Malfoy Manor was a dark silhouette against the sun, climbing slowly through the cloud-streaked sky. Draco stood in front of the entrance to the seaside castle, watching the first winter snow fall silently around him. Flakes spun in crazy, dancing circles before coming to rest on his robes and in his hair. The frosty pieces settled on the girl in his arms as well, seeming to pay particular attention to her closed eyes, which was the only part of her not covered in brown cloth, obscuring her identity. They collected on her lashes, precariously balanced in a lacy pattern. For some reason this annoyed Draco and he brushed them away hastily. As his hand brushed over her eyes Hermione stirred but did not wake. Draco wondered what she had done to land a sentence in Azkaban, who she even was. It was time to find out.
“Can you stand?” asked Draco, shaking her.
Through the thick layers of unconsciousness, Hermione heard a voice demanding rather urgently.
“Wha-what?” Hermione looked up, amazed that this was something she could still do. She had never expected to wake when from her faint as the dementors gathered around her. She had expected to be worse than dead. Instead, she seemed to have survived somehow.
She stared up curiously at the blonde young man carrying her.
“Can you stand? You know, like on your feet,” Draco was demanding. “I would think even a mudblood would learn to walk at some point in her life.”
He hadn’t changed much, was her first thought. But looking up at him she knew this was untrue. His features were the same but his eyes betrayed him. She would never have described Malfoy as carefree, but looking at him now made the old Malfoy seem like a cheerful, almost happy-go-lucky boy. This man was different. There was a story in an old astronomy book she’d read once back at Hogwarts. It told the tale of a wizard who’d committed a terrible crime and was so unhappy about it that he shut himself away from the world. It was the description of his face at the end of the story that struck Hermione, “haunted by shadows,” it read. Haunted by shadows, that was Malfoy now.
Her feet and her knees had been talking to each other and both were voting firmly in the negative on the standing issue, but her head and heart were adamantly refusing to be carried by Malfoy any longer. She slipped out of his arms and concentrated hard on not falling over.
Only a few hours before she had been sitting on a grimy floor in Azkaban prison, waiting for the dementors to claim her soul. She shivered, and it wasn’t because of the snow falling on the ground around her.
She remembered her sentence quite vividly. After she had served her time in Azkaban she had a lifetime appointment as a slave to the prestigious pureblood family: the Malfoys.
Hermione had given this a great deal of thought. Thinking was about the only thing one could do in Azkaban anyway. At first she was furious with the idea of being forced into slavery. But every moment spent with the dementors chilled her hatred, until she found herself looking forward to the day when she would be taken out of that place, no matter where else she was taken to. If she went to Malfoy Manor she might even have a chance to escape, she told herself, to find her friends and the Order of the Phoenix. But looking at Draco’s face, twisted into a cynical, sneering expression as he watched her attempts to keep herself on her feet, she felt anger well up inside of her again. Until her eyes slid down to his arm. He’d rolled up his sleeves when they were getting in the way of carrying her and the silvery circle surrounding the Dark Mark glittered on his arm in the morning sunlight. Hermione reached up almost involuntarily and traced the silver band branded on Draco’s arm.
“That’s Dumbledore’s mark,” she said softly.
Draco’s whole demeanor changed as he stared at her wordlessly. He put his hand over her mouth, and brought his face close to hers so she could hear his voice, which was barely a whisper.
“Don’t say another word until I tell you. Got it?”
She nodded, too surprised to do anything else, then gasped as Draco grabbed her hand and rushed into Malfoy Manor, pulling her along behind him. They flew through corridors and dashed down passageways until Hermione thought her arm was going to be pulled off. She found herself gasping for breath after the first few minutes; six months in Azkaban had a way of depleting one’s stamina. She wanted desperately to ask him to slow down, but refused to expose this weakness to Malfoy. It occurred to her that the last time she had seen him he had also been going unusually fast, racing down the corridors of another huge building: Hogwarts castle. Her entire world had been shattered after that experience. The parallel struck her as a bad omen. She was the last person to believe in omens, but she had to admit it didn’t sit well.
Draco finally stopped in front of what looked like a blank wall. He whipped out his wand and waved it in front of him. Obviously he was using wordless magic for his lips didn’t move. He slid his wand back into his pocket, satisfied, even though the wall looked exactly the same to Hermione.
“Come on.”
“Through the wall?”
“Yes, I copied the idea from platform nine and three quarters. This way, even if my enemies discover how to open it correctly they will think they got it wrong because nothing appears to change.”
Clever, Hermione conceded, as they descended down creaking wooden stairs behind the wall. At the bottom was a small room entirely hewn from stone and lit only by fiery orange torches lining the walls, their flames sputtering from lack of air so deep down. Draco closed the door.
“Here alone, we can speak freely. I would not trust anywhere else even in my own Manor.”
Could you have been a little gentler or was it your intention to pull my arm off?” Hermione instantly regretted the words. She was a slave now and saying such things would likely bring swift punishment.
“You could just grow another one if it does come off,” said Draco dismissively. He chose to ignore the impudence for the moment, struck by something.
It was odd, thought Draco. She sounds vaguely familiar when she’s angry. But her name certainly doesn’t ring any bells.
He leaned on one of the walls, his face only a few inches below one of the heavy torches.
“You’re name is Kai, isn’t it?”
“What? Oh, I mean yes, yes it is.” That was her dreg name but Draco knew her, or at least knew the Granger girl he used to clash with at Hogwarts. So why the charade? Hermione reached up and felt the mud-colored cloth that covered her face. Of course, she realized, he doesn’t recognize me. This surprised her but she instantly saw the advantage. In his eyes, she was still a mudblood slave, but she was not Granger, his mudblood-enemy-turned-slave, which was a small comfort.
“Now, you said you could see this?” Draco was questioning her urgently, pointing to the silver band.
“Yes.”
Draco looked at her carefully. “Are you absolutely certain?”
No, I lied, thought Hermione sarcastically. What, did he think she was blind?
“Yes, absolutely certain,” she said firmly.
Draco slumped against the hard stone, his expression was unreadable. “You’re the first person besides me who can,” he said in a low voice.
Something about the way he said it resonated with Hermione. There was a hopelessness coating his words that she knew so well. It was the same feeling she had felt every day in Azkaban. And she couldn’t help being curious about the mark. Without realizing what she was doing, she began to help, in the way only Hermione could.
She promptly asked the first question she always asked when encountering something strange and magical. “Do you know what it does? What its magical properties are and such.”
Draco frowned. In truth, it had consumed his every thought, he had never considered it ever doing anything except, well, existing. In retrospect this seemed incredibly foolish. It had been Dumbledore, after all, who had cursed him with the mark: who knew what the old wizard put into it?
“I have yet to discover its purpose,” he said softly.
“Dumbledore normally puts it on things he created. It is his signature, you might say,” lectured Hermione. “Like when a silversmith fashions a piece, he stamps it with his sign. That’s Dumbledore’s.”
Her words were mystifying, and what she said was hardly common knowledge anyway, or he would have known it. “You seem to know an awful lot about Dumbledore. Were you a student at Hogwarts?” Judging by her voice she was too young to have been anything else.
Hermione hesitated, struck by a sudden idea. If he knew she was a student at Hogwarts his thought might carry him even further, to her true identity. In addition to the humiliation such a revelation would bring, she would be watched more carefully. The more she was seen as a threat the narrower the possibility of escape. But if Draco thought she was, say, a squib she would be perceived as less dangerous. It was always better to let your enemies think you are weaker than you really are. And squibs were slightly higher than muggleborns in the wizarding world’s social caste system. She might receive better treatment.
“I can’t do magic.”
Draco looked unconvinced. “A squib who knows Dumbledore?”
“My parents were friends of his. They were very important in the wizarding world. Terribly disappointed when I turned out to be a squib,” supplied Hermione, hoping desperately he wouldn’t ask who her parents were.
She was lucky. Draco didn’t care. Who was important in the old wizarding world had no meaning now. Only Voldemort’s favor mattered, or his displeasure.
Hermione was mulling over the all the information she had just garnered. It was puzzling that Draco Malfoy, a Death Eater, would have Dumbledore’s mark branded on his arm. And even more strange, was that Draco seemed mystified at it as well.
“When did this happen, when did it…appear?” She asked.
Draco said nothing, and Hermione got the feeling this was something he would never reveal.
She realized what a precarious situation he was in. Draco might not know Dumbledore’s mark when he saw it, but she’d wager Voldemort would, and she could easily imagine how he would act if he found out one of his own Death Eaters bore such a mark. But Voldemort couldn’t see it. Nobody could…except her. She felt her stomach twist unpleasantly. There was something very sinister about all of this.
“Have you tried removing it?”
Draco stared at her incredulously. “Only every day,” he growled. “Not that anything ever works. But I think I may have something now, unwittingly provided by my master, that might do the trick.”
He looked as if he was weighing something in his mind and then appeared to have made a decision. He glanced up at her again. “I usually don’t pay much attention to slaves but you’re very clever for a squib, if a bit disrespectful. I also can’t afford to keep you too far away: you could run off and tell someone everything. So, I’ve decided to make you my personal servant. Your job is to assist me in trying to get rid of this,” he said pointing to his arm, “and to keep anything I tell you a secret, even this arrangement. When there are other Death Eaters or any other of Voldemort’s faithfuls present, you are to be my eyes and ears. No one pays attention to dregs anyway so you should be quite useful. Anything you overhear is to be reported to me and me alone.” He paused. “This will be in addition to anything else you are required to do here at the Manor, which isn’t much. My mother is far too kind to the slaves.” He unrolled his sleeves and the marks vanished from view.
“I’ll arrange for your quarters to be next to mine.”
“Oh, and Kai,” his voice dropped back to a whisper, “tell anyone about this and you can head straight back to Azkaban. I’m sure the dementors would give you a warm welcome. They don’t like losing their prey.” Draco turned and left her standing alone in the firelight.
He wound his way back up the stairs, taking every step with trepidation. He was uneasy knowing someone else knew his deepest secret, or at least part of it. But oddly, he felt a sense of. . . relief. There was no other word for it. The terrible secret had been weighing down on him for what seemed like an eternity, and he felt lighter with the knowledge that someone shared it, even if it was just a mudblood slave.