Chapter 1: No Credit, No Refunds
The sign above the door says S. SNAPE, APOTHECARY in flaking gold leaf, and underneath it, in newer paint and a much less patient hand: NO CREDIT. NO REFUNDS. NO, I WILL NOT SIGN YOUR CHOCOLATE FROG CARD.
You stand under it in the rain for a full minute with your trunk at your feet, reading it, while the gulls of Treleddan scream at each other over the harbour wall. The village is mostly Muggle: a chandlery, a pasty shop, a pub called the Drowned Man, cottages stacked up the hill like crooked teeth. You had to walk through the chandlery's back storeroom and tap the third lobster pot from the left to find this street at all. It is narrow and cobbled and smells of wet stone and seaweed and, faintly, beneath that, of asphodel.
You came here because you had no choice. You are trying very hard not to let that show on your face before you've even knocked.
The door opens before you can.
"You're late," says Severus Snape.
You know what he looks like. Everyone does. The Prophet ran his photograph for a month after the trial, the one where he's coming down the Ministry steps with Harry Potter at his shoulder looking like a man being escorted to his own hanging. But photographs don't move the way he moves, and they didn't show you the scar. It sits on the left side of his throat above a high black collar that doesn't quite cover it: two punctures, puckered and silvery, and a spread of darker tissue around them like ink in water. His voice comes out of a throat that was nearly torn out two years ago. It is low and rough at the edges, and it has lost none of its contempt.
"The Floo at the Drowned Man was out of order," you say. "I walked from Penzance."
"Then you should have left earlier." His black eyes go over you once, top to bottom: your soaked cloak, your trunk, your hands. He looks at your hands for longer than the rest of you. "Minerva tells me you were a Healer."
"I am a Healer."
"Not according to the Council." He steps back from the doorway without inviting you in, which you take to be the invitation. "You will sleep in the room above the shop. You will rise at five. You will not touch anything in my workroom without my express permission, and you will not, under any circumstances, attempt to improve upon a recipe of mine. I am told that is your particular talent. I don't care for it."
You drag your trunk over the threshold. The shop is low-ceilinged and dark, shelves of stoppered bottles running up to the beams, a long counter scarred with burns, an enormous brass scale. Every surface is spotless. It is the cleanest room you have ever stood in, and you have worked in a ward for spell damage.
"Anything else?" you ask.
"Yes." He is already turning away, robes moving around him. "Don't speak to me before I've had tea."
There is a version of your story that the Prophet ran, on page six, under a headline about a "ROGUE HEALER". It is short. A wizard was brought into St Mungo's with a bite from a creature nobody could identify, and the standard antivenins failed one after another, and a junior Healer on the night shift brewed something unregistered in the ward kitchen using a method no Potions Master had approved. The wizard lived. The Healer was struck off by the Council for six counts of unlicensed brewing and one of endangering a patient, and the only way back onto the register was a year's apprenticeship under a Potions Master who would put their name to her competence.
There is a longer version, in which you sat by that wizard's bed for four nights watching his veins turn black and the senior Healers argue about procedure. It doesn't matter. Nobody wants to hear that one.
What matters is that every Potions Master in Britain turned you down, and then Minerva McGonagall, who remembered your mother from some committee or other, wrote to the only one left who had no reputation to protect.
Snape doesn't tell you why he said yes. In the first week, you assume it was a debt to McGonagall. By the second week, you are fairly sure it was spite.
He sets you to the tasks he would give a first-year apprentice, which is to say a first-year anything: chopping, sorting, scrubbing. You dice daisy roots until you can't feel your fingers. You skin shrivelfigs. You sort a crate of beetle eyes by size with a pair of silver tweezers while he stands at the far end of the workroom brewing Pepperup for the village witch and does not look at you once.
"Your roots are uneven," he says without turning around.
"They're within a sixteenth of an inch."
"They are within a sixteenth of an inch," he agrees, "which is a sixteenth of an inch more than I would tolerate from a troll. Again."
You do them again. You do them again on Tuesday, too, and on Wednesday, when he tips your second batch into the compost bin in front of you without a word. By Friday you have started to understand that this is how he speaks: that he will say "adequate" when he means good, and nothing at all when he means very good, and that the silence over your third batch of roots was the closest thing to praise you will get in this house.
You are not good at silence. You have never been good at silence. So you fill it.
"Why Cornwall?" you ask on the second Monday, while you are grinding moonstone and he is decanting something into vials.
"Because it is far away."
"From what?"
"From people who ask questions while grinding moonstone." He holds a vial up to the grey light from the window and squints at it. "You're grinding it too finely. It'll cloud."
"It won't, if you add it after the porcupine quills instead of before."
He goes very still. Then he turns his head, and for the first time in eleven days he looks at you directly, with the full weight of his attention, and you understand in your stomach why a whole generation of Hogwarts students still had nightmares about him in Potions dungeons.
"What did you say?"
"The order of addition," you say. Your hands keep grinding. "In a Draught of Peace, if you add the moonstone after the quills, you can grind it to dust and it won't cloud. It's in Libatius Borage, the revised edition, it's a footnote. Nobody reads the footnotes. I read the footnotes."
"I am aware of the footnote," says Snape, very softly. "I wrote to Borage's editor about the footnote. In nineteen seventy-nine."
"Oh," you say. "Well. Then you know I'm right."
You expect him to throw you out. He doesn't. He holds your gaze for a long moment, his mouth a thin hard line, and then he turns back to his vials and says, "Grind it finer, then. Since you're so clever," and you swear you see the corner of that thin hard mouth move.
It changes slowly, in the way that the tide comes in at Treleddan: nothing, nothing, nothing, and then you look up and the harbour is full.
He lets you into the cellar, where he keeps the good stock and the dangerous one. He starts to leave you notes on the workroom table in cramped black script: Wolfsbane for Mr Penhallow, Thursday. Do not let it boil. I will know. He asks your opinion on a Burn-Healing Paste, then tells you your opinion is wrong, then makes it your way and charges the village witch double for it. He discovers that you can cook, and you discover that he will eat anything you put in front of him at ten at night while reading a journal, without ever once acknowledging that he is doing it. You learn how he takes his tea. You learn that he hates the gulls, and the summer visitors who wander up from the beach asking for sunburn cream, and Gilderoy Lockhart, about whom he has a surprising number of opinions for a man who claims never to think of him.
You learn about the scar.
You learn it at night, mostly. Your room is above the workroom and the floorboards are thin, and some nights you wake at two or three to hear him downstairs moving between the cauldrons. You assumed at first it was work. Then one night you came down for water and found him standing at the cold hearth with one hand pressed hard against the left side of his throat, head bowed, breathing through his teeth.
He heard you on the stairs. He straightened at once. His face, when he turned, was white and closed and perfectly blank.
"Go back to bed," he said.
"It hurts," you said. Not a question. You are a Healer. You know what a man in pain looks like when he's trying not to be.
"It is two years old. It doesn't hurt. It is simply a scar." His voice was even rougher than usual, the words scraped out. "Bed."
You went. You lay awake until dawn thinking about the venom of the snake that had bitten him, which the Prophet had called "a Dark creature of unprecedented potency," and which, according to everything you had read since, had never once been properly studied. You thought about the dark tissue spreading under his skin like ink. You thought about the antivenin you had brewed on a ward kitchen hob two years ago, and the method no Potions Master had approved, and the wizard who had lived.
You thought about the word penance, and whose it was.
In the sixth week, he teaches you the Draught of Living Death.
It is past midnight. You have been at it since supper, working on opposite sides of the same cauldron, and the workroom is close and warm and smells of wormwood. He is standing behind you as you crush the sopophorous bean with the flat of a silver knife, close enough that you can feel the heat of him at your back without him touching you at all.
"Not like that," he says, low, near your ear.
"This is how it's done. It releases more juice than cutting."
"I know how it is done. I discovered it." His hand closes over yours on the hilt of the knife. His fingers are long, stained at the tips, warmer than you expected. He adjusts your grip by perhaps half an inch, and his thumb rests over your knuckles. "Angle it. So. You're crushing it, not murdering it."
You don't move. Neither does he. The cauldron ticks over between you, steaming gently, and you are very aware of his chest a breath away from your shoulder blades, and of the fact that his hand hasn't left yours, and that he hasn't said anything cruel for nearly a minute, which is a record.
"Better," he says, eventually, and his voice has gone even rougher, and he steps back. He takes his hand with him. He goes to the other side of the room and spends a long time rearranging jars that do not need rearranging, and you crush the bean the way he showed you and do not look at him either, and the potion turns exactly the right shade of pale lilac on the first try.
He doesn't say "adequate." He doesn't say anything at all.
The salve takes you nine nights.
You brew it in the hours he's asleep, in a small pewter cauldron you bought in Penzance and keep hidden under your bed. You use the cellar stock when you have to, and replace what you can. It is based on the antivenin you made on the ward, and so it is entirely, unarguably illegal: six counts of unlicensed brewing all over again, on the premises of the man whose signature is the only thing between you and your career. If he finds out, he could end you with a single owl. You know that. You do it anyway, because you are what you are, and because you cannot lie upstairs every night listening to a man breathe through his teeth in the dark and do nothing.
On the ninth night, it's nearly done. The salve has gone from black to a deep translucent green, and it smells of dittany and something sharper underneath, and you're kneeling on the floor of the cellar with the pewter cauldron over a low blue flame, stirring anticlockwise for the last time.
The cellar door opens at the top of the stairs.
You don't hear him come down. You only see his shadow cross the flagstones, long and black in the light of your flame, and then a hand closes around your wrist, hard, and stops the stirring rod mid-turn.
"Explain," says Severus Snape from above you, in a voice like a blade drawn very slowly from its sheath. "Quickly."