By summer the river had changed its mind about the world.
It still smelled of metal in places, and there were mornings when the mills laid their breath over it so thickly the water seemed to carry soot instead of light. But on hot days, when the sky held and the wind turned properly, the whole stretch behind Cokeworth opened in a way the rest of Spinner's End never did. The banks widened. Grass grew long and yellow at the tips. Dragonflies stitched the air above the reeds. The current flashed silver where the sun found it.
On those days, if one stood in the right place and kept his back to the mills, it was possible to pretend the world had more space in it than it usually allowed.
Lily insisted on pretending this at every opportunity.
"Come on," she said, already halfway down the lane before he had properly agreed.
She had a satchel over one shoulder and her shoes unlaced enough to offend Petunia on sight if Petunia had been there to see them. She wore no cardigan because the day was too warm for one and too bright for caution. Her hair had been tied back badly and was already escaping.
Severus followed because he had known, from the minute the heat began building in the morning, that if Lily found him that day they would end up by the river.
He had not minded the knowing.
That, perhaps, was the first unusual thing.
The second was the weather itself.
Summer in Cokeworth was never clean. Even in heat the town kept its stains. The sky above Spinner's End had a way of paling rather than brightening, and the river never lost its industrial edge completely. But that day the sun had arrived with a kind of stubbornness rare for the place. It lay over brick and path and railing and turned even the meaner parts of the street into outlines instead of verdicts.
Lily walked faster than usual.
Not because she was late. Because the day was there.
She kept talking over her shoulder as they went, words half-lost in the brightness and in the movement of her own excitement.
"Mum said if we were back by tea and didn't ruin our shoes, which is unfair because shoes only ever get ruined by use and not by staying still, and Tuney said I'd get mud on the hem and I said then I simply wouldn't wear a hem worth minding, and she said that made no sense."
"It doesn't," Severus said.
Lily looked back at once, delighted that he had entered the stream of it. "It does if you think about it properly."
"I did."
"You thought about it wrongly."
He almost smiled.
The path opened beyond the lane and the heat changed there. Less trapped. More moving. Grass brushed their knees where it had grown wild at the edges. Somewhere beyond the reeds, unseen yet, the river carried sunlight in broken pieces. The mills remained behind them, but their noise came thinner now, less like command and more like memory.
Lily spread both arms once as she walked, not to balance, only because the space permitted it.
Severus noticed he had stopped scanning windows.
There were none here to scan. Only water, bank, reeds, insects, the broken old fence further along, and the occasional distant shout from children upstream. His body seemed not to know what to do with the absence of corners. It had spent so long learning rooms and streets that open ground still felt almost theoretical.
Lily did not seem to have this problem.
She got to the bank first and stopped only because she had found something worth stopping for.
"Look."
Severus came up beside her.
The river moved broad and slow in front of them, darker near the reeds, bright where the current turned over shallow stone. The bank dipped gently here rather than falling away. Flat rocks sat half-buried in mud near the edge, as if left there on purpose for children to discover uses for them. A dragonfly hovered above the water and then vanished with impossible precision. The sky was pale blue, faded by heat rather than cloud.
Lily bent and picked up the first stone she saw.
"That one's no good," Severus said.
She looked at him. "Why?"
"It's too round."
"It's a stone."
"Yes."
"That's what I wanted."
He crouched and put his satchel down.
"It has to be flat."
"Why?"
"So it skims."
Lily's face lit. "You know how."
"A bit."
"Show me."
He hated the immediate expectation in those words and was already learning that he hated it because he liked it.
He searched the mud and stones near the bank until he found one the right size. Thin. Oval. Not perfect, but good enough. He weighed it in his palm.
Lily watched as if this were advanced scholarship.
He drew his arm back and threw.
The stone hit the surface once, twice, three times, then sank.
Lily stared.
"That was brilliant."
"It was only three."
"Yes."
"That's not many."
"It is if you're a stone."
He gave her a look. Lily grinned and immediately bent to find one of her own.
The first one she chose was absurd. Thick as a biscuit and heavier. He told her so. She ignored him and threw it anyway. It struck the water with one grand hopeless splash and vanished.
Lily laughed.
"Again," she said.
For the next half hour they did almost nothing else.
The afternoon stretched around them in widening circles of light and sound. Stones. Splashes. The hiss of skimming attempts gone wrong. Reeds whispering at the bank. Lily talking between throws. Severus answering more than he usually would have, because the heat did something to his reserve, or perhaps the open space did. The prose of the day breathed. Even he could feel it.
She learned quickly.
Not technique exactly. Rhythm. The willingness to keep trying without embarrassment. The capacity to turn failure into another kind of fun before it had fully landed.
"No, flatter," he said.
"I am throwing it flat."
"You're throwing it at the river."
"That's where I want it to go."
He took the next stone from her hand and turned it between his fingers. "Like this."
She watched the angle of it, not his face.
"Why that way?"
"So it meets the water properly."
"Properly according to who?"
"The water."
Lily laughed so hard at that she nearly dropped the next stone before throwing it.
This one skipped twice.
She shouted as if she had personally improved the laws of nature.
"Did you see?"
"Yes."
"It did."
"Yes."
"That was because of the angle."
"Yes."
"Then I understand it."
"No."
"Yes I do."
He picked up another stone. "Then do it again."
She did.
Three skips.
Lily spun to him with both hands up as if claiming an invisible crowd. "There."
He had not realized until then how rare it was for him to stand beside another child in broad daylight and feel no need to reduce himself.
No house around them. No table. No stair. No door. No window with a curtain moving behind it. Only river and light and a girl whose delight in small success was so immediate that resisting it began to feel perverse.
They left the stones after a while and walked along the bank.
Lily took off her shoes and carried them by the laces, stepping into the shallower edge where the water cooled the mud and the mud tried unsuccessfully to keep her. Severus kept his own shoes on. Not because he did not want to feel the river properly. Because his only pair worth anything would take too long to dry, and he knew exactly how that would matter later. Lily accepted the difference without comment.
They found a place where the bank rose slightly and the grass was dry enough to sit in. Lily lay back almost at once and looked up at the sky as though the sky had been arranged specifically for that purpose. Severus sat with his knees drawn up and his arms around them, facing the water.
For a while neither spoke.
The sun pressed warmly at the backs of his hands. Grass seeds clung to Lily's skirt. Further downstream two boys shouted over something to do with a stick and the shallowness of the bank. Somewhere behind them, out nearer the road, a cart went by and then was gone. Insects made small authoritative sounds in the grass.
Lily said, eyes still on the sky, "Do you think clouds know where they're going?"
He looked up.
The clouds that day were thin and high, nearly white, with the sort of edges that dissolved while one watched. He considered the question seriously because Lily always did.
"No," he said. "Only the wind does."
"That's sad."
"Why?"
"Because then they never decide anything."
He thought about that.
"They still move."
"That isn't the same."
"No."
Lily turned her head and looked at him from the grass. "You always answer like things matter."
He stared at the river again.
"They do."
She seemed to accept this as a complete explanation.
A bee found a clump of late white flowers growing nearer the slope and spent several busy minutes proving they were worthwhile. Lily sat up to watch it. Then lay back again. Then sat up once more because stillness never held her long unless she was truly tired or truly interested.
"Race you to the willow."
Before he could answer, she was already up.
He followed because not following would be stranger.
The willow by the bend was hardly a proper tree yet, only grown enough now to give shade in one narrow ragged patch. Lily reached it first and claimed victory loudly despite the fact that the race had begun three steps after she started running. Severus pointed this out. She declared the complaint unsporting. He asked what sport she thought they were in. She said the winning sort.
By the time they circled back to the flatter bank where the good stones were, the sunlight had shifted slightly golden at the edges.
Lily bent at once to gather new ammunition.
"This time," she said, "I'll do seven."
"You've only done three."
"Exactly."
"That doesn't help."
"It does if I'm deciding."
She searched, found a stone, weighed it, rejected it, found another.
Severus watched her this time more than the water.
She did not choose the prettiest stones. She chose the ones that felt right to her hand, though less methodically than he did. She did not line herself up with the current or test her footing or think three throws ahead. She simply took the bank as if it were hers to negotiate and the river as if it were waiting.
The first throw did one skip.
The second did two.
The third flew too high and disappeared into the middle with no grace at all.
Lily made a face. "That one was rude."
"Stones aren't rude."
"They can be."
The next one, though, was right.
Severus knew it almost from the way it sat in her fingers. Thin enough. Flat enough. A better weight. She bent her arm, turned slightly at the waist the way he had shown her, and threw.
The stone struck the surface.
Once. Twice. Three times. Four. Five. Six.
Seven.
It vanished.
For one second neither of them moved.
Then Lily screamed.
Not in fear. In triumph so total it broke into laughter halfway through and sent a flock of small birds up from the reeds in offended alarm.
"Did you see?"
"Yes."
"Seven."
"Yes."
"Seven."
He was smiling now. Properly this time. He could feel it and did not immediately force it away.
Lily turned in a circle once, shoes still in one hand, hair coming fully loose now around her face. "I did seven."
"You did."
She looked at him, flushed with heat and success and the impossible satisfaction of having made the river behave. "Can you do seven?"
He said, because pride moved faster than caution in certain sunlight, "Probably."
Lily grinned with immediate cruelty of the cheerful sort. "Do it then."
He crouched for a stone.
Too quickly.
That was the first mistake.
The second was caring at once that she had seen seven and he had not.
He found one. Threw. Four.
Lily was gracious enough not to laugh. This was somehow worse.
He found another. Two.
Another. Three.
Lily sat down in the grass and watched with both hands around her knees, enjoying him more than the river now. "Probably," she said.
He ignored her.
The next stone went five. A good throw. A serious throw. He looked at the water afterward with grim concentration, trying to locate where the rhythm had broken.
"Almost," Lily said.
He looked at her.
She held up both hands in mock surrender. "I didn't say anything."
"You just did."
"Yes, but not what I was going to."
He went back to the stones.
The afternoon thinned around the contest. Sunlight dropped lower. The river changed from silver to a flatter burnished grey. Shadows reached longer off the reeds. Still he threw. Still Lily watched, sometimes offering truly terrible advice, sometimes no advice at all, only smiling in the maddening way of someone who had already achieved the thing and now had the luxury of patience.
At last, with the light going gold and then beginning to leave, he reached six.
The seventh never came.
Lily stood and dusted off her skirt. "Tea."
He looked at the water as if it had personally betrayed him.
"Tomorrow," she said.
He turned. "What?"
"You can try again tomorrow."
"I don't care."
She gave him the exact look that lie deserved.
Then, mercifully, she did not challenge it.
They walked back slowly in the kind of tiredness that comes from brightness rather than work. Lily talked less now. Severus did too. The day itself seemed to have spent most of their words. At the row of houses, they parted with the ease of children who already expected another meeting.
That evening, in bed, he thought of the seven skips.
Not Lily herself first. Not even the way she had shouted. Only the seven perfect touches of stone and water and the look on her face after.
The next day he went to the river alone.
Not because he had planned to. Because his feet took him there after school with three flat stones already in his pocket.
The bank was duller without her. More river, less day. He threw anyway.
Three.
Four.
Five.
Never seven.
On the second day he tried again.
This time the weather had turned slightly. More cloud. Less kindness in the light. But still he stood at the same place and worked through stone after stone until his arm hurt and the pocket of his coat hung heavy with damp circles where river water had leapt back against it.
He did not reach seven.
When Lily found him on the third afternoon and asked, infuriatingly cheerful, "Well?" he said only, "It doesn't count unless you do it the first day."
Lily considered this with her whole face. Then, in a rare act of mercy, said, "That sounds like something you've just made up."
He looked at the river.
"Yes."
She sat beside him in the grass, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched.
"That's all right," she said. "I'll still count mine."
He let out a breath through his nose that might have become laughter if allowed.
The river moved on in front of them, carrying light and mill-shadow and the memory of stones.
For a few hours that summer day had given him something no chapter before it had permitted in full: the shape of almost-normal childhood. Lightness without defensiveness. Failure without danger. A competition that mattered only because it was funny that it did. A girl laughing beside the river. A boy trying too long to match her and not minding, entirely, that he could not.
He would think later that the day mattered because of Lily.
And it did.
But it mattered also because of the river, and the sky, and the long grass, and the brief impossible evidence that there existed versions of himself who could sit in sunlight and care only about seven skips.
End of Chapter 19