Over the next weeks Harry revisited the memory Lupin had given him several times. He got a kick out of watching the very beginning of his parent’s relationship unfold.
Unfortunately, seeing Remus had not stopped Harry’s nightmares. It had only mixed them up. Now a teenaged Lily sometimes appeared at Godric’s Hallow, and Voldemort sometimes killed Sirius or Remus as well as James.
Either way Harry still woke up in a cold sweat.
So Harry did what he always did when he was in a quandary. He went to his wife.
Ginny was silent for a long moment after he told her about Snape.
“Hmm. On the one hand, I can see Remus’ point. On the other, would you really be able to get past how much you dislike Snape to ask him for a favor? Because that’s what you’d be doing.”
“I know.”
“Plus it would mean going to France, trying to track him down, and who knows how long that would take? The baby’s due in two more months.”
“If the French ministry has a lead on him it might not take that long.”
Ginny was quiet again for a few minutes. “And the idea of all that ugliness between the two of you being dredged up again…I can’t say I want you to go through that. But I think you should go.”
Harry blinked. “You do? You just said…”
“I think you should try. Go to France, Harry. Baby and I will be fine until you get back.”
“But what if…”
Ginny shushed him. “A month, Harry. Take a month, and try to get this settled so we can move on. I need you whole and focused when the baby’s here.”
“All right,” he reluctantly agreed. “One month.”
Harry packed a rucksack and his Pensieve, and flew to Paris.
The French equivalent of the Ministry of Magic, Le Départment de La Magie, at first denied they knew anything about the British wizard who’d once been known as Severus Snape.
And if they had ever heard of him, they certainly weren’t going to tell Harry where they’d gotten that information.
But Harry was used to massive bureaucracies, and to the often frustrating lack of communication between magical governments. He stayed in Paris for a week, contacting bureau after bureau, and using all the pull he had as an Auror. Finally, a harried manager gave him a piece of paper. Just one, but on it was the name of one of the Départment’s key informants.
On the advice (or more accurately, the insistence) of the French, Harry left his broom in Paris and traveled Muggle-style, by train, to Lyon. In a shabby quarter of the city he found the pub, Les Quatre Cavaliers, where his informant was to meet him.
If being called “The Four Horsemen” had not been a giveaway that this was a dark wizard’s gathering place, the smoky darkness inside would have convinced Harry. It consisted of only one room, with a bar in the middle. A fireplace contained a roaring fire. There were tables and chairs scattered around the room, all as old and run-down as the building that housed them.
Business seemed to be good. Some of the patrons were drinking; some were playing games of chance on the scarred wooden tables.
Harry approached a rather cross-looking goblin in a jeweled waistcoat, the only goblin in the place. He was sitting by the fire in front of an empty wizard’s chess board.
“Fancy a game?” Harry asked. Those were the words he’d been instructed to use.
The goblin gestured Harry to a chair, and began setting the pieces in place. He crooked his long finger in the direction of the one-eyed bartender, who brought over a bottle of firewhisky and two filthy glasses.
“Don’t suppose you’d care to make a wager?” the goblin asked. Goblins loved to gamble, but in this case it was a cover.
Harry pulled out a small bag of gold galleons. He counted out exactly half of them. The goblin’s eyes greedily followed his hands as Harry tucked the rest of the money away.
“I’ll wager half now,” he said. “If you win the game, you can get the other half.”
The goblin licked his lips. “Deal.”
Harry and the goblin, who said his name was Tighnaught, made a great show of playing chess while they conversed in low tones.
“The first thing you should know is, he doesn’t use his English name any more,” the goblin said, squinting at his rook.
“What name does he use?”
“The names of the family he works for. I say names, because there are two branches to the family. The Italian side is called Amalfi, the French, Lebeau. He sometimes uses one, sometimes the other, and sometimes both.”
Harry deliberately let one of his pawns be captured. “Are they dark wizards, this family?”
“Not exactly. They’re more like---go betweens. Between dark creatures and wizards, and sometimes between Muggles and wizards, too. If you need something done, something negotiated, you go to the Amalfi-Lebeaus. Not that they haven’t produced their fair share of witches and wizards over the centuries. But they aren’t accepted in respectable society.”
Tighnaught dropped his voice. “They have a bad habit of intermarrying with vampires. Several times, the last less than a hundred years ago. The vampire blood mixed in has made them all a bit…strange. And dangerous.”
Vampires were the ultimate outsiders in the magical world. A human family that intermarried with them even once was often viewed as tainted. To do so repeatedly would put them beyond the pale.
“And you know all this because…”
“I’ve worked for them in the past. Probably will in the future, too. But in the meantime a goblin’s got to look out for himself.”
The creature was rapidly clearing Harry’s side of the board as he spoke.
“I see. And where might I find him?”
“The last time I saw him was a few years ago, in a little town east of here, called Brison-Saint-Innocent. He may still be in the area. The mountains hide all sorts things, and the family holds a lot of land up there. But he may also have continued on, over the Swiss or the Italian borders. In which case you won’t find him.”
Harry let his king get chopped to bits by Tighnaught’s. That was probably the fastest game of wizard’s chess he’d ever played, he judged ruefully.
The goblin looked pointedly from Harry to the board and back again.
Harry sighed and pulled out the remainder of his gold. He handed it, pouch and all, to the goblin. “Thanks for the game. I’d better get going.”
The creature carefully counted and stacked his windfall. “Any time, young man. Do stop in again if you need anything else.”
From Lyon, Harry took the train east as far as the village the goblin had mentioned. He was well into the Rhône-Alpes region—beautiful but rugged country. Parts of it, where the mountains were more accessible, were hot spots for Muggle skiing. But not here. Here there were only little towns and villages, hugging the mountainsides and tucked into valleys.
From Brison-Saint-Innocent he headed north, figuring Snape would have chosen the most isolated spot possible. Most of the villages were so small they weren’t even marked on Muggle maps, and so isolated neither railroad lines nor highways accessed them.
There was not a trace of magic to be seen in the area—not a wizarding shop or a broomstick or even a glimpse of someone in magical robes. Harry was therefore careful to always keep his wand hidden and the Pensieve locked in its box.
He made inquiries, but no one seemed to have seen or heard of Snape, under that name, or under any of the other ones Tighnaught had suggested. They also seemed to resent that Harry, in his broken French, was bothering them by asking.
As he hiked from place to place, staying the night in dreary little inns, Harry began to feel more and more foolish, and more and more homesick.
What was worse, he was beginning to suspect that this part of the mountains had been made Unplottable. Often Harry would feel he was making progress, only to find the road he was walking on led back into a village he’d already visited.
Harry looked for Snape for three weeks, with no success. It was getting close to the time he’d promised Ginny he’d return home.
On what Harry had decided would be his last Sunday in France, he stopped in a tiny village appropriately named Ciel Gris—“Gray Sky.” It was nestled at the foot of a particularly steep range of mountains. The clouds piled up against them, blocking out a great deal of the sunlight in the valley below.
Harry left his baggage in the only inn in town and turned northwards again. The village only had one road, and it ran through orchards and pastures as it wound its way higher into the mountains.
It was September now, so most of the harvest was in. The lowering sky that had given the village its name and the empty fields gave the place a melancholy air. The higher Harry went, the shabbier the landscape got, with broken fences and untended orchards replacing tidy farmsteads. The road also got rockier. Finally Harry decided to walk in the pasture on one side, where there was grass and he could give his aching feet a break.
That turned out to be a mistake, because as he came out of a small grove of trees Harry found a large bull standing in the grass. The animal took one look at him, and lowered its head to charge.
Of all the possible dangers Harry might encounter on this trip, this honestly had not been one he’d anticipated. He pulled out his wand, and began to back away slowly.
This meant he wasn’t watching where he was going. He caught his heel against a fallen fence rail, and tumbled over backward.
Harry smacked his head against the ground, and for a moment all he could see were stars.
And then, against the gray sky, a face appeared.
It was Snape.