Potions was one of the few lessons in which revision did not feel like going backward.
In Charms, they repeated movements their wrists already knew.
In Transfiguration, Professor McGonagall returned them to mistakes they had thought finished months ago and proved otherwise.
In History of Magic, revision seemed to mean hearing the same dead people die for the same reasons a second time.
Potions was different.
There was still something to do.
Something could still change in front of him.
Severus stood over his cauldron and watched the surface settle from cloudy grey into something clearer.
Not clear enough.
He lowered the flame by a fraction.
Beside him, someone was chopping valerian root much too heavily. The knife struck the board with regular little blows that made Severus's jaw tighten.
Across the room, a cauldron hissed.
Slughorn's voice followed almost immediately.
"Less heat at that table, unless your intention is to remove your eyebrows before the examinations."
A few people laughed.
The boy muttered something Severus did not catch and bent over his burner.
Severus looked back at his own mixture.
Two clockwise turns.
Pause.
One counterclockwise.
Not because the instructions said so.
The instructions wanted three clockwise turns.
But the liquid had already begun thickening around the edge, which meant the powdered root had been finer than the quantity assumed by the book.
Three would be too many.
He stirred twice.
Stopped.
Watched.
The potion loosened.
A thin silver thread moved through the centre and disappeared.
Better.
There were things here that could be known if one paid enough attention.
Not guaranteed.
Known.
Heat changed colour.
Too much stirring changed resistance.
Ingredients told on themselves before they failed entirely.
A room could lie.
People could lie.
A potion usually did not.
"Mm."
Severus looked up.
Professor Slughorn had arrived beside his table without him noticing.
That irritated him.
Not visibly.
Slughorn leaned over the cauldron.
The professor had spent most of the lesson moving between tables with his hands clasped behind his back, offering warnings to some students and noises of approval to others. His waistcoat today was dark green, stretched firmly across his middle, and a gold watch chain caught the dungeon light whenever he moved.
He looked into Severus's cauldron.
Then at the instructions beside it.
"You've altered the stirring."
It was not a question.
"Yes, sir."
"Why?"
Severus glanced at the potion.
"The valerian was too fine."
Slughorn looked toward the bowl.
"You noticed that before adding it?"
"After."
"And adjusted?"
"Yes."
Slughorn's moustache shifted.
Not quite a smile.
"Most people respond to a mistake after the potion complains."
"It hadn't gone wrong."
"No."
Slughorn looked into the cauldron again.
"It hadn't."
He moved the spoon through the surface once, carefully, then lifted it and watched the mixture fall back.
"Good consistency."
Severus said nothing.
He had learned that praise became less awkward if he did not touch it immediately.
Slughorn set the spoon down.
"You have a remarkably good instinct for this sort of thing, Snape."
Severus's eyes returned to the cauldron.
Instinct.
The word was inaccurate.
Instinct suggested he had simply known.
He had not.
He had looked.
There was a difference.
"Not instinct," he said.
Slughorn's eyebrows rose.
Severus realized, slightly too late, that the correction had been spoken aloud.
"No?"
"The pieces were smaller than last time."
Slughorn looked at the valerian.
Then back at Severus.
"Observation, then."
Severus did not answer.
That was closer.
Slughorn seemed amused rather than offended.
"Well. Observation is often what people call instinct when they haven't noticed themselves noticing."
That sentence stayed.
Slughorn moved as though to continue to the next table, then paused.
"Anyone in your family have a talent for brewing?"
Severus looked up.
The question was ordinary enough.
Still, something in him changed position.
"My mother knows potions."
"Does she?"
Slughorn's attention sharpened pleasantly.
Not suspicion.
Interest.
"She went here."
"Ah."
Slughorn smiled.
"That explains something."
Severus disliked the sentence at once.
"What?"
Slughorn gave a small laugh.
"Nothing sinister, my boy. Hogwarts produces the occasional competent brewer."
At the next table, the boy dropped his spoon.
Metal struck stone.
Severus's attention went toward the sound automatically and then returned.
Slughorn had not moved.
"What was your mother's name?"
Severus hesitated.
"Snape."
Slughorn's expression did not change.
"Before she married."
The dungeon seemed no different.
Students stirred.
Someone whispered a question.
A flame sputtered blue beneath a cauldron.
Severus looked at Slughorn.
"Prince."
It was a word he had known for years.
A word from a box.
From old paper.
From photographs that moved when photographs should not.
From a life his mother had possessed before the kitchen at Spinner's End, before Tobias, perhaps before Severus himself had become a possibility.
He expected Slughorn to nod.
Instead the professor stopped.
Not dramatically.
Only enough.
His eyes moved from Severus to the potion and back again.
"Prince?"
There were different ways people repeated a name.
Severus had learned that too.
Sometimes they repeated it because they had not heard properly.
Sometimes because they had never heard it before.
Sometimes—
"Yes."
Slughorn regarded him for another second.
"Eileen?"
Severus's fingers tightened very slightly around the edge of the worktable.
"Yes."
That was worse.
"You knew her?"
"No, no."
The answer came easily.
Too easily for Severus to decide whether he was relieved.
"Not personally."
Slughorn's eyes remained on his face.
"But I know the name."
Behind them someone said, "Professor?"
Slughorn lifted one finger without turning.
"Half a moment."
The room went on.
Severus heard all of it more clearly now.
The scrape of a stool.
The low bubbling of his own cauldron.
The boy at the next table breathing through his nose because his mixture had developed lumps.
"You know the family," Severus said.
Slughorn's gaze shifted.
Something careful entered it.
"Know of them."
The phrase landed almost exactly where another had the night before.
Know of him.
Know of them.
Different from knowing.
Still more than Severus possessed.
"What does it mean?"
Slughorn frowned faintly.
"What does what mean?"
"Prince."
For the first time, Slughorn seemed uncertain what answer Severus expected.
"It means Prince."
"I know that."
Slughorn's moustache twitched.
Severus did not smile.
After a moment the professor folded his arms.
"An old wizarding family."
Severus waited.
Nothing else came.
"How old?"
Slughorn made a soft sound.
"That's rather like asking how long a staircase has been in Hogwarts. Long enough that most people stopped asking who built it."
Not an answer.
Severus's mouth tightened.
Slughorn noticed.
"Respectable family," he added. "Better known once than they are now."
Once.
The word attached itself.
"Why?"
Slughorn's eyes narrowed slightly.
"Why what?"
"Why aren't they known now?"
The professor looked past him briefly at the class.
Perhaps measuring the time.
Perhaps measuring the question.
"Families change."
Severus waited.
Slughorn did not continue.
"How?"
"Marriages. Deaths. Quarrels. Bad decisions. Good decisions that look bad to somebody else."
His tone remained light.
The words did not.
"Names disappear. Branches thin. People go elsewhere."
Severus thought of a narrow house with damp wallpaper.
A kitchen.
A woman who folded cloth along old creases.
A dark wooden wand kept hidden in a box.
"Did you know what happened to them?"
"To the Princes?"
"Yes."
Slughorn looked at him more carefully now.
"No."
A pause.
"Not really."
Severus knew enough about adults to hear the difference between no and not really.
Slughorn must have seen something change in his face, because his own expression softened by a degree.
"Your mother never spoke of them?"
There it was.
A door.
Open only slightly.
Severus saw the box immediately.
Letters.
Photographs.
The wand warming beneath his fingers when he had no right to be touching it.
Eileen standing in the doorway.
Her face when she saw what he had found.
He could say:
She kept things.
He could say:
There were letters.
He could ask whether Slughorn knew the people in the photographs.
Whether the names on those envelopes belonged to anyone important.
Whether Hogwarts had records of Eileen herself.
The questions reached the edge of speech.
Stopped.
"They were hers."
Slughorn waited.
Severus looked back at the cauldron.
"She told me the name."
Something moved in Slughorn's expression.
Understanding perhaps.
Or only politeness.
"Ah."
The potion gave a small bubble.
Severus adjusted the flame.
Slughorn glanced once more at the mixture.
"Don't let that boil."
"I won't."
"I rather suspected you wouldn't."
Then he moved away.
Just like that.
He stopped at the next table.
"Good heavens."
The boy straightened.
"What?"
"Did you intend to produce paste?"
A few students laughed.
The lesson continued.
Severus stared into his cauldron.
Nothing about it had changed.
Silver-grey.
Correct consistency.
Heat slightly below medium.
One more ingredient to add before cooling.
He knew exactly what came next.
That was what made everything else worse.
By the end of the lesson, the potion had turned out correctly.
Slughorn gave it one approving glance as Severus filled the sample vial.
Normally that would have been enough to occupy the walk upstairs.
Not today.
Students spilled from the dungeon into the corridor carrying books, bags and last-minute complaints about examinations.
The boy from the next table caught up beside him.
"Think he'll make us brew that?"
"Probably."
"He said it was revision."
"That doesn't mean it won't be examined."
The boy groaned.
"You're cheerful."
Severus looked at him.
The boy apparently decided that had been a mistake.
They climbed the stairs.
At the first landing, two older students were coming down.
One of them called to someone behind Severus.
"Rosier!"
The name passed.
The boy behind him answered.
Further up, a prefect stopped another student.
"Selwyn, your tie."
Another name.
No one explained either.
No one needed to.
Severus continued upward.
Potter.
Black.
Prince.
The first two had changed rooms when spoken.
He had watched it happen.
A chair turning.
An older student looking up.
A sentence altered because everyone except Severus already possessed whatever information the surname carried.
Now Slughorn had done the same thing.
Prince?
The pause had been small.
It stayed.
At the next staircase, the boy turned toward the common-room route.
"Coming?"
"No."
"Where are you going?"
"Library."
The boy stared at the books already under Severus's arm.
"Of course you are."
He went down.
Severus went up.
Madam Pince did not like vague questions.
Severus discovered this within thirty seconds.
"I'm looking for family records."
She looked at him over the top of the book she was cataloguing.
"What family?"
"Prince."
"What about them?"
He had not prepared for that.
"Records."
Madam Pince's expression did not alter.
"Yes. You said that."
Severus looked toward the shelves.
The library felt different when one entered without knowing what sort of book one wanted.
Usually he had a subject.
Plants.
Potions.
Weather.
History.
Something that could be reduced into a shelf, an index, a sequence.
Family was apparently not a subject in the same way.
"I want to know who they were."
Madam Pince closed the book in front of her.
Not hard.
Enough to show he now possessed her complete attention.
"Genealogy."
Severus said nothing.
She pointed with one thin finger toward the farther shelves.
"Reference section. Third bay after Magical Law. Registers and directories. Some are restricted to reference use."
"Restricted?"
"Meaning they remain in this library."
"I know what restricted means."
Madam Pince's eyes sharpened.
Severus lowered his voice.
"Thank you."
She stared another second.
Then returned to her cataloguing.
He walked away.
The section was narrower than he expected.
It also smelled different.
Older paper.
Dust trapped in cloth bindings.
Books that did not leave the shelves often enough to acquire the warmer smell of hands.
Some were enormous.
Some were narrow volumes with dates stamped down their spines.
One had no title at all until he pulled it halfway free and discovered lettering on the cover.
He began with the indexes.
That was obvious.
If a name existed across enough books, somebody eventually organized it alphabetically.
He found Peverell.
Prewett.
Parkinson.
Potter.
His hand stopped.
Only briefly.
The entry gave several references.
Page numbers.
Dates.
A cross-reference he did not understand.
He moved lower.
Prince.
There.
He stared at it.
No feeling arrived in any useful form.
Only stillness.
He touched the page near the word without covering it.
Prince.
Printed in black ink.
Not Eileen's handwriting.
Not an old envelope hidden beneath cloth.
Not something whispered in Spinner's End as though the walls might object.
A printer had set the letters.
A bookbinder had bound them.
Someone had decided the name belonged in an index.
There were four references beside it.
He copied them.
The first sent him to a volume from the previous century.
The book was too heavy to carry comfortably in one hand, so he took it to a reading table.
Pages whispered beneath his fingers.
He found the number.
No family history.
Only names arranged in columns.
Prince, Albert.
Prince, Cassian.
Prince, Honoria.
Dates.
Marriages.
One death.
Another page reference.
He read the entries twice.
None said Eileen.
Of course they didn't.
The dates were wrong.
Still, the surname looked strange surrounded by other information.
Real in a way he had not understood real could mean.
The second reference led to a book that was not on the shelf.
Severus checked twice.
Then crouched to inspect the lower row.
Nothing.
He returned to Madam Pince.
"The 1894 directory is missing."
"It's being rebound."
"When will it be back?"
She looked up.
"When it has been rebound."
"When is that?"
"When the binder finishes rebinding it."
Severus stared.
Madam Pince stared back.
He left before the conversation became less useful.
The third reference produced only a family crest beside a surname and two lines too faded to read properly.
Severus leaned closer.
Something about land.
Something about representation.
Nothing that explained Eileen.
The fourth led nowhere.
An older index referenced a volume the library apparently no longer possessed.
He sat back.
Four references.
Almost no answers.
That should have been frustrating.
It was.
It was also more than he had possessed that morning.
He took out his parchment.
At the top he wrote:
PRINCE
Then underneath:
old wizarding family
He stopped.
Slughorn had said respectable.
Severus considered writing that.
Didn't.
Respectable according to whom?
He wrote instead:
known to Slughorn
Then:
records before Mother
He stared at the words.
That was clumsy.
He crossed out before Mother.
Of course there had been records before her.
He meant something else.
Before Spinner's End.
Before Snape.
Before him.
The sentence refused to become exact.
He left the line blank.
"That's not Transfiguration."
Severus's head came up.
Lily stood on the opposite side of the table.
He had not heard her approach.
That happened too often with her now.
Not because she moved particularly quietly.
Because some part of him had stopped treating her arrival as something requiring warning.
She looked at the books around him.
Then at his parchment.
Her eyes settled on the word at the top.
"Prince?"
Severus put the quill down.
"Aren't you revising with Mary?"
"Finished."
"Already?"
"No."
She pulled out the chair opposite him.
"That's why I finished."
Severus looked at the book again.
Lily sat.
"What is it?"
He nearly answered nothing.
The word reached the back of his teeth and stayed there.
Instead he turned the parchment slightly toward himself.
"My mother's name."
Lily frowned.
"Her name's Eileen."
"Her other name."
Understanding arrived slowly.
"Before Snape?"
"Yes."
Lily looked down.
"Prince."
He nodded.
She said it again, more quietly.
"Prince."
The word sounded different in her voice.
Not recognized.
That mattered too.
"Slughorn knew it."
Lily's eyes lifted.
"What do you mean?"
"He asked if anyone in my family brewed. I said my mother did. He asked her name."
"And he knew her?"
"No."
Severus heard the irritation in his own answer and corrected it.
"He knew of the family."
Lily looked at the books.
"Oh."
It was a small sound.
Then:
"Are they important?"
Severus looked down at the old register.
"I don't know."
"But he knew them."
"The name."
"Same thing?"
"No."
Lily considered that.
Then nodded.
"No."
She reached toward the nearest book, stopped before touching it, and looked at him.
He moved it slightly toward her.
Permission.
She opened it.
The index entry remained visible where he had left a scrap of parchment between the pages.
Lily found it.
"That's them?"
"I think so."
"You think?"
"The dates are too old."
"Families usually are."
Severus looked at her.
"What?"
"My family is old too."
"That's not what it means."
"I know."
She smiled very slightly.
Then the smile faded as she looked at the page again.
"Did your mum tell you about them?"
"No."
The answer came too quickly.
He corrected that too.
"She told me the name."
Lily looked up.
Severus could see the question before she asked it.
"Why didn't she tell you?"
"She did."
"The name."
"Yes."
"That's not what I meant."
"I know."
Silence.
Around them, the library continued its June misery.
Pages turning.
Quills scratching.
Someone coughing twice and trying not to cough a third time because Madam Pince had already looked over.
Lily traced one finger along the margin without touching the printed names.
"Are you going to ask her?"
Severus looked at the entry.
He thought of Easter.
His mother at the kitchen table.
Hogwarts existing between them in ways neither seemed able to speak about directly.
He had asked pieces.
She had answered pieces.
Enough to make the missing parts larger.
"When?"
"Summer."
It came out before he had decided.
Lily nodded as if that settled something.
School ended soon.
Until that moment, summer had mostly meant leaving.
Train.
London.
Cokeworth.
The familiar narrowing of space.
Now there was something waiting inside it.
Or someone.
He did not know whether that made home feel nearer or farther away.
Lily looked at his parchment again.
"You wrote down that Slughorn knows them."
"The name."
"Right."
She watched him for a second.
"You really care about the difference."
Severus looked at her.
"Of course."
Lily nodded.
No teasing.
"All right."
She reached for her own satchel.
"What are you doing?"
"Revision."
"You said you'd finished."
"I lied."
"You said you hadn't finished."
"Exactly."
She pulled out her Transfiguration notes and set them beside the old family register.
For a while they worked without speaking.
Or Lily worked.
Severus attempted to.
The same paragraph on Switching appeared again beneath his eyes.
He read it once.
Then noticed the word Prince on the parchment beside his elbow.
Read the paragraph again.
Nothing entered.
Lily did not point this out.
That was probably why he let her stay.
That night the Slytherin dormitory settled slowly.
Beds creaked.
Curtains moved.
Someone whispered after lights-out until another boy told him to shut up.
Water pressed dimly against the windows beyond the dormitory walls, turning what little light remained green and uncertain.
Severus lay still until the room had become quiet enough to separate individual sounds.
Breathing.
Fabric.
A distant pipe.
The lake somewhere beyond stone.
Then he reached beneath his pillow and pulled out the notebook.
He drew the curtains a little closer.
Not all the way.
He did not need secrecy.
Only less light escaping.
The notebook opened near the back.
Earlier pages held weather.
Schedules.
Patterns.
Questions.
Things that had seemed important enough to preserve before memory altered them.
He found an empty page.
For several seconds he did nothing.
Then wrote:
PRINCE
The word looked different in his handwriting than it had in the directory.
Smaller.
More private.
Underneath:
Old wizarding family.
A pause.
Slughorn knows the name.
He nearly wrote respectable.
Didn't.
He nearly wrote better known once.
Instead he put his quill down.
The room remained quiet.
His mother had known the word all along.
Of course she had.
It belonged to her.
She had given it to him years ago in the smallest possible way: a fact without the shape around it.
He had thought the mystery lived inside the box.
It didn't.
The box had only been where she kept the pieces.
Severus picked up the quill again.
Under the last line he wrote:
Why did she leave?
The ink shone wetly for a moment.
He waited for another question.
Several came.
Why Spinner's End?
Why Tobias?
Why hide the letters?
Why keep the photographs?
Why let him find almost everything except the explanation?
He wrote none of them.
The first question was enough.
He closed the notebook.
PRINCE disappeared beneath the cover.
It did not feel hidden anymore.
End of Chapter 67