Chapter 1: Eleven Names, Nine Crossed Out
The fourth suitor of the day brought his mother.
Draconia Malfoy watched Mrs Selwyn settle into the best chair in the green drawing room, the one with the silver-leaf arms, and arrange her skirts as if she had already measured the curtains. Her son, Cassius, stood behind her with his hands clasped and the expression of a man waiting to be told which fork to use.
"Of course," Mrs Selwyn said, "there would be the question of the name."
"The name," Draconia repeated.
"Selwyn is a very old name, dear. Older than Malfoy, if we're honest, and I think we can be honest now. Your family has had such a difficult decade." She accepted a cup of tea from the house-elf without looking at it. "Cassius would of course move in. And I would come, naturally, to help with the running of things. A house this size needs a woman of experience."
"It has one," said Draconia. "My mother lives in the east wing."
"Narcissa." Mrs Selwyn's smile could have pickled onions. "How is she coping? With Lucius, and everything?"
Lucius had died in Azkaban five weeks ago, of a cough that the prison Healer had described in his report as "not alarming." Draconia had read that report so many times the parchment had gone soft at the folds. She set her cup down on its saucer without a sound, which was a skill her mother had drilled into her before she could read, and stood.
"Thank you for coming," she said. "Pimsy will see you out."
"But we haven't discussed the settlement..."
"We have discussed everything I need to know. Good afternoon, Cassius. Do tell your mother she can have the curtains when I'm dead."
When the front doors had closed and the gravel had stopped crunching under the Selwyn carriage, Draconia went to the window and pressed her forehead against the cold glass. Outside, the peacocks were doing their slow, offended patrol of the lawn. Her father had bought the albinos one at a time, as anniversary gifts, and she had always thought they were ridiculous. Now she was going to lose them to a cousin she had met twice, both times at funerals, and she found that she would fight a dragon for the stupid birds.
The trouble was the entail.
It had been written in 1693 by Armand Malfoy's great-great-grandson, a man whose portrait hung in the east corridor and who still sniffed whenever a woman walked past him. It said, in a hand so cramped the goblins had needed a magnifying charm to read it aloud, that Malfoy Manor and its lands would pass to the eldest child of the house, provided that child was a son, or was a daughter "honourably wed." An unwed daughter had seven days from the death of the master to correct her condition. Failing that, the Manor's wards would unseat her and settle on the nearest male of the blood.
The nearest male of the blood was Octave Malfoy of the Lyon branch, who wore a dragon-tooth signet ring and who had once, at Great-Aunt Ysolde's wake, explained to Draconia over the canapés that the Dark Lord had "had a point, if not a method."
Nobody had read the codicil in three hundred years, because nobody had needed to. Every master of the Manor had produced a son. Every master except the last one.
Bogrod had been very sorry about it in that particular goblin way, which involved a great deal of tapping on documents and no actual sorrow. "The Wizengamot will enforce," he had said, peering over his spectacles at her across the high counter at Gringotts. "The Pure-blood Estates Act is still in force for entailed property. The clock began at your father's death. Monsieur Malfoy's solicitors filed four days ago. You have, by my count, until midnight on Sunday."
"Midnight," Draconia had said. "Really. Not a sensible hour like noon."
"The Malfoys," Bogrod had said, "were not a sensible family."
That had been Tuesday. It was now Friday, half past four, and the ledger on the writing desk listed eleven names, nine of them crossed out. Rowle had laughed at her. Avery's nephew had asked whether the marriage would need to be "real in all respects" and then leered so comprehensively that she had hexed his eyebrows into his hairline. Theo Nott had been kind, and sorry, and was already engaged to a witch in Edinburgh who could apparently throw a Bat-Bogey Hex across a Quidditch pitch. Blaise had sent an owl from Capri that said only: Darling, I'd rather die, but I'll send flowers.
She sat down at the desk and dipped her quill and wrote, under Cassius Selwyn's name, a twelfth: Goyle?
Then she put a line through it so hard that the nib tore the paper.
"Mistress." Pimsy appeared beside the desk with a soft pop, ears drooping. "There is a gentleman at the door. He is not on the list, Mistress. He is saying he is having something of yours."
"Tell him I'm not buying."
"He is saying," Pimsy went on, twisting her pillowcase, "that his name is Harry Potter."
The quill snapped in Draconia's fingers.
He was standing in the entrance hall with his hands in the pockets of a Muggle coat, looking up at the ceiling the way people did when they had been in a house before under circumstances they would prefer not to discuss. He was taller than she remembered and more solidly made, broad through the shoulders in a way the Auror training did to people, and his hair was still a disgrace. There was a little grey at his left temple. The scar was paler than in the photographs.
He turned when he heard her heels on the marble and said, "Malfoy."
"Potter." She stopped on the third stair, because it put her eyes level with his and she did not intend to give him the height. "If this is about the confiscation register, I filed the paperwork for the Selwyn silver on Monday, and if your department has lost it again, that is your department's problem."
"It's not about the silver." He took one hand out of his pocket. In it was a wand, ten inches of hawthorn, unicorn hair core. She would have known it in the dark. She would have known it from the other side of the world.
Neither of them said anything for a moment. The grandfather clock by the drawing-room door ticked loudly, as if it wanted to be included.
"I took it from you," Harry said. "In this house. Ten years ago, near enough. I used it to fight him." He turned it over in his fingers. "I kept meaning to give it back and then it got to be a really strange amount of time, and then it got to be a stranger amount of time than that. And then I read the Prophet this morning."
"Ah," said Draconia. "The Prophet."
The Daily Prophet had run it on page two. MALFOY HEIRESS SEEKS HUSBAND, OR HOUSE GOES TO FRANCE, with a photograph of her taken outside Gringotts in which she looked as though she wanted to bite the camera. She had in fact wanted to bite the camera.
"So you came to gloat, and brought a prop."
"I came to give you your wand back." He held it out, handle first.
She came down the last three stairs and took it. The wood warmed in her palm at once, a deep and familiar warmth, like walking into a kitchen where someone had been baking. Ollivander had told her long ago that wands changed allegiance and some never changed back. This one had decided, apparently, that ten years was long enough to sulk.
"Thank you," she said, and was horrified to find that her voice had gone thin.
"You didn't say it was me," said Harry.
She looked up.
"In the drawing room. When they dragged us in and Bellatrix wanted you to say if it was me. My face was all swollen from Hermione's jinx, but you knew. You knew it was me and you said you couldn't be sure." He was watching her closely, the way he used to watch the Snitch. "I've thought about that a lot. I never said thank you."
"You testified for my mother. And for me. We're square."
"I don't think we are, actually." He looked past her, through the open door into the green drawing room, at the ledger on the desk with its torn page. "How many names have you got left?"
"That is none of your business."
"Two," Harry said. "I can read upside down. Auror training. And one of them is Goyle, crossed out, so really one."
Draconia felt heat climb her throat and despised it. "Cassius Selwyn is a perfectly suitable..."
"Cassius Selwyn's mum tried to have a portrait of his late father removed from Saint Mungo's because it said something rude about her hat. I was there. I had to take a statement from the portrait." Harry rocked back on his heels. "Who's the cousin?"
"Octave Malfoy. Lyon."
Something cold passed over his face. "We've got a file on him."
"Of course you have."
"It's thick, Malfoy. It's got a lot of interesting meetings in it. If he gets this house..." He stopped, and she watched him make the decision. She saw it the way you might see a man decide to step off a broom at height, all at once, with no visible effort. "Right. Marry me, then."
The clock ticked. A peacock screamed outside, long and outraged.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Marry me." Harry shrugged, as if he had suggested lunch. "It doesn't have to be real. A contract. We sign whatever the goblins need, the Manor stays with you, Octave goes back to Lyon and has a tantrum, and in a year we quietly sort it out. I'm not seeing anyone. I'm not going to be. You'd have your house."
"You hate this house."
"I really do," he agreed.
"You hate me."
He tilted his head, and a strand of that impossible hair fell across his forehead. "Do I?" he said. "Funny. I'd have thought I'd know."
Draconia stood in the hall of the house where she had been born, holding a wand she had given up for lost, and looked at the man who had once been the worst thing that ever happened to her family and was now, it seemed, offering to be the best. Behind her, in the drawing room, the clock struck five.
Fifty-five hours, she thought. Fifty-five hours to midnight.
"I have conditions," she heard herself say.
Harry Potter grinned at her, slow and crooked, and it did something deeply inconvenient to the backs of her knees.
"Course you do," he said. "Put the kettle on."