Sirius sat at the center of the study. Facing the desk. Hands on his knees. Looking acutely like a schoolboy facing the headmaster after being caught doing something magnificent and terrible in equal measure.
His grandfather, whom he had not seen in over a decade, stood behind the massive mahogany desk, arms crossed, looking down at him with the full, unhurried weight of a man who had been waiting for this conversation for a very long time and intended to conduct it on his own terms.
It had been ages since Sirius had found himself under that look. Ever since his sorting into Gryffindor, his grandfather's countenance had carried a permanent quality of disappointed expectation — not that Sirius had been subjected to it constantly. His parents had made a habit of leaving him at home during formal events, afraid he would cause a scandal simply by standing there. They brought Regulus instead.
Truth be told, Sirius would have bolted the absolute second he saw the sheer volume of family members packed into the hallway. Who would have guessed a full family meeting was underway? He had wanted to curse the moment he laid eyes on them. He had genuinely believed he was dealing with just his grandmother or at least his grandfather. Had he known he would be walking into the entire collective madhouse — in-laws included — he never would have set foot back here.
But before anyone could begin demanding answers, Arcturus, as paterfamilias, had extracted Sirius for a private conversation despite the protests from the rest of them. Cassiopeia had been loudest, insisting she be included. Abraxas had been quietly furious — he had questions about his daughter, about how any of this had happened, and he wanted them answered now. Lucius stood just behind his father, jaw set, the precise image of a man containing himself through sheer force of social discipline. But being paterfamilias of the House of Black outranked in-laws, however influential, and Arcturus had made that clear without raising his voice.
He also believed that not everything needed to be aired in front of a room that included people who were not family.
"So," Arcturus said, breaking the silence. "Is there anything you wish to say to me?"
"Well," Sirius said, his voice carrying that familiar edge — smooth aristocratic charm threaded through with structural rebellion. "I suppose 'hello' would be a start. Though, given the welcoming committee outside, I'm tempted to ask if I should have brought a defensive strategy."
"You think this a jest, Sirius?" Arcturus's voice dropped to a low, measured register that made the room feel suddenly smaller. "You think your family's concerns are a stage for your tiresome rebellions?"
Before Sirius could summon another response, Arcturus leaned forward and placed his palms flat on the mahogany desk.
"Rigel," Arcturus said.
The name hit the room like a physical blow. The easy posture Sirius had been maintaining vanished instantly. His breath caught. His spine went rigid. The blood left his face.
Arcturus did not pause. His grey eyes remained locked onto his grandson's, entirely unblinking. "Corvus. Lyra. And Alphard."
"How did you—" Sirius's voice cracked, the smooth charm gone entirely, replaced by the raw defensive alarm of a father whose perimeter had just been breached. "How did you know about them?"
"I suppose the long years of your self-imposed exile made you forget the fundamental nature of the house you walked away from," Arcturus said, his tone cold and precise. "Did you truly believe you could hide them from us? Our family's tapestry records the birth of every soul carrying Black blood with the permanence of old magic, Sirius. Legitimate or otherwise. The very moment they drew their first breath; their names were woven into it."
He gestured toward the tapestry mounted on the far wall.
Sirius turned. It was more extensive than the one at Grimmauld — larger, denser, the threads finer and more numerous, the record of the bloodline stretching back further than he had ever seen it rendered. And there, unmistakably, was his own name in gold. Beside it, Esme's. And beneath them both, four more threads, each carrying a name he had chosen. Sirius's jaw tightened. How long had this been here?
"Had you undergone heirship training in the first place, you would have known about this tapestry and how it works."
"It's different from Grimmauld?"
"The one at Grimmauld was maintained manually. Your mother updated it herself — additions, removals, the blasting of names she found objectionable. It reflected her preferences as much as the family record." Arcturus's voice was even. "This one is not manual. It is old magic, older than the house. It updates itself accurately, without anyone's intervention. It does not care about preferences."
"How long have you known?" The panic was controlled but present. If his grandfather knew — if the tapestry had shown what Sirius and Esme had worked so carefully to conceal — then the entire foundation of the cover story was already compromised before he had opened his mouth.
"A few days."
"A few days?"
"I had not consulted the tapestry in some years." Arcturus straightened to his full height, his voice dropping to the register he reserved for things that had genuinely tested his composure. "You may imagine, then, what it was to walk into that room and find four names I had never been told existed — names I should have been told, Sirius, as the head of this family." The grey eyes were very steady and very cold. "So. You will understand why I have questions."
"Considering none of you have made any effort to contact me in years, I was not under the impression this family considered itself entitled to anything from me," Sirius said, his voice hardening.
Arcturus's eyes narrowed. "Whatever grievances you carry, Sirius — and I do not dismiss that you have them — they are not relevant to this. I am the paterfamilias of this family. That is not a title that expires because you chose to absent yourself from it. Children carrying the Black name are my concern regardless of your feelings on the matter. Regardless of the distance you put between yourself and this house. Regardless of anything." His voice did not rise. It didn't need to. "You should have told me. Even if it is just me."
Sirius stood up.
"Told you," He said. The calm in his voice was the dangerous kind — the kind that had nothing underneath it but pressure with nowhere to go. "You want me tell you? You, who said nothing for years. You, who let me walk out of this family at sixteen and made no effort — none — to reach me. And now you sit there and tell me I owe you information about my children?" His jaw was tight. "You don't get to be absent from my life and then claim authority over it the moment it becomes convenient."
"You ran away!"
"You didn't stop me!"
"You should have come to us after you left Grimmauld!"
"Why should I?" Sirius's voice cracked like a whip. "Every message, every signal, every silence from this family told me the same thing — that my sorting was a disgrace, that I was a disgrace, that the House of Black had no use for a heir who couldn't manage to land in Slytherin like every Black before him. You want to tell me I should have come to you? On what basis? On what evidence, at sixteen years old, was I supposed to believe that door was open?"
Arcturus straightened. "The door was always open, Sirius. That was never in question."
"Your actions said otherwise." Sirius's voice was flat. "Every formal event I was kept away from. Every gathering where Regulus was presented and I was not just because he was the grandson who got sorted in Slytherin. Every silence from this house after my sorting. You want to tell me the door was open — I'm telling you that nothing you did suggested that to me."
"Your sorting was a scandal," Arcturus said. "I will not pretend otherwise. But a scandal is not a disqualification. You were still heir to the most ancient and most noble House of Black. A Gryffindor sorting does not override succession law. It does not override family magic. Your name was never removed from this tapestry. Your position was never formally revoked. Not even once."
"Then why did it feel exactly like it was?" Sirius said. "Because from where I was standing, inside that house, with that woman — the message was perfectly clear. I was an embarrassment. I was tolerated at best. And this family did nothing to suggest any different."
Arcturus was quiet for a moment.
"I will not pretend otherwise — I am very much at fault in this." He paused. "I knew your mother was difficult," he said. "I had always known that. But difficult and what she apparently was doing are not the same thing, and I did not understand the extent until it was too late." He paused. "By the time I understood what she had done — how she had used every absence, every rebellion, every incident of yours to paint a picture that kept me from seeing clearly — you were already gone. And I told myself you needed time. That you were young and furious and that you would come back when the fury burned down."
He looked at Sirius directly.
"I tried to find you. After you graduated. After you joined the Aurors I knew where you were, but the corps has its own authority and its own protections and approaching you there would have required you to be willing to be approached." A pause. "You were not. And then you left the Aurors and you disappeared entirely and I could not find you at all."
Sirius stared at him.
"You looked for me?" he said. It came out differently than he intended. Less controlled.
"Yes," Arcturus said simply. "I looked."
"Why would you do that?"
Arcturus looked at him for a long moment. Something moved across his face that Sirius had never seen there before — not warmth exactly, but the expression of a man setting down a tool he has relied on for a very long time because he has decided it is not the right one for this.
"Because you are my grandson," Arcturus said. "Not just the heir. Not just because you are a Black. You." He paused. "I have made a great many decisions in my life on behalf of this family that I would make differently now. I cannot undo them. What I can tell you is that I looked for you because losing you was not something I was willing to accept as permanent. Even if you were."
Sirius said nothing for a moment. The silence had a different quality to it — not the combative silence of the argument but the silence of someone who has received something unexpected and doesn't yet know what to do with it.
"Then why," he said quietly, "did you leave me there? If that's true. If you knew what she was." The words were controlled but only just. "You knew, Grandfather. You just said you knew she was difficult. You knew what kind of woman she was. And you left two boys in that house with her, and you looked the other way." His voice dropped. "So, I need you to tell me why. Not the politics of it. Not the family image. Why."
Arcturus was still for a long moment.
"Because I underestimated her," he said. "I knew she was unstable. I believed the structure of a household would contain it. I was wrong." He paused. "And I will tell you something else I have not said to anyone. When you were sorted into Gryffindor, I was furious. Not at you — or not only at you. At her. Because I knew, the moment that hat made its decision, that she would make it into something catastrophic. That she would take a sorting and turn it into a verdict." He looked at the desk. "And she did. And because I was angry at the scandal, she had made of it, I told myself about the distance between you and this house was her doing and therefore her problem to resolve. I looked away. I focused on the external damage, and I told myself the interior would settle."
He stopped.
"It did not settle. And by the time I understood what was happening inside that house — what she had done to you, what she had done to Regulus, how she had used my absence and my anger and my assumption that things were being handled — you were already gone. And the letters I sent went unanswered because they never reached you." His jaw tightened. "I allowed my own blindness to become your burden. That is not something I can undo. But I will not sit here and pretend it was anything other than what it was — a failure of my responsibility to you. As your grandfather. As the head of this family."
"You wrote me letters?"
"Several."
"I never received them."
Arcturus was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again something in his voice had shifted — not emotion exactly, but the specific quality of a man delivering information he has had time to sit with and has not yet made peace with.
"I know that now," he said. "I did not know it then. Your mother intercepted them. Every one. And the replies I received — the ones that made your position perfectly clear, that told me you wanted nothing to do with this family and that I should not contact you again —" He paused. "They were not yours. She wrote them. In a close enough approximation of you that I did not question it." His jaw tightened. "I believed you had made your feelings known and that pushing further would only drive you further away. So, I stopped. And by the time I discovered what she had done — after she died, when I found the copies, she had kept — you had been gone for years, and I had no way to reach you."
Sirius stared at him. "I don't understand," he said. "You are the head of this family. You have been for years. You have the authority, the magic, the resources — this entire house answers to you. How did one woman run circles around all of that? How did she have that much reach inside a family like this without anyone stopping her?"
Arcturus was silent for a moment. The silence of a man who has known this question was coming and has spent considerable time deciding how to answer it honestly.
"Because I allowed the conditions that gave her that reach," he said. "And that begins with something that happened long before you were born. Long before your parents were married." He paused. "Your mother did not come to that marriage by conventional means. She was not selected for it. She engineered it. And Pollux and I permitted it because by the time we understood what she had done, we had very few alternatives left."
He looked at Sirius directly.
"There was another match arranged for your father. A respectable one. A pure-blood family of good standing — the Princes. Eileen Prince. The arrangement was serious and the discussions were well advanced." He stopped. "Walburga found out. She cursed Eileen Prince publicly. In front of witnesses. And Eileen Prince, who had abilities of her own, said things in response that were specific enough and accurate enough that several other families withdrew entirely from consideration."
Sirius said nothing. He was very still.
"What you must understand," Arcturus continued, "is that her actions were not merely those of a jealous woman protecting her interests. Walburga had developed an obsession with your father long before any formal arrangements were being discussed. An unnatural one. He was her cousin. Her first cousin. We were aware of it. We told ourselves it was a passing fixation, the kind that young women of her temperament sometimes develop and outgrow. We were wrong about that as well." He paused. "She did not outgrow it. She acted on it. And when the opportunity to remove her primary obstacle presented itself, she took it without hesitation and without any apparent concern for the consequences."
"We were left managing a scandal with no remaining options except its cause," Arcturus said. "Pollux and I agreed to the marriage because it was the only arrangement that contained the situation. We told ourselves it would moderate her. That structure and responsibility would direct whatever this was into something manageable." He looked at his hands. "We were wrong. And in making that decision we handed her exactly the position she had wanted and the authority inside this family that came with it. Whatever she did after that — the letters, the isolation, all of it — she did from inside a role that we gave her."
Sirius was quiet for a long moment. He was looking at the desk rather than at Arcturus. He is not avoiding his grandfather's eyes, but he is deep in thought.
"My father knew, didn't he?" Sirius said finally. "He was there when she cursed Eileen Prince. He knew exactly what the marriage was and why it was happening."
"Yes," Arcturus said.
"So, he spent his entire life in that house knowing he had been maneuvered into it." Sirius's voice was even. "Knowing what she was. Knowing how he got there." He paused. "And he took it out on us. Not the way she did. He just — wasn't there. He checked out. Left two boys alone in that house with her and chose to look the other way because fighting her was a battle he had already decided he had lost before it began."
He looked up.
"I understand it," he said. "I can see the trap he was in. I can see how a man ends up like that." His jaw tightened. "It doesn't change what he did with the life he had inside it. He had sons. He knew what was happening to us and he made his choice every single day. He could have gotten us out. He has the option to, but he didn't. That doesn't mean I forgave him. Understanding why someone fails you isn't the same as forgiving them for it. I spent a long time thinking those two things were the same." He stopped. "They aren't."
Arcturus said nothing for a moment. "No," he said quietly. "They are not."
He did not argue. He could not argue. He had handed Orion the conditions of that life and he knew it. Orion was his son after all and he failed him as much as he failed his grandsons.
Arcturus looked at him for a moment longer. Then he straightened in his chair with the deliberateness of a man closing one ledger and opening another.
"The children," he said. "Tell me about them."
The shift was so clean and so characteristically Arcturus that Sirius almost laughed. Almost. He exhaled instead, slowly, and let the pivot happen because fighting it would have been exhausting and pointless in equal measure.
"What do you want to know?"
"Everything," Arcturus said. "Starting with their mother. You said she is a Malfoy. Abraxas's daughter." His eyes were steady. "I was not aware Abraxas had a daughter of that description. Which means she has been kept out of sight deliberately, or she has kept herself out of sight deliberately. I want to know which."
"It's not exactly my story to tell," Sirius said.
"Funny," Arcturus said. "Abraxas said something remarkably similar. That it was a Malfoy family matter."
Sirius scoffed. The sound was short and sharp and carried a considerable amount of weight in very little space. "Abraxas would say that. A Malfoy family matter." He shook his head. "Esme didn't have a father, Grandfather. Not in any meaningful sense. Abraxas was a name on a document and an absence in a house. At least my father was physically present. At least I could point to a man in a room and say that is him. Esme couldn't even do that much. So, no. It is not a Malfoy family matter. It is her matter. And it is not mine to give away."
Arcturus said nothing. He did not push it.
"What I can tell you," Sirius continued, "is how we met. And what happened after." He settled back slightly. "During the war I was working as an Auror and as a member of the Order of the Phoenix simultaneously. The work took me across Europe frequently. That was where I met Esme. She was a healer in training back then. We were in the same places at the same times often enough that it became something." He paused. "We married quietly. She wasn't speaking to her family. I wasn't speaking to mine. There was no one to inform and we didn't feel the need to perform it for an audience."
"You eloped," Arcturus said.
"We eloped," Sirius confirmed. "When she became pregnant, I sent her away. My position made her a target — as an Auror, as an Order member, the risk of her being used against me was real and I wasn't willing to take it. I kept her out of Britain and out of the conflict as much as I could manage." He paused. "After Voldemort fell, I had a significant disagreement with Dumbledore. With the Order. With people I had considered my closest friends. The disagreement was final and I left. All of it." He looked at Arcturus steadily. "I joined the Custodians after that. That is where I have been."
Arcturus was quiet for a moment. "The Custodians," he said, and there was something in his voice that had not been there before — a subtle recalibration, the sound of a man updating his assessment. "That explains considerably why you were impossible to find. Their operatives are not meant to be found." He paused. "That is not an organization one simply walks into, Sirius. Their standards are exceptional."
"I'm aware," Sirius said.
Arcturus said nothing for a moment. He looked at his grandson across the desk with the expression of a man who has received more than he anticipated and is taking stock of it quietly.
Then he looked at the tapestry. At the four names beneath Sirius and Esme's. His eyes moved across them with the focused attention he gave everything that mattered.
"The children," he said. "Tell me about them."
"Rigel and Corvus are twins, Lyra is my only daughter and Alphard is the youngest," Sirius said. "Rigel is the eldest. Corvus—" He stopped briefly. "Corvus was ill from birth. A serious magical malediction. Esme identified it early and even she, with everything she knows, could not find a solution through conventional means. We spent a considerable amount of time trying. Healers. Potions. Every available method." He paused. "Eventually we found an ancient ritual. Old magic, not fully documented. It worked." He looked at Arcturus steadily. "But we did not understand how far the consequences would reach."
Arcturus went very still.
"This ancient ritual," he repeated slowly. Something had shifted in his expression — not surprise exactly but the look of a man connecting the most important pieces together.
"Yes. An ancient one. We just didn't know there was consequences."
"That is what caused it," Arcturus said. It was not quite a question. "The golden light. Every carrier of Black blood simultaneously." He looked at Sirius. "I had been trying to understand the mechanism since it happened. I could not identify it." He paused.
"We didn't know," Sirius said. "I was — the ritual was not a simple undertaking. I was not in a condition to feel what happened when it moved through everyone because I was rendered unconscious because of it. By the time I understood the extent of it, it was already done." He paused. "I learned about Uncle Marius. That was when I began to understand how far it had reached."
Arcturus nodded slowly. "Marius was the most visible result. But not the only one." He was quiet for a moment. Then, with the careful precision of a man reporting something he has decided is relevant — "I am still an old man, Sirius. That has not changed. But I will admit that I have felt considerably better since that morning than I have in some years. The stiffness. The fatigue." He paused. "It is not unwelcome."
Sirius looked at him. "I'm glad," he said. "Genuinely."
Arcturus looked at him for a moment with an expression that was difficult to read and did not try to make itself easier. Then he gave a single small nod that acknowledged the statement without making anything more of it than it was.
The silence that followed had a different quality from the ones before it. Lighter, somehow. The way a room feels after something heavy has finally been named and set down. But neither of them moved to fill it immediately and after a moment it tipped from contemplative into something slightly uncomfortable.
Sirius looked at the tapestry.
He hadn't let himself look at it properly since he walked in. Now, with the argument behind them and the silence sitting awkward between them, his eyes moved across it properly for the first time. It was more extensive than the one at Grimmauld. It is larger, denser, the threads finer and the record of the bloodline stretching back further than he had ever seen it rendered. He found his own name easily enough. Gold. Esme's beside it, equally gold, settled and certain. The four threads beneath them carrying names he had chosen,
He looked at them for a moment with something in his chest that he didn't have time for right now.
His eyes moved on. Following the branches, the lines, the long-accumulated record of everything the House of Black had been. He traced the threads by color — gold, silver, white and black.
He found Regulus.
The thread was black.
"What does the black thread mean?" Sirius asked. He kept his voice even.
"That the family member is dead," Arcturus said. He looked at the tapestry briefly then back at Sirius. "The tapestry does not record when or how. Only the fact of it."
"Regulus," Sirius said.
"Yes." Arcturus's voice was measured but something underneath it was not. "I know what you must think. That he disappeared. That nobody knows what became of him. That he is alive somewhere and we need to find him. But the tapestry does not lie, Sirius. It never has. Whatever happened to your brother — wherever he went and whatever he did at the end of it — he is gone." He paused. "We never recovered a body. I looked. I had people look. There was nothing to find."
Sirius said nothing.
He was looking at the black thread with an expression he was working very hard to keep neutral and was not entirely succeeding. Because the thread was wrong. He knew the thread was wrong. And part of him — the part that had spent years doing intelligence work and understood the value of information that enemies did not know you had — recognized immediately that a tapestry showing Regulus as dead was in fact an extraordinary piece of cover that nobody had manufactured intentionally and that he should absolutely not compromise right now.
He looked away from the thread.
Arcturus watched him. Most people would not have noticed the shift. Arcturus was not most people.
"You have a specific expression on your face," Arcturus said. "I would like to know what it means."
"I don't have an expression."
"You have had several since you looked at that thread," Arcturus said. "None of them are grief. I know what grief looks like on a Black, Sirius. That is not it." His eyes were very steady. "Do you know something about your brother's death? Do you know where he is?"
"Grandfather—"
Sirius opened his mouth.
Closed it.
He looked at the door. Not the one to the corridor. The other direction. A specific point in the room that contained, to any reasonable observer, nothing but air and shadow.
"I—"
"Why do you keep looking at that corner?" Arcturus said. "Answer me, Sirius. Do you have any knowledge of the whereabouts of your brother's body?"
"No."
"Are you lying to me?"
"I am not lying—"
"You are. You know, don't you. You know where Regulus is." His voice dropped. "Sirius. Tell me. So that his body can be properly recovered and buried with the family rites."
"Grandfather."
The voice came from behind him.
Arcturus turned.
The young man standing in the center of the study was thinner than he remembered. Older. He was pale in the way of someone long kept from proper light, and he held a folded invisibility cloak in both hands with the careful composure of someone who has decided and is standing behind it.
But it was Regulus. Unmistakably, impossibly Regulus.
Arcturus stared at him.
"I owe you an explanation," Regulus said quietly. "Several, actually."
Arcturus looked at the tapestry. At the black thread bearing his younger grandson's name. Then back at the young man standing in front of him in the flesh. Then at the thread again.
Regulus followed his gaze. He understood immediately. He raised his wand and directed it at his own name in the panel with the small precise motion of a man who has known this moment was coming and has decided to meet it without ceremony.
The black thread went gold.
Arcturus's eyes widened. They moved from the thread to Regulus, to Sirius, and back to Regulus again.
Then his hand went to his chest and his knees buckled.
"Grandfather!" Both men moved at once.
"I have him," Regulus said, already there.
"I see that," Sirius said, already on the other side, and the two of them held their grandfather between them and looked at each other over his head with the shared expression of men who have faced considerably worse things than this and are finding, somewhat to their surprise, that this is the one that has genuinely undone them.
"Breathe," Sirius told Arcturus.
"I am breathing!" Arcturus yelled, with considerable dignity for a man whose knees had just given out. "I am perfectly—"
"Both knees, Grandfather."
"I was—"
"We both saw it."
Regulus put a hand briefly on Sirius's arm. The old signal. Not now. Sirius subsided.
Arcturus looked up at Regulus.
He was still now, the immediate physical crisis managed, the composure reasserting itself before his color had fully returned. He looked at his younger grandson with the full unguarded attention of a man who has stopped performing and is simply looking — at the thinness, the pallor, the careful way he was standing, the eyes that were the same eyes Arcturus remembered and different in ways that had to do with time and experience and whatever it was that had happened in between.
"You are alive," Arcturus said.
"Yes," Regulus said.
"You have been alive."
"Yes."
"For—" He stopped. His jaw tightened. "How long?"
"The whole time, actually," Regulus said. "The tapestry was — I placed an enchantment on myself. I needed people to believe I was dead." He paused. "I know what you were told. I'm sorry for the years of it. There were things I couldn't — I could not tell anyone. Not safely." His eyes moved briefly to Sirius. "He found me. It was recent. I've been recovering since."
Arcturus looked at Sirius.
"He was in a bad way," Sirius said, with the controlled understatement of someone who had stood in a cave and carried his brother out of black water and was not prepared to describe that in detail in this room. "Esme saved his life. He's been at Grimmauld since." He paused. "He came this morning. He was under the cloak because we weren't certain how this would go."
Arcturus looked at the cloak still folded over Regulus's arm. He looked at it for a moment with an expression Sirius could not entirely parse. Then he pressed his hand flat against his chest one final time. And lowered it.
He straightened in his chair. The jacket adjusted itself. The composure, which had slipped further in the last four minutes than it had in the preceding decade, reasserted itself with the determined efficiency of something that had been doing this job for a very long time and intended to continue.
He looked at them both.
Sirius, who had been gone for years and walked back in with a wife and four children and the bearing of a man who had been to places that left their mark and had decided to carry the marks honestly. And Regulus, who had been dead and was not, who was thin and pale and standing in the study of Blackwood Castle like a secret that had finally been given permission to exist in the light.
Arcturus looked at them for a long moment. The controlled exterior was intact. Barely. Underneath it was something that had not been there at the start of this conversation — the specific expression of a man who has spent fifty years believing he understood the shape of his own family and has just discovered, in the space of one afternoon, that he did not understand it at all.
He was the paterfamilias of the Most Ancient and Most Noble House of Black. He had managed wars and scandals and the slow decline of an entire bloodline. He had made decisions that shaped the lives of people in this very room. He had believed, because it was his function to believe it, that he knew what was happening inside his own family.
He had not known that one grandson was alive.
He had not known the other had a wife and four children.
He had not known any of it. And they had both been standing in front of him this entire time.
"Explain!" Arcturus said. His grey eyes moved between them — from Sirius to Regulus and back again. "Both of you! Now! Everything! Because I am the head of this family and I will not be kept in the dark about my own blood for a single moment longer than I already have been!"