Chapter 2: The Hand the Silver Knows
Draco Malfoy's workshop stood at the crooked end of Horizont Alley, three storeys high and narrow as a bookend, in what had once been a chandler's. Someone had painted CURSE-BREAKING & ANALYTICAL POTIONS on the window in letters so small you had to want to find them. Inside it smelled of iron filings and violets and, underneath both, toast.
The workroom was up a staircase so steep it was nearly a ladder. By ten o'clock on Tuesday night Hermione had been in it for four hours, and she had taken her shoes off.
She hadn't meant to. It had been a gradual surrender, like the cardigan on the back of her stool and her hair, which she'd twisted up with a pencil at eight and which was coming down. Draco's end of the long bench held copper alembics, reagents labelled in his small slanting hand, and a cauldron the colour of a bruise breathing violet steam. Hers held four ledgers in calfskin gone black with age, fetched from his mother's attic that afternoon in a tea chest along with a portrait that now stood against the far wall with its face turned in.
The portrait had been muttering since seven.
"Eudora," Draco had said, when Hermione asked. "She came with the ledgers. She considers curse-breaking a trade and me a disgrace to the name, and she's not wrong about the second." He'd raised his voice a little. "She also wasn't asked."
"Trade," said the wall.
The ledgers were Eudora's household accounts, recopied a century ago by Draco's great-grandfather in a cipher Draco had been picking at since he was fifteen. Hermione had been at it since six.
At twenty past ten she sat back and said, "You're very vain."
He looked up from the cauldron. "I beg your pardon?"
"Your family. There's a six-symbol word on nearly every page, sometimes three times. Nobody writes salver that often, so I used your name as a crib." She turned the ledger to face him and pushed her notes across. "It's a running key, and the key's the family tree. Each line shifts by the number of letters in the next ancestor's name, starting from Armand. He just couldn't stop writing Malfoy."
Draco read her notes for a long time.
"You've broken a hundred-year-old family cipher," he said, "by insulting my family."
"Yes."
"That's the most Slytherin thing anyone's done in my presence since the war."
She found the entry before eleven, written up in the same column as the price of candles. The footman's name had been Abel Kemp. He'd taken the salver in the spring of 1741 and been found in a ditch outside Salisbury that May, silver to the collarbone. Below that was a note: Eudora's sister had wept over the man, being soft, and asked whether there was any undoing it.
There is, Eudora had written. What the blood has bound, the blood may call home. Let a hand the silver knows be laid upon the taken flesh, and the silver will come to it as a dog comes to its master. It will not stay in us. But it will make us pay for the trouble of calling it.
And under that, in different ink: I did not call it.
Hermione read it twice. Draco was very still beside her.
"Well," he said finally. "That's very like her."
"It'll hurt you."
"She's clear on that point, yes."
"Malfoy, we don't know how much—"
"Pip Okafor's silver reached her shoulder this afternoon," he said. "I'll go at six tomorrow. Healers like punctuality." He reached past her to close the ledger, and his sleeve rode up, and she saw the Mark.
It had faded almost to nothing, grey on pale skin, like a drawing someone had tried very hard to rub out. He saw her see it, and he didn't pull the sleeve down.
"It doesn't move any more," he said. "In case you were wondering."
"I wasn't."
"You were. You always wonder. It's your whole personality." He looked at the Mark rather than at her. "I was in that drawing room too, you know. When my aunt had you on the floor."
"I know," said Hermione. "I remember who was there."
"I was the one doing nothing." His voice was perfectly level. "I find that harder to forgive than the ones doing something. They at least had the excuse of being mad."
She didn't tell him it was all right, because it wasn't, and he'd have despised her for saying so. She looked at his arm, and then at his face. "You're doing something now."
He went back to the cauldron without answering and began to stir a draught for the cold the curse left behind. Hermione got up, padded down the bench in her stockinged feet, and put her hand over his on the stirring rod.
"Sunwise," she said. "Eudora's recipe says sunwise. You're going widdershins."
"I'm the potioneer."
"You're the potioneer going the wrong way round."
He stopped. His hand under hers was warm and dry, with a callus along the first finger where a knife handle sat. She was aware, all at once and entirely, of how near she was standing, and that she had no shoes on, and of the steam curling up between them and the smell of his collar, vetiver and something scorched.
"Granger," he said quietly. "You're still holding my hand."
She let go. She went back to her end of the bench and read the same line about candles four times. Behind her the stirring started up again. Sunwise.
It rained on Wednesday the way it only rains on Diagon Alley, as though the sky held a personal grudge against awnings. Water sheeted off the bowed windows of Flourish and Blotts, and the cobbles had gone to black glass. Hermione had her hood up and her head down, and she was thinking about Draco at dawn, his bare hand flat on Pip's arm and his jaw locked while the silver drained from her shoulder back to her wrist, and how he'd then walked very calmly to the basin and been sick. "Two more sittings," he'd said, wiping his mouth. "Don't look at me like that, Granger." Then someone screamed.
It came again. Outside Eeylops Owl Emporium, in the middle of a knot of people, Dennis Creevey was on his knees on the wet stones.
He was holding his left hand away from his body as if it belonged to somebody else. A silver cigarette case lay in a puddle beside him. His hand was silver to the wrist, and as Hermione dropped down next to him she watched the line creep a quarter of an inch up his arm, quick as a candle burning down.
"I picked it up," Dennis said. His teeth were chattering. He was twenty-two and looked fifteen. "I thought someone had dropped it. I was going to hand it in. Hermione, I can feel it going—"
"Look at me." She took his face in both hands. Rain ran into her eyes. Fear quickens the blood. "Dennis. Look at me, not at it. You need to be bored. Can you do bored?"
"What?"
"Tell me the filing codes for the June declarations."
He stared at her. Then, in a cracked voice: "A-oh-three-one to A-oh-four-six, except the Selwyns, they went under S because Tobias—"
"Because Tobias can't read his own writing. Keep going."
He kept going. With one hand she held his jaw. With the other she drew her wand and reached for the memory she always reached for, the one that never failed: the summer after the war, the orchard at the Burrow, Harry trying to teach her to fly and the two of them sliding off the broom into the long grass, laughing so hard she couldn't breathe. The otter burst out silver-blue. "Draco Malfoy," she told it. "Eeylops. Now." It streaked off through the rain, and she turned back to Dennis and did not stop to think about whose memory she had just sent running to whom.
He came at a dead run, coatless, soaked through before he reached them. He went down on the cobbles on Dennis's other side without a word, pulled off his glove with his teeth, and closed his bare hand round Dennis's silver one.
Hermione watched the silver go home.
It ran backwards. There was no other word for it. It drained out of Dennis's fingertips and knuckles and wrist and poured up into Draco's hand, and as it went Dennis's skin came back pink and wet and alive. Draco made no sound at all. His breathing went short, his lips went white, and he didn't let go.
"Get away from him!"
Harry had Apparated in with two Aurors at his back and his wand up, pointed straight at Draco's head.
"Harry, don't! He's helping. Look."
Harry looked. She saw him see it: the silver running the wrong way, Draco's hand turning to metal and Dennis's back to flesh. She saw him understand what it was costing. He lowered his wand an inch at a time and didn't look away until it was done.
Afterwards, when the Aurors had taken Dennis to St Mungo's, Draco sat on the step of Flourish and Blotts under the dripping awning with his right hand in his lap, silver to the wrist and fading by slow degrees to a cold blue-grey. He was shivering and pretending not to.
Harry came and stood over him, rain running off his fringe.
"Why does it go into you?" he said.
"Because it's mine." Draco flexed his fingers. They barely moved. "It's coming home. It turns out it doesn't care for the house much either."
Harry was quiet for a moment. Then, in the voice of a man pulling his own tooth: "Thanks."
Draco looked up at him in real alarm. "Don't. I'll have to be civil to you, and neither of us will survive it."
Hermione wasn't listening. She was thinking about June: the committee room, the gallery packed to the walls, nine witnesses. Pip Okafor had been the third. Dennis had been the sixth. He'd talked about the year he was barred from Hogwarts and hid in his uncle's garage in Cheshire, and his voice had shaken the whole way through.
"They're working down the witness list," she said.
Both men turned.
"Pip testified. Dennis testified. The transcript's public, and seven of the nine were Muggle-born." She could hear herself going faster. "And the bill's in my name. It's on the front page. Introduced by H. J. Granger."
Harry's hand closed round her arm above the elbow. Not hard. He just held on.
"You're on the list," he said.
Down in the kitchen at Grimmauld Place, with Kreacher's treacle tart cooling untouched on the side, Ron beat him in eleven moves, which was a record even for Ron.
"You're not trying," Ron said, sweeping Harry's king off the board. The king went without protest; Harry's pieces had stopped shouting advice at him around 2001. "I've seen you play better with a Bludger concussion."
Ron leaned back, long legs stuck out under the scrubbed table, and looked at Harry the way he'd looked at him across a lot of tables over the years, like he'd worked it out already and was waiting for Harry to catch up.
Harry kept seeing Malfoy's hand: the silver running into it like water down a drain, and Malfoy's mouth going white, and Hermione on her knees in the wet looking at Malfoy over Dennis's head as though he'd hung the moon. He'd come round that corner ready to curse him and found him doing the bravest thing he'd seen anyone do in years. It had made him want to hit something. He wasn't proud of that.
"This is about Malfoy," said Ron.
"It's about the case."
"Right. Course. The case." Ron picked up a pawn and turned it over in his fingers. "Ginny saw them in the Leaky yesterday. Says he was looking at her like she was a pudding he couldn't afford."
Harry said nothing.
"Mate," said Ron, not unkindly. "I went out with her for a year and a half. You know who she went to first, every single time something went wrong?"
Harry looked at the board.
"You. Every time. Took me about a year to stop minding." Ron set the pawn down. "Then I noticed I'd stopped minding, and that told me something, didn't it. It's why we're friends now and not throwing sprouts at each other across Mum's Christmas dinner."
Harry couldn't have said when it had happened. Nothing had struck him like lightning. There had been a Tuesday last March when she'd fallen asleep on his sofa with her feet in his lap and a draft of the bill rising and falling on her chest, and he had sat there for two hours without moving because moving would have ended it. There had been a morning in July when she'd walked into his office with a split lip from a house search gone sideways, and the floor had gone out from under him, and he had understood, finally, what kind of frightened he was.
"If I tell her," he said, "and she doesn't—" He stopped, and started again. "She's the one thing, Ron. Everything else, I've lost or broken or had to give back. If I get this wrong, I don't get her back. I get a version of her that's careful with me. For the rest of my life."
Ron was quiet for a bit.
"And if you don't tell her," he said, "you get a version of her that's careful with you because she's going out with Malfoy. So." He stood and picked up his coat. "Thursday. Same time. Try to lose in more than eleven."
When he'd gone, Harry looked at the clock over the range. Ten o'clock. She'd said she'd be at the workshop late, going through the witness list, and her name was on the front of it.
That was a reason. It was a good, solid, professional reason.
He took his coat off the hook, and on the way he stopped for noodles on Charing Cross Road, because she'd have forgotten to eat.
"Hold still."
"I am holding still. This is what still looks like on me."
"Then hold stiller." Hermione tipped more murtlap essence into the dish, and it closed over his knuckles.
It was past eleven, and the workroom was dark but for the lamp on the bench. The silver had gone from his hand entirely now, but it had left the skin a bruised grey-blue from fingertip to wrist, cold as a stone out of a river, and he couldn't close it all the way.
The witness list lay at her elbow, two hours' work and nothing to show for it. The transcript had been printed in the Prophet, and anyone with an owl and a grudge could have read it.
"Why do you do this?" she said.
"Sit with my hand in a dish?"
"Curse-breaking. You could have gone to France with your mother and done nothing at all, very comfortably, for the rest of your life."
"Every object in your vault," he said at last, "is something a man like my father kept in a cupboard because he liked knowing it was there. I'd like there to be fewer of them." He watched her hands on his. "And nobody else will hire me, so it's this or the family business, and the family business has gone rather out of fashion. Why do you?"
"Because they took Pip's wand and put it in a drawer," Hermione said, "and somebody's still giving dinner parties on top of it."
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he said, "Yes. All right," as if she'd passed something.
She lifted his hand out and dried it, finger by finger, and began to wind a bandage round it, because murtlap worked better kept warm. That was true. It was also true that she didn't want to let go of it yet. His fingers were beginning to warm between hers.
She looked up to say something about the dressing and didn't say it.
He was very close, closer than at the cauldron. The lamplight caught the grey of his eyes and the small white scar through one eyebrow, and he was looking at her mouth and not pretending otherwise. She thought, oh. She thought it quite calmly, the way she'd once turned over an exam paper and found she knew every answer. She didn't remember deciding to lean in, but the space between them was going, an inch, then less—
"Your Auror's outside," Draco said.
She stopped.
He hadn't moved back. His voice was low and dry and very near. "Across the alley, under the lamp. Since half past ten."
Hermione got up. She went to the window in her stockinged feet, the end of the bandage trailing from her hand, and looked down.
Harry was standing under the streetlamp on the far side of Horizont Alley in the rain, a paper carrier bag going dark with wet in one hand. He wasn't knocking. He wasn't doing anything at all. He was just looking up at the lit window, the way she'd once seen him stand outside the Burrow the night after Fred's funeral, as though he wasn't sure he'd be let in.
"Forty minutes in the rain," Draco said behind her. "Not knocking. He'll catch his death, and I'll be blamed for that too." A pause. When he spoke again the edge had gone out of it. "I'd rather not kiss you while you're wondering what he'd think, Granger. I have some pride. Not a great deal. Some."
Down in the alley, Harry lifted his head and looked straight up at her, and she was much too slow to step back from the glass.