--Thank you ever so much for your continued support. It truly means the world to me. Knowing that this fiction have found a place in your lives is both humbling and inspiring. Cheers.--
Tornhook pinched the bridge of his nose and stared at the brass hands of the Ministry clock as if he could bend time with spite alone. The goblin had visited every morning for a week. Every morning the same clerk with the same pleasant lie. The Minister is in session. The Minister is reviewing papers. The Minister is unavailable. Tornhook bared his teeth in something that was not a smile. Unavailable meant busy squeezing someone else.
The message he carried up from the clans was simple. Reopen terms on the agreement. Share more. Arcturus Black had sent back a line of ink that smelled like a grin. Reduce your cut first. I am very busy. Tornhook had been born yesterday only once. He would not give back a single knut. The clan had stood a fortune on its edge to seed that venture. Two percent to the bank was already a temple tax. Let the wolf wait. Goblins had patience. Goblins also had ledgers. Ledgers lived longer than Ministers.
A door opened down the corridor. Corvus Black crossed the marble with an easy stride, robe cuffs clean, gaze sharp. Tornhook lifted one eyebrow and kept his seat.
"Master Tornhook," Corvus offered, a pleasant nod and the ghost of a smile.
"Brat," Tornhook answered without looking up from his pocket watch. The watch was shut but the point landed. Corvus only laughed once under his breath and moved on.
Corvus knocked once, waited for the bark, and stepped in. Inside the Minister's office, Arcturus sat behid his desk with a cup of black tea and a stack of folders that looked freshly bled. He inclined his head.
"Minister Black," he offered.
"Brat," Arcturus returned, the sound turning into a short, genuine laugh. "You were rude to Tornhook."
"I was polite. He rewarded me with honesty." Corvus took the chair opposite and folded his hands. "You asked me to come."
Arcturus set the cup down and slid two files across. "First, a confirmation. I am appointing a secretary. You will screen her for compulsions, bindings, memory surgery, any hint of allegiance that is not mine. If they pass, I will choose one of them."
Corvus flicked the folder open. Neat, cute and a stern face. Clear eyes. He read quickly, then closed it. "I will know in a minute. Bring them after lunch."
"Second," Arcturus continued, tapping the other file. "Lord Selwyn has a mark I want turned into leverage. See what you can learn from the brand and from the magic stitched into it. If it can be removed, we remove it on our terms. If it can be used, we use it."
Corvus weighed the file in his palm. "I will need a room without windows."
"You will have have it." Arcturus leaned back, gaze cooling. "And Corvus, the Lestrange transfers are complete. Vaults and lands are under the Black seal. See if you want any of them under your name instead of the House."
Corvus stood. "I will start with the secretary. Then Selwyn's stain. Then the Lestrange deeds." He paused at the door. "Master Tornhook is outside. He looks patient."
"Patience is cheap when you hoard gold," Arcturus muttered, already reaching for the next decree.
Corvus stepped back into the corridor. Tornhook still sat, hands steepled, the picture of injured dignity. Corvus gave a courteous nod on his way past.
"I hope the Minister finds time for you," Corvus offered.
"He will," Tornhook replied, eyes bright as coin under a vault lamp. "Or his successor will."
--
Far from London, snow lay clean on the roofs of the Oslo Enclave. Henrick Voss stood at the window of the Warden's office and watched light drift like thin silk across the sky. Three visitors waited with their hats in their hands and their questions already written.
"Master Voss," the lead visitor began as he took the chair. "Caleb Whitlock, Overseer for the Scandinavian conclaves. These are Registrar Nystrom and Kaarna."
Voss closed the window latch and turned. "You are welcome," he offered, voice calm, eyes unreadable. "How may I be of service?."
Whitlock folded a sheet once and set it on his knee. "We have reports of substantial purchases under your personal authority. Tracts in Svalbard, Rogaland, Vest Agder, Aust Agder and Hordaland. Construction crews at work. Ward pillars already set. The locations are remote. The speed is unusual. The scale is expensive." A small pause. "We ask the purpose and source of the funds."
"Purpose," Voss answered, hands resting lightly on the desk, "is the protection of the Statute. No Muggles near our houses means no accidents. No accidents means no fear of exposure. You understand this."
"And the funds," Whitlock pressed.
"Not from the ICW purse," Voss returned, a cool smile that never reached his eyes. "That is the answer you are owed. If you want more, open an investigation and show cause."
Registrar Nystrom shifted in her seat. Kaarna made a small note. Whitlock kept his gaze steady.
"Another point," Whitlock continued. "We hear you are building settlements for werewolves and for vampires."
"Correct." Voss did not move. "Warded grounds. Wolfsbane supplied on ration. Blood supplied from licensed Muggle banks. There will be no hunting. There will be no mixing. It is order."
"I am a half blood," Whitlock continued, chin lifting by a notch. "If my parents had lived under your order, they would not have met. You are building a wall inside a country."
A smile appeared on Voss' face. "A wall keeps storms out," he returned, tone still polite. "The Muggle threat is the only storm that matters to my office."
Silence settled for a count of five. Whitlock rose. The other two followed.
"We have no grounds to open a file today," Whitlock allowed. "We will report today's meeting."
"As you should, Overseer." Voss agreed. He did not stand. The envoy made the long walk to the door without the offer of a hand.
The latch clicked. Voss returned to the window and watched the thin silk fold and ripple across the sky. Construction crews would break ground at Hordaland by dawn. The vampire quarter at Svalbard would have its first delivery from the Muggle banks by week's end. The werewolf compound near the treeline would test its first brew of wolfsbane under wardlight tomorrow. The Overseer had brought questions. The answers were already rising in the formf of multiple settlements, build and for the magicals of this world.
--
Arcturus sent the candidates one by one into the small chamber beside his office. Each witch spoke the oath of silence, and waited. The first woman lasted less than a minute. Corvus studied her face, let his gaze drift to the pulse in her throat. A brush of his mind and half a dozen memory seals lit like frost in moonlight. He tapped the table. "Thank you. You may go." She went out stiff backed, eyes cast down.
The other two were clean. Charms slid over them and found nothing but the ordinary glaze of bureaucratic privacy. Arcturus chose the third, Ignatia Travers, a neat, contained witch in her mid thirties with Durmstrang diction and a solicitor's habit of precision. She carried herself like a metronome and named statutes from memory without reaching for a book. Arcturus folded his hands. "Service to my office while I sit this chair, and your word to keep its confidences for ten more years after I leave it." She weighed the terms, then inclined her head. "I will consult my head of house, Lord Travers before I swear." Corvus lifted his cup, unsurprised. A practical house would not refuse a post that close to the fulcrum.
A discreet knock. Arcturus opened the inner door and waved Lord Cadmus Selwyn toward the chair beside Corvus. He did not sit himself. "You are smart enough to know nothing can leave this room, written, spoken, thought or hinted. Not to the living, not to the dead or anything inbetween." Selwyn's wand was out and the oath of silence hung in the air like cooling glass. Selwyn lowered his hand and let out an old man's breath. Arcturus's mouth did not soften. "Good. We will speak plainly. Your forearm, if you will Lord Selwyn."
Selwyn tugged back his sleeve. The mark lay where it had always lived, ink gone almost brown with age, the serpent coiled through the skull as if it had burrowed there to sleep. Corvus leaned in without flourish or theatrics. Only focus. His pupils tightened. The room seemed to quiet around the soundless cadence of a language that never needed to be spoken aloud. In that stillness the brand resolved into what it had been all along, a lattice of parsel glyphs stitched into living skin, each curve a hook for pain, each loop a compass, each knot a siphon.
He traced the air above the skin and let a thread of magic skim the surface. "It is not only a badge," he murmured. "It is a handle. It can be used to call you, to find you, to punish you, and to drink you when strength is wanted elsewhere. A single finite in parsel speech drops it cold for as long as the cadence holds. Whoever wrote it assumed no one else could read the script or speak the sacred tounge of the serpent."
Selwyn's fingers twitched. The knowledge moved through him like ice water. He stared at his arm as if it had just betrayed him in public. For years he had told himself that power was power, that the Dark Lord stood apart by nature, that the sting in the brand was proof of a higher current. He found his voice and it did not sound like his own. "All this time," he breathed, "we fed him."
A soft sound from Corvus, half laugh, half pity. He rested the wand across his knee. "Indulge me, my lord. How did a man with a costume name walk the old benches without one of you asking what it meant. Voldemort." He let the syllables fall flat. "Vol de mort. Flight of death. A coward's boast, and you cheered it."
Selwyn shut his eyes. When he opened them the fretful awe that used to gather at the back of his throat whenever someone spoke that name was gone. Weariness had taken its place. "We were fools."
Arcturus had been silent while the younger man worked, but his gaze was busy. Ministry ledgers in one part of his mind, a list of marked names in another, the memory of old speeches and older votes threaded between them. Fewer than fifty brands on record, and many of those worn by men who feared the glare of this table more than they feared a shade who had promised them thrones and delivered them shackles. Leverage is a craft like any other. He turned the full weight of his attention on Selwyn.
"Answer me cleanly, Cadmus. Are you loyal to the thing that marked you." He did not bother with the theatrical title. He did not use the made up name.
Selwyn's jaw worked. He set his forearm on the table like evidence and met Arcturus's eyes. "I am not loyal to a liar."
Arcturus gave one short nod and looked to his heir. "Proceed to remove it please, Corvus."
Corvus steadied Selwyn's wrist with two fingers, then bent until his mouth was a breath from the skin. The hiss he gave it was quiet and exact, a smith's file on iron. The serpent inside the ink uncoiled by instinct, writhed once, and guttered. Color fled the skull, then the jaw, then the last curl of tail. When Corvus let go, only clean skin remained, a faint pallor where the brand had lived like a long regret.
Selwyn stared. He touched the place with the tips of two careful fingers, as if a wrong move might conjure the thing back. His voice dropped without meaning to. "You are a parselmouth."
Corvus sat back and folded the wand into his sleeve. Across the table Arcturus's mouth had become a line that might, in another man, have been a smile. The doors opening in his head sounded like locks sliding back.