FIC: The Wolf and the Spy (1/?)
This is something of an experiment, so maybe my readers can let me know if it's worth pursuing further.

Title: The Wolf and the Spy
Author: zephre
Rated:  PG this part
Word Count: 2,947
Prompt: 100 quills Table 50.2: Chains
Characters this part:  Remus, Severus, Luna
Pairings in series overall: Remus/Severus, Luna/Harry, Salazar/Helga
Summary:  Captured during a full moon while in possession of vital information for the rebels and for Hogwarts, Remus finds himself ransomed by taciturn potioner Severus of Snape, whose loyalties are in question. Together with a gifted former slave and an impetuous young lord, they must make their way north through Wessex, Mercia, and Northumbria, unto Alba and the sanctuary of the new and fragile Wizarding Alliance centered at Hogwarts castle.
Warnings:  So very, very Alternate Reality. Will feature slash and het!
Notes: This story and its associated series (The "Beginnings" series) take the characters of our familiar books and place them in the 11th century, the time of the Norman Conquest in Britain (and the Founding of Hogwarts). Yes, the Founders are all involved, too.
I have changed just about everybody's surname to be more reflective of what they would have been called in period, but have tried to maintain them as recognizable figures.
According to the calendar I have chosen to use, the Hare Moon is in May.


Remus woke in darkness sometime after the setting of the Hare Moon. Heavy manacles ringed his wrists and ankles, and if the pain of each labored breath was any sign, he had broken a rib or two. He wondered if Mad Lord LeStrange would bother to check this pit or just leave Remus to bleed or starve to death.

It smelled of wet straw, mold, and rust. The stone at Remus's back was damp, the chill seeping into his bare skin until his bones ached. He could just make out a sliver of light through the wood planking over the top of the pit. It must be well after sunrise, perhaps even nearing midday. With a small, careful movement Remus tested the give of the chain between the manacles on his wrists. One of the links seemed weaker than the others, and he strained to break it until the agony burning through his chest forced him to stop. He let his head fall back against the rough stones lining the walls of his crude prison and sighed.

There was no mercy in LeStrange. Even if Remus had been one of his lordship's own loyal Normans, there would have been no mercy or recourse. Werewolves were a plague upon all humans, and a Welsh rebel werewolf was just that much more a criminal.

When the planking moved at last, Remus braced himself for the crossbowman and the bolt of burning silver that would end his life. Instead, the silhouette of a thin figure appeared, probably female from the shape, and she dropped a bronze weight into the pit on a rope. Not a rope, Remus realized a moment after the weight had thumped into the dirt floor a good three feet from his body. A rope ladder.

The figure vanished from his narrow field of view and Remus squinted up into - yes, that must be midday sunlight. Then there she was again, and the weight on the ground moved in circles in the dirt as she climbed down into his prison.

She was small and slight, so thin that her wrists and ankles looked more bone than flesh. She wore leather clogs, a much-mended smock whose original color had faded into a dull, uneven gray, and a hemp belt hung with several bent iron hooks, from which descended leather pouches that looked much too expensive for her to own. Her face, when she turned to him, was as thin as the rest of her, and her gray eyes huge in the shadows of the pit. The hair coming free of her green headscarf coiled in unruly tendrils pale as dry autumn grass. Around her neck a circle of bronze rested, worked with braids and stamped with the seal of LeStrange. It could have been a clan torque but for the seal of ownership, and the fact it had been soldered closed. She was a household slave.

"You're awake," she said in surprise when he moved. Something about the way she shaped her vowels struck a familiar chord in Remus.

He noticed that she did not flinch away from him when she realized he was aware. Many people would. "Despite rumors to the contrary, werewolves are not nocturnal," he said, lifting his head as far as he could before his abused body protested.

She blinked at him. "Prima said you talked strange. Sound like a head table man, you do. Or a church man." As she spoke, she loosed one of the pouches from her belt.

"I am a tutor," Remus said. "Or, I was. Remus Magister, they called me." He sniffed the air again. Whatever was in that pouch smelled heavily of cinnamon, and he marveled that a slave would be allowed to carry such a valuable commodity.

"Master Wolf," the girl translated easily, surprising Remus. He would not expect a slave to know much Latin, although perhaps the tales had been told even among the lowest of servants. She lifted her fingers to his mouth; they were brown with a thick cinnamon paste. "Eat," she instructed. "And be still."

"I don't-" Remus began, but the moment he opened his mouth she pressed her fingers in and smeared his tongue with the strong-smelling stuff.

"Eat," she repeated, gently. "It will help."

He placed her accent this time; there was just the hint of Cornish inflection. He swallowed the dose and licked his lips. "You're helping me?" he asked. What horrors could LeStrange have in mind if not execution? Remus shuddered at the thought.

"I mean to heal you, Master Wolf." She smiled, a tiny curve of her lips that hinted at the beauty hunger and labor had stolen from her face.

Remus wondered how old she was, and how she had come here. But he did not have time to wonder yet. "Will your master kill me later, then?"

Her smile vanished. "I am told only to heal the man in the pit."

She did not even have a wand. She was a slave. This was some twisted jest of LeStrange's, some final laugh at Remus's expense. The Madman and his Norman brothers no doubt raised a glass even now to the destruction of the threat to their rule.

Remus sighed and let his head fall back to the floor. The cinnamon paste was starting to make him a bit dizzy, and he wondered what other ingredients had been in the odd concoction. Perhaps, if he was simply awaiting death, he did have time to wonder these things. Just enough time.

The girl took hold of one of his hands.

"Where did you come from?" Remus asked, since he had decided to wonder freely. "Where were you born?"

"In a village on the River Tamar," she answered easily, with no hesitation. "My father was a keeper of memory."

Remus knew the title from his own travels among wizards living among the amughoi. Someone had to know the old stories, had to keep the Old Ways, even as the Church sought to destroy them. It had been a very long time since Remus had met a living keeper of memory. "Freeborn, then?" he murmured, flexing his fingers in hers.  His hand felt oddly warm. "How -?" He gestured feebly with his other hand, weighted by the manacle. "Why a slave?" 

She moved one hand to still his movement, and where she touched him now felt distinctly hot. "Debts of my father needed settling."

She placed her fingertips against his ribs. This time he knew the moment that whatever power this slave girl wielded touched him. His bones knit together under her hands, and he breathed without pain.

He closed his eyes in relief and tried to think past the haze of the drug in his system. "No wand?" he asked at last.

"Never, Master Wolf," she said, and moved her hands to the dried blood crusting his hip. She leaned over him to touch his knees, then his ankles. He looked down at himself and saw that much of the bruising and lacerations from his transformation in chains had been mended. "My mother had a wand. It did not help her when the village stoned her for a witch."

She stood up, and Remus curled on his side, all his great hurts reduced to manageable aches. "What's your name, then?" he asked the girl, as she turned away. She was extraordinary. Her power should not be caged here, should never have been caged in the first place, but nurtured. Remus dared not think what she might do if she were trained to use a wand.

"Tertia," she said. "Ancilla Tertia."

Remus frowned. The third servant girl, that name meant. It was no name at all. "Not that one. What did your mother call you?"

She looked back at him, her eyes narrow and silver, curls bleached white by the sun haloing her pale face. The moment was so charged with portent that Remus was entirely prepared when she said, "Luna. My name is Luna." Of course it was. Of course she was, and the next full moon the Dyan Moon, moon of his cruel, pale goddess, and here She stood incarnate. Remus was certain that if he had the Sight the silver cord binding his wyrd to this girl's would be thick and unbreakable.

He must find a way to escape, and bring her with him to Hogwarts.

He wished he had a way to speed up the movement of the sun, to bring the long shadows of evening and the deep darkness of night. There would be no climbing and no running in clear daylight. That would bring the crossbowman and the silver bolt for certain.

"Sleep, Master Wolf," Luna said, bending to touch his forehead with two fingers. "Sleep and heal." She set a small, shallow bowl beside his head, smoldering with incense. When he inhaled the first whiff, Remus tried to hold his breath against it, wanted to knock the bowl away, but she stood over him, and her two fingers held him still more surely than any chains.

Wolfsbane.

Wolfsbane and something else, something sweet and pungent without the bite of the cinnamon she had fed him earlier. He knew she did not intend to harm him, but even a hint of that poison brought on panic. After his first few shallow breaths, his vision began to darken. Her face was white and round and full of light, and it was the last thing he saw before he passed out.

*

"Wake up, Wolf."

Remus heard the voice as through a veil of fog. He felt something warm and solid nudge one of his ankles, making the chains clank. The voice was familiar, but he could not place it.

"He is not like the others," said a second voice he recognized as the slave, Luna. She seemed to be speaking from far above him, floating like the sky goddess she was. "He is bright and blue and harder to put to sleep."

Remus had no idea what the girl was talking about, but apparently someone else did. "No, he is not like the others. He is an idiot. Make yourself useful and fetch something to drink, girl," said the first voice, and this time Remus recognized it.

Severus. A great euphoria swept through Remus as he realized who was standing in the pit beside him. And then just as quickly his joy plummeted in horrified realization.

Severus? Here? At LeStrange's keep? Had Godric been right all along, then, and the potioner had betrayed them all?

Remus rolled onto his back, felt his leg brush up against a leather-clad foot that was quickly withdrawn. Severus was a shadow in the pit, darker than the stones in the walls, save where the thin light of evening glinted on buckles or the hilts of the daggers in his belt. Suddenly conscious of his own nudity, Remus sat up and pulled in his knees.  The chains dragged across the dirt floor.

"Aperio," said Severus, pointing his wand. The manacles fell open into the dirt. "Get up, Wolf," the dark man ordered briskly. "Put these on."

Leather trews and a homespun shirt hit Remus in the face, then fell over his lap. Remus wondered if this was a rescue or merely a transfer of ownership.

"Sev-" Remus began, but the other man's wand sliced through the air with an audible whistle, and Remus felt the Silencing spell close his mouth.

Severus leaned over and took Remus's upper arm in a bruising grip, pulling the werewolf to his feet. "Be silent," he ordered, barely above a whisper.  "Get dressed. We have no time."

Remus nodded once, and felt the Silence lift. 

"Do not speak unless asked. Do not speak at all if you can help it. Not until we are away." Severus's voice was low and urgent behind Remus as he dressed. "I am purchasing your ransom."

That surprised Remus, and his mind began working at the problem. Severus himself was not landed, not wealthy. He had been a lay brother in a Lincolnshire monastery for several years after his apprenticeship, and only in the last decade come to serve Salazar the Slytherine. Where would he have gotten the money to purchase a ransom?

Who was paying Severus's way?

Remus himself was no great lord or landowner, and valued by no ruling king. What ransom could he possibly be worth, unless someone else knew the secrets he carried? Was he being ransomed to freedom, or to a different sort of imprisonment?

By the time Remus was dressed and ready to move, Luna had appeared once more at the top of the pit, holding a clay pitcher. Severus made Remus climb out first, and Remus sprawled happily across the sod the moment he cleared the planking. The evening star twinkled in a clear sky above.

"Drink," Luna said, crouching beside him with the pitcher held out.

Remus sniffed the offered beverage as he took the pitcher, then gulped greedily. It was more water than wine, but refreshing even so.

Severus closed the planks over the now empty pit when he emerged. "Come, we must go to Rudolfus before his feast is done."

Remus took a risk, then, feeling the pull of many threads on his wyrd. He reached up and took hold of the potioner's forearm, and spoke. Only five words, and quickly, so as not to rouse too much anger. But they were five urgent words. "She must come with us." With his other hand he touched Luna's elbow.

Severus scowled down at them. "I cannot buy you both."

Luna stared at Remus, her hand slipping on the pitcher.

"She must come," Remus repeated. He met Severus's gaze and tried to put all of his thoughts in the front of his mind. The girl was too powerful to leave here in servitude. And Remus owed her a debt.

For a long moment Severus stared into Remus's eyes, his face set and tight. Then he sighed, and scowled once more. "Very well," he declared.

Luna dropped the pitcher.

Severus turned on her, taking her delicate chin in his hand. His long fingers curled like claws around her jaw. "Listen to me, girl," he said, ignoring the beginnings of protest from Remus. "Do you wish to go? Leave all you have known for the darkness and despair of the world? You will be a fugitive, a criminal, until you reach sanctuary in Alba. Hogwarts is your only hope, and it lies miles to the north through dangerous country. Is that your wish, to risk your life to seek it?"

Remus did not know what he expected Luna to say to that. She was so young, and he had no idea what her experience of the world had been. Would she cave to the threat in Severus's voice, or actually hear the offer?

"I will go with you," Luna said with quiet calm, her eyes wide and unblinking as she met Severus's stare. Remus wondered if she had ever been taught not to look a wizard in the eye.

"Then you must trust me, and drink this." Severus removed a tiny vial from a silk bag sewn into the lining of his cloak.

Luna did not pause even long enough to sniff the contents of the vial. She took it from Severus's hand, removed the cork, and drank the viscous black contents in one swallow. She gagged on it, and dropped the vial as her hands went to her throat.

"It is called the Morrigan's Veil, and will hide you from the eyes of the living until sunrise. Do not fight it." Severus took the girl by the shoulders and eased her to the ground.

Remus stared at Severus in shock. Why did this man have a vial of such a potent, dangerous, and difficult potion on his person? The Veil was one of a series of potions from the Mothers, potions of such power that their very existence was considered myth in some villages. Not just any wizard could brew such a thing, and the consequences of botching the preparation were dire.

Of all the Mothers' Potions, though, the Veil of Morrigan was the most feared, the most misunderstood. Folk songs called it the Draught of Death, and called on the Lady to administer it to warriors fallen on the field. And perhaps she did so, indeed, for inevitably some warriors survived wounds that would have killed another man.

Luna's eyes rolled up and she slumped forward into Severus's arms. Remus knew that she would have no discernible pulse or breath until the sun rose to break the power of the potion. She was, to the evidence of all external senses, dead.

Severus lifted the body and carried it with them to the gate leading to the inner keep.  Beside the gate was a cart with a decrepit donkey grazing in harness. Severus laid Luna in the bed of the cart and tossed a grubby homespun cloth over her, tucking her feet up behind a barrel lashed to the side slats.

"Now let us go to Rudolfus, Wolf. We must be away from here by dawn."

Remus wished he knew what was happening in Severus's mind. How was a dead slavegirl easier to rescue than a living one? Yet he could not question, did not wish to have the Silence placed upon him for the entire night. Better to go along with things until he got his bearings. Remus may not be at his best the day after a Moon, but he was a quick study with an excellent memory. And Godric would need all the observations Remus could make.
    

So... worth it to figure out more of where it's going?