Chapter 1
The book had been screaming since the Battle of Hogwarts, and by the third week of term Hermione Granger had started to take it personally.
It was a slim thing bound in grey calfskin, rescued from the rubble of the west wing with its spine split and its pages scorched brown at the edges. Madam Pince had placed it on the restoration table with the expression of someone setting down a live grenade. "Charmed to cry out when mishandled," she said. "Somebody's curse caught it in May. Now it believes everything is mishandling." Then she had gone back to her desk, and the book had gone on keening, a thin, high noise like a kettle left on in another room.
Hermione had tried a silencing charm, which made it worse. She had tried Reparo, which made the scorch marks shift and rearrange themselves into something that looked uncomfortably like a frown. She had tried, at one in the morning and in a state she would not admit to anyone, simply talking to it.
"You'll want to stop that," said a voice behind her.
She did not turn around. She had known Draco Malfoy's voice since she was eleven, and she had heard it say every possible version of her name, most of them unrepeatable. Since September it had said almost nothing at all. He was one of nine eighth-years who had come back, and the only one who had come back on terms set by the Wizengamot: two years' probation, no wand use outside lessons without supervision, and community service to be arranged by the Headmistress. McGonagall, with what Hermione suspected was a sense of humour, had arranged it in the library.
"Stop what," Hermione said.
"Being kind to it. It doesn't know what that is. It thinks you're trying to trick it."
"It's a book."
"It's a Malfoy book." He came round the side of the table and stood across from her, hands in his pockets. He looked worse than he had at the trials. His face had gone sharp in a way that wasn't elegant anymore, just thin. "Or it was. My grandfather gave the school a set of them in the sixties. Wanted the name on a plaque somewhere. That's the third volume of Lineages of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, if you hadn't guessed from how much it hates you."
Hermione looked down at the grey cover. The keening dropped half a tone, as if the book had heard its own title and been flattered.
"It doesn't hate me," she said. "It doesn't know me."
"It knows your blood. The bindings are keyed. They were keyed to scream at anyone who wasn't..." He stopped. To his credit, he stopped. "Anyway. The scream was meant to be an alarm. Somebody hit it with a Confundus in the battle, or a Blasting Curse, and now the alarm's stuck on."
"And you know how to turn it off."
He shrugged with one shoulder, which she remembered as a gesture of enormous arrogance and which now looked mostly tired. "I grew up in a house full of them. You learn to put them to sleep, or you never sleep yourself."
Madam Pince, who had excellent hearing for anything that might damage her collection, looked up from the front desk. Her gaze rested on Malfoy's empty hands and then on his wand, which sat in a locked box on the shelf behind her, as the terms of his probation required.
"He can't do magic," Hermione said quietly. "Not without supervision."
"Then supervise," said Malfoy.
There was a beat in which she could have said no. She could have written to Professor Flitwick, who would have answered in a week with a reading list. She could have let the book scream until Christmas. She thought, for a moment, of the drawing-room floor at Malfoy Manor, cold marble against her cheek, and of a boy who had been asked to say whether a swollen face was Harry Potter's and had said, I can't be sure. Who had stood by the fireplace afterwards with his face turned away and done nothing else at all.
She went to the desk and asked Madam Pince for the box.
* * *
It took them nine evenings.
The first was the worst. He would not touch the book directly, and when she asked why, he rolled up his left sleeve without a word and held his forearm over the table. The Mark had faded since the war to the colour of an old bruise, but the book reacted to it like a dog that smelled its master. The scream cut off. In the silence, the pages rustled, eager and horrible.
"Put it away," Hermione said.
He pulled his sleeve down. The book started screaming again.
"That," he said, "is why I don't touch it."
On the second evening he told her about the binding: an old sort of magic, worked into the glue of the spine with a drop of blood from whoever commissioned the volume, so that the book would always know who it belonged to. The alarm was tied to the blood. You could not break it without breaking the book, and he said that as though it had occurred to him that breaking the book might be fine. Hermione said absolutely not. A book was a book. He looked at her strangely and did not argue.
On the third evening, she brought tea from the kitchens, two cups, and put one in front of him without comment. He looked at it for a long time before he drank it.
By the fifth evening they had a method. She worked the spells, because she was the one with a wand. He told her where to put them. It was the most humiliating collaboration of her academic life and also, she was slightly horrified to find, the most efficient. He knew things about blood-bound bindings that were not written in any book in the Hogwarts library, which was presumably the point of them. She knew things about counter-curses that made him go quiet and then, once, say "Huh," in a tone she decided to accept as a compliment.
"Your wrist's wrong," he said on the sixth night.
"My wrist is perfectly fine."
"For a normal charm. This one wants you to pull back. Like you're unpicking a stitch, not cutting it." He reached across the table, then stopped with his hand an inch from hers, and she saw him remember who he was and who she was, and seven years of corridors and insults go across his face in about a second. He took his hand back. "Pull back," he said again, quieter.
She pulled back. The scorch marks along the edge of the page lifted like smoke and settled into clean brown ink. The book whimpered and was still.
Neither of them said anything for a while.
"Why do you care?" she asked eventually. "It's a book about pure-blood family trees. It's a book that was made to scream at me."
He was looking at the page she had cleared. It was a family tree, and she read upside down, the way she had read everything all her life: the Malfoys, generations of them, names in that same narrow copperplate. Near the bottom, a blank space where someone had once been burned off.
"My mother's in volume four," he said. "Narcissa Black, married into the family, line of descent and so forth. This one's my father's side. I wanted to see if they'd put me in it yet." A small, unpleasant smile. "Whether the ink knew."
"Knew what?"
"What I did. Or didn't do." He touched the edge of the table, not the book. "These things update themselves. The magic's in the blood, so the books hear about births and marriages. And disownings. I thought if my father had decided I was a disgrace, it would show up here first. He's not allowed to write to me from Azkaban, you see. So."
Hermione looked at the page. At the bottom, beneath Lucius and Narcissa, in the same copperplate as all the rest, was Draco.
"You're still there," she said.
"I can see that, Granger, thank you."
But his voice had cracked very slightly on her name, and he did not look up for a long time.
* * *
On the ninth evening, the book went quiet for good.
She had expected to feel triumphant. Instead she felt the slightly hollow tiredness of finishing an exam, the pages smooth and whole under her palm, the grey calfskin warm from the candles. She closed it. It did not scream. When she opened it again, it let her.
"Well," said Malfoy. "That's that."
He stood and pushed his chair in, very precisely, the way he had been taught by someone who would have been appalled to see him do it in a library at eleven at night with a Muggle-born witch. Madam Pince had gone to bed an hour ago, leaving instructions to lock the box and leave the key under the inkwell. The candles had burned down to stubs.
"Wait," Hermione said.
He waited.
She took the box from the shelf, unlocked it, and lifted out his wand. Hawthorn and unicorn hair, ten inches, the one Harry had taken from him at the Manor and given back after the trials without making any speeches about it. She held it out to him handle-first.
"I'm supervising," she said.
He didn't take it. "Granger, that's a violation of about three separate conditions."
"I'm aware. I've read them. It says you may use magic in the presence of a member of staff or a designated supervisor. Madam Pince designated me on the first night. She wrote it down. It's in the log."
His eyebrows went up. "You checked."
"Of course I checked."
He took the wand, slowly, as if it might go off in his hand. For a second he only held it. Then he turned toward the book and touched the tip, very lightly, to the spine.
Nothing happened. Then something did: a line of ink unspooled on the inside of the front cover, copperplate, small and careful, and wrote out a sentence in a language Hermione didn't know. Old French, maybe. He read it twice.
"What does it say?"
"It's the bookplate. It's meant to say who it belongs to." He let out a breath that might have been a laugh. "It says Hogwarts. Not my family. The school."
"Is that bad?"
"No," he said. "No, I don't think it is."
He handed the wand back to her, handle-first, and she locked it in the box and put the key under the inkwell where it was supposed to go. When she turned around he was holding the door open for her. Then he walked her as far as the main staircase and no farther, because his dungeons were one way and her tower was the other.
Halfway up the stairs she looked back. He was still standing at the bottom, one hand on the newel post, watching the staircase swing her toward the Gryffindor corridor. He lifted his hand, not quite a wave.
The next evening, Madam Pince put a second book on the restoration table. It was bound in grey calfskin. It was screaming.
Hermione went to the kitchens and came back with two cups of tea.