Chapter 3: Midsummer's Eve
Ragnok the Younger had placed the contract in the middle of his desk like a body on a slab.
The silver ribbon was gone. The parchment was just parchment now, yellow and cracked, the ink of your fathers' signatures faded to brown. It looked smaller without the light around it. It looked like something you could fold up and put in a drawer and forget.
"Twenty-five years," Ragnok said, "this bond has sat in vault seven hundred and eleven. I have personally inspected it on every anniversary. I have billed for every inspection. And last night at eleven forty-two it went out like a candle, and I would like to know why, so I can invoice someone for it."
You looked at Theo. Theo was looking at the floor. He'd come in two minutes after you, unshaven, in yesterday's shirt, and had said "Good morning" to the goblin and nothing at all to you. You'd lain awake until dawn in the guest room at Nott Manor, waiting for a knock on the door that never came.
"It's the footnote," you said. "Isn't it."
Theo closed his eyes briefly.
"I'd like to hear it," you said. "Now, please. Not at Midsummer. You said if I asked, you'd tell me."
"I said if you still wanted out at Midsummer."
"The contract's dead, Theo. I don't think the timing matters anymore."
Ragnok glanced between you with the beady interest of a creature who smells a dispute. Theo took his glasses out of his pocket and put them on and leaned over the desk and laid one ink-stained finger on a line of tiny jagged script at the very bottom of the parchment, under the signatures, so small you'd taken it for a border.
"Gobbledegook," he said. "Old Gringotts legal register. It took me a month with a dictionary. It reads: Should the heirs, of their own will and before the day appointed, come to love one another, then the bond is superfluous and shall dissolve, and they shall be free to wed or not wed as they choose, and no House shall forfeit anything." He straightened up. "My mother wrote it. Not my father. Your mother told me. Apparently mine insisted on the footnote before she'd let the contract be signed, and my father agreed because he thought it could never happen, and he never read it again."
The office was very quiet. Somewhere below, a mine cart rattled down into the deep vaults.
"That's the loophole," you said. "The way out where nobody loses anything."
"Yes."
"You couldn't tell me. Because if I knew, I'd never know if it was real."
"Yes," Theo said again, very quietly.
"And it went out at eleven forty-two." Your mouth was dry. "I was asleep. On your shoulder. You were reading about a drowned city."
"I'd stopped reading," Theo said. "About an hour before."
Ragnok cleared his throat. "Both parties," he said, with the exaggerated patience of a goblin explaining interest rates to a troll. "The footnote requires both parties. A bond like this does not dissolve for one."
Theo's head came up.
He looked at you. And you saw on his face that he'd thought about every possible version of this morning except that one. He'd lain awake all night in the library certain it had gone out because of him, and that he'd done something terrible: freed you, when he'd only ever meant to win you. He'd thought you'd walk out of this office and go back to Romania and never think about him again.
He hadn't thought about the second list.
"Oh," said Theodore Nott, in a voice you'd never heard him use.
You stood up. Your chair scraped. Ragnok said, "There is the matter of my fee," and you said, "Bill the Notts," and Theo said, "Yes, fine, bill me," and you walked out of the solicitor's chambers and down the marble corridor and out through the great bronze doors into Diagon Alley, which was bright and loud and smelled of roasting chestnuts, and you kept walking, because you didn't know what else to do with your legs.
He caught up with you outside Eeylops Owl Emporium.
"Where are you going?"
"Romania," you said. You didn't stop. "My Horntail's due in three weeks. Charlie's been owling every day. I can go now. There's no contract. I'm free. You said so. Free to wed or not wed."
"Yes," said Theo, keeping pace, a little out of breath. "That's what it says."
"So I'm going."
"Yes." A pause. "Are you coming back?"
You stopped. You turned around. A wizard with a cage full of screech owls had to swerve round you both and swore.
"I don't know," you said. It was the most honest thing you'd said to him. "I came to England to get out of marrying you. And now I'm out, and I don't want to be. And I don't know what that means. I don't know if I want you because I want you, or because I've been told for twenty-five years that I was supposed to, or because you took me to see dragons in a bog and I'm a cheap date. I need to know which. I need to go and stand next to my own dragon and know which."
Theo looked at you for a long moment. Then he nodded, once.
"Go," he said. "I'll be here."
The Horntail laid her clutch on the twenty-first of June, at four in the morning, in a cave on the north side of the reserve in a storm that knocked out half the protective enchantments and set fire to the bunkhouse roof.
You were with her for all of it. You and Charlie and two Romanian keepers, in fireproof gloves, singing to her in the dark the way you'd learned to sing to Horntails, a low droning hum that the books said calmed them and that you privately thought just annoyed them into concentrating. Five eggs, black and bronze, each the size of a cauldron. When the last one was down and she curled around them, steaming and exhausted, and laid her great spiked head on the stone and let you stroke the hot ridge above her eye, you sat down on the cave floor and cried for ten minutes straight.
It was nearly dusk when Charlie found you on the ridge above the cave, filthy and singed, staring at the sunset.
"Midsummer's Eve," he said, sitting down next to you.
"I know."
"Big night, in England. Weddings and that."
"I know, Charlie."
"Bloke turned up at the gate an hour ago," Charlie said, very casually. "Tall. Glasses. Looks like he's been dragged through a hedge by a Hippogriff. Says he came by international Portkey, which cost him an absolute fortune, and then got lost in the forest for three hours because he was following a map from 1802. He's brought a book. Says it's for you. He won't come in. Says he promised he'd wait." Charlie glanced sideways. "I gave him a cup of tea. He looked at it like it had personally offended him."
You were already on your feet.
He was standing at the reserve gate under the wooden arch, in the gold light, with burrs in his hair and mud to his knees and a long scratch across one cheekbone. He had a parcel under his arm. When he saw you coming down the track he straightened up, and took his glasses off, and put them back on.
You stopped a few feet away.
"I said I'd wait," Theo said. "I'm aware this is not, strictly speaking, waiting. I'm aware I'm in Romania. I lasted three weeks. I'm told that's very good for me."
"You got lost in the forest."
"The map was eighteen hundred and two. The forest's moved. That's not my fault." He held out the parcel. "Happy Midsummer. It's a first edition. Of nothing in particular. I panicked in the shop."
You took it. You didn't open it. You looked at him, at the burrs and the mud and the scratch and the hazel eyes behind fogged-up glasses, and you knew. Not because of a contract. Not because of a footnote. Because you'd spent the worst night of your working life in a cave full of fire and smoke, and every time you'd needed to steady yourself, you'd thought: I have to tell Theo about this. He'll want every detail. He'll want the digestion bits.
"She laid five," you said. "Five eggs. Black and bronze. I've got burns on both arms and the bunkhouse roof is still smoking."
"Five," said Theo softly. "That's extraordinary. That's almost unheard of for a first clutch."
"I know. I thought you'd want to know."
"I do," he said. "I always do."
"Theo," you said. "Ask me again."
He went very still. "Ask you what?"
"You said at Gringotts, ask me again on Midsummer's Eve. So it's Midsummer's Eve. And there's no contract, and nobody forfeits anything, and I'm standing in a dragon reserve with soot in my hair, so if you've got something you want to ask, I'd do it now. Before I lose my nerve. Or before the Horntail wakes up."
For a long moment he didn't say anything. Then he stepped forward and took the parcel gently out of your hands and set it on the gatepost, and took your burned hands in his inky ones, carefully, around the bandages.
"Will you marry me?" said Theodore Nott. "Not because our fathers signed something. Not because of a house. Because I've read every word you've ever published and I still want to know what you'll say next. Because I'd like to spend the rest of my life getting lost in forests on the way to you."
"Yes," you said, and kissed him.
He made a small surprised sound against your mouth, as if, even now, even with everything, he hadn't quite let himself believe it. Then his hand came up to cradle the back of your head and he kissed you back, slow and sure and endlessly patient, the way he did everything, the way he'd read to you in the dark. He tasted of the terrible tea Charlie had given him. Behind you, from the cave on the ridge, the Horntail let out a long rumbling roar that might have been approval and might have been indigestion.
When you finally broke apart, he rested his forehead against yours and laughed, that rusty-gate laugh, and you thought you'd quite like to hear it every day for the rest of your life.
"Sixty days," you said. "You said sixty."
"Seventy," said Theo, wincing. "I checked. I went over. It's why I always leave a margin."
Something fluttered down out of the sky between you: a battered grey owl, ragged at the edges, with a tarnished iron band on its leg. It landed on the gatepost on top of the first edition and held out a letter with a seal you didn't know.
Theo went white.
"That's an Azkaban owl," he said. "That's my father's hand."