The Christmas holidays passed quickly, filled with what Draco privately considered productive extracurricular research.
Between sessions in the library, he accompanied Narcissa to a succession of deeply tedious social gatherings hosted by her extended family connections — the Yaxleys, the Rosiers, the Parkinsons, the Flints, the Bulstrodes, the Crabbes.
When it came to maintaining social networks, no one in the Malfoy family could rival Narcissa. Her maiden name alone was a masterwork of social architecture: the Blacks were connected by blood or marriage to nearly every significant pure-blood family in Britain, which made Narcissa a welcome and prestigious guest at almost any gathering she chose to attend.
She was striking — tall, fair, with Malfoy-pale colouring and the particular self-possession of someone who had never needed to compete for a room's attention. The dual heritage of Black and Malfoy carried its own weight.
Draco had the sense, sometimes, that Narcissa didn't particularly enjoy these occasions. She attended out of obligation to the family's position, not out of any genuine fondness for the company.
For the most part, especially with families of lesser wealth or influence, she didn't trouble herself to actively cultivate warmth. She arrived. She sat, composed and unhurried, and accepted the honour her presence conferred as something entirely natural. The hosts were grateful enough simply to have her there.
That said, Narcissa was perfectly capable of turning the full force of her attention on someone when there was reason to. When she chose to be charming, she was formidable — genuinely disarming in a way that seemed effortless, combining impeccable manners with just enough apparent ease to make the other person feel specially selected. Lonely dowagers who had spent decades receiving polite indifference from the great houses were particularly susceptible.
The arrogance never truly left her. Draco knew that. But she wore it differently depending on the occasion, and she was never clumsy about it.
At home, with him, she was simply his mother.
The people who deferred so carefully to Narcissa at those gatherings would have found it difficult to picture her settling onto the edge of his bed in the evenings to read aloud from Beedle the Bard. And yet here she was, doing precisely that, while Draco — inwardly a battle-worn seventeen-year-old in an eleven-year-old's body — listened with his eyes closed and made absolutely no objection.
He knew bedtime stories were irrational. He didn't care. These quiet stretches of time — uncomplicated, unhurried, belonging to no agenda — were some of the only moments in this strange second life where he didn't feel the weight of everything he carried.
Lucius, predictably, found this arrangement less charming.
"He is nearly twelve years old," he said from the doorway, arms crossed, expression that of a man practicing great restraint. "He doesn't need to be coaxed to sleep."
Draco said nothing. He found his mother's hand and looked up at her with wide, transparent eyes.
This had always worked. It worked now.
"It's rare for him to be home," Narcissa said, with the mild, sorrowful patience of someone who has been gravely wronged by the logistics of a school calendar. "Would you truly deprive me of a single evening with my son?"
"One story," Lucius said, surrendering with considerably less grace than he would have liked. "One."
Narcissa opened The Tales of Beedle the Bard to a page she knew from memory.
"The Tale of the Three Brothers," she said.
---
Once upon a time, three brothers were travelling along a lonely, winding road as dusk fell. In their path lay a river, swift and treacherous — too deep to ford, too dangerous to swim. But the three brothers were skilled in magic, and they conjured a bridge.
At the midpoint of the bridge, a cloaked figure barred their way.
It was Death — and Death was displeased. He had lost three souls that evening, for travellers usually drowned in that river. But Death was also cunning. He congratulated the brothers on their cleverness, told them they had outwitted him, and said that each of them would be granted a reward.
The eldest brother, a man who prized power above all else, demanded the most powerful wand in existence — a wand that could not lose a duel, worthy of a wizard who had conquered Death itself. Death cut a branch from an elder tree at the water's edge and fashioned a wand, and gave it to him.
The second brother, too proud to leave empty-handed, wished to shame Death further. He wanted the power to call back the dead. Death retrieved a stone from the riverbank and gave it to him, saying it could restore the dead to life.
Then Death turned to the youngest brother and asked what he desired. The youngest was the most cautious of the three, and he did not trust Death's generosity. He asked, instead, for something that would let him walk through the world unseen, beyond Death's reach. Death, grudgingly, surrendered his own Invisibility Cloak.
Then Death stepped aside, and let the three brothers continue on their way.
They parted at a crossroads and went their separate ways.
The eldest brother travelled for a week before reaching a distant village, where he quarrelled with a wizard and killed him with the Elder Wand — effortlessly, as promised. Flushed with victory, he entered a tavern that night and boasted of his weapon to anyone who would listen. While he slept, another wizard came quietly to his bedside and cut his throat. Death claimed the eldest brother for his own.
The second brother returned to his solitary home and turned the stone three times in his hand. The woman he had loved, who had died before they could be married, appeared before him. But she was not herself. A shadow lay between them — she was present but not truly returned; she was suffering. The second brother, driven to despair by a closeness he could not complete, took his own life to be with her. Death claimed the second brother as well.
But Death could not find the third brother.
He searched for years, and found nothing. The third brother had wrapped himself in the Cloak and moved through the world unseen. He lived to a great age, and only at the end, when he was ready, did he remove the Cloak and pass it to his son. Then he greeted Death as he would greet an old friend, and went with him willingly.
---
Narcissa closed the book. Lucius, who had ended up sitting on the edge of the bed at some point without clearly acknowledging this, was watching her rather than the story.
Draco's eyes were very wide open.
Almost every wizarding child grew up with that story. He had heard it many times. But something in it, tonight, sounded different.
The Elder Wand.
"Mum," he said, before he could make himself sound casual about it, "do you know what the three brothers were called?"
"The Peverells," Narcissa said, with the easy certainty of someone who has simply always known this. "That's the legend, in any case — the three Peverell brothers."
"Do you think the Elder Wand actually exists?"
Lucius made a quiet sound that conveyed fond scepticism, and reached over to ruffle Draco's hair once. "It's a bedtime story."
"The Peverell name appears in Lineage and Legacy: A Genealogy of the Wizarding Pure-Blood Families," Narcissa said, looking at Lucius with a slight smile. "I've never been entirely comfortable dismissing a legend just because it's a legend. There's usually something real underneath, even if the details have been embellished beyond recognition. The Peverells were one of the earliest families to vanish from the records, but they were real. I'm fairly certain of that."
Lucius withdrew an elegant pocket watch from his waistcoat, held it up for Narcissa's inspection, and looked at her with an expression of pointed expectation.
Narcissa smiled, bent forward, and pressed a kiss to Draco's forehead. "Close your eyes. The Hogwarts Express leaves early tomorrow."
Draco produced a convincing yawn.
Lucius extinguished the bedside candle. Draco heard the quiet sound of the door, and then the corridor, and then nothing.
He lay in the dark with his eyes wide open.
The Elder Wand. Made from an elder branch, cut from a tree by the river. The most powerful wand in existence — one that could not be defeated in a duel.
He already knew this wand. He had seen it.
Not the legend of it, but the thing itself.
In his previous life, the Dark Lord had used the Elder Wand in the final confrontation. He had acquired it from Dumbledore's tomb — had desecrated the burial, had dug it from the dead man's hands. And before that, Draco remembered the Astronomy Tower, and the moonlight, and a wand spinning through the dark air.
That wand. He remembered the distinctive pattern of the handle — the elder wood, distinctive even at distance.
He had Disarmed Dumbledore that night. The wand had been Dumbledore's.
If the Elder Wand was real — and he was increasingly certain it was — then it had been Professor Dumbledore's for years. Was still his now. Sitting quietly in his possession, doing what it was told, waiting.
And suddenly many things that had puzzled him began to make sense.
Why had the Dark Lord tortured Ollivander in the Malfoy cellar? Why had he crossed half of Europe to track down the wandmaker Gregorovitch? Why, at a moment when Potter was almost within his grasp, had he left England entirely to travel to Dumbledore's tomb?
Because the Elder Wand wasn't behaving the way it should. Because possessing it hadn't been enough.
Draco turned this over carefully.
The wand had refused to perform at its full power in the Dark Lord's hands. Why?
He recalled something Ollivander had said, years ago, in his quiet shop on Diagon Alley: "The wand chooses the wizard." Not in a poetic sense — in a literal one. Wands had their own nature. Their own allegiances.
He had experienced it himself. After losing his own wand in his previous life, he had tried others — his mother's, wands taken by chance — and none of them had been quite right. Not wrong exactly, but not his. They didn't understand him, or he didn't understand them, and the difference showed.
If wands could choose, could they change their choice? Could allegiance shift?
Potter had said something — in the Room of Requirement, in another life — something like: whoever wins a wand, keeps it. That the wand belonged to whoever had mastered it.
He had dismissed it at the time as Potter talking without thinking. But was it possible that Potter had understood something about wand-lore that Draco had not?
What counted as "winning"? Did theft count? Did robbery? Did it require an actual duel, a genuine contest?
He didn't know. He had too many fragments and not enough to connect them with.
But he knew where to start.
When he went to Diagon Alley for his second-year supplies, he would find an opportunity to visit Ollivander's wand shop.
He would ask his questions carefully, obliquely, in the way his grandfather had taught him — never make it obvious what you actually want to know.
He closed his eyes at last, Narcissa's voice still faint in his memory.
The wand that could not be beaten. The stone that could not truly restore. The Cloak that could not be found.
Three gifts from Death. Two of them curses in disguise.
The third one — the humble one — was the one currently folded in a trunk on the floor of his dormitory at Hogwarts.
That, at least, he already had.