Sirius had been putting off this visit for far too long.
Uncle Marius and Aunt Ophelia hadn't known yet that Sirius and Esme not only adopted Harry and Nathan, but they officially got married. Sirius figured that Aunt Ophelia will be thrilled. She was the one who set them up in the first place.
But they were the ones who rescued the boys, so they deserve an explanation and that include that those boys are now Rigel and Corvus. So, they brought the children to them.
What neither of them had anticipated was finding Uncle Marius in the middle of his sitting room, laying accidental waste to the furniture.
"You have magic?" Sirius gaped at his uncle.
Marius stood with his arms crossed by the fireplace, doing his absolute best not to set anything off. The sitting room around him bore the evidence of recent magical outbursts. A crack running along the left side of the mantelpiece that hadn't been there a few weeks back, and a faint scorch mark on the Persian rug that Ophelia had covered with a footstool and was pretending not to see.
Apparently, being seventy-six did not exempt one from the volatility of accidental magic. Having never experienced a lick of it in his life, the sudden onset was frankly terrifying. And the more he panicked, the worse the outbursts became. He had already laid waste to Ophelia's best tea set. She had been devastated. Sirius and Esme had mended the lot, though Ophelia had not entirely forgiven him for it yet.
"I haven't the foggiest what to tell you, Sirius. I was simply planning to visit my great-grandson when it happened." Marius's jaw tightened at the memory. He moved from the fireplace to the window. "Ophelia claims I began to glow. Golden light, shimmering all around me — my hands especially."
Judging by the timeline, the magic had flared the moment the children were officially blood-adopted. It was deeply concerning. Sirius hadn't realized there would be backlash of this magnitude reaching this far through the bloodline. Regulus had said nothing of it. Maybe because he was unconscious at the time? Sadly, Sirius cannot tell them yet about Regulus being alive.
But the question that had been sitting at the back of Sirius's mind when he saw Marius accidentally blowing up the vase was, were the others affected as well? His cousins? His grandparents?
"I am not the only one, before you ask," Marius said, catching his nephew's expression with the accuracy of a man who had been reading Blacks for seventy years. He turned from the window and lowered himself into the high-backed chair by the fire carefully. "Every living soul carrying our surname has felt it, apparently. Arcturus has already issued a gag order. No doubt he sent one to you as well, but you are impossible to reach at the best of times."
"You're telling me anyway," Sirius observed.
"Of course I'm telling you," Marius said, with the crisp delivery of a man who has decided that some instructions do not apply to him. "You are my nephew."
Sirius glanced toward the doorway. Esme and Aunt Ophelia were in the next room with the children, their voices a low, comfortable murmur beneath the occasional sound of Alphard issuing verdicts on things. He was quietly astonished by how readily Rigel had taken to Ophelia. The boy was usually cautious with strangers. Yet with Aunt Ophelia he was nothing short of charming, which Sirius suspected said something significant about Ophelia and filed away to think about later.
"That is not the only problem," Marius continued, pulling him back. He reached for the teacup on the side table, thought better of it — old habit— and set his hand flat on his knee instead. "The Ministry has been hounding me relentlessly. Reporters attempted to break into the house — can you imagine the audacity? If your grandfather hadn't appeared and warded the entire estate, they'd be swarming the hallways by now."
"Are they still out there?" Sirius frowned toward the window.
"No, not anymore. Arcturus saw to that." Marius's expression suggested he found this fact faintly irritating despite its convenience. "But it does not change the reality of the situation. This is public news in the wizarding world now, Sirius. A long-lost relative of the Blacks — declared a Squib, lived his entire life in the Muggle world — registering as a wizard at seventy-six?" He drew himself up slightly. "It is, apparently, a national scandal or breakthrough, whichever side you are."
"They assumed that because I had no magic, my home was unwarded and I was fair game," Marius added, with the clipped precision of a man who has already dealt with the matter and found the experience mildly satisfying. "Vultures. They were disabused of that notion rather swiftly."
They had been. A lack of a wand had never made Marius Black helpless. He knew how to wield a cane, and more to the point, he knew how to wield a firearm. He was a wealthy veteran of the Second World War, and his collection was formidable. Sirius had decided not to ask for specifics.
"Now the Ministry is insisting I obtain a wand. And that man Dumbledore had the extraordinary nerve to write to me personally, offering a place in classes at Hogwarts." Marius looked at Sirius with the expression of a man who has received an insult and is still deciding whether to be offended or merely contemptuous. "Me! In a classroom! I am seventy-six years old, Sirius. I will not sit in a desk surrounded by children."
"No," Sirius agreed carefully. He had moved properly into the chair now, elbows on his knees. "You won't. There's no law requiring it, actually. Hogwarts attendance has never been compulsory, whatever Dumbledore implies. Given the circumstances, a private tutor is entirely reasonable. Someone who can come to you, work at your pace, help you get the outbursts under control without making a spectacle of it."
Marius was quiet for a moment. He looked at his hands, which were resting still on his knees with the deliberate steadiness of a man who had decided to keep them there until he was sure they would behave. "I hadn't considered that."
"Fortunately, your favorite grandnephew is here."
"Don't be clever."
Sirius smiled. Then the smile faded as the other thread caught up with him. "Grandfather. You said he came himself. He warded the estate?"
"Without so much as knocking," Marius confirmed, his tone settling into something flatter. "We have not been close. Not since I was declared a Squib. I had assumed that was a permanent arrangement." He paused. "No doubt he is beside himself at Blackwood. The man cannot abide scandal, and people do not know the Blacks have Squibs in the line. That is not the sort of thing a family like ours advertises. You know how the nobility works. They hide the ones they considered unfit and pretended we don't exist."
"It's more than scandal though, isn't it," Sirius said slowly. "What's happened to you — it shouldn't be possible. A Squib developing magic at seventy-six. That's never happened. It means something." He looked at his uncle. "It means Squibs aren't what we've always been told they are. They aren't failures of magical heritage. They're something else entirely."
The room was quiet for a moment with the weight of that. The fire shifted in the grate. Marius looked at it rather than at Sirius.
"It isn't a failure," Esme said from the doorway.
Both men turned. She was leaning against the frame with her arms loosely crossed, a cup of tea in one hand that she had evidently acquired from the next room, and the expression she wore when she had been listening to a conversation reach a conclusion.
"I have done my own research on this," she said, and crossed into the room properly, setting her cup on the writing desk and taking the chair across from Marius with the unhurried precision of someone settling in for a conversation that requires it.
"Of course you have," Sirius said.
"Research?" Marius looked at her with the polite confusion of a man who had learned, over the course of the afternoon, that Esme Malfoy said very little without meaning considerably more than the words suggested.
"Where do you think Muggle-borns come from?" Esme asked.
The two men glanced at each other.
"There isn't a satisfactory explanation," Sirius said carefully. "Some say it's the natural order. Some say—" he paused with the expression of a man about to repeat something he found distasteful, "—that they steal magic from other bloodlines."
"Which is nonsense," Marius said flatly.
"Complete nonsense," Sirius agreed. "A convenient nonsense that pure-blood families use to explain why their lines are producing Squibs while Muggle-borns keep appearing. They cannot comprehend that the more likely explanation is several centuries of marrying their cousins."
"Inbreeding is certainly part of it," Esme said. She reached back for her teacup and held it without drinking, the way she held things when she was thinking through an order of words. "But it is not the whole of it. Not even close." She looked at Marius. "May I ask you something?"
"You may," Marius nodded.
"Your parents. When they sent you to live in the Muggle world — did they tell you that you had no magic at all? Or did they tell you that your magic was dormant?"
Marius frowned. His hand moved once, unconsciously, to the arm of the chair. "They said I had none. That I was a Squib. That was the end of it."
"Oui," Esme said. "That is always the end of it." She set her cup down and folded her hands in her lap. "I spent years working alongside Muggle doctors. Learning their medicine, their methods, their understanding of why children inherit the traits they do. They call it genetics. The study of how characteristics pass from parent to child — not just appearance or disposition, but everything. Including, I came to believe, magic."
"Magic isn't a characteristic," Sirius said slowly. Not disagreeing. Working through it. He had straightened in his chair without noticing.
"Isn't it?" Esme looked at him. "It behaves like one. It runs in families. It skips generations. It strengthens in some lines and weakens in others. It responds to bloodline the way any inherited trait." She paused. "The Muggle understanding of genetics gave me a framework that wizarding medicine never had, because wizarding medicine never needed one. The wizarding kind has always assumed that anything that cannot be explained is magic and leave it as that."
"And what did you find?" Marius asked. He was leaning forward slightly in the high-backed chair, the earlier agitation gone, replaced by the focused attention of a man who had spent seventy-six years being told one thing about himself and was now being offered another.
"That Muggles cannot produce magical children," Esme said. "Not on their own. It is not possible. Magic requires what I have come to call a magical core — the seat of a witch or wizard's power, present from birth, the thing that Squibs also possess." She looked at Marius steadily. "It's just in Squibs; it is simply dormant. Inactive."
The room was very quiet. The fire was the only sound. "It's also the reason why you and aunt have trouble taking in muggle medicine because even though you are a squib — considered a muggle by our kind's standards, you still have magical blood that was not taken into account."
"So, Muggle-borns," Sirius said. His voice had changed — the historian in him assembling pieces with the speed of long practice. He stood without quite deciding to and moved toward the window the way he moved when a thought was too large to hold sitting still. "They aren't — they didn't come from nowhere."
"They are not Muggle-born at all," Esme said. "That is the wrong name entirely. They are Squib-born. Descendants of magical families whose lines passed through Squibs — sometimes for generations — carrying a dormant core that finally, in the right conditions, reactivates." She glanced at Marius. "A Squib whose parents were both Squibs, or whose line carries sufficient magical heritage, is far more likely to produce a child whose core reactivates. Sometimes it skips several generations before it surfaces. But the magic was never gone. It was waiting."
Marius looked at his hands again. The hands that had destroyed Ophelia's tea set. The hands that had been glowing gold the morning after the blood adoption pulse moved through the Black bloodline and found, apparently, more than anyone had anticipated. He turned them over slowly, palm up, as though looking at them for the first time.
"I suppose the appropriate response to every squib with magic is welcome back," Esme said quietly, and there was something in her voice that was not clinical at all.
Marius said nothing for a moment. When he looked up his eyes were very bright. "So, Muggle-born isn't the right word."
"Oui," Esme said. "Which is why I prefer Squib-born. Because that is what they are. They didn't come from muggle families; they come from magical blood just not reactivated."
Sirius had been very quiet at the window. Esme recognized the quality of his silence — it was the silence of someone whose mind was moving faster than his mouth and had not yet decided which thought to surface first.
"The lost houses," he said.
Esme looked at him. "Yes?"
"If a Squib line can reactivate — if Muggle-born witches and wizards are actually descended from magical families — then some of them could be heirs. To houses that were declared extinct. To seats on the Wizengamot. To vaults in Gringotts that have been sitting sealed for generations because there was no one left to claim them." He turned from the window and looked at her with the expression he wore when something had just become significantly larger than it had been a moment ago. "These changes everything, Esme."
"I am aware," she said dryly.
"There is another layer to this," Esme continued. She rose from the chair and moved to the fireplace, not for warmth but for something to stand near — the old habit of a woman who thought better on her feet in a room she didn't know well yet. "Magical gifts. Talents that run in specific bloodlines — Seers, Parselmouths, Metamorphmagi, animagi predispositions. People assume these gifts are simply inherited, that if your family carries it, you will carry it. But it is more complicated than that."
"How so?" Marius asked.
"Some gifts are dominant," Esme said. "Parselmouth is perhaps the clearest example. It runs so strongly through certain lines that it suppresses almost everything else. If someone with a different magical gift marries into such a line, their gift is often lost within a generation or two. Absorbed. Overwritten." She paused. "Which means families who want to preserve a specific talent must be extraordinarily careful about who they marry. Someone whose own magical gift is too dominant will suppress what they are trying to protect."
"And someone with no dominant gift wouldn't suppress anything," Sirius said slowly.
"Precisely. A Squib-born carries no dominant magical gift to compete with due to its diluting over generations. Which means the surest way to preserve or even restore a lost magical talent in a bloodline is to introduce someone who cannot overwrite it."
Sirius was quiet for a moment. Then something crossed his face — recognition arriving from a personal direction rather than a theoretical one. He looked at the fire rather than at Esme, and his voice when it came was careful.
"Nymphadora," he said.
Esme looked at him.
"My cousin Andromeda's daughter," Sirius said. "She's a Metamorphmagus. The Blacks had that gift once. I've seen it referenced in the old family records, generations back, before it disappeared entirely. Everyone assumed it was simply lost."
He worked through it slowly, still looking at the fire. Andromeda, who had left the family for love and been blasted from the tapestry for it. Andromeda, who he hadn't seen in years and thought about more than he admitted. "But Andromeda married Ted Tonks. A Muggle-born. Squib-born, by your opinion. No dominant magical gift of his own." He looked at Esme. "So, the gift was never lost. It was in Andromeda all along, suppressed by generations of the Black line marrying other dominant bloodlines. And when she married someone who couldn't suppress it further—"
"It had room to surface in their daughter," Esme confirmed.
Sirius sat back down. He was quiet for long enough that Marius glanced at him once, then looked away with the tact of a man who knows when to give someone space inside their own head.
"Which means the pure-blood families who refused to marry outside their lines didn't just weaken their magic through inbreeding," Sirius said finally. "They actively suppressed their own gifts by only marrying other dominant bloodlines."
"Yes," Esme said. "And gifts lost that way are not necessarily gone permanently. The potential remains in the bloodline, suppressed rather than erased. Introduce the right non-dominant blood and it can resurface." She paused. "Which is also why Squib-born witches and wizards so rarely present with specific magical talents. Having been removed from magical society for generations, whatever gifts their line once carried have had no opportunity to resurface. The talent is there in the blood. But it has been waiting too long and too quietly to announce itself."
"This is going to change pure-blood notions," Sirius pointed out. "They will never accept this reality."
"They should." Esme crossed her arms. "Or else they risk losing their heritage entirely. Besides, I did not say that they cannot marry pure bloods. They can. They just need someone whose bloodline has not been mixed with their same genes. Muggles have a name for what happens otherwise — the bottleneck effect. When everyone who intermarries carries the same genes, defects that were once uncommon become common. The only thing to prevent this is to bring in new blood that is not already related to theirs."
There was silence. Marius was looking at his hands again, but differently now — not with the wariness of a man waiting for them to misbehave, but with the particular attention of someone who has been given a new map and is beginning to read it.
Sirius broke the quiet. "You are planning to publish this?"
"I have considered it." Esme answered
"You cannot publish this yet."
Esme raised an eyebrow.
"I mean it." He leaned forward. "You publish this now and the pure-blood families will tear you apart before anyone has a chance to consider whether you're right. They cannot afford for you to be right. It threatens everything they've built their identity on — the idea that blood purity means everything, that Squibs are failures, that Muggle-borns are lesser." He shook his head. "You need to be untouchable first. Publish your healing research. Your potions, your spells, your field work. Build a reputation so established that when this comes out, they cannot dismiss you as a fringe voice. Make yourself someone they have to reckon with before you make them reckon with this."
Esme was quiet for a moment. Not the quiet of someone being persuaded — she had already considered this.
"I know," she said. "I have known for some time that the timing matters as much as the research. I did not spend years building credibility in the field only to throw it away on a paper that the wizarding world is not yet equipped to receive." A small, precise curve of her mouth. "I was simply waiting to see how long it took you to say it."
Sirius looked at her.
"You are insufferable," he said, with great fondness.
"So, I have been told."
Marius had been listening to this exchange with the expression of a man watching two people who have clearly been married long enough to conduct entire arguments in shorthand.
"I do have something I need to raise," Marius said.
The shift in his tone was enough to stop the conversation. He is sitting forward slightly in the high-backed chair, both hands resting on his knees, his voice stripped of the dry wit he had been deploying all afternoon.
Sirius looked at him. "What is it?"
"Ophelia and I are the only people outside this room who know the truth about the children," Marius said. "How they came to be yours. Who they were before." He paused. "And we are Squibs, Sirius. Whatever I am becoming, whatever this magic is — we have no defenses. No occlumency. No resistance to potions. If someone determined enough got hold of us and wanted to know what we knew—" He stopped. Let the sentence finish itself.
"Nobody is going to—"
"You don't know that" Marius said. Not unkindly. "You are building something here. Something worth protecting. And the people who would want to dismantle it will not announce themselves first." He held his nephew's gaze. "I want you to modify our memories. Mine and Ophelia's."
The silence that followed was absolute.
"No," Sirius said.
"Sirius—"
"I said no." His voice was very controlled, which meant it was very close to not being controlled. "You found them. You got them out. I will not take that from you."
"I am not asking you to take it," Marius said. "I am asking you to protect them. There is a considerable difference." He leaned forward slightly. "I am seventy-six. I have magic now, yes — barely, unpredictably, not yet mine in any useful sense. It will be years before I can defend myself against someone who knows what they are doing, if I ever can. Ophelia has nothing. And between the two of us we are carrying information that could be used to take four children away from their family." His voice was steady and very clear. "That is not a risk I am willing to be."
Esme had been quiet through all of it. Now she looked at Sirius with the expression she wore when something was difficult and necessary, and she had already made her peace with it.
"He's right," she said quietly. "If the wrong people found them — found us — they could extract everything. Every detail. And then they would have grounds to challenge the adoption, to challenge the children's identities, to take them." She paused. "We cannot allow that."
"Over my dead body," Sirius said.
"Then don't make it come to that," Marius said. "Modify our memories. Leave us the children — leave us everything that matters. Just take the parts that can be used against them. As far as we need to remember, Rigel and Corvus have always been yours. That is close enough to true that it will hold."
Sirius looked at his uncle for a long moment.
Marius looked back at him with the patience of a man who has made his decision and is simply waiting for the other person to catch up.
The room was quiet for a moment after Esme spoke.
Sirius looked at his uncle. Then at his wife. Then back at his uncle, with the expression of a man who has just had a reasonable argument made to him and is finding it extremely inconvenient.
"You're both serious," he said.
"I am always serious," Marius said. "It is, as you know, something of a family trait."
"That isn't funny."
"It wasn't meant to be." Marius held his nephew's gaze with the steady patience of a man who has already worked through every objection in his own head. "Sirius. I am not asking you to take anything that matters. I am asking you to take a risk away from us. There is a difference."
"It matters to me," Sirius said. His voice had gone flat in the way it went when he was controlling something. "You found them. You got them out. You are the reason they are here at all, and you are asking me to make you forget that."
"I am asking you to make us safe," Marius said. "Which is what you have always tried to do for the people you love, even when you did it badly." A pause, and something in his expression softened fractionally. "You are better at it now. I trust you to do this correctly."
Sirius said nothing.
"The children," Esme said quietly, from across the room. Not pushing. Just placing the words in the space between them. "If anyone were to find out what they were before — who they were — we cannot control what happens next. We can ward this house. We can ward the castle. We cannot ward two people who have no magical defense against someone determined enough to look."
"I know," Sirius said.
"Then you know I'm right," Marius said.
Sirius looked at him for a long moment. The fire had burned lower without anyone noticing, the room dimmer than it had been when the conversation started. Somewhere in the next room Aunt Ophelia was saying something to one of the children in the warm carrying voice she used when she was pretending not to be delighted, and one of them — Corvus, by the pitch of it — was laughing.
"What about Aunt Ophelia?" Sirius asked.
"She will agree," Marius said. "She will not like it any more than you do. But she will agree." He paused. "She understands what is at stake."
"She deserves to be asked."
"Then ask her," Marius said simply. "But ask her after you've decided. Because if you walk in there uncertain, she will spend the next hour trying to talk you out of it and we will all feel better in the short term and worse in the long one."
Sirius pressed his mouth together. He looked at Esme. She looked back at him with the expression she wore when she had already said what needed saying and was waiting for him to finish arriving at it.
He looked at his hands.
He had done this before. Memory modification was not a clean or simple thing. It required precision and care and the willingness to be responsible for what you left behind as much as what you took. Done badly it left gaps, inconsistencies, the faint wrongness that sensitive people sometimes felt without being able to name. Done well it was seamless. A memory replaced rather than removed, the shape of the truth preserved even when the specific facts were changed.
He was good enough to do it well. He knew that. He had been good enough for a long time.
That was not the part that was difficult.
"I want you to remember," Sirius said finally. His voice had changed — quieter, more careful. "Not the adoption specifically. Not what they were before. But I want you to remember being part of this. Being there from the beginning. Because you were. That part is true and I won't take it."
Marius looked at him steadily. "Then keep it."
"I will." Sirius stood. "I'll construct something that holds. You and Ophelia set us up — that's true, you don't need to forget that. You were there when we married. You were among the first to hold Rigel and Corvus when they were born, and Lyra after them, and Alphard last. You've been part of their lives from the beginning." He paused. "It will simply be a beginning that looks different from the real one. Close enough to true that it will never feel wrong."
"That sounds right," Marius said.
"It won't feel like anything," Sirius said. "That's the point. You'll wake up tomorrow and it will simply be true, and it will have always been true and you won't know anything was changed."
"Good," Marius said. Simply.
Sirius looked at his uncle for a moment longer than the conversation required. Marius, who had spent seventy-six years being told he was less than he was. Marius, who had fired a gun at wizarding reporters and warded his own house with a cane and was now sitting in a high-backed chair asking to have his memory altered because it was the right thing to do for four children he was choosing to protect.
"Uncle Marius," Sirius said.
"Don't," Marius said, with the gentle firmness of a man who knows a sentimental speech is coming and has decided to spare them both. "Just do it properly."
Sirius almost smiled. "Yes, sir."
He went to find Ophelia.
*****
MAGIC AT SEVENTY-SIX: LONG-LOST BLACK SQUIB IGNITES NATIONAL FRENZY
SQUIB NO MORE: Marius Black's Awakening Forces Ministry to Re-Examine the Origins of Non-Magical Births
Late-Blooming Magic? Experts Debate Whether Squibs Are Misunderstood Magical Variants After Black Family Scandal.
Registry Revelation Sparks National Inquiry: Could Squibs Possess Dormant Magic All Along?
The newspapers lasted approximately four minutes on Arcturus Black's desk before he cast incendio on it.
He watched them burn with the satisfaction, then turned back to his chair and sat with the straightness of someone who has decided that the situation, however unprecedented, will not be permitted to affect his posture.
It was affecting his posture.
MAGIC AT SEVENTY-SIX: LONG-LOST BLACK SQUIB IGNITES NATIONAL FRENZY
He had read that headline four times before burning it. Four times, which was four times more than it deserved. The wizarding press had always been composed largely of vultures, and he had spent the better part of eighty years treating them accordingly.
But this? This was his family's private affairs spread across every breakfast table in Britain, dissected by people who could not spell lineage correctly and had opinions about things they had no business having opinions about.
He had gone to Marius's house immediately when the news came out. Had not asked permission, had not sent an owl, had simply apparated to the address he had kept in his files out of habit rather than sentiment and warded the property before the reporters escalated to the house. He had not gone inside. He had not spoken to Marius.
He was not entirely certain what he would have said.
That was the problem. Arcturus Black always knew what to say. He had built a considerable portion of his reputation on knowing exactly what to say and saying it at precisely the right moment with precisely the right weight. He had navigated four decades of Wizengamot politics, two wars, and the chaos of being head of a family that seemed constitutionally incapable of doing things quietly.
He did not know what to say to a cousin who had been declared a Squib when he didn't receive his Hogwarts letter and had just developed magic at seventy-six.
He reached for his tea. Set it down without drinking it. Stood and moved to the window overlooking the grounds of Blackwood Castle, which had the decency to look exactly as it always had.
The Ministry would want explanations. He would give them none. The press would want statements. They would receive a very short letter from his solicitor and nothing further. The family would want —
The family.
He turned from the window.
If Marius was now recognized as magical — properly recognized, registered, on record with the Ministry — then the family tapestry would reflect it. It always did. The tapestry didn't wait for his approval or anyone else's. It simply knew, the way very old magic always simply knew, and it adjusted accordingly.
He had been avoiding that room.
He was aware of why he was avoiding it. Had been aware of it for years, if he was honest with himself. The tapestry was a record of everything the House of Black had been and lost and diminished into, and there had come a point — he could not have said precisely when — where looking at it felt less like taking stock and more like reading a verdict. Too many gaps where names had been. Too many branches that ended where they should have continued. Too much evidence of a house that had been, on his watch, slowly hollowing out.
He was eighty-two years old. He had outlived his son. He had watched his grandchildren scatter or disgrace themselves or both. He had spent years quietly calculating whether there would be anyone left to carry the name forward when he was gone, and the answer had never been comfortable.
So, he had stopped looking.
He recognized this for what it was — the avoidance of a proud man who preferred not to have certain facts confirmed — and he found it faintly contemptible in himself, which did not make him any more inclined to address it. Until now.
He straightened his already-straight jacket. Walked to the drawing room.
The tapestry covered most of the far wall the way it always had, gold thread on dark fabric, names and lines and the long slow record of everything the House of Black had been and done and produced over centuries. He stood before it and let his eyes adjust and then began, methodically, to read.
Marius's name had changed.
That was the first thing. The faint slightly diminished quality that Squib names always carried on the tapestry — as though the magic was being polite about something uncomfortable — was gone. Marius Phineas Black glowed with the same steady warmth as any other magical member of the family. No caveat. No apology. Beside it, Ophelia's name. And beneath —
He followed the line down.
A son and daughter, both seem to have died. A granddaughter through his daughter's side. And at the end of the branch, small and new and certain of itself, a name he didn't recognize.
Justin Finch-Fletchley.
In white threads indicating that the child has not yet surfaced as either squib or magical or whatever it is. Common for children his age.
Arcturus looked at the hyphenated surname for a long moment. Muggle blood, then. The Muggle world had swallowed that branch so completely it had taken the surname with it. He filed this away under problems to be addressed in order and moved on.
His eyes traveled, as they always did when he stood before this tapestry, to the names that had always made him uncomfortable. Not burns — the Blackwood tapestry had never been burned despite Walburga's penchant on disowning family members without the paterfamilias permission.
The Blacks of Blackwood had instead done something he had always considered both more honest and crueler. They had simply recorded everything. Every member, magical or not, legitimate or not. The Squib names had always been there — not removed, not pretended away, just written in a thread that was silver rather than gold. Present but diminished. Acknowledged but lesser.
He had always told himself this was the more civilized approach.
Looking at Marius's name now — blazing gold where it had always been silver, certain and warm and entirely unapologetic about it — he was less sure.
His eyes moved on.
Andromeda's name. He had never agreed with how that situation had been handled. Had said so, once, to Cygnus, and had not been listened to. He did not dwell on it.
He moved on.
Lucius Malfoy's name sat where it always sat, attached to Narcissa's, and Arcturus looked at it with the expression he reserved for things that were technically legitimate and personally irritating. He had not objected to the match publicly.
The Malfoy name was old enough, the alliance strategic enough, and Narcissa had clearly made her choice with the deliberate certainty of a woman who knew exactly what she was doing. He had simply never warmed up to Lucius. There was something about the man that was all surface — the kind of wizard who wore his convictions like a fashionable coat and would wear a different one if fashions changed.
He picked up his tea from the side table.
His eyes moved further along the tapestry.
To Sirius.
Sirius Orion Black's name, which had been sitting isolated and faintly defiant on the tapestry for over a decade — too bright, too present, refusing to diminish the way Arcturus had half-expected it to after everything — had changed.
There was a line now.
Arcturus stared at it.
A line from Sirius's name to another name he did not recognize, written in the tapestry's gold thread with the absolute conviction of very old magic that has processed something and found it entirely legitimate and has no interest in anyone's opinion about it.
Esmeralda Clarisse Malfoy.
Pfft. Arcturus spat his tea.
It went, he would later reflect with considerable mortification, a remarkable distance.
"Arcturus!" Melania's voice from the doorway, sharp with alarm. "What on earth—"
He did not answer. He was pointing at the tapestry with one hand and attempting to locate his composure with the other, which was proving difficult because beneath the two names — beneath Sirius Orion Black and Esmeralda Clarisse Malfoy, written there as though it were the most unremarkable thing in the world — were four more names.
Rigel Sirius Black.
Corvus Arcturus Black.
Lyra Portia Black.
Alphard Regulus Black II.
"Arcturus." Melania had crossed the room. Her hand was on his arm with the practiced grip of a woman who has spent fifty years managing this man and knows exactly how much pressure to apply. "Breathe."
He breathed. Once. With great deliberateness.
"There are," he said, and his voice came out remarkably level given the circumstances, "four children on this tapestry."
"I can see that."
"Under Sirius's name."
"Yes."
"With a Malfoy."
Melania looked at the tapestry. Then back at her husband. "So, it appears."
Arcturus set down his teacup with the careful precision of a man holding himself together through sheer force of decades of practice. He looked at the tapestry. He looked at it for a long time, the way a general looks at a map that has just revealed an entirely unexpected development on a front he had considered quiet.
Sirius had been married. Long enough to have four children. Four children whose names were written into the Black family tapestry with the settled permanence of magic that had been given time to establish itself — this was not new. This had not just happened. This had been happening, quietly and without his knowledge, while Arcturus sat at Blackwood cataloguing losses.
His grandson had built a family in secret and told no one.
And then there was the Malfoy connection, which Arcturus turned over in his mind with the instinctive suspicion of a man who had spent eighty years watching other families maneuver for advantage. Narcissa had married Lucius. Now Sirius — estranged, supposedly un-political, living off the grid by all accounts — had married another Malfoy entirely. Two branches of the Black family tree. Two Malfoy connections. That was not coincidence. That was strategy.
Whose strategy was the question.
He looked at Lucius's name on the tapestry. Then at the name of the woman attached to Sirius. Esmeralda Clarisse Malfoy. He did not know her. Had never heard of her. Which meant she was either peripheral to the main Malfoy line or had been kept deliberately out of sight, and neither of those possibilities was entirely reassuring.
"Three," he said.
Melania looked at him. "I beg your pardon?"
"Three members of this family," Arcturus said, in the measured tone of a man presenting evidence to himself, "have now been connected to the Malfoy line." He counted without using his fingers, because he was Arcturus Black and he did not count on his fingers. "Narcissa married Lucius. Marius married Ophelia. And now—" he gestured at the tapestry, "—Sirius has married one as well." A pause. "Two of those I was informed of. One of them I was apparently not considered worth telling."
"To be fair," Melania said carefully, "Sirius has not been in the habit of informing anyone of anything for quite some time."
"That," Arcturus said, "is precisely the problem."
He looked back at the tapestry. At the four names beneath Sirius's, written there with the quiet permanence of things that had been true long enough to stop being surprising to the magic that recorded them. Four children. His great-grandchildren, apparently, existing somewhere with a mother he didn't know and a father who had not seen fit to mention any of it.
His eyes moved across the names slowly.
Rigel Sirius Black.
Corvus Arcturus—
He stopped.
He read the name again.
Then he looked away from it, back at the fire, with the expression of a man who has noticed something he is not yet prepared to have feelings about and has decided to file it away until a more appropriate moment.
He cleared his throat.
"Find Sirius," he said.
Melania raised an eyebrow. "We've been trying to reach him for years. He doesn't have a Floo connection, the house elves couldn't reach him, and he doesn't answer owls with any regularity."
"Then be irregular," Arcturus said. "Send it every day until he responds if you must. Pay extra for to track his signs if it is possible." He turned from the tapestry with the deliberate finality of a man closing a door on something he needs time to think about. "And call a family meeting. Everyone. If they can be found, they attend." He paused at the doorway. "I want to know who this woman is. This Esmeralda Malfoy. What branch she comes from. Whether Lucius knew about this match before it happened."
"And if he did?" Melania asked.
Arcturus considered this.
"Then we will have a conversation," he said, "about what it means to conduct family business without consulting the head of the family and figure out what in Merlin's name the Malfoys are eating to snatch three Blacks! Are they veelas?"
He walked out of the drawing room with the bearing of a man who has recovered his dignity entirely and is prepared to pretend the tea incident never occurred.
Melania looked at the tapestry for a moment after he left. At the four new names. At Corvus Arcturus Black, which her husband had very deliberately not mentioned.
She smiled.
Then she went to start writing.