It was late by the time Harry made his way down to the kitchen the next morning. He had not slept well and his brain felt stale and stewed. Despite the lack of instructions he had found his bedroom easily enough - the door had been spelled to open at his approach and it swung back invitingly as he crept up the stairs. That was the most inviting thing about it - the room itself was Spartan, to say the least. There had been more in the way of creature comforts at the Leaky Cauldron. Snape, predictably, did not believe in molly-coddling. Once Harry lay down, though, the bed was comfortable enough, but even so he had lain awake for several hours, alert to the many silences of the sleeping house…

What would Ron and Hermione think if they could see him now? A guest in Snape Cottage! Actually living in the dragon’s den! They’d never believe it was so, well, ‘normal’. Away from Hogwarts, Snape didn’t seem half so strange or intimidating: maybe he really was just a regular wizard who mowed the lawn and polished his broomstick on a Sunday afternoon. But how unlike him to employ a deaf house elf out of some sense of family loyalty. Hermione would be his fan for life once she heard that. And all that stuff about Snape’s family! Those initials on the gate! What was that name again? Harry was too sleepy to remember. Well, the Professor hadn’t actually said very much, but there was more - there had to be more. Maybe something really juicy. Ron would just love to get the dirt on the Potions master and his slimy relations.

The knowledge that that last category now included himself filled Harry with queasy dread. Feeling uncertainty rising towards his throat, he quelled it with some Occlumency exercises. He had tried to convince himself he was cool about this situation - after all, Dumbledore expected him to cope - but, in truth, he had no idea how to begin to relate to this stranger, his father. At this moment they were separated only by a lath and plaster wall - Harry could hear Snape muttering in his sleep, coughing sometimes; he was a restless sleeper too - but that wall might as well have been a mile thick.

Tomorrow, tomorrow he would have to pin Snape down to answering some serious questions…

* * * * * * * * * * * *

There was a jug of coffee, still hot, on the kitchen table. Harry poured himself a cup and sat down to ponder his next move. The liquid hit his taste-buds like embalming fluid, strong enough to skin a badger. Wow! Who does he think he is - Balzac? thought Harry, surfing on a caffeine tsunami. If he drinks this stuff no wonder he’s edgy.

Snape didn’t appear to be around. Harry had poked his head into the sitting room as he passed but there was no sign of him there either. The perfect host. It was a relief not to have to face him over breakfast. The thought of that was a bit too domestic for Harry to handle right now. He was still sucking coffee grounds out of his teeth when a plateful of food appeared on the table in front of him. At the same time a soft smacking noise alerted him to the arrival of Quig, who ambled into the room like a bald, leathery penguin, his long, bare feet slapping the flagstones.

Harry saw the elf in daylight for the first time. He was pleased to note that Snape did not allow him to go about in rags like Dobby or Winky. Though the apron affair he wore could not be called clothing, it was at least respectable. The elf’s features were lost amidst layers upon folds of shrivelled wrinkles, like a dehydrated Shar-pei. His ears - Harry knew it was rude, but he couldn’t help staring at the ears - seemed to have lost a long battle with leprosy, or else he’d played too much rugby as a child: they had all but disappeared, leaving knobby cauliflowers of cartilage that bulged from the side of his head like lumps of pumice. Two hawk-bright eyes peered back through the fleshy fringe at Harry. The eroded face suddenly crumbled into a tartar-brown smile and, nodding vigorously at the plate on the table, the elf gave Harry a double thumbs up. It seemed like a question.

“Lovely! Thank you very much.” Harry spoke distinctly. He turned his attention to the food, as yet untouched. There was a piece of something very hard and fishy, which might have been a kipper but looked like pemmican, four tiny, crisply fried eggs (another generation of thrushes lost to the world) and a soggy pile of paintbox-coloured mushrooms, their lacy undersides frilled in varying shades of purple and lavender.

“Where. Is. Snape. ?” Harry hoped the elf wouldn’t take offence at his leaving out ‘Professor’ but he wanted to stick to words of one syllable. Quig nodded again, produced an envelope from the pocket of his apron and, his errands accomplished, slapped out of the kitchen.

‘This is crazy,’ Harry said to himself, noticing his hands trembling as he opened the letter, ‘it’s only a letter.’ From Snape. So he hadn’t forgotten about Harry completely. Just the sight of the precise, perfectly quilled script made Harry nervous. It began without any form of salutation. Harry chuckled to himself: he doesn’t know how to address me!

‘I shall be occupied with estate business at Snape Manor this morning. The ground rules in effect for the duration of your visit are as follows:

1 No magic is to be performed unless in my presence.

2 The two basement rooms in the cottage are strictly out of bounds.

3 You are to stay within the protected perimeter of the property.

4 If you go into the estate grounds stay on the paths at all times. Do not approach the lake.

5 Refuse to eat any fried fungus provided by Quig.

6 If Braque attempts to lick you, stand perfectly still and you will not be injured.

Today you are to collect the fresh ingredients to prepare an Emergency Emetic Antidote - they are all available in the walled garden. You will find the recipe in Appendix 5 of Herbal Heroes: 1001 Common Kitchen Killers (bookcase, second shelf, third volume). Factor in your age, weight, height and wand reference number to customise the quantities required for your personal use.

Yours,

SS

That was not a reassuring letter. Meals were obviously a death-defying gamble; there was something dodgy in the basement - what a surprise – and the patronising bastard was treating him like a toddler who might get lost in the garden or fall in the lake. He knew how to swim, for Merlin’s sake. And who the hell was Braque?

As Harry skimmed through the letter a second time, feeling crosser at each new prohibition, he became aware that a large, craggy boulder by the back door, which he had taken to be an oversized doorstop, was gradually uncurling. One thick, scaly leg emerged, ending in a webbed foot with five dagger-sharp claws. The curved base of the rock that Harry had assumed to be some kind of plinth, started to straighten and flex. Another stocky leg inched forward. A sandy grey, blunt-snouted reptilian head raised itself by infinitesimal degrees and an eye-slit shuttered open.

Oh fantastic, looks like I’m going to meet Braque! Harry froze. He could feel shock tingling his fingers as the blood withdrew to defend his inner keep. His mouth was so dry he’d even have been grateful for a slug of Snape’s coffee.

The creature came towards him with glacial slowness, not seeming to move its limbs at all, but covering the ground by some process of animal osmosis. It was about four feet long, half of that being a muscular, ridged tail, the peaks of which continued up along the rough-scaled back in a spiny crest. There was something crocodilian about it, but it’s head was shorter and rounded with jowly pouches under a wide, frog-like mouth. Put a frilly collar round its neck and it would look like professor Umbridge!

It came within biting distance of Harry and imperceptibly halted. A purple, forked tongue darted out and flicked the veins on Harry’s wrist. He whimpered, desperate not to flinch. Flick… flick… the tongue was cold, a shard of ice, licking, tasting…

It was growing, getting taller. Harry realised that it was, muscle by rippling muscle, rearing up onto its sturdy hind legs, bracing itself on its tail, a living, prehistoric stony tripod. One scale-armoured paw rested heavily against Harry’s heaving chest, the claws piercing his shirt through to the skin. The tongue flicked upwards, sipping at Harry’s face, snaking into his ear… He clenched his eyes shut. He felt a forked scalpel sliding into his nostril, whipping away, sliding back…

And then it began its tidal retreat, ebbing back towards the doorway. When Harry finally dared to open his eyes, it had gone, easing itself into the garden with all the urgency of a fossil.

Weak and clammy, Harry sank down at the table, resting his head on his arms and shaking with tears of relief, shock and anger. Then he threw up into the sink.

“The bastard! Bastard, bastard; slimy, greasy bastard…”

It was lucky that Snape didn’t return at that moment. Harry might have told him what he really thought.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Snape’s bookshelves were a complete library of the Dark Arts. Before he permitted himself the indulgence of browsing through the forbidden texts, Harry skimmed along the second shelf and prised down ‘Herbal Heroes’. If Snape caught him, he’d have a valid excuse for being there.

Harry was spoilt for choice. From Gardeners’ 'Medical Miscellany’ to Dr Lazarus’ ‘The Naked Necromancer’, the extremes of magical life and all shades in between were housed on those shelves. There were even a couple of wizard novels – ‘Judas Jinx’ and ‘Poison, Obliquely’, though from their pristine appearance they looked as though they had never been read. Harry initially made his selection based more on the attractiveness of the books’ spines and covers than on the subject matter. The first one he chose, ‘Tropical Toxins’ had a prickly cactus embossed on the jungle design cover, entwined with gold tooled vines and creepers. It looked extremely exotic, but the inside was a turgid list of botanical plant names, source locations and their toxicity rating. ‘Nugget or Mullock? - Alchemy Downunder’ was stylishly bound in mahogany Morocco, but again the endless paragraphs of small, dense print, unrelieved by illustrations or subdivisions, made it heavy reading. Some clichés really are based on fact, he reflected.

Harry began to pull books out at random. From the history shelf came ‘The Foreign Vocabulary of the Occult’ and ‘Al-Aswadiyyah and the Eastern Tradition’ - Hermione might have found them interesting, but Harry was not inspired. There were several shelves devoted to plant properties, poisons and antidotes, mineralogy and the animal kingdom. ‘A Passion for Potions’ caught Harry’s eye. It contained three versions of ‘Dreamless Sleep’ potion - perhaps he’d see if he could try some of them out. Madam Pomfrey’s recipe never seemed terribly effective.

The good stuff - or bad stuff, depending on your point of view - was on the top shelf. Standing on his tip-toes, Harry could just reach to tease the spines out of their tight positions in the ranks. A flattish set of ring-bound pages was lying horizontally across several books, furred with dust. Moving it out of the way, Harry could see that it was an old Dark Arts’ calendar: ‘Bloodlust ’86 ’. Harry gasped. He had heard of these calendars, but he’d never seen one; they were strictly banned at Hogwarts. Rumour had it that they showed ‘artistic’, tastefully posed (who do they think they’re kidding?) photographs of well-endowed witches, in lurid scenes of dismemberment, auto da fé, noyade and worse; gruesome images of torture, violence and depravity. The moving wizard pictures actually revealed the women writhing in the agony of their death throes.

Harry was sweating. Just holding the wretched calendar felt like a violation. But, at the same time, the sixteen year old inside him was clamouring for a quick peek, or even an eye-full. ’86 ? he thought - Snape would only have been a couple of years older than I am now. Dirty s.o.d. ! Trembling with anticipation, Harry lifted the grimy cover… The naked witch thrashed and gasped before his eyes, clawing desperately at the tightening garrotte around her neck, in the final seconds of strangulation…

Harry never got beyond January. He stuffed the calendar back onto the shelf, then stood wiping his hands down the front of his shirt, as though by that action he could physically erase his revulsion.

One fat volume, heavier than he had bargained for, toppled from his stretching fingers and slammed down onto the floor with a crash. Harry snatched it up guiltily, turning it over and around, to check that the spine was not damaged, the pages not bent. ‘Encore a l’Enfer: les Maledictions Diaboliques’. Could Snape actually read this? He shoved it hastily back into its place and reached for ‘Herbal Heroes’, expecting someone to burst in and catch him snooping. But Snape was still at the Manor and Quig could not hear. There was no one to judge him. After a couple of minutes his heartbeat levelled off at something approaching its normal rhythm. Phew!

He was more careful with the next one. Using two hands he lifted down an old, worn copy of ‘Into Darknesse’ and opened the cover. The fronts-piece bore an illustrated bookplate: five snakes, their tails entwined to form a continuous serpentine border, surrounded the Latin motto:

‘Qui nescit dissimulare nescit regulare’ .

In the centre of the bookplate, in a hand-written, italic script were the words:

‘Ex Libris Lucius Malfoy’.

Harry could hardly contain his excitement. Had this book perhaps been a gift from Malfoy, or had Snape merely forgotten to return it? He began to turn the yellowing pages, and as he did so a dog-eared bookmark slipped out and onto the floor. Harry bent to pick it up. It was a photograph. In the foreground a group of three men had their backs to the camera. One of them had shoulder length white-blond hair. They were waving to another man who was bare-back riding a Hungarian Horntail, flexing and arching in synchrony with the ferociously flailing dragon as it lashed and bucked and twisted to unseat its dare-devil rider. The rider was Snape. Younger and with his dark hair tied back, but unmistakably Snape. Well cool, thought Harry, pocketing the photo.

It came as quite a revelation to see this dynamic, dashing version of the Potions master. Harry found himself wondering what else Snape had got up to in his youth. He must have been a reasonable Quidditch player, otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to referee the school matches, but he never mentioned it. Perhaps he had ridden a motorbike like Sirius, something noisy and powerful like a huge, old Norton. An image of Snape in a long leather biker coat and goggles popped into Harry’s mind, making him grin briefly. Maybe not.

Guilt was making him jumpy. He fancied he heard a door bang and immediately thrust the book back into its empty slot on the high shelf. Again he waited, tension beading his brow. This spying was a stressful business. Again it was a false alarm.

The next title he chanced upon made him smile, Harding’s ‘Curses and Incantations: New Choral Settings’. What the heck…? He supposed the Death Eaters must chant at their Black Masses. Sheet music was pretty meaningless to Harry. He was putting the folio away when he noticed another small, insignificant volume, hidden in the space behind the front row of titles. He pulled it out indifferently. ‘An Anthology of Modern French Verse’ ? What in Merlin’s name did Snape want with that? Was it another present from Malfoy? There was no bookplate, but Harry’s heart clenched when he read the name pencilled lightly in the top right hand corner of the fly-leaf: Lily Evans.

Why did Snape have her book? What right had he? Had he stolen it? Had she given it to him? Harry clutched it tightly, his mind brimming with questions and for the second time that morning he felt tears in his eyes. He’d only been staying with Snape for one day and already he was losing it!

There was no mistaking the door this time. It swung violently open, the knob gouging a fresh gash in the plaster scabs on the wall behind, and Snape’s figure filled the hallway. Muttering ‘Murum reparo’ as a matter of course, in the way that most people might say ‘hello’, he made straight for the forbidden basement. In each hand he was holding something at arm’s length by its tail - small, long, wiry creatures that corkscrewed and jack-knifed in his fingers, emitting a series of almost ultrasonic squeals. Harry heard a muffled word of command, immediately followed by a grating noise as the door scraped over an uneven threshold, then a sharp intake of breath and an angry expletive.

Harry stood paralysed with guilt, as though Snape had, in passing, shot him with Petrificus Totalus, his mother’s poetry book still in his hands. Breathing deeply, he poked it back into its hiding place, grabbed ‘Herbal Heroes’ and scooted for the kitchen. When Snape reappeared some minutes later, Harry had already boiled some water and had discovered a crock of eggs - real hens’ eggs - which he was preparing to scramble. Having not eaten any of Quig’s breakfast, he was starving.

“You received my note? Have you collected the Potion ingredients?” was Snape’s opening remark. No social niceties such as ‘Did you sleep well?’ or ‘Have you had a good morning?’.

Oh hell, here we go. I’ll cop it now.

“No, Sir. I’m sorry, Sir. I woke up late. I was just checking the recipe,” Harry answered contritely, knowing that he was in the wrong, waiting for the excoriation to begin. But Snape merely nodded; he seemed subdued and distracted.

“You need to get it done soon, it is important. Quig…”

“I know, Sir. He cooked me breakfast.”

The Professor made no further comment. He sat down, fathoms deep in his own preoccupations. The sight of him at the kitchen table stirred a memory in Harry: Snape and Sirius in the kitchen at 12 Grimmauld Place, arguing. Arguing about him. Father and God-father - what would they have said if they’d known? Sirius would have hated it. Oh, Sirius…

Forcing himself to focus on practicalities, Harry cooked and poured the tea. He didn’t yet trust himself to broach the subject of Sirius. He plonked a mug in front of Snape and, after a furious deliberation with himself, not sure if it was the right thing to do at all, a plate of eggs. Bolting his own food, he eyed the professor anxiously, feeling that he might have somehow overstepped the mark. Snape swallowed, barely aware of what he was eating. Harry had seen him in many moods - angry, impatient, intense, analytical, stoically enduring, even resigned to die – but never like this. Never so disengaged and, well, empty.

It’s really inconvenient of him. How come it’s never a good time to ask questions? For the questions were now starting to pile up, the events of the morning seething inside him. Harry wondered if it were possible to spur Snape into conversation.

“What were those creatures you brought back, Sir? The ones you took down to the ‘basement’?” The sarcastic side to the last word was intentional.

“What?”

The Professor looked up, momentarily disorientated. Then he dragged himself back from wherever it was he had been.

“The creatures? Oh, Cashmere-coated Gruber Weasels. A breeding pair. They escaped last week, so Quig informed me. I was fortunate to come across them on my way back from the Manor. Their pancreatic fluid contains a potent softening enzyme, and the fur, evidently, has its uses. Extremely vicious for their size.” He examined his index finger, where blood was spotting from two small, evenly spaced puncture wounds.

“So the basement is where you …?” Harry was beginning to understand and to regret his melodramatic assumptions.

“Where I keep and raise specimens. One of the rooms is a small laboratory. What did you think, Potter? That it was some kind of venue for clandestine activity? I do not issue arbitrary prohibitions. You are not to go in there unaccompanied for a good reason - I possess several highly dangerous species. You are not to put yourself at unnecessary risk.”

He’s doing that ‘protective’ thing again. If only he weren’t so damned autocratic about it. Harry was still annoyed, even though at least four of the points in Snape’s irritating note had been justified.

“What about the lake, then? I can swim, you know!”

“You know nothing about the contents of that lake!” Snape flashed angrily. “For your information it sustains three of the most poisonous creatures known to man. Have you heard of Friedman’s sea snake? I suppose that would be expecting too much. It is the most venomous snake in the world. What about the Metatron Puffer fish? A drop of its poison would kill you in less than twenty minutes. Valmont’s water wasp? Another name that has presumably eluded your attention. Highly dangerous. Perhaps you know it as the ‘Mad Monk’ jellyfish? No? Sixty tentacles, each containing millions of poisonous nematocysts? Need I go on, Potter? Do you still fancy a swim?”

“But don’t those things live in the sea? That’s a lake!” Harry’s comfortable illusions about the dull normality of Snape’s little country cottage, were slipping into quicksand and sinking fast.

“Do you know that? Your assumptions are based on what, Potter? On what is conventional? On the laws of Muggle physics? The mind of a true wizard is open to infinite possibilities. Habitats can be manipulated, environments modified…”

“I know that now!” retorted Harry, fighting the furious suspicion that he had been set a secret test and had just spectacularly failed. Snape didn’t play fair. He didn’t give you any information and then castigated you for not knowing it anyway. Bastard! That word tripped a switch and another grievance shot out of the trap. Scraping his chair back as he stood up, Harry bellowed indignantly at Snape,

“And what the hell is Braque?”

“Language, Potter.” The reprimand was automatic; Snape didn’t actually seem that bothered. “Did he lick your hand?”

“My hand? My hand? Yeah, right. And my face. And my ears. It even stuck its tongue right up my friggin’ nose!” At the thought of that flickering, slimy probe Harry was almost ready to heave again.

“Ah.” A brief smirk brightened Snape’s face.

“It’s not funny! You could have warned me!”

“I thought I had. You have not been bitten. You followed instructions from… Let me see, who might have given you instructions? Well, Potter?”

“Yes, alright. But you never tell me enough. There are all these things I want to know, and you never tell me anything…”

Harry had passed him an easy Quaffle. All Snape had to do was fly with it and throw it through the hoop. The ball hovered between them, daring Snape to take possession. For a few seconds he hesitated… …then he swerved, dodging an imaginary Bludger.

“Braque is very rare,” he said, “he is a Tuatara.”

“Tuatara? Hagrid’s not done those with us yet. What can it do - apart from lick you to death?” Though still angry, Harry couldn’t help but be curious. Snape gave him a pitying glance and adopted the supercilious, professorial tone that Harry recognised from the classroom:

“A Tuatara is not a Magical Creature. It’s a reptile, native to New Zealand. There are very few left in the wild. Its species is the sole survivor of a group of animals that is now extinct. They resemble lizards in many ways, but the two are in fact quite different. And Braque is exceptional because of his virtually amphibian ability to swim. You are aware, Potter, that many lizards cannot swim?”

“And I suppose he lives in the sodding lake too?”

“At present he has the run of the estate. But it may be impractical for him to enter the house once he is fully grown.” Snape’s gaze travelled round the kitchen, assessing the width of the doorways.

“You mean that thing’s still a baby?” Harry exclaimed, horrified. “Just how big does it get?”

“I’m not sure. Braque is already a large specimen. It may even be that he has already achieved his full growth potential. Pure bred Tuatara rarely grow much after the age of sixty years.”

“Sixty!” To Harry this discussion was bordering on the surreal, but Snape seemed open to chatting about his disgusting dinosaur creature. Why couldn’t he be this frank about everything else?

“My family has owned him for almost that long. I am reliably informed that Tuatara can live to twice that age.”

“A good wizard pet, then?” commented Harry. Then, making a shrewd stab, “That’s it, isn’t it? He’s your idea of a pet?”

Snape shrugged, looking uncomfortable.

“There is evidence of a highly evolved intelligence. He is trained and obedient. And he guards the premises.”

Harry scoffed,

“Not exactly built for speed though, is he? Wouldn’t burglars just run away, or nick past him?”

He illustrated his point with a feint round an invisible Braque and a quick flourish of an equally invisible cloak. (In his mind he was already working it up for Ron into a pun about a Tua-Toreador.) Up until then he had been standing with his hands in his pockets (again). It was a defensive stance and he made a mental note to avoid it in future - Snape picked up on body language.

He came to an abrupt halt. The photograph had fallen out of his pocket and lay face up on the floor like an unexploded Puff Pod. The young Snape gave them an insolent wave and the dragon lashed its tail, snorting blue sparks.

“Where did you get that?” Snape hissed. His face, pale enough already, was now white with anger, his low voice mercury smooth and just as lethal. “Give it to me!”

Harry sighed and handed over the picture. Snape took it wordlessly, and, without meeting Harry’s eyes, stalked out of the room.