The first time the hidden world asked him to leave the ground, Severus disliked it on principle.
This had nothing to do with fear.
At least not at first.
It had to do with method.
Ground, however unreliable in many other respects, possessed one enormous advantage over air: it held still for inspection. One could measure distance on it, identify exits, note where mud had gone deceptive at the edges, mark who stood where and how quickly they might cross to you if required. Ground allowed systems. Air, from everything he had yet seen of it at Hogwarts, seemed to encourage exactly the opposite sort of person.
The timetable announced Flying as if this were in no way an outrage.
FRIDAY
Third period
Flying, shared with Gryffindor
That last part Lily noticed first.
He, naturally, noticed Flying.
They stood in the corridor outside Charms while the others clustered and compared schedules and made noises in various houses according to whether broomsticks represented excitement, terror, or inherited family competence. Neville Longbottom looked as if the word Flying had personally insulted his ancestors. A blonde Gryffindor girl at Lily's elbow said she had been on a child's broom once and only crashed into a hedge twice, which was apparently meant to comfort.
Lily scanned the page with widening delight.
"Oh, good."
Severus looked at her. "Why is that good?"
Lily blinked. "Because it's flying."
"That isn't an answer."
"Yes, it is."
He stared at the timetable again.
Flying.
As if the hidden world had not already been impertinent enough with hats, moving staircases, and impossible train platforms. Now it wanted children on sticks in open air.
Lily, seeing the exact shape of his skepticism with insulting accuracy, smiled. "You're doing the face."
"What face?"
"The one where something is clearly awful and you haven't yet accepted that everyone else is wrong."
He folded the timetable.
"It is awful."
"You haven't done it yet."
"I don't need to fall off a roof to know I won't enjoy it."
The blonde Gryffindor girl laughed.
Lily looked delighted. "That's not what roofs are for."
"Neither are children."
That one made Lily laugh too.
The corridor around them filled and emptied by lesson bells and movement, but the whole week began bending toward Friday after that. Flying sat in the mind differently from Potions or Herbology. Potions could be prepared for with reading. Herbology with attention. Flying, as far as Severus could tell, required one to present one's body to gravity and trust a broom to develop ethics midair.
By Thursday evening the field where first years were to be taken had acquired in his imagination the same hostile grandeur the lake had held before the boats.
Lily, naturally, looked forward to it.
"Do you think it will feel like falling but on purpose?" she asked by the library shelves.
"That's the worst possible advertisement for it."
"I think it sounds brilliant."
Mrs. Hadley, shelving a returned volume behind them, said dryly, "You generally do, until something starts bruising."
Lily smiled into the stacks as if even this counted as confirmation.
Friday came cold and bright.
Not winter-cold. Enough to sting the ears and sharpen the morning into edges. The grounds spread under a high washed sky that gave back too much light and no warmth. Grass on the lower lawns still held dew. The lake beyond the castle looked like dark metal. The first years were marched out after breakfast by a teacher with the sort of whistle and expression suggesting she considered children unreliable in every direction but especially vertically.
Madam Hooch.
She had yellow eyes.
That was the first thing Severus noticed when she turned the line to face her. Not metaphorical yellow. Hawk yellow. A face weathered by wind, impatience, and long acquaintance with bad decisions made on brooms.
The field lay broad and open at the far side of the grounds, away from the lake and the greater cliffs, though not so far that the castle's walls ceased to look down. The grass had been cut shorter here than by the river. Seventeen broomsticks lay in a neat row on the ground, old school brooms by the look of them, all slight variations on worn wood, tired twigs, and ingrained polish from generations of children gripping the same handles before losing nerve or dignity.
Lily went straight to the nearest one.
Severus stood over his as one might stand over an unpredictable animal one had been told counted as transport.
The handle was smooth in places, splinter-prone in others. The bristles at the end looked as though they might resent speed. Nothing about it inspired trust.
Madam Hooch stalked along the line.
"Well?" she barked. "What are you waiting for? Stand to the left of your broom. Right hand over it. And when I say, call it up."
Around Severus, house colours sharpened.
Gryffindors, generally, leaned toward anticipation or bravado. One of the red-haired boys from the train was already grinning at his broom as if reunion with destiny had been delayed only by timetable. Another, freckled and bony-kneed, whispered something about his brother teaching him when he was six.
Slytherins hid things better.
Regulus Black stood with one hand poised over the broom and gave no outward sign of emotion at all, which meant either supreme confidence or the family discipline to conceal uncertainty before an audience. Mulciber's relation looked smug enough to be planning his own applause.
Lily stood opposite all this in red and gold and looked at the broom the way she had once looked at the field behind the mill or a new shelf in the library. Not assumption of mastery. Invitation to possibility.
Severus disliked admiring that in her.
Madam Hooch stopped before them.
"On my word," she said.
The cold air held.
The field held.
The castle, looming at the edge of peripheral vision, held too, indifferent witness to all first-year humiliations.
"Up!"
Brooms leapt.
Not all of them. Not equally. That, Severus thought, was the hidden world's preferred method: to make competence public before a lesson had even properly begun.
Lily's broom smacked straight into her hand as if it had been waiting all its life to obey that exact voice.
The red-haired boy's did too.
Regulus's rose cleanly, one neat arc into his palm.
Severus's rolled an inch.
Then stopped.
He stared at it.
On his left, someone swore.
On his right, Neville's broom did not move at all.
Lily looked over at Severus, her own broom already gripped in one fist.
"That was brilliant."
"No, it wasn't."
"For me, I mean."
He resisted the urge to tell her this was not the moment for editorial clarification.
Madam Hooch marched back down the line.
"Again!"
They called.
This time Severus put more command into the word, less disbelief, and the broom slapped into his hand with enough force to sting his palm.
There.
A small private satisfaction.
He looked at the wood. It looked no more trustworthy than before.
Madam Hooch had them mount.
This, too, was arranged with public indignity in mind. One leg over, lean forward but not too far, hands positioned exactly so, feet ready. Several first years managed to look foolish in four distinct ways before anyone left the ground.
Severus got onto the broom and discovered his body's objection at once.
Not terror. Distance.
The ground, now a little further below and no longer directly under both feet, had become something negotiated rather than possessed. Even before liftoff, Flying restructured certainty.
He hated that.
Madam Hooch paced.
"When I blow my whistle, kick off from the ground hard. Keep your brooms steady. Rise a few feet, hover, and then turn by leaning only slightly. Anyone who tries to show off will leave the field faster than they rose on it. Do I make myself clear?"
The Gryffindor side chorused yes with more enthusiasm than caution. The Slytherin side answered more selectively, which still sounded like yes.
The whistle blew.
The field lurched.
Or rather the brooms did, and the children on them discovered which category they belonged to.
Lily rose cleanly.
Not elegantly by older standards perhaps, but with immediate conviction. The broom took her and she laughed once in pure involuntary astonishment before catching herself and focusing on balance. She did not look graceful exactly. She looked right. As if another mode of movement had been opened and the body, after one shocked second, had simply accepted it.
Severus got three feet up and felt every line in his body rewrite itself around the fact that the ground was now an argument rather than a guarantee.
His grip tightened.
Too much. The broom jerked left. He corrected. Too sharply. The field swayed under him in a slow sickening tilt. Not fear of height. He had known rooftops, trees, walls. This was different. Height one produced oneself had a different moral quality. One could not blame gravity for all of it if one had voluntarily stepped into its jurisdiction.
He steadied.
To his own surprise, the calculation helped. Distance to ground, angle of handle, line of the horizon, the behavior of Lily's broom two widths over, Regulus's calm posture ahead, the way Neville was listing dangerously backward, the likely direction of a fall if one of them lost nerve. Once the body accepted that air would not become ground, it became simply another medium requiring rules.
He still did not like it.
But he could begin to map it.
Lily, of course, liked it at once.
She rose higher than Madam Hooch had instructed, not from arrogance but because exhilaration entered the body as speed before it entered the mind as choice. Her hair had already begun coming loose under the wind. Her face held that bright shocked joy of someone who had discovered the hidden world's promises were willing to become physical if invited correctly.
Madam Hooch bellowed, "Miss Evans! Lower!"
Lily obeyed at once, laughing and breathless and wholly unable to conceal how much she loved the disobedience she had not meant to commit.
Severus watched her come down the proper three feet and thought, not for the first time, that courage was easier to admire from the ground.
Or from a cautious hover close enough to the ground to claim relation to it.
Neville, predictably, was the disaster.
It began with his broom rising too fast.
Madam Hooch shouted before he was fully up. "Lean forward!"
He leaned backward instead.
The broom shot higher. Neville made the sort of sound people made when all language had gone to the body and none of it helpful. Then he slid. One foot lost its stirrup. The broom tipped. He clutched for balance and found only air.
Severus saw it happen in sequence before it completed. That old sharp narrowing of the world. Danger. Line. Impact. The hidden power in him stirred, not fully, only enough to make the edges of the field feel momentarily more exact. He had a clear irrational thought that he might somehow stop the fall if he wanted hard enough.
Then Neville hit the ground.
Not from deadly height. From enough. He tumbled, rolled, and lay still in a shape no one liked looking at.
The field crashed back into sound.
Madam Hooch was there first, skirts snapping, whistle already between her teeth. "No one move!"
Children froze in mid-hover and mid-panic. Brooms lowered uncertainly. Lily's bright exhilaration vanished at once into concern.
Neville sat up with a face gone white and then greener. His wrist lay wrong.
Madam Hooch took one look and swore under her breath with professional accuracy. "Broken."
The field breathed in.
Severus came down as carefully and quickly as he could. The ground, when it met his shoes again, felt almost indecently solid.
Lily was already half-off her broom before she'd fully landed.
"Is he all right?"
"No," snapped Madam Hooch. "He is not all right. And if anyone here possesses the remarkable idea of touching him, they will regret it."
Neville looked close to tears and angry at himself for that too.
Madam Hooch helped him to his feet, secured the arm with a quick stiffening charm that made several first years gasp, and marched him toward the castle with more competence than gentleness.
Over her shoulder she barked, "No one is to touch a broom while I am gone. Leave them exactly where they are. I mean it."
The field held still under the command.
The moment she and Neville disappeared over the rise, the atmosphere changed.
Not entirely. Some children still looked shaken enough to remember bones. Others, however, had begun already to translate fright into opportunity. The red-haired boy by Lily was examining his own broom with dangerous new respect. Mulciber's relation was telling anyone who would listen that his father had once broken two bones in a single season and still made county reserve, whatever that meant in broom terms. Somewhere behind Severus, a girl from Hufflepuff was saying she wanted to go inside and sit down for perhaps the rest of term.
Lily looked at him.
"Well?"
He stared at her.
"Well what?"
"That was astonishing."
"Neville fell."
"Yes."
"That isn't astonishing."
"It is if you weren't him."
The sentence was so Lily that he almost laughed despite the field's recent evidence against joy.
Then a movement above caught his eye.
The red-haired Gryffindor boy had mounted again.
Of course.
He kicked off before anyone could stop him and rose in a wobbling arrogant line a good ten feet into the air.
Shouts answered from the field.
"Get down!"
"You'll be expelled!"
"Idiot!"
He grinned down at them and banked left badly, windmilling one arm for balance. The whole field tilted its attention upward.
Severus felt that same cold focus return.
Not because he cared if the boy broke his neck specifically. Because public stupidity in air had a way of widening its damage radius without warning.
Lily, beside him, looked furious rather than frightened.
"That's stupid."
"Yes."
The boy above shouted something triumphant and impossible to make out. He dipped lower, then higher, then, with the total absence of foresight peculiar to eleven-year-old boys encouraged by altitude, attempted a turn worthy of storybooks and got only weather.
The broom slewed.
For one terrible second it seemed to recover.
Then not.
He lost the line and dropped in an ugly diagonal toward the lower end of the field.
Severus's body moved before thought. One step. Two. Useless from the ground. Still he moved. The hidden force in him sharpened again and then did nothing useful because distance and speed had exceeded whatever private fantasies he still carried about its obedience.
The boy hit, rolled, and came up swearing and muddy but blessedly whole.
Lily let out the breath she had clearly been holding.
"All boys are idiots," she said.
He looked at her.
"That includes you, by the way."
"Then it's not a useful category."
"Yes, it is."
The red-haired boy limped back grinning in the particular way boys sometimes smiled after surviving their own nonsense and mistaking survival for success.
"You saw that?"
Lily rounded on him. "We all saw it."
"Good one though."
"No!"
His friends were already laughing and slapping his back and turning peril into status, as boys on Spinner's End had always done. Here too, then. Different world. Same masculine stupidity under improved architecture.
Severus looked at the broom in his own hand.
Flying, he thought, had made one thing immediately clear. The hidden world's promise of physical freedom was not distributed evenly by temperament. For Lily it had been exhilaration first, rule later. For him it remained calculation, distance, and the unwelcome knowledge that courage looked magnificent in other people right up until gravity had to negotiate with their bones.
Yet something had changed.
He had not enjoyed the air. Not properly. Still, in the second after his own first lift, before correction and angle and distrust reclaimed him, he had felt a thin impossible opening under the body, a version of the world in which the old rules of path and stair and lane no longer held absolute power. The feeling was not joy. Not his. But it existed.
He did not know what to do with that yet.
Madam Hooch returned in a fury.
The red-haired boy's muddy robes betrayed him instantly. The field, which had a moment ago been prepared to lie collectively if required, took one look at her face and surrendered the possibility.
Detention was assigned. Points threatened. Brooms confiscated. The rest of the lesson reduced to handling, mounting, dismounting, and stern lectures about "romantic nonsense attached to altitude."
Lily whispered, while demonstrating a proper controlled descent with infuriating ease, "I still like it."
"I know."
"You hate it."
"I don't."
She looked at him from the corner of her eye. "You hate liking bits of it."
That stopped him.
The breeze crossed the field. The castle stood above them in old stone indifference. Children remounted and dismounted under supervision like penitents with broomsticks.
At last he said, "Maybe."
Lily smiled.
There.
That smile again. The one that meant she had found the exact place where resistance gave way to something more useful.
When the lesson ended, the brooms were returned to the grass in a neat line and the first years were herded back toward the castle in a rough chattering flock. Neville had gone to the hospital wing and the red-haired boy to detention. The rest carried away from the field whatever the hidden world had just made physical for them: fear, triumph, humiliation, appetite for more.
Lily walked beside him with hair fully loose now and cheeks bright from wind and motion.
"It felt right," she said.
He looked at her.
"I know."
She glanced sideways. "That sounded more cross than I meant it to."
He almost smiled.
For Lily, Flying had confirmed something she already suspected: the world could hold her weight in unexpected ways if she met it with enough nerve.
For Severus, it had confirmed something else: that air demanded a different kind of trust than any he had yet learned to give, and that watching courage from below remained easier than producing it midair with the ground waiting.
The hidden world, it seemed, had no intention of remaining abstract.
It meant to put bodies in its promises and see who trembled, who laughed, and who learned anyway.
End of Chapter 46