Chapter 3: The Opening Ball
He didn't sleep. He sat up in the kitchen at Grimmauld Place with the new robes hanging off the back of a chair, still in their tissue paper, and drank tea he'd made with the milk in first out of pure spite.
At eleven, Kreacher came and stood in the doorway.
"Master is unhappy."
"Master's fine, Kreacher."
"Master is sitting in the dark, drinking his tea like a Weasley." The elf's ears drooped. "Miss Draconia will be disappointed."
"Miss Draconia," Harry said, "can bill me for it."
Kreacher looked at him for a long time with his huge, wet, ancient eyes. Then he went to the dresser, took down the good cup, the bone china one with the Black crest that had sat behind glass for thirty years, and set it in front of Harry without a word, and went away.
She arrived the next morning at nine, as she always did, and knocked, as she always did, and walked into the drawing room with her ledger under her arm and said, "Right. The Reception. We'll do the whole thing start to finish, and then we'll do it again until you can do it half asleep, because I suspect that's how you'll feel on the night."
"I saw you," Harry said. "Yesterday. With Selwyn."
She stopped.
It was the first time in three weeks he'd seen her caught out, really caught, with no answer ready. It lasted perhaps a second. Then the ledger came down onto the table, very gently, and she sat in the good chair and folded her hands on her knee.
"How much did you hear?"
"Enough. 'Of course I'll think about it.'"
"Ah," she said. "So, the end. You always did have a gift for arriving in time for the worst bit."
"Was it the worst bit?"
"Potter." For a moment she looked almost tired. "What do you think Selwyn does if I tell him to go and boil his head?"
He didn't answer. He'd been an Auror for long enough that his mind went there before he could stop it.
"He finds another way," Draconia said. "He's had nine years of practice making things go wrong for people quietly. Someone tampers with the gramophone so the waltz comes in at the wrong tempo. Someone has a word with the Chief Warlock's secretary about the order of precedence, so you greet the Members in the wrong sequence and offend half the floor before you've opened your mouth. I know exactly what I'd do in his place, and I'd do it better. So the safest thing, the *only* sensible thing, was to make him think he didn't need to. Make him think I'd do it for him." She lifted her chin. "He's spent the night planning his speech for when you fall on your face. He hasn't spent it tampering with gramophones. You're welcome."
Harry looked at her for a long time.
"You could have told me."
"You'd have gone after him."
"I wouldn't have..."
"You would have walked straight down Diagon Alley in your new robes and asked him to step outside. You're very predictable. It's the main thing you have going for you." She picked up the ledger again, then put it back down. Her fingers stayed on the cover. "I'm sorry," she said, more quietly, "that you thought I might. I can see why you would. I'd have thought it too."
"I didn't think it."
"You sat up all night."
"I sat up all night," Harry said, "because I didn't think it, and I couldn't work out why I didn't."
She did not have an answer for that either. Over the mantelpiece, Phineas Nigellus pretended very loudly to be asleep.
"From the top," Draconia said at last. "Bow to me."
The Ball was held in the Atrium of the Ministry, because the Wizengamot had decided after the war that it no longer wished to hold its Opening in any private house, given what had been said in some of them. The gold fountain had been replaced the year after the war with something tasteful and abstract. The floor had been charmed into black and white marble. The floo fireplaces along the walls burned silver, and the ceiling, so high above that Harry had never once seen it clearly, had been enchanted with a slow fall of snow that melted a foot above everyone's heads.
He stood at the top of the stairs from the lifts in his midnight robes with the silver buttons, and the whole Wizengamot turned to look at him.
There were about sixty Members, in plum robes with the silver W. Behind them stood families and guests and a press box from the *Prophet*, with Rita Skeeter in the front row in a hat like a dead flamingo. Somewhere at the back, Hermione and Ron. Ron gave him a thumbs-up and Hermione hit him.
The order of precedence was announced. Harry knew it. He'd learned it in the library with Draconia reading it out from the charter, and then in the kitchen with Kreacher, and then in bed, alone, under his breath, at two in the morning.
He went down the stairs. He did not drop into anything. He lowered himself, as if the floor would still be there.
"Madam Chief Warlock."
The first bow, the deep one. The Chief Warlock was an old witch with a pipe-smoker's voice, and she looked at him with frank and cynical amusement and returned it, and said, "Mr Potter. The House of Black is received."
One down.
He went along the line. The Ogdens. The Abbotts, who were kind. The Shacklebolt seat, where Kingsley's cousin gave him a wink. The Greengrasses. Old Madam Marchbanks, who was a hundred and something and returned his bow by saying, "Hah," very loudly, which he chose to treat as a yes. He held the pause for exactly as long as Draconia had told him to, and not one breath longer.
Then he came to the Selwyns.
Lord Aurelius Selwyn stood at the end of the row with his painted beard and his kind, interested face. Beside him, Madam Selwyn, in diamonds. And beside her, the younger Mr Selwyn, a bit flushed, who smiled at Harry with real warmth and said, "Ah, Potter, good to see you. Please. Cassius."
There it was. The hand extended. The trap so friendly it might have been a gift.
Harry looked at the hand. Then he looked at Cassius Selwyn, and considered him, and let him see that he had considered him, and inclined his head perhaps half an inch from the shoulders, and held the pause a fraction too long.
"Mr Selwyn," he said.
Somewhere on the floor, someone laughed and turned it into a cough. Cassius Selwyn went red to the ears. Aurelius Selwyn's face did not change at all, which was how Harry knew it had worked.
"Lord Selwyn." The second bow, the lesser. Barely enough. Perfectly correct.
And Selwyn, who had a room full of witnesses and no grounds whatsoever, bowed back.
Draconia was standing at the edge of the floor in silver, and she was not looking at him. She was looking at the gramophone, and at the wizard beside it, who was Selwyn's secretary and had his hand in his pocket. When the man began to draw his wand, she said something to him very quietly. Harry never found out what. The man put his wand away and took two steps back and stayed there for the rest of the night.
Then the Chief Warlock announced that the House of Black would open the floor, and Draconia came across the black and white marble to him with every eye in the Atrium following her. She sank into a curtsey so deep and so slow that the hem of her robes pooled silver on the floor. Rita Skeeter's quill fell over.
He held out his hand. She took it.
"On three," she murmured.
On three, he did not stand on her foot.
He led. She made it look like a good idea. They went round once, and then again, under the falling snow that never landed, and the harp came in, and he turned her, and she turned exactly as fast as he expected because he had learned, by now, how she moved. The room blurred at the edges. He was dimly aware of other couples joining, of Ron and Hermione somewhere, of Phineas Nigellus's frame in the Black family box saying "*Bravo*" to anyone who would listen.
"You're not counting," she said.
"I stopped counting about a week ago."
"You never told me."
"You'd have billed me for it."
That surprised a laugh out of her. Not the escaped one, not quite, but close. Her hand tightened on his shoulder.
"I didn't want the seat," she said, very low, under the music. "I want you to know that. Mother gave it to me because she thought it would fix something, but I don't want to be handed things anymore. I'd rather be paid for them." A turn. "I'd rather be good at something because I'm good at it, and not because my name used to mean something in a room like this."
"You're good at this," Harry said.
"I know I am." Another turn. "You're adequate."
"High praise."
"Ask anyone," she said, and he could have sworn her voice shook.
The lifts ran all night for the Ball, gold and creaking, and when the dancing broke up into champagne and politics, she said she had to go and he said he'd see her to the lift, and it was empty when it arrived.
The grilles rattled shut. The cool female voice said, "*Level seven. Department of Magical Games and Sports.*"
Draconia took a folded piece of parchment out of her sleeve and handed it to him.
It was an invoice, written in silver ink, in her small, fierce, beautiful hand.
*Four weeks' tuition. Bows, forms of address, posture, tea, cutlery. Hours outstanding: one dance.*
At the bottom she'd written: *Paid in full.*
"That's not how invoices work," Harry said. His voice did not come out the way he meant it to.
"I've decided it is."
"*Level six. Department of Magical Transportation.*"
He folded it and put it in his pocket. Then he did the third bow to her, the considering one; he had never once managed it properly in the drawing room. He tilted from the shoulders and lowered his eyes and let her see him look, and held the pause a fraction too long, and then longer than that.
*I have considered you,* it said.
"Potter," Draconia said. "That's the wrong bow. That's the one for people you mean to insult."
"No, it isn't," he said. "You told me what it actually means, on the first day. You just told me I couldn't do it yet."
She looked at him. Something at the corner of her mouth gave way.
"*Level five.*"
He kissed her somewhere between five and four. She kissed him back with one hand fisted in the front of the midnight robes she'd chosen for him, the green coming up in the weave where she held it. When the lift shuddered to a halt and the grilles began to rattle open, neither of them moved.
"*Level four. Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures.*"
A wizard with a crate of something squeaking looked into the lift, looked at them, and decided to wait for the next one.
Draconia pulled back an inch. Her pins had come loose and her lipstick wasn't where she had put it.
"Same time Tuesday," she said.
"I'm fully trained."
"You are *absolutely* not." She reached up and fixed his collar. "There are the Selwyns to deal with, and the house-elf bill, and you're going to have to give a maiden speech, and you can't even pour."
"I can pour."
"You can pour *tea*." The grilles shut again. The lift began, very slowly, to rise. "I'm putting my rates up."
"How much?"
She thought about it. Then she kissed him again, briefly, on the corner of his mouth.
"Ask me on Tuesday," said Draconia Malfoy.