Chapter 1: Billed by the Hour
The letter arrived at breakfast, which was the first insult, and it arrived by a Ministry owl the size of a small dog, which was the second.
It landed in Harry's porridge. It looked at him as if this was his fault.
"Master has post," Kreacher announced, from directly behind his chair, in the hushed voice he usually reserved for the portrait of Walburga Black and for Harry's more catastrophic laundry. "Master has *Wizengamot* post."
"I can see that, Kreacher."
"The seal, Master. Master will look at the seal."
Harry looked at the seal. It was black wax pressed with a shield, a pair of greyhounds and a motto he had spent nine years avoiding: *Toujours Pur*. Under it, in smaller and frankly smug letters, someone at the Ministry had written *By Right of Inheritance*.
He read the letter twice. Then he read it to Hermione, who had come round for the newspaper and stayed for the toast, and who took it out of his hands halfway through the second paragraph because he was reading it wrong.
"'The Ancient and Most Noble House of Black having been without a sitting head since the death of Sirius Orion Black,'" she read, "'and the Council having reviewed the late Mr Black's testament, the seat is hereby confirmed to Harry James Potter, to be taken up at the Opening of the Winter Session, upon his formal Reception by the assembled Members.' Harry, this is huge."
"It's a chair."
"It's one of the oldest hereditary seats in the Wizengamot. You'd have a vote. On everything. On the werewolf registry, on the house-elf bill..."
From the corner, Kreacher made a noise like a kettle deciding not to boil.
"...on the house-elf bill," Hermione repeated, more firmly. "You could actually change things."
"Hermione. I went to a Ministry reception last month and accidentally called the Bulgarian Minister 'mate'."
"He was very gracious about it."
"In Bulgarian." Harry pushed the porridge away. The owl, who had never been told to leave, began eating it. "There's a bit here about Reception. What's Reception?"
Hermione turned the letter over. She went quiet in the specific way she did when she had found the clause nobody was supposed to read.
"It's old," she said. "At the Opening Ball, a new head of house is presented to the floor and greets each Member in the correct form. If enough of them decline to return the greeting, the seat isn't refused, exactly. It's considered *unclaimed*. And then it passes to the next eligible line."
"What's the correct form?"
"I don't know. That's sort of the point. It's not written down anywhere. You're meant to have grown up with it." She looked at him over the parchment. "The Opening is in four weeks."
"Brilliant," Harry said. "Lovely. I'll learn it from a book."
"There isn't a book."
"Then I'll learn it from Ron."
Hermione gave him the look that the suggestion deserved, and then a different look, slower and more considering, that he trusted much less.
"There's someone," she said. "She does exactly this. Muggle-borns who've been promoted, foreign wizards marrying into old families. She's discreet, she's very good, and she's expensive."
"Who?"
Hermione folded the letter into quarters and slid it back across the table, so that she wouldn't have to look at him when she said it.
"Draconia Malfoy."
She came on Tuesday at nine exactly, and she knocked, which was more than most people managed at Grimmauld Place.
Harry had last seen her properly at the trials, nine years ago, sitting very straight between her mother and an empty chair, wearing black and saying nothing at all for three days. He'd seen her since in the way you see anyone in wizarding London, which was constantly and at a distance: a pale head going into Gringotts, a tall figure at the back of a Ministry function, a name in the *Prophet*'s society column that people still lowered their voices to read.
Up close, at twenty-six, she had grown into the sharpness that used to make her look unfinished. Her hair was the Malfoy white-gold and she wore it pinned up in a way that looked effortless and was certainly not. Her robes were dove-grey and so well cut they made his jumper feel like an apology. She had a leather-bound ledger under one arm and a silver pen behind her ear.
"Potter," she said.
"Malfoy."
"May I come in, or shall we do the first lesson on the step? I'll warn you now, I charge the same."
He stood aside. She walked past him into the hall, looked at the troll-leg umbrella stand for a long, judicial moment, and said nothing about it, which was somehow worse.
They did it in the drawing room, because the kitchen was where Harry lived and he wasn't letting her in there yet. She took the good chair without being offered it, opened the ledger on her knee and uncapped the pen.
"Terms," she said. "Fifty Galleons an hour."
"Fifty?"
"Sixty for dancing. Dancing is physically hazardous for the instructor and I've seen you at the Ministry Yule party." She wrote something. "Lessons are billed in quarter hours. If you're late, I bill you for my waiting. If you're rude, I bill you for my patience. If you try to pay me in Chocolate Frogs, I leave."
"Who has ever tried to pay you in Chocolate Frogs?"
"A very nice young man from the Department of Magical Games and Sports," she said. "He's now married to a Rowle and I'm told he can hold a fish knife. Do you agree to the terms?"
He thought about the vote, and the werewolf registry, and Hermione's face.
"Fine," Harry said.
"Wonderful." She shut the ledger. "Stand up."
He stood.
"Now sit down."
He sat.
"No," Draconia said. "Again. You drop into a chair as if you've been shot. A head of house *lowers* himself, because he knows the chair will still be there. Up."
They did it eleven times. He stopped counting and she didn't. On the twelfth she said, "Adequate," in the tone of someone describing weather, and moved on to the bow.
There were, it emerged, five different bows, and he had been doing a sixth one, which did not exist and which she referred to as "the Gryffindor stagger". There was the bow for a Member senior to you, and a lesser one for a Member junior, and a third, barely a dip of the head, for someone you meant to insult without technically insulting them.
"That's the one I'll use most," Harry said.
"That's the one you'll use never, because you can't do it yet without looking as if you've pulled something in your neck." She stood and showed him. It was nothing: a slight tilt from the shoulders, a lowering of the eyes, a pause held a fraction too long. It said, as clearly as words, *I have considered you, and you will do*. Harry felt it land somewhere under his ribs and stay there, mildly offended.
"How do you even learn that?"
"From my mother, at the breakfast table, every morning, until I could do it to her and make her laugh." Draconia straightened. "Your turn. Do it to me."
He did it to her. She looked at him for a long moment.
"Potter, you look like you've seen a Dementor across the room and are too polite to mention it."
"That's the expression I was going for."
"It's the expression you always have. We'll work on it." She checked a small silver watch pinned to her robes. "Forms of address. Quickly, before I lose the will. The Chief Warlock."
"Er. Chief Warlock?"
"Madam Chief Warlock, at the Ball. 'Your Honour' in session. Never 'Madam', alone, because she'll think you're a waiter. The Selwyns."
"I'd rather not."
"Neither would anyone, but there are three of them on the Council and one of them is going to try to have you thrown out. Lord Selwyn, Madam Selwyn, and the younger Mr Selwyn, who will tell you to call him Cassius. Do *not* call him Cassius. The moment you do, you've accepted that he's your equal, and he isn't, he's a third son with a fondness for Doxy-racing."
Harry looked at her. "How do you know which one's going to try to throw me out?"
"Because it's my job," she said, "and because Aurelius Selwyn has spent nine years being polite to me in public and saying things about my mother in private, and I hold a grudge like a Niffler holds a coin." She wrote something else. "Cutlery."
The cutlery took an hour and a half. By the end of it Harry knew which fork was for oysters, which one was for the salad, and which one was, as far as he could tell, purely ornamental and existed to catch out people like him. Draconia set the whole service out on the drawing room table with a wave of her wand and made him go through it until he could reach for the fish knife without looking.
"Why is the fish knife shaped like that?"
"Because it is."
"That's not a reason."
"In pure-blood society, Potter, it's the *only* reason." She leaned over his shoulder to move his water glass a half-inch to the right. She smelled faintly of bergamot and something greener, like crushed stems. "There. Now you look like you were raised by people who knew what a finger bowl was."
"I was raised by people who thought I'd drink out of it."
She paused. It was very brief and he would not have noticed it if he had been looking anywhere else.
"Well," Draconia said. "Nobody needs to know that."
At four o'clock she checked her watch again and announced, in a voice of total serenity, that it was time for the waltz.
"No," said Harry.
"Sixty Galleons, Potter. Up."
"I'll pay you sixty Galleons not to."
"You'll pay me sixty Galleons either way, and only one of those options keeps you on the Wizengamot." She cleared the floor with a flick, rolled the old Black rug into the corner, and set a gramophone going on the sideboard. It was some old wizarding thing with a lot of harp in it. Phineas Nigellus wandered into the portrait over the mantel specifically to watch.
"Oh, this will be marvellous," he said.
"Shut up, Phineas."
"I didn't speak to you, boy. I spoke to the young lady, who is a credit to her blood."
Draconia inclined her head to him. It was the second bow, the lesser, and Phineas glowed like a lamp.
Then she held out her hand.
Harry took it. Her fingers were cool and she placed his other hand at her waist herself, with the brisk impersonal touch of a Healer setting a bone. They were nearly the same height; she'd worn heels, which he suspected was a tactical decision.
"You lead," she said. "Which means you decide where we go, and I make it look like a good idea. On three."
On three he stood on her foot.
On the second three he went left when the entire structure of the dance, the music, the floor and quite possibly the laws of magic had all agreed on right, and she went right, and they collided, chest to chest, and she made a small sound that might have been pain.
On the third three, he turned her and she turned faster than he expected, and the two of them spun almost all the way round before he lost the count and they stopped dead in the middle of the drawing room, his hand still at her waist, her hand still in his, and the harp going on without them.
And Draconia Malfoy laughed.
It was not the laugh he remembered from school, the high, carrying, cruel one built for an audience. This one escaped her. She put her free hand over her mouth and her shoulders shook and her eyes went bright, and she laughed with her whole face at him, at the ridiculousness of it, at Harry Potter standing in the House of Black with his feet tangled and Phineas tutting from the mantelpiece.
He had no idea what to do with his own face. He thought he might be smiling.
"I'm sorry," she said, not sounding sorry at all, not letting go of his hand. "I'm sorry, I'm going to have to charge you extra for that. That was the worst thing I've ever seen, and I once watched Gregory Goyle try to tango."
"You're enjoying this."
"I am enjoying this *enormously*." She wiped the corner of her eye with her knuckle and drew herself back up into posture, cool again, but not quite all the way. "Four weeks, Potter. You'll open the Ball. The new head of house leads the first dance, in front of the entire Council, and every one of them will be watching your feet."
"Who do I dance with?"
He expected her to say *someone suitable*, or *I'll find you a partner*, or another line item for the ledger.
Instead she looked at him for a moment too long. It was the third bow, almost; the considering one.
"Traditionally," Draconia said, "the new head opens the Ball with a woman of the line he's displacing. A courtesy. To show there are no hard feelings." She stepped back out of his arms and picked up her ledger. "Did nobody tell you, Potter? If you hadn't inherited the Black seat, it would have come to my mother."
She tucked the pen behind her ear.
"And my mother," she said, "gave it to me."