Chapter 1: The Peacocks Knew First
The peacocks knew first.
Draco woke to one of them standing on his chest. It was the albino cock, his father's favourite, the one with the temper and the wattle like a bad decision, and it was looking down at him with an expression of profound aristocratic disappointment.
He was lying in the rose garden, before dawn, and the grass had soaked through his pyjamas. The pyjamas were wrong. They were his, green silk and monogrammed, but they fitted like they belonged to a larger man. The sleeves swallowed his hands. The trousers had slid down to his ankles in a way that suggested he had either been undressing in his sleep or shrinking.
"Get off," he said to the peacock, and stopped.
That was not his voice.
The peacock left, with dignity. Draco sat up, and a curtain of hair fell into his face. It was white-blond and fine as cobweb, and it reached past his shoulders. It snagged on a thorn. He yanked it free, swore, and heard the swear come out in that same voice: low for a woman's, cool and clipped and drawling, but a woman's all the same.
He did not panic. Malfoys did not panic. Malfoys took stock.
His hands were narrower, the knuckles finer, the signet ring hanging loose on a finger it had fitted since he came of age. His wand was in his pocket, thank Merlin. He looked down the gaping neck of the pyjama top, looked back up at the sky very quickly, and said a word his mother would have hexed him for.
Then he panicked a bit.
The front door of Malfoy Manor was a slab of black oak older than the Statute of Secrecy, and it had known Draco's blood since before he could walk. He had stormed out of it and slunk back in. He had once, at a very low point, spent an entire night sitting against it on the inside, listening to the things happening in the drawing room and wishing it would let him out.
Now it would not let him in.
He put his palm flat to the wood, the way he had done ten thousand times, and the wards answered the way they answered intruders. There was a sound like a struck bell. Something invisible and enormous picked him up by the middle and set him down, quite firmly, on his backside in the gravel.
He sat there. The gravel was very cold.
"Tilly," he said.
The elf appeared with a crack at the edge of the drive, in the tea-towel smock she still insisted on despite six years of wages. She took one look at him and clapped both hands over her mouth.
"Oh," Tilly said, through her fingers. "Oh, Miss."
"I am not Miss."
Tilly lowered her hands. Her enormous eyes travelled slowly from his face to the general region of his chest and back up, and the look she gave him was so full of pity and tact that he wanted to lie down in the gravel and die.
"The house is saying it does not know you," she whispered. "Tilly asked it three times, Miss. It carried you out the window in your sleep like a cat, and Tilly could not stop it."
"The window," Draco said.
"The little one in the long gallery." Tilly wrung her smock. "It was very gentle, Miss. It put you in the roses."
Draco looked up at the house. Not a single lamp was lit. It had the air of a house that had drawn its curtains and was pretending to be out.
He asked for his dressing gown and slippers. Tilly brought them, the velvet gown trailing behind him like a cloak, the slippers slopping off his heels, and because she knew him better than he knew himself, she also brought a silver hand mirror he had not asked for. She held it out without a word.
He took it. He looked.
The face in the glass was his and was not. The bones were the same: the pointed chin, the long nose, the grey eyes Pansy had once called "unsettling in a way that's working for you." But someone had gone over all of it with a finer brush. The mouth was softer, the jaw narrower, the pale lashes absurdly long. He looked, he thought with a lurch, like the portraits in the east gallery. Like the women his father never talked about.
He looked like a Malfoy. He just did not look like Draco.
"Gringotts," he said aloud.
Tilly blinked.
"Three days ago. I signed the transfer, and the goblin asked if I was certain. He said the Malfoy entail was very old. I thought he was just being a goblin about it."
"Miss gave away the gold," Tilly said softly.
"Half of it. I gave away half of it." He lowered the mirror. "And the money cleared at midnight, and I woke up in the roses."
Somewhere behind him, at the end of the long drive, the iron gates gave a groan, and there was the unmistakable crack of someone Apparating in a hurry.
Draco had forgotten about the Trace.
Not the one every witch and wizard grew out of. The other one. The Ministry had laid it on the Manor seven years ago, as one of the conditions that kept his father out of Azkaban and his mother out of the newspapers: a monitoring charm that sat on the property like a cobweb and rang a bell somewhere in the Auror Office whenever anything Dark enough went off inside it. In seven years it had rung once, when Draco set the conservatory on fire brewing an Elixir to Induce Euphoria.
Apparently a centuries-old blood curse firing at midnight was Dark enough.
The figure coming up the drive was walking fast, wand out and low, the way Aurors were taught to walk. Scarlet Auror robes, buttoned wrong, over Muggle tracksuit bottoms and trainers. Hair flattened on one side as if he'd been asleep in a chair. Round glasses catching the first grey light.
Of course. Of course it was.
"Ministry," Harry Potter said, at a carrying, flat, professional pitch. "Step away from the door, please. Hands where I can see them."
Draco turned around.
He had not braced for the look on Potter's face. Potter stopped walking. His wand wavered off target by about a foot and stayed there. His eyes, as stupidly, unreasonably green as they had always been, went over Draco from the hair to the slippers and back up, and then did it again, slower, as though he had missed something the first time.
"Who," Potter said, "are you?"
"Potter," Draco said, "if you keep pointing that at me, I will make you eat it."
The wand dropped completely.
"Malfoy?"
"Well spotted. They should promote you."
"They did, actually," Potter said faintly. "Last year." He was still staring. He did not seem to be able to stop. "You're, um. You've got. You're a—"
"Yes."
Potter took a step closer, the way you might approach a Hippogriff, and Draco realised with deep and abiding fury that Potter was not looking at his face.
"My face is up here."
Potter's eyes snapped up. A dull red crawled from his collar to his ears. "I was looking at your face."
"That's worse, somehow."
"I was looking at your hair," Potter said, in the tone of a man digging. "It's very long."
"Potter, I have been thrown out of a window by my own house, and you are taking inventory. Could you possibly do your job?"
That worked. Something in Potter's face sharpened and settled, and he lifted his wand again, not at Draco but past him, toward the black door.
"Specialis Revelio."
The spell went out of him like a breath on a cold morning, pale and spreading, and when it touched Draco the air around him lit up.
He had seen curse-script before, but never on himself, and never like this: looping old handwriting, Norman French tangled with Latin, hanging around him like smoke from a snuffed candle. It coiled round his wrists. A thick knot of it hung over his heart and pulsed in time with it.
Potter whistled under his breath. "That's old."
"Thank you, I'd gathered."
"No, I mean it's really old. Hermione would sell her own wand." He walked a slow circle around Draco, reading, lips moving, and stopped behind him, very still. "There's a name on it. It's signed."
"Signed?"
"Like a letter." Potter came back around. He was frowning. "Who's Isolde?"
Draco went cold all over, in a way that had nothing to do with the grass.
There was a painting in the east gallery, at the far end, hung with its face to the wall. It had been hung that way for as long as anyone could remember. Once he had tried to turn it round, and his father had caught his wrist hard enough to bruise. That was never one of us, Lucius had said.
"Nobody," Draco said. "A rumour. An ancestor nobody talks about."
"Well, she's talking about you." Potter squinted at the knot over Draco's heart. "There's a condition at the end. 'Until the house that cast her out shall open to her whole.' And then something about the moon. Before the moon is dark, or after it's dark, I can't—" He waved his wand, and the smoke-script faded. "I need Hermione."
"You are not telling Granger about this."
"You're a cursed civilian on a monitored property. I have to tell my department, and Hermione's in my department." Potter tucked his wand into his sleeve. Then he did something that Draco would think about, uncomfortably, for days afterward. He unbuttoned his badly buttoned robe, shrugged out of it, and held it out.
"What," said Draco.
"You're shivering."
"I am not shivering."
"Your lips are blue, Malfoy."
He was shivering. He took the robe. It was warm and smelled of tea and Floo powder and broom polish, and he hated, absolutely loathed, how much better it made him feel.
"Right," Potter said. "Let's get you inside, and then I'll Floo the office."
"The house won't have me."
"Let me try." And before Draco could say anything, Potter walked up the steps and put his hand on the door.
It swung inward, silent and welcoming, like a dog rolling over.
Potter looked back over his shoulder, half apologetic. "It's always liked me. I think it's the life debt."
"Get out of my house."
"I'm trying to get you into your house." Potter held the door wide and stood aside. "Come on."
Draco got as far as the threshold. The bell rang out again, and the door slammed shut between them so hard the knocker jumped. He heard Potter swear on the other side. A moment later it opened again, only for Potter, who stepped out and shut it carefully behind him.
They stood on the steps and looked at each other.
"Well," said Potter. "That's not great."
"I'm going to murder you. And then a seven-hundred-year-old witch."
"Fine, but you can't stay out here. St Mungo's has a ward for curses—"
"No."
"Malfoy."
"I am not lying in a bed on the fourth floor so every Healer who was ever in my year can come and look at me." It came out sharper than he meant. "I'll go to my mother."
"In France? Through which Floo? It's in there." Potter pointed at the house. "Parkinson?"
"Italy. With a man called Fabrizio, who she says is a poet and who I believe to be a crook."
Somewhere a peacock screamed, which peacocks did, for no reason, at dawn.
"I've got a spare room," Potter said. "Several, actually. It's a big house and I'm hardly ever in it."
Draco stared at him. "Grimmauld Place."
"Kreacher will hate you." Potter paused. "No, actually, he'll love you. You're a Black, technically. He'll be unbearable."
"Potter, you can't possibly want me living in your house."
"I don't want you sleeping in a hedge either," Potter said, which wasn't an answer, and they both noticed it wasn't.
There was a soft crack at Draco's elbow. Tilly was back, and she was holding something out to him with both hands, the way she might have presented a cake. It was a sheet of thick, yellowed parchment, torn ragged along one edge.
"From the register, Miss," she whispered. "In the library. The house tore it out and gave it to Tilly. It said, give this to her."
He knew the page. Every Malfoy did. It was the last page of the family register, where each heir signed his name in his own blood on the day he came of age. His own name had sat at the bottom of it for ten years.
It was gone. The place was blank, as if no one had ever written there.
Beneath it, in a different hand, in ink so fresh it still shone wet, someone had written a new name. The script was old and looping and very elegant, the same hand that had hung in smoke around him on the drive.
Potter leaned over his shoulder to read it. His breath stirred the hair at Draco's temple.
"Draconia," Potter said slowly.
"Don't."
"Draconia Malfoy."
"Potter, I swear on every one of my ancestors—"
"Including Isolde?"
She turned around to tell him exactly where he could put Isolde, and found him close, closer than he'd been all morning, near enough that she could see the sleep crease still on his cheek. He wasn't laughing. He was looking at her face, this time. Only her face, as if it were a word he was trying to learn.
"Come on, Draconia," Harry Potter said quietly. "Let's go home."