Ministry of Magic
Office of Remembrance

Dear Mrs Weasley,

I know today will be a hard one. I wanted you to know that you are not the only one who remembers him.

Edmund Grieve, 2 May 2005

Harry opened his mouth to answer, and a silver badger came through the kitchen wall.

It was a large, heavy, slightly shabby-looking badger, the kind of Patronus that looked as if it had been cast by a tired man at the end of a very long day, but it came across the flagstones at a dead run, scrambled up onto the table and planted itself on the copied ledger. When it spoke, it spoke in Gawain Robards's voice, low and flat and fast.

"Harry. They're coming to Grimmauld Place. Twenty minutes, maybe less. They've turned over Nott's shop, and the Minister signed the warrants himself." The badger glanced over its shoulder. "I did not send this."

The badger dissolved into silver mist.

"How?" said Ron. "The Fidelius —"

"Ah," said Theo, and shut his eyes. "That'll be me. Your note, Potter. The one with the address on it. I never destroyed it. I was going to have it framed."

Pansy threw a teaspoon at his head. Then everybody moved at once.

"Malfoy," said Harry, over the scrape of benches, "this isn't finished."

"I'm aware, Potter." Draco was already on his feet, sweeping the ledger and the copied slate into Ginny's bag. "Believe me, I'm aware."

Luna turned back to the chalkboard and raised her wand. “Scourgify.”

The board foamed white. Ron's plans, their names and a fairly comprehensive case for the prosecution slid down it in soapy streaks.

"Where do we go?" said Ron. "Not the Burrow, that's the next place they'll look. Not Shell Cottage, Fleur's never forgiven us for last time. Not Hermione's —"

"The Manor," said Draco.

Ron stopped dead in the middle of the kitchen with an armful of Percy's files. "The Manor?"

"Nobody in the Ministry of Magic would dream of looking for any of you at Malfoy Manor. It's the last place on earth anybody would expect you to go of your own free will." Draco glanced round the room. "Mother's wards are older than the Ministry. And the Act hasn't taken the house yet. The hearings aren't until the end of the month."

"It's fine," said Hermione.

Everybody looked at her. She was standing by the pantry door, her Unspeakable's badge still clutched in one hand.

"It's fine," she said again. "It's the obvious choice. It's sensible. Let's go."

Harry saw Draco look at her for a moment, and then look away, and let it go.

"Bagsy not the dungeons," said Ron.

Percy had other plans. He stood in the middle of the kitchen with his five boxes floating at his elbow, took his files back out of Ron's arms, and announced that somebody had to be sitting at the Chief Clerk's desk at nine o'clock on Monday morning looking as though nothing whatsoever had happened, and it had better be the Chief Clerk. Then he Flooed home to Audrey, and took Exhibits A to E with him.

Blaise went home too. Nobody had seen him do anything in the Atrium except flirt, he pointed out, and somebody ought to be sitting at his mother's breakfast table in the morning looking innocent. He was, he added, a great deal better at it than Percy.

"Kreacher will come," announced a small, determined voice from the region of Harry's knees.

"Kreacher, you can't —"

"Kreacher goes where Young Master goes."

"He can come," said Draco.

"He's my elf!"

Draco raised an eyebrow. "On paper, Potter."

​

The gates of Malfoy Manor were exactly as Harry remembered them, which was to say he had last seen them while being dragged through them by Snatchers with his face swollen up like a pumpkin, and had not been in a position to appreciate the ironwork.

He appreciated it now. They were tall and black and fiercely ornate, and as Draco stepped up and laid his palm against them, the wrought iron twisted and rearranged itself into a stern, stylised face that looked down at the crowd of people on the drive behind him with open disapproval. Then it looked at Draco, softened almost imperceptibly, and swung open.

The lawns beyond were silver with dew. Across them, pale and ghostly in the moonlight, stepped a small flock of white peacocks, which stopped as one and turned their heads to watch the intruders pass.

"Why are they white?" said Ron, in a hoarse whisper. "And why are they glowing?"

"Because my father was a man of very specific tastes," said Draco. "Don't make eye contact. They bite."

"Course they do," Ron muttered. "Course the Malfoys've got killer peacocks."

"They're not going to kill you, Ron," said Hermione.

"I wouldn’t rule it out," said Harry.

Ron gestured at him. "He's been attacked by most things."

"Not a peacock," said Harry.

"Give it a minute."

The front door opened before they reached it.

Narcissa Malfoy stood on the threshold in a long dressing gown of silver-grey silk, with a lamp in one hand and a wand in the other. Her hair was perfect. It was the middle of the night. Harry had absolutely no idea how either of those things could be true at once.

She looked at her son. Then, she looked past him at the drive: at Harry and Ginny, Ron and Hermione, Luna with a crate under her arm, Theo, Pansy, Goyle, George with a bag of prototypes, and a house-elf in a tea towel, all of them sooty and bedraggled and covered in gold leaf.

"Draco," she said. "It's one o'clock in the morning, and you've brought the Order of the Phoenix."

"Most of it's Dumbledore's Army, Mother. I'm told there's a difference."

Her eyes found Harry and stopped.

The last time Harry had been this close to Narcissa Malfoy, ten years ago, he had been lying on the leaf litter of the Forbidden Forest with his eyes closed, playing dead, while her cool hand moved over his chest to find his heartbeat. She had leaned down and whispered a question into his ear, and then straightened up and lied to Voldemort's face. He had written to her that summer to thank her. It had taken him four drafts, and the one he finally sent said thank you and almost nothing else, because that was all he had. She never wrote back, and he had always wondered whether she'd read it.

"You're taller," said Narcissa Malfoy.

"Turns out I grow quite well," said Harry, "when nobody's trying to kill me."

"Yes," said Narcissa. "I believe that was true of a great many of us."

Somewhere out in the dark gardens a peacock gave a single sleepy squawk of protest. Narcissa glanced towards it, and whatever had been in her face was gone.

"I suppose you had all better come in, before the peacocks wake up properly. They're dreadful gossips." She stood aside to let them pass. Then her gaze fell on Hermione, and the smallest crease appeared between her perfect brows.

"Miss Granger."

"Mrs Malfoy."

Harry saw Narcissa's glance go, very briefly, past Hermione's shoulder to the dark hallway, and to a door somewhere down it that none of them could see.

"The east wing," said Narcissa, "is the furthest from —" She stopped. "The east wing is the warmest. I'll have the rooms made up."

"Thank you," said Hermione quietly.

Then there was a thin, high, strangled noise from somewhere near the doormat, and every head turned.

Kreacher had come round the side of Goyle. He was staring up at Narcissa. His ancient body was trembling from his ears to his toes, and his mouth was working soundlessly, and his enormous eyes had filled with tears.

"Mistress," breathed Kreacher. "Mistress Narcissa."

He threw himself at her feet and kissed the hem of her dressing gown.

Narcissa looked down at him in the most complete astonishment Harry had ever seen on a human face.

"Good heavens," she said. "Is that Aunt Walburga's elf?"

"Kreacher served Mistress Walburga for fifty years, Mistress." Kreacher lifted his wet face from the silk. "Kreacher remembers when Mistress was a little girl. Mistress came to Grimmauld Place for Christmas, in a blue dress, and Mistress said Kreacher's pudding was the best in England." He dissolved into sobs.

For a moment Narcissa Malfoy's face did something Harry had never seen it do. It went soft at the edges, just slightly, like frost on a window when somebody breathes on it.

"It was," she said. "It was the best in England." She bent and touched his head, lightly. "You'd better stay, Kreacher. The kitchens are through there. I'm afraid we've no elves of our own any more." She glanced at Draco. "Draco insisted."

Harry saw Hermione turn her head at that, sharply, and look at Draco. Draco met her eyes for exactly one second, and then, for the first time in Harry's memory, looked away first.

​

♫ Listen along

Hermione couldn't sleep.

The east wing was warm, as promised. The room she'd been given was large and very beautiful, all pale green silk and old dark wood, with a four-poster bed and a view across the silver lawns to the woods, and she lay in it with her eyes open for two hours and listened to the house.

It was a very quiet house, and in the quiet, if she let herself, she could still hear the echo of her own screaming.

In the end she gave up pretending she might sleep, and got up, and put on the dressing gown Kreacher had left folded at the end of the bed, and went out into the corridor. She had no particular plan. She told herself she had no particular plan. She walked down the east wing and across the great hall with its marble floor, past the portraits of pale, disapproving Malfoys who opened one eye to watch her go by, and down a long corridor that she had last walked with her hands bound and a Snatcher's fist in her hair.

She stopped outside the door at the end of it.

It was an ordinary door. Tall, panelled, painted white, with a brass handle. She had seen it only once, from the other side, as it was slammed shut on Ron's shouting. She had heard a great deal through it. She stood and looked at it for what might have been a minute, or an hour.

"You'll catch cold," said a voice behind her, "standing about in corridors at this hour."

She went on looking at the door. "So will you."

"I grew up here. The corridors are used to me." Draco came and stood beside her, nearer than he had sat on the back step at Grimmauld Place, though not as near as he had been that afternoon. He was in shirtsleeves and bare feet, with a cup of something in his hand that had gone cold a long time ago, and his eyes, like hers, were on the door.

Then he reached past her for the handle. For a moment his arm was across her, and she felt the heat of him through the thin cotton of his sleeve, and caught it again: the clean, faintly expensive smell she had learned that afternoon in the dark of a cupboard, and had spent the whole evening trying not to think about. He turned the handle, and pushed the door open.

It wasn't the drawing room any more.

That was the first thing she understood, and it took her a moment longer to understand the rest. The room was still the same shape: long and high, with tall windows along one side. But the ceiling was gone, and in its place, far above, was a great arched roof of glass through which she could see the stars. The panelled walls were gone. The great chandelier was gone. The heavy furniture, the portraits, the mantelpiece: all gone.

And the floor was gone.

It had been torn up entirely, board and joist and flagstone, all the way down to the bare earth beneath, and out of that earth, filling the whole long room from end to end, grew a garden.

There were lemon trees in great terracotta pots, heavy with fruit, their leaves glossy in the starlight. There was jasmine climbing up iron frames where the walls had been, pale and sweet-smelling. There were plants she knew, and plants she knew only from the small slate labels at their feet, lettered in an elegant, slightly slanted hand she had last seen at the top of a chalkboard in Grimmauld Place. And along the far wall, where the great marble fireplace had once stood, in a long, low, carefully tended bed, grew row upon row of a small, grey-green, woolly-leaved plant that she would have known anywhere.

Dittany.

She stood in the doorway and looked at it, and breathed in the jasmine and the warm, damp green smell of earth, and found that, for once in her life, she had no words at all.

"It's warmer in here than the rest of the house," said Draco, after a while. He was looking very carefully at a lemon tree. "Mother wanted lemons."

"It's lovely," said Hermione.

"It's a greenhouse, Granger."

She let him have that. He had come to stand at her shoulder, close enough that she could feel him there all down one side, through the silk of the borrowed dressing gown, and there he stayed. The back of his hand was perhaps an inch from hers. She could have closed the gap by breathing in. She found she had got as far as the third Principal Exception to Gamp's Law before she realised she was reciting it.

Beside her ear, a loose curl lifted all on its own, and crackled faintly.

"Your hair," said Draco, to the lemon tree, "is doing that thing again."

"It's static," said Hermione. "Silk, and dry air. It's extremely well documented."

"It's sixty-two per cent humidity in here." He was still addressing the lemon tree. "That's accidental magic, Granger. Five-year-olds do it."

"I am twenty-nine years old."

"Yes," said Draco, and looked at her at last. "I'd noticed."

She smoothed it down, and it sprang straight back up.

"Accidental magic," said Hermione, "is an involuntary discharge in response to strong emotion, in a witch or wizard who is untrained, unwell, or —" She stopped.

"Or?" said Draco.

"Tired," said Hermione. "It's the middle of the night."

"Strong emotion," said Draco. He had given up on the lemon tree altogether.

"Tired," said Hermione.

The curl rose again beside her ear and crackled, rather smugly.

Draco reached out and caught it. He tucked it back behind her ear, slowly and carefully, the way he did anything he meant to get right, and this time it stayed.

His hand stayed too. It came to rest along the side of her face, his fingers in her hair and his thumb at the corner of her jaw. It was warm. It was not, she noticed, entirely steady. Gamp's Law went somewhere around the second Principal Exception this time, and she found she had no wish to go looking for it.

She tipped her face into his hand without deciding to. It seemed to be a night for things happening on their own. The inch between them had gone somewhere, and she had no idea which of them had closed it.

Draco took a breath to say something, and out on the lawn, every peacock in Wiltshire began to scream.

It was an appalling noise, outraged and full-throated and thoroughly pleased with itself, as though they had seen everything through the glass and were already telling the neighbours.

Hermoine jumped. Draco's hand fell away. He shut his eyes. "I'm going to have them stuffed," he informed the roof.

Hermione laughed, and after a moment, without opening his eyes, so did he.

After that they stood in the doorway side by side for a long time, with an inch of air between their hands again, while the peacocks grumbled themselves back to sleep and the stars wheeled slowly over the glass roof and the lemon trees stirred in a breeze that came, as far as she could tell, from nowhere at all.

The curl stayed exactly where he had put it.

​

The Daily Prophet arrived the next morning, by an owl who plainly did not approve of the address.

THE BOY WHO TURNED? said the front page, in letters two inches high. And underneath, in slightly smaller ones: DUMBLEDORE'S ARMY RETURNS — WITH DEATH EATERS.

They read it round the long breakfast table in a room that Draco referred to as "the small dining room", which was about the size of the Great Hall at Hogwarts. Draco had declined to use the other dining room, and nobody asked him why.

POTTER'S GANG IN MINISTRY RAID, the subheading went on. Rogue Auror leads armed break-in on Department of Mysteries. Disgraced Unspeakable Granger dismissed. Convicted Death Eater Malfoy among fugitives. Minister: 'A dark day for the Wizarding World.' By Rita Skeeter.

"Oh, of course," said Hermione.

"The Boy Who Turned," Ron read out, through a mouthful of toast. He considered it. "That's quite catchy, actually."

Hermione kicked him under the table.

"It's an improvement on Disturbed and Dangerous," said Harry.

Kreacher came in with the tea. In the twenty minutes Robards had given them, he had packed three things: a photograph of Master Regulus, his good tea towel and the cup the Blacks had kept for tradesmen. He set the last of these down in front of Ron and bowed until his ears brushed the carpet.

"You packed it," said Ron. "We were being raided, and you packed it."

"Kreacher packed what was important," said Kreacher.

Harry had forgotten about the photographer. The Prophet apparently hadn't. It had printed the lot: Harry on the front page, and the rest of them across a double-page spread inside under the heading WANTED, every photograph going round and round in its own small, endless loop.

Harry's showed him snapping a wand cleanly in two. His face was perfectly calm. Harry looked at it for some time and didn't recognise it at all.

Hermione's took up half the spread. She looked, Harry thought, like the kind of witch people in old stories built walls to keep out.

Draco's was beside it. He was standing in front of her with his wand raised and the black shield burning. And in the last second of the loop, every time, just before it started again, his eyes slid sideways over his shoulder to watch her step out from behind it.

"Charming," said Draco, and turned the page rather quickly.

Under Harry's photograph it said troubled Auror. Under Ron's it said joke-shop assistant, and Ron put down his toast. Under Draco's, convicted Death Eater. And under Hermione's it said: Hermione Granger, 29, unemployed.

"Unemployed," said Hermione.

"It's Skeeter," said Ron. "She's had it in for you since fourth year."

"Since I let her out," said Hermione. "I was a senior Unspeakable until yesterday afternoon. I have published eleven papers."

The rest of them hadn't fared much better. Theo was the very picture of a hero until the last frame of every loop, when he glanced down at his waistcoat in dismay; underneath, it said Knockturn Alley runesmith. Ginny was a Harpies reserve. Luna was daughter of eccentric Quibbler editor Xenophilius Lovegood. And Pansy, green to the wrists with Floo powder, was a socialite.

Pansy read that one twice. Then she put the paper down gently, the way you might put down something you intended to deal with later. Across the table, Draco caught her eye, and for reasons Harry could only guess at, he looked almost sorry for Rita Skeeter.

"Top scorer in the league," said Ginny, and stabbed a sausage. "Reserve."

"Join the queue," said Pansy.

Harry, who was a troubled Auror, kept out of it.

At the head of the table, Narcissa Malfoy had a copy of her own, and she did not turn the page. She went through the photographs one at a time, and after each one she lifted her eyes and looked down the table at the person in it, as though checking the likeness. Harry found her gaze hard to hold.

When she reached the end, she laid the paper flat beside her plate.

"Goodness," she said quietly.

It was all she said. But her eyes kept going back to the paper, and every time, Harry noticed, it was to the same photograph, and the same last second of the loop.

George was down as wanted for questioning. Blaise wasn't on it at all, which Blaise, when he Flooed in later that morning, declared to be a deep personal insult.

"I was in the Atrium for the entire thing," he said, sitting down and helping himself to a croissant. "I was magnificent. I kept those Wardens talking for twenty-five minutes. And not a word. Not so much as known associate." He poured himself coffee. "Mother says to tell you she's moved the Fawley creature to the good wine cellar. He was crying in the other one."

On his way back to the coffee pot Blaise set a small, stiff card down beside Hermione's plate without looking at her. It was engraved in copperplate with a solicitor's name and, underneath, two words: Probate. Wrongful Dismissal.

"Mother's," said Blaise. "Seven husbands' worth of probate, and she's never once lost to the Ministry. She'd adore you, Granger."

Hermione looked at the card, and then at him. Blaise was already asking Theo to pass the marmalade.

Gwenog Jones's Patronus arrived with the second pot of coffee: a large, furious-looking hawk that came straight through the closed window of the small dining room, landed in the marmalade, fixed Ginny with a glare, and spoke in Gwenog's gravelly voice, at a volume that rattled the teacups.

"Suspended pending inquiry. Never been prouder of anyone in my life. Still fined."

Then it was gone. Ginny snorted. Narcissa Malfoy's eyebrows rose a fraction. Nobody had ever, in the whole of her life, snorted at her breakfast table.

"Sorry," said Ginny, who wasn't. "Your husband once put a cursed diary in my cauldron, Mrs Malfoy. I think we're past table manners."

Narcissa looked at her across the toast rack. "Then I expect we are," she said, and passed her the toast.

Hermione had been scribbling on the back of a napkin since the paper arrived, and now she turned it round so that they could all see it.

“If the Prophet’s going to print us all on one page, and call half of us Death Eaters’ children,” she said, "then we may as well be organised about it." She tapped the napkin. "The Society for the Protection of Accused Wizards' Next-of-kin. I've drafted a constitution."

Everybody round the table worked out the initials at slightly different speeds. Ron got there first.

"Hermione," he said. "You've called us spawn."

"It's an acronym, Ronald."

"So was spew."

"It's a description," said Theo, enchanted. "I want a badge."

"There'll be badges," said Hermione.

"Oh, Merlin," said Ron. "I'm not being treasurer again."

"I'd wear one," said Goyle.

"So would Malfoy," said George. "He's always liked a badge."

Draco said that he would sooner be eaten by the hounds, and went back to his kedgeree. Hermione underlined it twice.

It was page four that stopped everyone laughing.

It was Goyle. It was the photograph from the Evening Prophet. Except that this morning, the Prophet had cropped it. The screaming first-years were gone from the edge of the frame. The crowd of wizards running to help was gone. There was only Goyle, huge and soaked and straining, with the memorial to the war dead tilted at a terrible angle above him, and underneath it the caption:

DEATH EATER'S SON DAMAGES WAR MEMORIAL IN ATRIUM RAMPAGE.

Goyle was sitting at the far end, as usual, a little apart from the rest of them. He looked at the photograph for some time. Then he went back to his toast. He buttered it right to the edges, slowly and carefully, the way he did everything.

He didn't eat it. After a while, without a word, Luna got up, went round the table, and sat down beside him.

"That's not what the photograph says," said Luna.

Goyle went on staring at his toast.

"You're holding it up. Not knocking it down." Luna was buttering a crumpet with great concentration. "Anyone with eyes can see that."

"Nobody looks at the pictures," said Goyle quietly. "Only the words underneath."

"I do," said Luna. She put the crumpet on his plate, and after a moment, Goyle picked it up and ate it.

Across the table, Pansy had picked up the paper and was reading the Skeeter article from beginning to end, with such withering contempt that Harry was surprised the pages didn't curl. When she reached the end, she glanced once down the table at Goyle. Then she held the Prophet out at arm's length and set fire to it with a flick of her wand.

"Amateur," she said, and dropped the burning remains into the toast rack.

"You say that," said Ron, "like you know better."

Pansy gave him an odd look.

"Everyone knows better than Skeeter, Weasley," she said.

"Mandragora'd have her for breakfast," said Ron.

​

They met in the library at ten, as soon as Neville had come through the Floo from Hogwarts, with a potted Mimbulus mimbletonia under one arm, because he hadn't been sure what else you brought to Malfoy Manor. Seamus, Parvati and Dean came through behind him.

Seamus stepped off the hearth, took one long, slow look round the library of Malfoy Manor, and said, to nobody in particular, "I did say. At volume."

Dean came through last. He stood on the hearthrug for a moment, looking down at the floor as though he could see straight through it to whatever lay underneath, and then he went and sat down by Luna, who moved up without a word to make room for him.

Neville put his plant down on the nearest table. Then he took a copy of the Daily Prophet out of his cardigan pocket and laid it beside the plant, open at the WANTED spread.

"There was a whole class of Hogwarts first-years in that Atrium on Friday," he said. "On a Remembrance trip. I've spent all morning writing to their parents." He looked round at them all. "Explaining the mountains."

"It's quite a small range, darling," said Theo. "And it was freehand."

"It goes down three floors, so it does," said Seamus. "I've been at it with a chisel since six, and they won't let me blow it up."

"There's an Auror on the ceiling," said Neville, turning the page.

"He's got hedges," said Luna.

Neville bent over the photograph despite himself, and studied it for a moment with professional interest. "Box?"

"Box."

"Nicely clipped," said Neville, and then remembered he was cross. "Four of my third-years have asked if they can join. One of them's a Slytherin. I told them I'd have to check with the management." He looked at Harry, and then, after a moment's thought, at Draco.

Draco looked, very briefly, extremely pleased.

​

The library itself was a vast room, three storeys high, with a gallery running round the upper floors and a great dome of painted glass at the top. Every inch of wall was covered in books. There were more books in it than in the Black library at Grimmauld Place and the whole of Flourish and Blotts put together, and Hermione, who had stopped dead just inside the door when she first walked in, had still not entirely recovered.

"You can come back later," said Draco, in passing. "Nobody's quite managed to read all of them. The dusty ones on the top shelf'll be delighted."

"Spines out, are they?" said Harry. Then he stood with his back to the fireplace and looked at them all. Ginny, Ron, Hermione, and Neville, who knew. Draco, Theo, Pansy, Blaise, Goyle, Luna, George, Dean Seamus and Parvati, who didn't. Or who didn't yet.

He had told the story once before, the whole of it, to Ginny, Ron, Hermione and Neville, in the ruins of Hogwarts on the morning after the Battle. That had been the only time. He found, now that he came to it, that he had no idea where to start.

As it turned out, somebody else had already decided. Before he could begin, Ron and Hermione got up from their seats, crossed the library and came to stand on either side of him at the fireplace, without so much as a glance at each other, exactly as if they had agreed it all beforehand. Harry realised that they almost certainly had, and that nobody had thought to mention it to him.

"Wait, Harry," said Hermione. "Before you say anything."

She opened her beaded bag, reached in up to the elbow, and drew out a long roll of parchment and a quill, and Ron cleared a space on the reading table for it without being asked. She unrolled the parchment and weighted the corners down with books. At the top, in her small, neat handwriting, it said ATTENDANCE.

Ron snorted.

"I made one this morning," she said. "Before anybody hears another word, I'd like everyone to sign it."

Harry looked at the parchment, and then at her, and for a moment she was fifteen again, in the back room of the Hog's Head, with ink on her fingers, making very sure that nobody could ever hurt him by talking. She had never once, in all the years since, stopped doing it.

"Attendance?" said Blaise.

"The last time I gave a list a name," said Hermione, "the Minister for Magic tried to arrest Dumbledore with it."

"What does it do?" said Pansy.

"It makes sure that what's said in this room stays in this room."

"And if it doesn't?"

"Then whoever told will know all about it," said Hermione. "And so will everybody else."

Pansy sat back. "Absolutely not. I saw Marietta Edgecombe's face, Granger. The whole school saw Marietta Edgecombe's face. It was permanent."

"It isn't spots this time."

"Oh, well, that's all right, then."

"I've improved it."

"Improved it how?"

"I'd rather nobody ever found out," said Hermione. She kept her voice perfectly level. "Nobody has to sign, Pansy. But if you won't, you can leave."

Pansy folded her arms and stayed exactly where she was. Somewhere up in the gallery, a book shifted on its shelf.

Then Ginny got up. She crossed to the table, took the quill out of Hermione's hand, and signed, quickly and untidily, right under the date: Ginny Potter. She already knew every word of what Harry was about to say. Watching her, Harry understood that this was rather the point.

Draco went next. He read the parchment from top to bottom first, small print and all, the way he read everything, and he looked at the empty space under Ginny's name before he dipped the quill. Then he signed his name under Ginny's in a quick, sharp hand. Harry saw it catch him. His hand stopped on the last letter, just for a second, and he looked down at it as though the parchment had taken a stitch in him and pulled it tight.

He looked up at Hermione. "That's a binding."

"It's a precaution."

"It's a very good precaution," said Draco, and from his face it was hard to tell whether he was furious or impressed. Harry suspected he didn't know either.

After that it went quickly. Theo signed with a flourish that took up two lines and most of the margin. Luna drew a very small hare beside her name. Neville, Dean, Seamus, Parvati and George had all signed a list like this once before, in the back room of the Hog's Head, and they signed this one without reading it, the way you'd answer to your own name. Blaise read the small print twice, raised an eyebrow at a clause near the bottom that began Notwithstanding the foregoing, Professor Minerva McGonagall, and signed with a sigh. Goyle wrote his name carefully, in large round letters, and read it back before he put the quill down.

That left Pansy.

Ron, who had still to sign himself, picked up the quill and held it out to her across the table.

"It's only spots, Parkinson."

"She said it isn't spots."

"Well, then it's probably worse," said Ron reasonably. "Sign it anyway."

Pansy looked at him. Then she snatched the quill and signed, in a small, furious, beautiful hand. "If anything comes up on my face, Weasley," she said, "I'll know exactly who to blame."

"Fair," said Ron.

Hermione signed, and then Ron, last of all, and Hermione rolled the parchment up, put it back in her bag, and nodded at Harry.

"Go on."

"You know the Tale of the Three Brothers," said Harry.

"Potter." Draco had gone back to his bookcase, and was leaning against it with his arms folded. "I have been reserved for All Hallows, like a table, and I have just signed one of Granger's contracts. We are somewhat pressed for time. This is not the moment for children's stories."

"Last time Harry told me something that sounded mad," said Neville mildly, "I ended up cutting the head off a snake." He settled back in his chair. "I'd let him get to the end."

"Beedle the Bard," said Theo. "Three brothers cheat Death on a bridge. Death, being a petty bastard, gives them each a gift, then picks them off one at a time. Moral: never cheat Death. He holds a grudge like a maiden aunt." He straightened a cuff. "My mother used to read it to me."

"So did mine," said Luna.

"Well, it's true," said Harry. "The gifts were real. They're called the Deathly Hallows. The Elder Wand, the Resurrection Stone, and the Cloak of Invisibility." He took a breath. "And I've owned all three."

"I'm sorry," said Blaise politely. "Owned all three?"

Luna looked round at all their faces with mild surprise.

"Oh," she said. "Was that not obvious to everyone else?"

"No," said several people at once.

"Daddy told them," said Luna. "They came to our house that spring to ask him about the sign, and he told them the whole story. And then he sent for the Death Eaters, because they'd promised to give me back." She said it quite peacefully. "I wasn't there, of course. I was downstairs."

It took the room a moment to work out what she meant. Dean, who had been down there with her, didn't need the moment. He looked at the floor. On the far side of the room, Draco looked at nothing at all.

So Harry told them.

He told them about the Cloak, which had been his father's, and his father's father's, all the way back to Ignotus Peverell, the youngest brother; and there was a gleam in Theo's eyes that suggested he had been quietly questioning the provenance of that Cloak since breakfast on Friday.

Theo wasn't the only one. Draco had been frowning at that Cloak, on and off, ever since Theo had pointed a Danish pastry at it and announced that nobody could possibly have had it since they were eleven. Harry had caught him at it more than once, like a man trying to remember where he'd left his keys. Now, quite suddenly, he found them.

"Third year," he said. "Hogsmeade. The Shrieking Shack." He turned his head, slowly, and looked at Harry. "Somebody threw mud at us."

"Yes," said Harry.

"Your head came out of thin air. I went straight to Snape. He didn't believe a word of it."

"He did, actually," said Harry. "He just couldn't prove anything."

Draco looked, for a moment, almost unbearably vindicated.

"Vince said it was a ghost," said Goyle, from the window seat.

Pansy reached across and put her hand on his arm, and left it there, and Draco looked a great deal less vindicated.

At the end of the sofa, George had sat forward. Harry saw him look at Ron, and then at Hermione, and then back at Ron, slowly. A year in a tent. A year with no letters home, and Mum lighting a candle in the kitchen window every night, and Fred making jokes about it that weren't quite jokes. And this had been part of it.

"So that's what you lot were up to," said George.

"Some of it," said Ron.

"We'd a book running on it, that year," said Seamus. "In the Room of Requirement. Where you'd gone, and what you were at." He wasn't smiling. "The Carrows were handing out the Cruciatus for detention, and we used to lie there in the dark telling each other the Chosen One would be off somewhere with a plan. Nobody had money on a fairy tale."

"We weren't hunting the Hallows, Seamus," said Hermione quietly. "Not really. They found us."

"Then what were you hunting?" said Parvati.

Harry looked at Ron, and Ron looked at Hermione.

"That's another story," said Hermione.

"A worse one," said Ron.

That might have been the end of it, with any other audience. But this was a room full of people who had spent ten years wondering, and it turned out that some of them had been keeping notes.

"It had something to do with the snake," said Dean. "Didn't it?" He was frowning at the fireplace, the way he frowned at a drawing that wasn't coming right. "I was on the front steps when Neville went for it. You-Know-Who was standing right there, and Neville went straight past him for the snake, like it was the only thing on the field that mattered. I've always wondered about that."

Neville became deeply interested in a loose thread on his cuff.

"There was a tiara." Draco had come away from his bookcase. "In the Room, that night, with the whole place on fire. You went for a tiara, Potter. I remember thinking you'd finally lost your mind."

He was looking at Harry, and Harry could see him going further back, past the fire, to a night in this very house. "My aunt," he said slowly. "When they brought you here. She wasn't frightened that you'd got the sword. She was frightened of what else you might have taken out of her vault." He had gone very pale. "And a few weeks later you broke into Gringotts and robbed it. Her vault. Of all the vaults in the bank."

Theo had taken off his spectacles and was turning them over and over in his fingers. "A snake that never left his side. A tiara out of a burning room. Something he'd trusted to Bellatrix Lestrange, in the safest vault in Britain." He laid it out quite quietly, the way he read runes, one stroke at a time. "My father kept a book I wasn't allowed to read, about why a wizard might want things like that, and what he might put in them. I read it anyway. There's a name for them. They're called —"

His tongue turned to lead.

He tried again, and managed a sort of strangled hum. Then he put his spectacles back on and looked across the library at Hermione, and Hermione smiled at him very sweetly.

Theo looked at the beaded bag the parchment had gone into, and sat back in his chair with his hands folded, like a man who had suddenly remembered how fond he was of his face.

"It's finished," said Harry. "That's the part that matters. It was finished ten years ago, and it's going to stay finished." He looked round at them all: at Theo, who already knew more than was good for him, and at Draco, who was very clearly still doing sums.

When the room had settled, Harry took up the story again.

♫ Listen along

He told them about the Stone, which had been set into a ring, and then hidden in a Golden Snitch, and which he had held in his hand in the Forbidden Forest on the night he walked out to die. He didn't tell them what he'd seen when he turned it. He didn't think he ever would.

"You told me to kill the snake," said Neville. "That night, just before you went." He was looking at Harry as though he had never quite seen him before. "You weren't coming back. You knew you were going there to die."

Theo's eyes slid to Harry's faded scar.

"I hoped you'd manage it," said Harry.

"You could have said."

"You'd have tried to stop me."

Neville thought about that. "Yeah," he said. "I would've."

Then he turned to Ron and Hermione, who were still standing on either side of Harry at the fireplace like a pair of bookends. "And you two just let him go?"

"Let him?" Ron's ears had gone red. "We didn't know! He'd gone off under the bloody Cloak."

"We looked everywhere for him," said Hermione sharply. "Nobody saw him go."

"I did," said Neville.

Hermione's head turned, very slowly, towards Harry.

"I didn't tell them either," said Harry. "Same reason."

"We've had words about it since," said Ron. "Several. Mostly Hermione's."

Across the room, Pansy Parkinson, who had once stood up in the Great Hall and pointed at him, was looking at Harry as if she had never seen him before either.

"Except you didn't die, Harry," said Parvati.

"I know," said Harry. "He was furious."

He told them that he had dropped the Stone there in the Forest, on purpose, somewhere among the leaves, and had never gone back to look.

"Where?" said George.

It was only one word, and he said it lightly, but Hermione's hand tightened on Harry's.

"I don't know," said Harry. "Somewhere in the Forest. It was dark. I didn't look where it fell."

George nodded slowly, as though he were filing it away, and Harry found himself wishing very much that he had lied.

And then he told them about the Wand.

"It was Dumbledore's," he said. "He won it from Grindelwald. And the Elder Wand only cares about one thing: who beat the last person to hold it. Whoever disarms its master becomes its master, whether they know it or not." He looked across the library. "On the Astronomy Tower, the night Dumbledore died, somebody disarmed him before Snape ever got there."

Draco hadn't said a word since the Forest. He had gone a bad colour, and he was staring at the floor between his feet like a man trying very hard not to be sick on his own carpet. But at the Astronomy Tower his head came up, and something new began to dawn on his face, slowly and then all at once, as if he were reading the small print on a contract he had already signed.

"Wait," said Draco.

Harry, who had been looking forward to this part, carried on regardless. "And then, a few months later, in this house, I took his wand off him."

"Wait," said Draco again. "The Tower. I disarmed —"

"You did. Very neatly, too. I had an excellent view."

Draco stared at him. "You were there?"

"Under the Cloak," said Harry. "Do try to keep up."

"And then you disarmed me. Here. In this house."

"Wrestled it off you, if we're being accurate. Not my most elegant moment. Not yours either."

"So for nearly a year, I was the master of the Elder Wand."

"Technically. Don't let it go to your head."

"The most powerful wand ever made. The Deathstick. The Wand of Destiny."

"Don't do the voice."

"And I spent that year," said Draco, "being shouted at by my aunt, threatened daily by the Dark Lord, and made to sit at dinner every night with a snake the size of a drainpipe."

"Character-building, I'd have thought," said Harry.

"I could have done something!"

"Such as?"

Draco cast about for an answer, and failed to find one.

"I could at least have enjoyed it!"

"Enjoy it now," said Harry. "We'll wait. I know you're pressed for time."

"This," said Theo, pressing a hand to his heart, "is better than the ferret."

"Nothing beats the ferret," said Ron.

"You told me," said Pansy, "for the whole of seventh year, that you were the unluckiest wizard who had ever lived."

"I was the master of the Elder Wand, Pansy."

"Technically," said Harry.

Blaise had begun to laugh, and was trying very hard not to, and failing. Even George's mouth was twitching.

"Where is it now?" said Theo, when things had calmed down a little. He also dealt, on the side, in antiquities, and it showed. "The Wand. Purely hypothetically."

"Back in Dumbledore's tomb," said Harry. "I put it back. The day after the Battle."

"You put it back?" Theo looked genuinely faint. "The single most valuable object in the history of magic, and you put it in a coffin?"

"I didn't want it." He shrugged. "I've never wanted any of them. I dropped the Stone, I put the Wand back, I kept the Cloak because it was my dad's. That's all." He looked round at them. "But I still won them. All three of them. The Wand still answers to me, even lying in a tomb."

"That makes you the Master of Death, Harry," said Luna softly.

Harry looked down at his hands. He knew what most people thought the words meant: that you could give Death orders, keep it waiting on the doorstep, send it away. He had walked into the Forest with the Stone in his hand, and he knew better. The youngest brother hadn't beaten Death. He had simply stopped running from it, and when the time came, he had gone to meet it like an old friend.

Whatever being the Master of Death meant, it did not mean you got to keep anyone.

"He doesn't like to say it," said Ron. "Makes it sound like a band."

"It's more of a job description," said Luna.

The laughter went out of the room quite slowly, the way water drains out of a bath.

Hermione opened the copied ledger at its last page and laid it on the reading table where everyone could see. And the Master, to open the door.

"Folio Nine is missing from the sealed archive," she said. Her tongue didn't lock. Perhaps it didn't count any more, now she'd been sacked. "It's the Peverell folio. Everything the Department has ever learned about the Hallows. Somebody took it out and didn't report it."

"And Stroud said the Wand was the difficulty," said Draco. His face had gone serious again. "The tomb's guarded, he said. McGonagall's in the way." He looked at Harry. "They're going to Hogwarts."

"They'll go for the Wand first," said Ron. He was looking at the ledger the way he looked at a chessboard. "Then the Stone, in the Forest. Then —"

"And then you," said Hermione.

Harry kept his eyes on the ledger.

"The Cloak stays with you," said Ginny. "Every minute."

"So do you," said Ron to Ginny. "Every minute. He gets ideas."

"I don't get ideas," said Harry.

"You get ideas," said Ron, Hermione and Ginny together, and nobody in the room, not even Draco, took Harry's side.

Neville was in the fireplace before anyone else had moved. "Hogwarts Headmistress' Office," he said, and was gone in a burst of green flame, leaving his Mimbulus mimbletonia behind on the mantelpiece.

​

♫ Listen along

He found Draco in the kitchens after midnight.

Harry hadn't been looking for him. He'd come down for a glass of water, and got lost twice in the dark corridors, and come out at the bottom of a flight of stone stairs in a great vaulted kitchen, high as a chapel, that had plainly not been used for its proper purpose in years. There were copper pans on the walls, green with neglect. There was a range the size of a small car. In a basket beside it, curled up in a nest of tea towels, Kreacher was fast asleep and snoring.

Draco was sitting at the long scrubbed table in the middle of the room with a pot of tea he wasn't drinking.

"You don't sleep, do you," said Harry.

"Not much. Never have." Draco's eyes were on his cup. "There's tea. It's dreadful. I made it."

Harry sat down across from him and poured himself a cup. "So it is," he said, after the first mouthful, and drank it anyway.

They drank the terrible tea. Kreacher snored.

"Go on, then," said Draco eventually.

"What?"

"Get it out of your system. The books. You've been dying to ask since last Sunday. I've seen your face."

Harry considered denying it, and then didn't bother. "All right. What happens in volume three?"

Draco sighed, very deeply, like a man approaching the gallows with dignity. Then, to Harry's considerable surprise, he told him.

It took some time, and he knew every name by heart. Volume three, it emerged, opened with Harry Potter, aged nine, being summoned from his luxurious country house by an owl of unusual intelligence named Cicero, with the news that a crew of vampire pirates had seized a lighthouse in the Outer Hebrides and were holding a Muggle fishing village to ransom. He set off at once on his winged horse, whose name was Thunderbolt, accompanied by his loyal best friend, a goblin called Snigg who spoke only in riddles. He carried a wand made from a dragon's tooth, which had been given to him by the Minister for Magic personally for services rendered in volume two. There was a sword fight on a ship in a storm. There was a sea-serpent. There was a scene in which Harry Potter, aged nine, defeated the Vampire Captain in single combat on the top of the lighthouse by means of a clever trick involving a mirror and the sunrise, and then shook his hand, because even vampires deserved a second chance.

"It was very well written," said Draco stiffly. "For what it was."

Harry was laughing so hard that he'd had to put his cup down. "I had a winged horse?"

"Called Thunderbolt."

"And a goblin?"

"Snigg. He was the best character. He saved you in every book he was ever in, and you never once thanked him."

"Swap the goblin for a house-elf," said Harry, wiping his eyes, "and that's actually quite accurate."

He looked round the great, cold, empty kitchen as he said it, at the green copper pans and the unused range, and it occurred to him, for the first time, that Dobby had once lived down here.

Draco almost smiled. Then he followed Harry's glance round the kitchen, and looked down at his tea, and turned the cup slowly round and round on the table, and when he spoke again his voice had changed.

"What were you actually doing?" he said. "When you were nine."

Harry stopped laughing.

He thought about changing the subject. He had never told anybody the whole of it, not even Ginny; she knew bits, and Ron and Hermione knew bits, and he had always preferred it like that. It was a long time ago. It didn't matter.

But it was one in the morning, in a kitchen at the bottom of Malfoy Manor, and the tea was terrible, and the man across the table had just spent the best part of the last hour describing a childhood that Harry had never had, in loving detail, without once realising it. And for some reason, Harry found that he didn't want to leave it there.

"I lived with my aunt and uncle," he said. "In Surrey. They didn't like magic. They didn't much like me either."

He told it plainly, the way you'd read out a report. The cupboard under the stairs, and the spiders, and the single bare bulb. Dudley's birthdays, and his own, which nobody remembered. Cold toast. His uncle's hand on the back of his neck. The years of not knowing why strange things happened around him, or why he was in trouble for them, or why he was always, always in trouble. The letters that had come for him when he was eleven, which his uncle burnt in the grate, one after another, until they came down the chimney in their hundreds.

He didn't make any of it sound worse than it was. He didn't need to.

When he'd finished, Kreacher had stopped snoring.

Draco had stopped turning his cup. He was sitting there with his eyes on Harry's face, and Harry saw something move across his expression. It wasn't pity. Harry had had a great deal of pity over the years and could spot it at fifty paces. This was something slower, and more painful, like watching somebody take down a picture that had been on their wall for twenty years and discover that there was nothing behind it but a crack in the plaster.

"Nine," said Draco at last.

"Nine."

"In a cupboard."

"Until I was eleven. Then they gave me Dudley's second bedroom." Harry shrugged. "Only because they were scared of the letters."

Draco got up abruptly, went over to the range and began to make a fresh pot of tea. He did it badly, with a great deal of clattering, and Kreacher opened one eye in his basket to watch with deep disapproval, but Draco was past noticing. He brought the pot back to the table, poured Harry a fresh cup, pushed it across to him, and sat down again.

"Volume three's at my flat," said Draco, not looking at him. "When all this is over. You can borrow it, if you like."

Harry looked at him. "Is it any good?"

"It's the best one."

Harry picked up the fresh cup. It was even worse than the first. He drank all of it.

​

They gave Sunday to the slate. Ron sat and watched the four grains of rice, which did not move, and then watched them a bit longer, in case. By Sunday night they knew exactly as much as they had on Saturday morning, and Hermione had colour-coded it.

Theo sat up with the border long after everyone else had gone to bed, going round and round it with one finger, and Luna sat up with him. She told him a good copy went on showing you what was there, if you were patient with it. Some time after midnight, when he had run out of patience, he said something to the slate in Old Irish that was probably also rude, took out his wand instead and turned it over and over in the lamplight. The silver had run right up into the wood in the Atrium and stayed there, and there was no join anywhere that he could find.

"It isn't supposed to do that," he said. "Wands don't take things in. They're terribly particular. I've had four hundred through the shop, and not one of them has so much as looked at a hairpin."

"They've shared a waistcoat for years," said Luna. "I expect they got attached."

It was not, Theo thought, a theory Ollivander would have accepted. He kept it anyway.

​

♫ Listen along

Edmund Grieve came on Monday morning.

By nine the whole team was at the Manor. Neville had come back from Hogwarts the night before, grim-faced, to say that McGonagall had tripled the guard on the tomb and put a curse on the lake that he'd been asked not to describe. Seamus, Dean and Parvati had Flooed in first thing for a council of war. Seamus had put his head back in the fire to ring in sick to Magical Maintenance, coughing horribly, and Parvati had swapped her shift at St Mungo's. They were all in the small dining room arguing about the Forest when the peacocks started to scream.

Draco was at the window first. Harry saw him stop there with one hand flat against the glass.

"Potter," he said.

Harry went to the window, and looked out, and felt the floor tilt under his feet.

A man was standing at the Manor gates. He was quite alone. He wore a grey cardigan under an old tweed coat, a soft felt hat and a small red poppy on his lapel, and he was leaning slightly on a walking stick, to the top of which somebody had tied a white handkerchief. It stirred a little in the morning breeze. On the drive around his feet, in the full autumn sunshine, the gravel had turned white with frost.

​

They went out to him. All of them. Harry didn't remember deciding that they would; they simply did, one after another, out through the great front doors and down the steps and across the frosted lawn, until they stood in a loose, uneven line on the inside of the tall black gates, with the peacocks shrieking somewhere behind them.

Narcissa stayed at the back, with her wand in her hand.

Edmund Grieve looked at them through the iron bars. He looked at each of them in turn, slowly and carefully, the way he had looked at Harry across his desk three weeks ago, the way he looked at the photographs on his walls. When he reached Harry, he smiled. It was a tired, gentle, genuine smile, and that was the worst part.

"Hello, Harry," he said.

Harry couldn't speak. At the end of the line, Draco had gone rigid.

"I'm sorry," said Grieve. "I know you trusted me. I know you're angry. You're quite right to be." He rested both hands on the top of his walking stick. "I'd like to explain. If you'll let me. Then you can decide what you think of me."

"You took your own daughter out of her grave," said Neville. His voice was shaking.

"I'm bringing her home, Mr Longbottom." Grieve turned his gentle gaze on Neville. "She'd been in the cold for ten years. I'm bringing her home. She's waiting. She was very fond of you, you know. She talked about you in every letter. Neville says. Neville thinks. She'd have followed you anywhere."

Neville flinched as though he'd been struck.

"The coin," said Harry. His voice came out hoarse. "She sent the message. She told us to stop you. Don't let him bring me back. She doesn't want this."

"My daughter is frightened," said Grieve softly. "She's tired, and she's cold, and she's been a very long way from home for a very long time. When she's back, she'll understand." He looked up at Harry again. "They all will."

Then he told them.

He was gentle about it, and plain, and he never once raised his voice. Ten years of writing to the families of the dead had taught him how to make a terrible thing sound reasonable. He told them about the hollow hills, and the gate beneath one of them, and the old folk who lived there and kept the door. He told them what the Veil was: a splinter of that door, carried off to London centuries ago and set up in a stone room by people who had never understood it. He told them that on the night of All Hallows, when the boundary between the worlds grew thin, the door could be opened. And that when it was, what had gone through could come back.

"As themselves," he said. "Warm, and breathing, and walking in at their own front doors. But the door keeps a ledger, as I do. It gives nothing for free. For every life it returns, it takes a life in exchange. That's the price. That's always been the price. Balance."

"A hundred," said Hermione. Her voice was steady. "For a hundred."

"A hundred of the wrong dead," said Grieve, "for a hundred of the wrong living. The ones the war should have taken, and didn't." His eyes moved, without hurry, along the line to where the Slytherins were standing. "The debt the war never collected."

Further down the line, Pansy's chin came up.

"And I'm not asking you to help me with that," Grieve went on. "The hundred are already mine to take. They were owed on the day the war ended. I'm not asking anything of any of you at all, except this." He turned back to Harry. "The door can only be opened by its Master. And the Master must walk up the hill to it of his own free will. It won't open for a prisoner. It won't open for a man under the Imperius Curse, or a man in chains." He smiled sadly. "Believe me, Harry, I checked. I could have taken you any night this month. I haven't. I'm asking."

Harry's hands had closed round the cold iron bars of the gate.

"No," he said.

"You haven't heard what I'm offering."

"I don't need to."

"I think you do," said Edmund Grieve gently. "I think you all do."

And then, one after another, he named them.

He named Fred first. He looked at George as he did it, and at Ron, and at Ginny, and he said that he had written to their mother every year on the second of May, and that she had written back twice. He named Colin Creevey, and looked at Seamus, and at Neville. He named Lavender Brown, and Parvati made a small sound and put her hand over her mouth. He looked at Dean and named a man Dean had never met, and said that Dean had his father's hands. He named Cedric Diggory, and said that Amos Diggory still set a place for him at Christmas.

He named Remus Lupin and Nymphadora Tonks, and he looked at Harry.

"Teddy is ten," said Grieve softly. "He has his mother's hair and his father's nose, and he has never once heard either of them laugh."

Harry's hands were white on the bars.

"And James and Lily Potter," said Grieve. "Your mother was twenty-one, Harry. Your father was twenty-one. They'd have been at your wedding."

Somewhere behind Harry, Hermione made a sound that Harry never wanted to hear again.

"You have until All Hallows," said Grieve. "Think about it. All of you. Think about who you'd like to see at your table at Christmas." He began to turn away, and then turned back, and his gaze settled on the one person in the line he had been saving for last.

"And Mr Malfoy," he said.

Draco was standing exactly where he had been, a little apart from the others, very straight, very pale, with his hands at his sides.

"You asked me once why Vincent Crabbe wasn't on my wall." Grieve's voice stayed as gentle as ever. "I'll tell you why you're last on my list, since I imagine you've wondered. Your aunt killed my daughter, Mr Malfoy. On the fourth floor of Hogwarts Castle, at eleven minutes past two in the morning on the second of May, with two third-years standing behind her. I have the Healer's report. I've read it every night for ten years."

Draco stood there and let it land. Only his face changed, very slightly, as though something had been taken out of it.

At the back, Narcissa Malfoy had gone as white as her peacocks. She did not look surprised.

"You'll understand," said Grieve, to Draco, "better than any of them, I think. What's owed. You've always understood about debts. Your family taught you that much." He touched his hat. "Good morning, all of you."

"Mr Grieve," said Ginny. She walked up to the bars.

He paused.

"I was at her funeral," said Ginny. "I watched you not cry. I thought it was the worst thing I'd ever seen." Her hands were quite steady on the bars. "I was wrong."

He turned, and walked away down the drive, leaning on his stick, with the white handkerchief fluttering above him. Where his feet had touched the gravel, the frost was melting, in a trail of small wet footprints that shone in the sun, all the way to the lane.

​

It was Dean who went first.

He didn't make a speech. He just stood in the entrance hall of Malfoy Manor, with the frost still melting off everybody's shoes onto the marble, and said, "My dad, Harry," and his voice cracked in the middle of it.

"Dean —"

"I never knew him. I never even —" Dean pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. "I'm not saying I'm with him. I'm not saying that. I'm saying I need to think. I can't — I can't be in this house right now, and think."

He went to the fireplace. Seamus went with him.

Seamus stopped at the hearth and looked back, and Harry saw his eyes go past him, across the hall, to where Pansy was standing with Theo and Blaise and Goyle, and then back to Harry.

"I'm sorry, Harry," Seamus said. "I can't be standing here picking between Colin and her."

"Nobody's asking you to choose," said Harry.

"Ah, Harry," said Seamus quietly. "He just did."

The green flames took them.

Parvati didn't leave. She sat down on the bottom step of the great staircase, put her face in her hands, and cried, silently, for a long time. Luna sat down next to her and put an arm round her shoulders and held on.

Neville stood in the middle of the hall with his fists clenched at his sides.

"She wouldn't have wanted it," he said. He said it to nobody in particular, and to all of them. "Immy. She held a corridor on her own so two kids could live. She'd never have traded anybody for anything. Not in a million years. Not for herself."

George wasn't in the hall. Harry found out later that he'd walked away from the gates after Grieve left, and out across the lawns, and into the rose garden, and had sat down on a stone bench among the roses that somehow still bloomed in October and stayed there all day.

Ron went out after him. On his way to the door he passed Pansy, and stopped beside her for no more than a moment.

"Don't go anywhere," he said, low, without looking at her.

Pansy watched him all the way out of the door. Then she did as she was told, more or less: she went exactly as far as the long gallery on the first floor, and no further.

Theo and Blaise and Goyle went up with her, and the four of them sat down at the far end of it, on the window seats and on the floor, in the grey light, with the width of the whole house between them and everyone else. They looked, Harry thought, like people who had just heard their price named out loud, and found it was about what they'd always expected.

After a while, Luna got up from where she was sitting in the hall and went up the stairs. Harry followed her as far as the top. From there, through the open doors at the end of the landing, he could see all the way down the long gallery. Luna walked the length of it and sat down on the floor next to Theo Nott as though nothing at all had happened. After a moment Harry saw Theo's shoulders come down, just slightly, from somewhere up around his ears.

Hermione went to make tea, because somebody had to do something, and Ginny went with her. By the time it was made, there was nobody left to bring it to. The Gryffindors had drifted away to the library, one by one, and shut the door. The Slytherins were at the far end of the gallery. And between them, the great staircase of Malfoy Manor stood empty, and the gap between the two halves of the house was as wide, Harry thought, as the one down the middle of the kitchen table at Grimmauld Place had been, before any of them had said a single name.

​

Hermione took one of the cups out anyway.

She had made it black, with nothing in it, which was how Kreacher always brought it to him, and it was only halfway across the hall that she realised she had noticed. She found Draco on the front steps, alone, looking down the long drive to the gates. She set the cup down on the stone beside him, and stayed standing.

"I know what your aunt was," she said. "Better than he does."

He didn't look up. "I know you do, Granger. That's rather the problem."

"You're not her, Draco."

That made him look up.

She stood there a moment longer in the cold. Then she went back inside, and left him the tea.

​

Harry found Draco on the front steps not long after.

He was sitting on the top step with his arms round his knees and an empty teacup on the stone beside him, looking down the long drive to the gates, where the last of the light was going and the peacocks were settling for the night in the trees. He went on watching when Harry came out, and when Harry sat down beside him, he shifted over without a word to make room.

They sat there without speaking, while the lawns went blue and then grey.

"I didn't know," said Draco eventually. "About my aunt. About his daughter. I didn't know."

"I know."

"Mother did."

"I saw."

Draco nodded slowly, as if that settled something, and looked back down the drive.

It was almost dark. Behind them, through the tall windows of the house, lights were coming on, one by one: in the east wing where the Gryffindors were, and in the long gallery where the Slytherins were, and a single one in the kitchens, very far down. Between them, the rest of the great house stood dark.

"Would you?" said Draco.

Harry turned his head.

Draco was looking down the drive, to where the frost had melted in small wet footprints all the way to the gate, and his voice was quite light and quite steady and not unkind at all.

"If it came to it," he said. "My name on his list, and your mother and your father on the other side of the scales. Would you?"

Harry opened his mouth.

He knew what the answer was. He knew what it had to be, and what it would always be, and he knew exactly the words he ought to say. He had them ready. They were right there.

But he thought of a mirror, in an empty classroom, when he was eleven years old, and two faces smiling out of it. He thought of a stone turning in his hand in the dark of a forest. He thought of a ten-year-old boy with bright turquoise hair and his father's nose, who had once, at the age of four, asked Harry whether his mum and dad had been able to see his birthday cake from heaven.

And he didn't say anything at all.

Draco waited. The silence went on, one second, and then another, and then long enough for both of them to hear it.

Then Draco nodded, very slightly, the way you nod when someone has answered a question after all. He got up without a word, and brushed down his trousers, and went back into the house.

The door closed behind him. Harry sat alone on the steps of Malfoy Manor, in the dark, and listened to the peacocks settle.

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