Every victim of this curse is on the same web but the spider has wrapped each of us in a cocoon of dreams, so we can't see one another. But if, by some miracle, you manage to get out of your cocoon, then you can crawl about, and visit other people in theirs."

"And that's what you did?" she prompted.

"That's what I did."

"How did you get out?"

Morry opened his mouth to speak, and then stopped himself. "I don't know," he said at last. "I shouldn't have been able to. You see, I've visited lots of different dreams – I've poked around in more cocoons than I'd care to mention. Every one of the dreamers is frightened. The dream pushes them; it creates just the right conditions to make them desperate."

"And then?"

Morry shrugged. "Then they die."

"How do they die?"

He frowned again. "I'm not sure exactly. They get frightened, like I said, and they try to defend themselves. They cast a piece of magic. It's such a draining piece of magic that it kills them." He gave her a sideways look and went on: "You don't know much about curses, do you? I mean casting them, as opposed to healing them?"

Poppy shrugged.

"You know what Salazar Slytherin said?" he continued, with a teasing smile. "You can't hope to break a curse until you know how to cast one."

"He's not famed for his abilities as a Healer," said Poppy drily.

Morry grinned. Old and jaded as he was, the sound of Poppy Pomfrey's disdain never failed to give him goose-bumps. He didn't push it, however.

"Well, anyway. A really deadly curse has to have a lot of emotional weight behind it. The deadliest ones involve a sacrifice from the curser – blood, sometimes an amputated limb, sometimes a first-born child or a treasured possession. But, if you're prepared to die to smite your enemies, you can create something really special. That's the kind of state this dream pushes you into. It makes you so angry, and frightened, and full of hate, that you're prepared to die to hurt your enemies. That's how the dreamers always die. That's how I should have died – but somehow, I didn't. And, when I didn't, I found that the cocoon was gone. I couldn't wake up, but I could wander about the web freely."

Poppy raised her eyebrows skeptically. "And where's the spider, while all this is going on?"  

"Oh, he's around – don't you worry about that."

She looked at him – and Morry, drunk on the idea that somebody was finally listening to him, couldn't help going on. "The curse is ancient, and that, in itself, is a puzzle. Even the deadly curses I was talking about – the ones fuelled by a whole human life – start to lose their potency after the wizard who cast it has died. Even really powerful curses can't outlive their caster by more than a few hundred years. But this curse is monolithically ancient."

"A few of the dreamers stuck in it are dark wizards or treasure-seekers, because there's some kind of legend that, if you can go through this dream and wake up, you will awake to immortality. But most of us fell into it by accident."

"Is that what happened to you?" she asked delicately.

He grinned ruefully. "Yes and no. I was seeking immortality, but by a more indirect route. I was an explorer. The curse struck me down when I was breaking into an Egyptian tomb. I wanted to recover magical artifacts and write books about my travels. Nothing ostentatious. For a Slytherin, that hardly qualifies as ambition at all. I just wanted to be famous."

He trailed off, and Poppy sighed. "I'd just - ,"

"What?" he asked eagerly.

"I'd just like you to consider the possibility that you've taken one too many Confundus Charms to the head."

Morry exhaled, and somehow, the exhalation turned into a laugh. He felt – in a cruelly ironic way – as though he'd just woken up. The way she listened cast a spell on you. She followed you on every mental leap, across every gulf of logic, and then, sweetly, right at your elbow, she murmured: "You do realize you're talking bollocks, don't you?"

He hadn't been expecting it. After decades – centuries, maybe – of watching human beings, wandering through their dreams, gawping at their fears, she had made him forget everything he'd learned. When she listened, she made you feel that what you had to say was important. But her incredible gift – if gift it was – lay only in the listening; she heard, and encouraged, and made sympathetic noises, but she didn't have to believe you.  

He went on laughing, because it was difficult to stop. Poppy was starting to look worried. He could see that she was wrestling back the urge to feel his forehead for signs of fever.

"It doesn't matter, Poppy," he said at last. "Everyone's crazy in their own specialized way."


Fifty feet below them, on the pebble-beach at the foot of the cliff, a little girl and a teenage boy were bent over a device which looked like a compass, but which had images dancing across its glass face. The compass was showing a perfect picture of the couple on the clifftop as they talked, and even relaying their voices – although Poppy and Morry had such a tendency to mutter that their words were very hard to make out.

It was an experiment that, much to Snape's surprise, had turned out wonderfully well. He'd tried to use the Ideoscopes for eavesdropping before. Lily, of course, had refused to co-operate, so he'd persuaded her to take hers off, and had tried stashing it in the Gryffindor common-room, to see if he could spy on Potter and his cronies. It had never worked. Apparently, in order for one Ideoscope to broadcast images to the other, a person needed to be wearing it. It must have been powered by its proximity to human flesh or something.

But it was working now, and Severus had only hung the other Ideoscope around a branch of the elder tree up on the clifftop.

What kind of magic could that be? Wizards had been transfigured into trees before, of course. And there were trees with magical powers, like the Whomping Willow. There was even a story about a tree in South America that behaved like a boa constrictor. Apparently, a young girl had once fallen asleep high up in the branches, and the branches had silently folded in on her, squeezing her tighter and tighter, until her blood was trickling in sticky rivers down the bark.

Severus had a knack for remembering stories like that.

Anyway, for whatever reason, they could both see and hear the couple on the clifftop, and their conversation made interesting listening.

"I still say we could've found that out by introducing ourselves to them," Elsa said sullenly.

"I've told you," said Snape, not looking up from the Ideoscope, which was now showing the couple's retreating backs as they headed down the hillside. "No interacting until we know exactly what we're dealing with here – and please don't put that in your mouth."

Elsa froze with an unwrapped toffee halfway to her lips.

"Doesn't Bruiser read you stories?" he demanded, with strained patience. "Haven't you ever heard of Persephone? When you travel into these worlds, you don't eat the food. Or you'll never be able to get out again."

Elsa shrugged defensively. "I've eaten here loads of times, and I could always get out."

"You keep, coming back, don't you?" said Snape. "Persephone could leave for six months of the year."

Elsa Valance, most unusually, said nothing, and Severus tried to collect his thoughts. Valances were the enemies of all clear-thinking.

They had emerged beside the elder tree, with its litter of nodding poppies clustered among its roots. Elsa, delighted by the familiar surroundings, had started jabbering about all the things she'd wanted to show him.

" – And they've got this weird custom, where they cut into the tree's bark, and kind of watch it bleed, like it's a ceremony, and they even sold ice-creams, and I got one and it's not like at home – they've only got one flavour, and it's vanilla, I think, but it's not real vanilla, it's all sweet and tastes of rust, like it's been kept in a tin - ,"

Severus had let her prattle and taken in his surroundings. They were on a cliff-top above a village. It was bright – almost blindingly so – but the sky was overcast.

And the dream, it appeared, was shaping itself around them. It had kitted them out in wartime clothes. Elsa was wearing a long red coat, with a ribbon arranged like an Alice band in her hair, holding back her baby-blonde curls.

Severus had been given something grey and inconspicuous. Perhaps the dream was shaping itself around his personality, as well as his presence. He was wearing grey trousers and faded shirt-sleeves. With a shudder, he suppressed the idea that he looked exactly like his father, on the rare days when his father could be bothered to get dressed.

Over the hill, toiling up the steep path that led out of the village, he could see two people approaching. One was a very thin woman dressed in a tweed jacket, with curls piled tidily on top of her head. She kept her eyes fixed on her shoes, so she wasn't going to be a problem. But the other was a man, with slicked-back hair and a dashing moustache, and his eyes were everywhere. Severus felt the familiar prickle of alarm he always got when he was in open view, and surrounded by inquisitive people.

He'd hurriedly stashed one of the Ideoscopes on a branch, without much hope that it would transmit images, and pulled Elsa down the stone steps cut into the cliff-face, down to the pebbled beach. Severus had never seen so many different shades of grey. The sky was porridge-grey, and had a similar, lumpy texture. He half expected clumps of it to slither down and drip glutinously onto their shoulders.

And the faces of the people! Once he'd recognized Madam Pomfrey and her companion – and once he'd got over the shock of realizing who that companion was – he could see that they looked ill. Only brains that had been kept for decades in jars of formaldehyde could achieve that kind of lifeless, chemical grey.

There was definitely something wrong with this dream. It was an under-cover nightmare. It hid its horror in everyday things, like bus shelters and bicycles.

Severus pulled his grey coat closer about him. He didn't want to be here. The place reminded him too much of Spinner's End. It was too insular and stifling – too flesh-creepingly muggle.

Yes, that was it, he thought gloomily. He was watching a brilliantly sensitive woman suffocating in a muggle town, and he couldn't stop thinking about his mother.

He looked sullenly at his only companion. Elsa had thrown away the toffee cheerfully enough and resumed her prattling. She was chattering away happily – about how she'd never been in a nightmare like this one before, about the funny looks she got from the locals - as though they wanted to gobble her up - about the ice-creams and the way the sun never shone.

"It's fun having company on these trips, though."

"You've always had company," said Snape wearily. "That's the problem, isn't it?"

She threw a casual glance at her green-eye pendant. It was looking stern and unblinking in the grey light. "He don't talk much," she said, with a shrug. "You don't either, o'course, but, with you, I know it's a choice."

She let her eyes wander back to the Ideoscope, and the retreating backs of Poppy and Morry. "He looks a lot like you, don't 'e? I mean, apart from the moustache."

"Yes," Severus replied sourly, resting his chin on his upturned palm. "There's a reason for that."

"Yeah?"

Snape didn't respond. He didn't want to talk about it – and certainly not with Elsa Valance.

Only once – and only as part of her campaign to bribe him into brewing up an Amortentia potion – had Narcissa Black invited him to her house. But once was enough. He'd seen the sleeping figure in the glass coffin in her back garden. It was what her house was most famous for, really. Her father's collection of unicorn skeletons was, mysteriously, never talked about.

The coffin had been covered with lichen and creeping ivy. Apparently, the House Elf cleaned it off every day, but the green shroud always grew back within a couple of hours. Severus liked to think this was because the Prince family had a genetic instinct for concealment and subtlety.

But Narcissa – in an uncharacteristic, and definitely manipulative, gesture of consideration – had vanished the ivy using an Evanesco charm, and shown him the face of his long-lost ancestor. They looked so alike it was almost eerie. At the time, Severus had found this gratifying. He liked to think his father's DNA had been masked by strong wizard genes, and Moribund Prince seemed to confirm this.

It was strange, seeing him now, full of intelligence and vitality.  

Years ago, he had dreamt of magical relatives arriving on the doorstep at Spinner's End, ready to take him away to Diagon Alley, or Platform Nine and Three Quarters, or any of the other places his mother described with bitter longing in her voice. And they would act like real parents. They would buy him ice-creams and ask him about his day. They would teach him to ride a broomstick and buy him his first Potions kit.

Snape's imagination had always been vivid and, even though he'd bitterly renounced these fantasies years ago, he could still taste them. He would scan the muggle crowds for anyone who looked the tiniest bit like him, anyone with whom he felt an affinity. But they never came. There was nobody out there who cared. The wizard world was as indifferent to his plight as the muggle one had been.

The sight of a relative – a sober, clear-sighted relative after all these years – was… strange. Severus had never felt related to anybody before.

Did he resent it – the fact that somebody was walking around this grim old Northern town wearing his face? Was he angry that Moribund Prince had been sleeping all this time, instead of being a kindly old relative who bought him ice-creams? Was it because he was talking to Madam Pomfrey – the icy old crone who'd whisked Lily away from him before he could make sure she was alright? Or was it because he'd arrived in Severus's life entirely too late?

Whatever the reason, Snape took an instant dislike to Moribund Prince. A useful source of information, perhaps, but certainly not a kindred spirit – not if he could talk to Madam Pomfrey with every indication of enjoyment like that.

"So, what do you think we've got to do?" Elsa asked conversationally. "What's the mission? We've got to stop Madam Pomfrey from getting upset, so's she don't cast this life-draining curse he keeps talking about? Should be easy. She looks like a sweet-tempered lady anyway."

Snape raised his eyebrows, thinking about Madam Pomfrey's tantrums in the Hospital Wing – the way she slammed cupboard doors and refused to sweeten her foul-tasting potions.

"I don't know yet," he said quietly. "I've told you, we need to research this first."

"Oh, come on," Elsa moaned. "That's boring!"

"I think," he continued, ignoring her, "this is from her past. She still talks with a Yorkshire accent when she's angry. And, if she's about twenty here, and this is just after the war, she'd be about fifty now, which I'm fairly sure she is."

"So?" Elsa demanded, swinging her arms.

"So, if something's going to happen here to make her more-than-usually angry, in our world, it has already happened. If this dream follows the events of her life, we should be able to find out about any dramatic events before they occur."

"Yeah," said Elsa, her eyes lighting up. "And we could stop them from happening!"

"I think that's unlikely to be a wise move," said Snape. "But we could try to prepare her for them, at least."

He looked down the beach towards the village. Something was definitely waiting to happen here. The place was holding its breath.

He was tired. The anger had passed, and now the sheer enormity of the task he was facing dawned on him. He had to find a way to break a curse that had been consuming people for thousands of years. He had to stop Madam Pomfrey – Madam Pomfrey, who thundered around the Hospital Wing, slamming doors and hissing at visitors – from getting angry. And he was quite alone, apart from a chattering eight year-old and her spying, one-eyed brother.

It wasn't fair.  

And, usually, at moments like this, Snape's over-active imagination would supply a list of all the hundreds of things that could go wrong. But, right now, perhaps because of all the thick white cloud hanging over the cliffs like a descending ceiling, he thought of that afternoon on Platform Nine and Three Quarters – where Lily had lifted him out of the deepest depression simply by giving him a conspiratorial smile and a cursory touch on the shoulder.

And now, whenever he was surrounded by idiots – whenever squealing Hufflepuffs, droning Ravenclaws, taunting Gryffindors and demented Slytherins hemmed him in until he felt he couldn't breathe, he thought of that moment – a tiny, absent-minded flash of tenderness that she could easily have neglected to show – making the difference between the blackest depression and the brightest day. And it almost turned him into Dumbledore – he was almost amused by the idiots – he was almost delighted when their stupidity surpassed itself. Almost. Lily was a good healer, but she couldn't work miracles. The almost was enough, however. It was infinitely more than he had expected.   

It was like she'd reached into his chest, drawn out his heart, blown the dust off it, and put it back where she'd found it, shining and new. And, for every thousand times this trusting stupidity threatened to get her killed, there would be one occasion when it would send sunlight pouring into somebody's world as violently and decisively as a collapsing roof. That was worth protecting.

But, in order to keep trusting people like that alive, there had to be sacrifices on the part of people who weren't so trusting. That was the part Dumbledore understood so well. Jaded and suspicious individuals – who'd known the darker side of humanity for as long as they could remember – had to work very hard, and do horrible things, so that moments like the one on Platform Nine and Three Quarters could happen. So that innocence was still an option for other people.

And if it hadn't been Lily he'd been ordered to sell his soul to protect, Severus would have said it wasn't fair. But it was Lily, and so he kept quiet.

That was just the shadow to the sunshine. Magic was all about balance.

The sunshine needed the shadow, even if she didn't know it all the time.