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lomonaaerenTitle: Promises Made on Wands
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Wordcount: 15,000
Rating: PG
Pairings: Harry/Ginny, Harry/Draco preslash
Warnings: Weirdness, heavy angst, ambiguous ending. Ignores the epilogue.
Summary: Harry needs information from Draco Malfoy—several times. And each time, Malfoy only asks for the smallest price in return. A promise made on wands.
Author’s Notes: Yes, this one’s fairly odd. Hopefully what happened will be clear by the end of the story, though—or at least something that ought to provide a good theory.
Promises Made on Wands
“Why do you think I know where she is?”
The words were mild and curious, not at all the tone that Harry had thought to hear coming out of his old rival’s mouth when he asked for information like this. But then again, the Malfoy who sat on the other side of a table in the Leaky Cauldron was not the same boy Harry had once known. Taller, dressed in dark blue robes, his hair finer and softer and straighter than Harry remembered it and bound in a braid with a black ribbon tied across the end, he looked like the ghost of Lucius.
Or of my wet dreams.
Harry shook his head. If there was a more inappropriate subject to think about when he was engaged in trying to find Ginny, he didn’t know what it was. “Because she came to the Manor before she vanished,” he said. “I know that you run a network of safehouses.”
“For people to go to when they want to drop out of sight for a while, yes.” Malfoy picked up the rough wooden cup in front of him and took a sip of the equally rough wine that he’d ordered. Another unexpected thing, Harry thought, and not fitting with either the image of the prissy schoolboy that he retained or the coolly aristocratic one that Malfoy presented now. “That doesn’t mean that she’s in one of them. After all, she’s hardly traded a Dark artifact of questionable provenance.” He smiled at Harry.
Harry took a deep breath. He would just have to put aside the suspicions that Malfoy had concealed several Dark wizards who’d been wanted as witnesses in some of the cases he worked until enough time passed that the case was tried and over. He didn’t have proof.
And he needed Malfoy’s help to find Ginny.
“It’s nothing bad, the reason I want to find her,” he began, and then stopped, because Malfoy’s face was bright with amusement, and he realized that it wouldn’t matter to Malfoy if he had wanted to find her for an illegal reason. Harry shook his head and raked his hand through his hair hard enough to make it stand up in spikes. Malfoy confused all his usual reasons and ways of doing business, and he hated it. “I mean—we had a row. A big one. I said some things I shouldn’t have, and she ran out of the house. I want to find her and apologize.”
“Ah.” Malfoy took another sip of the wine. “And did you ever consider that she might not be interested in hearing your apologies, if she’s taken the trouble to hide so thoroughly that not even Harry Potter, Super-Auror, can find her?”
Harry sighed. “Yeah, I thought of that, but—I want at least the chance to talk to her. If she rejects me after that, well.” He swallowed, and the thought of wet dreams about men like Malfoy felt foreign and far-away from him now. The image of Ginny was before him instead, Ginny with her wide-set brown eyes and her bright, inquiring glances, Ginny with the laughter that made him feel as though he had stepped into a grove of trees lit by sun and moon together. “That’s her choice.”
Malfoy considered him. His face had gone unreadable, losing both surprise and humor. Harry stared back and wondered what in the world Malfoy was thinking. Harry knew there would be a price, and he’d brought a full sack of Galleons to pay it, but he wasn’t entirely sure, from the way that Malfoy’s eyebrows pinched together, if that would be enough.
As if on cue, Malfoy shook his head and said, “I don’t need money.”
“What do you need, then?” Harry held his breath, wondering what he could offer if Malfoy really did turn his back on the Galleons.
Malfoy took out his wand. Harry tensed for a different reason, but all Malfoy did was lay it on the table between them. “Have you ever made a promise on someone else’s wand, Potter?” he asked, face strangely intense.
Harry shook his head. His throat ached. He wanted to ask what this was doing to get him closer to Ginny, but he kept silent instead, because Malfoy’s tone didn’t seem to fish for responses, despite his question.
“You make a promise that has to be kept,” Malfoy said. “That’s all. At some time in the future, the person you made the promise to can call it in. It’s like a life-debt.” His voice shook on the last words. He paused and took a drink of wine.
Harry blinked. He knew that some pure-blood wizards took life-debts incredibly seriously, but he didn’t think he’d ever heard anyone’s voice shake when they talked about it. “Er, all right?” he asked cautiously.
“You can’t break the promise,” Malfoy said. “Do you understand that? It’s what I’ll ask for, if I give you the information about where your Weasley is living.”
“I understand,” Harry said.
Malfoy bowed his head and took a deep breath. “Take out your wand and lay it across mine,” he said in a whisper.
Harry did so, his back stinging with suspicion. Perhaps this was a bigger deal than it seemed like; perhaps he should have refused. But he didn’t really think so. Malfoy was just—being weird, that was all. He tried to sit up and look like he was unafraid of the superstitious way that Malfoy was acting.
Malfoy looked down at their joined wands for a moment and then closed his eyes. Harry didn’t know what he was doing, not for certain, but it looked as though he might be summoning up the words of a ritual he didn’t know that well, or committing the sight of holly and hawthorn lying across each other to memory.
Once, Harry saw his lips move. He was murmuring to himself, Harry thought, and he was almost certain Malfoy had said, “Are you sure that you want this?”
Nothing made sense. Harry sat there anyway, stolid, waiting, and willing to do this even if it was as serious as a life-debt. After all, he had owed life-debts and been owed them before. He didn’t really think Malfoy would ask him to do something that might get him killed, not when the murder could be traced back to him easily enough. More than one person had stared at them, walking through the Leaky Cauldron at the same time and sitting together.
Finally, Malfoy opened his eyes and pinned Harry with the same intense look. Harry shifted, then told himself not to act afraid. He had the idea that that was what Malfoy was trying to cause right now with all his strangeness.
“Fine,” he said. “What do I do? Is this like an Unbreakable Vow?”
Malfoy started and shook his head. A strand of hair had come loose from the braid that trailed down his back and swayed back and forth like a stalk of wheat in the wind. “No. You simply make the promise.”
“Right,” Harry said, and waited. But Malfoy only sat there, gazing at him with wide, solemn eyes, so it was up to Harry to sigh and ask, “So, what’s the promise?”
Malfoy started again. Harry wondered if perhaps he was mentally unstable and everyone except Harry knew it. Hermione and Ron hadn’t said anything when Harry went to meet him, though. They just gave him sad, knowing looks.
“That you’ll promise to come to me when I call you,” Malfoy said.
Harry blinked. It seemed such a minor thing for Malfoy to get worked up about. What could a visit to the Manor mean for Harry, in the larger scheme of things? Or even a visit to Malfoy somewhere else; he would just make sure that it wasn’t an isolated place, or, if he had to do that, that one of his friends knew where he was going.
“What do I say?” he asked, reaching one hand out so that it hovered above the wands. Malfoy had already done that, and it seemed to make sense.
“Promise on your wand,” Malfoy whispered. His voice was hoarse, and Harry was more and more certain that either he was mentally unstable or else that he attached far more significance to a promise like this than Harry did. Well, perhaps he isn’t owed many life-debts, Harry decided charitably. Or perhaps he intends to have me come to him in front of a library that he’s going to dedicate or something like that, and he’s thinking of the political capital he’ll gain from my promise. “That you’ll come when I call you.”
“I promise on my wand that I’ll come when Malfoy calls me,” Harry said obediently.
He waited for some explosion of magic, but nothing happened other than a faint glow rising from the wands and then settling back into them. Harry reached out and cautiously picked up his wand, sending Malfoy’s clattering and rolling. Malfoy immediately lunged for his wand and caught it as if it was something precious.
Nothing felt different about the wand, Harry decided, testing the weight and the smoothness of the wood, unless it was that the shaft of the wand was smoother and warmer than before. And how could you estimate that?
He watched Malfoy. Malfoy, hugging his wand to himself, showed no inclination to resume the conversation. Harry was the one who had to clear his throat rather noisily and ask, “The information, Malfoy?”
Malfoy came back to himself, slid his wand up his sleeve, and began to write down directions on a napkin. Harry squinted to make sure that he could make out his script and then nodded, standing up with the napkin in his hand and a bright thrumming in his heart. He was going to find Ginny and make everything right again.
“Wish me luck?” he said impulsively to Malfoy, who had remained at the table and seemed content to finish the rest of the rough wine.
Malfoy lifted his eyes and fixed Harry with the same intense expression that he’d used earlier, when there seemed so little need for it. “I’m afraid that I can’t do that, Potter,” he said. “Almost anything else, but not that.”
Harry shrugged, more puzzled than angry, and went bounding towards Ginny and his future.
*
“Back again, Potter? And I didn’t even call on you to keep your promise.”
Harry scowled and slid a hand through his hair. He had known that Malfoy would sound like this, lilting and mocking, and he hadn’t wanted to come to him in the first place. But Ginny had insisted. “He hid me when I wanted to run away from you,” she’d said. “And he’ll do anything for the right price. Even if he can’t do it himself, he knows people who can.”
Harry took a deep breath and raised his eyes to the tall man, with a shock of soft hair dangling in his eyes, who stood wrapped in a robe in the middle of the Manor’s doorway. He was just going to recite his prepared speech and hope that worked. “Ginny and I are having some—problems—conceiving children,” he said. “We want a potion that can help. Ginny said that you would know the right people.”
Malfoy’s eyes grew very wide. Then he blinked once and said, “I need some more information. Is the problem with her or with you?”
Harry gritted his teeth. He had known this was coming. It didn’t make his cheeks burn any less. “With me.”
Malfoy didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. A single deep look was enough, and then he stepped aside. “You’d better come in.”
Harry shuddered as he stepped into the Manor, and then wondered why. He didn’t feel the immediate bad memories and fear that he’d expected, since there were memories of Hermione being tortured and them being imprisoned here. Instead, it was just a sensation of cold. Everything in sight was white or silver or grey. It reminded Harry of the grey chair that Aunt Petunia had bought once and declared sacrosanct; not even Dudley could sit in it. Just being in this place gave him the feeling that he was about to mess it up.
Malfoy studied Harry’s reaction with a little smile, the bastard, but said nothing about it. He went over to the nearest table and took out a silver inkwell and a piece of parchment so blinding white that Harry flinched back from it. “I trust that you have been to the Healers already?” he asked briskly.
“Yes,” Harry said. He would keep his answers as short as possible. “They said that Ginny can have children. I can’t.”
“What is the cause?” Malfoy sounded almost professional now, writing down words without looking up.
“They didn’t know, exactly,” Harry said, and coughed. In spite of everything, his face was burning. He turned to stare blindly at the portraits on the walls, but that wasn’t much better, since they were Malfoy ancestors and looked down their noses at him in response. “They thought it was either a genetic defect—apparently my grandparents had my father late in life, and he was an only child, even though my grandmother was pregnant lots of times—or something from the Dark magic I may have been hit with during the war.”
Malfoy snorted. “I think it’s unlikely that it’s the last, if your wife doesn’t have this damage. She spent more time at Hogwarts and in the tender custody of the Carrows than you did.”
Harry winced despite himself. He hated being reminded that he hadn’t been there for Ginny when she needed him. “Yeah, well. They couldn’t eliminate that for sure as a cause.”
“Of course they couldn’t.” Malfoy laid the quill down on the parchment. “They say it to cover their bases, and their methods aren’t as good as mine. Come with me, and I’ll test you to learn what kind of potion I’ll need to brew.” He paused and looked back at Harry. “You know that this is going to cost you?”
Harry nodded in resignation. “And I’ll have to pay more to buy your silence, of course.”
“Do you have any trouble getting it up?” Malfoy asked.
“What?” Harry snapped. “Of course not!”
“Then you don’t have to buy my silence.” Malfoy gave him that same deep smile he’d used to embarrass Harry before. “It’s hardly a titillating story that Harry Potter is infertile. If you weren’t able to fuck her at all, then I agree, that would be too much for me to resist. But what do I care if the little shrew can’t have the famous Potter children she wants?”
He went on his way. Harry rubbed his forehead, which already hurt in ways that it hadn’t since the war, and followed.
Malfoy asked more questions that made no sense to Harry, ranging from what time he woke up in the mornings to how much time he spent on the toilet. But finally he stepped back from the table in the lab he’d led Harry to and nodded. Harry blinked. He had barely realized that Malfoy was piling ingredients into a vial or stirring, since Malfoy’s body had been in the way, but there was a bright, glittering blue-purple concoction.
“And that’s going to help, is it?” he asked skeptically.
“I don’t know for certain,” Malfoy said. “I believe that, yes, the problem is genetic, but it might not be the one I think it is. The potion should make it easier for you to have children if I’m right. If I’m not, then come back and we’ll try again.” He paused, leaning against the table, and seemed to wait for Harry to say something.
“Er, thanks,” Harry said, picking up the vial and wondering if he would have the courage, after all, to take a potion that Draco Malfoy had prepared.
“My price,” Malfoy prompted.
Harry sighed. “Right. How many Galleons—”
But Malfoy had drawn his wand, and laid it down on the same table where he’d prepared the potion. Distantly, in the back of his mind, Harry was shocked. Snape would never have done something like that, and even Slughorn had told them that they should be extremely careful to clean their tables before they rested their wands on them. “My price,” he said, “is another promise made on the wands.”
Harry sighed in relief—there weren’t that many Galleons in his vault, after all, and he and Ginny had been somewhat strained lately with all the magic they’d been spending on Healers to fix this problem—and dug his wand out of his sleeve. He crossed it with Malfoy’s.
“I want you to promise on your wand,” Malfoy said, his voice low and his fingers so still that it gave Harry pause, “that you’ll do as I ask when I call you.”
Harry eyed him. “What do you mean? I’ve already promised to come visiting or to save your arse, whichever it is. Why would you need me to save you when I would already be there to do just that?”
“This is something else,” Malfoy said.
“What?” Harry asked.
“Never you mind.” Malfoy gave him an enigmatic smile beneath the swath of blond hair falling over his face. “It doesn’t concern you greatly, you know.”
Harry rolled his eyes and said, “I promise on my wand to do what you ask of me, after you call me.”
The wands hissed this time, and Harry thought the air glittered around them more than before. But his wand still felt no different when he picked it up—and he made very carefully sure that he was picking up his wand and not Malfoy’s, easy as the mistake would have been to correct.
“Thanks, Malfoy,” he said, and gave the potion a dubious glance despite himself. He didn’t think Malfoy would poison him, not really; Ginny could trace it back to him too easily. But it did seem that he’d been too eager to help Harry, and in fact to brew the potion that day instead of putting it off for a few days and making him sweat a little.
“Potter.”
Harry should have kept going. He knew it. But he paused at the threshold of that cold drawing room and turned around, reluctantly interested in the choked tone in Malfoy’s voice.
Malfoy stood with his arms folded, staring intently at him. Harry shifted uneasily. He didn’t know why the stare and the tone in Malfoy’s voice should bother him so much; it wasn’t as though he was going to be hurt if Malfoy had a poor opinion of him. He didn’t think that even a Potions master could make a potion poisonous from a distance.
“Sometimes,” Malfoy said, “the ways of nature are too mysterious for us, too powerful. If something happens, then it might be meant to be.”
Harry snorted in spite of himself, because he doubted that Malfoy believed that. It seemed much likelier that he would use his money and his magic to conquer any obstacle that got in his way. “I’ll keep that in mind for the time when I’m dying and I know that I can’t do anything about it.”
Malfoy didn’t smile. “A piece of advice,” he said. “It’s up to you whether or not you listen to it.” He turned and walked back through the door to the lab.
Harry shook his head and left. He did notice, as he passed the table where Malfoy had been taking “notes” earlier, that the parchment bore nothing more than a few random doodles and Harry’s name. Perhaps Malfoy really had the material for the fertility potion in his head and didn’t have to think hard to write it down. That sounded pretty likely, from what Harry knew about him.
*
Harry pounded on the door of the Manor. Then he huddled under the gracefully arched portico, which didn’t provide as much protection from the howling wind and flying rain as it should have.
Nothing happened, so Harry reached over and pounded again.
This time, it opened so fast that Harry nearly hit the house-elf in the face. He pulled his hand back just in time and ignored the creature’s bowing and lamentations, instead demanding, “Is your master in?”
“I’m here, Potter.” Malfoy moved up behind the elf and raised an eyebrow. “Do you mind telling me why you’re inflicting violence on my servants?”
Harry pushed in without responding and stood there shivering and dripping in the entrance hall. He wanted to say several things at once, but for right now they were all tangled up with each other and fighting behind his teeth. He would just have to wait a few minutes until they sorted themselves out.
Malfoy gave him a keen look, then nodded, although Harry knew he hadn’t said anything, and spoke a few quiet words to the house-elf. It vanished at once, and then reappeared holding what looked like a glove filled with red-hot coals. Harry eyed it warily and wondered if Malfoy intended to torture him for showing up twice in three months without an invitation.
“You rest your hands inside it,” Malfoy said, “and it spreads warmth to the rest of your body. It’s less hot than it looks,” he added, as though he’d divined Harry’s thoughts, though Harry was fairly sure that he hadn’t picked up on the one about torture devices. He probably wouldn’t have been able to let that one go.
Harry hesitated once more. But he’d trusted the potion, hadn’t he, like a bloody fool? Once again, Ginny knew where he had gone. He slid his hands into the glove, and the house-elf stepped back. Harry gasped as heat shot and blazed through him, and managed to relax with a faint grunt. All right, then. He could accept that not all of Malfoy’s intentions might be evil.
Just the vast majority.
Either that thought or the passage of time prompted him to speak of the thing that had brought him here. He stared at Malfoy and demanded, “How often do you brew potions that don’t work?”
Malfoy tossed his head back as though he’d expected the accusation and knew the best way to meet it. “I did warn you,” he said.
“What?” Harry spluttered. He had expected indignation, scientific concern, or denial, but not this calm acceptance. “You did not! Why waste time brewing a potion that you thought wouldn’t work?”
“I did warn you,” Malfoy repeated, “that sometimes nature puts obstacles in our path that we can’t get over or around.” He seemed to be growing continually calmer and cooler the longer Harry was upset. “I suspected that the genetic defect your Healers said was there might be too great to be overcome by a mere fertility potion. If they couldn’t even detect it, the possibility increased. Probably the result of a long-ago curse on your bloodline,” he added, this time in the heartlessly interested tones Harry had expected. “I wonder if any of the other families bear the same curse, and if that’s the reason so many of us are slow to have children.”
“Ginny and I want a family, Malfoy,” Harry said, and drew his wand.
“What exactly is this promise going to be offered for?” Malfoy watched Harry’s wand as if he were on the verge of snatching it away and crossing it with his own immediately. The covetous gleam in his eyes made Harry pause, but he had to forge ahead. Malfoy had caused this problem, getting their hopes up. Ginny had spent the last fortnight looking as if she were going to cry. Harry would get some satisfaction from Malfoy, or else.
“I—I want some way to overcome that defect,” Harry said, lowering his wand and closing his eyes. He wanted to do something, to lash out, to kill, but Malfoy wasn’t a Dark wizard in the traditional sense of the word, and the Ministry wouldn’t accept Harry attacking him in his own home without a reason. Harry turned sharply away instead and paced to the far side of the room. He stared at the wall until he thought he could speak rationally.
Malfoy was already speaking by then, of course, the self-righteous git. “There’s no potion I could brew that could overcome something like this, Potter.”
Harry turned his head. “You said that you could brew,” he said. “You can put me in contact with someone who can?”
Malfoy bowed, never taking his eyes from Harry. He was watching Harry as if he was going to consume him. Harry turned away again and closed his eyes, taking a deep breath, feeling hope for the first time in weeks.
“It’ll cost me another promise on my wand, won’t it?” he asked. He didn’t fear that. Malfoy was going to call in those promises someday, Harry had no doubt—unless he just wanted to go to his grave exulting in his power over Harry—but he would deal with that when it happened.
“Yes, it will,” Malfoy said. “And you have to realize that I can’t guarantee results. Depending on the source of the problem, if it is an ancient curse, it could well be that the potions would poison you or couldn’t be strong enough to overcome the problem without otherwise killing you.”
“Ginny and I want children, Malfoy,” Harry repeated. He would keep saying that until Malfoy realized that he was prepared to risk everything for that, including his own destruction.
Malfoy shrugged as if to say it was none of his business what strange things Harry wanted, and took out his wand.
Harry laid his over it on the table and looked at Malfoy. Malfoy stared contemplatively back at him, bowed his head, and seemed to think for a long moment before he spoke. Harry decided that was probably a load of bollocks, though. Malfoy had likely decided on what he wanted years ago, if he ever got the chance to take revenge on Harry or place him at a disadvantage. That had to be what these promises were about, Harry thought. Some way of shaming him, of making up for the fact that Harry had won the war and Malfoy’s side hadn’t.
But the help Malfoy was giving away was worth far more to Harry than those promises could be to Malfoy. So Harry just waited until Malfoy looked up, nodded slightly, and said, “When I call you, you’ll put what I ask you to do above other things.”
Harry shook his head. These promises were all so vague and insubstantial that he wondered if Malfoy hadn’t decided what kind of revenge he wanted, and would just go with whatever sounded good to him at the time. Harry didn’t mind that, really. He had learned that impulsive criminals often did the least damage, because they would flail and strike out at the first thought that came to them, and that thought was usually something stupid and small, petty.
“I promise on my wand that I’ll put what you ask me to do above other things,” Harry said.
Malfoy bowed his head. This time, the light that shone around the wands was real beyond a doubt, a blazing star, six-pointed, that wavered back and forth as though being blown in a strong wind before it faded away. Harry snatched up his and waited while Malfoy wrote out a list of names in a hand that Harry thought was unnecessarily painstaking.
When Malfoy handed over the list, their hands brushed. Malfoy swayed, and Harry wondered if the promises took something out of him that they didn’t take out of Harry. There was a strange look on his face, too, white and wide-eyed shock, as though he was waking up from a nightmare.
“Thanks, Malfoy,” Harry said, already reading the names. He recognized a few from rumors of their being Dark Arts potions brewers, but not as many as he had thought he would. He hoped that he could choose one who would enable him to get what he and Ginny needed without breaking the law.
Not that he would hesitate if it came to that, he had to admit. He’d already asked Malfoy for three favors in his pursuit of having a family. He would do it again if he had to. He would do twice that much, three times that much. The thought of Ginny’s eyes filling with tears of happiness for once was enough motivation.
He glanced back, and saw Malfoy leaning on the wall, watching him with a keen, cold, devouring gaze.
Probably hoping that I get in trouble and something even worse happens to me than his planned revenge, Harry thought, giving him a cold smile of his own back. Too bad, Malfoy. I’ll just keep going in the direction that I’ve chosen.
*
Harry couldn’t believe that he was back here again. Once Ginny had become pregnant, he had thought that they would have nothing left to wish for. Yes, the price for the potion that made him fertile had been steep, but it was nothing he couldn’t afford when his family’s future was on the line.
But with what the Healer had said today…
Harry took a deep breath and raised his hand to knock on the Manor’s door, but a house-elf opened it before he could.
“Master Malfoy is not here,” the elf said, bowing again and again, as if it thought Harry would lash out just because it was there. If it was the same elf he had almost hit last time, Harry couldn’t blame it, though. “He is being in the garden, with the grove.”
“The grove?” Harry asked. He thought a group of trees should be easy enough to spot, since the Manor gardens seemed to be mostly flat, but he wanted to be sure. He didn’t really have any time to waste. Not if what the Healers had said was—
His hands clenched down, and he shook his head. He wasn’t going to think of that now, not when it would overwhelm him and make him look weak in front of Malfoy.
“Yes, Master Harry Potter, sir.” The elf leaned out of the doorway and pointed a long arm around the house to the left. Harry nodded roughly back and then turned and strode away. The Healer’s words forced themselves back into his mind as he went, even though he tried savagely to think about the pretentiousness of the white peacocks strutting around in front of him.
I’m sorry, Mr. Potter, Mrs. Potter. The Healer, a tall woman with spectacles who had reminded Harry of a gentler McGonagall, had looked nervously back and forth between them and then pushed her glasses up as if that would spare them from what she was about to say. Your child has a malformed heart. We have a few days to find a cure, but we’ve seen this time and again, and we’ve never—we don’t usually save them.
Harry closed his eyes. He couldn’t help thinking that this was partially his fault, that the genetic defect that the potion had helped him overcome had wounded his child. And he knew that Ginny was thinking it, too. She had looked at him and then away, with her eyes full of shining tears that didn’t fall, and she said nothing, but he knew she was thinking it.
He stumbled over something, and his eyes flew open.
In front of him was a grove of short, stubby trees. Harry blinked at them. He thought he’d seen something like them before, but he couldn’t identify them until he moved his head a bit and recognized the (had to be artificially preserved, in this weather) white flowers clinging to them. Hawthorn.
Like Malfoy’s wand, he remembered, and then snorted at himself. Only he would think of something that irrelevant at this moment.
“Malfoy?” he asked, cocking his head to see in between the trees. He didn’t see anyone in the center of the grove, but then again, there were so many thick clusters of white flowers that he might have missed him at first.
A sliver of white-silver light appeared from nowhere. Harry glanced up instinctively, but the sun had set into a thick bank of clouds already, and the day hadn’t been very bright, anyway. He stamped his feet and shivered as the light went on shining, wondering if it was a spell Malfoy had cast to kill intruders, but unwilling to move away from the trees as long as there was a chance of finding salvation.
The light finally coalesced in the center of the grove and seemed to fragment into tiny flakes that fell together, forming up an image of Malfoy. Harry stared, with his breath caught in his throat. He’d never seen anything like that, and he didn’t know whether it made it more or less creepy that Malfoy shook his cloak off, scattering the last bits of light like snow, and strode towards the edge of the grove.
He did step back when Malfoy pulled away a thorny branch and suddenly stood in front of him. This close, Malfoy’s face was cold, his eyes lightless. Harry had to wonder if he would be as obliging as he had been the other times.
But the thought of his child strengthened him. Harry cleared his throat awkwardly and launched into the plea that he’d already prepared.
“We need your help, Malfoy. Our child is going to be born with a malformed heart. The Healers say that they can’t save her. Can you help?”
Malfoy continued to study him with that cold, shut-in look, and then turned away and stared at the horizon as if it held the answers. When he turned back, he looked more human, but only marginally. A wind whipped the edge of his cloak, and it took Harry a moment to realize why that was strange. He couldn’t feel the wind on his own cheeks or hair or clothing.
“I had thought I would let it go,” Malfoy said, apparently talking to himself. “Why disturb what worked well, what worked better in dreams than in reality? But here you are again. What will the end be, I wonder?”
Harry sighed. “Malfoy, do we have to do this mysterious-wise-sage act? Can you please just tell me whether you’re willing to help?”
Malfoy glanced at him. He had a slight smile now, one that would have made Harry back up and reach for his wand if he was encountering it under working circumstances. But he wasn’t, and his daughter needed this cure, and he gritted his teeth and continued to face Malfoy down. He wasn’t really scary, Harry told himself. He only wanted to look that way so that he could intimidate Harry.
“I notice that you didn’t ask whether I can,” Malfoy murmured. “Have you become that used to seeing me as the fount of all wisdom? In which case, I can plead for the authenticity of my act as sage.”
Harry didn’t know exactly what that meant, but he didn’t care. He just shook his head and said, “Can you help or not?”
“I can,” Malfoy said. “Not with a potion. With a spell.”
Harry bristled. “If you think I’m going to let you cast spells on my pregnant wife—”
“For the love of Merlin, Potter.” Malfoy sounded more like himself now, stupid and arrogant, his eyes narrowing in irritation. “Of course not. I’ll teach you the spell, and you’ll cast it yourself. You think I care about your pregnant wife that much?”
Harry blinked. “Oh,” he said weakly. He had no explanation for the conclusions he’d jumped to, and no longing to apologize, so he focused on something else. “But you must care at least a little bit about her, or why would you have sheltered her when she asked for help and given all these potions and advice to her?”
“Wrong person for my caring to target,” Malfoy breathed.
“What?”
“Never mind,” Malfoy said. “Let me go back inside. The book I need is there, and you’ll need a few hours to memorize the incantation, at least.”
Harry swallowed back the automatic response, which was to say that he didn’t have that much time. Of course he did. The Healers had told them it would be a few days before Lily died. He would do this, and he would save her, and Ginny would look at him with shining eyes again, and they would be a family.
“It’ll be another wand-promise, won’t it?” he asked Malfoy’s back, suddenly realizing that they hadn’t discussed payment.
“Oh, yes.”
The words were soft and heavy, like nightfall. Harry frowned and wondered for the first time exactly what this would cost him.
But he shrugged off the worries. Whatever price Malfoy charged, it had to be less than the contentment and safety of his family. Harry had wanted people to love and belong with all his life, and now he was finally getting that. If fate tried to stand in his way, he battered down fate and found some way around it.
And Malfoy was weak compared to fate.
“Here.”
They were in the library already, and Malfoy drew down a heavy book filled with yellowing pages. He flipped through a few of them, nodded, and then extended the book to Harry.
Harry took only a cursory look before he shook his head and handed it back. “I can’t read Latin.”
“Then you’ll have to trust me, won’t you?” For some reason, Malfoy looked immensely delighted.
Harry thrust the book at him. “Yes, I will. But I warn you: I can make you regret this for the rest of your life if you fuck up.”
Malfoy snorted and accepted the book with care that made Harry wonder what would have happened if he’d bent a page. “I don’t want to do that, Potter,” he said. “If the help provided in return for a promise made on wands is false, then it invalidates the promise.”
Harry paused. “Then doesn’t that render my second promise to you null and void?” He couldn’t remember what the promise had been for a moment; he had to search his memory. “The promise to do as you ask when you call me?”
Malfoy shook his head. “I did the best I could with that potion, and I warned you that it might not work. You chose to take the risk anyway.”
That sounded fair, Harry had to grudgingly admit. And then a vision of Lily as the Healers had raised it, a colored shadow drifting in Ginny’s womb with her heart beating grotesquely out of rhythm, came to him, and he closed his mouth against the rush of panic, feeling as if he would throw up. Here he was, debating nuances of his actions with Malfoy, when his daughter was dying.
Malfoy seemed to catch his urgency, or read something from the expression on his face, because he turned smoothly back to the book as if there had never been an argument. “Emendator corculum,” he said, “You need to make sure that you say every syllable, Potter, and exactly as I pronounce it to you. Magic that changes the unborn is nothing to mess around with. Do you understand?”
How was it that Malfoy’s pale eyes could pierce him when his daughter was the one who would be affected? Harry wondered, but he nodded anyway. “I promise. Repeat it again.”
And he had Malfoy say it again, and again, until he was confident that he had it right, and his tongue and teeth and lips worked around the words as if he had known them all his life, as if they were English. After that, Malfoy showed him the correct wand movement, a cross-shape followed by a descending arc. Malfoy also warned him that he had to perform them right above the baby’s heart.
Harry already planned on performing them a hundred times if necessary, over every square inch of Ginny’s stomach. He was going to get this right.
At last Malfoy nodded judiciously as he performed the spell, and it flared out in a red crackle of sparks that faded when they found nothing to latch onto. Malfoy had already reassured him that the spell would have no effect if he cast it somewhere that wasn’t the target, which was why Harry could repeat it if necessary. “I think you have it, Potter. Now, about that promise.” He turned towards a projecting shelf that had no books on it and laid his wand down.
Harry looked at the door, longing. “What if I promise to come back as soon as I can and make that promise, Malfoy? I want to go home and use this spell now, while there’s still a chance that—”
“She’ll be all right for the moment it’ll take you to do this.” Malfoy’s voice was as cool as the light Harry had seen him manifest in, inside the grove—and what kind of spell was that, anyway? Harry would have asked, thinking it Dark, if he hadn’t been so worried about Lily. “I’m afraid that I’m not that naïve, Potter, to let you go right now.”
Harry rolled his eyes as he laid his wand across Malfoy’s. “You think that I’d dash off and never come back again?”
“Oh, I’m quite sure that you’d come back again,” said Malfoy, but didn’t elaborate further. He pointed to their crossed wands. “I want you to promise that you won’t make any protests when I call on you.”
Harry looked at him warily. “If you want me to murder an innocent or something like that, Malfoy, I sure as hell would.”
Malfoy chuckled, but his eyes were hollow, and he looked, briefly, like a starving vampire. Harry regretted that his wand was on the table. Malfoy saw him looking at it and shook his head, and regained a normal expression with, Harry thought, a bit of effort.
“I didn’t mean that,” he said. “I meant that you won’t complain constantly about how you would rather be elsewhere, doing something else. You’ll do what I ask cheerfully and without complaining, and when it’s finished, why then—” And he turned his hand over with a sharp movement that startled Harry, to show his empty palm. “Then you can leave.”
Harry nodded and blinked, and then gave the promise. The wands this time shone as if they had been dipped in molten gold, and when Harry picked his up, he could feel a thrumming current running down his arm, the way that he had once felt when he touched a Muggle electrical plug.
He stared at Malfoy. “What is this process doing to my wand, Malfoy?” he demanded.
“Did I say that it was doing something to your wand?” Malfoy kept his head bowed over the table where his wand lay, tapping it from side to side with his fingers, staring at it in what seemed like fascination. “No. The effects of multiple promises make it a bit more—mindful, that’s all. It’s the wand that holds the promise.” He looked up and smiled, and Harry thought this one looked even worse, like a deaths-head grin. “A wand-borne promise would weaken you permanently if you could break it. Which you can’t.”
Harry shrugged, too impatient to ask what he meant. He had already wasted enough time here, and Ginny and Lily were waiting.
As he left the house, he had the strange impression that Malfoy hadn’t moved, but stood where he had been, staring after him. And he had the even stranger one that Malfoy’s smile hadn’t lasted long, but had faded, to become a look of unconquerable longing.
But that was stupid, and there was no way he could have known that, because Harry didn’t look back.
Part Two.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Wordcount: 15,000
Rating: PG
Pairings: Harry/Ginny, Harry/Draco preslash
Warnings: Weirdness, heavy angst, ambiguous ending. Ignores the epilogue.
Summary: Harry needs information from Draco Malfoy—several times. And each time, Malfoy only asks for the smallest price in return. A promise made on wands.
Author’s Notes: Yes, this one’s fairly odd. Hopefully what happened will be clear by the end of the story, though—or at least something that ought to provide a good theory.
Promises Made on Wands
“Why do you think I know where she is?”
The words were mild and curious, not at all the tone that Harry had thought to hear coming out of his old rival’s mouth when he asked for information like this. But then again, the Malfoy who sat on the other side of a table in the Leaky Cauldron was not the same boy Harry had once known. Taller, dressed in dark blue robes, his hair finer and softer and straighter than Harry remembered it and bound in a braid with a black ribbon tied across the end, he looked like the ghost of Lucius.
Or of my wet dreams.
Harry shook his head. If there was a more inappropriate subject to think about when he was engaged in trying to find Ginny, he didn’t know what it was. “Because she came to the Manor before she vanished,” he said. “I know that you run a network of safehouses.”
“For people to go to when they want to drop out of sight for a while, yes.” Malfoy picked up the rough wooden cup in front of him and took a sip of the equally rough wine that he’d ordered. Another unexpected thing, Harry thought, and not fitting with either the image of the prissy schoolboy that he retained or the coolly aristocratic one that Malfoy presented now. “That doesn’t mean that she’s in one of them. After all, she’s hardly traded a Dark artifact of questionable provenance.” He smiled at Harry.
Harry took a deep breath. He would just have to put aside the suspicions that Malfoy had concealed several Dark wizards who’d been wanted as witnesses in some of the cases he worked until enough time passed that the case was tried and over. He didn’t have proof.
And he needed Malfoy’s help to find Ginny.
“It’s nothing bad, the reason I want to find her,” he began, and then stopped, because Malfoy’s face was bright with amusement, and he realized that it wouldn’t matter to Malfoy if he had wanted to find her for an illegal reason. Harry shook his head and raked his hand through his hair hard enough to make it stand up in spikes. Malfoy confused all his usual reasons and ways of doing business, and he hated it. “I mean—we had a row. A big one. I said some things I shouldn’t have, and she ran out of the house. I want to find her and apologize.”
“Ah.” Malfoy took another sip of the wine. “And did you ever consider that she might not be interested in hearing your apologies, if she’s taken the trouble to hide so thoroughly that not even Harry Potter, Super-Auror, can find her?”
Harry sighed. “Yeah, I thought of that, but—I want at least the chance to talk to her. If she rejects me after that, well.” He swallowed, and the thought of wet dreams about men like Malfoy felt foreign and far-away from him now. The image of Ginny was before him instead, Ginny with her wide-set brown eyes and her bright, inquiring glances, Ginny with the laughter that made him feel as though he had stepped into a grove of trees lit by sun and moon together. “That’s her choice.”
Malfoy considered him. His face had gone unreadable, losing both surprise and humor. Harry stared back and wondered what in the world Malfoy was thinking. Harry knew there would be a price, and he’d brought a full sack of Galleons to pay it, but he wasn’t entirely sure, from the way that Malfoy’s eyebrows pinched together, if that would be enough.
As if on cue, Malfoy shook his head and said, “I don’t need money.”
“What do you need, then?” Harry held his breath, wondering what he could offer if Malfoy really did turn his back on the Galleons.
Malfoy took out his wand. Harry tensed for a different reason, but all Malfoy did was lay it on the table between them. “Have you ever made a promise on someone else’s wand, Potter?” he asked, face strangely intense.
Harry shook his head. His throat ached. He wanted to ask what this was doing to get him closer to Ginny, but he kept silent instead, because Malfoy’s tone didn’t seem to fish for responses, despite his question.
“You make a promise that has to be kept,” Malfoy said. “That’s all. At some time in the future, the person you made the promise to can call it in. It’s like a life-debt.” His voice shook on the last words. He paused and took a drink of wine.
Harry blinked. He knew that some pure-blood wizards took life-debts incredibly seriously, but he didn’t think he’d ever heard anyone’s voice shake when they talked about it. “Er, all right?” he asked cautiously.
“You can’t break the promise,” Malfoy said. “Do you understand that? It’s what I’ll ask for, if I give you the information about where your Weasley is living.”
“I understand,” Harry said.
Malfoy bowed his head and took a deep breath. “Take out your wand and lay it across mine,” he said in a whisper.
Harry did so, his back stinging with suspicion. Perhaps this was a bigger deal than it seemed like; perhaps he should have refused. But he didn’t really think so. Malfoy was just—being weird, that was all. He tried to sit up and look like he was unafraid of the superstitious way that Malfoy was acting.
Malfoy looked down at their joined wands for a moment and then closed his eyes. Harry didn’t know what he was doing, not for certain, but it looked as though he might be summoning up the words of a ritual he didn’t know that well, or committing the sight of holly and hawthorn lying across each other to memory.
Once, Harry saw his lips move. He was murmuring to himself, Harry thought, and he was almost certain Malfoy had said, “Are you sure that you want this?”
Nothing made sense. Harry sat there anyway, stolid, waiting, and willing to do this even if it was as serious as a life-debt. After all, he had owed life-debts and been owed them before. He didn’t really think Malfoy would ask him to do something that might get him killed, not when the murder could be traced back to him easily enough. More than one person had stared at them, walking through the Leaky Cauldron at the same time and sitting together.
Finally, Malfoy opened his eyes and pinned Harry with the same intense look. Harry shifted, then told himself not to act afraid. He had the idea that that was what Malfoy was trying to cause right now with all his strangeness.
“Fine,” he said. “What do I do? Is this like an Unbreakable Vow?”
Malfoy started and shook his head. A strand of hair had come loose from the braid that trailed down his back and swayed back and forth like a stalk of wheat in the wind. “No. You simply make the promise.”
“Right,” Harry said, and waited. But Malfoy only sat there, gazing at him with wide, solemn eyes, so it was up to Harry to sigh and ask, “So, what’s the promise?”
Malfoy started again. Harry wondered if perhaps he was mentally unstable and everyone except Harry knew it. Hermione and Ron hadn’t said anything when Harry went to meet him, though. They just gave him sad, knowing looks.
“That you’ll promise to come to me when I call you,” Malfoy said.
Harry blinked. It seemed such a minor thing for Malfoy to get worked up about. What could a visit to the Manor mean for Harry, in the larger scheme of things? Or even a visit to Malfoy somewhere else; he would just make sure that it wasn’t an isolated place, or, if he had to do that, that one of his friends knew where he was going.
“What do I say?” he asked, reaching one hand out so that it hovered above the wands. Malfoy had already done that, and it seemed to make sense.
“Promise on your wand,” Malfoy whispered. His voice was hoarse, and Harry was more and more certain that either he was mentally unstable or else that he attached far more significance to a promise like this than Harry did. Well, perhaps he isn’t owed many life-debts, Harry decided charitably. Or perhaps he intends to have me come to him in front of a library that he’s going to dedicate or something like that, and he’s thinking of the political capital he’ll gain from my promise. “That you’ll come when I call you.”
“I promise on my wand that I’ll come when Malfoy calls me,” Harry said obediently.
He waited for some explosion of magic, but nothing happened other than a faint glow rising from the wands and then settling back into them. Harry reached out and cautiously picked up his wand, sending Malfoy’s clattering and rolling. Malfoy immediately lunged for his wand and caught it as if it was something precious.
Nothing felt different about the wand, Harry decided, testing the weight and the smoothness of the wood, unless it was that the shaft of the wand was smoother and warmer than before. And how could you estimate that?
He watched Malfoy. Malfoy, hugging his wand to himself, showed no inclination to resume the conversation. Harry was the one who had to clear his throat rather noisily and ask, “The information, Malfoy?”
Malfoy came back to himself, slid his wand up his sleeve, and began to write down directions on a napkin. Harry squinted to make sure that he could make out his script and then nodded, standing up with the napkin in his hand and a bright thrumming in his heart. He was going to find Ginny and make everything right again.
“Wish me luck?” he said impulsively to Malfoy, who had remained at the table and seemed content to finish the rest of the rough wine.
Malfoy lifted his eyes and fixed Harry with the same intense expression that he’d used earlier, when there seemed so little need for it. “I’m afraid that I can’t do that, Potter,” he said. “Almost anything else, but not that.”
Harry shrugged, more puzzled than angry, and went bounding towards Ginny and his future.
*
“Back again, Potter? And I didn’t even call on you to keep your promise.”
Harry scowled and slid a hand through his hair. He had known that Malfoy would sound like this, lilting and mocking, and he hadn’t wanted to come to him in the first place. But Ginny had insisted. “He hid me when I wanted to run away from you,” she’d said. “And he’ll do anything for the right price. Even if he can’t do it himself, he knows people who can.”
Harry took a deep breath and raised his eyes to the tall man, with a shock of soft hair dangling in his eyes, who stood wrapped in a robe in the middle of the Manor’s doorway. He was just going to recite his prepared speech and hope that worked. “Ginny and I are having some—problems—conceiving children,” he said. “We want a potion that can help. Ginny said that you would know the right people.”
Malfoy’s eyes grew very wide. Then he blinked once and said, “I need some more information. Is the problem with her or with you?”
Harry gritted his teeth. He had known this was coming. It didn’t make his cheeks burn any less. “With me.”
Malfoy didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. A single deep look was enough, and then he stepped aside. “You’d better come in.”
Harry shuddered as he stepped into the Manor, and then wondered why. He didn’t feel the immediate bad memories and fear that he’d expected, since there were memories of Hermione being tortured and them being imprisoned here. Instead, it was just a sensation of cold. Everything in sight was white or silver or grey. It reminded Harry of the grey chair that Aunt Petunia had bought once and declared sacrosanct; not even Dudley could sit in it. Just being in this place gave him the feeling that he was about to mess it up.
Malfoy studied Harry’s reaction with a little smile, the bastard, but said nothing about it. He went over to the nearest table and took out a silver inkwell and a piece of parchment so blinding white that Harry flinched back from it. “I trust that you have been to the Healers already?” he asked briskly.
“Yes,” Harry said. He would keep his answers as short as possible. “They said that Ginny can have children. I can’t.”
“What is the cause?” Malfoy sounded almost professional now, writing down words without looking up.
“They didn’t know, exactly,” Harry said, and coughed. In spite of everything, his face was burning. He turned to stare blindly at the portraits on the walls, but that wasn’t much better, since they were Malfoy ancestors and looked down their noses at him in response. “They thought it was either a genetic defect—apparently my grandparents had my father late in life, and he was an only child, even though my grandmother was pregnant lots of times—or something from the Dark magic I may have been hit with during the war.”
Malfoy snorted. “I think it’s unlikely that it’s the last, if your wife doesn’t have this damage. She spent more time at Hogwarts and in the tender custody of the Carrows than you did.”
Harry winced despite himself. He hated being reminded that he hadn’t been there for Ginny when she needed him. “Yeah, well. They couldn’t eliminate that for sure as a cause.”
“Of course they couldn’t.” Malfoy laid the quill down on the parchment. “They say it to cover their bases, and their methods aren’t as good as mine. Come with me, and I’ll test you to learn what kind of potion I’ll need to brew.” He paused and looked back at Harry. “You know that this is going to cost you?”
Harry nodded in resignation. “And I’ll have to pay more to buy your silence, of course.”
“Do you have any trouble getting it up?” Malfoy asked.
“What?” Harry snapped. “Of course not!”
“Then you don’t have to buy my silence.” Malfoy gave him that same deep smile he’d used to embarrass Harry before. “It’s hardly a titillating story that Harry Potter is infertile. If you weren’t able to fuck her at all, then I agree, that would be too much for me to resist. But what do I care if the little shrew can’t have the famous Potter children she wants?”
He went on his way. Harry rubbed his forehead, which already hurt in ways that it hadn’t since the war, and followed.
Malfoy asked more questions that made no sense to Harry, ranging from what time he woke up in the mornings to how much time he spent on the toilet. But finally he stepped back from the table in the lab he’d led Harry to and nodded. Harry blinked. He had barely realized that Malfoy was piling ingredients into a vial or stirring, since Malfoy’s body had been in the way, but there was a bright, glittering blue-purple concoction.
“And that’s going to help, is it?” he asked skeptically.
“I don’t know for certain,” Malfoy said. “I believe that, yes, the problem is genetic, but it might not be the one I think it is. The potion should make it easier for you to have children if I’m right. If I’m not, then come back and we’ll try again.” He paused, leaning against the table, and seemed to wait for Harry to say something.
“Er, thanks,” Harry said, picking up the vial and wondering if he would have the courage, after all, to take a potion that Draco Malfoy had prepared.
“My price,” Malfoy prompted.
Harry sighed. “Right. How many Galleons—”
But Malfoy had drawn his wand, and laid it down on the same table where he’d prepared the potion. Distantly, in the back of his mind, Harry was shocked. Snape would never have done something like that, and even Slughorn had told them that they should be extremely careful to clean their tables before they rested their wands on them. “My price,” he said, “is another promise made on the wands.”
Harry sighed in relief—there weren’t that many Galleons in his vault, after all, and he and Ginny had been somewhat strained lately with all the magic they’d been spending on Healers to fix this problem—and dug his wand out of his sleeve. He crossed it with Malfoy’s.
“I want you to promise on your wand,” Malfoy said, his voice low and his fingers so still that it gave Harry pause, “that you’ll do as I ask when I call you.”
Harry eyed him. “What do you mean? I’ve already promised to come visiting or to save your arse, whichever it is. Why would you need me to save you when I would already be there to do just that?”
“This is something else,” Malfoy said.
“What?” Harry asked.
“Never you mind.” Malfoy gave him an enigmatic smile beneath the swath of blond hair falling over his face. “It doesn’t concern you greatly, you know.”
Harry rolled his eyes and said, “I promise on my wand to do what you ask of me, after you call me.”
The wands hissed this time, and Harry thought the air glittered around them more than before. But his wand still felt no different when he picked it up—and he made very carefully sure that he was picking up his wand and not Malfoy’s, easy as the mistake would have been to correct.
“Thanks, Malfoy,” he said, and gave the potion a dubious glance despite himself. He didn’t think Malfoy would poison him, not really; Ginny could trace it back to him too easily. But it did seem that he’d been too eager to help Harry, and in fact to brew the potion that day instead of putting it off for a few days and making him sweat a little.
“Potter.”
Harry should have kept going. He knew it. But he paused at the threshold of that cold drawing room and turned around, reluctantly interested in the choked tone in Malfoy’s voice.
Malfoy stood with his arms folded, staring intently at him. Harry shifted uneasily. He didn’t know why the stare and the tone in Malfoy’s voice should bother him so much; it wasn’t as though he was going to be hurt if Malfoy had a poor opinion of him. He didn’t think that even a Potions master could make a potion poisonous from a distance.
“Sometimes,” Malfoy said, “the ways of nature are too mysterious for us, too powerful. If something happens, then it might be meant to be.”
Harry snorted in spite of himself, because he doubted that Malfoy believed that. It seemed much likelier that he would use his money and his magic to conquer any obstacle that got in his way. “I’ll keep that in mind for the time when I’m dying and I know that I can’t do anything about it.”
Malfoy didn’t smile. “A piece of advice,” he said. “It’s up to you whether or not you listen to it.” He turned and walked back through the door to the lab.
Harry shook his head and left. He did notice, as he passed the table where Malfoy had been taking “notes” earlier, that the parchment bore nothing more than a few random doodles and Harry’s name. Perhaps Malfoy really had the material for the fertility potion in his head and didn’t have to think hard to write it down. That sounded pretty likely, from what Harry knew about him.
*
Harry pounded on the door of the Manor. Then he huddled under the gracefully arched portico, which didn’t provide as much protection from the howling wind and flying rain as it should have.
Nothing happened, so Harry reached over and pounded again.
This time, it opened so fast that Harry nearly hit the house-elf in the face. He pulled his hand back just in time and ignored the creature’s bowing and lamentations, instead demanding, “Is your master in?”
“I’m here, Potter.” Malfoy moved up behind the elf and raised an eyebrow. “Do you mind telling me why you’re inflicting violence on my servants?”
Harry pushed in without responding and stood there shivering and dripping in the entrance hall. He wanted to say several things at once, but for right now they were all tangled up with each other and fighting behind his teeth. He would just have to wait a few minutes until they sorted themselves out.
Malfoy gave him a keen look, then nodded, although Harry knew he hadn’t said anything, and spoke a few quiet words to the house-elf. It vanished at once, and then reappeared holding what looked like a glove filled with red-hot coals. Harry eyed it warily and wondered if Malfoy intended to torture him for showing up twice in three months without an invitation.
“You rest your hands inside it,” Malfoy said, “and it spreads warmth to the rest of your body. It’s less hot than it looks,” he added, as though he’d divined Harry’s thoughts, though Harry was fairly sure that he hadn’t picked up on the one about torture devices. He probably wouldn’t have been able to let that one go.
Harry hesitated once more. But he’d trusted the potion, hadn’t he, like a bloody fool? Once again, Ginny knew where he had gone. He slid his hands into the glove, and the house-elf stepped back. Harry gasped as heat shot and blazed through him, and managed to relax with a faint grunt. All right, then. He could accept that not all of Malfoy’s intentions might be evil.
Just the vast majority.
Either that thought or the passage of time prompted him to speak of the thing that had brought him here. He stared at Malfoy and demanded, “How often do you brew potions that don’t work?”
Malfoy tossed his head back as though he’d expected the accusation and knew the best way to meet it. “I did warn you,” he said.
“What?” Harry spluttered. He had expected indignation, scientific concern, or denial, but not this calm acceptance. “You did not! Why waste time brewing a potion that you thought wouldn’t work?”
“I did warn you,” Malfoy repeated, “that sometimes nature puts obstacles in our path that we can’t get over or around.” He seemed to be growing continually calmer and cooler the longer Harry was upset. “I suspected that the genetic defect your Healers said was there might be too great to be overcome by a mere fertility potion. If they couldn’t even detect it, the possibility increased. Probably the result of a long-ago curse on your bloodline,” he added, this time in the heartlessly interested tones Harry had expected. “I wonder if any of the other families bear the same curse, and if that’s the reason so many of us are slow to have children.”
“Ginny and I want a family, Malfoy,” Harry said, and drew his wand.
“What exactly is this promise going to be offered for?” Malfoy watched Harry’s wand as if he were on the verge of snatching it away and crossing it with his own immediately. The covetous gleam in his eyes made Harry pause, but he had to forge ahead. Malfoy had caused this problem, getting their hopes up. Ginny had spent the last fortnight looking as if she were going to cry. Harry would get some satisfaction from Malfoy, or else.
“I—I want some way to overcome that defect,” Harry said, lowering his wand and closing his eyes. He wanted to do something, to lash out, to kill, but Malfoy wasn’t a Dark wizard in the traditional sense of the word, and the Ministry wouldn’t accept Harry attacking him in his own home without a reason. Harry turned sharply away instead and paced to the far side of the room. He stared at the wall until he thought he could speak rationally.
Malfoy was already speaking by then, of course, the self-righteous git. “There’s no potion I could brew that could overcome something like this, Potter.”
Harry turned his head. “You said that you could brew,” he said. “You can put me in contact with someone who can?”
Malfoy bowed, never taking his eyes from Harry. He was watching Harry as if he was going to consume him. Harry turned away again and closed his eyes, taking a deep breath, feeling hope for the first time in weeks.
“It’ll cost me another promise on my wand, won’t it?” he asked. He didn’t fear that. Malfoy was going to call in those promises someday, Harry had no doubt—unless he just wanted to go to his grave exulting in his power over Harry—but he would deal with that when it happened.
“Yes, it will,” Malfoy said. “And you have to realize that I can’t guarantee results. Depending on the source of the problem, if it is an ancient curse, it could well be that the potions would poison you or couldn’t be strong enough to overcome the problem without otherwise killing you.”
“Ginny and I want children, Malfoy,” Harry repeated. He would keep saying that until Malfoy realized that he was prepared to risk everything for that, including his own destruction.
Malfoy shrugged as if to say it was none of his business what strange things Harry wanted, and took out his wand.
Harry laid his over it on the table and looked at Malfoy. Malfoy stared contemplatively back at him, bowed his head, and seemed to think for a long moment before he spoke. Harry decided that was probably a load of bollocks, though. Malfoy had likely decided on what he wanted years ago, if he ever got the chance to take revenge on Harry or place him at a disadvantage. That had to be what these promises were about, Harry thought. Some way of shaming him, of making up for the fact that Harry had won the war and Malfoy’s side hadn’t.
But the help Malfoy was giving away was worth far more to Harry than those promises could be to Malfoy. So Harry just waited until Malfoy looked up, nodded slightly, and said, “When I call you, you’ll put what I ask you to do above other things.”
Harry shook his head. These promises were all so vague and insubstantial that he wondered if Malfoy hadn’t decided what kind of revenge he wanted, and would just go with whatever sounded good to him at the time. Harry didn’t mind that, really. He had learned that impulsive criminals often did the least damage, because they would flail and strike out at the first thought that came to them, and that thought was usually something stupid and small, petty.
“I promise on my wand that I’ll put what you ask me to do above other things,” Harry said.
Malfoy bowed his head. This time, the light that shone around the wands was real beyond a doubt, a blazing star, six-pointed, that wavered back and forth as though being blown in a strong wind before it faded away. Harry snatched up his and waited while Malfoy wrote out a list of names in a hand that Harry thought was unnecessarily painstaking.
When Malfoy handed over the list, their hands brushed. Malfoy swayed, and Harry wondered if the promises took something out of him that they didn’t take out of Harry. There was a strange look on his face, too, white and wide-eyed shock, as though he was waking up from a nightmare.
“Thanks, Malfoy,” Harry said, already reading the names. He recognized a few from rumors of their being Dark Arts potions brewers, but not as many as he had thought he would. He hoped that he could choose one who would enable him to get what he and Ginny needed without breaking the law.
Not that he would hesitate if it came to that, he had to admit. He’d already asked Malfoy for three favors in his pursuit of having a family. He would do it again if he had to. He would do twice that much, three times that much. The thought of Ginny’s eyes filling with tears of happiness for once was enough motivation.
He glanced back, and saw Malfoy leaning on the wall, watching him with a keen, cold, devouring gaze.
Probably hoping that I get in trouble and something even worse happens to me than his planned revenge, Harry thought, giving him a cold smile of his own back. Too bad, Malfoy. I’ll just keep going in the direction that I’ve chosen.
*
Harry couldn’t believe that he was back here again. Once Ginny had become pregnant, he had thought that they would have nothing left to wish for. Yes, the price for the potion that made him fertile had been steep, but it was nothing he couldn’t afford when his family’s future was on the line.
But with what the Healer had said today…
Harry took a deep breath and raised his hand to knock on the Manor’s door, but a house-elf opened it before he could.
“Master Malfoy is not here,” the elf said, bowing again and again, as if it thought Harry would lash out just because it was there. If it was the same elf he had almost hit last time, Harry couldn’t blame it, though. “He is being in the garden, with the grove.”
“The grove?” Harry asked. He thought a group of trees should be easy enough to spot, since the Manor gardens seemed to be mostly flat, but he wanted to be sure. He didn’t really have any time to waste. Not if what the Healers had said was—
His hands clenched down, and he shook his head. He wasn’t going to think of that now, not when it would overwhelm him and make him look weak in front of Malfoy.
“Yes, Master Harry Potter, sir.” The elf leaned out of the doorway and pointed a long arm around the house to the left. Harry nodded roughly back and then turned and strode away. The Healer’s words forced themselves back into his mind as he went, even though he tried savagely to think about the pretentiousness of the white peacocks strutting around in front of him.
I’m sorry, Mr. Potter, Mrs. Potter. The Healer, a tall woman with spectacles who had reminded Harry of a gentler McGonagall, had looked nervously back and forth between them and then pushed her glasses up as if that would spare them from what she was about to say. Your child has a malformed heart. We have a few days to find a cure, but we’ve seen this time and again, and we’ve never—we don’t usually save them.
Harry closed his eyes. He couldn’t help thinking that this was partially his fault, that the genetic defect that the potion had helped him overcome had wounded his child. And he knew that Ginny was thinking it, too. She had looked at him and then away, with her eyes full of shining tears that didn’t fall, and she said nothing, but he knew she was thinking it.
He stumbled over something, and his eyes flew open.
In front of him was a grove of short, stubby trees. Harry blinked at them. He thought he’d seen something like them before, but he couldn’t identify them until he moved his head a bit and recognized the (had to be artificially preserved, in this weather) white flowers clinging to them. Hawthorn.
Like Malfoy’s wand, he remembered, and then snorted at himself. Only he would think of something that irrelevant at this moment.
“Malfoy?” he asked, cocking his head to see in between the trees. He didn’t see anyone in the center of the grove, but then again, there were so many thick clusters of white flowers that he might have missed him at first.
A sliver of white-silver light appeared from nowhere. Harry glanced up instinctively, but the sun had set into a thick bank of clouds already, and the day hadn’t been very bright, anyway. He stamped his feet and shivered as the light went on shining, wondering if it was a spell Malfoy had cast to kill intruders, but unwilling to move away from the trees as long as there was a chance of finding salvation.
The light finally coalesced in the center of the grove and seemed to fragment into tiny flakes that fell together, forming up an image of Malfoy. Harry stared, with his breath caught in his throat. He’d never seen anything like that, and he didn’t know whether it made it more or less creepy that Malfoy shook his cloak off, scattering the last bits of light like snow, and strode towards the edge of the grove.
He did step back when Malfoy pulled away a thorny branch and suddenly stood in front of him. This close, Malfoy’s face was cold, his eyes lightless. Harry had to wonder if he would be as obliging as he had been the other times.
But the thought of his child strengthened him. Harry cleared his throat awkwardly and launched into the plea that he’d already prepared.
“We need your help, Malfoy. Our child is going to be born with a malformed heart. The Healers say that they can’t save her. Can you help?”
Malfoy continued to study him with that cold, shut-in look, and then turned away and stared at the horizon as if it held the answers. When he turned back, he looked more human, but only marginally. A wind whipped the edge of his cloak, and it took Harry a moment to realize why that was strange. He couldn’t feel the wind on his own cheeks or hair or clothing.
“I had thought I would let it go,” Malfoy said, apparently talking to himself. “Why disturb what worked well, what worked better in dreams than in reality? But here you are again. What will the end be, I wonder?”
Harry sighed. “Malfoy, do we have to do this mysterious-wise-sage act? Can you please just tell me whether you’re willing to help?”
Malfoy glanced at him. He had a slight smile now, one that would have made Harry back up and reach for his wand if he was encountering it under working circumstances. But he wasn’t, and his daughter needed this cure, and he gritted his teeth and continued to face Malfoy down. He wasn’t really scary, Harry told himself. He only wanted to look that way so that he could intimidate Harry.
“I notice that you didn’t ask whether I can,” Malfoy murmured. “Have you become that used to seeing me as the fount of all wisdom? In which case, I can plead for the authenticity of my act as sage.”
Harry didn’t know exactly what that meant, but he didn’t care. He just shook his head and said, “Can you help or not?”
“I can,” Malfoy said. “Not with a potion. With a spell.”
Harry bristled. “If you think I’m going to let you cast spells on my pregnant wife—”
“For the love of Merlin, Potter.” Malfoy sounded more like himself now, stupid and arrogant, his eyes narrowing in irritation. “Of course not. I’ll teach you the spell, and you’ll cast it yourself. You think I care about your pregnant wife that much?”
Harry blinked. “Oh,” he said weakly. He had no explanation for the conclusions he’d jumped to, and no longing to apologize, so he focused on something else. “But you must care at least a little bit about her, or why would you have sheltered her when she asked for help and given all these potions and advice to her?”
“Wrong person for my caring to target,” Malfoy breathed.
“What?”
“Never mind,” Malfoy said. “Let me go back inside. The book I need is there, and you’ll need a few hours to memorize the incantation, at least.”
Harry swallowed back the automatic response, which was to say that he didn’t have that much time. Of course he did. The Healers had told them it would be a few days before Lily died. He would do this, and he would save her, and Ginny would look at him with shining eyes again, and they would be a family.
“It’ll be another wand-promise, won’t it?” he asked Malfoy’s back, suddenly realizing that they hadn’t discussed payment.
“Oh, yes.”
The words were soft and heavy, like nightfall. Harry frowned and wondered for the first time exactly what this would cost him.
But he shrugged off the worries. Whatever price Malfoy charged, it had to be less than the contentment and safety of his family. Harry had wanted people to love and belong with all his life, and now he was finally getting that. If fate tried to stand in his way, he battered down fate and found some way around it.
And Malfoy was weak compared to fate.
“Here.”
They were in the library already, and Malfoy drew down a heavy book filled with yellowing pages. He flipped through a few of them, nodded, and then extended the book to Harry.
Harry took only a cursory look before he shook his head and handed it back. “I can’t read Latin.”
“Then you’ll have to trust me, won’t you?” For some reason, Malfoy looked immensely delighted.
Harry thrust the book at him. “Yes, I will. But I warn you: I can make you regret this for the rest of your life if you fuck up.”
Malfoy snorted and accepted the book with care that made Harry wonder what would have happened if he’d bent a page. “I don’t want to do that, Potter,” he said. “If the help provided in return for a promise made on wands is false, then it invalidates the promise.”
Harry paused. “Then doesn’t that render my second promise to you null and void?” He couldn’t remember what the promise had been for a moment; he had to search his memory. “The promise to do as you ask when you call me?”
Malfoy shook his head. “I did the best I could with that potion, and I warned you that it might not work. You chose to take the risk anyway.”
That sounded fair, Harry had to grudgingly admit. And then a vision of Lily as the Healers had raised it, a colored shadow drifting in Ginny’s womb with her heart beating grotesquely out of rhythm, came to him, and he closed his mouth against the rush of panic, feeling as if he would throw up. Here he was, debating nuances of his actions with Malfoy, when his daughter was dying.
Malfoy seemed to catch his urgency, or read something from the expression on his face, because he turned smoothly back to the book as if there had never been an argument. “Emendator corculum,” he said, “You need to make sure that you say every syllable, Potter, and exactly as I pronounce it to you. Magic that changes the unborn is nothing to mess around with. Do you understand?”
How was it that Malfoy’s pale eyes could pierce him when his daughter was the one who would be affected? Harry wondered, but he nodded anyway. “I promise. Repeat it again.”
And he had Malfoy say it again, and again, until he was confident that he had it right, and his tongue and teeth and lips worked around the words as if he had known them all his life, as if they were English. After that, Malfoy showed him the correct wand movement, a cross-shape followed by a descending arc. Malfoy also warned him that he had to perform them right above the baby’s heart.
Harry already planned on performing them a hundred times if necessary, over every square inch of Ginny’s stomach. He was going to get this right.
At last Malfoy nodded judiciously as he performed the spell, and it flared out in a red crackle of sparks that faded when they found nothing to latch onto. Malfoy had already reassured him that the spell would have no effect if he cast it somewhere that wasn’t the target, which was why Harry could repeat it if necessary. “I think you have it, Potter. Now, about that promise.” He turned towards a projecting shelf that had no books on it and laid his wand down.
Harry looked at the door, longing. “What if I promise to come back as soon as I can and make that promise, Malfoy? I want to go home and use this spell now, while there’s still a chance that—”
“She’ll be all right for the moment it’ll take you to do this.” Malfoy’s voice was as cool as the light Harry had seen him manifest in, inside the grove—and what kind of spell was that, anyway? Harry would have asked, thinking it Dark, if he hadn’t been so worried about Lily. “I’m afraid that I’m not that naïve, Potter, to let you go right now.”
Harry rolled his eyes as he laid his wand across Malfoy’s. “You think that I’d dash off and never come back again?”
“Oh, I’m quite sure that you’d come back again,” said Malfoy, but didn’t elaborate further. He pointed to their crossed wands. “I want you to promise that you won’t make any protests when I call on you.”
Harry looked at him warily. “If you want me to murder an innocent or something like that, Malfoy, I sure as hell would.”
Malfoy chuckled, but his eyes were hollow, and he looked, briefly, like a starving vampire. Harry regretted that his wand was on the table. Malfoy saw him looking at it and shook his head, and regained a normal expression with, Harry thought, a bit of effort.
“I didn’t mean that,” he said. “I meant that you won’t complain constantly about how you would rather be elsewhere, doing something else. You’ll do what I ask cheerfully and without complaining, and when it’s finished, why then—” And he turned his hand over with a sharp movement that startled Harry, to show his empty palm. “Then you can leave.”
Harry nodded and blinked, and then gave the promise. The wands this time shone as if they had been dipped in molten gold, and when Harry picked his up, he could feel a thrumming current running down his arm, the way that he had once felt when he touched a Muggle electrical plug.
He stared at Malfoy. “What is this process doing to my wand, Malfoy?” he demanded.
“Did I say that it was doing something to your wand?” Malfoy kept his head bowed over the table where his wand lay, tapping it from side to side with his fingers, staring at it in what seemed like fascination. “No. The effects of multiple promises make it a bit more—mindful, that’s all. It’s the wand that holds the promise.” He looked up and smiled, and Harry thought this one looked even worse, like a deaths-head grin. “A wand-borne promise would weaken you permanently if you could break it. Which you can’t.”
Harry shrugged, too impatient to ask what he meant. He had already wasted enough time here, and Ginny and Lily were waiting.
As he left the house, he had the strange impression that Malfoy hadn’t moved, but stood where he had been, staring after him. And he had the even stranger one that Malfoy’s smile hadn’t lasted long, but had faded, to become a look of unconquerable longing.
But that was stupid, and there was no way he could have known that, because Harry didn’t look back.
Part Two.
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