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“Our Percival’s told you about the crazy American scheme to keep completely separate from their non-magicals, hasn’t he?”
Newt nodded, dutiful, swallowing as quickly as was possible around the warm porridge-drink that this clan preferred. It wasn’t tea, or even the dreadful American coffee Percival drank by the pot; thicker by far and oddly textured, but it was incredibly warm and filling: the left-overs from the beer they made mixed with milk from the reindeer. Both kinds of reindeer — the muggle herd with their sweet, creamy milk and the smaller, shaggier magical ones that occasionally forgot themselves enough to fly, ice-white with golden horns and golden milk that tasted of honey and warm vanilla and tumeric and all manner of foreign spices. With the weather this cold, cold enough that his hair crackled with ice within five minutes of stepping outside even in late February, he was grateful for every chewy gulp.
“Good,” Sivert nodded into his own mug. Morfar, grandfather, to the half a dozen little ones who’d just trooped out of the sauna to fling themselves into the lake under the watch of Percival and his cousins' — the parents — watchful eyes, Sivert had stayed behind to interrogate the husband-to-be. Three months in, it was starting to become an almost comfortable ritual; an Elder taking the first crack at him, usually with an anecdote and a lesson. “You know why?”
“Something about muggle, er, no-maj, politics and a near miss with exposure. Congress banned interactions other than what was strictly necessary.”
“You wonder why we don’t do that?”
Newt paused, considered. Considered the slow-meshing ties-that-bind magic, warm and bright but not unbreakable, the pressures of meeting every clan in just a year, of remembering hundreds of names and sitting through dozens of hours of subtly prying chats, some that still made his palms sweat to think of. Could imagine running--could imagine regretting it, but could imagine it all the same. “Yes.”
Sivert chortled, dryly. “You wizards, you have, what are they--unbreakable oaths?”
“F--Fidelius, the Fidelius charm, yes.”
“We have better, hm?” It wasn’t shocking — not after three months— how cold and flat a selkie’s eyes could go, warrior and predator and hunted creature all wrapped up in one exquisite skin. He’d learned to stop shivering under it, but hadn't quite managed to quell the initial twitch.
“Percival has explained...divorce,” Newt answered carefully. The Finfolk didn’t often delve into euphemism, but their language deliberately rejected any words for the killing of subjugator-rapist, sires-of-anchors, skin-thieves, captor, child-stealer, parent-taker, selkiesbane ; that was external. All the complicated wounds of the heart that came for it, those words were theirs: dozens of ways to describe the breaking of false-forced bonds and dozens more for the pain of having left behind whatever was left behind, but that death was of the wizarding world and the wizarding world only, and softened away to a safe politeness for the sake of the survivor. “I. Would assume that, er. Covers it. Typically.”
It was a strange, twisting relief, to know exactly what end awaited, if he somehow grew so careless and cruel.
“Ha, no. He has done a bad job. You and he would not be divorced.”
He hated this part, hated it. He’d never been good at these games, trying to make twisting words and politics and oblique leading statements about amorphous consequences make sense. And selkies, or the Elders, anyway, excelled at them, left his head spinning and heart racing with alarm only to turn about and smile warmly; tell him a teaching-story meant for the children.
“There are, ah. He’s mentioned oaths.”
“Yes. Those are not for you— well, there are a few, but mostly, no. His oaths are yours, when you join together.”
“Then I don’t, er.”
“He would be--what’s the American phrase for it, it is--ah, yes. Your dirty secret, but one you could never tell, yes? Your tongue would burn. And we are a people of secrets and spies. How many apparation races would you have to win, to buy the silence of every elder about what’s in that case of yours, the living trophies you steal? The secrets you carry — India to Ghana, Ghana to Zanzibar? They trained you well, dragon-rider, but not so well as that. Not so well that our spies could not whisper better poison faster than you could spill any truths.”
“I think,” Newt said, very carefully. Those were actually the recipes they resembled, or mostly; they concealed secrets, but not proper treason. But the same couldn’t exactly be said of Egypt, and it wasn’t like his Pashto was exactly good enough to disassemble properly about those notes either— and even a wrongful accusation of that sort wouldn’t be particularly easy to navigate, not and keep his case and all the lives inside it safe. “That I would prefer divorce, to betraying him.”
There was a smile on Sivert’s lips, just starting to reach his eyes again. “Good. Then you will not need to have our tricks and lies and he will not be your dirty secret or you his.”
He frowned, and the cold fierce look was gone with another blink. “You should drink; too much shivering is no good.”