The marble in the drawing room held the cold even at the height of summer.
Draconia could feel it rising through the soles of her shoes as she stood waiting in the centre of the rug, exactly where her aunt had told her to stand. The velvet curtains had been drawn since the afternoon. Someone had snuffed out half the candles in the chandelier, and what light remained didn't reach the corners, where the Death Eaters leaned against the walls, masked, still as furniture. It smelt of melted wax and of firewood no one had lit.
Her father's armchair was where it had always been, turned towards the cold fireplace. Empty. The Dark Lord had had a high-backed chair brought in from the dining room and set right beside it, so that anyone who looked at him would have to look, too, at the worn leather where Lucius Malfoy used to read the Daily Prophet after dinner.
Something heavy slid along behind her, brushing the hem of her dress. Draconia didn't turn. She knew what it was by the smell — damp cellar and raw meat — and she knew that turning would be worse.
"So this is the Malfoy heiress."
The voice came low, unhurried. He did not get up. He was drumming his long white fingers on the arm of the chair, and each tap made a dry little sound, nail against wood.
"Yes, my Lord."
"Lucius used to talk a great deal about a son, you know." The red eyes travelled over her slowly, from her shoes to her face. "The son he would have. The name he would pass on. I imagine he grew resigned to the idea, in time."
By the fireplace, Narcissa's hand tightened on the edge of the mantelpiece. Her wedding ring clicked against the marble — a small sound, which in that room seemed enormous. Draconia kept her eyes on the collar of the Dark Lord's robes. Not on his face. Never on his face, her aunt had taught her. Not until he told her to.
"She's ready, my Lord." Bellatrix circled behind her niece, too close, and Draconia felt her breath on the back of her neck. "I've had the girl all summer. She learns fast. For a Malfoy."
"We shall see."
He raised his wand. He didn't need to say anything else.
Draconia unbuttoned the cuff of her left sleeve. The pearl button slipped twice between her fingers before it went through the buttonhole, and she hated those two times more than anything that came after. She folded the fabric back to the elbow. The skin of her forearm, white and still unmarked, had come up in gooseflesh.
A gesture from him drew her closer. The fingers that took hold of her wrist were cold and dry — cold in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room. The tip of the wand touched her skin.
It wasn't like a burn. It was worse, and deeper: something burrowed in under the flesh and closed a fist around the bone. The air left her chest all at once. Her legs wanted to give way and she didn't let them — she locked her knees and bit down on the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood.
And it was then, with the pain trampling everything, that the memory slipped free.
The Great Hall sheathed in ice that never melted. The Weird Sisters' cello still tuning up. Theodore Nott had spent half an hour on his father's collection of pheasant feathers and then wandered off towards the punch bowl, and she hadn't gone after him. And across the Hall, Potter. Sitting. Arms crossed, tie askew, Patil long gone, dancing with some boy from Beauxbatons. She had crossed the dance floor without deciding to. Pulled him up by the wrist.
"Get up, Potter. You'll never get another chance to step on my toes."
His hand on her back. Warm through the fabric. The wrong step neither of them corrected. Those damned green eyes, fixed on hers, inches away.
"Look at me."
Draconia raised her eyes.
The red eyes were too close. And they were getting in. She felt his presence cut through the pain the way a blade cuts through water, turning things over, searching — and there was the memory, laid bare: the music, the hand on her back, Potter's face a hand's breadth from hers.
No.
She did what her aunt had spent the summer screaming at her to do, until her nose bled. She didn't hide the memory. She sank it beneath another.
That June morning. The Prophet owl tapping at the breakfast-room window. The headline. The photograph of her father being dragged away by two Aurors, trying to cover his face with a manacled hand, trying again, the picture repeating that useless gesture forever. And in the third paragraph, the name she had read so many times that the paper had torn along the fold. Harry Potter. The boy who had led the Aurors to the Department of Mysteries. The boy who had put her father in Azkaban.
She gave him that. All of it. And she didn't have to fake a thing.
The presence withdrew. He let go of her wrist, and her arm dropped to her side, heavy, throbbing in time with her heart. On the skin, where there had been nothing before, the skull and the serpent were finishing drawing themselves — black, swollen, still moving.
"Potter." The Dark Lord tasted the name slowly. A thin smile spread across the noseless face. "You hate him."
"Yes, my Lord."
That was true as well.
"Good. Hatred is a fine beginning." He sat back. The fingers resumed their drumming. "I have a task for you, Draconia. A task your father, unfortunately, is in no position to carry out."
And he told her what it was.
No one in the room moved. Even the thing sliding behind her went still. From over by the fireplace, Draconia heard a sound her mother would never have let slip in front of anyone else — a short breath, caught halfway.
Dumbledore.
"Yes, my Lord."
Her voice came out steady. It came out exactly as it should. In the folds of her skirt, her right hand was clenched, nails driven into the palm, and she only let go when she felt the skin give.
"Lucius has a great deal of time on his hands in Azkaban," he said, already looking elsewhere, already bored. "It would be a shame if, when he got out, he had nothing left to come home to."
Draconia curtsied anyway, briefly, and turned. Wormtail opened the door for her before anyone told him to.
— -------------xXx---------------
Her bedroom was just as she had left it that morning. The bed made by the house-elves, the curtains open onto the dark garden, the white peacocks asleep along the hedge like smudges of chalk.
Draconia locked the door and went straight to the porcelain basin. She turned on the tap and thrust her forearm under the icy water. The skin hissed — or she imagined it did. The water ran red at the edges of the Mark, then clear, and she stood watching the design beneath the stream: the skull's open mouth, the serpent that still seemed to be settling in, shifting for position.
In the mirror above the basin, a pale young woman of twenty stared back at her, lower lip bitten white. Draconia turned off the tap. She dried her arm carefully, without rubbing, and pulled the sleeve down over it.
She crossed the room. She opened the wardrobe to fetch her nightdress, and there it was, right at the back, still in the silk cover her mother had ordered it kept in: the silver-grey gown. Not a single thread of green. She remembered the look on her aunt's face when she'd seen it, and how funny she had found that at the time.
She shut the wardrobe without taking the nightdress.
She lay down fully dressed, on top of the covers. Her arm throbbed. Downstairs, her aunt's voice was laughing at something, and a door slammed, and then the house went quiet in the way it only ever did when there were too many people inside it.
And now that no one was watching, the memory came back on its own. She let it.
The Weird Sisters had slowed the tempo. Everyone else had gone to a blur. Potter was still looking at her — up close, the way no one had ever looked at her, as if he were trying to work out where the joke was. She had felt his hand hesitate on her back, almost pull away, then come back. Felt her own heart in her throat. And then she had opened her mouth and said something true. The only true thing she had said to Harry Potter since that first day on the Express.
And watched his face change.
Draconia opened her eyes to the dark canopy of her bed and didn't close them again until it was light.
— -------------xXx---------------
Harry woke with the music still in his ears.
He lay still, eyes open in the dark, until the last note of the cello had dissolved into the silence of Privet Drive. His right hand was clenched in the sheet. He had to tell his fingers to open.
The room surfaced bit by bit: the open trunk, the stack of fifth-year books he hadn't touched since June, Hedwig's empty cage — she'd gone out hunting at nightfall. Out in the street, a car went by slowly, and its headlights swept the ceiling from one end to the other.
More than a year and a half. It had been more than a year and a half, and the dream still knew every detail. The grey gown, no green anywhere, which he'd noticed before he noticed anything else. Her cold hand in his. The wrong step. And her saying something, very quietly, her grey eyes suddenly without any defences at all — and him opening his mouth to answer.
He always woke up at that part.
Harry sat up on the edge of the bed and put on his glasses. On the desk, between a dried-up inkwell and a box of Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans that Ron had sent, lay the June Prophet, folded the way he'd left it weeks ago. In the front-page photograph, Lucius Malfoy was being led away by two Aurors, raising a manacled hand to cover his face. Lowering it. Raising it again.
Harry watched the gesture repeat itself three, four times.
Then he turned the paper face down and went back to bed.
He didn't sleep.