Sirius stared at the financial ledgers open across his desk. He was not worried about money. He had enough to live comfortably for himself, Esme, the children, and generations beyond them without needing to lift a finger, and that was before touching the main vault. But Blacktide was another matter. A castle of its age and size demanded constant attention, and attention, in this case, meant contracts and a considerable amount of gold.
He glanced up from the numbers and out the window. A crew of goblins were working on the eastern wall, precise and unhurried in the way goblins always were when they considered a task worth doing properly. It had been easy enough to find workers this close to Goblin country, and the arrangement had been made easier still by the fact that Sirius and Esme had returned every piece of goblin silver and every artifact in the castle that originally belonged to goblins. It was something no previous owner of Blacktide had apparently thought to do.
Goblins never stopped considering their creations theirs, but wizards believed payment settled the matter. And it's that gap alone had started more than one war.
"Why don't you just rent it?" Sirius had asked Ragnok once.
"Rent it?" The goblin had gone very still in the way that meant he was not dismissing the idea so much as turning it over carefully, looking for where it would break.
"Yes. You create something a wizard needs, they pay a monthly or yearly fee to use it, and when the arrangement ends, it returns to you. You already have access to every vault in Britain. I mean the infrastructure is there. And if they breach the terms, the contract does the work of reclaiming it for you. No wars. No chasing down heirlooms. And you get more gold and you can keep the ownership title."
Ragnok looked at him the way he always looked at Sirius — with the wariness of someone who had decided not to trust a man but kept finding, to their irritation, that the man kept saying things worth listening to.
As for Esme, the location of the stasis chamber and the rooms around it has become her own personal laboratory, office, and even clinic all in one. Esme herself has considerable wealth of her own. She is a Malfoy after all, most of it coming from her mother's side of the family. Plus, she has income from the medic spells and royalties from the published potions. She already published her monitoring tool that allows a healer to monitor a patient's vitals if they are on their bed. It has become popular in many hospitals as it saved magical energy but also requires them to easily keep an eye on the patient's situations without needing to constantly use their wands as this can affect treatment if there are multiple healers dealing with a patient.
With the money that he had, Sirius is also considering creating his own enterprise. There are many magical and muggle innovations that Sirius believes he can use for the magical world especially here in Britain. He should consult with Uncle Marius with that. The man may have lived in the muggle world, but he didn't just keep to himself. He builds enterprises and connections that he is considered wealthy in muggle terms.
*****
Sirius, Esme, and the children had settled well into Blacktide. The rooms had been designed around the children's preferences, which had made the process considerably longer and more negotiated than Sirius had anticipated, but the result was a castle that felt, improbably, like a home.
Rigel and Corvus still shared a bedroom. Sirius and Esme had quietly agreed not to push the matter. Whatever the boys had been through before they came to them it was not something to be hurried out of. They would find their own way to independence when they were ready. For now, Rigel simply slowed his pace whenever Corvus needed him to, and Corvus smiled at him in the way he smiled at everyone, warm and unhurried, as though the world was generally a reasonable place and he expected it to continue being one.
Corvus required a cane on difficult days, or the wheelchair when his body had simply decided it had done enough. He never complained. He would look up at you from whatever he was doing — a book, a sketch, the careful observation of something growing on the windowsill — with that smile, and somehow the smile always felt like reassurance rather than the other way around. Sirius had caught more than one goblin workman going considerably out of their way to bring Corvus something interesting from the eastern wall. The child has already had people wrapped around his finger without apparently trying.
Alphard was two and conducting himself accordingly. He followed Sirius everywhere, said no to everything including things he clearly meant yes to, and had recently taken to calling everything he disliked — and several things he did not dislike — ugly. Sirius still had no idea where he had learned the word. He had also developed an ongoing and creative relationship with every elevated surface in the castle. The fireplace. The sofa. The unfinished bookshelves.
Rigel had appointed himself the early warning system, appearing at Sirius's elbow with the calm urgency of someone delivering a tactical report whenever Alphard was attempting something inadvisable. Sirius had taken to saying good job, pup approximately four times a day.
And then there was Lyra.
Sirius had thought, in those early months, that his youngest daughter was the quiet one. The watchful one. The one who regarded you from across a room with those grey eyes that missed nothing and offered very little in return. He had found it faintly unnerving and had privately attributed it to her years of illness, to all that time spent in beds and clinics observing the world from a careful distance.
He had been wrong. She had simply been waiting until she had somewhere to go.
"Oh, Merlin's balls!" Sirius cursed as he ran out of his office.
He was out of the door and down the corridor before the words had finished leaving his mouth.
"LYRA PORTIA BLACK!"
His voice came out with a volume and a particular edge that he recognized, distantly, as the voice his own father had used during incidents he had caused at approximately the same age — a voice he had sworn he would never use, and which had apparently been waiting in his vocal cords for the appropriate provocation.
Lyra looked down at him from fifteen feet up on the exterior of the eastern tower, entirely unruffled.
"GET DOWN FROM THERE RIGHT NOW!"
"No."
"Lyra —"
"I'm looking," she said, with great dignity, and turned back to whatever she had been looking at. Which appeared to be the sea.
Sirius stood at the base of the tower and breathed carefully through his nose. He was aware of Corvus watching from his spot on the low stone bench, his book lowered, wearing the expression of someone observing something both alarming and extremely interesting. Rigel had appeared beside Sirius, Alphard anchored firmly under one arm, watching with an expression that might, in certain lights, have contained something in the vicinity of sympathy.
"How," Sirius said, with great restraint, "did you even get up there?"
Lyra pointed, helpfully, at the series of decorative stone protrusions running up the tower's exterior. They were, now that he looked at them, quite adequately spaced for a small and determined child with no fear of heights and strong opinions about looking at things.
He was going to have to climb up and get her. He was too afraid to use a spell and risk startling her.
He was also, immediately and comprehensively, warding every exterior surface of every tower on this property before the end of the week.
Forty minutes later, Lyra was on the ground, apparently unbothered by the experience, and Sirius was standing with his hands on his knees catching his breath, having discovered that the decorative stone protrusions were rather less adequate for a fully grown man.
"Papa," Lyra said.
He looked up. It's still feels new to him every time the children call him "dad", "da", or "papa".
She was regarding him with those grey eyes that saw everything and revealed very little, in the way she had that still occasionally made him feel he was being assessed by someone considerably older than four. And here he had thought his daughter was simply the quiet one. Forget that. She was going to be the death of him.
"The sea is very big," she informed him.
"Yes," Sirius said. "It is."
"I wanted to see it properly."
He straightened up. He looked at her small, earnest face and the wind-tangled hair and the absolute absence of remorse in her expression, and felt the complicated, helpless thing he was beginning to recognize as what parental love actually felt like in practice — the specific mixture of terror and exasperation and a tenderness so large it had nowhere to go.
"I'll take you up the tower," he said. "The proper way. With me. When I've warded it."
Lyra considered this. "When?"
"Soon."
"How soon?"
"Very soon."
She took his hand, which she did not always do. Corvus watched them cross the courtyard toward him with his small, warm smile, and Rigel set Alphard down with the focused care of someone completing a mission successfully.
Good job, pup, Sirius thought.
The wards went up that very day. All of them. The towers, the exterior walls, the cliff edge, the upper shelves of the unfinished library, around the fireplace, the kitchen threshold, and every bathroom in the family wing. Cushioning charms on every stone floor. Safety wards on every window above ground level. A comprehensive barrier along the cliff that would activate if anything under a certain weight came within three feet of the edge.
Esme found him finishing the last of it at approximately seven in the evening, standing in the corridor outside the kitchen with his wand still out.
"Sirius."
"I'm nearly done."
"You have been at this for four hours."
"There were more surfaces than I initially accounted for."
Esme looked at the corridor. At the subtle shimmer of no fewer than three overlapping ward-layers on a completely ordinary stretch of stone floor. "You even warded the floor outside the kitchens".
"Lyra climbed a tower this morning."
"I heard."
"Fifteen feet."
"Je sais."
"She is four, Esme."
Esme was quiet for a moment in the way she was quiet when she was choosing her words. "A small fall will not kill her," she said, with the calm of someone who has delivered this opinion before and expects to deliver it again.
"Children fall. They learn from falling. If we remove every possible consequence of every possible risk, we are not keeping them safe — we are keeping them from learning where the edges are."
"I have cushioned the edges."
"You have cushioned all the edges. Which is precisely what I mean."
He looked at her. She looked at him. This was, he was learning, one of the fundamental tensions of raising children with a woman whose professional life had been spent making precise, evidence-based decisions about acceptable risk.
"The cliff," he said. "Surely the cliff —"
"The cliff ward is reasonable," she conceded. "The floor outside the kitchen is not."
He lowered his wand. "I just need them to be —"
"Safe," Esme said. "I know." Her voice had shifted, very slightly. "So do I." A pause. "On trouvera un équilibre. On le trouve toujours."
He put his wand away. "No Floo," he said. "I'm still not putting a Floo in the castle."
Esme closed her eyes briefly. "Sirius —"
"The portkeys work. The cottage at the gate —"
"Is a twenty-minute walk from the family wing and a portkey is very inconvenient."
"Fifteen minutes, through the east garden."
"It's autumn." Which meant it would be winter soon. Who treks from their castle to a cottage outside the gates just to use the Floo?
They had, in the end, the same conversation they always had about this, and arrived at the same place — the cottage at the gate remained the Floo point. Esme reserved the right to revisit the matter in spring, and Sirius agreed to remove the ward from the kitchen floor, which he did under mild protest. It was, he was finding, what compromise felt like in practice.
*****
The forest came with the property. Sirius hadn't fully processed this when they moved in.
He had been occupied with the cliff wards and the tower wards and the bathroom wards and the ongoing negotiation with Esme about the kitchen floor, but the forest was there, running along the northern edge of the grounds — dark and old and entirely theirs.
Like most magical forests, it had its own ideas about what lived in it and what rules applied inside it, which was either comforting or alarming depending on how you felt about things having their own ideas. Sirius was still deciding.
He was looking at the tree line when Esme appeared beside him.
"Non," she said.
Sirius turned to look at her. "I haven't said anything."
"You do not have to say anything. I know that look."
"What look?"
"The look that means you are about to ward an entire forest."
Sirius said nothing. This was, he had learned, not as effective a defense as remaining silent felt like it should be.
"Sirius."
"They could get lost in there," he said. "Lyra alone could —"
"Lyra is not going into the forest unsupervised."
"She climbed a tower."
"That was outside the forest."
"My point is that she is creative about —"
"Are you genuinely planning to ward an entire magical forest?"
He had, in fact, been mentally mapping the perimeter. "It's not as unreasonable as you're making it sound."
Esme looked at him with the expression she reserved for things she found genuinely difficult to believe. "C'est une forêt, Sirius. It is large. It is old. It has its own magic. You would be trying to put a ward over something that was here before this castle and will be here long after both of us are gone."
"I could start at the tree line —"
"Non."
"Just a boundary marker, so they can't —"
"Non."
"Esme —"
"A boundary marker," she said, with the precision of someone closing a negotiation, "is reasonable. Warding the interior of an ancient magical forest is not. The forest will not thank you, the magic will not hold cleanly, and you will have wasted three days that could be spent on things that will actually keep the children safe."
Sirius opened his mouth.
"Une limite," Esme repeated. "That is all."
He closed his mouth. He looked at the forest. The forest did not offer an opinion, which he found unhelpful.
"Fine," he said. "A boundary marker."
"Good."
"With an alert charm."
"...Acceptable."
"And possibly —"
"Sirius."
"I'm just saying, if I added a secondary —"
"Are you serious?"
He paused. He knew, with the certainty of a man who has made this joke before and suffered the consequences, that he should not make it. He made it anyway. "Well. It is technically my name."
The smack landed with considerably more force than its source suggested it should.
"OW —"
"You knew that was coming."
"I did," he admitted, rubbing his arm. "I maintain it was worth it."
Esme regarded him with narrowed eyes. He smiled at her. She pressed her lips together against something that was not, quite, a smile.
"Regarde, maman. Un joli hibou." Lyra's voice, carrying from somewhere behind them.
They turned. Lyra was holding a small tawny owl with both arms, the way one might hold something both precious and slightly alarming. The owl, for its part, appeared entirely unbothered.
"Oiseau," Esme said, moving toward her, "where did you find this owl?"
Where, indeed. Sirius glanced past them toward the boys, who had gone very quiet. That generally meant something was happening. A lesson Sirius learned as a first time parent.
"What do you have there, pup?" Sirius called.
Rigel looked up. He was holding a snowy owl with the careful, deliberate grip of a child who had assessed the situation and decided that competence was the appropriate response. "Owls, Papa."
"Jolis," Corvus agreed from his wheelchair, with the serene certainty of someone offering an objective assessment. He had a brown tawny owl in his lap and two long-eared owls perched on the arms of his chair, regarding him with an air of having chosen him specifically.
"Mon petit ange," Esme said, arriving at his side with the brisk calm of someone conducting a medical assessment, "do not let them scratch you."
"They won't," Corvus said, with the confidence of someone who had already established terms with the owls.
"Where did these come from?" Sirius asked. He was certain the grounds were warded against unnecessary arrivals. The Custodians used the mirrors he had developed for communication; there was very little reason for messenger owls to be —
He stopped.
The owls had letters tied to their feet.
"Boys. Those are messenger owls." He looked between them. "You cannot simply collect messenger owls. They are carrying letters. To people. Possibly important people."
"There are many," Rigel said.
"Very many," Corvus agreed.
"Many," Sirius repeated. "How many?"
"Outside," Rigel said.
"Outside —" Sirius turned. "I told you not to go beyond the castle gates without —"
"Sirius." Esme's voice came from the direction of the gates, she was looking at something she had not yet fully processed. "I think you should come here."
He crossed the courtyard in a few long strides and stopped beside her.
And that's where he saw it.
Before the gates, covering every available surface — the bridge, the cottage roof, the rocks, the trees along the drive, and a considerable portion of the ground itself — were owls. Hundreds of them. Perched and waiting, patient and silent.
The boundary ward had held, which was something. But with this many birds pressing against it, some had inevitably found their way through the gaps.
"Qu'est-ce que c'est que ça," Esme said, very quietly.
Sirius stared. "What in Merlin's name —"
"Sirius." Esme had moved to the nearest owl at the gate. She untied the letter from its foot with practiced efficiency and turned it over. Her expression shifted in a way that made him look at her properly. "They are all addressed to you."
He took the letter from her. The handwriting on the front was precise and old-fashioned, the ink slightly faded — but the hand was one he recognized without needing to think about it. Something cold moved through him.
He looked out at the hundreds of owls waiting beyond the gate, each one carrying the same hand, the same seal, the same impossible volume of correspondence from a woman who had never in his memory written him so much as a single word.
His grandmother had sent them. All of them.
Sirius did not, as a rule, frighten easily. But his hand, he noticed, was not entirely steady as he turned the letter over.
Something had happened. Something significant enough that Melania Black had sat down and written until she had no more words left — or, more likely, had said the same words so many times that the owls had simply kept coming. Which meant it was not one thing.
"Sirius," Esme said. Her hand was at his arm, steady and certain. "What is it?"
He looked at the owls. He looked at the letter in his hand.
"Something's wrong," he said.
*****
Lucius Malfoy looked at his wife.
"Lord Black wants me?"
"He summoned me to a family meeting," Narcissa said. "And invited you as well."
Lucius was quiet for a moment. He was a man who prided himself on reading a room, a negotiation, a political current — but this piece of information required a moment to properly examine. Lord Arcturus Black III had never made any secret of his opinion of Lucius Malfoy as if he was a thief trying to steal the Black fortune, which in political sense is what Lucius is really trying to do. As for family meetings, it has always been direct lines only. Which meant his wife, not him.
So why would Arcturus Black summon him?
BANG.
The sound came from the direction of the Floo point in the sitting room, followed immediately by the sequence of French profanity that Lucius had grown up hearing and had learned very early never to repeat in good company.
He knew, before he had even turned around, exactly who it was.
His father stood in the doorway of the sitting room, robes slightly askew from the Floo, grey hair immaculate despite everything, and wearing an expression that suggested the last several hours had been a considerable personal affront.
"Father." Lucius stared at him. "What are you doing here? You are supposed to be in France."
"I am here," Abraxas Malfoy said, with the wounded dignity of a man who had spent seventy years cultivating an unimpeachable sense of his own consequence, "because that insufferable, arrogant, overbearing old crow summoned me. Me. As though I answer to him. As though the Malfoy name means nothing. As though I am some — some —" He appeared to run briefly out of words, which Lucius had seen happen perhaps twice in his life. "I have half a mind to send it straight back."
"Lord Black summoned you as well?" Lucius asked. "Why?"
"I have no idea." Abraxas swept further into the room, each step carrying the energy of a man conducting a grievance. "I received a howler from Arcturus — a howler, Lucius, as though I am a schoolboy who has misplaced his homework — and then, not an hour later, a perfectly civil invitation from Lady Black, which tells me that his wife has rather more sense than he does, which I have always suspected."
"What did the howler say?"
Abraxas made a gesture that encompassed the fundamental impossibility of the question. "It was so loud and so sustained that I could not distinguish one word from the next. The man was bellowing. All I could make out, once the noise had reduced itself to something approaching language, was that I was to check the family tapestry." He drew himself up. "Now if you will excuse me."
"You could have written to me to check it," Lucius said.
Abraxas did not dignify this with a response. He was already moving toward the tapestry room with the focused momentum of a man who had decided something needed to be confronted directly, and Lucius and Narcissa followed in his wake.
The tapestry room was dim and cool, the great woven genealogy covering most of the far wall, centuries of Malfoy names rendered in thread that seemed to shift in the low light. Abraxas stopped in front of it.
Lucius came up beside him. His father's back was to him, shoulders rigid, one hand half-raised as though he had reached for something and thought better of it.
"Father?"
Abraxas said nothing. Then, without a word, without a sound, he went down.
"Father —" Lucius caught him by the arm, barely, and lowered him rather than let him fall. "Father!" He turned. "Narcissa, help me, he's —"
He heard his wife's sharp intake of breath. Not the kind that meant someone had fainted. The other kind.
He looked up at her. She was staring at the tapestry.
Lucius straightened, still half-supporting his father, and turned to look at it himself. His own name was there, as it always had been. Narcissa's beside it, the thread connecting them down to Draco's name, neat and unambiguous and exactly as it had always —
There.
Next to his name. A line he had never seen before, connecting outward to a name that should not have been there, could not have been there, had certainly not been there the last time he had looked, which was when? He couldn't remember. And from that name, a line to another, and beneath them both, four more.
Esmeralda Clarisse Malfoy.
Sirius Orion Black.
And four children, named and woven into the tapestry as neatly and permanently as though they had always been there.
Lucius Malfoy was not, by nature, a man given to strong physical reactions. He had sat across negotiating tables from people who wanted him ruined and maintained his composure. He had weathered political reversals that would have broken lesser men without so much as a loosened cravat.
He rolled his eyes.
Then he went down.
"Lucius!"
Narcissa stood alone in the tapestry room, looking at her husband and her father-in-law arranged unconscious on the floor, and then at the tapestry, and then back at them.
She looked at the tapestry for a long moment.
"Bien," she said to no one in particular.
She called for a house elf.