Gin a Body Meet a Body | Harry Potter for Grown-Ups

Chapter Two

When the door had shut behind his Deputy, Severus let his face fall into his hands.

He should have known. Just when he thought things couldn't get worse, they inevitably did. He had spent the past week since his official instalment as Headmaster of Hogwarts hiding in his quarters and working up the courage to face his former colleagues, every last man and woman of whom believed him a murderer. Which he was.

He had been drawn from his hidey-hole by the thought that his newly appointed Muggle Studies and Defence teachers now had free rein among the staff and students. In fact, he had expected the main subject of the meeting Minerva had requested to be just that.

Now he wished it had been.

Lifting his face from his palms, he used his wand to unlock the drawer in which the Headmaster's book was kept. He withdrew the monstrous old tome using a Levitation spell—it was too heavy to lift—and paged carefully through the leaves of aging parchment until he came to the section on the castle's protections.

The first several pages were written in a faded medieval script, rendering them almost impossible to read. After more than an hour, Severus thought he had managed to understand the gist of it.

As far as he could tell, the foundational wards had been put into place by Headmaster Spurius DeLacey in 1184 after an attack by a marauding band of—Severus thought it said giants—had destroyed much of the castle and killed more than two-thirds of its inhabitants. DeLacey had understandably employed the strongest magic known: a form of blood magic that required an annual full blood sacrifice to be made by the Head of the school at "a tyme moste holie".

DeLacey had required each family of a child attending the school to send one member to stand for them at the lottery that was held each year at Samhain. The unlucky "winner" of the lottery then had his or her blood completely drained, and the last drop was put into a cup of wine, which the Headmaster would drink, sealing the protections for the year to come.

DeLacey had written that the protections seemed effective and that he would recommend to his successor to continue them.

There was no more about it until the entry of Headmistress Eoessa Sakndenberg from 1485, and then she noted only that she saw fit to record the names of the sacrificial victims, a tradition that the next twelve Heads had apparently continued.

Severus turned through the pages and pages of names, occasionally recognising one: Malfoy appeared once, as did Longbottom, Greengrass twice, and Prewett a horrifying four times in the next two hundred fifty years.

Finally, in 1741, Headmistress Dilys Derwent had thought to do away with the practice entirely. She had evidently sought opinions from eminent charms masters and mistresses from all over Europe, and it was concluded that the blood sacrifice might be replaceable with another sort of symbolic sacrifice "to replicate in nearly equal measure, the sublime moment in which the carnal and the transcendent are as one."

Severus thought that was taking the metaphor a bit too far.

Ah, now he was at the meat of it. He read the requirements of the amended spell:

The Headmistress or Headmaster, being most intimately connected with Hogwarts by virtue of the blood pledge, must lie with another so connected by birth or by blood pledge, to the ultimate moment in which the essence of life is exchanged.

Snape snorted aloud. Essence of life indeed!

"Is something troubling you, Severus?"

Snape looked up to find the portrait of Dumbledore smiling down on him beatifically.