Petunia came because Lily did not come without her.
This was obvious from the first second.
Lily arrived at the Snape gate as though she had every expectation of the afternoon unfolding in some interesting direction if only she reached it quickly enough. Petunia arrived half a step behind with the expression of a person forced into the orbit of bad decision-making and determined to document the fact with her face.
Severus saw them from the front room window before either knocked.
The day had gone pale and sharp, not cold enough for frost but cold enough that breath showed faintly if one watched for it. The boarded kitchen pane had finally been replaced that morning, and the new glass sat in the frame a little too cleanly, reminding him how long the old crack had lived there before the storm finished what it had begun. Light came into the house properly again, though "properly" on Spinner's End still meant a grey filtered thing that looked as though it had passed through soot before reaching the floor.
He stood back from the curtain and watched Lily stop at the gate without hesitation.
Petunia stopped too, but not because she wanted to. Because Lily had. Her coat was buttoned all the way to the throat. Her hat sat too carefully on her head. Everything about her suggested an argument already begun and temporarily suspended for lack of witnesses.
Lily looked up at the house.
Straight to his window.
Severus let the curtain fall and stepped back before she could see him properly. The movement came too late to be invisible. He knew that. She had probably already seen enough to know he was there. This knowledge arrived with equal parts irritation and a strange inward shift he was beginning to dislike because it did not fit inside any system he knew.
The knock came.
Not loud. Quick. Certain.
From the kitchen, his mother said, "If you hover in the front room much longer, they'll think you're furniture."
He looked toward the doorway.
Eileen stood by the stove with one hand on the kettle lid, not looking at him directly. There was no smile in the line of her mouth, but there was something close enough to irritate him more than if she had laughed.
"I wasn't hovering," he said.
"No," she replied. "Furniture."
The knock came again.
His mother nodded toward the hall. "Go on."
Severus did not ask why it must be him. He knew why. Because if his mother answered too often, Lily would begin speaking to adults first, and that would change the shape of the whole thing. Because children were supposed to sort themselves where possible, and adults only intervened when necessary. Because Eileen, practical as ever, had likely already decided that the least troublesome version of this would be one in which Severus learned to stand in a doorway and survive it.
He went.
The hall was colder than the kitchen. The front door gave off its usual smell of old paint and damp wool. He lifted the latch and opened it a little.
Lily brightened at once.
"Hello."
Petunia looked him over with the same clean dislike as before, as if she had spent the interval since their last meeting refining it.
"What?" Severus said, before remembering halfway through the word that this was a poor opening.
Lily, to his horror, seemed delighted by it. "Nothing. We came to see if you were out."
"He isn't," Petunia said.
This was not a statement of fact. It was a criticism of his entire species.
Lily ignored her. "Mum said we could be out till tea if we didn't go near the river."
Petunia made a face. "Mum said you couldn't go near the river."
"She meant both of us."
"She did not."
Lily looked at Severus as if inviting him into a conversation already in progress. "Do you want to come?"
He stared.
At once three answers presented themselves.
No, because the street was easier to manage from windows than from within it.
No, because Lily asked questions as if answers were harmless and Petunia looked at him as if he were an accident her sister insisted on collecting.
And yes, because he wanted very badly to know where Lily went when she said "out" as though the word meant possibility rather than exposure.
Petunia, sensing the hesitation, folded her arms tighter. "He doesn't have to."
Lily frowned at her. "I didn't say he had to."
"You don't need to ask him everything."
"I'm not asking him everything."
Severus stood in the open doorway with cold gathering at his ankles and understood at once what Chapter 14 was supposed to do.
Petunia did not simply dislike him. Not yet in a deep or final way. What she disliked was the beginning of an arrangement in which Lily had turned toward him naturally and expected him to answer, as if it had not occurred to her that Petunia might get a say in where her attention went. Petunia saw, before Lily did, that this could become a pattern.
He recognized that kind of dynamic with cold familiarity.
It was not the same as his parents. It was not even the same as boys at school deciding who sat where and who was laughed at. But it belonged to the same family of tensions: one person taking for granted what another feared losing.
This recognition came fast and settled fast.
Lily said, "Well?"
Severus looked over his shoulder toward the kitchen. His mother had not followed. Only the kettle hummed faintly in the other room, and the patched quiet of the house held.
"I'll get my coat," he said.
Lily smiled as though he had agreed not to a walk but to some private theory of hers.
Petunia looked actively offended.
He left them in the hall and went upstairs.
His room felt smaller than usual because he knew he would be leaving it on purpose. The coat hung from the chair. The library card remained in its envelope, safe in the pocket where he had buttoned it in. He checked the button without meaning to, then stopped because this, too, was becoming a habit. He put on the coat, glanced once at the shelf of books as if consulting witnesses, and went back down.
Lily had made herself at home in the hall by studying the framed print on the wall with great seriousness, as though it might reveal secrets if looked at properly. Petunia stood exactly where he had left her, facing the street with the rigid patience of someone trying not to seem trapped.
"You have a picture of a boat," Lily said as soon as he appeared.
"It came with the house," he said.
"It did not," Petunia muttered.
Lily ignored that. "Where are we going?"
"We?" Petunia said sharply.
Severus looked from one sister to the other and had no answer prepared. That annoyed him. He generally preferred to know the shape of a situation before standing in it.
Lily solved it herself. "The field behind the mill."
"You said we weren't to go there," Petunia said.
"I said not the river."
"That's practically the same."
"It isn't."
Severus shut the door behind him and stood on the step. The cold air pressed at his face. The row of houses opposite watched with all the usual windows. Mrs. Kirkby's curtain was still. That did not mean she was not there.
"We don't have to go anywhere," he said.
Petunia seized on this at once. "Exactly."
Lily looked at him. "Do you not want to?"
The directness of the question caught him again. Most children, if they wanted agreement, arranged their wishes around one another until refusal became awkward. Lily placed the wish openly on the pavement and waited to see whether he would step around it or into it.
He said, "You shouldn't go by the river."
"I know."
"Do you."
That was Petunia.
Lily gave her sister a look of extraordinary patience for a nine-year-old and turned back to Severus. "Then not the river."
It was decided, then.
Or rather, Lily carried within her a manner of speaking in which things seemed decided as soon as they had been spoken with sufficient confidence. Severus was beginning to understand this. He was not yet sure whether it was foolishness, privilege, or some more useful quality the world had simply never made available to him.
They walked.
At first only along the row, past the houses with their damp brick and narrow steps and half-clean curtains. Lily moved a little ahead, then fell back, then moved ahead again, as if the street itself had more interesting corners if viewed from multiple distances. Petunia kept to the inside edge of the pavement where puddles were fewest. Severus stayed closest to the wall without thinking, measuring as he always did which doors might open suddenly, which gates sagged, which voices from open windows sounded too sharp to be harmless.
Lily noticed everything. But not in the same way.
She noticed as if the world were offering itself.
Severus noticed as if it might lunge.
This difference hung between them from the first ten paces and deepened with each one.
"Why is that house painted green?" Lily asked.
No one answered.
"It's ugly," Petunia said.
"It's only a door."
"That's why it shouldn't be green."
Lily turned to Severus. "Do you always walk like that?"
He looked at her. "Like what?"
"Like something's behind you."
Petunia laughed once, briefly, and not kindly.
Heat rose into his face before he could stop it. "I don't."
Lily looked at him. Then at the street behind them. Then back at him. "You do a bit."
Petunia said, "Maybe something usually is."
Lily frowned. "Tuney."
It was the first time Severus had heard the nickname in full. Petunia hated it at once with her whole posture.
"What?"
"Don't."
"Don't what?"
Lily's annoyance was genuine now, but still warmer than most people's. "You know."
Petunia's mouth tightened. She said no more, but the silence she left in its place was shaped like disdain.
Severus felt, absurdly, that he ought to say something and hated that feeling at once. Defending himself would make him look weak. Leaving it alone would make him look as though her words had landed, which they had. There were no good positions in such exchanges, only less bad ones.
He chose the oldest strategy. Observation over reaction.
"The field's this way," he said.
Lily brightened again instantly, as if the shift in subject had cost her nothing. Petunia looked as though it had cost her a small but dignified form of war.
They turned down the narrower lane by the disused wall where weeds pushed up through stone in the warmer months and died back ragged in the cold. The air changed there, carrying more of the mill and less of the houses. It smelled of metal, water not seen but near, and the stale sweetness of rotting leaves caught in drains.
At the end of the lane the ground widened.
Not properly into a field at first. Into waste ground. Then beyond that, the rough open stretch Lily had noticed from upstairs. Long grass browned by season. Mud in the lower patches. A scatter of broken fence posts and old tins half sunk in the earth. Beyond it, the river's existence could be inferred rather than seen in the way the air cooled and the land dipped.
Lily stopped and took it in.
Petunia stopped too, but with visible disappointment that this, apparently, was the destination.
"It's mostly mud," she said.
"It's a field," Lily said.
"It's ugly."
Severus thought both were correct and said neither.
Lily stepped off the path without hesitation.
Her shoe sank half an inch.
She laughed.
Petunia said, "Honestly."
Severus watched the mud claim the edge of Lily's sole and felt the warning rise before he could organize it. "Don't go too far."
She turned at once. "Why?"
"Because it drops near the river."
"Where?"
He pointed, because pointing was easier than explaining gradations of ground and danger and the ways fields became traps by inches.
"There. And there. Not where the grass is thicker. And not by the posts."
Lily looked where he pointed with complete attention.
Then she said, "How do you know?"
He shrugged. "I've been here."
"How many times?"
He had no answer ready for the truth. Enough to know the ground. Not enough to call it freedom. "Sometimes."
Petunia folded her arms. "You're always saying 'sometimes.'"
Lily crouched near a clump of grass gone bronze at the tips. "That's because you ask questions badly."
"I do not."
"You do."
Petunia did not look at her sister this time. She looked at Severus.
It was a long enough look to say something without language. Not simple dislike. Something colder and more evaluative. He understood at once that Petunia was not merely irritated by the outing. She was measuring what sort of person he was in relation to her own house, her own sister, her own sense of what belonged where.
Severus had known that look from adults. Seeing it on a child made him feel oddly tired.
Lily, meanwhile, had found a feather.
"Look."
She held it up.
Grey and white, damp near the quill, bent at one edge but still mostly intact. She offered it first to Petunia, who glanced and said, "It's dirty." So Lily turned without offense and held it toward Severus instead.
He took it before thinking.
The feather was lighter than expected. Cool. A little slick with damp. One side had a dark stripe through the grey. Not beautiful in any grand way. But exact. A thing from the field that had become particular by being noticed.
"You can have it," Lily said.
He looked at her. "Why?"
"I found it."
"That means it's yours."
She considered. "Not if I give it away."
Petunia made another soft contemptuous sound and looked out toward the mill as if hoping an entirely different family might claim her by mistake.
Severus did not know what rules governed gifts among girls who handed over feathers because they had found them and apparently did not mind losing them. He only knew that in Spinner's End things were usually kept for the keeping. Even scraps.
Still, he closed his fingers around it.
"Thank you," he said.
Lily smiled.
The whole exchange took perhaps five seconds. It felt much larger in the field than it ought to have.
Petunia saw that too. He knew she did, because her expression altered by a degree that would have been invisible to anyone not trained by years of narrow rooms to read tiny changes properly. There it was: the first real hardening. Not because of the feather itself. Because Lily had noticed something, chosen him, and seemed not to understand this choice could be interpreted as division.
Petunia said, "Mum said we weren't to be out long."
"We haven't been," Lily replied.
"We have."
"We haven't."
"It's getting dark."
It was not. Not yet. But the afternoon had begun the slow flattening toward evening that November and early winter mastered. The sky had paled toward colourlessness. The mill behind them was louder now that fewer street sounds competed with it.
Lily straightened. "All right then."
Petunia looked immediately victorious.
Lily turned to Severus. "Will you come tomorrow?"
Petunia spun toward her. "Lily."
"What?"
"You can't just decide that."
"I'm asking."
"You're always asking."
Lily blinked, genuinely puzzled by the objection. "Yes?"
It was so artless that even Petunia seemed momentarily wrong-footed.
Severus looked down at the feather in his hand.
Tomorrow.
The word entered him strangely. Most days in Spinner's End arrived one at a time and were survived rather than anticipated. To be asked about tomorrow as if it might contain something chosen rather than merely endured felt almost indecent.
"I don't know," he said.
Lily nodded as if this were an entirely fair and sufficient answer. "All right."
Petunia exhaled sharply through her nose.
They started back.
The walk home was quieter. Lily seemed content with silence now that the field had been seen and some private line had apparently been crossed in her own mind. Petunia remained tense with a frustration too diffuse to aim neatly. Severus walked beside them with the feather in his pocket and the chilly air stinging his ears and thought of nothing very coherent at all.
At the corner before their row, Lily said, "There's a tree by the chapel with a hole in it."
Petunia said, "And?"
"We could look inside tomorrow."
"We could not."
Lily looked at Severus as if he were the missing vote in a system that had not previously required one.
He said, because it was true, "There are bees in it in summer."
Lily's eyes widened with delighted seriousness. "How do you know?"
"Sometimes," Petunia said acidly, before he could answer.
Lily frowned at her. "Tuney."
Petunia lifted her chin and looked away.
Severus understood then with complete clarity that Petunia was not losing Lily. Not yet. But she could feel that some new arrangement of attention had begun, and because she could feel it before Lily could, she resented him for being where that attention landed.
The recognition made him uneasy. It also made him, though he would not have admitted this even to himself, a little less defensive with Lily. Anyone who could provoke that look in another child simply by standing there and answering questions was perhaps not entirely ordinary.
At the Snape gate Lily stopped.
"Goodbye, Severus."
Again the name spoken as though it fit easily in the mouth.
He nodded. "Goodbye."
Petunia gave him no farewell at all. Only that look once more, clean and cool and already filing him under some private category of her own making.
Then the sisters crossed the street together. Lily talking. Petunia not answering. At their door Lily turned once and lifted a hand in a quick wave. Petunia did not.
Severus went into the yard.
The kitchen light was on. Through the new pane, Eileen's shape moved at the stove, half turned from the window. The ordinary smell of the house met him at the door: onion, coal, old wood, and something sharper underneath that came with evening no matter what was cooking.
When he entered, his mother glanced at him, then at the state of his shoes.
"Mud."
"Yes."
She took that in, and then, because nothing escaped her long, "Did you go with both of them?"
He set his coat on the chair and reached into the pocket for the feather before he thought better of it. Too late. It was already in his hand.
Eileen saw.
She did not comment on the feather first. She commented on the thing it represented.
"The sister doesn't like you."
The sentence landed with no warning. Not cruelly. Plainly.
Severus looked at the feather. "I know."
His mother's eyes stayed on him a second longer, then moved back to the pot. "That's useful."
He frowned. "Useful?"
"Knowing early."
She stirred once, set the spoon down, and reached for the loaf. "People are easier when they announce themselves."
Severus said nothing.
The feather lay across his palm, dampness almost gone now, the stripe in it darker under the kitchen bulb than it had looked in the field.
After a moment his mother added, in the same practical tone, "The other one will take longer."
Severus looked up.
Eileen was cutting bread as though she had only mentioned weather.
"What do you mean?"
She glanced toward the window, where the Evanses' house showed a square of yellow through its front curtain. "The red one," she said. "She hasn't decided anything yet."
That answer stayed with him through supper and through the evening and long after Tobias came home and the house resumed its smaller, tighter arrangements.
Later, upstairs, he placed the feather between the pages of an old book so it would dry flat.
Then he stood at the window a moment and looked across the street.
The Evans girls' upstairs room glowed. Two shadows moved behind the curtain. One restless. One rigid. Even in silhouette the difference held.
He thought of Petunia's look in the field. He thought of Lily handing over the feather as though that sort of small choosing cost nothing.
He did not know, then, that Petunia's resentment would go on growing exactly because Lily had not meant any harm.
He only knew that some tensions began long before anyone named them, and that once seen, they were difficult to stop seeing.
End of Chapter 14