Chapter 429 - A Harmonious Home

Chapter 429: Chapter 429 - A Harmonious Home

The door of the Room of Requirement shut behind him, and Regulus didn’t head back to the dormitory. He turned west along the corridor instead.

At that hour the corridors held nobody. The torches burned quietly, dragging his shadow along the stone.

The Owlery sat at the top of the West Tower. Three winding staircases, then a crooked wooden door, and behind it a strange stench of dead mice and droppings hit him full in the face.

Half past nine, peak hour for owls.

Dozens of them, maybe hundreds, crammed into the rafters and the hollows in the stonework. Some had come back from hunting with field mice still hooked in their talons. Others were launching out through the windows, wings clattering.

Two Barn Owls beat at each other over a stretch of beam. A cluster of tawnies squatted on the highest rafter watching the show, round faces swiveling, producing a flat monotonous hooting.

In one corner an eagle owl dozed until the scops owl beside it clipped it awake with a wing. It glared, huge orange eyes rolling left and right in search of the culprit, found nothing, and shut them again.

Regulus crossed to the stone table by the window, drew parchment from an inner pocket, and picked up a stray feather, transfiguring it into a quill.

Set into the wall above the table stood a communal inkwell, the ink gone grayish. Serviceable enough.

The letter to Orion was short. Two dips of the quill and it was finished.

[Father,

Regarding the matter we discussed at home, I intend to depart this Saturday. I will need leave for a period. Please arrange the travel documentation.

Regulus]

He blew the ink dry, folded it, slid it into an envelope, and fished a small bronze seal from his pocket to press into the wax.

The family owl already had a claw out, waiting.

Regulus tied the letter to its leg. It spread its wings, shot through the window, and dissolved into the dark within a blink.

He turned to leave, out the door, down the stairs, and stopped halfway down a flight. He thought a moment, then went back up.

Fresh parchment spread on the stone table. A second letter.

To Walburga, and nothing of substance in it.

[Mother,

I hope you are well. The weather has been warming. The ice on the lake at Hogwarts has almost gone, and the trees along the edge of the Forbidden Forest are putting out buds.

Professor McGonagall praised me in Transfiguration last week. She said my theoretical work was more complete than most sixth-years’ manage. Her words, not mine.

Potions goes well enough. Professor Slughorn insists I have a gift and presses crystallised pineapple into my hands at the end of every lesson. I have refused many times. He remains undeterred.

I eat enough and sleep enough. The Pumpkin Juice grows tiresome after a while, and the Hogwarts House-elves cannot cook to Kreacher’s standard.

Do take care of your health.

Regulus]

He read it over once. Exactly the sort of letter a well-behaved young wizard sends home. Ordinary, trivial, light.

He folded it and left the heir’s seal in his pocket, closing it with plain wax.

The second family owl came in. He tied the letter on. She spread her wings in silence, passed through the window, and was gone into the night.

His mother had changed. Since the Christmas dinner she’d been changing steadily.

Once she’d worn him like a medal, trotting him out to the other Pure-blood wives, working my younger son into every conversation, her eyes burning with it.

None of that fervor had anything to do with him. What she saw was the doctrine she believed in.

That had stopped. She’d begun feeling her way, cautiously, toward being an ordinary mother.

Regulus could see the effort. Clumsy, out of practice, but underway, and that was enough.

Change requires positive feedback.

Basic behavioral psychology: if you want a behavior to persist, reward it when it appears.

His mother had started behaving like a mother, so he’d start behaving like a son.

Every attempt she made, he’d answer with something.

Write a letter. Mention the small things. Let her know her son ate well and slept well at school and carried no burdens, the way any boy from any ordinary family writes home.

A harmonious home makes everything prosper. The principle travels well.

---

The next morning, 12 Grimmauld Place.

Walburga and Orion sat at opposite ends with an entire breakfast spread between them.

The room held perfect quiet, nothing but cutlery touching porcelain and the crackle of the fire.

That morning’s Daily Prophet lay open beside Orion’s hand, the front page reading, New Ministry of Magic Head of Legal Affairs Proposes Expanding Dementor Patrol Range.

Beneath it sat a blurred photograph of a middle-aged wizard in a pinstriped suit forcing a stiff smile at the camera.

He glanced at the headline, found nothing of interest, turned to the international pages, and lifted his teacup.

Across the table Walburga spread marmalade on her toast without hurry.

She wore a dark gray house robe, her movements as elegant as ever.

Kreacher materialized at Orion’s elbow, a silver tray held high in both hands, bent so low his nose nearly brushed the floorboards.

His voice shook with excitement. "Master, a letter from young Master."

A single letter lay on the tray, dark envelope, Regulus’s personal seal pressed into the wax.

Walburga’s hand paused. The back of her knife tapped the rim of the plate.

Her gaze drifted from her own plate to the envelope, rested there a moment, then withdrew, and she went on spreading marmalade as though nothing had happened.

Orion noticed and said nothing, taking the letter and breaking the seal.

A few lines only. Unremarkable to look at, and entirely clear to him.

After Regulus came back from the Malfoys’, after the business at the werewolf camp, they’d talked in the study.

He meant to go to Dumbledore. About werewolves, about souls, about the new things he’d run into on the road he was walking.

Three weeks with no word. Orion had assumed his son was still weighing it.

Now the letter had come. Departing, and leave required.

He set it aside, picked up the paper, and opened it again.

Regulus absent from school. A few days meant nothing, but a week or two would get noticed.

Plenty of eyes were on him within Slytherin. Several of the older boys from certain families already carried the Dark Mark on their forearms. Four or five that Orion knew of.

The other houses weren’t necessarily clean either. Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff had Pure-blood sons of their own, and Gryffindor was harder to judge, though news moved between the houses faster than any owl.

Someone would ask questions, and the odds favored the Death Eaters.

The marked ones wouldn’t come forward themselves. But there were always a few short on brains and long on eagerness to prove their loyalty, desperate to pass Regulus’s movements upward. They’d go to classmates. They’d go to the ones closest to him.

The Cuthbert boy. The Mulciber boy. The whole group that followed him into the Room of Requirement.

Those children didn’t worry him. Regulus had kept people around him for close to two years now, and holding your tongue was the baseline. Anyone who couldn’t had been filtered out long ago.

Failing there, the next step would be the professors.

Slughorn was Head of Slytherin. Anyone digging would reach him sooner or later.

So Slughorn ought to have something in hand to tell them.

A letter requesting leave, with a reason ready-made. Family business. France.

The Blacks kept a vineyard in the south of France, deep in Provence, spread across half a hillside, its magical wine supplied to a number of Pure-blood houses across Europe.

The vines themselves served as wand material. That stand of old growth had been in the ground more than a century, high in magical affinity, a stock Ollivander had bought from for years.

The protective enchantments had been tampered with. Sabotage. Several batches of vines contaminated, beyond the local staff to handle, requiring a core member of the family in person.

By the conventions of Pure-blood houses, when holdings are violated, the heir attends. It’s a statement of ownership. Every family has done it and every family understands it.

The timing fit as well. Mid-March, the critical stretch of a vineyard’s spring, when the protective magic needs maintenance anyway. Trouble in that season surprised nobody.

France had been chosen with care too.

Traveling from Britain meant crossing the Channel. The Floo Network didn’t reach into France, and Portkeys had to be registered with the Ministry of Magic in advance. For anyone attempting a quiet investigation, every step left a mark.

The geography made its own buffer, unlike Germany or Scandinavia, close enough to Britain that a person could wander across without effort.

The French vineyard ran its own management structure with local wizards on long-term contracts. Arranging for a Regulus to come and go there normally was trivially easy.

The commercial registry at the French Ministry of Magic held complete records too. The public file would show the estate undergoing spring maintenance and repairs to its protective enchantments.

Anyone could look it up. What they’d find was precisely what he wanted found.

The alternatives failed on their own terms. The magical creature farm in Ireland was too small an operation to justify sending an heir.

The plantation in Cornwall sat on British soil, close enough to Hogwarts that it explained nothing about why the boy wasn’t coming back to school.

As for India...

Regulus was still too young. Talented or not, he had no business in a place like that.

France. Sound timing, geographic buffer, cover story already in place, business logic that held up.

The letter to Slughorn would spell all of it out, detailed enough to be recited to anyone who came asking.

That was only the first layer.

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