Chapter 1: Within Reach
In nine years of prosecuting for the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Hermione Granger had lost exactly four cases, and she could tell you the precise moment each one had started to go wrong. This one went wrong at nine forty-two on a Tuesday morning, when Tiberius Ogden sneezed.
The Wizengamot courtroom sat in the old dungeons below the Department of Mysteries, a squat stone amphitheatre lit by torches that had been converted to permanent flame some time around the Goblin Rebellion and never cleaned since. The benches rose in tiers on every side. Fifty-odd witches and wizards in plum-coloured robes looked down on the floor of the court, where, in the middle of a ring of chalk, Hermione knelt facing Draco Malfoy with their right hands clasped.
She hadn't wanted it to come to this. She'd fought it for two days in pre-trial. But Thaddeus Selwyn's barrister was a small, silky man called Cuthbert Mockridge who had spent thirty years getting purebloods off charges they were transparently guilty of, and he had argued, beautifully, that the prosecution's star witness was a former Death Eater with a family history of absconding to France, and that the defence could have no confidence he would still be in the country when the time came to cross-examine him.
The Wizengamot had agreed. Witness assurance by Unbreakable Vow. Both parties to swear: the witness to remain, the prosecutor to keep him. Chief Warlock Ogden to bind.
"I'd like it noted," Malfoy murmured, as Ogden fumbled his wand out of his sleeve, "that I'm doing this voluntarily, out of civic duty, and that you owe me dinner."
"I'd like it noted that you're the reason we're doing it at all."
"I'm the reason you've got a case at all." His grip on her hand was warm and dry and completely steady, which annoyed her, because hers wasn't. "Don't look so tragic, Granger. It's three days. Then I testify, Selwyn goes to Azkaban, the Vow dissolves, and you can go back to pretending you don't know my name in the lift."
"I don't pretend. I genuinely don't think about you."
"You've thought about me every day for six weeks. I'm the only witness you've got." He tipped his head. "And I'm extremely memorable."
She would have said something cutting. She had something lined up. But Ogden had found his wand and was raising it over their joined hands, a hundred and something years old and wheezing faintly, and the court had gone quiet.
"Do you, Draco Lucius Malfoy," said Ogden, "swear to remain within reach of the prosecution until such time as your testimony is given?"
"I do."
A thin tongue of flame slid out of Ogden's wand and wound itself around their hands like a glowing wire.
"And do you, Hermione Jean Granger, swear to keep the witness within your reach until such time as his testimony is given?"
"I d..."
Ogden sneezed. It was a tremendous sneeze, the sneeze of a man who'd spent a century in damp dungeons, and his wand hand jerked, and the second tongue of flame, instead of winding neatly round their wrists, shot sideways, looped twice around both of them, and sank into their skin with a flash like a struck match.
Hermione felt it go in. It was hot, and then it was not hot, and then it was simply there, a tight warm line around her right wrist and a strange, low tug somewhere behind her breastbone, like a fishhook.
"Bless you," said Malfoy, into the silence.
Ogden blew his nose on a lace handkerchief. "Thank you, young man. Where were we? Ah. I think that took." He peered at them. "Did that take?"
There was a faint glowing mark around Hermione's wrist, like a bracelet of embers. There was a matching one around Malfoy's. As she watched, they dimmed to a thin silvery line, barely visible.
"I think," she said carefully, "it took."
It took about forty minutes to discover how badly.
The trial opened. She made her opening statement, which was very good. Mockridge made his, which was better than it had any right to be. Just before noon, Mockridge rose to request a short adjournment, which he got, and Hermione gathered her files and strode out of the courtroom and down the corridor toward the lifts with her mind already on the afternoon, and Malfoy, who had stopped to talk to the court usher about the coffee, stayed where he was.
At roughly fifty feet, something grabbed her by the breastbone and yanked.
She went over backwards. Her files went everywhere. She landed on the flagstones with a cry, and at the far end of the corridor she heard Malfoy swear and saw him stagger, clutching his chest, and the silver line around her wrist flared red and started to burn.
"Granger!"
He was coming toward her at a run. With every step, the burn eased. By the time he reached her and crouched down, it was a warm hum again, and the fishhook behind her ribs had let go.
They stared at each other.
"Within reach," said Malfoy slowly.
"Oh, no."
"He sneezed. It was supposed to be a standard witness assurance. Remain in the jurisdiction. Don't abscond." He held up his wrist. "And instead the Vow has decided, in its wisdom, that 'reach' means..."
"Fifty feet," Hermione said, from the floor. She'd felt exactly where it bit. "Give or take a few inches."
"How do you know it's fifty?"
"I did the Ministry's corridor survey in my first year. This corridor is ninety feet long and you were standing by the third torch." She closed her eyes. "Fifty feet."
He was silent for a moment. Then he started, very quietly, to laugh.
"It's not funny."
"It's extremely funny. You have to admit it's funny." He offered her a hand. "Hermione Granger, terror of the Wizengamot, chained to a Death Eater by an old man's head cold."
"Former Death Eater," she snapped, and let him pull her up, and only realised as she was standing that she'd defended him without thinking.
He noticed. His eyebrow went up a fraction. He didn't say anything, which was worse.
The Unspeakable they sent up from the Department of Mysteries was a thin, colourless woman called Ms Grieve, who examined both their wrists through a series of increasingly unsettling lenses and pronounced the situation "fascinating."
"Can you lift it?" Hermione asked.
"It's an Unbreakable Vow, Miss Granger. The clue's in the name." Grieve made a note. "It will dissolve when the terms are fulfilled. When Mr Malfoy has given his testimony. Until then, it's interpreted the terms as literally as it can. Reach. Physical reach." She tapped Hermione's wrist with a pencil. "If you exceed the limit, you'll experience discomfort. If you persist in exceeding it, the Vow will treat it as an attempt to break, and you both know what happens then."
"We die," said Malfoy pleasantly.
"You die," agreed Grieve. "Messily, in the literature."
"Fine." Hermione made herself breathe. "Fine. It's three days. The trial resumes this afternoon and he's due to testify on Thursday. We can manage three days."
At that precise moment, the door of the little witness room opened and a clerk put his head in.
"Sorry, Miss Granger. Message from the bench. Mr Mockridge has entered a fresh motion on the defence's disclosure. They're adjourning to consider it." He consulted a slip. "Trial resumes in three weeks."
The door closed.
Ms Grieve looked from one of them to the other, made a final note, put her lenses away, and said, "Well, good luck," and left.
They spent the first afternoon in her office, because it was nearer, and because she had work, and because she refused, on principle, to let her life be rearranged around Draco Malfoy for one minute longer than necessary.
Her office was small and stuffed with files. He sat in the visitor's chair with his long legs stretched out across most of the available floor and read the Prophet and made remarks about it. At four, he went to fetch tea, and she felt him go: the pull growing behind her ribs as he walked down the corridor, the slight warmth in her wrist. At forty-odd feet he stopped. She heard him say to someone, "No, I'll wait here, actually. She gets upset if I wander off." Then a woman's laugh.
He came back with two mugs and a smug expression and the news that the entire Department now believed they were sleeping together.
"Why would they believe that?"
"Because I've been sitting in your office all afternoon, and I told Susan Bones in the tea room that you couldn't bear to have me more than fifty feet away." He handed her a mug. "Which, to be fair, is true."
"I'm going to kill you."
"Then the Vow would kill you. It'd be very romantic. A tragedy in two acts." He sat back down. "Where are we sleeping?"
She looked at him over her tea.
"Your flat or mine," he clarified. "I'm assuming you've done a survey."
She had, in her head, during the clerk's message. Her flat in Bloomsbury was one bedroom and a sofa, and the sofa was a lumpy Victorian thing she'd inherited from her grandmother and which no human being could sleep on. His was in Kensington, according to his witness statement, and had, according to the same statement, a guest room.
"Yours," she said. "You've got a guest room. Is it within fifty feet of your bedroom?"
"It's next door."
"Then that's settled."
It was settled. It stayed settled through a silent and very expensive takeaway, through an extremely awkward negotiation about the bathroom, and through her lying in a wide, cool guest bed in his flat late at night, staring at the ceiling, listening to Draco Malfoy move around in the room next door. Water running. A drawer. The creak of a mattress. Then silence.
She fell asleep sometime after midnight.
She woke at a quarter past two with her wrist on fire.
It was worse than the corridor. Much worse. She was curled on her side, gasping, and the line around her wrist was blazing red in the dark, and the fishhook in her chest had become a fist. She stumbled out of bed and into the hall. The pain eased as she reached his door. She pushed it open.
He was sitting up in bed with his hand clamped around his own wrist, white-faced and breathing hard in a wash of red light.
"It's tightened," he said, through his teeth. "While we were asleep. I think while we're unconscious it's taking 'reach' even more literally."
Hermione took three more steps into the room. The burn dropped to a sting. She looked at the gap between the door and his bed, and then at her wrist, and then at the bed, and understood with absolute, appalling clarity what the Vow considered to be within her reach when nobody was awake to argue with it.
Arm's length.
Malfoy had obviously worked it out at the same moment. He looked at her, standing in the doorway of his bedroom at two in the morning in a borrowed T-shirt that came to her knees, and for once in his life he appeared to have absolutely nothing to say.
Hermione closed her eyes, counted to three, and opened them.
"Move over, Malfoy," she said.