Chapter 3: Silver for Duty, Gold for the Heart
For nine days, Draconia Malfoy wore long sleeves.
It was June. It was, by the standards of an English summer, a heatwave. Pansy sent an owl from Italy asking if she had joined a convent. Draconia ignored it, and went to work at Gringotts in high-necked robes with cuffs to her knuckles, and came home every evening to the Manor and to the husband who now lived in the blue room at the end of the corridor, and did not look at him, and did not look at her wrist, and was entirely, perfectly fine.
At dawn on the wedding night she had said, "It's a trick of the light. The rite is seven centuries old. The colours are unreliable." Then she had got out of bed with the sheet wrapped round her like a toga and walked into the bathroom and locked the door, and when she came out, he had gone back to the blue room.
He had not pushed. That was the worst of it. He did not ask again. He took the room she gave him, because the old law said a handfasted couple must share a roof for a year and a day, and he was polite to her mother's portrait and kind to the elves and he ate breakfast across the long table from her every morning with the Prophet propped against the marmalade, and he never once said the word gold. Sometimes she caught him looking at her over the top of the paper. When she did, he looked away first.
He had also, she noticed, started wearing his Auror bracer on his left wrist even at breakfast. She told herself it meant nothing. Probably he was expecting to be called out.
On the tenth morning, an owl arrived with a black seal, and Harry read the letter, and put down his toast.
"Selwyn's petitioned the Wizengamot," he said. "He says the marriage is a sham."
"It's an old provision," Hermione said, walking fast beside them down the long black corridor toward the courtrooms. "Very old. Under the old law, a marriage contracted after a blood betrothal can be set aside at the betrothed's request if it was contracted only out of duty. To evade the contract. That's his argument."
"And how," said Draconia, "does the Wizengamot propose to judge what we contracted it out of?"
Hermione stopped walking. She looked, for a moment, very sorry.
"The marks," she said. "Silver for duty. Gold for the whole heart. They'll ask you both to show your wrists. And for the marriage to stand against a prior betrothal, Draconia, both marks have to be gold."
The corridor was very cold. Draconia felt it go through her robes to the skin.
Both. Not one. If his was silver, it would not matter what hers was. The marriage would be set aside, and the contract would wake, and she would be Selwyn's by sundown, and she would have stood in front of the whole Wizengamot with her sleeve pushed up and shown them, shown Harry, shown everyone, exactly what a fool she had been.
She did not look at him. She could feel him looking at her.
"Right," she said, and lifted her chin, and walked on.
The courtroom was the old one, deep under the Ministry, the dungeon room with the high banked benches and the chair with chains on its arms in the middle of the floor. She had sat in that chair at eighteen with her mother's hand on her shoulder and the whole court staring down at her. She had kept her chin up then, too.
Cassius Selwyn stood at the petitioner's table in plum-coloured robes, smoothing his moustache. He bowed to her as she came in. She did not bow back.
The Chief Warlock read the petition in a dry, bored voice. Selwyn's advocate spoke for ten minutes about the sanctity of the blood betrothal and the cynical abuse of ancient rites. Draconia stood beside Harry at the respondent's table and looked at a fixed point on the far wall and did not hear a word of it.
"Very well," said the Chief Warlock at last. "The respondents will show the court the marks of their handfasting. The bride first."
Every face on every bench turned to her.
Draconia unbuttoned her left cuff. Her fingers were perfectly steady. She had unpicked curses in tombs where one wrong twitch would have peeled her skin off; she could unbutton a cuff. She pushed back her sleeve, and held up her wrist, and let the court see.
The gold line around it caught the torchlight and blazed.
A murmur went round the benches. Somebody up in the gallery said, "Oh," quite loudly, in the tone of a woman watching the end of a very good play. Selwyn's moustache twitched.
Draconia kept her arm up and her eyes on the far wall. Her face was burning. She did not care. She would not look at Harry. She would not.
"And the groom," said the Chief Warlock.
Beside her, she heard the small sound of a buckle coming undone.
She looked.
Harry had taken off the bracer. He was holding his left arm up next to hers, and the line around his wrist was not silver. It was gold. It was gold so bright it looked molten, brighter than hers, bright enough to throw light on the underside of his jaw, and he was not looking at the court at all. He was looking at her.
He had been hiding it. Under the bracer. For nine days.
"The petition," said the Chief Warlock, sounding faintly amused for the first time in living memory, "is dismissed."
She made it all the way back to the Manor without saying anything. She made it through the front door and across the entrance hall and up the main stairs, with Harry two steps behind her the whole way, and into her own bedroom, and then she turned round and shut the door and put her back against it.
"You hid it," she said.
"So did you."
"Nine days, Potter. You sat across from me at breakfast for nine days."
"You said it meant nothing." He was standing in the middle of her room with the bracer still in his hand. "You said it was a trick of the light. You locked yourself in the bathroom. You've been counting the days to a year and a day since the morning after, I've seen you do it, you've got a calendar in the library with little crosses on it—"
"That's the potions schedule."
"Is it?"
It was not.
"I thought you wanted out," Harry said, quieter. "I thought, she married me because she had to, and the magic caught on something I felt, and now she knows, and she's being polite about it. I didn't want you to feel like you owed me anything. So I covered it up." He looked down at the bracer in his hand, and then back at her. "I didn't know yours was gold for the same reason. I thought maybe it was just the sex."
"Just the sex," Draconia repeated.
"It was very good sex."
"Harry," she said, and her voice cracked straight down the middle. "It's meant everything since Cairo."
He went still.
"You walked into a curse in that tomb in the Valley of the Kings because you were showing off," she said. "And they flew you to a Muggle hospital, and I sat by that horrible bed for nine hours while you were grey and not waking up, and I made a list in my head of everyone I would kill if you died, and the list was everyone. And then you woke up and the first thing you said was, did you get the scarab." She was not crying. Malfoys did not cry in front of people. She wiped her face with the back of her gold-banded wrist. "And I knew then. And I have spent two years stealing your chips and calling you a halfwit so you would never, ever find out. And then I had to marry you. And then you were nice to me. It meant everything. It means everything. Are you satisfied?"
Harry dropped the bracer on the floor.
He crossed the room in three strides, and took her face in both his hands, and kissed her.
It was not angry, this time. It was not careful either. It was slow and deep and so sure that her knees went, and he caught her against the door and kept kissing her, and she wound her arms around his neck and kissed him back and felt the gold on her wrist warm against the nape of his neck, like a coal.
"I love you," he said against her mouth. "Since before Cairo. I just didn't have a list."
"You never have a list."
"I'll make one. First item." He kissed the corner of her jaw. "Take you to bed. With the lights on."
She laughed, wet and shaky, and pulled him toward it.
They undressed each other in the afternoon sun that came slanting through the tall windows, without hurry, without any buttons worth counting. She pushed his shirt off his shoulders and kissed the white locket scar over his heart. He unwound the pins from her hair one at a time and kissed her for every one. When they were finally bare he laid her down on the bed, in the full gold light, and she let him look, and looked back.
He kissed his way down her body as if he had all the time in the world. He had. They both did, now. His mouth found her breasts, her ribs, the soft inside of her thigh, and then between her legs, and he licked into her slow and patient until she was gasping and tugging at his hair, and still he did not stop until she came apart against his tongue with a cry she didn't bother to muffle.
Then he moved up over her, and she guided him into her, and this time they did not rush.
He moved in her in long, deep, unhurried strokes, his forehead against hers, their fingers laced together on the pillow so that the two gold bands lay side by side. She could feel every inch of him. She could see every flicker in his face. She wrapped her legs around his hips and pulled him deeper, and he groaned, and she said, "Again," and he did it again, and again, and the pleasure climbed in her so slowly she barely noticed it until it was everywhere.
"Say it again," she whispered.
"I love you." He kissed her. "Draconia. I love you."
"I love you," she said, and it was so much easier than she had ever imagined, like a door swinging open. "I love you, you reckless, idiotic—"
She came with his name in her mouth, and he followed her, and the gold at their wrists flared until the whole room was full of it, warm and bright as the afternoon.
Later, lying tangled in the sheets with the sun going orange on the ceiling, Harry traced the band around her wrist with one finger.
"So," he said. "A year and a day."
"Hmm."
"What happens at a year and a day?"
"Under the old law, the handfasting either dissolves," Draconia said, "or it's renewed." She caught his finger and held it. "With a ring. And a party, and my mother crying, and Weasley giving an unforgivable speech."
"I'd like that," said Harry.
"I know you would. You're soft."
"Harry Malfoy," he said, thoughtfully. "Has a ring to it."
She was still deciding whether to hit him with a pillow when there was a sharp tap at the window. A large grey Gringotts owl sat on the sill, glaring in at them, a scroll tied to its leg sealed with the bank's crest.
Draconia untied it, read it, and sat up very straight.
"What?" said Harry.
"The tomb in the Valley of the Kings," she said slowly. "The one where you nearly died. It's reopened. Something's come out of it. Gringotts wants its best curse-breaker on the next Portkey to Cairo." She looked down at him, at her husband, sprawled in her bed in the orange light with his hair a disaster and a gold band round his wrist. "And they want the Auror she married."