Chapter 1: Would You Marry Me on Saturday
The third canopic jar exploded six inches from Harry Potter's head, and Draconia Malfoy, crouched behind his shield charm with stone dust in her hair, chose that moment to propose.
"Potter," she said, "would you marry me on Saturday?"
"Yes," said Harry, and then, as the fourth jar went off and something green and screaming hurled itself against the shield, "wait, what?"
"Left. Left, it's going left—"
"I've got it." He twisted, wand arm braced, and the shield bowed and held. The green thing hit it again, howled, and dissolved into a smell like hot pennies. Down the length of the cellar, the remaining jars rattled on their shelves, building to something. "What do you mean, Saturday?"
"I mean this coming Saturday. The fifth." Draconia had her own wand out and was sketching runes into the air in quick, savage strokes, unpicking the trigger hex that the shop's late owner had laid across his stock of smuggled Egyptian funerary goods. "It's my birthday."
"You want to get married on your birthday."
"I don't want to get married at all. I have to get married by midnight on Friday, or at midnight on Friday I become the property of Cassius Selwyn." She slashed the last rune. Every jar on every shelf went quiet at once, like a held breath let out. In the sudden silence, her voice sounded very loud. "Shield down. We're clear."
Harry dropped the shield. He did not get up. He stayed exactly where he was, on one knee on the filthy flagstones of a Knockturn Alley cellar, with plaster in his hair and a scorch mark on the sleeve of his Auror robes, and stared at her.
"You're serious," he said.
"I am always serious. It's my most attractive quality."
"Selwyn. The Selwyn who was at the Ministry last month? Gave evidence at the Rookwood appeal? The one who looks like a pickled egg?"
"He's my fiancé," said Draconia. "Apparently."
The contract was sitting on the table in Hermione Granger's office in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement an hour later, and it was even worse than Draconia had told him.
"It's a blood betrothal," Hermione said. She had her reading glasses on and the look of a woman who had been up since five working out how to kill a man legally. "Signed by Lucius Malfoy and Thaddeus Selwyn, the year Draconia was born, sealed with both fathers' blood. It's dormant until the bride's twenty-eighth birthday. At midnight it activates."
"And then what?" Harry said.
"And then the Malfoy vault, the Manor, and the bride all pass into the Selwyn family's keeping. Thaddeus is dead, so it falls to his son." Hermione took her glasses off and pinched the bridge of her nose. "If she refuses, the contract binds her magic. Permanently."
The office was very quiet. Draconia was looking out of the enchanted window, which today showed a pleasant drizzle over the Thames, with an expression of such exquisite boredom that Harry knew she was about three seconds from hexing something.
"My father," she said, without turning round, "was in Azkaban for six years after the war and has been dead for four. In all that time, it never once occurred to him to mention this. I found it on Monday. In a drawer. With his good cufflinks."
"Can't you just tear it up?" Harry said.
"It's sealed in blood, Harry. Tearing it up would trigger the binding." Hermione put her glasses back on. "But there's a way out. Old marriage law trumps old contract law. If Draconia contracts a marriage under the old rites before midnight on Friday, a handfasting, it supersedes the betrothal. But only if the husband's line is at least as old as the Selwyn line, which rules out almost everyone."
"Peverell," said Draconia, to the window.
Harry blinked.
"You're descended from Ignotus Peverell," Hermione explained. "Through the Potters. It's on the Invisibility Cloak; it's in the Ministry genealogies. Your line is older than the Selwyns by about two hundred years."
"So it has to be me."
"It doesn't have to be you," Draconia said. She turned round at last, and her face was cool and pale and perfectly composed, and her hands, Harry noticed, were folded very tightly in front of her. "It's a legal arrangement. You'd be doing me a professional courtesy. We stay married for a year and a day, which is what the old law requires, then we quietly dissolve it, and Selwyn can go and find himself another heiress to pickle. You don't have to. I'd understand."
"I already said yes," said Harry.
"You said yes while you were being attacked by a mummified shrew."
"Still counts."
Hermione cleared her throat. She looked, suddenly, rather pink.
"There's one more thing," she said. "The handfasting doesn't take on the vows alone. Under the old rite, the bond has to be sealed. Before dawn on the wedding night."
There was a pause.
"Sealed," Harry repeated.
"Consummated," said Hermione, to the contract.
Draconia did not move a muscle. A faint wash of pink climbed from her collar to her cheekbones and stayed there, like a stain.
"Willingly," Hermione added, faster. "The text is very specific. 'With will and with whole heart, before the sun.' If it isn't, the handfasting is void and the betrothal stands. I'm so sorry. I looked for eleven hours. There isn't another way."
They had the conversation in the corridor outside, in low voices, with a pair of interdepartmental memos flapping around their heads.
"It means nothing," said Draconia.
"Right."
"It's a transaction. A ritual requirement. Like signing a form."
"Like signing a form," Harry agreed. He was having trouble looking at her, because every time he looked at her, his brain helpfully supplied the word consummated, in Hermione's voice, and he went hot to the ears.
"We do it once," Draconia went on. She had produced a small notebook from somewhere and was, Harry realised with deep alarm, writing a list. "Lights off. Quickly. No kissing."
"No kissing? At our own wedding?"
"At the ceremony, fine. In public. A peck. Afterwards, no."
"Malfoy."
"Those are my terms, Potter." She snapped the notebook shut. Her eyes were very bright and very grey, and the pink had not left her face. "I know this is an imposition. I know you didn't ask for any of it. I'm trying to make it as painless for you as possible."
He looked at her. Two years of working cases together. Two years of bickering in tombs and vaults and the backs of shops like this morning's, two years of her cold hands steady on his shoulder while she unpicked a curse he'd walked into, two years of her stealing his chips at the Leaky and calling him a reckless Gryffindor halfwit and once, after a job in Cairo went sideways, sitting by his bed in a Muggle hospital for nine hours and pretending she'd only stopped by.
"It's not an imposition," he said.
She looked at him oddly. Then she turned on her heel and walked away down the corridor, very fast, and the memos scattered out of her way like pigeons.
They were married on Friday evening in the rose garden at Malfoy Manor, with the sun going down gold behind the yews.
It was small. Narcissa came from France in dove-grey silk and looked Harry over for a long moment, and then said, "Ignotus Peverell," in a tone of deep satisfaction, and kissed him on both cheeks. Hermione officiated, because the old rite needed someone who could read Latin without tripping, and Ron stood behind Harry in his good dress robes and looked like he was trying very hard not to laugh or cry, or both.
Draconia came down the garden steps on nobody's arm.
She wore her grandmother's wedding dress. It was ivory silk, very old and very simple, high at the throat and fitted to the waist and falling to the grass in a long fluid line, with a row of tiny pearl buttons down the back that went on, Harry thought dazedly, forever. Her white-blond hair was pinned up off her neck. She carried nothing. Her chin was up and her face was perfectly calm, and when she stopped in front of him, he saw that her hands were shaking.
He took them before he could think about it. They were cold as they always were.
"Hello," he said, quietly.
"Don't," she said, just as quietly. "If you're nice to me, I'll fall apart."
So he wasn't. He grinned at her instead, the way he did in the tombs, and said, "You've got a bit of plaster in your hair," and she said, "I do not," and her hands stopped shaking.
Hermione read the rite. She bound their joined hands with a silver cord, three times round, and the words of the old vows rolled out over the darkening garden. Harry repeated them. Draconia repeated them. Somewhere around the second vow, the cord began to glow, faint and silver, and Harry felt it settle into his skin like warm water.
"Mark of the handfasting," Hermione said, softly, as the cord melted away and left a thin silver line around each of their wrists, like a bracelet drawn in light. "It will hold until the bond is sealed. Then it changes." She cleared her throat. "You may kiss the bride."
Draconia tipped her chin up a fraction. A peck. Those were the terms. He had read the list.
He meant to stick to it. He really did.
But she was looking up at him in the last of the light, with her face so carefully blank and her eyes not blank at all, and she smelled of roses and of the cold clean scent of her that he had been breathing in tombs and vaults for two years. He put one hand along her jaw, and he kissed her.
Not a peck. Not quite anything else, either. Just slow, and sure, his mouth on hers for long enough that he felt her go still with surprise, and then felt her lean in. Felt her lips part, just slightly, under his. Felt her fingers close in the front of his dress robes and hold on.
When he pulled back, she was breathing fast. Behind him, Ron said, "Blimey," in a reverent undertone, and Narcissa began, delicately, to applaud.
"That," said Draconia, very low, "was not a peck."
"No," Harry agreed.
"We'll be discussing it."
"Looking forward to it."
The sun slid behind the yews. Lamps lit themselves all along the terrace. Narcissa was saying something about champagne, and Hermione was saying something about the time, and Draconia's grip on his robes had not loosened at all.
"Midnight's in five hours," she said. "Dawn's at a quarter to five. We have the east bedroom." She let go of him and smoothed down his lapels, very precisely, as if she were wiping away the evidence. "We'll have a glass of champagne, and then we'll go upstairs and get it over with."
"No," said Harry.
She looked up sharply. "What?"
"We're not getting it over with." He caught her hand again, the one with the silver line around the wrist, and ran his thumb over it, and watched her breath catch. "You heard Hermione. With will and with whole heart. If we're doing this, Malfoy, we're doing it properly."