Chapter 1: The Bad Part of Town
Draco had a theory about Hermione Granger, and the theory was that she had been put on this earth to ruin his evenings specifically.
The evidence was extensive. In the two years since the Wizengamot had made him Keeper of the Ministry Archives (a post nobody else had applied for, nine floors of dust and damp and paper under the Department of Mysteries, which suited him down to the ground), Granger had submitted four hundred and thirty-one file requisitions. He had counted. Half of them arrived after five o'clock. A third were marked URGENT in red ink, underlined, sometimes twice. One, memorably, had been marked URGENT, underlined three times, with a small furious drawing of a clock.
And now it was a quarter past eleven on a Thursday night in March, and she was here in person, on a ladder, in his stacks, in the section he privately thought of as the bad part of town.
"You know there's a form for this," he said from the bottom of the ladder.
"I've filled in your form." She did not look down. She was holding a lit wand in her teeth, which made the words come out slightly mangled, and running one finger along the spines of the Wizengamot rulings for the 1750s. "I filled in your form on Monday. Your form came back on Monday afternoon saying the file was 'unlocated.'"
"It was unlocated."
"It's a library, Malfoy. Nothing is unlocated. Things are just badly shelved."
"It is an archive," said Draco, with the patience of a man who had had this argument before, "and the difference is that in a library people put the books back."
She took the wand out of her mouth to glare at him properly. From below, the effect was mostly hair. Granger's hair had not improved with age so much as achieved a kind of independent sovereignty. Tonight it was escaping from a knot at the back of her head in about forty directions, and the light from her wand made a corona of it. She was wearing the charcoal robes of the Deputy Head of Magical Law Enforcement, unbuttoned at the throat, sleeves shoved to her elbows, and there was a smudge of ancient dust along her jaw he was going to make no effort to tell her about.
"The Cadwallader ruling," she said. "1752. A werewolf named Ffion Cadwallader sues the Ministry for the right to keep her family's land after her diagnosis. She wins. It's the only precedent of its kind, and if I don't have the original in front of the Wizengamot by nine tomorrow morning, a man called Owen Pryce loses the house his grandmother built because he was bitten on a walking holiday." She went up another rung. "So yes. I'm in your bad part of town."
He had not known she knew he called it that. He decided not to ask how.
"Granger. It's twenty past eleven."
"I can read a clock."
"Then you can read the sign on the door you walked past to get in here."
She paused. Then, with the air of someone humouring a lunatic: "What sign?"
Draco sighed and pointed his wand straight up the aisle, towards the great iron doors at the far end of the archive. Above them, in tarnished brass letters a foot high, the Ministry of 1926 had seen fit to inscribe a warning. He had read it every morning for two years. It said, The Curfew Ward descends at midnight and lifts at dawn. Persons remaining within do so at their own peril and the Ministry's indifference.
Granger read it. He watched her read it, the small crease appearing between her eyebrows.
"That's not real," she said.
"It's extremely real. Someone stole half the Gamp papers in 1925. The Ministry's response was to seal the place every night like a tomb. No Floo, no Apparition, no owls in or out. The doors won't open for anyone, including me. I don't even have a key; there isn't one. At midnight it shuts, at sunrise it opens." He glanced at his watch. "Which gives you thirty-nine minutes to find your werewolf and get out."
She looked at him for a long, calculating moment. Then she climbed down the ladder, very fast, and shoved a stack of folders into his arms.
"Then help me," said Hermione Granger, "instead of standing there being decorative."
They did not find it in thirty-nine minutes.
They found Cadwallader v. the Wizengamot at four minutes to midnight, in a box marked HOUSEHOLD ACCOUNTS 1803, two aisles from where it ought to have been, under a pile of somebody's tax returns. Draco had to admit the shelving was a disgrace. He blamed his predecessor, who had been a hundred and six and mostly asleep.
Granger was holding the brittle scroll in both hands like a holy relic when the Curfew Ward came down.
It came down the way it always did, with a sound like a very large book being shut somewhere above them. The lamps along the aisles dimmed to a low amber. Far away at the end of the room, the great iron doors settled into their frame with a long, satisfied groan, and Draco felt the air around them go thick and close, like the inside of a closed fist.
Granger looked up. "Was that it?"
"That was it."
"So we're…"
"Sealed in until dawn. Yes." He checked his watch again. "Sunrise is at twenty past six. So, six hours and twenty minutes, give or take. Congratulations, Granger. You found your precedent and you're going to be the first person in eighty years to spend the night in the Ministry Archives."
"You said 'we,'" she said slowly.
"I said 'you.'"
"You said 'we' a minute ago. Why are you still here? You knew about the ward. You could have left at half eleven."
Draco opened his mouth, and found to his considerable irritation that he did not have an answer ready. The true answer was that he had looked at her up that ladder with dust on her face and her wand in her teeth, and it had not crossed his mind for a single second to leave. That answer was not available for public consumption.
"Someone had to make sure you didn't burn the place down," he said.
"With what?"
"With your general attitude."
She laughed. It was a short, surprised, unguarded sound, and it did something unacceptable to the back of his neck. Then she sat down where she was, on the floor between the 1750s and the 1760s, and held the scroll up to the amber light with an expression of such open, unselfconscious delight that he had to look at a shelf for a while.
"Six hours," she said, after a minute. "What do you do in here all night?"
"I've never been in here all night."
"But you know where everything is."
"I know where everything is meant to be. As you've just seen, that's a separate question." He leaned against the shelving. "Why?"
"Because I've read this four times now and I can't make it say anything new. And I'm not going to sleep." She tilted her head back to look up at him, and the lamp caught the line of her throat. "Show me something, Malfoy. You've had two years. Show me the best thing in here."
He knew immediately what the best thing in here was. He also knew, with equal clarity, that showing it to Hermione Granger at midnight in a sealed room was a profoundly stupid idea.
He did it anyway.
The door to Section C was at the very bottom of the archive, past the Goblin Rebellions and a corridor of Floo network maps that whispered when you walked by. It was a narrow oak door with a small brass plaque that read RESTRICTED: CONFISCATED MATERIALS, CATEGORY C (INDECENT). Under it, somebody in the 1800s had scratched with a knife, ALSO VERY GOOD.
Granger read the plaque. Then she read it again. Then she looked at him, and he watched her face go through surprise and suspicion and something much more interesting.
"Indecent," she said.
"Four centuries of the Ministry's most stringent moral judgement," said Draco, unlocking it. "Every dirty book they ever confiscated. Seized from bookshops in Diagon Alley, from private libraries, from the bedrooms of Ministry officials who should have known better. Including two of the Ministers for Magic. I catalogued it my first winter. I am the world's leading authority."
"Of course you are."
"Somebody had to be."
He pushed the door open. Inside, the shelves went up into the dark, packed tight with books in every binding: vellum and calfskin and cheap penny-dreadful paper, books with clasps, books with locks, books that shifted slightly and sighed as the light fell on them. There was a reading desk in the middle with a green lamp, which he lit. The air smelt of old leather and older perfume.
Granger walked in slowly. She turned in a full circle. When she came back round to face him, her cheeks were pink in a way that had nothing to do with the cold, and her eyes were very bright.
"Malfoy," she said. "This is the best thing you've ever done."
"I know."
She went to the nearest shelf and pulled down a small, rose-coloured book with gilt edges. She opened it at random. She read a line, and her eyebrows went up, and she read another, and her mouth opened a little.
"Well?" he said, more roughly than he intended.
She cleared her throat. Then she began to read aloud.
"'He did not ask permission with his tongue; he asked it with his hands, which were patient, and waited at each button until she said yes.'" Granger looked up from the page. "This is from 1791."
"The Georgians," said Draco, whose mouth had gone quite dry, "were very good with buttons."
She turned a page. He watched her read silently this time, her lips moving very slightly, and watched the pink in her cheeks travel down her throat to the open collar of her robes. Somewhere above them, the archive creaked and settled in the dark.
"Malfoy," she said, without looking up.
"Granger."
"You know how I've always said you lose my file requests on purpose?"
"I'm aware of the accusation."
"I've been checking. You don't. You pull them first. Before anyone else's. Every time. For two years." She closed the book on her finger and looked at him across the green lamp, and her eyes were very dark. "I'd like to know why."
He said nothing. There was nothing to say that would not be the whole truth, and the whole truth had six hours and some minutes to get out, and nowhere at all to go.
Hermione set the book down on the reading desk, very carefully, and came round it towards him.