Chapter 2: Through the Gates
The contract ran to eleven pages because Draconia wrote it and nine of them were about bathrooms.
"Separate wings," she said, sliding page four across the kitchen table at Grimmauld Place on Saturday morning. "You may keep this house, obviously, and come and go as you like, but for the purposes of the entail you must be seen to live at the Manor at least four nights a week. The south wing has its own staircase. You will not need to see me at breakfast."
"What if I want to see you at breakfast?"
"Why on earth would you want to see me at breakfast?"
Harry, who had been reading page three with a biscuit in his mouth, took the biscuit out and considered the question with what looked like real interest. Kreacher, polishing a gravy boat by the range, muttered something about Mistress Black's niece's daughter in the master's kitchen, at last, at last, and Draconia pretended not to hear.
"You're very funny in the mornings," Harry said. "I imagine. You strike me as someone who's very angry at toast."
"Sign page four."
He signed page four. He signed page five, which forbade the press, and page six, which forbade the Weasleys from visiting more than one at a time, and paused at page seven.
"No public displays of affection beyond what is required for credibility," he read aloud. "Who decides what's required?"
"I do."
"That's not very fair."
"It's my house, Potter."
"It's going to be our house, Malfoy. That's the whole point." He tapped the clause with his quill. "If we're going to pull this off, people have to believe it. Octave's solicitors are going to challenge. The Wizengamot is going to want a hearing. Skeeter is going to be up a tree outside your bedroom window with a telescope. If you flinch every time I take your hand, we're done."
"I don't flinch."
He reached across the table, slowly enough that she could have moved, and laid his hand over hers.
She did not flinch. She did, regrettably, stop breathing for a second, which she disguised as a cough. His palm was warm and rough at the base of the fingers, a broom-handle hand, a wand hand, and there was a thin scar across the back of it that read, very faintly, I must not tell lies.
"See," said Harry gently. "Fine."
She took her hand back and wrote, in the margin of page seven, Credibility to be determined jointly, and initialled it with more force than the parchment strictly deserved.
The problem with a Saturday wedding was that the Ministry did not do Saturday weddings.
They found this out at ten past two, standing in the marriage registry on level two in front of a wizard named Mr Ebbs, who had a cold and a profound devotion to procedure. "The registry is open," Mr Ebbs said thickly, "Monday to Friday, nine until four. Emergency unions require the signature of a Wizengamot elder and seventy-two hours' notice of banns."
"Seventy-two hours from now is Tuesday," said Draconia.
"Then you will be married on Tuesday, miss."
"I will be homeless on Tuesday."
Mr Ebbs sneezed into a handkerchief embroidered with the Ministry crest and looked at Harry, and at the scar, and something in his watery face sharpened into the particular hunger of a civil servant who sees a story he will tell for the rest of his life. "Of course," he said, "the Minister may waive banns at his discretion."
Kingsley Shacklebolt was at his sister's house in Ipswich, eating Sunday lunch a day early because his sister was flying to Lagos in the morning. It took them until half past five to find this out, and until seven to get there, because Draconia refused to Apparate into a stranger's garden and Harry refused to let her take the Knight Bus alone, and the Knight Bus went via Aberdeen.
Kingsley opened the door himself with a napkin tucked into his collar. He looked at Harry, and then at Draconia, and then back at Harry, and said in his slow deep voice, "I read the Prophet."
"Everyone reads the Prophet," said Draconia.
"I read the Prophet," Kingsley said again, "and I thought, that poor girl. And then I thought, I wonder which idiot is going to offer." He looked at Harry. "I did not think it would be my Deputy Head Auror."
"Acting deputy."
"You are not acting anything, Harry. I signed the papers myself, and you were late to that as well." Kingsley took the napkin out of his collar and folded it. "Come in. My sister makes a very good jollof and she will want to meet the bride."
Kingsley's sister was called Adaeze and she asked Draconia, while Harry was in the next room being given a quiet talking-to by the Minister for Magic, whether she loved him.
Draconia, who had been raised never to lie to a hostess, said, "No."
"Mm," said Adaeze, spooning more rice onto her plate. "And does he love you?"
"Of course not. It's a contract. He's doing it out of some sort of Gryffindor compulsion to rescue things. It's like a medical condition."
"Mm," Adaeze said again, and looked through the doorway, where Harry was nodding at something Kingsley said and glancing, every few seconds, at the kitchen. "He has checked on you nine times since you sat down. I have been counting. My brother has checked on me once in forty years, and that was when I set my hair on fire."
Draconia looked at her plate.
At eight o'clock, Kingsley signed the waiver with a fountain pen that had belonged to Albus Dumbledore. At nine, Harry Apparated them both to the gates of the Manor, because it was quicker than arguing, and Draconia was too tired to argue anyway.
At ten, the wards refused to let him in.
They found out the way you find out about a glass door. Draconia walked through the iron gates the way she had a thousand times, the metal mist parting for her like a curtain, and turned to see Harry bounce off thin air with a noise like a bell and sit down hard on the gravel.
"Oh, for..." He rubbed his nose. "Is that normal?"
"No." Draconia stared at the gates. They had never refused a guest she had invited. The house knew her mind; that was the whole point of a Malfoy house. "It's the entail. It must already be turning. It knows I'm not..." She swallowed. "It knows I haven't done what I'm supposed to."
"We've got the waiver."
"A waiver isn't a wedding."
Harry got up and brushed off his trousers. He looked at the gates, and at her standing on the far side of them, white-faced in the lamplight with Kingsley's signature crumpled in her fist. Then he looked at his watch.
"Who can marry us right now?"
"Nobody. Any licensed officiant, but it's ten o'clock at night, Potter, and they're..."
"Hermione's licensed. She did Luna's wedding." He was already pulling out his wand. "She'll kill me, but she'll come."
Hermione Granger-Weasley arrived at twenty past eleven in a dressing gown and a fury, with Ron behind her carrying a flask of tea and a small striped sock he had apparently not noticed was stuck to his jumper. She looked at Draconia through the gates for a long silent moment.
"If this is a prank," she said, "I'll Transfigure you both into teaspoons."
"It isn't a prank," said Draconia.
"I know it isn't. You've been crying." Hermione stepped through the gates as easily as breathing, because the Manor, unlike its mistress, held no grudges against witches it had once watched bleed on its floor. She looked around at the dark lawns and the lit windows of the house and her mouth went very thin. Then she squared her shoulders and pulled her wand from her dressing-gown pocket. "Right. It has to be inside the boundary for the entail, I assume. Harry, stand there. As close as you can get."
They did it through the gates.
Harry stood on the gravel outside and Draconia stood on the gravel inside, and the old iron bars ran between them, and when Hermione told them to join hands they had to do it through the gap, his fingers wrapping round hers between the cold curled metal. Ron held his wand up for light. A peacock wandered over to watch and sat down on Draconia's foot.
Hermione said the old words, the ones from before the Statute, about binding and keeping and the turning of the year. She said them beautifully, in the clear carrying voice that could quiet a full sitting of the Wizengamot, and Draconia found that she could not look away from Harry's face. He was taking it seriously. Of course he was. He took everything seriously, that was the whole maddening problem with him.
"Do you, Harry James Potter..."
"I do."
"I haven't finished."
"Sorry. Yes. Do go on."
"...take this witch..."
"I do," said Harry, softer. He was looking at her as if there were nobody else on the lawn.
It was eleven fifty-eight when Hermione turned to her. Draconia knew because the clock in the entrance hall had begun the long whirring breath it always took before midnight, and she could hear it through the open door, and her heart had started counting with it.
"I do," she said.
"Then by the right I hold and the witnesses here, I bind you," Hermione said, and touched her wand to their joined hands, and gold light ran up both their arms like water. "You may..."
The clock started to strike.
Harry leaned forward and kissed her through the bars.
It should have been awkward. There was cold iron pressing a line into her cheek and a peacock on her foot and Ron Weasley holding a light up as if he were filming it. But Harry's free hand came up and cupped her jaw, carefully, as though she were made of something worth being careful with, and his mouth was warm and certain against hers, and on the fourth stroke of midnight the gates swung open on their own.
Neither of them noticed until the twelfth.
When she pulled back, Harry was standing inside the boundary, on her side, and the wards were humming around them like a cat. All the windows of the Manor had lit at once. Somewhere deep in the house, she could feel it, a great old weight turning over and settling down to sleep.
"Well," said Ron, into the silence. "That was nearly romantic."
Harry did not look away from her. "Was that credible enough?" he asked quietly. "For page seven?"
Draconia opened her mouth to say something sharp, and nothing came out.
From the dark of the drive came the soft crack of Apparition, and then a voice with a Lyonnais accent, amused and much too close.
"Félicitations, ma cousine," said Octave Malfoy, stepping into the lamplight. "Now. Shall we talk about the honeymoon clause?"