Chapter 1: Declared Objects
The first memo of the morning clipped Hermione on the ear at eight minutes past eight. By half past there were eleven of them circling the lamp above her desk like pale violet moths, waiting their turn, and she had read four, answered two, and set fire to one by accident.
Her office was a converted storeroom at the far end of Level Two, past Improper Use of Magic and a broom cupboard that hummed on Thursdays. Its one window was enchanted to show whatever weather Magical Maintenance felt like; this week, in a rare fit of honesty, it showed London's actual sky, low and grey and wet. There was a filing cabinet that bit anyone who wasn't Hermione and a brass plate on the door reading OFFICE OF ARTEFACT AMNESTY AND REGISTRATION in letters slightly too big for it. She had paid for the plate herself at twenty-three and been unreasonably proud of it.
She was twenty-six now. It was October 2005, seven years since the Battle of Hogwarts, and the bill that had grown out of this cupboard was nineteen days from a vote of the full Wizengamot.
The Inherited Artefacts (Declaration and Amnesty) Bill ran to two hundred and twelve pages, and she could have recited most of them. Every old family in Britain had something in the cellar it shouldn't: cursed heirlooms, Dark objects, and worst of all the wands and wedding rings the Muggle-born Registration Commission had confiscated in 1997 and handed round its friends like sweets. Declare them, the bill said, and the Ministry would take them and ask no questions. Hide them, and when the amnesty closed, the Aurors would come asking a great many.
Since May, as a pilot, forty-one families had brought things in. The Malfoys had come first. Hermione still hadn't decided whether that had been the best day of her career or the start of its end.
Harry came in at twenty to nine without knocking; he'd given up knocking on her doors at about thirteen. There was rain on the shoulders of his Auror robes, which at twenty-five he still wore over a jumper Molly had knitted for someone with longer arms, and he was carrying two paper cups from the café on the corner of Whitehall. He set one by her elbow without a word. Milk, no sugar, too hot to drink for ten minutes. He'd known how she took her tea since they were children.
A memo dived at her hair. Harry caught it without looking, the way he used to catch Snitches, and laid it flat on her blotter.
"You're not going to like this," he said.
"I don't like anything before nine. You know that."
"I know. That's why I brought the tea first." He didn't sit. Harry always sat in her office, sprawled in the spare chair with his feet on her bin, eating her biscuits. Today he stayed by the door with his hands in his pockets and the look he got when someone had been hurt and he had decided, somewhere behind his eyes, that it was his fault. "Do you remember a witch called Philippa Okafor? She gave evidence to your committee in June."
"Pip," Hermione said at once. "Flourish and Blotts. The Commission took her wand in the autumn of ninety-seven and she never got it back. Willow, phoenix feather, eleven inches. She cried at the end and apologised for crying, and Bertram Ogilvy told her to take all the time she needed, which was the only decent thing he did all session." She put the cup down. "Harry. What's happened?"
"Her flatmate found her last night. She's at Mungo's." He took one hand out of his pocket. In it was a small evidence bag, and in the bag was a brass tag on a loop of string, the kind Hermione ordered by the thousand. A-0117. "She was holding a silver hand mirror. This was tied to the handle."
Hermione knew the number the way she knew her own Floo address. The A was for amnesty. The 01 was for the first family to declare.
"That's from the vault," she said.
"Yeah."
"That's Malfoy."
"Yeah," said Harry, and then, more gently, because it was the worst part: "She's turning to silver, Hermione. From the hand up."
The Healers had put Pip Okafor in a side room on the fourth floor of St Mungo's, at the end of a corridor that smelled of lavender and singed hair. Someone had charmed the window to show a garden with a bench and a pear tree, and Hermione suspected she would remember it for the rest of her life.
Pip was awake, propped on three pillows, her right arm laid on top of the blanket. It was silver to just below the elbow.
Someone might have taken a cast of her and poured it in metal. Every crease of the knuckles was there, the lines of the palm, a small scar on the side of her thumb that was now a small, bright scar. The silver ended in a ragged tide mark across her forearm, and the skin above it had gone grey and tight.
"Miss Granger," Pip said. Her voice was steady, which was worse than if it hadn't been. "I thought it was from you."
"What was?"
"The parcel. Saturday morning. It had a Ministry seal and a card. With the thanks of the Office of Artefact Amnesty and Registration." She tried to smile. "I thought a mirror was a bit much, honestly. But it was pretty. I picked it up to look at the back."
Hermione heard Harry shift behind her. She didn't turn round. "We didn't send it. Pip, I promise you, nobody in my office sent you anything."
"No," said a voice from the window. "But it was thoughtful of them to use your stationery."
Draco Malfoy stood in the corner with a pair of long bone-handled tongs in one hand and a lead-lined box open on the sill. Hermione hadn't seen him in over a year, and then only across the Atrium. He was thinner than at school. His hair was cut short enough that it no longer did anything at all. He wore a charcoal coat with the cuffs turned back exactly twice and dragonhide gloves to the wrist, and he was looking at her the way he looked at everything, as though working out what it would cost.
"Malfoy," said Harry.
"Potter. You're dripping on the patient."
"What are you doing here?" Hermione said.
"Being useful. It's a novelty for everyone involved." He tipped his head at the Healer by the door, a tired woman in lime green. "Healer Carvalho keeps a list of curse-breakers who'll come out at four in the morning. I'm at the bottom of it, under a man in Dorset who's been dead since August, and still they sent for me first, because I'm cheap." He lifted something from the box with the tongs: an oval mirror the size of a palm, its back chased with lilies and a coiled beast Hermione took a moment to read as a wyvern. "And because this is mine."
"Yours," said Harry.
"My family's. I'm told that's the same thing. It's called the Argent." Draco turned the mirror so the false sunlight ran along its rim. "An ancestress of mine, Eudora, had a footman who stole a salver in 1741. She took it personally. Anyone not of the blood who handles a piece she cursed goes the way of the piece. It starts where the skin touched, and it travels in. When it reaches the heart—" He laid the mirror back in the box and shut the lid. "The family has always had a strong sense of proportion."
"How long?" said Hermione.
"About a week from the touch. Less if they're frightened. Fear quickens the blood." He glanced at Pip, and something in his face moved by a degree, though his voice didn't. "So do try to be bored, Miss Okafor. I realise that's difficult with Potter in the room."
Pip laughed, a startled crack of a sound, and pressed her good hand over her mouth.
"Can you stop it?" said Harry.
Draco looked at him for a long moment. "I don't know yet."
Hermione hadn't expected him to say that, flat and undecorated, in front of the patient. She respected it, and was irritated to find she did.
"Is it bound to the object or carried by the contact?" she said. "If it's bound to the object, can the object be destroyed, and would that break it or seal it in? Is there a counter-curse in the family papers? Where are the family papers? Does your mother know—"
"One at a time, Granger." He peeled off a glove, finger by finger. "I know you think four things at once. Some of us have to say them out loud."
"Then say them faster."
He nearly smiled. She watched it start at the corner of his mouth and watched him stop it. "Bound to the object. Destroying it would seal it, so please don't let Potter hit it with anything. The papers are in my mother's attic in Wiltshire, which she hasn't set foot in since 1998, written in a cipher my great-grandfather thought was very clever. And no. My mother doesn't know her silver's been out visiting."
"You brought those boxes in," Harry said quietly. "In May. You carried them in yourself."
"I did." Draco folded the glove into his pocket. "Shall I hold out my wrists now, Potter, or would you like to finish your speech first?"
"Harry," said Hermione.
"I'm only saying—"
"I know what you're saying." She turned back to the bed. Pip was watching them with the fixed, bright attention of someone trying hard not to look at her own arm. Hermione took her good hand. It was warm, and it was shaking. "We're going to fix this," she said. "Both of them are going to help me, and they're going to stop squabbling, and we're going to fix it before Sunday."
From the window, very softly, Draco said, "Squabbling."
The lift was not built for three people who weren't speaking.
It shuddered down past Level Nine, and the cool voice that announced each floor had nothing to say about Level Ten. Harry stood on Hermione's left with his arms folded. Draco stood on her right with his gloves back on. She read the floor numbers with great concentration, as if they might change.
Level Ten had been the old courtrooms, most of them shut now, their doors furred with dust. They passed Courtroom Ten and Harry didn't look at it, and Hermione knew him well enough to know he didn't look on purpose. At the end of the corridor, behind an iron door with a brass grille at head height, was the Amnesty Vault. She'd chosen it because nobody wanted to come down here, which at the time had seemed like a virtue.
Elias Hapgood, who had kept the Ministry's lost property for forty years before he kept her vault, met them with the register open. "Nothing's left, Miss Granger," he said before she could ask. "Nothing's gone out of that door since the day it came in. Door wouldn't let it, not without a line in the book."
"The door reads the book?" said Draco.
"The door reads the book, sir, and the door reads faces. Four of them. Mine, Miss Granger's, Mr Merrow's, and Head Auror Robards's, God help us, though he's never once come down. A face it doesn't know, it won't open for."
"A door that knows faces," Draco said. "How trusting."
The grille looked at Hermione, considered her, and swung open with a noise like an old man clearing his throat.
Inside, the air was cold and dry, and floating lamps brightened as they walked. Shelves ran floor to ceiling, and everything on them wore a brass tag. Hermione had catalogued half of it herself, cross-legged on this floor in May while Dennis Creevey read out numbers: a Hand of Glory, goblin-made spoons that screamed if you stirred anything sweet, a tapestry family tree that bled where names had been burnt off it. A wand box with a girl's name on the lid. Then another, and another.
The Malfoy declaration had a shelf to itself. Fourteen tags. Hermione's chest loosened when she saw the hand mirror lying in its place, silver and oval, lilies on the back.
Draco picked it up, turned it over, and made a small, contemptuous noise.
"What?" said Harry.
"Dragon." Draco held it out. Among the lilies coiled a beast with four legs and a forked tail. "Ours are wyverns. Two legs. Someone bought a likeness in Knockturn Alley and doesn't know the difference, which narrows it down to nearly everyone in the country." He went along the shelf, turning each piece over, and stopped twice more. "The christening cup. The cigarette case." He looked at Hermione over the top of the shelf. "Three fakes. One of the real ones is in a box at St Mungo's. That leaves two out there, in London, in somebody's pocket."
Then the grille clanked again and Auror John Dawlish came in with his collar up and his wand already drawn, as though the vault might rush him. He took in the shelf, Draco, and the fake mirror, in that order, and arrived exactly where Hermione had known he would.
"Well," he said. "Malfoy brings the things in. Malfoy's things turn up cursing Muggle-borns. I'm no detective, but—"
"No," said Draco.
Dawlish went red to the ears. "Robards wants him in, Potter. Formal interview. Today."
Hermione saw Harry hesitate. It was half a second, and she didn't blame him for it. She thought of a drawing room in Wiltshire and the sound her own voice had made on its floor, and she didn't blame him at all. Then she thought of Pip's silver knuckles, and a week that was already a day shorter.
"He's the only person in Britain who can read that curse," she said. "Lock him in an interview room and you lock up Pip Okafor's only chance. He's on contract to my office from today. Consultant curse-breaker. I'll sign it this afternoon."
"With what money?" said Dawlish. "Your budget goes in front of the Wizengamot in nineteen days with a dead Muggle-born on it, Granger. Ogilvy and his lot will dance."
"She's not dead," said Harry. He had moved, Hermione realised, to stand a little in front of her. He'd always done that without seeming to notice. "Hermione's right. I'll square it with Robards." He looked at Draco, and there was nothing friendly in it, but there was something honest. "You report to me. Every day."
"I'd be delighted," said Draco. "Will there be a gold star?"
Harry offered to walk her home at seven. She said she had the contract to draft and the transcripts to go back through, and he looked at her with his head on one side and said, "Eat something," and went.
It was past nine when she came down to the Atrium, and the great hall was nearly empty. The fires burned low and green, and the gold symbols on the peacock-blue ceiling moved so slowly you had to look away and back to catch them at it. Where the fountain had stood before the war there was now only a wide stone basin and water falling into water from nowhere in particular. The committee had never agreed on a statue, and Hermione, who had sat on it for fourteen months, had come round to thinking the empty basin the most honest thing in the building.
Draco Malfoy was sitting on its rim.
A roll of parchment lay across his knee, and he didn't get up when he saw her. "Granger. I'd started to think you slept here."
"I have a sofa," she said. "It's a perfectly good sofa. What are you still doing in the building? You were meant to sign at five and go home."
"I signed at five. Then I went back down and had a word with your door." He held out the parchment. "Hapgood is a dear man and he's going blind, and he let me copy the last three months of the register because I asked nicely. I do ask nicely, now and then. It frightens people."
It was a neat copy in a small, slanting hand she knew from fourth-year Potions, when he'd flung a page of notes across a table at her in a temper. All deposits. No withdrawals.
"I know," she said. "Nothing went out."
"Look again." He drew his wand, touched it to the page, and said, "Specialis Revelio."
Ink rose out of the parchment like something surfacing in a pond. Three new lines, in spaces she'd have sworn were empty. 2 Sept. A-0117. Released for examination, Dept. of Mysteries. The cigarette case on the nineteenth. The cup on the thirtieth. Each with a set of initials in the authorising column.
H.J.G.
"I didn't sign those," Hermione said.
"I know you didn't."
"You can't know that. Dawlish is going to say—"
"I know you didn't," said Draco, "because you've never initialled anything in your life. You sign your full name, and the date, and if there's room, a footnote." He stood, and he was taller than she'd let herself remember. "But whoever wrote that has watched you sign a great many things, Granger. Close enough to copy you. They even know you put a little hook on the tail of your G."
He walked to the nearest fireplace, took a pinch of powder from the pot on the mantel, and stepped into the green without looking back.
Hermione looked down at the page. The hook was there, small and neat, exactly where she would have put it.