Chapter 3: Open to Her Whole
The roses were dying.
She smelled it before she saw it, the moment they Apparated to the gates: a sweet, rotten, autumn smell, wrong for June. The long beds that ran down either side of the drive had gone brown at the edges and black at the hearts. Petals lay on the gravel like dropped confetti. The yew hedges, which her great-great-grandmother had charmed to stay clipped forever, were sprouting ragged shoots in every direction, as if they had forgotten what shape they were supposed to be.
And the house was making a noise. She had never heard it make a noise before. It was very low, more felt than heard, the sound of the struck bell from that morning drawn out and out and faltering, like a note held by someone who was running out of breath.
"Merlin," Harry said softly.
Every window was dark except one. High up in the east wing, at the end of the long gallery, a single pane flickered with a weak blue light, on and off, on and off.
"That's where she is," said Draconia.
"Right." Harry was already rolling his sleeves up. "I'll go in. Tilly can show me the way. You wait here, and if anything goes wrong—"
"If anything goes wrong, I can't get in to help you. Yes, Potter, I'm aware of the parameters of my own curse."
He looked at her. In the dark, with his glasses catching the blue flicker from the window, he looked very tired and very determined and very much like someone who had once walked into the Forbidden Forest on purpose.
"I'll be quick," he said.
She waited on the steps.
It was the longest twenty minutes of her life, and she had once spent an evening at a dinner table with the Dark Lord. She sat on the cold stone with Harry's Auror robe wrapped round her and listened to the house groan, and every so often something inside it fell with a distant crash, and she counted her breaths and did not, at any point, put her ear to the door to listen for his voice. She did not do that more than twice.
Then the door opened, and Harry backed out of it, bent nearly double, carrying a gilt frame half as tall as he was.
"Mind the step," said the portrait. "Young man, mind the step. I have not been carried anywhere in four hundred years and I would prefer not to begin with a fall."
Harry set it down on the gravel, very carefully, and stepped back, breathing hard. Draconia came down the steps.
She had always assumed Isolde would be ugly. A disgrace, her father's tone had said. Something so shameful it had to be turned to the wall. But the woman in the painting was not ugly. She was tall and pale and sharp-chinned, in a gown of faded blue with long hanging sleeves, a sprig of rowan berries pinned at her breast. Her hair was white-blond and fell to her waist. Her eyes were grey.
It was like looking in the silver hand mirror again.
"Well," said Isolde Malfoy, and looked Draconia up and down exactly the way Walburga Black had done. "You are taller than I expected."
"You did this to me."
"I did." Isolde inclined her head. "Seven hundred years ago, in a fit of temper I do not entirely regret. Sit, granddaughter. You look as though you might fall over, and the young man is spent."
"I'm fine," said Harry, who was leaning on his knees.
"I'm not your granddaughter," said Draconia.
"Near enough, across twenty generations." The painted woman settled her hands in her lap. "You want to know why. You have been asking it of the house for a day and a night, and the house, being a house, has no answers. Only orders. My father's orders. He was very fond of giving them."
"Hermione told us," Harry said. "About the plague year. About the vault."
"Did she? Then she will have told you I was cast out for opening it." Isolde's mouth tightened. "That is the story. The truth is plainer. I was cast out because I was a daughter, and because I would not pretend to be sorry for it. My father would have forgiven the gold. He could not forgive that I stood at his door and did not beg."
Draconia said nothing. The house groaned behind her.
"So I made a curse," Isolde said. "Not to punish. My father was dead before I finished it, and I find it is no good punishing the dead. I made it to wait. I said, one day an heir of this house will do what I did. He will give away what the house has hoarded, because he cannot bear to keep it. And on that day, let him stand where I stood. Let him be what I was, and see if the house has learned anything." She looked up at the dark windows. "It has not. It still turns away whatever it does not recognise. But perhaps the heir has."
"I don't understand," Draconia said. "I've tried. I've put my hand on that door a dozen times. It doesn't know me."
"Of course it doesn't. You knock like a guest." Isolde's grey eyes were very steady. "You stand on the step with your hand on the wood, waiting to be told you are allowed. My father's house does not open for those who ask. It never did. 'Until the house shall open to her whole.' Not to a name in a register. To all of you. The part that gave the gold away. The part that lived here, in those years when the house was full of monsters, and did nothing, and has never forgiven itself. The part that is standing on this gravel in borrowed clothes. All of it. You must not ask the house to take you. You must tell it."
The single blue light in the east window flickered and went out.
The house was completely dark now. The groan had dropped so low that Draconia felt it in her teeth. Tilly, at the bottom of the steps, gave a thin wail and pressed both hands to her face.
Harry straightened up. He didn't say anything. He just looked at Draconia, the way he had looked at her across the kitchen table, as if he already knew what she was going to do and had decided to be there for it.
She climbed the steps.
She took out her wand and, before she could think about it, drew the tip across the heel of her left hand. It stung. A line of red welled up, bright in the dark.
She put her bloody palm flat on the black oak, and she did not wait.
"My name is Draconia Malfoy," she said. Her voice came out steady, low, her own. "I gave away the gold, and if you push me, I'll give away the rest. I lived in this house when it was full of monsters, and I was a coward, and I've had to live with that, and I'm still here. I've been a son. Apparently I'm a daughter now. I don't care which one you were expecting." She pressed her hand harder against the wood. "I'm not asking to come in. This is my house. Open the door."
For a moment, nothing.
Then the bell rang out again. Not faltering this time. Clear and full and enormous, a sound like every church bell in Wiltshire struck at once, rolling out over the lawns and the yews and the dying roses. Under her palm, the wood went warm.
The door swung open.
Light poured out. Every lamp in the entrance hall flared at once, and then the lamps in the corridor beyond, and then the windows above, one after another, racing up through the house and along the wings, until the whole of Malfoy Manor stood blazing against the night like a ship. Behind her she heard Tilly shriek with joy. She heard something rustle in the flowerbeds and turned, in time to see the brown, dead rose heads lifting on their stems, uncurling, flushing back to white and blood-red and gold.
She looked down at her hand. The cut was gone.
"There," said Isolde, very quietly, from the gravel. "That is how it is done."
They hung her in the entrance hall. Draconia insisted. Facing the door, at eye level, so that she could see everyone who came in.
"So I may judge them," Isolde said, pleased.
"So you can tell me if any of them knock like guests."
Before they left her there, the painted woman beckoned Draconia close, and spoke so that Harry, who was arguing with Tilly about whether it was too early for breakfast, could not hear.
"The blood will listen to you now," she said. "You have opened the door, and the curse is answered. If you ask it to give you back the shape you had before, it will."
Draconia looked down at her own hands. Narrow. Long fingers. Her signet ring hanging loose. Hands that had brewed a reversal draught she had known wouldn't work, and had let Harry Potter plait her hair.
"Do I have to decide now?"
Isolde laughed. It was a surprisingly warm sound. "You have the rest of your days, granddaughter. That was always rather the point."
The sun came up while they were in the rose garden.
She had not meant to end up there. She had walked out to look at the roses, and Harry had followed, and somehow they had ended up at the exact spot where she had woken a day and a night ago with a peacock on her chest. The grass was still flattened in roughly the shape of her body.
"This is where it threw me," she said. "Right here."
"Gently, Tilly said."
"Tilly's a liar. I had gravel in places gravel should not be."
Harry laughed, and then stopped laughing, and she realised he was looking at her again. Not the stare from the drive. Something quieter and more serious that made her stomach drop.
"Potter, if you walk into a rosebush, I'm leaving you there."
"I watched you at your hearing," he said.
She went still.
"After the war. You were in that chair with the chains, and the whole Wizengamot was looking at you, and the press. And you didn't look at anyone. You just kept your chin up. The whole time. Like if you lowered it an inch, you'd fall apart." He pushed his glasses up. "I thought about that for years. I didn't know why. I'd see you in Diagon Alley, and think, there's Malfoy, still keeping his chin up. And then you opened the door yesterday morning and you looked exactly the same. Different, obviously, I'm not blind—"
"You've made that very clear."
"—but the same. You had your chin up, standing in the gravel with no shoes on." He took a breath. "I've been staring at you for a day and a night, and you keep thinking it's because of the curse. It isn't. The curse just gave me an excuse."
She looked at him. At the stupid hair and the crooked glasses and the sleep crease, still there, on his cheek. At the green eyes that had never once, in all the time she had known him, been any good at hiding anything.
"You're an idiot," she said.
"Yeah."
"I'm a prat, and you're an idiot."
"That's been established."
She took the front of his T-shirt in her fist and kissed him.
He made a small surprised sound against her mouth, and then his hands came up, one at her waist and one at the back of her neck, cradling the terrible lumpy plait he had tied, and he kissed her back like he had been waiting to. He tasted of tea. He was warm. Somewhere behind them the albino peacock let out a long, offended scream, and she felt Harry start to laugh into the kiss, and she bit his lip to make him stop, and he didn't, and she didn't care.
When she pulled back, he kept his forehead against hers.
"Draconia," he said, like he was trying it out.
"Don't push it."
"Draconia Malfoy."
"Potter."
"Harry," he said. "I think. After that. I think you have to call me Harry."
She opened her mouth to tell him exactly what she had to do, and saw something over his shoulder, and froze.
There was a beetle on the rosebush. A fat, glossy, green-black beetle, sitting on a white rose not two feet from Harry's ear. It was perfectly still. Its antennae were turned toward them. And around its tiny eyes there were markings, faint and pale and unmistakable, exactly like a pair of jewelled spectacles.
"Harry," Draconia said, very quietly, without moving her lips. "Don't turn around. Where's your wand?"