Chapter 81: The Princess’s Tale
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
The Manor’s shadow fell in a black crosspiece on the north lawn, a carveout on the green. Venetian windows burned with the hellish gilt of a red sunset between alternating ribs of brick and marble on the palladian facade. Wrought-iron gates sealed up the worn driveway, over which the beginnings of a gnarled overgrowth were moving in a slow vanguard of ivy and moss.
The guests were due at eight o’clock. Draco waited in the drawing-room until Briselda, who had been adding mourning sheets over the portraits, announced at seven that the stationmaster at the local train had signalled, and a half-hour later, a hesitant and respectful: “They’re at the gates, milord; shall I bring them in?”
Little point in correcting her form of address. He went himself to the portico and waited there for the thestral carriages to pull up the drive, their black bodies shining leathery and burnished under the setting sun.
It would be the first time since Grimmauld Place that he saw more than one person at once. For days he had lived in blindness, without knowing what the wizarding world was coming to, or if indeed it still existed. When word came, it came only by way of Fawkes, and it was spelled in Dumbledore’s spidery hand.
The Ministry had resumed function, under the leadership of Runcorn and a new cabinet. The Wizengamot had been dissolved, without a set date for its reformation, and many of the representatives from the Populares party were in hiding. Clemency had been declared for the prisoners recently escaped from Azkaban, and the prison itself had been shuttered, with remaining inmates moved to other facilities. The auror force had been eradicated, though there were still sightings of people who looked like aurors throughout the countryside, apparently patrolling, though on what power or authority, no one quite knew. A state of emergency had been declared. There were lights on in the Ministry building, and none of the public had been inside since it reopened.
There were mass Obliviations of muggles taking place in and around Islington. What good it would do, Dumbledore was not certain, as no degree of Obliviations could overwrite public memory of such a hugely distressing event, especially one that had left visible evidence of damage at Grimmauld Place and King’s Cross. The muggle government had to take notice, and it did; the Daily Mail called it a terrorist attack, and the reports of cloaked figures swarming in the sky were cabined as hallucinations, induced by distress. Dumbledore assumed that some journalists and representatives had been taken under the Imperius Curse, to abet the coverup. He doubted it was a genuine effort to maintain peace and order in the muggle world, but rather an attempt to repel international attention; breaching the Statute of Secrecy, at least without any good-faith effort at cleanup, brooked investigation from the International Board of Arbitration and, at worst, the European Confederation of Wizards. Not that help would be forthcoming from that square. Barring breaches of secrecy, the international wizarding community tried to leave nations to manage their own domestic affairs.
Dumbledore’s letters discussed these realities with a frankness that surprised Draco. They did not seem calibrated to soothe or assure him; they were hard, clear, and direct. He was grateful, in some sense, for the absence of illusion, though it cast no great light on the dark corridor of his future. But then, he supposed that Dumbledore no longer had anything to gain from the pretense of calm.
The world was falling. Draco stayed at the Manor. He lived on coffee and toast points. He planned his mother’s funeral.
The morning of the ceremony, he had watched the sun rise from his window. If he’d slept he didn’t remember it. A stack of unopened Christmas presents lay at the foot of his bed, tressed in satin paper and silk ribbon, with notes in a hand he recognized. He’d forgotten them over the winter holiday, but they’d remained there. Now they sat obdurately at the foot of his bed, wearing a thin cloak of dust.
He had tried to open them. He’d gone so far as to pick one out — a small one near the top of the pile, in green gilt wrapping-paper with a brocade of poinsettias. He’d brushed off the dust on it. Broke the seal on the wrapping.
As he did it went through him like a cold knife that he had undone something she did with her hands, and it would never be back to the way she put it.
He put it back where it had been. He nudged it to get the angle right, then again, though it still seemed different, somehow. Upon consideration, he threw a cloak over the pile. The unchanged silhouette quietly rejected the attempt.
Draco slammed the door on it, and went to tell Briselda to open one of the guest rooms for him.
Not that he’d used it. In the three days since he’d dozed, if at all, in armchairs in the library, or at his desk, or simply slipped out of consciousness for an hour or two while in the middle of some other task. It did not help abate the surreality of the occasion, when the day of the ceremony came.
The gates, which stood closed at most times of the year, had been thrown open, and up the mossy drive rattled just two carriages of mourners, most of whom had not known the deceased: Albus Dumbledore, who had left through the same gates only a few hours earlier, after helping finish the spellwork for the ceremony; then Arthur and Molly Weasley, both wearing gold-hemmed mourning robes and caps not out of place in a scullery; and with them, Harry, Ron, and Hermione, an assortment of people she would have been hard-pressed to tolerate at a garden party, much less the final celebration of her life.
Hermione jumped out first, forcing the footman to scuttle back, her hand up to shield her eyes from the sun. Catching sight of Draco, she broke into a run. Her hair twisted with visible strain into a chignon, and she wore her school uniform with a black shirt and gold earrings, all of which fell into disarray when she climbed the stairs two at a time and leapt at him.
Their bodies collided, and he grabbed her; her momentum threw her off her feet and swept her around. It shielded her a little from the others, who were disembarking at a courteously slow pace from the carriages. Her body was hard and heavy in his arms and some of her hair sprang free of its confines to greet him, too, showering around his face in a cascade of feathery touches. He wound his arms around her waist and held her tightly, and she kept gripping him tighter and tighter, too, as if it were not close enough, to be skin to skin, as if she intended to climb inside him and plant her flag in the war-ravaged territory inside his chest.
She was the first person he’d touched, since — well, since.
Hermione pulled back a few inches — he didn’t let her go far — and her eyes skittered over him. “Draco,” she said, and of all the ways she’d said his name, of the hundreds and thousands of variations, it had never been so heartbreakingly sad. His eyes burned at the way she said it, and so he kissed her, partly to hide them.
She made a muffled noise, pained, and kissed him back. Her lips parted around a sad gasp, and she was crying, a little bit, or he thought she was; it might have been him, probably was, didn’t matter; the heat of her mouth was the only warm thing he could feel, and the rest of him gravitated to it in abject desperation. She cradled his jaw in her hands like a delicate object and kissed him with a soft, gentle movement of her lips, but he wanted more heat, and he pulled her tighter to him to try to get more of it, flattening her against him. He wanted to be warm again. This was the only thing that did it, it was the only thing that had the reach.
Her hands glided down his shoulders and stroked his arms, gripping the sleeves of his robes. A startled, hesitant noise tore out of her throat when he nipped her bottom lip, and she turned her head just far enough to break the kiss. “Sorry,” she said. Her breath was hot and rough against the underside of his jaw. “I wanted to say. I’m so sorry. I know she—”
He didn’t want to hear any of it. He’d reviled the approach of this evening because he knew he’d have to hear so much of it, and so he kissed her again, a selfish kiss, a hard fast clash of lips and tongue, which made her twitch in surprise. “Don’t say it,” he said. “Don’t. You don’t have to say it.”
She understood, or seemed to, and nodded. He was relieved and grateful. “I won’t apologize, then,” she murmured, “but I should have been with you. I didn’t want to leave. They took me. Kingsley Apparated me, I didn’t ask him, I told him not to.”
“I know.”
“I shouldn’t have let them. I won’t let them, again,” she said, with a flicker of bitterness. “I should have splinched him.”
“It’s better you didn’t,” he said, even as he imagined it: he nearly smiled. “It wouldn’t have helped.”
“I don’t give a shit if it wouldn’t have helped,” she said. Her strident voice wavered only slightly around the expletive. She was so young, and so old, and he noted that loved her, very abruptly and painfully. “You wouldn’t have been alone, when — anyway. You aren’t alone now. I won’t leave unless you tell me to.”
“You really don’t have to do this.”
“Please, just — I know it’s uncomfortable and you don’t want to hear it and this is the worst time. I know. And I wouldn’t want me to comfort me either. And all the things the books say to do are mawkish and banal and you’d hate them. So we don’t have to talk about anything, we don’t have to talk about this ever again after today if you don’t want to, and God knows I wouldn’t want to,” she breathed, “but you don’t have to be alone here, after this. You do know that. You can come stay with me, or — if you want to be here, I’ll come and stay with you.”
“What about your parents?”
“I’ll sort that out,” she said, with a forceful indifference. “You shouldn’t have to worry about them.”
“No, but I suspect that one of us should.”
She twitched in the irritated way that meant he’d struck true. “If it really matters, you could come stay,” she muttered unhappily, “or, or get a hotel room in London, or something, or—”
It was a conversation they didn’t have the time or space for. Dumbledore was climbing the steps with a slow, ambling gait, his attention vested courteously on the trawling jasmine.“Later,” he said quietly, as the others crested the staircase, and she trailed off, uncharacteristically helpless. At Dumbledore’s approach she put her arm through his, almost warily, as if she might be taken away from him again.
Arthur touched him on the shoulder as he passed. After six months of recovery from his injuries at Christmas, he could speak only a few words at a time, and the cords of scarring on his throat meant they came out at a mere whisper. Nevertheless, he uttered none, for which Draco was grateful.
Molly had brought flowers. That was funny, for some reason.
“Briselda will take those,” he said. “Thank you.”
“My dear,” she whispered, and her lips wobbled; but Ron cleared his throat, and she moved along, briskly roping Briselda into a hunt for a vase.
“Sorry,” he muttered. He wore his school uniform with a gold tie instead of a red one, and the knot was tied properly, for once. It filled Draco with a complex resentment. “Told her not to start any productions. Dad’ll hustle her off, if she starts bawling.”
That was decent of him. Draco nodded.
“Anything for us to do?” said Harry. “I can help, if there’s something to set up, or carry, or…”
“It’s through this way.” Draco turned and led them into the foyer. Hermione went with him, casting a glance over her shoulder. Ron sucked his teeth and clapped Harry on the back as they went in.
White sheets flickered in the periphery of each room. The Manor had been shut up while Narcissa was traveling, and much of it remained closed, doors locked, sheets drawn over the furniture to preserve it from dust. The effect was a museum of unfinished marble statues, their half-chiseled shapes left by a wandering sculptor, their contours hinting only vaguely at the artist’s vision.
A set of marble stairs led them down from the upper gardens to the family mausoleum, which sat in a shaded grove of poplar trees some distance from the lake. Warm evening, bright scent of grass. The door to the mausoleum had been rolled open, and inside, torches lapped over two stories of elaborately decorated cells, ornamented with gargoyles of iron and stone, with names carved in the stone over each gated awning. Some sported two coffins, for couples who had been buried together, but not all. Each coffin bore an engraving of the birth signet of its occupant. The Lords Malfoy sported an additional engraving of a coronet of fleurs-de-lis.
He had to unlock his father’s cell for the occasion. It was the most lavish and most recent of the graves, on a sunken level of the mausoleum under the earth, and the stone interior was heaped high with treasures. Jewels and furs, chains of goblin-gold, braided tapestries of conquest and ancestors from the Dark Ages, a suit of dragon-hide armor, the nacreous pelt of a unicorn, a whole cask of selkie pearls. In olden days the cell would have been filled with the wizard’s own acquisitions, but those times were past, and it seemed undistinguished to burden an altar with deeds to investment properties. Sic transit gloria mundi: Paper and ink for emeralds and rubies. Leveraged bonds for pillaged gold.
Draco slit his thumb brusquely, with a jerk of his wand that made Hermione clench her teeth, and pressed it to the lock. The iron shuddered and the deadlock sprang free, letting the gate roll back with the shrill complaint of corroded metal. His father’s coffin sat unchanged by the blink of eight years, though the spoils had started to decay. The flowers once heaped upon it had dried to strands. Like the one set to join it, it was carved entirely from statuario marble, a translucent white so fine it looked almost soft to touch.
The mausoleum wasn’t the only place where they buried Malfoys. Outside, in the cooling shade of the poplars, tombstones rose from the earth like a carnival of stone ornaments: cousins, spinsters, second sons, and the few human servants whose service distinguished them so well their bones could be interred beside their masters’. In that little stone-walled graveyard the new coffin rested, brought there by Dumbledore. The Black insignia sat upon it in engraving so fine it was like a silver ink on the marble.
It was drawing closer to sunset, and the burning sky peered with beady eyes through the black walls of the poplar trees. Peacocks crooned distantly, their cries high and eerie on the silent lawns.
Dumbledore was the first to fold his robe and kneel before the coffin. Arthur and Molly followed him, arranging themselves carefully on the gold rug that had been unfurled for the occasion. Draco was about to join them when there was a creak at the graveyard gate, and a figure poked her head around the corner.
It was Andromeda. She wore a robe of exquisite gold brocade, her shoulders layered so thickly in thread it formed a sort of epaulette, with a headdress of jet and carved yellow leaves that pinned back her curls. She held herself with a stiff formality, as if she were representing an ambassadorial delegation from a hostile country.
Behind her came, like attendants, her daughter, who balanced on crutches, and a gentleman with receding sandy hair and a long, thin face, a once-prominent jaw softened by the encroachment of age, and unfashionably large square glasses. At their heels trotted a black German Shepherd with tattered ears, which sat contritely at the edge of the graveyard, its tail wrapped over its feet with uncharacteristic poise. It dipped its head, and the transformation rippled across its fur.
A moment later, Sirius sat cross-legged on the grass, wearing a black high-collared coat, gold chains dripping down the front of his shirt. He dipped his head deeply to Draco when their eyes met.
Andromeda paused with her hand on the gate, as if seeking permission. Draco realized belatedly that the permission she sought was his. He nodded to her, and she let herself inside. The Tonks family took their seats on the far edge of the golden rug. Molly shuffled over to make room for them, shooting Andromeda a poorly concealed stare.
Ron muttered in Harry’s ear. Hermione scowled at him, but they fell to whispering anyway. Draco tipped his head back and tried not to laugh. He evaded doing so only by a drowning wave of self-contempt. It shouldn’t have been possible to laugh.
“Castle… not… asked Mad-Eye.”
“Wasn’t … Black?”
“Wouldn’t… safe, or… I think.”
Hermione snapped her fingers at both of them with furious emphasis. Draco’s eyes burned. But that was the way of everything, after Grimmauld Place. Nothing was real, so anything could still be funny. In fact, most things were funny, once nothing was real anymore.
It was tradition for the next of kin to speak first. He had ventured a few drafts of something to say — some drivel about duty, and bravery, and the things his mother had loved. But the lines turned to syrup and ash on the page, and it nauseated him, the idea of sending her away on the wings of such tepid prayers. He tried to think about her now, but she seemed so far away, and in that pitched surreality he was not certain he could remember anything about her except the color of the robes she had been wearing the day she died.
Dumbledore gestured subtly, asking to speak. Draco jerked his head at him, caring little, wishing only that the whole thing would be over and everyone would stop looking at him with their big piteous eyes.
The headmaster stood and placed his hand on the coffin.
“I will be brief,” he said, “as the departed, while she lived, often enjoined me to be. She made no secret of her opinion on my taste for digression, and I will not indulge when she has been deprived of the chance to object.
“Narcissa enrolled as a student of Slytherin House in 1966. For five years, I taught her Transfiguration, until I assumed the post of Headmaster and quit teaching. She did not enjoy my subject, or any subject, as far as I could glean. She believed, of course, that she would never undertake a career. I do not comment on that conviction except to espouse my belief — born far too late in her life for it to matter — that someone in her youth should have urged her to contemplate a broader universe of choices, even if she did not take them, even if only for his latter-day peace of mind.” He removed his glasses and gestured with them while he spoke, turning to address the congregation.
“She was not known for her interest in school rules. It was you, Auror Tonks, who broke her standing record for class absences. Unlike you, I do not believe she ever served a detention, though she followed curfew only intermittently, and appeared to come and go from Hogsmeade as she pleased. Due to her family’s influence, her teachers generally declined to impose consequences. I was the lone professor, I think, who persisted in the attempt… Not until I became headmaster did I grasp the scale of the Black family’s power at the school. Cygnus Black, a generous benefactor and my first Chairman of the Board, left no doubt about the kind of treatment he expected for his little girl. I confess — and if she is listening, it will doubtless please her — that she frustrated me in the extreme.
“I believe she was well-liked in Slytherin. In truth, I do not know. I have, and always had, limited insight into the social mires of that house. But I perceived her a favored prefect among the younger Slytherins, whom she always attended with great care. Children and small animals brought out the best of her; they were the only affairs capable of coaxing out her true intellect and strength of character, which, it seemed, she did her best to conceal. In the castle flood of 1971, a pipe burst in the dungeons, and Slytherin House had to be evacuated while their commons were drained. In the mayhem, a kitten belonging to our caretaker unfortunately went missing, and while the rest of her house was at work drying its socks, she returned to search for it. She found the poor creature — I never discovered how — and restored it to its master, who in his emphatic gratitude, I believe, conferred on her the right-of-way of the castle, and would never again report to me a word of any wrong she had done.” Dumbledore smiled. “Perhaps she had such a reward in mind when she embarked on the search. However, I like to think she did not. I like to think that she went out because she imagined a small, frightened creature alone in the darkness, with the torches extinguished, and decided to right a little wrong.
“She was also a woman of contemptible ideas,” he added, his voice deepening with sudden sobriety. “She had, as did all members of her family, a fathomless vitriol for those who did not comply with the narrow standards of her upbringing. She rejected out of hand the idea that all wizards were equals, much less that all people might be. She thought these were regrettable but necessary truths, undeniable, and essential to her way of life. One might distinguish between her prejudice, which was inculcated by indifference and habit, and the violent conviction with which prejudice is now enforced by some of her peers; but I do not. When we forgive cruelty on the excuse of habit, we cede our moral responsibility to the past. When we forgive cruelty on the excuse of civility — because it is expressed sweetly, because it is expressed politely, because it is defended with words instead of fists — we suggest that the scores of violent hateful act without invitation; we suggest that violence has no root, it has no seed, that it is not conceived in the silence of the acquiescent. Narcissa was not a soldier, but her hands were not clean.
“And yet she died,” he said, with gravity, “for a cause antithetical to her beliefs. Let us contemplate her actions: her sacrifice. Let us say she died for us. She died for our fight, that muggles and wizards might live together peaceably, that muggle-born children might grow up welcome and safe and free. Is that so?” He paused. “No. I do not think she would have said so. Let us not disrespect her sacrifice by removing it to an altar of our own choosing. It was her life, after all; given by her, freely, for her own purposes; let us seek to understand it, as every creature deserves to be understood.
“She died for a private cause. She had lately been challenged to reflect on her beliefs: not as a source of evil, in truth, but because they posed a personal danger.” He glanced at Draco, and his face tightened apologetically. “Her son, who survives her, was becoming even early in his adolescence a different and more thoughtful person than she had been — perhaps I should say, invited to be — in her youth. He had become a man committed, by his own private causes, to oppose what she believed. She died in order to conceive a world where he might be free to do so. I doubt she admired the aspect of such a world, in her own private considerations, but she pursued it anyway, because it was the only world where her son might both love her and be happy. The great work she did in service of that goal, we may lay at his feet. But we must lay the choice with her, because she could have chosen otherwise. To deny that she chose her son freely — to suggest she was compelled by threat, or by the hopeless force of mother-love — is to deprive her of agency. I consider such an idea,” said Dumbledore, looking intently at Draco, “greatly misguided. The children of loving mothers often harbor the fortunate misconception that their mothers care for them ineffably, involuntarily, as a reflex of nature; this is not so. A mother’s love, like any love, is a series of choices. And to love something so well you wish it to be free, rather than to be with you, or to be as you desire it — this is the most difficult choice, and it takes the most towering strength. I beseech you all, I beseech you, to grant her in death the laurel she earned: remember her towering strength!”
His voice rebounded on the mausoleum. Molly was weeping, with a laudable effort at silence, into Arthur’s shoulder.
“Given time,” Dumbledore continued, “she might have rehabilitated her convictions to match her son’s. But she also might not have. The answers to such questions will not come to us in this life. Even so, I am, you have learned, an unreservedly hopeful man. I would like to think that in years to come, she would have allowed her love for her son, that is, the best of her, to conquer the worst. Disagree with me if you wish. I am old — please, mask your surprise — and I have seen people more lost than she was come much farther than she had left to go. I have seen them do it with far less to live for.”
He did seem old, then with the marks of time set deep in his face, and the rasp of it loud in his throat. “She was not a lost cause,” he remarked. “I, for one, had great hopes for her. I wish that I had nurtured such hopes sooner. I wish I had expressed them to her when they would have meant more, and stood any chance of helping. Narcissa, I am sorry. It was my job to see in you something better than what you were, and I failed you. You would hate me for saying so, I know. But I did see it, eventually; and what I see survives you. He has your laugh precisely, and your mischief, and your wit. And if he spurns the path you would have chosen, then I charge you, Lady Malfoy, to remember your old teacher’s lament: You always did like to break the rules.”
And at last, Dumbledore withdrew, and took his seat.
Then they were looking at Draco again. But Dumbledore’s eulogy had not inclined him to speak. If anything, the opposite. Dumbledore speaking for Narcissa had been bizarre enough: For Draco to say anything would trip the whole occasion into bleak absurdity. Anyway, he didn’t know what he would say, and if he opened his mouth what came out might very well be offensive, or bitter, or cruel. Certainly it would be no consolation for Molly Weasley, who was weeping, he knew quite well, mostly for him.
He had very few warm words to say about his mother, in truth. She had gone. It seemed, in a childish way, unfair for him to have to praise her in recompense for it.
But then: What kind of son was that, who couldn’t say a kind word for his mother at her own funeral? What kind of son could sink to such depths of failure in his duty? And it wasn’t like he didn’t know the kind things he could have said about her. He thought of them constantly. He thought of them every night instead of sleeping, all the parts of her that only he would ever know. He wanted other people to know them, to remember them, if only to take the unbearable weight of remembering off his shoulders. But it was impermissible to anoint her death by telling them. They were the things you could only tell people when you knew she was never coming back.
There was so much of him that she had understood that nobody else did, and now no one ever would.
Andromeda stood, with a rustle of skirts, and laid her fingers lightly on the coffin lid. Her frown knit her dark brows together.
“My sister,” she said, faltering. She looked back at her husband, who nodded at her and smiled in a faint, anxious way. Andromeda’s answering smile fought through a rictus of discomfort to reach him, and it was a hard thing to watch— that blinding axon-tip of love.
“My sister was the sweetest creature ever born in that house,” she said. Her voice was low and throaty, washed thin by tears.“Which, in truth, does not say much. She had a bitter palate. She loved our parents — that was an accomplishment. I think she even loved Aunt Wally, which ought to have earned her some kind of prize. I doubt anyone ever loved Bellatrix more than she did, and I daresay they never will. And she loved me, for a while.”
She peered down at a notecard hidden in her palm, and crumpled it.
“She resembled our mother,” she said. “Druella Rosier. Bella and I took after our father. We had the Black look, as it were. All of you know it; there’s enough of us. But Narcissa had the Rosier hair, and the Rosier… delicacy. I don’t know where she came from — you won’t find any aunts that look like her. But Mother loved it. She’d dress her up in little pinafores and parade her around at parties. It made me sick with envy. I never told her. I told her I thought it was stupid, and that Bella and I had spent the whole time playing without her, which made her cry.” Andromeda sniffled. “Later on she never cried like that. Something happened to her, the year I went to Hogwarts, when she was alone at home with Mummy and Daddy. When Bella and I came home the next summer she’d gone all cold, and she never cried at all. By the time she started at Hogwarts I’d come to see how we’d misjudged her, growing up; she was scary clever, though she never showed it off, and she had spent so much time watching us, I sometimes think she knew us better than we knew ourselves. I did try to know her, too. But I suppose it was too late, by then. She had locked something up, that year she was alone, and if she ever let it out it wasn’t for me. I doubt it was for Bella. Perhaps her husband managed it, I wouldn’t know.
“When I had Nymphadora,” she said, “I wrote letters to her and Sirius. Sirius wrote me back straightaway and came to see Nymphadora, and he brought all his friends, and it was very — well, it was a nice thing to do, and I wept buckets, even though the Potters got the sex wrong and bought her a lot of hideous boy clothes. I thought Narcissa might come too. I suppose that sounds silly of me. I didn’t think it was. After her marriage, she outranked Mother and Father both. Did you know that?”
It was not clear who she was asking. “It’s true,” she said. “And Bella. As Lady Malfoy, she was very near Aunt Wally. I suppose — well, you’ll think this is silly. I thought that would make her more willing to bend the rules. ‘Who can hurt her now?’ I thought. ‘Who would dare? What a darling; she’s gone and made herself impervious, and now she’ll be my guardian and my protector, for she loves me so.’” She flashed her teeth in a smile. “How silly of me.”
Sirius made a sympathetic noise in his throat.
“I now believe,” she said, “that I lost her a long time ago. It wasn’t Ted that did it, or Nymphadora. And it wasn’t Lucius, truly. I don’t believe it helped her personality one bit to marry him, but if she never did I’d still have lost her. It happened when I got on that train for Hogwarts, with Bellatrix, and left her all alone in a big house where nobody ever laughed — but we loved each other, once. When I was a child and she was a child, in a kingdom by the sea.”
She stumbled back, and sat down. Sirius shuffled over and offered her his hand, palm-up. She squeezed it and flashed him a bright, watery smile. He leaned around her back to salute Tonks. They were at ease with each other, their little triumvirate of the forgotten.
It would have been the ideal time for Draco to speak. His father’s funeral had lasted for three hours, between all the speeches. But by now the sun had set. It could be over, if he wanted it to be.
He stood up, drawing his wand. Dumbledore rose gracefully at his example, raised his wand, and helped walk it into the mausoleum, suspended between two Levitation Charms.
The coffin settled in the hollow left beside Lucius’s. The cell had been dressed in advance with her grave artifacts: the jewels she had liked to wear, her pearls and her emeralds — her diamond engagement ring, which he had placed carefully in a silver dish beside Lucius’s wedding band. A tin of her favorite caviar he located next to one of her good evening gowns, and one of Fortescue’s ice cream. A taped cassette of the ballet she’d dragged him to, the summer he turned fourteen. A handkerchief adorned with the Black family crest.
When he was finished, he dragged the gate closed and pressed his bloodied thumb to the lock. The deadbolt sealed his mother’s body in the crypt. The two coffins sat together. A stray thought wondered if the company would be consolation for his father’s. Then he snorted, and turned away.
Outside, the mourners filed again into the glade. Draco pointed his wand up first, wanting only to get it over with, but Andromeda beat him to it.
“Narcissa,” she said, lighting her wand. Lumos arrowed into the heathery darkness of the sky.
A scant collection of murmurs followed her, and beads of light darted up from the poplars. They scalded the branches with light as they passed, like a group of meteors reversing course, or angels retracing the fall.
Hermione drew her wand, briefly unclasping his hand to grasp it. Lumos bathed her face in sudden light. Her eyes were clear, but she was looking at him even as she sent the light up through the trees, her brows furrowed, her mouth a curlicue of worry. It was a breach of protocol, to do that, but he didn’t care. She was the only one he didn’t mind looking at him. It wasn’t so much that he enjoyed it, but part of him sincerely worried if she stopped the rest of him might just dissolve away.
He lit his wand, and at the crucial moment, his tongue slipped. It ought to have been her given name, but he said, “Mum.”
Stupid child. Stupid, mewling child to do that, like everyone wasn’t watching.
A commotion by the graveyard’s edge. Tonks had stumbled, and her crutch had collided with the relief on one of the tombstones. A moss-eaten dragon-head, probably a few centuries years old, peeled off and toppled into the dirt.
She whirled around in panic, but a harsh sound interrupted her apology. Draco was laughing.
It came up through his chest as a clean, purging burn, that laugh. The others gave him stares ranging from alarm to bemusement. None of them joined him, of course they didn’t. But it was such a relief that he didn’t care about the impropriety. He leaned back and laughed the laugh he would never have dared, if his mother was alive, because it was funny, and because there was no one to stop him. There was no one to stop him from doing anything. It was his house, his name, his title.
His mother, his tomb, his hole in the ground. His laughter, shattering the peacocks into a tempest of ghosts over the lake.
It was nearly ten o’clock before the light was entirely gone, and there was tea and firewhiskey served in crystal tulips in the drawing-room, although in that tall, cold, elegant chamber, with its massive hearth and high ceilings, the evident scarceness of guests chilled any embers of conversation. During Christmas, Draco remembered the vast pine tree that someone — had it been his mother? Or Dobby? Or a maid, or someone paid from the village to come, he didn’t remember or he’d never asked — erected in the corner and dressed in tinsel, with baubles and ornaments.
Tonks and Dumbledore shared a private conversation behind a vase of white mourning roses, which Draco biopsied as he passed them.
“…emergency government in Cambridge,” she was murmuring. “The rest of the Populares Party, or what’s left of them. Half won’t come because they’re scared. They’re choosing a Minister tomorrow, three guesses who.”
“And what does Lord Shacklebolt intend to do, from Cambridge?”
“Give speeches? Take votes? Get himself killed? Merlin, I dunno. He says our military can’t be our government. Something about giving the Ministry a monopoly on public trust.”
“And this so-called military — will he be supplying it himself?”
“Yeah, I don’t know, boss. I don’t work for him, remember? This is his secretary after eight shots, not his deposition—”
“I simply find it very optimistic of Kingsley to start opposing someone with neither political nor military power, and our enemy has both.”
“Doesn’t sound like he’s opposing you.”
“Does he expect me to follow the laws he passes? By his one-party government, in Cambridge?”
A pause.
“You want someone in his office?” she murmured. “I can get people.”
“It would be nice to have some warning,” he sighed, “if he tries to interpose… but don’t threaten him. Kingsley is a good man, and a reasonable one. He knows politics far better than I. He may be right, in truth, about siloing the politicians from the warmakers.”
“…But?”
“But he believes quite strongly in transparency,” said Dumbledore. “And if I am going to produce this military miracle for him, I need a little shade to work in.”
Draco passed out of earshot, or perhaps Dumbledore had cast Muffliato, for their voices vanished into murmurs.
He found Sirius in the foyer, gazing up at one of the marble sculptures. It was an eight-foot Rhea Silvia, a twin nursing on her breast, her palla pooled at her hips. The other twin clung to her knee, his face twisted up in eternal supplication.
Sirius was smoking a cigarette. When Draco emerged from the shadows, he subtly Vanished the ash at his feet.
“Bad habit,” he said. “You want me to put it out?”
Draco consulted himself for affront and found none. The irony helped ward off the pall.
“Give me one.”
Sirius shrugged and slipped one out of his coat. Draco lit it from his wand, and his mouth filled with the foul taste of smoke.
“Old acquaintance, that one,” said Sirius, tipping his head at the statue. “Used to haunt the ballroom at Witherfell. Dad must’ve shipped it off as a wedding present.”
He tried to recall the associated myth.
“What a foul present.”
“Yeah. Foul bloke.”
The taste of smoke filmed his teeth. Stinging heat flew in his throat with each drag, like the air at Grimmauld Place, foul and thick.
Draco considered him from the corner of his eye. Sirius regarded Rhea Silvia with forlorn respect, like two immortals, commiserating.
“Remus is on assignment,” said Sirius. “I got your invitation for him, and I asked Mad-Eye to pass it along, but he said it was no contact. So. Here’s what you missed: He’d tell you he’s sorry, and you’re a good kid and it’s not fair this happened to you, or some other thing that would help, I dunno. And then he’d hug you. Then he’d yell at me for smoking. Then he’d yell at you for smoking. Then he’d yell at me for letting you smoke. You get the picture.”
“Do you have,” he said, “a cell of self-respect in your body?”
“Used to. Left it with him. Along with most of my sense. Classic Remus, I tell you, hogging all the best bits of me. Suppose he made them, so they’re his by rights, but it’s frankly childish of him to play keep-away.”
Then Sirius spoke over Draco’s effort to interrupt him: “I’m sorry it was her.”
“What?”
“If one of us had to die,” he said. “You didn’t deserve that. I’m an old washed-up so-and-so, and she had a kid. And I’d have been done in, if not for you lot. Truth be told,” he added, with a brisk and unhappy gratitude, “I owe you the kind of debt I never wanted to owe anybody again. Sorry if I wasn’t gracious about it. Nobody likes to wake up on credit.”
“You pulled me from the burning building. Forget your debts.”
“That was a freebie,” said Sirius. “Didn’t know I owed you, then. Just seemed unsporting to let another decent little bloke die in that house.” He plucked the stub of his cigarette from his mouth. “Anyway,” he said, “I’d forgot what it felt like to save somebody.”
Draco dropped his own cigarette, half-smoked, to the tile. A twist of his heel snuffed it out.
“Why didn’t you speak?”
“At the ceremony? Didn’t know her,” said Sirius, in surprise. “Wouldn’t be right.”
“Then why did you come?”
“I dunno. Same as everybody,” he said. “You called.”
This pained him so acutely he lost his words. He thought of the distance it was to Hogwarts Castle, and the pain left him surprised that he was still breathing. There was only one thing for it.
He ground his teeth together and extended his hand. Sirius stared at it. Only when Draco began tapping his foot did he juggle his cigarette and clasp it.
“Black,” he said.
“Malfoy.”
Draco turned on his heel, and left.
Andromeda and her husband had occupied a corner to themselves, studying something that Draco recognized belatedly as his parents’ wedding portrait. Narcissa was wearing a high-collared gown of gold lace with lantern sleeves, and a thin circlet dripped a sapphire from the V of her hairline. Lucius condescended to the viewer in a round-collar suit of green-and-blue brocade. The clasp of his cloak was the twin to the jewel on his wife’s circlet. The engraving on the frame read MAY 9, 1974.
“I always wondered what she wore,” mused Andromeda. “Poor thing. She was much better in silver.”
She turned to Draco, her expression innocently curious. “Did she really ride in on a unicorn, like they said in Witch Weekly? I’ve heard mixed reports.” When he didn’t answer, she gave a tinkling laugh. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I asked you. You weren’t there. Nymphadora was at mine, you see, but your mother would never permit that sort of scandal.”
He didn’t know how to answer that.
After a moment’s hesitation, she touched her husband’s shoulder. “He was there, too. At mine, I mean! Not hers. Edward Tonks — Draco Malfoy. My nephew.”
“I go by Ted.”
“Unfortunately,” she said.
His uncle had a firm handshake, and a surly manner that conveyed hostility until it was revealed for awkwardness. At first glance, it was hard to imagine him and Andromeda falling in love. It was hard to imagine them even having a conversation. Draco was reminded of Percy Weasley, which did not enable understanding on previous points.
He wondered what had happened to Percy, in the government reshuffle. It was one of a hundred uncertainties that yawned up from the shodden aftermath of his year.
“I was rude to you, last August,” said Andromeda. “Scampered off without a word. Not a handshake, even! Terrible work. But how was I to know you were there with Harry Potter? Nobody tells me anything. And of course I supposed you’d be there at your mother’s bidding, and that she might even be with you, and I daresay nobody wanted that to happen. I didn’t even want to come, only Nymphadora bullied me into it—”
“You could have written.” He was not angry at her, but he was tired. His tone was informative. “You could have come to Grimmauld Place.”
“Oh,” she said with a laugh, “if you think your mother would have forgiven that, I don’t know what to tell you.”
They lapsed into silence.
“Before she died,” he said, “my mother and Bellatrix spoke of you.”
Andromeda blanched. Ted coughed on his drink.
“She said you left because something had happened to Bellatrix. That she had been betrayed.”
“I left because I changed,” she said, strained. “It had nothing to do with Bella. She made her own decisions. Tell me, how much of Cissa’s life did she think was my fault?”
His expression must have made her reconsider; she winced, and said: “Bella chose to get married before I left. She wanted out of that house more than I did, and she took the first train leaving the station. Even if it was twice her age,” Andromeda said, unhappily. I couldn’t tell you why a woman I haven’t known in two decades said anything to anyone. It’s likely enough she’d blame me for Bella, or Bella for me, or anyone but herself for everything in the world.”
“You think she lied to Bellatrix, then?”
Andromeda shrugged, insouciant. “I think she probably believed something that wasn’t true. Perhaps she knew it wasn’t true, and still believed it. Narcissa was good at that. She could tell herself a story so sweet and sad she’d make herself cry, and all day nobody could coax her to be happy again.”
This was an unexpectedly deep cut. “That’s my mother you’re talking about.”
She snickered, then. It slipped through the mask of her contrition, and he understood in a flash how someone could hate her. The Black family charm, with none of the Black family gravitas; he’d thought Sirius was a bad case.
“She’d be fed up with me,” she said. “Complaining about her at her own funeral. The opprobrium! She’d eat me up. But Bella would think it was funny.” She glanced at the window, across the darkening grounds.
Ted wrapped his arm around her shoulders. “Being here is difficult,” he murmured, formally. “I apologize.”
“It unmakes me,” announced Andromeda. “I’m not myself, when I’m here… or I’m more myself than ever. Which is it, do you think, Edward?”
Her husband smiled at her. “That’s a riddle, not a question.”
“But you like riddles, don’t you? You were in Ravenclaw.” She turned back to Draco. “I hear you’re in Gryffindor,” she added. “That must have been an awful shock.”
Draco said that it was. Then he asked leave of her, and left the stranger to her husband, with strictly more courtesy than he thought she had earned.
His blood was high in his temples, and he pushed through the double-doors of the terrace to get some air. Anger at her presumptions faded quickly into irritation, and then into a dull, restless sort of itch. He could recognize the voice in Regulus’s letter. He recognized, too, why her memory would hurt his mother so much, so long after she had gone. Andromeda had a way of crawling under the skin.
Firelight guttered in the braziers. On the vine-tressed balustrade, a trio sat with their heads together, talking in low voices. Harry straddled the marble, while Ron leaned against it, with his arms folded; Hermione sat side-saddle on it, her robe spilling over the bustles of jasmine and bougainvillea.
Light spilled behind him from the drawing-room as he opened the doors. The three of them turned — a fleeting impression of deer, as the light reflected on their eyes — and Hermione sat up a little at the sight of him, her shoulders sinking. Her hands stilled around a twined piece of her hair.
“One almost feels neglected,” he drawled, although his heart wasn’t in it, the barb. “Did the reception bore you?”
“You were talking to Andromeda,” said Hermione, undeterred. “A bit loudly, to be honest. I didn’t want to get in the middle of it.”
“You should have.” He nudged the doors closed behind him. “It could only have improved the conversation.”
She frowned. Her gaze sharpened. “Are you alright?”
“I’m fine. Will I step on the moment, joining you?”
Ron pushed off the balustrade. “Yeah, bit cramped, this pavilion,” he said, “it’ll be a squeeze, but if you sit on my lap—”
“Don’t get excited.”
Ron sniggered. Hermione relaxed, a little, though her eyes followed him anxiously in her periphery. Draco leaned his hip next to Hermione’s, the scent of crushed jasmines blooming through the smoke and the warm night air.
The coin of the moon lay flat on the lake. He thought of Daphne.
He’d thought of inviting her, but hadn’t. If her family knew, the world would know. They would anyway, once word went around.
Theo and Pansy had, but he couldn’t invite them, either. They were not friends and could not be, on this side of the war, or perhaps any other.
He regretted that quite a bit, in retrospect. Theodore should have been there. He had cared for Narcissa greatly, and Pansy, whatever her feelings, had somehow left Narcissa with the impression that she was a “lovely girl.” They should have had the chance to say goodbye. It was his fault they wouldn’t. There was another thing for him to carry.
These things had costs: the choices one made, the company one decided to keep. Draco had expensive tastes.
“We were talking about Snape,” said Ron. “They said he broke his cover to save Harry.” He shot Harry an unpleasant look. There lay some mire of argument that Draco hadn’t begun to uncover. He found himself spitefully uninterested in them. He hoped it caused them problems; he hoped Ron had shouted himself hoarse, and it was some contentment that he trusted Ron to do it.
“So… sorry,” said Ron brusquely. “For thinking your godfather was trying to kill us all.” He glanced around. “Sort of thought he’d be here.”
He might have said I told you so, but his heart wasn’t in it; the angels of Snape’s better nature, skeletal and pallid things they were, did not make frequent appearances.
“My godfather is in hiding.”
“Yeah, so’s Sirius, but—”
“Sirius Black isn’t a target in the way Snape will be. Black is dangerous; Snape was essential. Arguably the reason they pursued Black in the first place was because Lestrange thought he’d taken possession of her ring. By her great fortune, and subsequent misfortune, my mother did instead.”
“What ring?” said Ron.
“I second that ‘what,’” said Hermione, frowning. “Why did she want the ring? And what was Snape trying to do with the spell? There’d be no possible reason to do something that destructive a closed space — unless he thought it was the only way to even the odds with Bellatrix, but the risks — well, the risks are evident, now. I thought perhaps he’d recalculated when he thought Harry was out of the room, but even then, I can’t believe a duelist of his skill would want to—”
“That’s not why.”
In for a knut, in for a galleon. It couldn’t possibly harm him now.
“The ring is a piece of the Dark Lord’s soul,” he said. “It kept him from dying when his body was killed. Presumably you can’t scry them, or else they would be significantly harder to find. That’s why Snape cast fiendfyre. It’s one of the only ways to destroy a horcrux.”
The others stared at him.
“She wore a bit of his soul?” Harry said, horrified.
“Not knowingly.”
“Have you checked yours?” said Ron, and Draco barked a laugh.
“No,” he said, “my father got a book, instead. Thank you for worrying.”
“How long have you known?” Hermione demanded. Her voice was edged with injury; she was angry, of course, he hadn’t told her.
“A year. My mother swore me to secrecy. It’s difficult to play a hand the other man can see.”
“And — and—” She was struggling not to blame him for not telling her; he watched her, tiredly, as she wrestled the feeling aside. “And so you can tell us only now, because the vow is gone?”
“Vows don’t work like that,” mumbled Ron.
“Quite right, they don’t. But since I swore on the dishonor and destruction of my house, I find myself curious what else the fates can possibly do to me.”
Hermione reached to touch him, but hesitated, fingers curling.
Draco drew his wand and re-lit one of the dying braziers. The flame jumped from his wand in a rippling arch.
“We should talk about it,” said Harry.
“I was under the impression we were talking about it.”
“Yeah, but not really.”
“Fine. I can think of no reason Harry Potter shouldn’t have his pleasure. What would he like to talk about?”
“Your mother.”
“My mother, yes. Go on. What about her?”
“She died—”
“You’ve concluded that, have you?”
“—and you blame me—”
“Do I? Why bother to think at all? Saint Potter will tell me—”
“—but you can’t blame me without blaming yourself,” said Harry, hard and flat, “because if you weren’t there, she wouldn’t have been, either. So if you’d like to hate me — and I reckon you would — you have to go through yourself to do it. Which I reckon isn’t gonna stop you. So do you want to talk about it?”
Draco threw his wand to the ground and punched him.
CRACK. The boy toppled back from the balustrade and landed in the hedges a few feet below. Hermione cried out more loudly than Harry did.
Draco rounded the post on the stairs and followed him down. Prying him from the hedges, it was easy enough to hit him, at point-blank range, and hit him again. Harry shouted and caught another blow to the face, throwing his glasses into the dirt.
The pain blossomed hot and immediate over his bruising knuckles. He didn’t throw punches often. Ron made it seem easier than it was.
“How fucking dare you?”
“Christ,” Hermione muttered, coming after him, but she didn’t stop him. She hung back, with Ron, while Harry tried to grapple free.
Their heads rolled over and over each other in the dirt, white and black, though the first was collecting enough dirt to grey it some. Draco got the upper hand and shoved him down, bracing him in the dirt with a knee on his chest.
“How fucking dare you,” he breathed, “speak to me of blame—”
“Go on,” Harry panted. “You’re right, go on.”
“How dare you speak to me of fault? If you had stayed—”
“I know—”
“Why couldn’t you stay put?”
Ron flinched. Hermione folded her arms, her expression stony, and looked at her shoes.
“Why was it so fucking hard? Why? They played you, and you knew it, and you let them, like a fucking idiot! She spent the last year of her life teaching you Occlumency for fucking nothing!”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry, I don’t know.”
“You ran away!”
“I didn’t know—”
“You didn’t know there would be fucking consequences?” he snarled. “As if you, of all people, have had a life with so few of them?”
Harry coiled into the ground, his fingers digging in the earth.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“You should be.”
“I killed her,” croaked Harry. “I was there, so you were there, so she was there, so she died. That’s what you want to say, isn’t it?”
Draco stared at him. His pulse throbbed.
“Fuck’s sake,” he bit out, and shoved off him. Harry sat up, blinking, as Draco turned his back and stalked off.
“Draco,” said Ron lowly, “what are you—”
“Formal challenge,” he said shortly, crossing ten paces. The space from Harry made it easier to think. “Wands. Heel to cranium, to w— to first blood.”
“No,” said Ron suddenly. The speed with which he moved in front of Harry was irritating, and, distantly, flattering. “No. Not with wands—”
“Ron, get away,” said Harry thickly, struggling up. “Let him. I can take it.”
“Are you mad? What does this fucking help? Letting him curse you?”
“Nothing,” said Draco, twirling his wand. “It doesn’t help anything at all.”
Ron shouldered Harry back. “Draco,” he said roughly. “You’re not thinking.”
“He is, though,” said Harry, in a hard voice. “Ron, get out of the way. You don’t understand.”
Ron staggered back.
It was perfectly sized to gut him: Now run along, Ron, you don’t understand. Harry could be cruel, when he wanted to be. And he could be careless, when he wanted to be. And he could be fretful, and jealous, and spiteful, in all the ways apropos for something dropped on a doorstep and forgotten for eleven years.
How horrible to be like him. They were locked alone together in an empty room.
“My mother didn’t have to die,” said Draco. He became aware, with a terrible wonder, of the desire to hurt something.
Worse: He wanted to kill something. He wanted to watch its body stop moving under his boot. To feel as powerful as he had thirty seconds before he walked into the drawing room of Grimmauld Place.
He wanted death, destruction, armageddon. He wanted thousands to drown in blood, for the world to bear a scar — but that was not what he wanted, not at all.
“Hermione,” Ron exclaimed, appealing finally to the fourth of them, who had been silent. “Talk to them. They’ll listen to you, Merlin knows they never fucking listen to me—”
“I wouldn’t be offended, Ron, Harry doesn’t listen to anybody,” she said coldly.
All three of them looked at her. Harry said gutturally, “Hermione, if you want to step in after him, we can do that, too.”
“No,” she said, in the same tone, “I think this is all ridiculous posturing, candidly. I don’t like duels. You’d remember that, if you’d put to memory anything I’d ever said on the subject.”
“Oh, thanks,” said Ron, “that really helps—”
“I’m not his carer. What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know! Damage control! You’re a prefect!”
“We’re not at school,” she said, watching Draco, who caught his wand and held it still.
“It could’ve been your brother,” called Draco, and took savage pleasure in how Ron whipped his head around. “Bill was there. My mother saved him. Not that it may matter, in the end; we’re going to lose the war.”
Ron faltered. “Shut up,” he snapped. “Don’t say that. Don’t say we’re going to lose.”
“We are. Do you know what happens in wars where one party can die, and the other can’t?” He twitched his wand at Harry. “Ask his parents. Ask mine.”
“Enough. You want a shot at me,” said Harry hoarsely. “I’m giving it to you.”
He almost laughed again, incredulous, because Harry was serious, and in his horrible, misbegotten way, he was trying to be kind.
The torchlight guttered on the boy’s glasses, paving the green in coins of fire, catching the veins of his scar, and in that light he was somber and angry, the calm clean anger that had stared down Umbridge and raised the Great Hall to fight at his back.
A pair of voices echoed in his head: You wish the other kid left that graveyard? Not as much as I do. And: Strike me, old man. I know you want to do it.
Here was a boy who had been punished for living, and asked for more. Who kept asking. As if he had been born with a debt in it, a bond of suffering that someone else had run up on his account. That explained his bravery — at least the deep end of it, the chemical insensate courage that Draco had never understood; the pain didn’t frighten him. Of course it didn’t. There was nothing left to be frightened of.
There was no joy in hitting a boy like that. He took it as his due. It was like kicking a dog; and really, it was worse than kicking a dog, because a dog would at least avoid someone after it was kicked.
Draco sheathed his wand. “I don’t need your largesse,” he said, dripping spite. “Save it for the next one.”
Ron sucked a breath through his teeth. Harry dropped his head, rolling his jaw through the hit.
Draco turned his back, and swept up the staircase. It was a few moments before Hermione’s footsteps followed him.
He wondered what had passed, unspoken, between her and the others such that they did not call out to her. Or perhaps she had followed without looking.
At the top of the stairs, he almost ran through Molly Weasley, who without preamble caught him and pressed him into her arms. He stood there woodenly in her embrace, his pulse running in his ears, as she refused even at some length to let him go.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
Draco thought of the blood running from Harry’s nose. He wondered if she would still embrace him when she saw it. That, too, made him want to laugh, horribly.
But when Harry came up, his bruises were healed, and the blood was gone. Ron subtly slipped his wand into his back pocket, darting a stiff nod at Draco.
“The carriages have come,” Molly whispered. “Won’t you come with us, dearie? We’re staying over with the Tonkses in Birmingham, and on to Hogwarts in the morning. I hate to think of you—” She made an awkward late-stage elision of the word alone— “out here in the countryside, so far away from us. Isn’t any adult staying with you?”
“Severus Snape is my legal guardian.”
“That is not an answer to my question.”
He stepped away from her, even as she kept wheedling. “There’s plenty of room at the Tonkses! And Arthur brought the tent, if it’s too tight a squeeze—”
“Mum,” muttered Ron.
“Safe travels, Mrs. Weasley,” said Draco. “Thank you for coming.”
The guests migrated out. Ron kept one hand on Harry’s shoulder as they left, as if wary of hostiles leaping at him from the trees. Harry turned as they left, and tried to say something; but nothing came up, and he closed his mouth miserably, his eyes burning into Draco from across the steps.
Sirius slunk past him. He had steered clear of Harry during the ceremony, and now he transformed again into his animagus form, which trotted up and jumped up to curl in the unoccupied driver’s box of Harry’s carriage. He would be returning to Hogwarts, with the rest of them. Of course, if he had not enough to resent, there was the revelation that Harry had gotten what he wanted
Molly and Arthur boarded their carriage, and the Tonkses glided down into the other, Andromeda lingering only for a somber, slightly regretful touch of his hand. When she opened her mouth, he was surprised to hear a string of French syllables tumble, somewhat rustily, out from between her painted lips.
“Au revoir, neveu. Ravi d’avoir fait votre connaissance.” She hesitated. “We are all each other has left, are we not?” She glanced at Hermione and tapped her nose. “Traitors must stick together.”
Draco stiffened, and did not reply. Andromeda, seeming to sense a misstep, pressed her lips closed — but no apology was forthcoming. At length, Draco stepped back. She gave her husband her arm, and allowed herself to be steered like a golden barge into the glowing port of the carriage.
But Ted looked back at him. He seemed to flinch upon meeting Draco’s stare. His hackles rose, and his hand stilled on the carriage-door.
Draco raised his hand. Ted relaxed and smiled at him, a bit uneasily. He raised his hand back, and then clambered into the carriage.
Tonks was one of the last out, with Dumbledore. She stopped to shake his hand, and leaned in to speak in his ear.
“Hey. Sorry about Mum,” she muttered. “She means well, I swear.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Well, no, it’s your mum’s funeral. It’s not fine.”
He jerked his head dismissively. “Perhaps. But as you say, it’s my mother’s funeral,” he said. “If it’s any consolation, she chose the one day it could have no appreciable effect on my mood.”
She nodded. “You’re tough,” she said. “Don’t be too tough, yeah?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said tonelessly.
Tonks kissed her teeth and turned her head. “At the Academy, the first thing they teach you is how to take a fall,” she said. “They spend a week knocking you down a hundred different ways. In the mud, in the water, in a crowd, off a building. They teach it like an art form, knowing how to fall.”
I am not falling, he might have said. I am on the ground. There is nothing left to fret about breaking.
He stepped aside to let her pass. She clipped him off a short salute, and then Tonks and Dumbledore joined her parents in the second carriage. Before they left, Dumbledore offered him a small gold coin, with the emblem of a phoenix cast in silver.
“A ward key to Hogwarts,” he said. “If you change your mind. If not… I will expect you in September.”
The sentence canted upward at the end, open to interpretation as a question.
He pocketed the coin. Dumbledore nodded, tipped his golden cap, and descended from the Manor steps.
Hermione lingered on the stairs beside him. The wind stirred her hair, too, unfurling it curl by curl from her bun.
“Are you going to make me go?” she said. It was a quiet challenge.
He didn’t want to. The silence of the house at night had thorns.
He forced himself to say: “Do your parents expect you?”
“Eventually,” she said.
“Let’s try again. What did you tell them, exactly?”
“I told my mother I might stay over, and she said — well, she understood.”
“That’s a dextrous choice of verb.”
“I… Draco,” she said, and that was it, his name, her tone, one plea. Once the glimmer of uncertainty opened her face he wanted to recant any objection, tug her behind the doors, and lock them. If he’d ever had the ability to deny what he wanted, it wasn’t today. He wanted her here; she’d stay. He could have what he wanted.
It couldn’t possibly fall to him, today, to do anything else.
“Don’t leave,” he said. “Go back to your parents tomorrow.”
It was a weak thing to do; he was weak, and selfish. Taking her away from her parents. Weak and selfish, Draco Malfoy, but at least he could be honest with himself.
Hermione exhaled. The preparatory bristling for an argument dissolved in one breath. “Good,” she said fiercely. “I will. I’ll go tell them — I’ll be right back—”
She darted down the stairs and stuck her head into the Weasleys’ carriage, at which she had a short, intent conversation with someone inside. When she emerged, her expression was queasy, but relieved, and she shut the door behind her. The carriage wheels gave a creaking turn as she started back up the stairs, the lamplit interiors shrinking like yellow will-o-wisps up the drive.
Hermione crested the staircase again, breathing strained. He sought her hand again, idly, while she tried to salvage the remainder of her bun. “They said it was fine if my parents gave permission,” she said, “which I obviously said they did. It makes things easier at the Tonkses, anyway.”
“How so?”
“I’m not really talking to Harry at the moment,” she said. There was a pause.
“You don’t have to hold him to account for me,” he said stiffly. “I don’t intend to deprive him of his friends.”
“I understand that,” she said, after a moment, “but I’d also note that it isn’t — entirely — about what happened to you. Though it doesn’t… help.”
Draco said, “He broke your trust.”
“Not even that. I don’t care that he broke a promise. I could forgive him for that. But I spend so much time,” she said, her voice warbled, “thinking about him. For five years. I risked my life and my health, and so much of my time, and — I left my parents over the holidays, to be with him. Fourth year summer, fourth year Christmas… Fifth year Christmas. Every time he called. And when Umbridge tried to take his broomstick,” she said, her voice hardening, “I got this. On my hand. For him. And then I did what I did to Cho, and nobody looks at me the same anymore — for him. I did everything I thought he needed, before he needed it, because I knew he wouldn’t ask for it. And I did it willingly! But when he had the chance, he didn’t think about me. I wasn’t a consideration. My parents weren’t a consideration. None of the muggles on that platform were a consideration.” She wrinkled her eyes shut. “I’m so sick,” she said, her voice no longer faint but furious, “of wizards who can’t, who won’t, think about anyone else.”
Silently, Draco reached out and hitched their fingers together. She sniffed, and watched the carriages trundle out to the gates and turn onto the far road.
“Ron thinks I should try to forgive him. That’s what he’s trying to do,” she added. “Ron.”
“Is he making progress?”
“Oh, he says he isn’t,” she said tiredly, “but he will. It’s Ron.”
He had expected that much. Ron would shout at him, assuredly, and might give him the cold shoulder for a while, but it would not deter him. He knew how Ron fought. He would come running back as soon as he remembered he was needed, and at this juncture, there were plenty of things to remind him.
The will-o-wisps flitted through the trees beyond the gates and sank into the gloom.
“Do you want tea?” she said.
Briselda brought the tray up to his private sitting-room. He sent her to turn down a guest room of some size, and then locked the door and cast Muffliato. The maids like to talk to each other.
With the windows open, there was more than enough heat to manage without the fireplace, before which rested the camelback sofa where she’d slept, the night they got their prefect letters; she might have been recalling it, too, because her fingers drifted along the back. The lamps filled the room with low brassy light, and the moon pressed a pale glaze on the windowpane. On his desk by the window, Ulysses rattled the bars in greeting.
Hermione’s tea preference divested him of a sugarbowl. She leaned against the arm of the sofa, her hands wrapped around the tiny porcelain cup, her legs folded over his lap. He pulled out a piece of her hair and threaded it through his fingers.
“Do you know if Dumbledore has a plan?” she said quietly.
“With respect to what?”
“With respect to anything. To finding the horcruxes. To winning the war, as he did the first time.”
“Dumbledore didn’t win the first Wizarding War.” His index traced a circle lightly around her knee. “The Order was losing, and steadily, up until their immortal enemy committed suicide by infant.”
“But there has to be a way,” she persisted. “No one is actually immortal. Anyone can be killed.”
“That’s true. There was one way. It was Snape and my mother, and they’re both gone.”
By now the Dark Lord knew that Snape had betrayed him, he knew he had lost the secret of the horcruxes. A wizard with a tenth his intellect would have moved them by now. And there was no war to be fought against an enemy that could not die.
To kill a man, one had to find his body. The Dark Lord had many bodies, mostly hidden. Dumbledore didn’t need soldiers half as much as he needed spies.
If there’s no Harry Potter, there’s nothing to fight for, Hermione had said. People love you, Harry, you’re a symbol of the Second Wizarding War. And Ginny had said, hard and deadly with love, With an army, they couldn’t take you from us. That was true. They’d walk over the bodies to get him, and send them into death together.
Ginny and Fred and George and Neville. Dean and Seamus. Katie and Angelina. Luna Lovegood and Lavender Brown, the Patil sisters, the Creevey brothers, Alfie Chrissenpoffer and Victoria Frobisher, and good Cedric Diggory, who had only ever tried to do what a prefect should. He knew now how their bodies would lie. How the weight of them would settle in his arms.
It had to be someone’s responsibility. It wasn’t fair, that they should all pay the price. It wasn’t their war. It wasn’t his, either. But in the registry of costs and faults and failures, he would not emerge with clean hands.
Bellatrix Lestrange had clutched his hand and asked him to run with her. A fine thing, she had called him. And somewhere in the world, at that moment, she would be suffering at her master’s hand for what happened to the ring, but she would be forgiven. It wasn’t her fault, after all, that Snape had betrayed her. The Dark Lord’s right hand could not be dispensed with so easily.
And it would know, if anyone did, where the other horcruxes were.
He remembered something his mother had said, before she died. The day was vanishing into the blear of memory; he panicked, sometimes, at how little of it he remembered only a few days later. How little of what she said he could recall. But he remembered her saying, quite clearly, with annihilating regret: I should have fought. I could have won.
Hermione had set her lips against the teacup, thinking. She lifted them, curious.
“Why didn’t you tell me about them?” she said suddenly. “The horcruxes?”
He almost flinched at the uncanny feeling that she’d plucked the word from his thoughts. “I made a vow to my mother,” he said.
“Your mother asked a lot of you. Not all of it was fair.”
“And not all of it was done,” he said. “I tried to give her anything I could stand to.”
She frowned. The lamplight made her skin soft. “Did she ask you to stay away from me?”
His fingers stilled in her hair.
“Granger—”
“I’d like to know. Because I always knew you were giving something up,” she said stubbornly, “breaking with your upbringing. Being what you are. But I sometimes thought it wouldn’t have mattered to her, me being in your life, if I hadn’t had feelings for you.”
It would have. He didn’t mention that. “Technically, your feelings weren’t the problem.”
“Ah, right,” she said. “You were supposed to fancy a genteel pureblooded girl who’d have your children.”
“Little chance of that, with you around.”
“There might have been. If you’d started seeing someone proper, then she mightn’t have cared—”
“I would have still wanted you.”
She said quietly, “You might have learned not to, after a while.”
He coiled the hair around his fist and closed it. She glanced at it, a fleeting movement of her eyes.
“That would have saved no one,” he said, “and certainly it would not have saved me.”
Hermione made a sharp noise and set down her teacup. She shifted, easing his hand out of her hair, and replaced it in a businesslike way on her waist. She sat up, drawing their faces closer together.
“Tell me something about your mother,” she said intently. “Something you’ve never told anyone.”
The pressure in his chest changed. He was tempted to laughter, again, although the itch crept up his throat in a suspicious way.
“I want it noted,” he said, “that your attempt at comfort began with an interrogation.”
“I append to the note that this was not the beginning of the attempt,” she said, with classic pedantry, “and it is not my fault you respond to some methods better than others.”
A smile tugged his mouth, although it hurt to swallow.
“She took her tea with lemon,” he said. “Just lemon. No cream, no sugar.”
Hermione nodded, politely.
“Don’t make that face. Not all of us want ten volts of sugar at eight in the morning. Anyway, that’s how she took it. She preferred darjeeling. First flush. When I started drinking tea, I copied her, only watered it down with cream.”
“Which you, not knowing better, thought was an acceptable way for tea to taste,” she agreed, and smiled when he flicked her ear. “Did you often take it together?”
“Most days. When I was younger, she gave me cocoa. Or mint, if I’d behaved badly.”
“That’s more disciplined than I expected.”
“No, it isn’t. I always had cocoa. If I didn’t I’d cry, and she could never stand to see me unhappy.”
His eyes stung. He tipped his head back at the ceiling, trying to cool them.
And it was so much pain at once to think about it, to think about it for a fraction of a second, that it was better not to think at all. It was better to think of anything, to laugh or to bicker or to dream of other kinds of pain, than to permit for a fraction of a second the idea to cross his welted mind that she was dead.
Dead, and no longer employed in the business of being his mother. She had said her last words to him. She had touched him for the last time. That was the end of his allotment. There was no more of Mother left.
Moving swiftly, Hermione wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her head in his shoulder, which gave him privacy for the pressure to release, in his chest, in short breaks like the beats of a caged bird’s wings.
He couldn’t count in minutes or hours the length of time she held him there in silence. The teapot had ceased to steam. Maids’ footsteps no longer troubled the floors above them.
“What did she say to you?”
Hermione drew back, clearing her throat. “What?”
“At Grimmauld. My mother whispered something to you. What was it?”
“Oh,” she said thickly, rubbing the corner of her eye. “I’m really sorry. I don’t know. It was loud, and I didn’t hear her.”
He tilted his head. Hermione swallowed and flicked the sleep from her fingers.
“Was it unpleasant?” he asked her.
“No. I told you, I just didn’t hear.”
He began to argue, but he considered then the stark and brutal content of what his mother had said to her; and, pursuantly, the circumstances under which she would say something she could not tolerate her son to hear, even knowing she was likely never to face the consequences for it.
“You can tell me, if it was cruel,” he said. “I heard the rest of what she said to you. She was — passionate. I hope she didn’t try to hurt you.”
She laughed slightly to herself. “Yes,” she said. “She was passionate. I don’t think she intended to hurt me. But to be honest, I don’t think she cared about my feelings at all. It was a concession speech. She’d surrendered something very precious, and not quite willingly, and she was trying to do it with whatever grace her beliefs allowed her.”
He was about to reply when a queasy feeling passed through him, a ripple, like a comb being dragged along his ribs. In a single swift motion, he levered Hermione off his lap and stood, wand out.
“What is it?” She began to stand, her legs uncurling, and he stilled her with a touch to her shoulder.
“Someone’s come through the wards.”
She shot up and grabbed her wand from the table, diving for her shoes. He cast out his feeling for the wards, groping along the contours of the estate — they were murky, still, since he wasn’t seventeen; the best he could do was a watery sense of the house, its thick walls, the faint motions of Briselda and the maids in the kitchen below. Something else stirred weakly on the terrace, a presence so dim it could have been an animal, if it were not drifting towards the drawing-room.
The door to his bedroom snapped open before he touched it, responding to a premonitory thought.
“Downstairs,” he said, sweeping out. Hermione followed him, her wand flaring with Lumos.
“How did they get through the wards? Did they break them?”
“They can’t have, I would have felt it—”
“But then they can’t get through without permissions, or—”
“Or I’d have to admit them myself.” Another pair of doors burst open at his approach, and he stalked through. “Which I didn’t. So unless it’s Dumbledore—”
“It can’t be, he just left with Harry.”
“—and assuming we’re not about to die horribly—”
“As I might have, up until you used the word ‘assume’—”
“—then there’s only one person who could enter the Manor without my permission, while I’m here.”
The maids had put out the sconces. Shadows pooled around the corners and clung to the starless vault of the ceiling. In the drawing-room, the doors to the terrace hung open, and a warm wind stirred the drapes in flickering snaps, like the lashing tails of serpents pinned at the throat. In the awning of the doors stood a hunched figure in a traveling cloak, favoring its left side. When the wind peeled back the lip of its cowl, it revealed a narrow, pallid face, rimmed by a tattered oilslick of hair.
Snape waded forward, silhouetted by the moonstruck lake. The fingers of his right hand were unnaturally thin and pointed, and when Draco focused on them he saw his phalanges terminated in points of bare bone. Black wires mimicked the structures of sinew and tendon, trawling from an ivory cuff at the wrist. Another flicker of wind revealed it for an ivory bracer, which curved over the pale helix of radius and ulna, fastened by leather straps at the elbow.
The wires seared gold whenever Snape twitched them, puppeting the skeletal architecture of Potions Master’s new forearm. As he watched, the bone-hand tucked his wand back into its sheath, and removed a brass chest from where it was tucked under his other arm.
“My apologies,” he rasped. “I came to pay my respects.”
With that, Draco’s godfather crumpled to the floor.
-Hey, guys. Going through it right now, so sorry if I can’t reply to as many comments as I’d like to. You are the bright spot in my life; reading what you’ve written brings me nearly to tears.
-Andromeda’s reference is, of course, “Annabel Lee,” by Edgar Allen Poe. Shoutout to that person who pulled a Poe reference in the comments for the last chapter, I had to go through my notes frantically to make sure I hadn’t mixed up the posting dates.
-Unless wizard cats, like wizards, have extended lifespans, I imagine that there have been many Mrs. Norrises through the years (possibly with different first names, or prefixes). I like to think that when one dies, it’s a student tradition to raise money and get Filch a new kitten.
-This chapter and the next were originally in the same document, but I broke them up out of sympathy for M&G, since suggesting that anyone record a chapter of that size might very seriously make me liable for injuries incurred due to vocal strain.
-This one goes out to the Poldark soundtrack, which was playing while I wrote most of this chapter. That’s a real “make the words go” OST.
-The two-part finale of Book 5 (and Volume II) will be posted two weeks from today: “The Princess’s Tale, Part II” and “Toujours.”
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