Chapter 1: Seven
For the record, and Draconia Malfoy kept a very good record, the six rescues were as follows.
One: the Lestrange vault reclamation in February, in which a Gemino Curse had multiplied a cursed goblet until it filled the vault to the ceiling and she had been, admittedly, buried to the chin in hot silver. Potter had arrived with a Vanishing Charm and the expression of a man finding his Christmas present early.
Two: the Shacklebolt Street flat in March. Not her fault. Nobody could have predicted the wallpaper.
Three: April, a cursed pensieve in Bath that had pulled her halfway in by the hair.
Four and five, June, the same Tuesday, which she still maintained should count as one.
Six: the Inferi in the cellar in Hull, where she had been entirely in control of the situation for at least ninety seconds before he'd come down the stairs with a torch, set fire to everything, and said, "Hiya, Malfoy."
After the sixth, she had come back to her office at Gringotts to find six gold marks painted on the wall above her desk, neat as tally marks on a prison cell, with POTTER written over them in curling letters, and under that MALFOY: 0. She had tried every unsticking charm she knew. She had tried several she'd invented. She had tried, on one bad evening, a hammer. The paint had been fixed with a Permanent Sticking Charm, and she knew exactly one wizard who had learned that charm from his godfather's mother's portrait.
So when the floor of Ignatius Thorne's drawing room took hold of her boots on a frosty Thursday afternoon in December, and the walls began, with a deep grinding groan, to move inward, Draconia's first thought was not I am going to die.
It was: Not seven. Not today.
"Right," she said aloud, to the walls. "Let's be civilised about this."
The walls groaned closer.
It was a Gripping Hex in the floor, bound to a Constricting Charm in the panelling. Old work, early nineteenth century, the kind of thing a paranoid collector put in a room where he kept the good silver. The trigger had been a pressure plate under the rug, which she ought to have checked and hadn't, because the rug had been very ugly and she'd assumed nobody would booby-trap something so ugly. Lesson learned.
She drew her wand. Hawthorn, ten inches, unicorn hair. Her old one, which she had got back after the war in a brown paper parcel with no note, and had never asked about.
The counter-curse for the floor would take four minutes. She'd have to unpick the binding thread by thread, from the outside of the pattern in, and the walls were moving at, she estimated, a foot a minute. The room was eighteen feet wide. That left her a reasonable margin, if she didn't panic and didn't make mistakes, and Draconia Malfoy had not panicked since the spring of 1998.
She began.
The first thread came loose at forty seconds. The second at a minute twenty. The panelling was close enough now that she could see the woodworm holes. Somewhere behind her a portrait fell off its hook and cracked on the floor. She ignored it. Third thread. She was whispering the incantation under her breath, steady, quick, the way old Bodrik had drilled her in her first year at the bank, when the drawing room door blew off its hinges.
"Malfoy!"
She didn't look up. "Don't you dare."
"The walls are..."
"I can see the walls, Potter, I'm the one standing between them. I've got this. Two minutes. Go away."
"You've got thirty seconds."
"I have a minute and a half and you're wasting it!"
He didn't go away. He never went away. He came in through the space where the door had been, ducked a falling bust of somebody's ancestor, put both hands on the advancing wall and said "Reducto," and the whole east side of Ignatius Thorne's drawing room came down in a roar of plaster and lath and two hundred years of dust.
The Gripping Hex, its pattern broken by the collapse of the panelling it was bound to, let go of her boots all at once. Draconia fell forward onto her hands and knees in a drift of rubble.
Potter was beside her before the dust had finished settling, hand under her elbow. "You all right?"
She looked up at him. He had plaster in his hair. He always had something in his hair. His glasses were askew and his green eyes were bright behind them, and he was grinning, the absolute bastard, he was grinning.
"I had it," she said.
"Course you did."
"I had three threads out of five. I had it, Potter."
"Sure." He hauled her up. "Seven," he said, very kindly, and she hit him.
Harry let her hit him. It was the least he could do.
They stood outside in the frozen garden while the Auror team went through the wreck of the house, and she shouted at him for a full ten minutes, and he listened with every evidence of enjoyment, because Draconia Malfoy in a temper was one of the great sights of the wizarding world and he'd seen most of the others.
Her plait had come half undone. There was dust on her cheekbone. She kept jabbing a gloved finger at his chest to make points, each one more technical than the last, and he didn't understand half of them and didn't care. She was alive. She was standing on frozen gravel being rude to him. Every time he got a call-out with her name on it his heart went somewhere unpleasant and stayed there until he saw her like this, and then it came back, and he grinned like an idiot and she hit him.
It was, if he was honest, the best part of his week.
"...and a Reductor Curse on load-bearing panelling, are you insane? You could have brought the ceiling down on both of us."
"It didn't, though."
"That's not a defence!"
"It's a bit of a defence."
She made a noise like a kettle. Ron, coming round the side of the house with an evidence bag, took one look at them, turned on his heel, and went back the way he'd come.
"Why are you even here?" she said. "This is a Gringotts reclamation. The family hired us. There's no Ministry interest."
That stopped him smiling. "There is now." He nodded at the house. "Thorne died in September. No heirs. The goblins got the contract to clear his collection. Only it seems that some of it's been walking out of the house before the goblins get there. We've had three of his pieces turn up in Knockturn in the last month. A cursed snuffbox. A necklace that nearly killed a witch in Hogsmeade. A mirror." He hesitated. "That one we haven't found yet. It was sold to someone. We don't know who."
"So somebody's been robbing a dead man."
"Somebody's been robbing a dead man who collected the worst things in Europe. And they've been setting the traps back after them. That rug was moved, Malfoy. Recently. You'd have seen it if you'd looked."
She went very quiet. He didn't like it. He preferred the kettle.
"I'd have seen it," she said at last, "if I'd looked."
"Yeah."
"Somebody reset that trap knowing a curse-breaker would come in."
"Yeah."
"Well." She lifted her chin, and pulled off one glove, and began re-plaiting her hair with quick, furious fingers. "That's very rude of them."
Harry laughed before he could help it. She glared at him over her shoulder, the half-made plait in her fist, and for a second, in the frozen garden with the house still smoking behind her, he forgot entirely what he'd been about to say.
"What?" she said.
"Nothing. You've got plaster on your face."
"So have you."
"Yeah, but it suits me."
She looked at him for a long moment, the way she'd looked at the rug, as though he were a trap she should have checked for. Then she turned and walked back toward the house, and he followed her, because that was apparently what he did now.
Her office at Gringotts was three floors underground, along a corridor that smelled of damp stone and dragon. The walls were lined with locked cabinets and there was a goblin-made desk too big for the room, and above it the gold tally gleamed in the lamplight.
There were seven marks.
Draconia stood in the doorway in her filthy coat and looked at it. She had not been back to the bank since. Potter had not been in her office. She'd watched him Apparate away from Wiltshire herself.
She went closer. Under the seventh stroke, small and slanted, new letters had written themselves in gold: Thorne House. Reducto. You're welcome.
"It's linked to his reports," she said aloud. "He's linked it to his Auror reports. Every time he files a rescue with my name on it..." She was going to kill him. She was going to take her time about it.
"Miss Malfoy."
She turned. Bodrik stood in the corridor, his long fingers folded over the head of his cane, his black eyes glittering. He was Head of Curse-Breaking and nearly a hundred and forty and had never, in her experience, delivered good news in person.
"The Thorne collection," he said. "The Ministry has asked for a curse-breaker. Gringotts has agreed to lend one, for a fee that pleases us. You will report to the Auror Office on Monday, at eight."
"To whom?"
His mouth spread in a goblin smile, full of small sharp teeth.
"To Senior Auror Potter," said Bodrik. "Who asked for you by name."