Chapter 3: Two Hands
You go down together, barefoot, him in trousers and nothing else, you in his shirt with the torn side and the Dittany stain, both of you with wands out like that will help.
The cellar is freezing. The lamp on its chain is swinging gently though there's no draught. And the box is awake.
Every iron snake on the lid has uncoiled. They're standing up off the metal now, heads raised, swaying, and the hiss coming out of them fills the low room, rising and falling like breath. In the centre of the shield your father's knot is glowing a faint, steady gold.
"What's it saying?" you whisper.
Mattheo listens. His face is very pale in the lamplight.
"Two hands," he says slowly. "It keeps saying it. Two hands. The blood of the house and the hand that tied the knot." He swallows. "It's been waiting for both of us to be in the house at once and not trying to kill each other. I think tonight counts."
You'd laugh if your heart weren't hammering. "My father tied it."
"Your father's not here. You learned it from him." He looks at you. "Same hand."
You step up to the table. He comes round to stand beside you, close enough that your arms touch, and you both look down at the thing you've spent nine nights fighting.
"Together?" he says.
"Together."
He lays his palm flat on the lid and speaks, a long low hiss that the snakes answer. You lay your burned fingertips on your father's knot and pull the finishing loop, the one that kinks to the left, the way he taught you on a stool in a pawnbroker's shop with his burned hand over yours.
The knot comes apart like a sigh. The snakes sink back into the iron. The lid lifts a quarter-inch on its own and stops.
Neither of you moves for a long moment.
Then Mattheo opens it.
There's no gold inside. No dark artefact, no Horcrux, nothing that would make Silas Mulciber the next anything. There's a velvet lining gone grey with age. There's a single sheet of parchment folded around a birth record, sealed with a blob of blue wax. And under it, tucked against the side of the box, is a fat envelope in handwriting you would know in the dark.
Your name is on it.
You read your father's letter sitting on the cellar steps with Mattheo's arm around you and his chin resting on top of your head. He doesn't read over your shoulder. You notice that.
The letter is short. Your father never wrote long letters. He says that in the spring of 1998 a witch called Isolde Selwyn came to his workshop in the middle of the night with a birth record in her coat and a price on her head. She had borne the Dark Lord a son and then run from him, and that record was the only thing left that tied her name to her boy's. The Dark Lord wanted her found. She wanted the record put somewhere he would never think to look, so he could never use it to hunt her, and so that one day her son could have it.
So your father put it in the Dark Lord's own family heirloom, behind a ward only a Gaunt and a student of his own knot could break, and borrowed four thousand Galleons from a crook called Fenwick to pay for Isolde Selwyn's passage out of the country. Then he wrote: If I don't come home, it's because he found out what I did. I'm not sorry. Look after your mother. Don't let anyone tell you curse-breaking is a safe job. I love you more than every tomb in Egypt.
You read it twice. Then you fold it up very small and press it against your mouth and don't say anything for a while, and Mattheo holds on to you and doesn't say anything either.
"He wasn't running," you say eventually. "All those years. I thought he'd just left us."
"He was protecting somebody."
"He was protecting you." You turn your head to look at him. "Your mother hid you. Your whole life. And she hid the proof here."
He's staring at the blue-sealed parchment in his hand. He hasn't opened it.
"Mattheo."
"I don't remember her," he says. His voice is very quiet. "I was raised by a house-elf and an old witch in Wiltshire who told me my mother died when I was born. Then the war came and everyone found out whose son I was and it didn't matter who my mother had been. I was his. That's all anyone ever saw." He turns the letter over in his fingers. "I thought the box would have something of his in it. Something I could burn."
"Open it," you say.
He does. You don't read it. You watch his face instead. You watch him read the first line and stop, and press his free hand flat over his mouth, and read on, and his eyes go wet and he doesn't wipe them. When he's finished he hands it to you without a word, and you read only the last few lines, because he wants you to.
You are not his. You were never his. You are mine, and you were loved before you ever had a name. If I live, I will be in Brittany, in the house with blue shutters my mother used to talk about. Come and find me when it's safe. I'll wait as long as it takes.
The date at the top is nine years ago.
"She might be alive," you say.
He laughs, a cracked, wet sound, and puts his face down into your shoulder, and you hold him while the lamp swings and the cold comes up off the stone floor and the box sits open and empty on the table at last.
You go back up to the kitchen as the sky outside starts going grey. He lights the range with a flick of his wand and doesn't make eggs. He just stands there with his back against the warm iron, looking at you across the room, in his trousers and nothing else, with his mother's letter folded in his pocket and his eyes still red.
"I need to tell you something," he says. "And you're going to think it's because of the letter. It isn't."
"All right."
"I didn't burn the page because I'm a generous man. I'm not. I burned it because the night you knocked twice I looked at you and thought, if she comes back, I want it to be for me. Not for gold. Not because I made her." He pushes off the range. Crosses the kitchen. Stops in front of you, close, not touching. "And you kept coming back. Every night. I'd sit on those steps and not read and think, she's going to stop. She's going to find out the debt's gone and walk out and I'm going to let her, because I'm not going to be him."
"Mattheo—"
"I'm not done with you," he says, rough. "I don't think I'm going to be done with you. That's the whole of it."
You reach up and take his face in your hands. His stubble scratches your burned fingertips.
"Then don't be," you say. "Come to Brittany. Find her. I'll break anything that gets in the way."
He kisses you like you've given him something. Slow and deep and shaking a little, his hands coming up to cradle your jaw. The shirt you're wearing is his, and he undoes the buttons one by one without taking his mouth from yours, and pushes it off your shoulders so it falls to the flagstones, and then just holds you against him, skin to skin, his heart going hard under your palm.
"Here?" he murmurs. "Or upstairs?"
"Here." You back him up until his legs hit a kitchen chair, and push, and he sits down hard and looks up at you with his hair in his eyes and an expression of naked, astonished want. "You've done everything your way tonight. It's my turn."
"Is it?" His voice cracks on it.
"Do you want it to be?"
"Yes," he says. "Fuck. Yes."
You unbutton his trousers and he lifts his hips to help, and then you climb into his lap and sink down onto him, slow, so slow, feeling every inch, watching his head fall back and his throat work. His hands find your hips and grip, but he doesn't move you. He lets you set the pace. You ride him slowly in the grey light with the range ticking behind you and the frost melting on the windows, rolling your hips until he's gasping, until he's saying your name over and over against your breast like a word he's afraid of losing.
"Look at me," you tell him, the way he told you.
He looks. You hold his eyes and move, and there's nothing between you now, no debt, no ledger, no curse, nothing but his heartbeat and yours and the old chair creaking under you both. His thumb slides between your legs and circles, sure and steady, and you come apart over him with your forehead pressed to his, and he follows a moment after with a sound you'll hear for days, his arms locked round your back as though the house might fall down.
For a long time afterwards you stay like that. The sun comes up over Little Hangleton. Somewhere in the village a church bell rings for an early service, and he laughs into your neck, because of course it does.
"Brittany," he says at last.
"Brittany," you agree. "I'll pack the tiara job and the wine cellar. We go next week."
"Tomorrow."
"Mattheo."
"I've waited nine years without knowing I was waiting," he says. "I'm not waiting a week."
You're still arguing about it, mostly with kisses, when the black owl comes tapping on the kitchen window. It's not one of his. It's bigger, ragged, with a red ribbon on its leg, and the note it carries is three lines long.
Heard you opened the Gaunt box. Heard what was in it. I found her first. — S. M.