Chapter 1: Clause Nine
The Pairing Ledger had been carried up from the Department of Mysteries at seven that morning, and by nine Hermione Granger had decided she hated it more than she hated the Act.
It sat on a lectern at the front of the old Wizengamot chamber, a book the size of a headstone, bound in something grey and pebbled that she suspected had once belonged to an animal with opinions. The two Unspeakables who brought it in had worn dragon-hide gloves to the elbow and the expressions of men carrying a sleeping Horntail up a staircase. She had asked, twice and in writing, what the binding was made of. Both memos had come back folded into neat paper birds with nothing written on them at all.
"You're doing the face," Harry murmured.
"I don't have a face."
"You've got a face. It's the one you do when Kingsley says 'let's revisit this next quarter.'"
She unfolded her arms, because he was right, and then folded them again, because the chamber was cold and full of people who were staring at her.
They had reason to. Every unmarried witch and wizard in Britain between twenty-one and forty had received an owl on Monday summoning them to the Ministry for the reading, and every single one of them knew whose name sat at the top of the Matrimonial Restoration Act's drafting committee. Hermione had watched it sink in on their faces as they filed past her: Seamus, who gave her a wounded look; Pansy Parkinson, who gave her a much worse one; a row of Ravenclaws she half recognised who simply looked at their shoes as if she might pair them out of spite.
She had not wanted to write it. Nobody believed that, and she had stopped saying it in June.
The old guard on the Wizengamot had wanted a marriage law since the casualty lists were published, and by the spring of 2005 they had the votes. Births in magical families had fallen by a third since the war. Half the old houses had no heirs. Somebody was going to write the thing, Kingsley had told her over a terrible cup of Ministry tea, and it could be her or it could be Corvin Wellbelove, who still referred to Muggle-borns in committee as "the newer families."
So she had written it. She had cut the blood-status weighting on her first pass and the heir quotas on her second. She had added the betrothal exemption, which was how Harry came to be standing beside her as a spectator instead of a participant, and how Ron had registered an engagement to a lovely Muggle accountant from Croydon called Sandra forty minutes after the Act's first reading. She had added a dissolution route after a year and a day. And at two in the morning, furious, with Wellbelove's latest amendments spread across her kitchen table, she had added Clause Nine and Clause Four.
Clause Four said that no witch or wizard would be exempt by reason of office, rank, blood or service.
Clause Nine said that anyone who had borne the Dark Mark and refused their match would forfeit everything they owned to the Reparations Fund.
She had been rather proud of Clause Nine.
At the lectern, the Ledger's pages began to turn on their own. A quill rose from the gutter of the book, dipped itself in nothing, and started to write in gold.
"Abbott, Hannah," read the clerk, and the hall held its breath, and then, "Macmillan, Ernest," and Hannah let out a sound that could have been relief or could have been the start of a long sob. The quill moved on. Seamus got Millicent Bulstrode and went the colour of skirting board. Pansy got Oliver Wood, who was visibly trying to work out whether this would affect his Puddlemere contract. Somebody near the back laughed and was shushed by fifty people at once.
Hermione stopped listening properly somewhere in the Fs. She was thinking about the Elf Labour Protections Bill, which was due its second reading in November, and whether she could get Percy to second it, and whether it would survive Wellbelove's committee if she wasn't there to sit on it.
"Granger, Hermione Jean."
She looked up.
The quill hung over the page for a long moment. It had not done that for anyone else. The chamber noticed, and the quiet changed texture, the way a crowd goes still before a Bludger hits.
The quill wrote.
"Malfoy, Draco Lucius."
There was no gasp. That was what she would remember afterwards: no gasp, no shout, just two hundred people turning their heads in the same direction like sunflowers, toward the back of the chamber, where a tall man in a dove-grey suit was leaning against a pillar with his hands in his pockets.
He did not look surprised. He looked, if anything, as though a train he had been waiting for had finally pulled in on time.
Across the full length of the chamber, Draco Malfoy met her eyes and inclined his head, exactly once. Then he straightened, turned, and walked out before the clerk had finished reading the next name.
"Hermione," Harry said carefully.
"Don't," she said. "I need to think."
She took the stairs to Level Two because she could not face the lift. She could not face the lift's other occupants, or the memos circling its ceiling, or the cheerful disembodied voice announcing the Department of Magical Law Enforcement as if it were a destination anyone chose.
There had to be something. She had written the Act; she knew every clause by heart, every sub-clause, every footnote Wellbelove had slipped into the schedules at midnight. There was always something. Laws were made by people, and people left gaps, and she was very, very good at finding gaps.
She went through it clause by clause on the stairs. By the time she reached her office she had found nothing, and she had found it thoroughly.
The door was open. She was certain she had locked it.
Draco Malfoy was sitting in her chair.
He had his feet on the floor, which was something, and his jacket folded over the back of the chair, which was not. In front of him lay the bound committee copy of the Act, the one with her notes in the margins, and he was reading it with a green pencil in one hand and the unhurried attention of a man who has nowhere else to be.
"Get out of my chair."
"It's a very good chair." He did not look up. "This isn't Ministry issue. The Ministry would never buy you a chair with lumbar support. You bought this yourself."
"Malfoy."
"Granger." He turned a page. "Clause Nine. 'Any witch or wizard who has borne the Dark Mark, and who refuses, obstructs, or fails to solemnise a match made under this Act within thirty days of its recording, shall forfeit all real property and vaulted assets to the Reparations Fund.'" He tapped the pencil against the page. "It's got a lovely rhythm. Did you read it out loud when you wrote it?"
"Yes," she said, because it was true, and because lying to him had never once in her life seemed worth the effort.
That made him look up. His eyes were the same pale grey they had always been, but the rest of his face had changed in the years since the trials. The sharpness had worn into something leaner and more tired. There was a faint scar through his left eyebrow she didn't know the story of.
"And Clause Four." He flipped back without needing to search for it. "'No witch or wizard shall be exempt from the provisions of this Act by reason of office, rank, blood, or service.' Service. That's the clever word, isn't it? That's you shutting the door on war heroes. So nobody could say an Order of Merlin bought you out."
"So nobody could say anything bought anyone out."
"Mm." He set the pencil down. "You wrote it so my father couldn't buy his way out of something for once. You just never thought it would be you standing in the doorway."
She came in and shut the door, because the office next to hers belonged to a woman from the Improper Use of Magic Office who had ears like a bat. Then, because he still had not moved, she sat down in the visitor's chair on the wrong side of her own desk. It was a small indignity. She had survived larger ones.
Above his head, pinned to the corkboard between a Floo schedule and a photograph of Crookshanks asleep in a box of case files, was a letter. Plain parchment, a dozen lines, no signature. She had pinned it up in February and never quite managed to take it down. She looked at it now, briefly, the way some people touched wood.
"I've been looking for a way out," she said.
"Since the reading?"
"Since the stairs."
"I've been looking since March." He leaned back. "There isn't one. You write very tight law, Granger. It's extremely irritating."
"Thank you."
"It wasn't a compliment."
"It was, a bit."
Something happened at the corner of his mouth that on another man she might have called a smile. It went away again quickly.
"So," he said. "Thirty days. You lose your post if you refuse, and your little elf bill dies in committee without you. I lose the Manor and whatever is left in the vaults. Neither of us is going to refuse. Shall we skip the part where you shout at me?"
"I wasn't going to shout."
"You were going to shout a bit."
She pulled a fresh sheet of parchment from the drawer, which meant leaning across him, which he permitted without comment. She uncapped her pen.
"Terms," she said.
"Naturally."
"One. Separate bedrooms."
"Agreed."
"Two. Neither of us speaks to the Prophet. About anything. Ever."
"Agreed, and I'd like it in blood."
"It's not going in blood. Three. We file for dissolution on the first day the Act allows, a year and a day from the ceremony, by mutual petition." She wrote it out, then looked up. "And I won't live at—"
"No," he said.
It came out quick and flat and very quiet, and it stopped her pen.
"I wasn't going to ask you to," Draco said. He was looking at the parchment, not at her. "I don't live there myself. I haven't in years."
There was a short, odd silence. She had prepared a speech about the Manor. She had prepared it in the stairwell, between Clause Six and Clause Seven, and it had been very good, and she discovered she did not need any of it.
"Where do you live?" she asked eventually.
"Above a workshop in Knockturn Alley."
"Absolutely not."
"Then I suppose I'm moving into yours." He held out his hand for the pen. She gave it to him, mostly out of curiosity, and watched him add in neat, slanting script: Four. The left half of the bathroom shelf is mine. Five. No one refers to this as the Malfoy-Granger marriage.
She frowned at it. "What do you want it called, then?"
"Alphabetical." He slid the parchment back. "Granger-Malfoy. G comes before M. I'd have thought you of all people would insist."
She had opened her mouth to argue, purely on principle, when someone knocked on the door and opened it without waiting.
Corvin Wellbelove was a soft, pink man with a voice like warm butter, and Hermione had never once heard him say anything kind that did not cost someone else something. He was Undersecretary to the Chief Warlock. Since August he had also been Head of the Matrimonial Compliance Office, a post Hermione had fought for six weeks to keep out of the Act and lost in a single afternoon vote.
"Miss Granger. Mr Malfoy." He beamed at them both. "Congratulations are in order, I think. Such a symbolic match. The Prophet will be beside itself."
"The Prophet," said Draco pleasantly, "can go and—"
"Thank you, Undersecretary," Hermione said.
"I only came up to tell you personally," Wellbelove went on, as if neither of them had spoken, "that I've taken the liberty of assigning your file to myself. Given its sensitivity. You'll recall the dissolution provisions require proof of good-faith cohabitation for the full year." His eyes went to the parchment on the desk, and to the word bedrooms, and his smile widened by a careful quarter inch. "Inspections are unannounced, of course. Good faith can't be rehearsed. You wrote that line yourself, Miss Granger, I believe."
She had. She had written it to stop people like him from faking marriages for property.
"Do let me know," he said, "if there's anything at all I can do."
The door clicked shut behind him. Hermione let out a long breath through her nose.
"He wants it to fail," she said. "Obviously he wants it to fail. It's the Muggle-born who wrote the Act and the Death Eater it was written for. If it falls apart, he gets to stand up in the Wizengamot and say the whole thing was a farce from the start."
"No," said Draco slowly. He was still looking at the door. "That's not it."
"Then what?"
He turned back to her, and for the first time that morning he looked like someone who was afraid of something.
"He doesn't want it to fail, Granger," he said. "He wants it to fail on day twenty-nine."