Chapter 3: The Coin
"Two years," Draconia said.
Harry had walked back from his meeting into a silence so complete that the inter-office memos had stopped flying over his partition. Every Auror in the room was very interested in their paperwork. Ron had gone to lunch. Draconia was standing at his desk with the call-out log open in front of her and her finger on a column of his initials, and her face was the colour of the frost on Thorne's lawn.
"Two years," she said again. "Every call-out. Every single one. The goblet. The wallpaper. Hull. You asked for all of them."
"Yeah."
"Why?"
He opened his mouth. What came out was, "Somebody had to keep an eye on you," which was the worst possible thing he could have said, and he knew it as soon as he'd said it.
Something closed in her face like a door.
"Of course," she said. "Somebody did. The Malfoy heiress. Can't be trusted on her own. Better send the Chosen One to supervise." She shut the log. "Thank you for clarifying, Auror Potter. I'll report back to Gringotts on Monday. Bodrik can send you someone who needs watching."
"Malfoy. That's not what I..."
But she'd already gone, coat flaring, out through the Auror Office and into the lift, and the memos began flying again overhead, and Harry stood at his desk and called himself every name he knew.
"Mate," said Ron, from the doorway, holding half a bacon roll. He'd come back from lunch early, or never really left. "What did you say?"
"Something stupid."
"Yeah, I got that from the way she went past. Hermione's going to kill you. I'm going to hold her coat." He chewed. "Go and fix it."
Harry went to Gringotts at six with an apology he'd rewritten four times on the back of a requisition form. Her office was dark. The tally gleamed at him over the empty desk, seven gold marks, and he stood looking at it for longer than he'd like to admit before he gave up and went back to the Ministry to work out what on earth he would say to her on Monday.
She went back to Wiltshire alone.
It was stupid. She knew that. She told herself so all the way across the frozen grounds in the early dark, with her breath smoking. It was very stupid, and she was doing it anyway, because she had to walk into one room in her life that Harry Potter hadn't been assigned to, and walk out again on her own.
The mausoleum was at the back of the estate, under a stand of black yews. The goblins had marked it as the last thing to clear. Draconia had noticed in the inventory on Wednesday that the vault beneath it was listed as empty, which no vault of Thorne's had any business being, and that the lock had been opened and closed again in November. Whoever had been robbing the house had come here too.
The door opened at a touch. She went down the stone steps by wandlight. The vault was small and dry and very cold, and in the centre, on a marble plinth where a coffin should have been, there was a mirror.
Tall, silver-framed, its glass gone dark with age. Thorne's catalogue had called it a Mirror of Sight. Nobody in the Auror Office had found it in Knockturn because it had never left. It had been brought here. Propped against the frame was a cream envelope, and on the envelope, in brown ink, someone had written:
For Miss Malfoy, when she finally comes.
Draconia had time to think, very clearly, That is a trap, and then the door at the top of the stairs closed with a sound like a struck bell, and the wards went up around her in a ring of cold blue fire.
She knew the work at once. Blood ward, sealed from outside. She could break it. Of course she could break it. It would take her an hour, maybe a little more, working carefully from the inside.
Then she noticed the candle on the plinth, which she hadn't lit, guttering. She noticed her own breath, thin and white, and the way her chest had to work for it. The ward wasn't only keeping her in. It was keeping the air out.
Twelve minutes, she thought. Fifteen at the outside.
She sat down on the cold floor with her back against the plinth, and for a long moment she didn't move at all.
The coin was in her coat pocket. She could feel it against her hip, small and round and stupid.
It's not a rescue if you choose it.
"Bloody Potter," Draconia whispered, and she took it out, and closed her fist around it, and thought, as clearly as she had ever thought anything in her life: Thorne's mausoleum. The vault. Please.
It got hot in his pocket in the middle of the Ministry Atrium, and Harry Disapparated so fast that he left a scorch mark on the floor beside the Fountain of Magical Brethren and nearly took a wizard from Accidental Magical Reversal with him.
He ran the last half mile through Thorne's grounds because the estate wards wouldn't let him land any closer. He found the mausoleum by the blue glow leaking under its door. He put his hand on the stone and felt the ward like ice under his palm and nearly blew it off its hinges out of pure terror.
"Don't you dare!"
Her voice, thin through the stone. He'd never been so glad to be shouted at.
"It's a blood ward," she called. "Sealed from your side. If you blast it, it collapses inward and takes the ceiling. Do you understand? Put your hand flat on the door. Left of centre."
He did.
"Now listen. I'm going to unpick it from in here, and every time I pull a thread, it's going to try to close back up from your side. You have to hold it open. You'll feel it pull. Don't let go." A pause, and her breath was short. "Can you do that, Potter?"
"Yes."
"Don't be a hero about it."
"Wouldn't dream of it."
It took nine minutes. It was the longest nine minutes of his life, longer than the forest, and he'd thought nothing would ever be longer than the forest. The ward dragged at his hand like a living thing, trying to seal, and he held it, and he heard her voice through the stone, steady, quick, whispering the counter-curse, getting thinner each minute. At one point she stopped altogether and he shouted her name and she said "I'm thinking, shut up," and he had to put his forehead against the door.
Then the blue light went out all at once, and the door swung inward, and Draconia Malfoy came up the steps on her own two feet, white as paper, gasping, the cream envelope crushed in one gloved hand. She made it to the top step and her knees went.
He caught her. She let him.
They sat in the frozen grass under the yews, and she breathed, great ragged lungfuls of cold air, with her face pressed into his shoulder and his arms around her and his heart going like a train. Neither of them said anything for a long time.
"You came," she said finally, into his robes.
"You called."
"I didn't need rescuing." She lifted her head. Her eyes were wet and furious. "I want that on the record. I broke that ward. I got myself out."
"You did. I just held the door."
"You just held the door," she agreed. Then, after a moment, more quietly: "Thank you for holding the door."
He looked at her. Dust in her hair. Her plait coming down. Her face an inch from his, and still, somehow, the most annoying person in the world.
"It wasn't to keep an eye on you," he said. "What I said in the office. That was rubbish. I panicked." He took a breath. "I asked for your call-outs because every time one came in with your name on it, I couldn't breathe until I saw you walk out. And then you'd shout at me, and I could breathe again. That's all. That's the whole reason. It's been two years of that. I'm sorry I didn't tell you. I didn't know how to say it without you hexing me."
She stared at him.
"That," Draconia said, "is the stupidest thing I have ever heard."
"I know."
"You could have just asked me to dinner."
"Would you have said yes?"
"No," she said. "Absolutely not." And she took his face in both her cold gloved hands and kissed him.
It was a clumsy kiss, at first. Her nose was freezing and his glasses were in the way, and she made an impatient noise and pulled them off his face and kept kissing him, and after that it wasn't clumsy at all. She kissed him the way she did everything, precisely and completely and with no margin for error. He put his hand at the back of her neck under the falling plait, and she sighed against his mouth, and the frost cracked under them where they sat, and overhead the stars were sharp and white above the black yews.
When she pulled back, she was still holding his glasses. "You're blind," she said.
"Bit."
"Good. I'd rather you didn't see my face right now."
"I can see it fine," Harry said, and she put the glasses back on him crooked, on purpose.
It was nearly midnight when they got back to her office. He stood in the doorway while she lit the lamps, and looked at the wall.
Seven gold marks. POTTER. MALFOY: 0.
"Go on, then," she said, without turning round. "File your report."
"I'm not filing it."
"You have to file it. It's the rules."
"It's not a rescue." He came and stood behind her. "You said so. You got yourself out. I'll put it down as assistance."
She was quiet for a moment. Then she picked up a pot of silver paint from the shelf, and a brush, and before he could say anything she reached up beside his column of gold and drew a single silver line. Under it, in her neat hand, she wrote: ASKED: 1.
Harry looked at it for a long time.
"Bit sentimental," he said.
"Shut up, Potter." She put the brush down. Then she held up the envelope, still crushed from her fist, still sealed. For Miss Malfoy, when she finally comes. "We're opening this tomorrow. Together. Whoever reset those traps knew I'd be the one to walk in. They've been waiting for me."
"Then they'll have to get through me."
"No," said Draconia, and took his hand, and held it. "They'll have to get through us."