Chapter Thirty-Eight of 'I Give You a Wondrous Mirror'- Help For a Malfoy
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Chapter Thirty-Eight-Help for a Malfoy
“You should have learned better than that, Harry.”
Harry said nothing. He concentrated on keeping his breath, his sanity, and his consciousness in the wake of what felt like a dozen minutes of Cruciatus, though he knew it could barely have been two. Twelve minutes would have been sufficient to make him lose his sanity; he knew that much. An image of Neville’s parents flashed through his mind, and he shuddered.
“Do you understand how foolish you were to challenge me?”
Harry forced his eyes open slowly. Andromeda stood over him, her hand so tight around her wand that Harry was vaguely surprised it didn’t shatter, her face contorted into a snarl. When she saw Harry looking at her wand, she tightened her grip on it again and shook her head. Harry would have smiled if this were even a vaguely appropriate place and time. Did she really think he could Summon her wand with his gaze? Even the little wandless magic he was capable of wouldn’t have been available to him now, with this burning ache lodged in his bones. He couldn’t concentrate enough past the pain and her words to grasp hold of it.
“I don’t think you do,” Andromeda whispered. “I think that you still believe, even now, even after all this, that you were only doing what you had to do, as if that excused your actions. I do not think you will appreciate the seriousness of the situation until you see one of your children sobbing in front of you.”
And Harry learned what fear was.
*
Draco skidded around a corner and leaned for just a moment against the stone, panting. He badly needed the chance to catch his breath, but he also needed to run his hand along the traceries carved into the wall and learn which direction he was going.
He nodded sharply. Good. He had not lost the way in his frantic dash. He still knew where he was, and the Masked Lady’s soldiers had not the slightest idea. They kept behind him with annoying persistence, he had to give them that, but that was not enough to protect them.
His legs and his memory together guided him up the polished stone corridor to one that was more rough-hewn, and he hesitated whether to turn right or left. But then his memory took over, and he turned to the left.
And then there was a solid wall, at least to anyone looking at from a distance. One had to be close at hand, and preferably with fingers brushing the wall, to realize that part of it was actually a door, also made of stone and set perfectly flush with the surrounding rock. The Malfoy ancestors hadn’t wanted anyone gaining unauthorized entrance by sticking fingers or a wand around the sides.
Draco laid his palm flat against the door, in the middle of a spiraling design of skulls, and forced his breathing to calm and his mind to concentrate on the names of his ancestors that Lucius had taught him from the time he was old enough to speak. Lucius, Abraxas, Julian, Octavius, Quintus, Julius…
Beneath his hand, the door went soft, as if he were pressing his fingers into bog. Draco forced himself not to leap back. He leaned forwards and accepted what was happening, even as he lost his balance.
Then the suction tightened, and drew him in. Draco heard a hex crackle past his feet and hit the wall. He imagined that his enemies would have no last sight of him, and no explanation, other than the way his body whipped into the wall as if a hungry octopus were pulling at him.
He was within the midst of the stone now. Draco kept his breathing as even and soft as he could, while in his mind the names repeated.
Septimus, Lucius, Regulus…
*
“No,” Harry said softly. “I will give you whatever you want, if only you will not touch them.”
Andromeda didn’t respond. She stood in the entrance of the room where she had confined the children, staring at them. Harry hung behind her, gripped by a spell that dangled him from the collar of his robes like a kitten transported in its mother’s mouth, and couldn’t see the expression on her face.
He could see the sudden hope that overcame James’s boredom, though, and the way that Al reached out for him. Scorpius, sitting on a low chair, looked past Harry and mouthed something that looked like, “Daddy?” Even Lily’s gurgles had turned inquiring.
“Where’s Teddy?” Harry asked, because he thought the question might raise a response from Andromeda.
“With my sister,” Andromeda murmured. “I told you, neither of them has been harmed, and I don’t intend to harm them, either.” Her voice was distracted, and her left hand rose and wavered back and forth between the children.
It terrified Harry that she could be choosing which one to torture. “Anything,” he repeated. “I will give you whatever you want.”
Andromeda sighed and turned to face him. “As matters fall out, I was going to choose Scorpius,” she said. Harry could see Draco’s son cock his head at the sound of his name. “And why should that matter to you, since he is your lover’s child and none of your blood?”
Harry swallowed. Whatever happened next was probably going to hurt, but so long as he could keep her attention focused on him and not the children, he counted that as winning a victory.
“You really don’t understand, do you?” He filled his voice with pity, and saw her stiffen at the sound of it.
“You will explain yourself.” Her wand bobbed in a single sharp gesture, and the spell at the nape of Harry’s neck tightened, making it hard to breathe. He coughed twice before he realized it wouldn’t get better, and he should talk to Andromeda while he still had a chance.
“I mean,” he said, “you don’t understand why anyone outside family matters. You kept Teddy safe because he has a blood connection to you, and likewise with Narcissa. And you’re doing this because you want vengeance for your daughter. It never once occurred to you that your war could hurt other families, did it? That the men and women you kill are also sons and daughters, and that their parents love them as you loved Nymphadora-“
He never saw the spell she cast, but it sliced open his cheek easily. Harry felt the flaps of skin fall back to expose his gums and teeth.
Al screamed as if he had been the one to feel that pain. James whispered, “Daddy? Daddy, what’s she doing?”
Harry didn’t scream. The noise wanted to emerge, but the mere thought of what the faces of his children would look like if it did prevented him from voicing it. He swallowed several times, then said, “She’s just punishing me, James.” His voice sounded distorted because of his open cheek, but at least he could speak.
“A good answer,” Andromeda whispered, and lifted her wand again.
Another slash laid open his other cheek. And then she began to paint patterns of blood on his stomach, dangerously close to his intestines and several other major organs, leaving him to wonder what would happen when she broke the barrier of the skin. He had seen the pictures of Esther Goldstein’s murder. Even if Andromeda had not been the one to kill and mutilate the girl, he thought she probably knew the spells.
He did not want to die in front of his children. But so long as he could keep her attention fixed on him, he spared them for a few moments, and he would have another chance to come up with a plan that might spare them further.
*
The stone pressed down on him as if it were still liquid rock flowing in the heart of a volcano. Draco found himself shivering convulsively, wondering if he were to be crushed after all, but not by the walls of a closet this time. Lucius had taught him how risky any intrusion into the crypts was. They were the domain of the dead, and though the living might come to them if they were of Malfoy blood, it still wasn’t something to undertake lightly.
But the darkness parted suddenly in a flash of light that reminded Draco uncomfortably of the way Scorpius had been born, and he found himself clambering out of the wall into the middle of a familiar corridor. He leaned against the stone to catch his breath and gaze at the nameplates beneath the niches.
Each niche was no more than a ledge in the stone, just the length of a human body. Each cradled a molded silver or platinum or iron figure-depending on the wishes of the deceased and how much they had achieved in life-representing the Malfoy whose body rested there. Draco discovered he was between the elder Lucius’s stern, staring, hands-folded silver figure and the platinum face of his many-times-great-aunt Julia, who had held the family together when her father had gone to prison and arranged the deaths of its enemies with ruthless efficiency.
He straightened his back. He knew which direction the door was from here. If he wanted, he could stroll through it and emerge in his bedroom, inside the defenses the Masked Lady had set on the upper floors.
But that was not what he wanted. It was too bloodless to be what he wanted.
He laid his fingers on the nameplate beneath Lucius’s figure, and then beneath Julia’s. All the time, he was concentrating on his own name, Draco Malfoy, his degree of descent from both of them, and his dire need.
An enemy has kidnapped the heir of our house and my mother. My traitorous wife has come within the wards again. My partner, a man who gave up his own wife and part of his reputation to love and live with me, is a prisoner, and so are his children. They may be tormented even as I think this.
He called up all the images that he had forbidden himself when he was in the closet, the images of Harry writhing in pain and Harry’s children screaming as flesh was shredded from their bones. The need had to be dire to coax the ancient Malfoys to rise. Lucius had warned him of that a hundred times. A Malfoy child using this for a trick would be consumed along with the people he had tried to “save.”
But this was no trick, and Draco felt his fear nearly choke him as he imagined, again, what the Masked Lady could do, and reminded himself what she was capable of.
He was swallowing bile when the metal beneath his fingers shifted.
Draco opened his eyes with a startled breath, but didn’t jump away. Lucius had also warned him that an unnecessary amount of disturbance during the rising process could send his ancestors back to sleep.
Again he whispered the names of the possible victims and their relationships to him and their necessity to his future happiness. They were important to him, the heir of the Malfoy family. Would Julia and Lucius and the rest hear and respond?
The shriek of grinding metal lashed around the crypts like a thrown blade. Draco swallowed dryly and fought the temptation to shield his eyes. No stone chips were flying towards his face, though it sounded as if they should have been.
The carved letters beneath his fingers stirred. And then Julia Malfoy’s statue arose, a metal golem, and fixed her eyes on him.
A moment before, they had been the usual carved, staring eyes that the wizard-smith hired to make them set in place for every such mask. Now they studied him, a shade of intense blue that reminded Draco of his mother’s, and blinked and fluttered and moved.
“I have come in answer to your need,” said the rasping voice of his ancestress. No matter what she might be now, she still had a metal throat. “And others will.”
Draco nodded dumbly, hearing the sound of metal scraping across rock behind him. The older Lucius would be standing, he knew, and from further down the crypts, as the call and the need spread, everyone down to his grandfather Abraxas would shrug off the bonds of stillness and come back to life. But the mere fact of its happening had stunned him, and he could only stare right now.
Julia’s lips moved, flowing like molten metal into a pretty smile that Draco knew, from family legend, far too many people had mistaken for a mindless simper when she was alive. “So, nephew. Point us at your enemies.”
*
Harry knew the moment when he couldn’t allow Andromeda to torture him any longer. James started to cry along with Al. His older boy was doing his best to muffle the sobs and make it sound as if he were coughing instead-even at Al’s age, he had been shy about crying for any reason other than anger-but Harry was too familiar with the sounds to be fooled. And then Lily began to wail, set off by the others, and Scorpius, whose face Harry could just see when he was trying to look out of pain-squinted eyes, sniffled.
“Enough, Andromeda,” he whispered.
“It will never be enough,” she whispered back. “Until the seas are full of blood and the ground is covered with bodies. Until I have done all the fighting I could have done at my daughter’s side. Until I feel that I have satisfied my duty as a mother.”
Harry licked his lips, spat out blood, and hoped he had got better at lying in the last few years. Lying to Draco and Ginny was out of the question, but Andromeda didn’t know him nearly as well.
Or she hadn’t seemed to, at least. Here was hoping that her grief had blinded her to what happened when Harry told a lie as well as to the general definition of sanity.
“You never knew what Tonks said to me just before she died?” he asked. “You never knew why she wouldn’t have approved of your doing this?”
Andromeda’s wand, which had started downwards as if she were going to open a slash across his forehead, abruptly dropped. She stared intently at him. “What do you mean?” she whispered. “I know every moment of that last day of my daughter’s life. I have questioned each of the Weasleys five times. I have tracked down and interviewed everyone else who was in the battle, and the people who saw Bellatrix kill her. There is nothing I do not know.”
Harry winced. Of course, the people Andromeda talked to would have given her any information they had, out of pity for a mother’s grief, never knowing how each fact solidified her madness.
He shook his head. “You didn’t ask me about this, and I didn’t tell you. I probably wouldn’t have remembered, except that you’re making me concentrate harder on my memories of Tonks than I have in years.”
“You never should have forgotten her.” Andromeda’s wand hand twitched like the tail of a stalking cat. Harry watched it narrowly, but it didn’t begin the gestures of a spell, and that was good enough for him. Every moment that went by with both his children and him spared pain, so that they could live and he could think, meant-
Meant what? Did he expect Draco to come charging in and rescue him? That would be silly. But he refused to question the steady hope welling up in him. He would have to pursue his lie.
“I never should have,” he agreed, in the most soothing tone he could muster. “After all, if I could remember the life-debts I owed the Malfoys and give them a second chance, why couldn’t I call up the memory of Tonks and make her live for me?”
Andromeda nodded. “You were about to tell me what she said to you.”
“It wasn’t long after she and Remus had come through from your house, and the battle began,” Harry improvised. He made himself recall the sights and scents and sounds of the Battle of Hogwarts in all their detail, which wasn’t something that happened often outside his nightmares. If he could cast himself into the right mindset, his lie would be that much stronger. He’d learned that from the times he fudged the truth around Hermione. “We were isolated together in a seventh floor corridor while the Death Eaters attacked from below and Voldemort declaimed. She looked straight at me and smiled a little. ‘I’m so happy that I lived long enough to marry Remus and have Teddy,’ she said.”
“Yes,” Andromeda murmured, watching him raptly. “That was like Dora. To think of others before herself. My sisters, who condemned her because of her father, never knew what a chance they missed for knowing a good, generous, kind woman.”
Harry smiled back. “I asked her-because it frustrated me, I have to admit-why she and Remus had come into the battle. I was thinking of what would happen if they both died and Teddy was orphaned.” He swallowed, because that part was true. “I lost both my parents to a war against Voldemort. I didn’t want the same thing to happen to my godson.”
“She had to,” Andromeda whispered. “I tried to get her to stay at home, and she wouldn’t. She insisted that her place was in the front lines, beside her husband. And how she suffered for it! How they both suffered.”
“So I asked her that question,” Harry said doggedly. He didn’t think it would be the best thing, right now, to allow Andromeda to sink into grief. She might come out of it snapping like a maddened dog at everyone around her. At the very least, Harry would no longer be able to predict her actions. “She was silent for a bit. Then she said, ‘I’m a trained Auror, Harry. I have to do my job, don’t I?’
“But I didn’t think that was everything, and I pressed her a little more. She gave this little wrinkle of her nose that she made when she was irritated-“
“Dora to the life,” Andromeda said, almost too softly for Harry to hear.
“-And turned her hair red as blood. ‘That’s not the whole reason, no,’ she said. ‘I came because I love Remus and have to fight beside him. And besides, I know that Teddy will be in good hands if I die. My mother loves and values life. She cares so much about family, Harry. You should know her better.’
“That’s one of the reasons that I visited so often after the war, and tried to get to know you better. You, Andromeda, not just Teddy. I wanted to know about the woman who had the strength to raise one child, and send her off to war because that was where she needed to be, and then had the strength to start all over again with her grandson. And Teddy’s a good kid. You raised him well.”
Andromeda shut her eyes. Tears were streaking her face, rolling down so slowly that they reminded Harry of the tears Al had cried when the wand was pressed against his neck. But he couldn’t look at his son right now, even though he had a strong urge to know how Al was faring. He would break.
“I didn’t have the strength,” Andromeda said. “Not really. She just thought I did. She had never seen what would happen to me when she was on a particularly dangerous mission. How could I tell her? She was so proud of being an Auror and a member of the Order of the Phoenix, and she wanted me to be proud of her, too.”
“But you do have the strength.” Harry held his voice to a murmur, and didn’t reach out to touch her, even though his hands were free of the gripping spell and he could have. “You showed your daughter that you did. You showed your grandson that you did. You showed me that you did. Just because you also planned the war doesn’t mean that everything you showed us all was a lie. It was also true, at the same time.”
Andromeda took a few steps towards him, her mouth slightly open. Harry had no idea what she was going to say or do next. He had no idea what he must look like at the moment. He could only hold her eyes and hope that his words had been enough.
Andromeda paused in front of him, still staring, and then leaned towards his ear.
“If you had told me that a year, or two years, or five years ago,” she whispered, “it might have been enough to stop me. Now, it is far too little, far too late. How does it feel, Harry, to know that you could have spared the wizarding world a second war, if you had paid a little more attention to the grief of people around you?”
Harry shut his eyes. He should not have expected the lies to take her in, even if they had fascinated her for a few moments. She was simply too invested in her own plots and plans.
But he had no intention of giving up, either. The spell holding him suspended his legs a good distance off the ground-perhaps high enough up that he could kick her hard in the breasts. He began to gather his strength to try it.
Andromeda turned away from him before he could. Harry opened his eyes, in a panic, to see her aiming her wand at Al.
“No!” Harry screamed.
“Cru-“ Andromeda began.
And then something else provided the interruption that Harry could not, as a crash of falling stone echoed from further back in the Manor. Andromeda spun around, her eyes wide and her head cocked in a listening posture.
I hope to God that’s Draco, Harry thought, and then provided his distraction, swinging himself up and kicking Andromeda in the side as hard as he could.
*
Draco had thought his ancestors would show more respect for the Manor that had been home to so many of them. He had envisioned secret passages, ones that even Lucius had never been trusted with, leading from the crypts to the surface.
Instead, Julia simply reared back and punched a hole in the wall at the end of the tunnel that led down from Draco’s bedroom with one metal fist. It groaned, wavered, and fell, and Draco heard startled shouts from the soldiers further in the Manor.
Julia swept past him. Draco saw her from the back for the first time, and realized, to his shock, that she wasn’t a solid statue as he’d assumed. Yellowed bones, with bits of cloth and skin still fluttering from them, worked inside the metal shell like the cogs of some intricate machine; when she turned back to see why he hadn’t followed her, her skull rotated inside the head. The intense blue eyes were still the same, though, incongruously living in the midst of bone. The smell of rotting flesh and congealing blood and pus streamed backwards from her.
“Come, Draco,” she said. “I can sense that your son is in danger. Surely you will not neglect the task you awakened us to accomplish?”
Scorpius.
Draco surged grimly forwards. He would risk far worse than marching beside the dead to rescue those he loved.
Chapter 39.