Chapter 1: Unwelcome
The peacocks saw him first. They always did; it was the only thing they were good for.
Draconia heard them from the morning room, that strangled, outraged shriek that went up whenever anyone came through the gates who did not smell of Malfoy, and she set down her cup and went to the window and watched Harry Potter walk up her drive with a battered canvas bag over one shoulder and a white peacock pecking at his ankles.
He did not kick it. She would have kicked it. She stood there for longer than she meant to, watching him try to reason with it.
By the time she reached the front steps she had arranged her face. She was twenty-nine years old and the last Malfoy in England, and she had been arranging her face on these steps since she was old enough to stand on them.
"Potter."
"Malfoy." He looked up at the house. Everyone did, the first time back. She watched it happen to him: the long grey front, the black windows, the yews clipped into points. Something went across his face and was put away. "Nice to see the place hasn't changed."
"It's changed enormously. The previous tenant had very poor taste in houseguests." She did not offer her hand. "You know why you're here."
"The wards are failing. The Ministry wants someone on site for a month in case they go all at once. If they do, there's about nine hundred years of Malfoy protective magic sitting on this hill with nothing holding it in." He shrugged the bag higher. "Kingsley asked for me."
"Kingsley," Draconia said, "has a sense of humour I find very tiresome." She turned and went in. He followed her, because there was nothing else for him to do. "The east wing. Second floor. The elves have aired it. You'll eat in the small dining room or in your rooms, as you prefer, and I'd prefer your rooms. The library is open to you, the grounds are open to you. The drawing room is sealed. Don't try it."
"I'm here to check the wards. I'll need..."
"The drawing room," she said, "is sealed."
Her voice came out of her sharper than she'd meant it to. It rang off the marble. He stopped at the foot of the great staircase and looked at her, properly, the way she remembered him looking at things he meant to understand, with his head a little forward and the green of his eyes very steady behind the glasses.
"All right," he said.
She had expected an argument. She'd prepared for one. She stood there with all her prepared words and nowhere to put them and hated him, briefly and very cleanly, for being reasonable.
"Dinner's at eight," she said, and left him on the stairs.
For three days she succeeded in not seeing him.
It was a large house. It had been built to accommodate a great many people who did not wish to see each other, and she knew every back stair and servants' passage. She heard him, which was worse: the creak of the east landing at odd hours, the murmur of diagnostic charms in the long gallery, once a muffled swear word and a crash from the direction of the orangery that the elves later reported, with relish, was Mr Potter falling off a stepladder.
She knew what he was finding. She'd found it herself, months ago, kneeling on the cold floor of the cellar with her wand over the foundation stone, watching the old gold threads of the warding come up through the flagstones thin and grey as old hair. Her father's death had loosened them. Two years since he'd died in Azkaban, and every month since, the house had been letting go of something.
She had not called the Ministry. The Ministry had called her, because a Muggle farmer in the next valley had complained of hearing music from an empty hill.
On the fourth night she could not sleep, which was not new, and she went down to the library in her nightgown and an old green dressing gown of her mother's, because the library was hers and it was two in the morning and Potter was a man who fell off stepladders at eleven and was presumably unconscious.
He was not unconscious. He was sitting at the long table in the window with every ward-ledger in the house spread out in front of him and a cold cup of tea at his elbow, in a grey T-shirt and flannel pyjama trousers and bare feet.
They looked at each other.
"Don't let me stop you," he said. "Whatever it is you came down here to do in your dressing gown."
"I came down to read in my own library. What are you doing with my great-great-grandfather's ward-ledgers?"
"Reading them. Your great-great-grandfather had terrible handwriting." He tapped one. "And a lot of opinions about drainage."
"Put them back where you found them."
"I'll put them back when I've finished."
"You'll put them back *now*."
"Or what, Malfoy?" He leaned back in the chair. He was smiling slightly, the irritating crooked thing she remembered from the trials, when he'd stood up in a courtroom and spoken for her mother and then looked straight at her as if daring her to thank him, and she discovered that eleven years had not done a thing to make it less infuriating. "You'll tell your father?"
She went very still.
It was a cheap shot and he knew it. She watched him know it; watched the smile go and something more like dismay come up underneath. He opened his mouth. She didn't wait to hear what came out of it.
"Get out," she said, very quietly. "Get out of my library. Get out of my house, if you like. I'll write to Kingsley and tell him I'd rather the whole hill went up than spend another night with you under my roof."
She turned on her heel. She reached the door. She took hold of the handle.
It was locked.
It was not, she realised in the next second, simply locked. The handle was warm under her palm, and as she watched, a thin line of gold light ran round the frame of the door, quick as a struck match, and sank into the wood. Behind her, every one of the long windows went dim. The fire in the grate, which had been embers, sat up and burned bright and steady, as if someone had settled in for the night.
"*Alohomora*," she snapped. Nothing.
Behind her, a chair scraped. Potter came and stood at her shoulder, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him through the dressing gown. He put out his own hand and laid it flat on the door. The gold flickered under his fingers, recognising, or considering.
"Huh," he said.
"Don't *huh*. Open it."
"I can't." He tried something nonverbal, a long complicated unpicking she could feel in her teeth. The door ignored him completely. "It isn't a fault. That's a deliberate lock. It's woven into the main warding, I can feel it going all the way down." He took his hand away. "It's not going to open."
"Until when?"
"I don't know." He sounded, infuriatingly, interested. "Until it wants to, I suppose."
The windows stayed dark until dawn.
He tried for an hour. She let him; it was something to watch that wasn't his face. Then he gave up and sat down on the floor with his back against the bookshelves, and after another twenty minutes of standing by the door on principle, she sat down in the armchair by the fire, because her feet were cold and her pride did not extend to frostbite.
The fire stayed bright. The silence went on. Somewhere around four, she realised he was looking at her, not unkindly, and that her dressing gown had slipped at the shoulder, and that she'd tucked her bare feet up beneath her like a cat, and that she had been, until she noticed all of this, almost comfortable.
"I'm sorry," Harry said. "About your father. That was a filthy thing to say."
"Yes," she said. "It was."
"I don't know why I said it."
"Yes, you do. You said it because you were sitting in the house where they kept you on the floor, and I walked in like I owned it." She looked at the fire, not at him. "I do own it. I sealed the drawing room the week after the trials and I haven't opened it since. I can't go in. I can stand outside it in the corridor, and on bad days I can't even do that. So you can stop looking at me as if I'm the Lady of the Manor. I'm the Lady of the Manor except for the one room that matters."
It was the most she had said to anyone about it in eleven years. She did not know why she'd said it to him, at four in the morning, barefoot.
He didn't answer for a while. When he did, it wasn't anything she was braced for.
"Your mother's dressing gown," he said. "It's nice."
She laughed. She couldn't help it. It came out of her like something escaping, and she put her hand over her mouth, and he was grinning at her from the floor in the firelight, his hair a disaster, and she was suddenly and very precisely aware of the shape of his shoulders under the grey cotton, and the length of his bare forearms, and the fact that they were locked in a room together in the middle of the night and only one of them had underwear on.
She did not know which one. She found she wanted to.
That thought was so unwelcome that she stopped laughing all at once. Across the room he stopped too. The fire cracked. Neither of them said anything, and the silence stopped being a silence and became something else, warmer, with edges.
The windows went grey with dawn. There was a soft click.
The door swung open on its own, as politely as an elf.
Draconia stood up and walked out without a word. She didn't look back. She heard him behind her, the scrape of the ledgers, the flick of his wand, the low murmur of diagnostic charms going up into the morning air.
She was halfway up the stairs when he called after her.
"Malfoy." Something in his voice stopped her where she stood. "Your wards aren't failing."
She turned. He was standing in the library doorway, in the grey light, holding one of the old ledgers open in both hands.
"They're spending," he said. "Everything they've got left. All of it going into one charm, and I think I've just found out what it does." He looked down at the page, then up at her. "Your house isn't dying, Malfoy. It's trying to lock us in."