Chapter Text
The train had smelled of coal smoke and fear. James didn't think about it now.
He thought about his feet instead — about keeping them moving through the dark, through the wet grass that soaked through his boots to the ankle, through the kind of night that pressed down on you like a hand on the back of your neck. The moon was cooperative at least, half-hidden behind cloud cover, giving them just enough light to run by and not enough to be seen. Small mercies. His mother had always said to be grateful for small mercies. James had always privately thought that was what people said when the large ones weren't coming.
He wasn't going to think about his mother right now either.
"Left," Sirius breathed behind him.
James went left. The field gave way to a dirt road, two pale tracks worn into dark earth, and then to the silhouette of buildings. No lights in the windows of the houses they passed. Good. He slowed to a walk and heard Remus exhale long and controlled behind him
"Is that it?" James asked, head tilting towards the few houses scattered ahead.
"The church is at the centre. Has to be." Sirius came up alongside him, slightly out of breath, which he would never admit. He had a cut across his chin from the fence they'd crossed outside Jihlava and had been touching it periodically all evening with a kind of indignant fascination, as if he couldn't quite believe the fence had had the audacity. "Alferd said the square. There'll be a statue."
"There's always a statue in these God-forgotten places," Remus huffed. He was limping slightly. James was trying not to dwell on it, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to go further.
They moved through the outskirts of the village in single file, keeping close to the walls. It was the kind of town that had probably been the same for three hundred years before the war and was now trying very hard to pretend it had always been something else. Red banners hung limp in the still air, two of them, strung between a post and the corner of what looked like a community hall. A portrait of Gottwald, faded and slightly peeling, gazed out from the wall beneath them with the blank authority of all portraits of men who needed you to believe they were watching. James kept his eyes forward.
"You're sure about Alferd," Remus said. It wasn't quite a question.
"He's my uncle," Sirius said.
"That's not what I asked."
James could feel Sirius deciding how honest to be in the dark, which was a different calculation than the one he made in daylight. "He wrote back," Sirius said finally. "That's enough."
Remus made a sound that communicated an entire lecture in a single syllable. James had always admired that about him.
The square opened up ahead of them. Cobblestones, a dry fountain, a linden tree that must have been a hundred years old spreading over half the space, and yes, a church. Stone, squat-towered, the kind that had survived the Hussites and the Habsburgs and presumably intended to survive whatever came next as well. The statue in front of it was wrapped in scaffolding, a shroud of wooden poles and planking that sagged slightly to one side. James stared at it.
"That's what we're here to fix," he said.
"Among other things," Sirius said.
"I'm just saying. It looks like it's been like that for a while."
"James."
"I'm not criticising the plan, I'm observing the statue —"
James.
He stopped. A light had appeared in the church. A single candle, moving behind the narrow window beside the door. It paused. Then the door opened, and a man stood in the frame, silhouetted and still, looking out at them across the empty square.
He was older than James had expected. Still broad shouldered, but with white at his temples and a watchfulness about him that had nothing to do with age. He wore a dark cassock and no expression at all.
He looked, James thought, very much like what Sirius might be in forty years if everything went wrong and then somehow right again.
He raised his hand. Alferd raised his in return.
They crossed the square quickly, no longer quite running, not quite walking either, the in-between gait of people trying to appear as nothing. Alferd stepped back from the door to let them in and James went first, ducking his head through the low arch into the dark of the vestibule. It smelled of candle wax and cold stone and something faintly herbal that he couldn't identify. Behind him he heard Sirius and his uncle greet each other in low voices. Not with an embrace, which somehow said more than an embrace would have.
"You made it," Alfred said. His Czech was slightly accented, the kind nobody under fifty spoke anymore.
"Of course we made it," Sirius said, but he was grinning.
"The train from Brno was watched."
"We didn't take the train from Brno."
Alferd looked at them, the mud on their boots, at Remus's leg, at the cut on Sirius's chin. "No," he said. "I can see that." He turned to James. "You're Potter."
"James," James said. "Yes. Thank you for —"
"Thank me when you're across the border." Alferd turned away before James could finish, lifting the candle and moving deeper into the church. "Come. There are pallets in the vestry. You won't be seen there."
They followed. The church was small and plain. There was no baroque excess here, no gilt cherubs or marble saints, just whitewashed walls and old oak pews worn to a shine by generations of local farmers who had believed, or at least showed up. A wooden Christ hung above the altar with the exhausted expression of someone who had heard every possible human problem and was still, somehow, listening. James looked at it for a moment longer than necessary.
"The cover story," Alferd said, setting the candle down on a vestry table and turning to face them. The room was crowded with four people in it. Small, functional, shelves of vestments and record books and a particular brand of organised clutter. "You are craftsmen. Stonemasons. You have been contracted by the district cultural office to assess and restore the statue of Saint Wenceslas in the square."
"Which needs actual restoring," Remus observed, sitting down on the edge of a pallet with careful deliberateness. His leg must still hurt quite a lot, James thought, if he sacrificed having the high ground.
"Which is why the cover story works," Alferd said. "I am the one who requested the assessment. The paperwork is legitimate." A pause. "The signatures are legitimate."
"And the ones doing the assessing?" James asked.
"Know enough not to look incompetent. Basic stonework. I'll show you in the morning." Alferd looked at him steadily. "Your Czech."
"Is fine," James said, in Czech. It was better than fine and he knew it. He'd grown up half-bilingual, his father's doing, late-night lessons at the kitchen table framed as games and only obviously lessons in retrospect. Another thing he wasn't going to think about.
Alferd's expression didn't change, but something in it settled slightly. "Good. The village is not large. People will notice you. You will be polite, you will work, you will not draw attention, and you will not" — his gaze moved briefly to Sirius — "do anything… interesting."
Sirius opened his mouth.
"I mean it," Alferd said.
Sirius closed it again.
Alferd took a folded piece of paper from the shelf and handed it to James. He apparently trusted him enough to know he would do something sensible with it. James unfolded it. A map, hand-drawn, the village and its outskirts, two roads marked with small crosses. "The patrols," Alferd said. "Routine, so far. There is an officer from the district, Crouch, who has been here for three weeks. He is thorough."
"Great," Sirius said,sarcasm dripping of his tongue.
"I'll handle Crouch," Alferd said, in a tone that closed the subject entirely. He moved to the door of the vestry, then stopped without turning around. "You have perhaps five weeks before the window closes. After that, the route is…." he chose the next word deliberately, "uncertain."
James folded the map. "We'll be ready."
"You'll need to be more than ready," Alferd said. "You'll need to be invisible." He glanced back once. "Sleep. I'll wake you before the bells."
He left. The candle stayed.
James looked at Sirius, who was sitting on his pallet with his elbows on his knees and his eyes somewhere in the middle distance, thinking something large and not saying it. Remus had his boot off and was examining his ankle with clinical detachment, the slight tightening around his eyes the only concession to pain.
"Right then," James said. He sat down on the remaining pallet. The straw was thin and the floor was stone beneath it. The church was cold in the way only old stone was cold, a cold with memory in it. He stretched out, put his arms behind his head, and looked up at the vaulted ceiling disappearing into shadow.
Outside, somewhere in the village, a dog barked once and went quiet.
Five weeks. A forged assignment and a falling-down statue and one elderly priest between them and whatever came after. James thought about the letter in his breast pocket, the one that had started all of this. His father's handwriting, which had always looked like it was in a hurry to get somewhere. We'll be waiting. Whatever you need. Come home.
He pressed his hand once, briefly, against his chest.
"Moony," he said quietly.
"Hm."
"How's the ankle?"
"Fine."
"Prongs," Sirius said, in the same tone Remus used when delivering a lecture in a syllable.
"I'm just asking —"
"He said it's fine."
"Right." James looked back at the ceiling. The candle threw shadows that moved slightly, breathing. "Right. Good."
Silence settled over the vestry. Not a comfortable silence, there was no such thing, not anymore, not for a while, but a functional one. The kind you could sleep inside if you were tired enough.
James was very tired.
He closed his eyes and thought about five weeks, and the border, and his father's handwriting, and the cold that had memory in it, and he did not think about the village sleeping around them, and all the strangers in it, and whatever came next.
He was asleep before the candle burned down.