Chapter 1: The Good Bench
I had prepared for the interview, the written examination and the practical. I had not prepared for the bench.
The Belby Fellowship in Curative Research had been endowed by the family of Damocles Belby, who invented the Wolfsbane Potion and was, from everything I've read, as difficult as he was brilliant. It paid for one researcher, one lab and three years, and this year, for the first time in its history, the selection panel at St Mungo's had named its target: the long-term nerve damage left by prolonged exposure to the Cruciatus Curse. There were people on the fourth floor who had been waiting for that cure since before I'd heard the word *magic*.
I resigned from the Ministry the day the notice went up. Harry said it was the most Hermione thing I'd ever done. Ron said it was the second most, after the time I'd tried to unionise his mother's kitchen. I bought a new set of scales, re-read everything Belby ever published, and arrived at the basement lab at seven o'clock on a Monday morning in March to find the best bench in the room already taken.
It was the one under the high window, the only natural light in the place, with the good ventilation hood and the brass rack of graduated flasks. On it, someone had laid out a silver knife, a set of crystal phials arranged by size, a bound notebook in green leather and a china teacup with a saucer.
Behind it, wearing a high-collared black lab robe with dragonhide cuffs, and drinking from the teacup, sat Draconia Malfoy.
"Granger," she said. "You're late."
"It's seven o'clock."
"I was here at half past six." She set the cup down in its saucer with a click. "I assumed you'd want the other bench. It's closer to the door. In case you need to run out crying when the board picks me."
Healer Augustus Pye, who was now head of the Spell Damage research unit and still, at nearly forty, had the eager pink face of the trainee who'd once tried to stitch Mr Weasley's snakebite with Muggle thread, explained the situation over a pot of very bad tea.
"There were two outstanding candidates," he said, beaming at us both as though he'd done something clever. "The board couldn't choose. So we thought, well, why not let the work decide? You'll share the lab for six weeks. Same resources, same access to the archive, same supplier accounts. At the end, you'll each present to the panel, and we'll award the Fellowship on the strength of what you've produced."
"Six weeks," I said.
"Share," said Malfoy, in exactly the tone I'd have used for *gargle*.
"I know it's unusual." Healer Pye looked from one of us to the other with an optimism that I can only describe as medically unsound. "But I've read both your applications, and I think you'll find you have more in common than you'd imagine. You both cited Belby on page one. You both have a rather lovely approach to cross-sensitised stabilisers. And of course," he added cheerfully, "you were at Hogwarts together. So you'll know each other already."
Malfoy and I looked at each other across his desk.
"Oh," she said, "we know each other."
I want to be fair to myself. For the whole of the first week, I was extremely mature.
I took the bench by the door. I set up my own scales and my own cauldron, a good pewter one, size four, and I laid out my notes and I got on with it. My approach was a slow-infusion restorative, built on a base of Murtlap essence and essence of dittany, that would coax damaged nerve-sheathing to regrow along its original path instead of in the tangled scar-mass that left people trembling for decades. The theory was sound. The difficulty, as it always was in this field, was holding it stable at body heat for long enough to do any good.
Malfoy's approach, as far as I could tell from across the room, involved a great deal of moonlight, an alarming amount of powdered silver, and humming.
She hummed. She hummed while she chopped, while she stirred, while she wrote in the green notebook with a silver-nibbed pen. It was never a recognisable tune. It was never loud. It was *constant*, in the way a dripping tap is constant, and by Wednesday I was dreaming about it.
"Do you have to do that?" I said, on Thursday.
"Do what?"
"Hum."
She considered this with her head on one side. She'd pinned her hair up in a knot that should not have been possible with three pins, and she had a smudge of powdered silver on her cheekbone that she plainly didn't know about and that I was not going to tell her about.
"I don't know," she said. "I've never tried not to."
"Try."
She tried. She lasted forty seconds. Then, very quietly, with her eyes on her cauldron, she started again, slightly lower, as if lowering it were a concession.
The first lunch went missing on Friday.
I am a creature of habit about lunch, and I make no apology for it. A cheese and pickle sandwich on brown bread, cut into triangles, an apple, and a flask of tea. I'd been eating the same lunch since my first job at the Ministry because it meant one decision fewer in a day already full of them. I put it in its paper bag on the shelf by the door each morning, labelled with my name, which I should have known was an invitation.
At half past twelve, I went to the shelf. The paper bag was there. My name was there. The sandwich was not.
The apple was still there. So was the tea. Somebody had left a small folded card in place of the sandwich, of heavy cream stock, with a crest embossed on the front: a serpent and a pair of dragons rampant.
Inside, in green ink, it said: *Branston? Really, Granger?*
I turned round.
Malfoy was eating her lunch at her bench in the window light. She ate as she did everything, as if she were being photographed for a portrait: a starched linen napkin across her lap and a china plate in front of her. On the plate were two neat triangles of cheese and pickle on brown bread.
She looked up and met my eyes, quite calmly, and took a bite.
"It's very vinegary," she said, chewing. "You'd think it would be dreadful. It isn't."
"That," I said, "is my sandwich."
"Was."
"That's *theft*."
"It's research." She dabbed the corner of her mouth with her napkin. "I wanted to understand your process. I've decided your process is chaotic, and that chutney is a crime against cheese. But that's not a bad sandwich, Granger, I'll give you that. There's a lot of butter."
"You could have *asked*."
"You'd have said no."
I would have said no. I said nothing, which she correctly interpreted as conceding the point, and she went back to the sandwich, and I went back to my bench and ate an apple for lunch and took notes on Murtlap degradation with such ferocity that I tore the parchment.
It was a week before I noticed the other thing.
I'd hit the problem I'd been dreading since the beginning. My restorative held perfectly up to about blood heat and then, at the precise point where it needed to do its work, it began to separate. It went from a clear pale gold to a thick, curdled, useless amber, the colour of old toffee. I ran it eleven times. I adjusted the dittany, the stirring, the Murtlap ratio. I tried a cooling charm on the flask, which only delayed it, and a Stasis Charm, which stopped the separation by stopping everything else as well. By the following Friday I'd been in the lab until ten o'clock four nights running and was beginning to suspect that the laws of magic were personally against me.
On Friday night I took my notebook home. I always did, as a rule; I wasn't stupid enough to leave a year's work on a shelf in a room I shared with a Malfoy. I sat at my kitchen table with a cup of tea gone cold, turned to the page of the last failed trial, and stopped.
There was a note in the margin.
It was not my handwriting. My handwriting is fast and small and slants hard to the right. This was upright and elegant and very precise, in green ink, beside my notes on the eleventh trial, with a neat line drawn to the exact point in my method where I'd added the stabiliser.
*Your stabiliser curdles above blood heat because you're using powdered moonstone,* it said. *Powder has too much surface. Try a single polished cabochon, suspended, and take it out at the third turn. You're very welcome. D.M.*
I read it three times.
Then I put on my coat, went straight back to St Mungo's, let myself into the empty basement lab at eleven o'clock at night, and ran it again with a single polished moonstone on a silver thread, taken out at the third turn.
It held.
It held at blood heat. It held above. It sat in the flask under the lamp, a perfect clear gold, glowing a little, and did not curdle, and I stood over it with my hands flat on the bench and wanted, very badly, to scream.
Because she was right. Because she had picked the lock on my notebook, or charmed it, or simply walked over and opened it while I was at the archive. Because she'd read the work I'd been guarding all month like a Hungarian Horntail on a clutch, and instead of stealing it, she had fixed it. And because she must have looked at that page and seen the answer in the time it took to drink a cup of tea.
I looked across the dark lab at her bench in the moonlight.
The green leather notebook sat there in the middle of it, perfectly squared to the edge.
She'd left it out.