Chapter 1: Entire and With All Its Contents
Be it known that on this, the first day of March, in the year nineteen hundred and eighty, the Houses of Nott and of the undersigned do bind their heirs in marriage, the same to be solemnised no later than Midsummer's Eve in the year that the younger heir attains the age of five-and-twenty; and that should either heir refuse the bond, the family seat of the refusing House shall pass, entire and with all its contents, to the other.
You had read it so many times on the Portkey from Romania that you could recite it in your sleep, and you did, apparently, because Charlie Weasley had told you that at three in the morning in the bunkhouse you'd sat up and said entire and with all its contents in a voice like a hostile goblin.
"You could just not go," Charlie had said, packing your trunk for you while you glared at the letter. "Stay here. Marry a Hungarian Horntail. She likes you."
"She bit me."
"Affectionately."
But the letter had come with the Gringotts seal on it, and the Gringotts seal meant that this was not a family squabble anymore. It was a binding magical contract that had been sitting in a vault for twenty-five years, ticking, and on your birthday it had started making noises like a kettle.
So here you were, in London, in the solicitors' chambers on the third floor of Gringotts, wearing your one good set of robes and eyebrows that had only half grown back from a Chinese Fireball in January, waiting to meet the man you'd been promised to before either of you had teeth.
He was late.
That was the first strike against him. You'd composed a mental list on the Portkey. It went: late, pureblood, Slytherin, father in Azkaban, almost certainly insufferable, probably wears a cravat. You were looking forward to adding to it.
The door opened at seven minutes past.
"I'm so sorry," said Theodore Nott. "I got caught in Flourish and Blotts. They had a first edition of Bathilda Bagshot I'd been chasing for three years, and the woman in front of me wanted it as a doorstop. I had to explain. At some length."
He was carrying a book under one arm and a paper bag under the other, and both were slightly damp from the rain. He was tall, taller than you'd expected, and lean in a way that suggested he forgot to eat when he was reading. Dark brown hair that curled at his collar and needed cutting. Wire-rimmed glasses, which he took off and folded into his breast pocket as he came in, as if he'd only just remembered he was wearing them. Ink on two fingers of his right hand. No cravat.
He looked at you, and you watched him take in the robes, and the eyebrows, and the half-healed burn on the side of your neck. His eyebrows went up a fraction.
"Fireball?" he said.
You blinked. "How did you know?"
"The burn pattern. Fireballs spit sideways when they're startled. It's in Scamander. Third edition, the revised one, not the first, which gets it wrong." He set the book and the bag down on the solicitor's desk and held out his inky hand. "Theo. It's very nice to meet you properly. I've only ever seen you in the christening photographs, and you were mostly bonnet."
You shook his hand because your mother had raised you to, and because you were too thrown to do anything else. His grip was warm and dry and brief.
"You've been studying up," you said.
"I've had twenty-five years' notice," he said. "It seemed rude not to."
The solicitor, a goblin called Ragnok the Younger, did not enjoy his job, and made sure everyone in the room knew it. He laid the contract on the desk between you. It was parchment, the old kind, yellowed and cracked, and a thin silver ribbon of light ran around its edges, pulsing gently like a heartbeat.
"The bond is active," Ragnok said. "Midsummer's Eve. One hundred and twelve days. Should either party refuse, the refusing party's family seat transfers in full. Questions?"
"Yes," you said. "How do I get out of it?"
Theo, who had been unwrapping what turned out to be a lemon tart from the paper bag, paused.
Ragnok looked at you with deep disdain. "You refuse. You forfeit."
"My family seat is a farmhouse in Devon with a leaking roof and a ghoul in the attic who thinks he's my great-uncle."
"Then you forfeit a farmhouse in Devon with a leaking roof and a ghoul."
"It's my mother's house. She's lived there her whole life. It's where my grandparents are buried." You turned to Theo. "No offence. I'm sure you're very nice. But I've got a job in Romania, and a dragon who's halfway through a difficult pregnancy, and I'm not marrying a stranger because our fathers got drunk at a christening and signed something in a vault."
"They weren't drunk," Theo said mildly. "My father never drank. He thought it made you careless." He set the lemon tart down. "But I take your point about the rest. May I make a suggestion?"
You folded your arms. "Go on."
"You want me to refuse. If I refuse, Nott Manor goes to your family and your mother keeps her house. That's the cleanest exit for you."
"Yes," you said, slightly wrong-footed. "That's... yes. That's exactly it."
"Then here's my offer." He sat back in the solicitor's chair and steepled his inky fingers, and for a second he looked so much like a Slytherin that you nearly wrote it on your list. "Give me until Midsummer. Stay in England. Let me court you. Properly. Dinners, walks, the whole tedious business. And if, on Midsummer's Eve, you still don't want to marry me, I'll refuse the bond. Nott Manor goes to you. You'll never have to see me again."
Ragnok made a small, scandalised noise.
You stared at him. "You'd give up your house."
"It's a very draughty house," Theo said. "Half the rooms are shut. My mother's portrait won't speak to me, and my father's portrait won't stop. But yes. I would."
"Why?"
He looked at you then, really looked, with a kind of quiet attention you weren't used to. Dragons looked at you like that, sometimes, just before they decided whether you were food.
"Because I don't want a wife who's only there because of a contract," he said. "And because I think you'll change your mind."
There it was. Strike two. Arrogance.
"You think you can make me fall for you in a hundred and twelve days."
"I think I can make you fall for me in about sixty," said Theodore Nott, "but I like to leave a margin for error."
You laughed. You didn't mean to. It came out of you sharp and surprised, and Ragnok looked offended by it, and Theo smiled for the first time. It was a small, lopsided thing, a bit rusty, as if he didn't use it often, and it did something irritating to your stomach.
"Fine," you said. "Midsummer. But I'm warning you, I'm not easy to impress. I work with dragons. I've been set on fire four times this year."
"Five, surely," he said, glancing at your eyebrows.
"That one doesn't count. That was a Bunsen burner."
"You'll have to explain what that is."
"It's a Muggle thing. For science. My cousin has one." You eyed him. "Do you even know any Muggles?"
"I know a bookseller on Cecil Court who thinks I'm a retired accountant," Theo said. "He sells me nineteenth-century almanacs and tells me about his knees. I'm very fond of him." He picked up his damp first edition, tucked it back under his arm, and nodded politely to Ragnok, who did not nod back. "We'll leave you to your billing, Ragnok. I'm sure we've already cost someone a fortune."
He walked you out through the marble hall of Gringotts, past the long counters and the goblins weighing rubies, and held the great bronze doors for you. Outside it was still raining. Diagon Alley was a smear of wet lamplight and umbrellas.
"Dinner on Friday," he said. "I'll send an owl with the details. Wear something you can walk in."
"Why? Where are we going?"
"That," said Theo, "would ruin the courtship."
He turned to go, then turned back, frowning a little, as if he'd been arguing with himself and lost.
"There's something you should know," he said. "Since we're being honest. I've read the contract. All of it. Including the footnotes in Gobbledegook that Ragnok didn't translate, because Ragnok is paid by the hour and gets nothing if we settle early."
"And?"
"And there's a way out," Theo said. "A real one. Nobody forfeits anything. Your mother keeps her house. I keep my draughty Manor. It's been in the contract since nineteen-eighty. My father never noticed it, because he never read the footnotes either."
The rain dripped off the edge of the Gringotts porch between you. Your heart was doing something stupid.
"Then tell me what it is."
"No," said Theo Nott, quite pleasantly.
"No?"
"Not yet." He took his glasses out of his pocket, put them on, and looked at you over the top of them, and there was nothing polite about his eyes now at all. "Ask me again on Midsummer's Eve. If you still want it, I'll tell you. Good evening."
And he Disapparated, with a soft pop, leaving you standing on the steps of Gringotts in the rain, holding a lemon tart you hadn't noticed him give you.