Chapter 1: The Veil Fall
Hel woke with her fingers in the dirt.
Not mud. Not the clammy grey soil of a graveyard or the scorched dust of the Ministry floor. This was black, crumbly, warm as fresh bread, and it smelled like everything good she had ever been near: rain on a hot pavement, cut grass, her mother's imagined garden, the greenhouse at Hogwarts in high summer. She lay on her back on a slope of it and the sun lay on top of her like a second blanket.
She should have been dead. She remembered the spell, remembered Sirius tipping backward through the veil with that surprised little smile, remembered Bellatrix's scream of triumph, and then light, white and total, and the sensation of being pulled inside out through a keyhole. Her eyes opened now on a sky so blue it looked painted.
Hel sat up slowly. Her body felt wrong in the best way. Lighter. Softer. Every ache from years of cupboard sleeping and Quidditch crashes had been smoothed out of her, and her skin hummed, actually hummed, faintly, the way a struck tuning fork hums, with warmth. She held her hands up. Same hands. Small, bitten nails, the faint scar on the left knuckle from Aunt Petunia's vegetable peeler. But the light came through them and they glowed gold at the edges, just a little, like paper held in front of a candle.
"Okay," she said aloud, and her voice was the only voice in the world.
She was in a garden. That was the only word for it, though garden was like calling the ocean a puddle. Flowers everywhere, and none of them flowers she knew. Midnight-blue blooms the size of dinner plates, their petals so deep a blue they looked like holes cut in the air. Sunflowers taller than Hagrid, their heads the width of cartwheels, all turned toward her as if she were the sun. Vines heavy with fruit she couldn't name, purple and oblong and warm. And all of it growing through and over a crumbling stone wall, an old wall that ran off into the flowering distance, broken at intervals, with a stone bench half-swallowed by fragrant creepers.
Something in the soil was talking to her.
Not in words. In pulls. Her palms itched and her fingertips tingled and there was a low, sweet pressure under the ground, like a thousand seeds all leaning toward her at once. Hel, who had never been good at knowing what people wanted, knew instantly and completely what the seeds wanted. They wanted to grow. She curled her fingers into the black earth and thought, very simply, grow.
A rose opened in her fist.
It came up through her own skin almost, welling out of her palm the way blood wells from a prick, a green stem unspooling, and then leaves, and then a rose the colour of sunrise, unfolding petal by petal with a faint rustle she could feel as well as hear. Hel stared at it. Then she laughed, a startled hiccup of a laugh, and tears came with it, because it didn't hurt, nothing hurt, and it was the most beautiful thing she had ever made by accident.
She knelt and planted her hands in the soil again and this time she didn't hold back. Heat rolled down her arms from somewhere behind her heart, sun-warmth and earth-warmth braided together, and the garden answered. Blue flowers surged upward around her in a ring. The nearest sunflower grew a foot in the space of a breath, its stalk creaking. New buds cracked open all down the wall, hundreds of them, a sound like soft applause. A vine near the bench swelled and produced three of the purple fruits in a row, plump and ripe, dropping gently into the grass.
"Oh," Hel whispered, wiping her face with a dirty wrist. "Oh, that's. That's lovely."
The air crackled.
It was the smell she noticed first, sharp and mineral, ozone, the smell of the sky just before lightning. The warmth on her skin flickered as a cloud, a small personal cloud, no bigger than a bedsheet, slid across the sun. The hair on her arms stood up.
"You."
The word came from the shadow of the wall, and it was a word Hel knew the way a rabbit knows the shadow of a hawk.
Bellatrix Lestrange stepped out of the flowering dark, and Hel's whole body went rigid. Bellatrix had changed and had not changed. She was taller, much taller, six feet and more, her black curls spilling wild to her waist, her body heavy with muscle under torn black robes, her face younger and yet more terrible, the madness in it refined, concentrated, like wine gone to vinegar. And in her right hand, dancing between her fingers, coiling and snapping, was lightning. Actual lightning, white-blue, jumping from finger to finger with little cracks of sound, and it didn't burn her at all.
Hel scrambled backward up the slope and the soil, her soil, rose gently under her slipping feet to catch her, steadying her. Bellatrix's eyes flicked down at the movement. Flicked back up.
"You're alive," Bellatrix said. Her voice was lower than Hel remembered, richer, with a new harmonics in it, a resonance that made the fine hairs on Hel's neck stand in a way that was not entirely fear. "The veil spat you out too. Isn't that funny. Isn't that the funniest thing."
She moved forward and it wasn't walking, it was gliding, her boots barely pressing the grass. Lightning wreathed her fist now, and the smell of it stung Hel's nose, and that stinging was one of the too-many things, the light too bright off the flowers, the humming of her own skin, the smell of ozone and lightning and Bellatrix's sweat and the roses all together, too much, too much, and Hel pressed her palms flat against the soil behind her because that was the only thing that had ever helped, earth, weight, ground.
"Where are the others," Bellatrix said. Not a question. A blade.
"I don't. I don't know. I woke up here, I only just." Hel's voice came out small. She hated that it came out small. "I only just woke up."
"Liar." The lightning crawled up Bellatrix's forearm. The grass around her boots, Hel saw, was browning, wilting, a ring of dying green spreading outward from where she stood. Her magic, whatever it was now, drank things. "You're here. Rodolphus is somewhere in this overgrown catastrophe, I felt the earth move half an hour ago, that was you, wasn't it, little butterfly, shaking the ground. The brothers will be close. And you're here, blooming."
"I'm not going to fight you," Hel said.
Bellatrix stopped.
Something crossed her face, quick as the lightning, and it was not the mockery Hel braced for. It was more like a person hearing a note they hadn't expected from an instrument they thought they knew.
"You're not going to," Bellatrix repeated slowly, tasting it. "Potter. The Girl Who Lived. The woman who walked out of my cage at the Ministry with her wand out and her friends dying around her. You're not going to fight."
"I don't like hurting people." Hel said it plainly, because it was plain, it was the truest thing in her, truer than any spell. "Even you. I know that's stupid. I know what you did to Neville's parents. I know what you are. But I still don't want to hurt you, and I can't make myself want it, and I've tried, after Sirius, I tried, and it just. Doesn't take."
The lightning dimmed. Just a fraction. Bellatrix's head tilted, a slow birdlike tilt, and her dark eyes, eyes that had glittered with hate for sixteen years, glittered now with something Hel recognised from the greenhouse, from Professor Sprout looking at a cutting that had rooted against all the texts. Curiosity. Keen and acquisitive and, in Bellatrix, more dangerous than the hate had ever been.
"You feel it," Bellatrix said softly. "Don't you. The change. I felt my old magic like a coat, and then the veil took the coat off me and there was this underneath. Weather. I am weather now." She flexed her fingers and the lightning leapt joyfully, splitting a low branch off the wall with a bang, and the wood smoked and hissed. "And you. What are you, little butterfly? Because you're glowing. Have you seen yourself? You're glowing like a struck match."
Hel hadn't. She looked down at her hands and yes, the gold at the edges of her was stronger now, warmer, and the sun had come back out from Bellatrix's little cloud and lay on her like approval.
"I don't know what I am," Hel said. "I was scared and I put my hands in the dirt and things grew."
"Things grew." Bellatrix came closer, one gliding step, and the ring of dead grass moved with her, and the wilting edge of her power reached the healthy edge of Hel's garden and the two met in a line Hel could actually see, brown meeting green, and where they touched the garden shivered. "And what does it cost you? Everything costs. What did the veil take as its price?"
"Nothing. It doesn't hurt. It's the opposite of hurting, it's." Hel fumbled. Words for this were hard. She did the thing she did instead, the honest clumsy thing, she held out her hand, the one still holding the sunrise rose, stem growing out of her palm. "Here. You can see."
Bellatrix looked at the rose. Her nostrils flared. For a long moment nothing in her moved but her eyes.
Then she did the last thing Hel expected, which was nothing so sudden or violent at all. She reached out, slow, deliberate, the way you reach toward a bird you don't want to startle, and she took the rose out of Hel's hand. Her fingers brushed Hel's palm in the taking, a drag of callused skin across the centre of Hel's hand, and Hel felt it like a struck bell all up her arm.
And Bellatrix felt something too. Hel watched it happen. Bellatrix's spine straightened; her eyes, which had shadows of exhaustion carved under them from the veil and whatever had come before, cleared; the trembling fine tremor in her left hand, the one that had shaken since Azkaban, went still. Colour flooded back into her cheeks. She stood there holding a single rose and looking ten years younger and absolutely furious about it.
"What did you do to me," Bellatrix whispered.
"Nothing! I didn't do anything, you touched me, I don't know how to do anything to anyone, I just grow things." Hel's voice cracked with the beginning of panic, too loud, too fast. "I'm sorry. Was it bad? Did it hurt?"
"It didn't hurt." Bellatrix stared at her own steadied hand. She crushed the rose slowly, letting the petals rain through her fingers, and the crushed perfume of it filled the air between them. "I have not felt like this since I was a girl. Nothing aches. Nothing screams. My head is quiet." Her voice dropped, went almost tender, which from Bellatrix was the most frightening register yet. "What are you?"
"Heulwen," Hel said, because when people asked what are you in that tone, her mother's old instruction surfaced: give your name, it's polite, it anchors things. "Heulwen Potter. Everyone calls me Hel."
"Heulwen." Bellatrix said it correctly on the first try, the Welsh rolling out smooth, and something in Hel flinched at hearing it in that voice. "Sunshine. Your parents named you sunshine and the veil made you literally sunshine. There's a joke in there the universe is too stupid to appreciate."
Twigs snapped in the flowering distance. Two sets of footsteps, heavy and fast, and Hel's stomach dropped. Bellatrix heard them too, of course, and her smile came back, the wide one, the mad one, but there was calculation under it now where before there had been only appetite.
"Ah," she said. "The brothers."
Rodolphus Lestrange came through the wall's broken arch first, and Rabastan behind him, and they were both enormous and both wrong in the same new way Bellatrix was wrong: taller, broader, de-aged and hardened, moving with a predator's economy. Rodolphus's hands were granite and gold dust, and where he stepped the ground subtly rose to meet his feet, pebbles rolling to brace his heels. Rabastan was wreathed in a faint shimmer, heat haze, and the air around him bent and rippled, and Hel's eyes watered trying to focus on him.
"My lord," Rabastan said to Bellatrix, and then his gaze found Hel and his whole body changed, coiling. "Potter."
"The very same," Bellatrix said, and Hel heard the new thing in her voice, the possessiveness, and it made her insides go cold. "And she is not to be killed."
Both brothers stopped. Rodolphus's eyes narrowed at his wife.
"Bella. She's the Dark Lord's. Or she's a witness. Either way."
"The Dark Lord is on the other side of a veil we just survived, darling, and you may tell him I said so if you ever find him." Bellatrix began to circle Hel, slow, and Hel stood in the middle of her own blooming garden and let her, because running would hurt someone eventually and everything in Hel was built to avoid the word eventually. "Look at the garden, Rodolphus. Truly look. You are a man of stone and soil now, so look with your new senses and tell me what you feel."
Rodolphus looked. Hel watched the calculation move through his cold grey eyes, watched him feel the pull of the seeds the way she had felt it, only fainter, a man reading a language he'd studied at school over a letter written by a native. Rabastan felt it too. His heat haze stilled. Both of them, slowly, turned their heads to Hel.
"The whole garden," Rodolphus said. "One girl's morning."
"She fed me strength through a rose," Bellatrix said lightly, twirling the crushed stem. "Skin to skin, five seconds. I feel like I've slept a year. Imagine, darling. A well of it. A renewable well. Wearing a Potter's face."
"She's eighteen," Rabastan said. His voice was dry but his eyes had not stopped moving over Hel, cataloguing, and the heat around him made the air smell of hot stone. "The veil aged the rest of us and left her a child."
"The veil perfected us, brother. Perhaps this is her perfected." Bellatrix stopped circling, directly in front of Hel now, and looked down at her, and Hel looked back, because her aunt-by-marriage's face was very close and Hel did not know where else to put her eyes. "Tell me, sunshine. When the Dark Lord finds a way through, and he will, he is a stubborn dead spider, whose side will this garden be on?"
"I don't want sides." Hel's hands had found the soil again without her noticing; vines had crept up the back of the bench; a blue flower had opened between her boot and Bellatrix's. "I want to go home. I want my friends. But I can't get home, and you can't either, apparently, and this place has no people in it, I've listened, there's nothing but birds and us. So." She swallowed. "So nobody has to hurt anybody. Yet. That's a rule, isn't it, that's a sensible structure, we agree nobody hurts anybody until we know more."
Silence. Somewhere in the giant sunflowers a bird sang something with no fear in it at all.
Bellatrix started to laugh. It was her true laugh, the awful delighted one, head thrown back, curls swinging, and the lightning around her fingers popped and crackled in time with it. Rodolphus watched his wife with narrowed eyes. Rabastan's mouth twitched despite everything.
"Oh, you are a find," Bellatrix said, wiping her eye. "Rules. You want rules. Very well, little butterfly, here are mine, and the boys will keep them because they can see what I see. Nobody hurts you." She leaned down, close, close enough that Hel could feel the static raise the fine hairs on her temple. "You grow things for us. You keep us strong. You tell us everything you learn about what you are and what this world is. And in exchange, we keep you alive, and we keep you. Every part of you."
"You don't own her," Hel said, before she could think better of it.
Bellatrix's eyebrows rose. Slow delight spread across her face like the blooming of one of the midnight flowers.
"There she is," she murmured. "Not yet, sunshine. But the day is young, and you've made me feel wonderful, and I find I'm in a generous mood." She straightened and turned to the brothers, and her voice snapped into command as if a whip had cracked somewhere. "Rodolphus, water and shelter before dark, stone and soil are yours, build. Rabastan, high ground, find what this world has, smoke, roads, people, anything. I'll stay with our garden and learn our sunshine." Her dark eyes came back to Hel and stayed there, glittering, curious, patient in a way that was worse than hunger. "It's going to be such an interesting eternity."
Hel's palm itched. Against her will, without her asking, a second rose had begun to open between her fingers, straight toward Bellatrix's hand.
She closed her fist on it gently and kept it.
For now.
"First rule," Hel said quietly. "Ask before you take."
Bellatrix's smile widened, and for the first time in Hel's memory, it looked almost like a promise instead of a threat.
"Asked and answered," she said. "Teach me how to grow something."