Chapter 2: The House of Black Approves
Kreacher took one look at her in the hallway of Number Twelve and burst into tears.
"Mistress Narcissa's daughter," he croaked, clutching at the hem of Harry's robe, which she was still wearing. "In this house. At last, at last, a daughter of the Blacks comes home, and in such a state, in the Half-blood's clothes—"
"Kreacher," said Harry.
"—with her feet bare, like a Mudblood's scullery maid—"
"Kreacher."
"Kreacher will run Miss a bath," the elf announced, with tremendous dignity, and vanished with a pop that sounded distinctly triumphant.
Draconia stood in the dark, narrow hallway and looked at Harry. Harry looked at the ceiling.
"He's never run me a bath," he said. "Nine years. Not once."
Then the curtains at the end of the hall twitched open on their own, as they always did when anyone raised their voice, and Walburga Black's portrait drew breath to scream. Harry winced in advance. Her yellowed face swung toward them, mouth wide, and fixed on Draconia.
The scream did not come.
The old woman in the frame looked her up and down, slowly, from the uncombed silver-blond hair to the velvet dressing gown. Her eyes narrowed. Then she sniffed.
"Cissy's," she said. "Obviously. You have the Black wrists. Stand up straight."
Draconia stood up straight before she could stop herself.
"Better." Walburga turned her gaze on Harry, and it curdled. "At last, someone in this house with breeding. Get her out of that rag. She looks like a refugee." And the curtains swept shut.
Harry stared at the curtains for a long moment.
"I've been trying to get her off that wall for nine years," he said. "I've used a Sticking-Charm counter-jinx. I've used a chisel. Ron once tried setting her on fire."
"Perhaps you should have tried breeding."
"Your house threw you out of a window," Harry said, "and it's been half an hour and you're already smug about mine."
By noon Grimmauld Place had been invaded.
Hermione arrived first, by Floo, with an armful of books, two boxes of clothes, a quill tucked behind her ear and the expression of a woman who had been told there was a seven-hundred-year-old curse in the building and had cancelled three meetings. She stopped dead in the kitchen doorway when she saw Draconia, opened her mouth, closed it, and then said, very sensibly, "Do you know your size?"
"I do not," said Draconia, with the last shreds of her dignity, "know my size."
"Right. I've brought a range." Hermione put the boxes down. "Some of these are mine, some are Ginny's. Ginny says keep anything you like, but if you stretch her Harpies jumper she will find you."
Ron came through the Floo behind her, brushing soot off his shoulders. He looked at Draconia, who was sitting at the kitchen table in one of Harry's old Quidditch jerseys with her hair tied back in a knot with a bit of string, and said, "Bloody hell."
"Yes, thank you, Weasley."
"No, but really. Bloody hell."
"That's the second time."
"It's warranted twice." Ron sat down across from her, uninvited, and helped himself to a biscuit. "You look like your mum."
It was, Draconia thought, possibly the nicest thing Ron Weasley had ever said to her, and she had no idea what to do with it, so she took a biscuit as well and they ate in silence while Hermione unpacked an alarming number of books.
The clothes turned out to be the easiest part. Draconia retreated upstairs with both boxes and came back down twenty minutes later in a pair of Hermione's black trousers, which fitted, and a grey cashmere jumper of Ginny's, which did not quite, falling off one shoulder in a way that she decided was intentional. She had wrestled her hair into a plait. It was not a good plait.
Harry was coming out of the pantry with a tin of tea. He saw her on the stairs and walked into the doorframe.
Not dramatically. Just a soft, solid knock, shoulder against wood, the tea tin rattling. He stepped back and looked at the doorframe as though it had moved.
Ron, at the table, put his face in his hands. Hermione made a small noise into her book that might have been a cough.
"All right there, Potter?" Draconia said.
"Fine," said Harry. "Grand. It's a narrow house."
"Isolde Malfoy," Hermione said, an hour later, laying a book open on the table between them. The page was so old it had gone the colour of weak tea. "Born around 1290. Firstborn of Brutus Malfoy, who was, from everything I can find, a truly horrible man."
"That tracks," said Draconia.
"She was meant to inherit. She was the eldest, she was by all accounts a gifted witch, and the estate wasn't entailed then. Then her younger brother was born, and Brutus had the estate bound so it could only pass through the male line. A blood entail. Very old magic, very nasty. It ties the house to the heir and the heir to the vault." Hermione turned a page. "In the plague year, Isolde tried to open the vault to buy food for the villages around the estate. Her father had her cast out. Struck off the register. The house itself was charmed to turn her away at the door."
The kitchen was quiet. Draconia thought of the painting hung face to the wall, and of her father's hand around her wrist.
"She cursed the line before she died," Hermione went on. "Not every heir. One heir. Whichever one did the thing she was punished for." She ran her finger along a line of cramped Latin and translated. "'If ever the heir of this house gives away what the house has hoarded, let the blood make him what it unmade in me, and let the house that cast me out cast him also.'"
Harry, who had been leaning against the dresser with his arms folded, slowly unfolded them.
"Gives away," he said. "What did you give away, Malfoy?"
Draconia looked at the grain of the table.
"Half the vault," Hermione said quietly. Draconia's head came up. Hermione's face was very strange, and very gentle. "Didn't you. The anonymous donation to the war-families fund. Last week. I sit on the board. We didn't know who it was. Gringotts wouldn't say."
"That was the point of anonymous, Granger."
"It's the largest single gift the fund has ever had," Hermione said.
"It's the least anyone in my family has ever done." Draconia's face was hot. "And I'd thank you not to tell the Prophet. Or Weasley's mother. Or anyone."
Ron had stopped chewing. Harry was looking at her in a way she could not stand, so she did not look back. She looked at the book instead, at Isolde's cramped handwriting, at the translation in Hermione's neat pencil.
"What's the end bit," she said. "The condition. Potter said there was something about the moon."
Hermione hesitated. "'Until the house that cast her out shall open to her whole,'" she read. "'And if it open not before the moon is twice dark, then let her stay what the blood has made her, for all her days.'"
"Twice dark," said Ron. "That's two new moons?"
"The first was last night. The curse fired at the dark of the moon." Hermione had a calendar out already. "The next one is in twenty-nine days."
She could not sleep. The bed in the room Kreacher had prepared was enormous, hung with green brocade, and smelled of mothballs and very old money, and every time she turned over her hair got caught under her shoulder and she woke up thinking someone had grabbed her.
At two in the morning she gave up and went down to the kitchen. She had brought nothing from the Manor, of course, but Harry had a surprisingly decent set of cauldrons in the cupboard by the range, left over from what Hermione called his Auror training and Harry called his dark period. By half past two she had a reversal draught simmering, not because it would work, a blood curse would laugh at it, but because her hands knew how to brew and nothing else about her body felt like it knew anything.
At twenty to three Harry came down the stairs in a T-shirt and pyjama bottoms, his glasses crooked, and stopped in the doorway.
"Doorframe's on your left," she said, without turning round.
"Funny." He came and sat at the table. "Couldn't sleep?"
"I keep lying on my own hair."
"That's a real problem?"
"It's like being attacked by a very soft animal all night." She stirred anticlockwise, seven times. "What's your excuse?"
He didn't answer for a while. When he did, he said, "Half the Malfoy vault."
"Potter."
"Why didn't you tell anyone?"
She tapped the spoon on the rim of the cauldron and put it down.
"Because then it would have been about me," she said. "Draco Malfoy buys his way back into polite society. I could see the headline. I didn't want anyone to have to say thank you." She turned round and leaned against the range. "And because half of those families lost someone in my drawing room, or near enough. Granger was on that floor. You know what happened in that house. I've been walking past that door for seven years, and I couldn't do anything about it, and I could do this."
Harry was looking at her the way he had looked at her in the kitchen that afternoon, the way she could not stand, so she said, "Stop it."
"Stop what?"
"Looking at me like I'm a stray you've decided to keep."
"I'm not," he said. "I'm looking at you like I'm wondering why I spent seven years thinking you were still a prat."
"I am still a prat."
"Yeah," Harry agreed. "But you're also this."
She did not have anything to say to that. She turned back to the cauldron so that he would not see her face, and the plait she had tied that afternoon chose that moment to come undone and spill over her shoulder into the steam.
"For God's sake," she muttered, and grabbed at it, and Harry was already on his feet.
"Here. Sit down."
"I don't need—"
"Your hair is about to go into a potion, Malfoy. Sit down."
She sat. He stood behind her chair. For a long moment nothing happened, and then she felt his fingers, careful and clumsy, gathering her hair up off her neck. He divided it into three. He crossed one over the other. He swore under his breath and started again.
"You're terrible at this," she said.
"I've done it once. On a Muggle mannequin. During a disguise module."
"You are genuinely terrible."
"You're letting me," said Harry.
She was. She sat very still in the warm kitchen with the potion ticking over and the house asleep above them and his knuckles brushing the back of her neck every time he crossed a strand, and she did not tell him to stop.
"There," he said finally, and tied it off with the bit of string. "It's a bit lumpy."
She put a hand up and felt it. It was dreadful. It was the best thing anyone had done for her in days.
"Thank you," she said, and it came out quieter than she meant.
The crack of Apparition made them both jump. Tilly stood in the middle of the kitchen floor in her tea-towel smock, and she was shaking.
"Miss," she said. "Miss, you have to come. The house is sick."
Draconia was on her feet. "What do you mean, sick?"
"The wards, Miss. Without the heir, they are going out like candles." Tilly's ears were flat against her skull. "The roses are dying. The portraits are crying. And the east gallery, Miss." She swallowed. "The painting that faces the wall. Tonight, it turned around."