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Of her lover’s many faults and arguable virtues, he's never late. So when 8 o’clock runs into 10, 12 ticks into 2, and Hermione's third note of rationally tempered concern flies unanswered back to sender, she panics.
“He's probably sick,” says Harry. “You both work in a hospital. The place where diseases live.”
“When has he ever,” says Hermione, “failed to advertise a twinge?”
Outside the Malfoy Manor gates, the grass is green.
Inside the fence—
“Go home,” says Harry gravely.
“Go to hell,” Hermione replies.
And because that is that, they plod up the drive and strain open the door to a landscape of ominous white.
Snow covers every inch and article. Flakes spiral down from God knows where, bitterly cold and slow to melt, dampening their voices and sugaring their heads as they walk up the iced marble stairs.
Narcissa sits at her dressing table, evaluating herself in the mirror.
“Where's Draco?” Hermione demands. “Are you alright?”
“I heard the moon in the night.” Narcissa probes cyanotic fingertips into the hollows beneath her eyes. “I called and called, but she won’t come down for tea.”
Harry mumbles a request for additional units into his comms device.
The floors are slick, and Hermione takes care when she runs.
Beneath the snow in Draco’s rooms, his linens are tucked. His valise is untouched. His clothes remain in good order.
She trails a locomotive plume of breath from the nursery to the servants’ quarters, the kitchen to the cellar, each as hospitable as an Antarctic ice box. Careening through the study like a whirlwind late for tea, she discovers an overturned box.
Atop a dodecapedal monstrosity of a desk, beneath the awning of a lamp, a silver ring box lies on its side. It’s empty, save for a handful of dry leaves spilling out across the baize.
Hermione crumbles a pinch between her fingers. It smells earthen and medicinal. Culinary and green. Thyme, a century past expiry.
Who stuffs a ring box with herbs?
Pay attention.
Take a breath.
There's the nerve-spike of ozonic cold, then the usual great house smells: banked fires and insidious damp, hardwood and oiled leather. But under that . . .
It’s the geosmin musk of wet loam. Leaves steeped in rainwater. Petrichor in the night. Fox piss, bird shit, skin, horn and bone smothered under an oak litter eiderdown.
She spies Draco’s wand beneath the desk, and her heart catches. She draws her own wand and aims.
“Priori Incantatem.”
An echo pulses from Draco’s wand tip. The air near a corner cabinet shimmers.
Protego Totalum. He’d defended himself. Or he'd tried.
No hyperdontic malevolence lurks behind the cabinet doors, excepting the complete 300 volume leatherbound series of Malfoy family tax records.
The hall thuds with arriving cavalry. As Hermione shuts the cabinet door, she swears she catches a scrap of a minor key waltz.
❆
“You need to rest,” says Harry. “You look like shit. Here—drink some tea.”
Without unsticking her nose from her book, Hermione snatches the cup. “What I need are Robert Shirley’s missing diary pages from the winter of 1236.”
“Who the fuck,” asks Harry crisply, “is Robert Shirley?”
“A verderer.”
“A murderer ?”
“Verd, as in green. A judicial officer in charge of executing woodland resource law.”
“His diary’s a page-turner, then.” Harry considers Hermione’s dining area-cum-incident room. “Take a shower, at least. Eat. The DMLE’s giving it everything we’ve got.”
It's not enough.
When in doubt, Hermione needs a library.
All of them: Hogwarts, the Archives of the Ministry of Magic, Cambridge University, Basement 6 and below of the British Library, the most secretly expansive corners of the Bodleian.
Facts in hand like the givens of a Latin square, she pores over Roman inscriptions and medieval travelogues, the marginalia of cookery books and the memoirs of Benedictine nuns. She reasons unknowns into probabilities and probabilities into certainties that make her shiver.
Sat between dim-lit stacks, she translates spells that should have been abandoned to booklice and damp storage long ago.
To Call Upon the Aid of Those of an Inconstant Nature. To Summon the Faceless Traveler. To Bottle Mistakes. To Open a Door.
To open, to shut, to lock and to make, and then, at last—
To See.
❆
Under cover of the longest night and dressed for a polar expedition, Hermione commits civil trespass.
In Draco’s study, she unzips her bulging puffer jacket and lifts Crookshanks onto the floor. He shakes out his legs and sniffs, tail quivering at the promise of prey.
Hermione draws a ball of cardinal-colored yarn from her pocket, unravelled from last year’s Christmas jumper. It’s one of several contrabands stowed in her pockets, and the only sort of magic she'll trust tonight—the kind bound up in sheep’s wool, madder root dye, and the kinks left behind by Molly's stitches.
Crooks paws at the cabinet door as Hermione knots the yarn to one of Draco’s supernumerary desk legs and zips the ball in her pocket.
For all her research, the spell is simple—mere lines on an index card.
But simple has never meant safe.
“We have an objective,” she reminds Crooks. “Remember? Rabbits are a side project.”
The cat passive aggressively sharpens his claws on the rug.
He’s lucky to have his defenses. Hermione’s wandless and wardless, without so much as a salt circle. The only flair she’ll risk is a robustly phrased termination clause. At sunrise tomorrow morning, the door will slam shut whether she comes back through it or not.
The recitation takes all of ten seconds.
Then she waits.
One minute.
Two.
Nothing happens.
Three.
Four.
The house groans in the preternatural cold.
Hermione didn’t expect a doorman and a welcome mat. But her observations had led her . . . her resources were sound . . . she had prayed, quite fervently, if she’s being honest—
Crookshanks slaps the cabinet door open and pounces through.
Hermione scrambles after him and flings the door so wide it nicks the wainscot.
No paw, no tail, no throbbing occult portal. Only a sprig of cat hair and three centuries of felony tax evasion.
She rips the books off their shelves and hammers on the cabinet back.
“Crookshanks?” She peers underneath. “Crookshanks!”
He doesn’t answer.
She slumps to the floor and closes her eyes.
In the dark behind her lids, there is a door.
❆
It’s a shadow limned in darker shadow, neatly fitted to the cabinet opening.
Eyes open, she sees overwrought furniture.
Eyes shut, she sees the door.
Blindly, cautiously, she takes hold of the shadow and draws it open.
A draft of underground chill lifts her hair.
She tugs the yarn. Certain it’s sound, she steps forward. Her shins ought to bark against the cabinet’s forward edge. Instead, she stumbles on a descending step. When she opens her eyes, the room is gone. Groping for something solid in the dark, she touches compact earth at either side. She fumbles for her torch and flicks it on.
An earthen tunnel angles steeply into darkness.
In the depths shines a pair of green eyes.
“Crooks.” Hermione clutches her chest and laughs. “You gave me a heart attack.”
The cat turns, and his eyeglow lights the tunnel like a lamp.
❆
The way slopes down and down until forever, snarling on itself like a knot.
At a fork, Hermione squeezes her yarn for reassurance while Crookshanks paces and evaluates his options.
The music's soft at first, barely a record hiss. Judy Collins—her father’s favorite. Party sounds. Laughter and cutlery. A cork pop.
When she was little, Hermione’s parents sometimes put her to bed early and had dinner parties. She’d play possum then sneak onto the landing and listen, nightgown stretched over her knees. Pilled polyester with eyelet lace. Mr. Matey. A slick of Macleans. Her feet are cold. Her cheeks are hot. She hears her father now, in the deep down below, coming up to carry her to bed.
Pain spikes her to the meat.
Hermione can’t remember approaching the leftmost passage. She’s already two steps in.
Crookshanks eases his claws from her thigh. Chastened, Hermione follows him where he tells her to go.
Cats, her research suggests, are adept if fickle guides. Dr. Euphemia Greengrass, 17th century thaumaturge and seducer of virtuous wives, observed her own black tom and his descendants slip into minuscule knotholes and emerge from cracks that wouldn’t admit a fingernail. One might follow a trustworthy cat down liminal paths and see much worth recording.
Euphemia never met with such an animal.
Crookshanks, for his part, orders Hermione along like he’s been saddled with an abstracted child.
❆
Forks and crossroads multiply. The tunnel narrows.
Hermione’s bent neck becomes stooped shoulders becomes an awkward hinge at the hips. Spider silk and mycelium threads garland her hair. Roots claw at her clothes. A stumble pairs a gash in her trousers with a gaping hole in her knee.
The intersections become ambiguous and complex. But as his options increase, Crookshanks decides ever faster. Hermione runs after him until she has to crouch, then crouches until there’s only space to crawl.
The soil squirms.
Her fingers churn up pockets of soft, digested earth, probing spongiform fungal mats, the mucus-slicked bodies of worms, chitinous grubs, carapaces glossy smooth as billiard balls.
Forced to her belly, torch clamped between her teeth, the tunnel becomes a vise.
“Crooks,” she wheezes.
He’s too far ahead.
“Crooks!”
His eyeglow fades into a pin.
Crookshanks!
She can't make a sound.
His light blinks out.
She’s starving. Her mouth is parched. How long has she been running? Miles, she thinks. Long minutes. Or many hours. Shouldn't that be clear?
With effort, she feels for her yarn.
The skein is scarcely smaller than when she started.
But the line is taut.
Wriggle back, says the voice of reason. Slither home to Mum and Dad. Harry and Ron. Dinner plates and firesides. Tedious Quidditch matches and books for birthdays and rainy Burrow Christmas mornings spent reading on the sofa until lunch.
Ahead lies a tunnel with no end. A night without air. A prolonged asphyxiation in the peristaltic throat of the dark.
She reaches forward and pulls.
Inch by inch. Toe by claw. Another scrape, another push—
It’s a mistake.
She cannot move. She cannot breathe. She pants, lips parted, staring at the lights of approaching syncope.
Her torch goes out.
A mistake. It’s just a mistake. Go back and try again. More research and a new approach. More lighting and a spade.
A thousand-legged thing walks across her hand.
A mistake grows a thousand legs when the lights go out. Accidents can also be crimes. Is this a punishment? Breathe—oh, no, oh, no, oh, but in the dark at the end, what does she owe? What does she own? A ball of yarn without its cat. Has she saved enough to serve the debt? What cost to spend a lifetime believing she could answer every question right? Work hard enough, read fast enough, write sharp enough, earn every affirmation, ace each evaluation—and a pen tick of approval would be scrawled into the margin of her life?
A mark in green, like the lights of her faltering vision. Soil and grit sift before the flashing light, cat’s eye green and white and white and white, goodnight, God, not like this, goodnight.
Crookshanks rakes trenches in Hermione’s hands.
Her blood is red. Green is the light. Green and red and red and white.
This was not a mistake.
He is not a mistake.
The world opens, and Hermione falls out the bottom.
❆
Here is where love will get you: flat on your back with a cat in a ditch full of snow.
Hermione heaves up clots of soil, eyes streaming, fingers screaming in the ice. How sweet to bleed. How nice to breathe. How delicious the air, sharp and mean, so cold it scrapes her insides clean.
The coughing slows. She blows a pebble from her nostril.
Crookshanks sits patiently, licking his feet.
The yarn stretches from her pocket into a hole like a badger’s sett beneath a tree, its underside scored by massive, heavy claw marks and partially collapsed into the ditch.
It’s the work of a frenzied bear, not a house cat.
Hermione’s hands are a sawtoothed snaggle. Her flesh is red with cold, stiff and trembling, spackled with soil and the blood still seeping from a latticework of raw lacerations.
Crookshanks slips his tongue between his toes.
“Crooks,” croaks Hermione. “You saved my life.”
“Please.” The cat scrubs a saliva-slicked paw across his face. “Never mention it.”
❆
In the forest at the bottom of the earth, the trees are smooth and oil-dark, trunks warped and bent like fickle-minded espaliers, their naked limbs threading back into the ground. The canopy is improbably high, or impossibly dense, so that the trees fade into night on every side and funnel up into bleak black shadow.
In the space between the trees, snow falls even as a metronome.
“Where are we going?” Hermione asks.
Crookshanks’ head bursts from the snow like a Xenomorph, blinking in the cool white light that shines from the heart of every snowflake. “To find your prince. Unless this was about using up annual leave.”
Hermione would laugh if her muscles weren't so stiff.
She hears music again.
When it was still intact, her puffer jacket was rated for alpine summiting. But people die on mountains all the time wearing very expensive coats. Stiffness. Delirium. She’s bellied up to death's bar for another round, sipping on a frosty glass of exposure.
Her yarn, made of sterner stuff, spools taut from her pocket like a fishing line.
“Can you hear that, Crooks?”
“Hear what?” says the cat beneath the snow.
“The music.”
“Is that what you call it?” He digs free and shakes the powder from his coat. “Good news for the dedicated hypothermics among us—that’s you, by the way. We’re here.”
“Where?”
Crookshanks grapples up a tree, settles on a curl of trunk and switches his tail towards 2 o’clock.
“There.” His eyes narrow. “I swear, you could smell their kind from the I.S.S.”
Far up ahead in the snowlit forest there’s a circle of thin yellow light.
❆
“Here is where I leave you.”
Crookshanks crouches at the threshold of a mean little door in a snowbank, staring out into the dark.
Hermione’s fist stalls mid-knock. “What? Where are you going?”
Crooks whips his tail in agitation and glances at the door. “Not in there. I’d rather shit glass. And besides . . .” His ears prick forwards. “The game is afoot.”
Something wearing the shape of a hare walks on spindly legs beneath the trees, one shining yellow eye trained in their direction.
“If you catch that forest spirit,” says Hermione, “it's going to turn you into an unremarkable stone. I won’t come looking.”
But they’re off together, orange streaking after brown.
Hermione’s alone.
The waltz behind the door is a melancholy rumination. It’s the sound of sad, inevitable things—Sunday afternoons and the closing of August, first partings and last goodbyes. When, Hermione wonders, was the last time her mother carried her?
No. She covers her ears. That’s quite enough.
She stashes her red yarn in the snow and fishes a pouch from her pocket. It’s packed with puffs of raw wool, greasy with lanolin and steeped in Neville’s homemade oils—rue, thyme and yarrow. She jams a wad down each ear and one up each nostril.
Stoppered up, the music sounds wrung out, perfunctory and without joy.
She knocks, and a green person answers.
They wear a mint satin tailcoat and green-tinted stockings under breeches of palest lichen. Beneath a shock of jade hair, their skin is deep bottle green, and their eyes as bright as new clover.
At the mangled, bloody sight of Hermione at the door, their mouth falls open to reveal short, pointed teeth like a hedgehog’s.
Hermione drops into a curtsy. “I beg harbor in this gracious house.”
On cue, a spider rappels from her hair.
The green person gags.
“Oh, you miserable child!" Their voice is like the snapping of green sticks. "You nasty thing! Come in! Come in, the door is open!”
Behind the shabby door, there is a palace underground.
A mirrored antechamber burns with chandeliers and tapered girandoles, positioned so that every candle flame is infinitely multiplied by its own reflection.
“How ill you look,” tuts the green person. With the turn of a wrist, a wine glass perches between their fingers. “You are thirsty. Name your nectar and I shall fill your glass.”
Doubtless, their words sound sweet. But Hermione hears the green stick snap of a command through the wool in her ears, and has no desire to obey.
“Please, forgive me.” She lowers her head. “By your leave, I wish to dance.”
Anger warms the clover-colored eyes. It cools. The green person vanishes the glass and grins.
“And so you shall!”
Tables stacked with tiers of candles ring a mirrored hall where a thousand dancers circle through a waltz. The grey-faced players in the minstrel’s gallery never deviate from their repetitions, sawing and piping like they’d rather be hauled before a troika and summarily shot. For all the incandescent opulence of the room, the dancers move like clockwork gears, decorous and unsmiling.
Hermione accepts the green person’s hand, and they join the surge of lace and satin churning in the mirrorglow.
As they turn, she meets eyes like oil slicks and violet sunrises. Striated birch bark complexions and skin dark as burnt logs. There’s a dancer with a nimbus of lavender hair and one with teeth like perfect grey pearls.
None has the shape Hermione searches for.
Platters ferried by invisible hands circuit the room, mounded with fat black grapes, cuts of roasted flesh with crackling skins and baked apples oozing with mincemeat. As they pass, putrid smells of mould and rotting meat seep through the wadding in Hermione’s nostrils.
Their hosts observe the dance from a chaise longue atop a dais. Hermione and her partner make four circuits before they come close enough to see.
Beneath a canopy of state sits their pale benefactress, a white stoat wrap draped low around her shoulders to reveal acres of milk-white skin. She’s crowned by a white mist of hair, airy as dandelion fluff. It takes on the character of newborn rabbit fur as it spreads down her nape, thickening into down that wraps her slender shoulders like a shrug.
Her eyes are over-large in her small-featured face, uniformly black and unreflective, following every movement of the dance with malign indifference.
Reclined in a lavish Rococo court suit in white silk embellished in white, her companion makes a charming ornament. His head rests in his lady's ermine lap as she murmurs in his ear and coaxes blood red strawberries past his lips.
Hermione looks away.
“I should like to honor the lady of the house,” she says to her green partner.
They brighten with surprise and delight. “So you shall!”
They pull Hermione close, and as they circle the floor again, her torn and bloodied outerwear begins to fray. It peels away in living threads that swerve and duck and twist, warping and wefting into fresh fabric. Turn by turn around the hall she's stripped and refitted, pinned and powdered, cinched into swells of iridescent pond-dark taffeta.
Her partner preens at their work as they wheel her through the mass of dancers, hurtling through breathless figures before they deposit her abruptly before the dais.
The green person genuflects before their host, and Hermione copies, jeweled swags tinkling in her curls.
“Your Grace,” simpers the green person.
The lady of the house narrows her matte black eyes.
“What is this, Heatherdown?” Her voice is an aerial trill.
“A lost lamb, Your Grace,” says Heatherdown.
“Hm.” The Duchess strokes her companion's hair. “And why have you shown it to me?”
“Your Grace—” Heatherdown begins.
“I’ve brought gifts, Your Grace,” Hermione interrupts. “To honor your renown.”
The Duchess’s lip curls. “I have gifts.”
She extends a pallid hand as though she means for Hermione to kiss it. An egg-sized diamond weighs on her finger, flawless and frigid and ablaze with refracted light.
A missing figure slots into Hermione's mental Latin square. She draws a flacon of honey-colored liquid from a pocket and holds it out to catch the light.
The Duchess sits up straight.
“Love in summer,” says Hermione.
She passes the flacon to a page, who unstoppers the bottle and wafts it beneath the Duchess’s nose.
“I want,” Hermione had said, depositing the empty flacon on Pansy and Neville’s kitchen table at their castle in the woods, “what you two have.” She tapped the lid. “In here.”
The resulting extract is half Pansy’s highbred nose, half Neville’s botanical genius. It’s an intoxicating composition, neither perfume nor potion, and also both. Meadowfoam honey, dry pasture grass and linen on the line. Wood fire smoke and cold spring water, fresh cream and blackberry pie. It feels like a kiss at the nape of a sun-warmed neck. A walk in the wet. Laggard sex with the windows open on a hot Sunday morning in July.
Hermione smelled it once and felt like she ought to apologize.
The Duchess breathes in, and her moth's eyes flutter closed. She squirms in her seat and claps her small white hands with the strike force of a facial tissue.
“More,” she demands.
Hermione produces the ignominious ring box in silver-clad iron, scrubbed clean of the odor of thyme. She curtsies as she hinges it open, revealing a small pink marble set in a gold metal ring.
The Duchess pouts.
“A first kiss, Your Grace,” says Hermione.
She's glad that it was Viki. He was the first boy to see that she was beautiful, and when he leaned close and waited for Hermione to close the gap, she understood what it felt like to be adored. A person was meant to wait for that—adoration. His lips were too hot and her hands were so wet that she clasped them behind her like one of General Stanley’s prancing daughters. But he had liked her and wanted her, more than any other girl, and she had liked him and wanted him, too.
The memory is a pink haze, roiling like smoke inside the marble.
The Duchess drops the monstrous diamond into her strawberry bowl and slips the kiss on her finger.
“Heatherdown,” she says, angling her new bauble in the light, “in future, you may bring me such lambs as you choose.”
With a hungry sideways glance at Hermione, Heatherdown bows.
The Duchess lifts up in her seat, trying to ascertain what Hermione has left in her pockets. “And what else?”
Hermione produces a parchment scroll secured with a thick wax seal.
“A new play, Your Grace. From the pen of a defeated artist.”
According to the literature, the Fair Folk, Kindly Ones, Good Neighbors—whatever one chooses to call them—enjoy displays of love and undying devotion.
But they adore the comedy of human suffering.
Hermione is the only person who knows about Percy’s abandoned hobby, after catching him reciting his own lines at the bottom of the garden after Sunday dinner.
“A play about a fairy court?” he’d asked when Hermione proposed the commission. “And roles to include—”
“Assorted lords and ladies. Pomp and circumstance. Ironic punishments. Great cunning and wisdom verbally acknowledged by the other characters. That sort of thing.”
“Flattering our patron’s vanity?” Percy lifted a brow. “And you’re coming to me, specifically, because I’ve given up.”
“I don't think—”
“I was an inexcusably magniloquent dramatist, Hermione. If I asked who this was for, would you tell me?”
“No.”
Percy reached for a fresh roll of parchment. “One act or two?”
The page hands the play to the Duchess, and Hermione holds her breath.
Tear hard as she wants, the Duchess cannot break the seal. She returns it to her page, who struggles for five seconds before the Duchess snatches it back.
She jabs it at Hermione. “Open it.”
Hermione accepts it again and pretends to examine the seal. “Oh, dear.”
“Say what you mean, lamb, ” says the Duchess.
“I’m afraid”—Hermione offers the scroll to the page—“that only Your Grace has the power to break it.”
“How?”
“By granting a boon.”
The Duchess’s voice is tender poison. “What sort of boon?”
“Perhaps . . .” Hermione pauses for effect. “A kiss. To replace one I've recently lost.”
The game is at its end. Her hand lies face up on the table.
The Duchess considers. “From whom would you receive it?”
Hermione swallows the lump in her throat. She wants nothing more than to look at the Duchess’s companion. But she’s staked both their lives on a gamble she's cheating to win.
She says, blandly, “From any within your power to command.”
The Duchess could choose Heatherdown, or any one of her attendants. Hermione’s real ace in the hole is the power of thwarted curiosity.
The Duchess’ eyes never leave the scroll as she waves her companion forward.
“Go and give the lamb a kiss,” she says in her featherlight voice, “so I can have my play.”
For the first time, Hermione allows herself to look.
And what is there to say?
That face.
The sight of it makes every stitch of embroidered fairy silk look cheap.
She's read every subtle variation and private implication in his library of expressions. But she's never seen him absent from himself. It's like he’s locked himself behind a door and can't let himself back in.
He stays shut away as he bends his head to hold his mouth a chaste half breath from hers.
Heatherdown has joined the Duchess on the dais. They take turns ogling down the open end of the sealed scroll, trying to make out the writing inside.
Hand shaking, Hermione snaps open a tin tucked deep within her pocket and dips her finger inside. She draws it out, and a pyramid of English salt rests on her fingertip like a steadfast snowflake.
The moment it touches her tongue it begins to melt.
She moves gingerly.
Up on her toes, eyes closed, she kisses him like an apology.
And again like she's saying goodbye.
I have loved you, she thinks, to the dark end of winter. And I'll love you long after I die.
His lips part.
The tip of his tongue seeks hers and finds its medicine.
The effect is immediate.
He gasps like he's been gifted a breath while drowning and reels back, face contorted with disgust.
“Do not kiss me with that mouth, sweet lady.” He scrubs her saliva from his lips with the back of his hand. “You do me no kindness to wear that face.”
“Sorry.” Hermione stands like a pole while her heart cracks open inside her. “All my others were in the wash.”
Draco recoils. “What are you?”
“Healer." Hermione swipes the tears from her cheeks. "Occasional baker. Not much of a candlestick maker.”
“You can't be here.”
“And yet, here I am.”
He approaches with caution, then studies her with care.
He hooks a finger under her chin and lifts it. Turns her face from side to side. Finds every freckle in its proper position. Brings a coil of hair to his nose and shuts his eyes.
“Tell me that you’re real,” he says softly, “And I’ll believe you.”
On the dais, the Duchess claps with delight as the scroll unfurls. “The Court of Administrative Inefficiency! A new play by P. I. Westley.”
“How are you bound to her?” Hermione asks. “Is it an oath, or a signed contract? Signed in blood, or—”
“My God.” He cups her jaw. “You really are real. How are you here?”
“Nevermind that.” Hermione eyes their benefactress. “Have you sworn fealty?”
“What? No. Gross. I don't indulge nymphs who come skulking out of my cabinetry."
The Duchess calls up her attendants and begins organizing them by height.
"She came for the ring,” says Hermione.
“One of her trinkets," says Draco. "Missing for a century or two. My forefathers made some dubious investments."
“Played a bit fast and loose with chain of possession?”
“Putting it mildly. But dammit, you shouldn't have come. Even when they forget about you, you can't leave. There's nothing but that dismal forest for miles."
"Problem preemptively solved. But if you've entered any form of contractual obligation, including nonverbal assent, goods exchange or mock nuptials—"
Draco pushes his hand through her hair and gently fists it at the root. "Hermione?"
"What?"
"Have I ever told you that you’re singular?”
"Not today."
“I'm going to kiss you.”
“So you’re not bound?”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
❆
“I swear, I left it right here.”
Hermione kicks at the snow beside the shabby little door.
“We’re looking for yarn?” asks Draco.
“It’s red. You can’t miss it.”
Draco cranes his neck and squints. “Is that your cat?”
❆
A supine Crookshanks stops boxing the yarn ball with his back feet and looks up at them through his remaining eye.
He’s blood-drenched and missing most of an ear.
“Nice time with the forest spirit?” Hermione asks.
Crooks’ feet slowly cycle back into motion. “You should see the other chap.”
❆
As the dawn chorus rises, a cat jumps out of a tax cupboard.
Four minutes later, the cupboard explodes.
Amidst a stratovolcanic slurry of snow and soil and splintered wood there sloshes a woman clutching red yarn wrapped in the arms of a man sporting silk satin breeches.
They settle amidst a sexy chorus line of polished cabriole desk legs, and remain there for a very long time.
Torpid, sticky snowflakes flutter over the aftermath like moths.
“There’s snow in my house,” says Draco. “On the inside.”
“It’ll melt.”
“That’s the problem.”
“Why were you faffing about with that ridiculous ring in the first place?”
“Mm,” he says. “Anyway, I’m sleeping at yours.”
“For how long?”
He buries his nose in the crown of her head and breathes in. “What exactly didn't you like about the ring?”