Chapter 72: The Deputy Special Inquisitor
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Two days before they left for Hogwarts, Remus left Grimmauld Place. He claimed he had a meeting with Dumbledore, but he told them not to wait up for him, and on the way out the door he said goodbye to Harry with a long, tight hug, as if he would not be seeing him again for some time. To Sirius, he gave a brisk handshake and a resounding silence. Sirius said nothing, but his restraint seemed visibly painful, and when the door shut behind him he spent some time staring at the thing as if he wished to destroy it.
Ron said, “Hope he’s alright out there,” his voice crystal cold. Sirius flinched. Harry shoved his hands deep in his pockets and said nothing.
Later that evening, Draco was coming downstairs when he heard a blur of voices coming from the drawing-room door. He stopped and retreated into the shadows of the corridor.
“ …honest with me. I’m your family, remember?” It was Tonks; her tone was weary, a bit softened by alcohol, not without understanding, and not without a grudge. “I’m just asking. Won’t judge. Why did you do it?”
“I told you already.” Sirius, noticeably thicker, slurring around the edges. “It was stupid. I fucked up. I fucked up because I’m a fuckup. That’s what I do, I fuck things up. You want to hear that? You want me to say it again?”
“I’m not asking you to confess your sins, mate. Just tell me the truth. Where’d you go?”
“I told you. The graves.”
“Yeah, but why?” Her voice had a tangible bite of frustration. “You loved them. I get it. But you also love Harry, right?”
“More than anything. More than myself.”
“You do. Okay. What do you think happens to him if you die, Sirius?”
“I trust Molly.” It was gruff. “She can be a right bint, but she’s a better mother than I ever was a godfather. Arthur, too. They’ll care for him when I go.”
“Sure. What’s left of him, maybe.”
A chair screeched. Glasses clinked. “Besides the point,” said Tonks. “You knew the site was being surveilled. The graves, Godric’s Hollow, Privet Drive — they’re all red zones. Hotspots. ‘Likely points of assembly.’ Moody was clear.”
“You said you weren’t here to chastise me.”
“I’m not. I told you. I want to know why you did it.”
“Why do you care? Feeling sorry for your sad old cousin?”
“No.”
“Sore at me, then, now Moony’s gone? Or jealous? Were you mooning over him, too? He doesn’t go for birds, I’m sorry to say.”
“Stop embarrassing yourself,” said Tonks calmly. Suddenly the softness of the alcohol disappeared, and she spoke with a clear, low voice. “If you really want to know, Moody put me up to this. He wants to know if you’re a security risk. I’m looking for reasons to tell him you’re not.”
There was a pause.
“Somehow I’d forgotten,” said Sirius icily, “that my dear cousin works in espionage.”
“That was a mistake.”
Another pause.
“Well, fine. Let’s play that out. What happens if I am a security risk? You all find another hidey-hole? Pack up and clear out? Maybe Obliviate me for good measure?”
Tonks said nothing.
“Very funny,” said Sirius.
The nothingness stretched on, interminable.
“Nymphadora.”
“I answer to Alastair Moody,” she said. “I love you. You’re family. But I am loyal—”
“To Moody? I get it.”
“To the cause, Sirius.”
“They are the cause.” His voice was thick and hard.
Tonks set down her glass. Her voice shifted into a lower pitch. “Okay,” she said. “That tells me what I need to know, I think.”
“Wait. Nymphadora.”
“It’s fine. Don’t worry. Moody hasn’t made a decision yet.”
“You want to know? I went because I thought I could do it. Listen to me. You weren’t alive for the first war. You didn’t know me then. I used to be — Tonks, I used to be bloody incredible. I was the best melée fighter in the Order. Second best duelist, after Moody. I taught James and Remus both how to duel. I trained with Merrythought and Tartover, advanced lessons. I trained with fucking Bellatrix, back when we were kids, if you can imagine that. I was the real thing.” He grew hoarse. “Do they ever talk about me? What I did? I know the world thinks I’m a traitor, but — they have to remember, right? I killed Johannes Rosier in wand-to-wand combat. I brought down an aerial unit of hags with only Pettigrew for backup. I dueled Lucius Malfoy and Rodolphus Lestrange at the Battle of Stirling. Ripped his face open. Would have killed him, too, if we hadn’t retreated at the wrong damn time.”
His hairs stood at the mention of his father’s name.
“That was thirteen years ago.” Tonks’s tone was gentle with pity.
“I know. I know I’m not what I was. The point is: thirteen years ago, I could have taken a graveyard full of aurors. I could have taken a graveyard full of anything.”
A footstep creaked a board close to the door. Draco moved back, slipping further into the darkness.
“That’s why I went. Because I’m that good. And even if I’m not that good, I’m still better than you can afford to lose. You can put that in your little fucking spy assessment for Moody.”
“My little fucking spy assessment,” she repeated tonelessly, “currently finds that the ward master of the Order headquarters is a suicide risk.”
Footsteps thumped upstairs: two people, at least three. The two inside the drawing room went hushed as they passed. Draco pressed his back to the wall, pulse tripping.
The footsteps faded, and the silence of the old, dusty house resumed — a house so old that even its silences seemed to whisper, as if the shadows themselves teemed with the watching eyes of a forgotten past. The ominous echoes of anonymous movements overhead leant to the impression of a place where there were things happening out of sight, and perhaps even outside the realm of the real, the echolalia of the past teeming through the walls and beneath the floorboards. Grimmauld Place had more ghosts than any building he’d ever known.
“Yeah?” said Sirius roughly. “Then you can tell him it’s a short-term problem.”
In the lavender gloom of a four o’clock sunset, the halls of the Hogwarts Express were quiet. Students moved about in slow, careful motions, fidgeting with their collars, wandering restlessly through the aisles. There seemed to be fewer people than there had been on the train away from Hogwarts, earlier that year.
Near the front of the train, most compartments were empty, save one. Hermione sat by herself in the prefects’ compartment, perched on a seat by the window. Her journal was open in her lap, and she was fidgeting with her quill. The low winter light paved her face in a sheer, ghostly shade of purple, as if she was half-translucent.
He leaned against the window beside her. She glanced up, and her face slackened infinitesimally in relief. She kept watching the highlands slip past in a white blur.
“I can’t stop thinking about it,” she said. He knew what she meant, but he didn’t answer. He could hear another thought swelling on her tongue.
“Arthur, I mean. In the hospital.”
“It was fairly gruesome.”
“Yes. No, though. Not that part. The blood, the injury, I don’t mind all that.” Her nail bit deep into her cuticle, drawing blood. “I wish I’d used the phoenix tears. I wish I’d thought of it, before—”
“Wouldn’t have worked.”
“No?”
“The tears aren’t a panacea. They can heal lacerations and they’re a potent antivenom. But Arthur’s wound was cursed to regenerate. You’d have used them and it would have opened up again five minutes later.”
She swallowed. She seemed to be struggling against the temptation to feel relief. “I didn’t know that then. For all I knew, it would have saved him. But I just froze up. I didn’t think. Like always. I can never think of things like that when it’s important, only afterwards. And what if he died? What if Arthur died, Draco?”
Hermione stared at him with a wide, wild stare that was deeply unused to not having all the answers.
“Then we would be having the same conversation. Because it still would not be your fault.”
It took a moment; but she nodded hesitantly, and turned back to the window.
“I feel sorry for Sirius, too.”
Draco set his jaw and tilted his head towards the window. His feelings about Sirius were complicated by many factors, one of which was the imposition of grave risk to his own life, Hermione’s life, and almost every other life he generally worried about.
Another factor was the increasing suspicion that Sirius was not so very different from the person Narcissa thought he was, and the similarities between his and Draco’s situations seemed much less comforting in light of that fact.
“I think he feels sorry enough for himself. He doesn’t need our help.”
“You’re right. And I’m not saying he’s the victim here. Obviously, Arthur… and the Weasleys, Ron… Molly… but Sirius almost got someone killed. I can’t imagine how that would feel. If I had done it—” Her breath hitched. “If I’d said something, even by accident, that put Harry in danger—”
He frowned. “You wouldn’t make that kind of mistake.”
“You sound so sure,” she said tightly. “But you don’t know that. I could make mistakes. I do make mistakes.”
“Not that mistake.”
“Not yet, but someday.”
“You’re not going to betray him.” He pushed off the window and sat across from her, leaning forward on his knees. Her eyes flickered at him and fixed stubbornly on the hills. “What are you actually afraid of?”
“I’m afraid,” she said, quietly, “of what Ron said. Last year. On — this train. Do you remember?”
“About protecting Potter?”
“Yes, but more than that, it was — Ron said this one thing,” she said, knuckling her temples, “and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head since. He said, ‘if it’s him or me, it’s him.’” She screwed her eyes shut, her mouth a moue of unhappiness. “And over the summer, I thought: what if it was him or Ron? What if it really, actually was? Because Ron’s absolutely right, he’s totally, perfectly dead on, it’s completely possible and even probable that at some point, in the next year or years or whatever it will be, there will be a situation where it’s him or Ron. And I don’t know what to do.”
“I believe Ronald told you,” he said, carefully, when no answer seemed forthcoming.
“But that’s the thing! Isn’t it? How can I look at Ron and think: ‘I love you, and I’ll protect you, and I’d take a curse for you, but you’re second on my list.’ Isn’t — isn’t that a betrayal? That’s what our fight last year was all about, wasn’t it, the fact that we shouldn’t think of each other that way? Because we’re equals?”
“I doubt he’d have asked if he saw it that way.”
“And — and besides that,” she said frantically, “isn’t it psychopathic? To be able to do that? I’m worried that if I can — if it comes to that, and I can do it, it means I wasn’t… that I never really loved Ron, after all. To love someone, and still sacrifice them, it’s — that’s not love. At all. It’s a contradiction in terms.”
“No, it’s not.”
“How?” she demanded.
“Because they offered,” he said.
The line between her brows deepened.
“I don’t accept that,” she said. “I don’t care if it’s given freely. I shouldn’t ever get to — to do that, it’s not fair, I shouldn’t have that power — even if it’s Harry or Ron, I — I mean, why not me? If it’s my choice, if anything, I should be the one—”
“No.”
She broke off, startled. The echo clung faintly to the walls.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t accept that.”
“That’s hypocritical,” she said. “I mean — you can’t tell me I need to make hard choices and then say I can’t—”
“I don’t care.”
He was very cold.
She shrank into herself, pressing her knees together.
“You’re upset,” she said.
“Well spotted.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“We can stop talking about it,” she said, stilted. “But I’ve — and I’m sorry, we’ll stop talking about it after this, but — you get my point, don’t you? If you’re upset just thinking about it happening, imagine how I’d feel, having done it — or if it was me or Harry, one way or another, it’s not like it would be easy for you—”
“Yes, it would.”
She twitched, a full-body thing, as if something deep in her recoiled at the idea. She stared at him in shock. His heart seemed to graze his ribs each time it beat, a little rasp of pain.
“Don’t say that,” she said, and it wasn’t just anger in her voice, but a thin pall of fear. “I don’t — like that. I don’t want to know that. That’s an awful thing to say.”
“It’s the truth.” The train slipped through a copse of trees, and the windows turned black. “I’m sorry if you don’t like it. But I also don’t really care.”
Her stare hardened.
“it’s not just about Harry, you realize,” she said sharply, by and by. “He’s my best friend, and if I lost him I’d probably lose my mind. But there’s another level here, which is that he’s the Boy Who Lived, and if that business with the twin cores and the blood protection means anything, then there’s a good chance he’s the only person who can kill Voldemort. Making him quite literally the only hope for the future.”
“You’re right, of course,” he said. “I’m aware of all that. But I don’t know why you think it matters.”
She sucked a breath through her teeth and glared at him, as if she could intimidate him into changing his mind with her eyebrows. Adorable.
Don’t say that. I don’t want to know that.
He knew what her disappointment felt like, and he wasn’t afraid of it. It felt like having his own ribs pried open with a crowbar. It felt like knowing that there were things about him that frightened her, and that if he wasn’t careful with them, she would get burned. And she was right to be wary of them. It wasn’t like they didn’t frighten him, too.
But her disappointment was nothing, not one microscopic atom of pain, compared to the world without her.
“You’re angry at me.”
“No,” she said shortly. She bit her lip, and he followed the movement without really intending to. “I just don’t understand you. And it’s irritating, because that’s usually not a problem.”
“I don’t know why. It’s a very simple thing that I’m telling you.”
“That you’re delusional, and I’m an accessory to it?”
“That I’m selfish, and you’re essential.”
“Don’t be dramatic. Not everyone you care for is essential.”
He put his hand under her chin and tipped it up, emboldened with the easy confidence of someone with little to lose. She was already cross with him, and he was already feeling somewhat reckless; one more liberty taken wouldn’t make a difference. Her skin was warm and her breath was short on his hand.
“Not everyone. No.”
Her eyes slipped closed. She inhaled deeply, as if gathering patience, and then touched his wrist, pulling his hand away from her chin.
“You shouldn’t say things like that to me,” she said, stilted.
“Why not?”
“Because it makes me want things I shouldn’t want.” Her voice was almost inaudibly low. She flipped his hand over and placed it flat between hers. “Because it makes me feel like a foolish person who thinks foolish things. Because I shouldn’t like hearing you say things like that. About being essential.”
“Who’s to say,” he said quietly, “what you should like?”
Her eyes slipped closed.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she said.
“About what?”
“What we said in the hospital.”
He was more interested in kissing her, or failing that, finding a way to close the distance between them in the carriage. He said merely: “About ‘relationships,’ you mean.”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Her lips pressed together, and the corner turned. “No. Frankly. I want to stop the train,” she said, “and run back to Grimmauld Place, and hole up in the library for another century while nothing ever changes. With you. And a cup of tea, and a sleeve of chocolate biscuits, and Crookshanks. That’s what I want to do.”
“You can still have most of those things.”
“Except the one that matters,” she said wryly, opening her eyes. “Which is the nothing-ever-changing part.”
“See, I thought you were referring to me.”
She laughed, and her eyes dropped to his lips. He knew with his whole body what was about to happen; it felt strange, the certainty, as if the nerves in his body had decided before he did.
He leaned forward, tilted his head against hers, and kissed her. With a soft melancholy sound, she tilted her head too, and kissed him back. Her lips caught and tugged gently at his, slow, gentle, not particularly passionate; but that was alright, because it wasn’t that kind of kiss. He’d never kissed someone this way before, as if the point weren’t kissing itself but the communication of something that only touch could say.
By and by, in no particular hurry, she drew back and placed a hand on his chest. She tipped her forehead against his, and he stayed there, anchored by the places where she touched him.
“Thank you,” she said.
Then Hermione climbed carefully to her feet. “We should find the other Defense Club people before we arrive,” she said. “Harry, Ron, and Daphne, at least. And soon. We’re coming up to the castle. I think it’s best if we go up together.”
The last time he had seen Daphne, she had been holed up in Gryffindor Tower with a stack of novels and what she claimed was a head-cold. She had looked like refuse warmed over.
In the gloom of the Express, however, she looked like refuse served cold. The face perched atop her mink-fur mantle was wan and sunken, with bruises of exhaustion bracketing the nose. Her hair was flat and greasy, and she sported a fresh crop of spots, which drew attention to the ropey ribbing of her facial scars.
She stared out the window, her breath rattling miserably through her sinuses.
“You’d better not be contagious, because when Brown’s sick, the whole Tower is,” he said. He shut the door behind him. “In which case I’ll see you in hell.”
“Draco! Darling! How are you? How was your vacation?”
“Dreadful, to both, thanks for asking. You’re leaking.”
She fumbled for a handkerchief. “I can’t wait to see Pomfrey,” she said thickly. “I’ve been locked up in my room since December, and none of the Healers have helped. I’ve been glugging Pepper-Up Potions until I nearly threw them all back up again—”
“I saw your sister at St. Mungo’s.”
“What were you doing at St. Mungo’s? You’re not sick, are you?”
“Arthur Weasley had a bad Christmas. Don’t ask.”
“Oh, God! How awful,” she whispered. “Poor Ron. On top of everything else…”
“He’s enduring.”
“I daresay. Oh, we should do something nice for him, won’t we? When’s his birthday? March?”
“Do I seem like any sort of person who would know?”
“But you seem like the sort of person who’d know everything,” she said, fluttering her eyelashes.
“You look like a nearsighted drunk.”
“I look comely and winsome.”
“You’re winsome as a bog body.”
“And you’re half as friendly. No offense.”
“Offense bitterly taken, hateful wretch,” he said. “I’ve something for you.”
“Ooh! A Christmas present?”
“Of sorts.” He produced Pansy’s envelope. She slit the crest and scanned it with the expression of a child discovering a workbook in their Christmas stocking.
“It’s from Parkinson. She wants you to burn it, by the way.” He watched her scan it three times, squinting more and more with each go. “I wouldn’t mind knowing what it says.”
“Well, since you asked, it’s an illustrated record of an amorous encounter with Gregory Goyle. Vividly drawn, too. Gosh, how does he fit all that—”
“It was a mistake to introduce you to Lavender Brown.”
“Maybe for you. And don’t be nosy.” She passed it over. It read:
In the event of the worst
Gringotts Vault 1103
Password – Iphigenia
In this way each creature flies from its enemy: love is the cause of my following thee.
“Either I’m missing something, or Parkinson has gone mad at last. What does it mean?”
She shrugged and hummed a singsong: I don’t know. “Possibly she thinks I’m smarter than I am. ‘Iphigenia’ is my middle name, but it could also be a reference to anything. Pans and Teddy are notorious riddlers. Used to force everyone to do them at parties. Yawn.”
“You don’t recognize that vault?”
“No. My family’s assets live in a heritage account. Named, not numbered.” Daphne lit it on fire with a flick of her wand. “Anyway, who knows?” she chirped. “I wouldn’t take it too seriously. It’s all very ominous, but coming from Pans, ‘in event of the worst’ could mean her parents want to throw a soirée. Anyway, we’re about to arrive; let’s find the others. I don’t want to ride up alone.”
“Alone? What am I, Godric’s ghost?”
“You’re like furniture to me. Said with love.”
As they descended from the carriage, a river of black robes splashed out over the platform and winnowed down the rock path towards the herd of bone-white thestrals that waited on a small crest of rock and snow, drawn into pale prominence against a black mass of colorless, sprawling forest. The last time he had been there, he had been racing across that platform in the evening gloom.
Draco drew his wand, responding to a threat that existed only in memory, and then muttered Lumos to disguise the action. He pushed forward without looking at Hermione, climbing down from the train behind him, to avoid dredging up the memory of their last escape from the castle. He would have welcomed for once the insipid chatter of students returning from their holidays — lists of presents, boasts of overeating, moans about the volume of homework — but for once, the student march back to the castle was quiet, almost bone-silent. They moved into the mists of the forest with their faces cast down.
The castle peered over the treetops like a cluster of knives, its sharp turrets carving out triangles of starlight into void. They moved into its shadow and boarded carriages drawn by creatures that should have been invisible to them.
He climbed up into a carriage and offered a hand to Hermione, who took it to pull herself aboard; she clutched it, briefly, as she moved into the carriage. Her face was an expressionless slate. Harry was wearing the same bitter expression he had when they left Grimmauld Place that morning; Ron was merely vigilant, and grim. He shot a dark glower at a pair of Slytherin prefects standing by the next carriage up, fingering his wand.
“Don’t start anything,” Hermione warned him. She tugged him in by the back of his robe, and he sat down with a humph.
“They were watching us.”
“Of course they are,” she said. “I’m extremely famous.”
It was a wooden joke, stifled by a quiver of anxiety; but Harry’s lip quirked up. He reached for her hand and squeezed it. She patted his shoulder briskly, as if he were merely feeling a bit under the weather, and they rode up to the castle in silence.
Daphne thrust herself through the crowd. “Draco! What’s he doing here? Do you know anything? Tell me now!”
“Specificity,” said Draco, “and fewer pronouns, please.”
“Waste of time! Just come!”
Daphne urged them into the Great Hall. Perched over a crowd of milling despairants below, Umbridge sat next to Dumbledore, engaging him in unsmiling conversation over brussels sprouts.
“Slytherin table!” she gasped. “Ten o’clock!”
“I know where the Slytherin table is, actually,” Hermione said. “I do pay atten— what’s he doing here?”
Cassius Warrington sat in pride of place among the Slytherins, surrounded by a coterie of variably convincing sycophants, absorbed in the act of either lecturing, telling a joke, or both. His curls were coiffed and oiled to shining, and he wore a Ministry uniform of lush purple.
Theo, at right, was cradling his chin in his hands and evaluating his fork as a weapon of suicide; Pansy, at left, was holding her goblet with closed eyes as if her own evaluation had concluded, and she was now fortifying herself for an attempt.
“She seems miserable,” said Daphne, miserably. “I wish we could help her.”
Ron looked at her, not unkindly, as if she’d suggested helping a blast-ended skrewt.
“Last I checked, you had to agree to marry somebody in this country,” he said. “Unless Umbridge changed that, too, over the vac.”
Umbridge gave a high, shrill laugh that stilled the hall like a shattered glass. With her fiancé’s attention diverted, Pansy ventured a furtive, worried glance down the table at Theo, who didn’t seem to hear any of it, floating in his own dull myopia. The food on his plate hadn’t been touched. Draco took note of the fact that the hollows under his cheeks had darkened, and then carefully un-took note of it.
He wanted no share in their miseries, and he had long since revoked any claim to share in their joys. So rather than continue to watch the small, bitter vignette unspool, he left the Great Hall, his feet pointed to the one part of the castle that still felt like home.
At the foot of the staircase, a pair of Gryffindor first years were huddled together. He recognized Alfie Chrissenpoffer and Victoria Frobisher, whom he’d corralled at the Opening Feast.
“No loitering in the halls.”
They sprang apart. “It’s Malfoy,” said Alfie, relieved. “Hullo, sir. Could we have a Mending Charm?”
“I’m not a tailor.” He drew his wand anyway, wearily. “What is it you’ve broken? If it’s a tapestry, you’re getting detention with McGonagall and not one ounce of sympathy. Granger told you not to climb them.”
Victoria hid something behind her back. Alfie elbowed her. She reluctantly withdrew a white scrap of fabric. It had an insignia embroidered in red and gold: the forked tendrils of a lightning-bolt. Draco’s stomach sank.
“Frobisher, that had better be your handkerchief.”
“It’s for Potter’s Army,” said Alfie. “They’re to wear after detentions with Umbridge. Lavender said—”
“She did? Wonderful. How long have you been wearing these?”
“Since I got detention,” said Victoria, “and I needed one. It says we’re for Harry. Which we are. He’s our House, and that means we have to study up like you and Granger, so we can kill Slytherins.”
“Who told you to kill Slytherins?”
“Nobody, but the Slytherins want to kill us,” said Alfie, matter-of-factly. “That’s what Seamus says, and Dean, and Katie. That’s why we’re not to talk to them or tell them anything about what Gryffindors are doing.”
“Seamus,” said Draco tightly. “Dean. Katie. Right. So, on the counsel of idiots—”
“Malfoy.”
The hairs on his neck rose.
Cassius smiled at him politely from the doors to the Great Hall, hands folded behind his back. Pansy stood at his elbow with a guarded, blank expression.
“Back to the common room,” Draco snapped. “Both of you.”
Alfie and Victoria scrambled up the steps. Victoria paused at the banister to blow a raspberry at Pansy.
Draco slid his wand back into its sheath.
“Warrington,” he said, by way of greeting. “Retaking your N.E.W.T.s?”
“Play nice,” warned Pansy, laying a hand on Cassius’s arm. “Cassy is training as the new Undersecretary of Education.”
“Lovely. Is he aware that he’s missed his office by several hundred miles?”
“Mr. Parkinson did me the generous favor of arranging—”
“Or does he require instruction as to what education looks like?”
“If you must know, he’s here to shadow Professor Umbridge.”
“Such internships are quite common at the Ministry,” drawled Cassius. “I’m surprised you haven’t had one yet. Not surprised, that is — but you catch the idea.” Draco ignored him.
Rufus Warrington was a member of the pureblood nouveau riche: a wizarding line pure enough to respect, but not old enough to buy the kind of things Cassius wanted. Real power needed time to ferment, and it aged on the scale of generations. The Parkinsons had been pure since at least the Napoleonic Wars, but they’d lost much of their wealth in the First Wizarding War. Money wanted pedigrees, and pedigrees needed money. And the marriage was a political masterstroke: a Minister-in-Training and a princess of the Old Guard, one of the last intact lines of the Sacred Twenty-Eight. They’d live at Parkinson Court, and Warrington money would fund her dinner parties with other politicians’ wives; Cassius would have every door in the Cavalier Party opened to him at the flourish of her father’s seal. Their children might even take her name. It was probably all laid out in the marriage contract.
But what was he doing here? Cassius was the Triwizard Champion, with all the glamor and notoriety that title could buy. Umbridge obviously stood to benefit from harboring a connection with him, both publicly and privately — she could find in him what she had hoped to find in Draco. But what did Cassius need from her? Not Ministry influence. His father was the primary shipping contractor for the Ministry. Neither Warrington needed anything from Umbridge, who — even given a generous estimation of her influence with Runcorn — didn’t have half the sway in the Ministry that Cassius’s father did.
So perhaps Cassius wasn’t doing it for himself.
He turned the pieces over in his mind: Umbridge needed Cassius. Cassius needed Pansy. What did Pansy need?
“What did she give you?” he said sharply.
“Who?” drawled Pansy.
“Umbridge.”
“Nothing,” she said. Her voice was flat and her expression blank, a rare thing for such a spiteful creature. “She didn’t do anything for me.”
The doors to the Great Hall parted, and Theo slipped silently into the shaded, guttering torchlight of the Entrance Hall. He drew the door closed, and as he did, Draco stared at the bare span of his wrist — free of the silver cuff it had sported in October.
Theo brusquely tugged down his sleeve.
Daphne had told him something about Cassius’s father, once.
Warrington owes Lord Nott enough money to mortgage Gringotts, twice.
Pansy kept her fingers balanced delicately on Cassius’s outstretched arm. It was a facsimile of a gesture; there was no possibility of drawing support from her limp grasp.
“Not half a choice,” Draco repeated quietly.
She did not blink. “I beg your pardon?”
“It was elegantly done. Heinous,” he said brusquely, “and it’ll make life worse for everyone, not least of all him; but elegant.”
“‘Heinous’ is melodramatic, even for you.”
“Whose idea was it?” he said, raising his voice. “Yours? Or hers? I don’t suppose Nott asked you to pawn your fiancé for his freedom?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do. Is Warrington here to oversee his parole? That was the deal, wasn’t it? Warrington’s the watchdog, and you’re the leverage. Carrot and stick.”
“Pure drivel,” said Cassius, “and incomprehensible babbling. Are you well?”
He ignored Cassius and turned to Pansy. “There are certain people who will expect things of him, you know. Now that he’s lost that bit of jewelry.”
“Expect what of me?” said Carrius irritably. All three of the others ignored him.
“Don’t lecture her,” said Theo, raising his voice for the first time. It rasped. “And spare me the firewyrm tears for my safety. We both know you don’t fucking care.”
Draco twitched, but wrestled past the flare of emotion and found the cold will to ignore him, too. “The only thing that still confuses me, frankly, is what your fiancée stands to gain. One does wonder what he thinks he’s getting out of this, since it’s obviously not the sweetness of your affection.”
“You’re rambling, Draco,” said pansy.
“Really, dear boy,” said Cassius. “A man might think you were envious.”
Draco snapped, “If that’s your read here, I marvel that you even remember to breathe.”
“Zing,” said Theo tonelessly. “Boy, you got him. Well done. Now go upstairs and take a nap.”
There was no point in pressing further. With a parting sneer, Draco made to leave.
“Did you happen to call on the Greengrasses, over vacation?” Pansy called in a lofty tone.
He nearly laughed at her. Pansy Parkinson — stupid, selfish, petulant Pansy Parkinson — poor, foolish Pansy Parkinson, who might very well have doomed them all — still fancied herself a spymaster.
“Pout-etre,” he said. “Did you happen to visit Gringotts?”
Her flinch was enough to confirm his suspicions. What inflamed them still further was the twitch that ran across Theo’s: recognition, quickly suppressed, almost too fast to be noticed.
He climbed the stairs to Gryffindor with the weight of their eyes pressed firmly into his back.
“Well,” said Hermione. “I suppose that means Theodore Nott is off the leash.”
There was a pause. Then Daphne said hesitantly: “Is that — such a terrible thing?”
The lake glittered in the dull gray glare of an overcast winter afternoon, faceted with chop, with doilies of frost encasing the stones on its banks. Under the spindly vault of a naked oak, Draco, Hermione, and Daphne reclined in the roots. Down by the water, Harry and Ron were making a slow circuit of the beach, pausing to skip stones across its slate face.
The landscape was the desaturated, ruddy, almost reddish brown of foliage in winter, the sky a foamy swell of rolling clouds. Rain swept down in a gauzy curtain on the hills, not yet approaching the castle, but scented in the wet, cold air.
“He’s the plaything of his father,” said Draco flatly. “A Death Eater. And now he’s able to leave the castle whenever he pleases. I don’t know, Greengrass, do you think that’s a ‘terrible thing’?”
She scowled. “He might not be a good person, but he’s nobody’s ‘plaything.’ Especially not his father’s.”
“Want to bet?”
“I might! I’ve known him since birth, Draco, and you’ve only known him for three years — the worst three of his life, I’ll add—”
“I’ve known others much less, and trusted them more.”
“You’re not being fair. I’m not saying you should trust him, but one mistake shouldn’t condemn—”
“One mistake?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Hermione interrupted. “Theo’s not interested in redemption. He’s made that very clear. So it doesn’t matter whether we think he deserves it.”
Crookshanks prowled around the roots at her feet, hopping here and there to chase the scuttling beetles and doxies that inhabited the marshes by the shore. Occasionally he crept back and rubbed his nose against Daphne’s legs, which earned him a coo and a treat, no matter how many times Hermione chided; the little beast was faithless as well as violent.
January had dawned cold and grueling. New rules furnished the notice board in the hall, which had overgrown the actual board, and spilled onto the stone walls above and beside it in a thin, flaking film of tiny-lettered paper. The thin and flaking face of authority spread wider as the term went on: the Inquisitorial Squad ran concurrent patrols with prefects, so that often after hours, Draco would find one of them wandering around the castle without any particular purpose. In the hallways, the hush of chastened students became a vulnerability for anyone trying to trade information, illicit or not, such as Defense Club meetings. He became aware of how easy it would be for someone to overhear a murmured word of encouragement on the stairwell, or to notice a Potter’s Army band flashed beneath a sleeve. The young students rarely went to any prefects outside of their own house. The first years kept mixing up the Inquisitors with the prefects, which usually meant speaking to neither.
Draco took to carrying his wand around the halls. He rarely used it, but the presence of a weapon made the mounting and nameless tension feel more manageable.
Being in the same calendar year as their O.W.L.s. inflicted a subtle psychological change on the fifth years, and an unsubtle change in their professors. In Potions, Snape humbled them all with an eighty-question pre-test that only half of the cohort managed to pass. McGonagall raked them all over the coals for failure to complete the vacation homework, then raked them back the other direction for being unprepared for trans-animal transfiguration. In this, as in most classes, Hermione was a flurry of activity, her desk flush with a stack of color-coded notes to her right and the annotated textbook open at her left. In Defense Against the Dark Arts, however, she had changed so profoundly that it caused some to wonder if something had happened to her.
For one thing, she had stopped bringing her books to class. When Umbridge asked her a question on the reading, she shrugged.
“Do you intend to pass this class, Miss Granger?”
“Yes, professor.”
“In fact I think you do not,” she said sweetly. “Because you are not taking notes, you see! And only very stupid girls think they are smart enough to pass classes without taking notes. Are you a stupid girl, Miss Granger?”
Hermione gazed into the middle distance, stone-faced. Draco’s fingers itched for his wand. He slipped them in his pockets.
Umbridge snapped her fingers in front of Hermione’s face. “Answer me.”
“What was the question, professor?”
“Are you stupid?”
“I—”
Lavender Brown raised her hand and gave a noisy cough. Umbridge sighed.
“What, Miss Brown?”
“Ummmmm. I thought the question was… like… the counter-curse for tickling? Which is… like…. Anti-titullara?” Her voice was a parody of itself. Lavender hadn’t sounded that vapid in years, if ever. “Erm. I think. Like, titullara, but not?” She fiddled with her hair. “Is that right, professor?”
Umbridge didn’t reply. Coldly, she said: “You would do well to learn from Miss Brown, Miss Granger.”
But she moved on. Lavender glanced at Hermione and tugged the bandages on her hand, then hid the movement by fussing at her bracelets.
Now, almost a week later, Hermione was frowning at the frosted vista, and tugging the same bandages on her right hand.
“I wonder to what extent he’s working with Warrington,” she mused.
“Doubt it,” muttered Daphne. “He thinks he’s an idiot. I doubt he’d work with him on anything.”
“He’s not an idiot,” said Hermione, whose tone indicated this was the best she could say about him. “He pulled off some advanced magic in the Triwizard Tournament. And he’s maneuvered himself into a marriage with Pansy, which is politically intelligent, if not particularly enviable.”
Draco sniggered. She gave a private, self-contained smile.
“I think the real danger here is Cassius,” she said abruptly. “We’ve been focusing on Theo — and I share your worries about him, believe me — but at the end of the day, he’s an underage student, and his father’s in prison. Cassius is an adult. He’s rich, he’s well-connected, and he doesn’t have the Trace. He also happens to have acquired tremendous influence over Theo and Pansy both in the span of a year. I have to wonder who’s really the mind behind their arrangement.”
The idea of Cassius as the person pulling the strings was a startling reorientation of perspective; in Hermione’s framing, the fourteen-year-old Pansy seemed much less like a mastermind than she had on the steps of the Great Hall.
“Theo doesn’t like him,” Daphne said doggedly. “He wouldn’t work with him. He doesn’t trust him.”
“He doesn’t trust anyone that isn’t Parkinson or Greengrass,” retorted Draco, prodding her with his foot. She scowled.
“Or you,” said Hermione.
He made a dismissive sound.
“He did like you,” she said matter-of-factly. “You were the only person outside Slytherin he ever made an effort with. And he tried to recruit you.”
“He tried to recruit me because I’m incredibly valuable,” said Draco. Daphne giggled, and he kicked her again. “Besides which — a valuable bloodline, Greengrass, and piss off, you know what I meant — besides which, I’m not bad in a duel, and I’ve rather a lot of money. Be offended if he didn’t, I daresay.”
“Several things can be true at once,” said Hermione, cryptically. Strands of hair still pricked up and danced in the draft off the lake.
He shrugged, somewhat irritated by the suggestions of both women that he had some rare degree of closeness with a boy in several respects responsible for the end of the world.
“It’s been a very long time since he’s liked me,” he said, with a finalistic tone deeming the subject closed. “And a longer time since the feeling’s been remotely mutual.”
Hermione hummed noncommittally.
“Say you’re right,” she suggested. “If Theo cares for Pansy — as you say — her husband would be important to him, wouldn’t he?”
“Fiancé. Not ‘husband.’”
“Does the difference matter?”
“It would to him.”
She blew into her cupped hands and rubbed them for warmth. “Alright. Why?”
“Because there’s a difference between marriage and anything else.”
She rolled her finger in a go-on gesture.
“It’s hard to explain. Wait— hang on—”
“If I had a shilling for every time someone said that—”
“Not what I meant, listen—”
“—of a patently explicable fact in the magical world, as if it were too astonishingly complex—”
“I meant I had to think about it—”
“—only to come up with a trumped-up fancy version of something perfectly comparable to what muggles do—”
“Granger,” he said patiently, and she stopped. Her breath billowed into the air as steam. “I know.”
“Do you?”
“I do. When I say it’s hard for me to explain, I don’t mean that it would be difficult for you to understand.”
She blew out a breath. After a moment, she grimaced and flashed him a look that was not quite an apology, and he touched her knee, which was not quite an apology, either.
“There’s an old-fashioned way to do it and a modern way to do it,” he said, after a moment. “The old-fashioned way is practiced usually by—”
“No, I’ll guess.”
“Right. Not without reason, anyway. The ceremony is complicated. It involves a lot of binding spells, and oaths, and vows of devotion, and such. The truly, arcanely old-school back their oaths with curses— ‘if thou striketh thy bond, thou shalt suffer twice her sufferings,’ or ‘whither thou diest, there shall I die,’ or ‘may the fruits of your flesh wither and die if thou goest afield’—”
“Can you divorce?”
“Well, I’m not married.” He settled back on his elbows.
“Obviously by ‘you,’ I meant—”
“Purebloods, naturally. Just because I’m a pureblood doesn’t mean I know everything about them. Maybe I don’t speak for all of us. We don’t all know each other, you know.”
She wrinkled her nose at him, her mouth taut from its battle with a growing smile. Her eyes were practically glowing with fondness. The weather suddenly felt almost temperate. “Fine,” she said. “I’m dreadfully sorry for assuming. I’ll ask Daphne — Daphne—?”
“Divorce exists, but it isn’t common,” he interrupted, resting his head back on the roots. “And it’s quite difficult. You’d have to undo all the household enchantments, which is a right mare if you’re from an old family. For some places it’d take a team of curse-breakers years to get through them all.”
“There are enchantments involved in your marriages?”
“Naturally. The Laws of Blood bind spouses into each other’s families. So my mother, for instance, has a ward key to the Manor, even though she isn’t properly its mistress. She can Apparate on and off its grounds. And she can use Malfoy heirlooms, a certain amount of household magic, that sort of thing. You’d have to remove that, in the divorce. And socially, of course, it’s a terrible scandal. Usually it’s just easier to kill your husband.”
“Loads,” agreed Daphne.
“I should think the husbands would prefer to be divorced than murdered,” said Hermione, “personally.”
“But it’s not embarrassing to be murdered,” said Daphne, puzzled. “Dying is perfectly respectable. Happens to everybody.”
“I … suppose I hadn’t considered that.”
“If you think of marriage as a strategic alliance between families,” said Draco, “for political or financial gain, you’d like the alliances to be permanent. It’s the same with contracts. You make them binding so people can trust them, and if they trust their contracts, they’ll make more of them. There’s more trade and more investment in enterprise.”
“A wife is not an ‘investment in enterprise’!”
“Certainly not once you’ve divorced her.”
She hit him. It was well-earned and failed utterly to keep him from laughing. She hit him twice more, for good measure, and sat back with a fire in her eyes. He tipped his head back and grinned at her.
“You know what? Thank you. You’ve affirmed my belief that muggle marriages are categorically better, happier, and more humane.”
“You haven’t seen a wizarding ceremony,” said Draco. Hermione’s hair swam in and out of his field of vision like a pattern of lace on the clouds. “It might change your mind. It’s a singular thing.”
“Doubtful,” she muttered, but she was bluffing. Hermione had a soft spot for magic. It was the same spot that made her pause on patrols to take in the view of the grand staircase, and stare in muted delight while she was coming into the Room of Requirement.
She liked splendor. She couldn’t help it. Magic, for her, was a perennially exotic thing, and living with it had gilded her life in a varnish of wonder that had yet to lose its luster after five years.
He was smiling. He sorted it out quickly.
A bandage still fluttered around her wrist. She caught him looking, and tucked it back into her glove.
“Give me a practice question,” she said. “Herbology. Written section.”
“Describe the properties of hellebore.”
“Six sections, twenty-two species. Four are caulescent, the rest have basal leaves. Common ingredient in several poisons. Give me a hard one.”
“That was — alright, have it your way. List four metabolites of the genus Thalictrum.”
“That’s horrid,” she said happily. “Magnoflorine, hernandezine… berberine… Hint?”
“Alkaloid.”
“Oh, I’m an idiot. Thalicarpin.”
“There’s a girl.”
She grinned and settled back against the tree. Her leg bounced.
He reached out and picked a leaf from her hair. She went still all over, with the charming effect of a startled deer.
The unspoken Thing they had together had grown courageous since the vacation; in the gloom of an empty Grimmauld Place, and in the subsequent gloom of a quiet winter term at Hogwarts, it had started manifesting habits. It had developed a tendency of touching her, at odd times, when she was passing through a doorway or up a staircase; it had, on her side, begun to reach instinctively for his arm or his hand whenever they were alone, and no one was looking; it had, at least twice, driven her to reach across the silence of an empty common room, with the fire crackling low and a splay of forgotten textbooks at their feet, to lean across the sofa and press a kiss to his shocked, waiting mouth; and then to retreat, silently, saying nothing, while fear of frightening off her newfound recklessness held his tongue. He had kissed her back only once, when they were on patrol, under a secluded eave where the portraits couldn’t see, and when her he drew back the pink flush rising under her freckles haunted the back of his mind for a few nights after.
He was certain now that he was losing his mind, but pleasantly, in a sort of complacent surrender to the process, which altogether had more rewards than costs.
Gravel crackled. The boys came loping up from the lake, their cloaks snapping like dark standards in the cool wind.
“Better go in,” called Ron. “Rain’s blowing this way. You look cozy.”
Hermione blinked in shock. Daphne glanced up from petting Crookshanks.
“I — I don’t — excuse me?”
“All three of you,” he said awkwardly. “Sat together like that. S’like a painting or something.”
“Oh. Yes. I guess so.”
“What did you think I meant?”
“No idea. I was being stupid.” She laughed nervously and stood up. Draco rolled to his feet, stretching his shoulder, and Ron followed him with his eyes.
“So,” he said, “Hermione, Harry and I were thinking we ought to teach the Defense Club to cast Patronuses tomorrow. What do you think?”
“Fine idea,” she said crisply, brushing off her robes. “It’ll have to wait for February, though. Draco and I are teaching runic traps tomorrow.”
“Can’t we just switch them? Patronuses tomorrow, traps in February?”
“But we prepared a lesson already. And we haven’t talked about how to teach the Patronus at all.”
“We don’t need to talk about it. It’s not that hard to teach.”
“Runic traps are, though,” she said, with a faint edge, “and we’ve already prepared those, so I hope you’ll understand why we don’t want to switch—”
“But you’ve already done the work, so why does it matter?”
“I could say the same of you! You’ll get to do it anyway, why should it matter which lesson goes first?”
Ron exhaled. “Because you and Draco are the only ones who know how to do runic traps,” he ground out. “Alright? And it makes me and Harry look like dolts when we have to just sit there and watch you two go off on your swot expeditions together. It doesn’t feel like we’re a team.”
“We are a team,” she said, stung, “but — Ron, you don’t know how to do runic traps. I don’t see how those two things have anything to do with each other.”
“So? Maybe Harry and I want in on it, yeah?”
“Leave me out,” Harry muttered. Daphne made a noncommittal noise.
“In on what?”
Ron looked pointedly at Draco.
“In on what?” Draco repeated.
“You know.”
“I don’t,” said Hermione frostily, “and I’m sure we’re all very curious.”
Ron deflated. “Never mind,” he muttered.
“No, really,” she snapped, “don’t back off now. It’s perfectly obvious you’ve got something to say, so don’t let it stick between your teeth.”
“It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing!”
Ron mulishly put his hands in his pockets and stared at the ground.
She shot to her feet, brushing dirt from her skirt with force bordering violence. “Fine. Go have a sulk about it instead. In fact, wait — you don’t have to go anywhere. I’ll go back to the castle. Daphne, would you care to join me?”
“Very much,” Daphne murmured, and gathering Crookshanks with a graceful movement, she disembarked with Hermione from the oak tree.
Draco followed them with his eyes as they scaled the lawns. Ron gave him a hard and searching glance, then followed them.
Harry cleared his throat and turned to the lake, folding his arms. He made no move to go with them, and neither did Draco.
The two of them stood on the banks of the lake, cold and increasingly rained-on, for an interval of time sufficient for a murder of ravens to migrate from one tree to another.
“Potter, it’s raining.”
“Wow,” said Harry. “Is that what those little droplets are?”
“I mean that you’re getting soaked.”
“Boy, you don’t get those O’s for nothing.”
He folded his arms and shifted his weight, feeling brittle.
“Flitwick taught us a water-repelling charm.”
“Yeah? What do I keep you around for, then?”
Draco snorted, and conjured one over their heads.
They turned to the lake, whose surface shattered into a million facets under the downpour.
“I thought you’d follow Ronald.”
“Ronald can use some time to himself, sometimes,” said Harry placidly. “I’m enjoying the lake.”
“Did you know what he was going to say?”
“Not my business,” said Harry. “Besides, I was enjoying the lake.”
“Did he say anything to you about it?”
“No, because that’s not my business. Do you mind? I’m really trying to enjoy this lake.”
It was a gray, dreary, afternoon, and there was not, in his opinion, much enjoyment to be had. Rain sieved off the edges of the charm and formed an iridescent curtain of beads.
Draco let out a breath that seemed to have been in his chest for some time.
“How’s Professor Malfoy?” said Harry casually.
“I beg your pardon.”
“Your mum,” he clarified. “Narcissa. Occlumency teacher. Likes to knock things around in my brain and then yell at me for it. How’s she?”
“Fine. I imagine.”
Harry raised an eyebrow. Draco shot him a curt look that instructed him to drop the subject. Harry’s look replied quite firmly that he would not.
“Not a sure thing, is it?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Wow,” said Harry. “I wonder what that must be like.”
Draco snorted; a nameless relief came over him as the weight of explaining himself lifted. He cleared his throat and ventured, albeit reluctantly: “We fought over the vacation. Haven’t spoken since.”
“About…?”
“Granger.”
“Ah, shit,” said Harry. “The blood thing?”
“No. Because she wore corduroys at the dinner table. What do you think?”
Harry paused before answering.
“I think your mum’s pretty old for her age,” he said. “And it’s hard for adults to get their heads around the idea — or to admit, even if they can — their kids know something they don’t.”
“That seems to be the way of things.”
A great heron settled into the shallows a stone’s throw from them and dipped its beak into the water.
“Bet she still loves you, though,” Harry said hesitantly, as if he wasn’t actually sure. “Your mum.”
“She does.”
“Yeah.” It was relieved. “I mean, of course she does.”
“It’s a very strange thing,” said Draco slowly, “but one comes to a point where that fact doesn’t… actually matter.”
Harry looked like he wanted to say a number of things all at once. But he voiced only one of them. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize for her,” he said, with a sudden coolness in his voice that even he did not understand. Then, tautly, with more awkwardness than cold: “She’d loathe you for trying, you know.”
Harry covered his mouth with his hand. Draco stiffened, wary that he had trod on a raw nerve; but unexpectedly, Harry started to laugh.
“I apologize for that, Potter. It was ungenerous of me to mention.”
“No — that’s fine — it’s just,” he said thickly, “everybody — everyone already loathes me, mate. The whole world. And compared to them, she’s not even good at it. She’s one of, like, ten adults on the planet who are actually trying to help me stay alive, and one of — what, fifteen? Twenty? — who don’t actively want me dead. In the tiers of people who hate me, she’s League Two. She hasn’t even tried to kill me yet. I — I’m sorry, but at this point, I expect a better game.”
“I appreciate,” said Draco, “the optimism expressed in the word ‘yet.’”
For some reason, Harry found this hilarious.
After a minute, Harry gave a long sigh and cast his eyes around the grounds contentedly. “Hey, look who it is,” he said.
The downpour had flushed out two more people from the lakeside path: Dolores Umbridge and Cassius Warrington were rapidly climbing the path to the castle on the other side of the lake, their heads shielded by the glimmering sheen of Water-Repellent Charms.
“What do you suppose they’re talking about?” he said.
“How to kill me,” Harry suggested, polishing his glasses on his robe.
“I was being serious.”
“I am serious,” he said casually. He pointed at them with the corner of his glasses. “Trust me, I know when someone wants me dead.”
-I LIVE!
-HAPPY NEW YEAR!
-If you’ve been here for a while, you know that this kind of hiatus happens sometimes — deeply sorry — came as soon as I could, even if it’s been far too long. But I couldn’t let actual New Years’ pass without finally letting Draco out of St. Mungo’s. Terrible place for a celebration, really.
-This chapter is dedicated to the Succession soundtrack, which has a brilliant way of making the words go, and which powered me through the past two days of editing.
-It’s also dedicated to the absolute real ones who stay in the comments section even when it’s been months since the latest update. Without you this would not exist, and it would not exist many times over. You’re the petrol in the engine of this story. The comment-essayists are the diesel.
-Next chapter soon. Stay tuned. All my love and wishes for 2025 — it’s gonna be great, y’all.
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