On a sweltering afternoon in late July, Mrs. Zabini and her son came to Wiltshire.
They arrived through the wrought-iron gates of the estate, where the air carried a faint dreamlike quality in the summer heat, and were met with the sight of the two great fountains set symmetrically on either side of the drive.
"I have heard so much about Narcissa's garden," Mrs. Zabini said warmly to Draco, who stood waiting to receive them. "Seeing it in person, I can say the reputation is entirely deserved. Are those white peacocks I see along the hedge?"
"They are, madam," Draco said politely. "We keep a small number. Purely ornamental."
"And these flowers — what a remarkable mixture of scents." She lifted her face and breathed the air with genuine pleasure.
"Primarily roses and wild roses, with bluebells and some other summer varieties," Draco said, and turned his head to give Blaise a small nod.
Blaise, standing just behind his mother with his hands in his pockets, returned a lazy grin.
"Mother," he said, with the patient suffering of someone who had been through this before, "if we admire the garden much longer, we'll be late for Lady Malfoy's tea."
"Oh!" Mrs. Zabini laughed and glanced at the platinum-haired boy beside her. "Forgive me, darling. Lead on."
"It's no trouble at all," Draco said. "My mother would be glad to know the garden held your attention. The tea will be held in the drawing room on the second floor — the windows and balcony look out over the garden directly."
Mrs. Zabini smiled with warm appreciation, and they proceeded along the neatly kept garden path toward the house.
Draco maintained his attentive manner and allowed himself, beneath it, a careful assessment of his guest.
Mrs. Zabini was not a woman to be underestimated. The wizarding world knew her name, and not only because of her beauty. Six husbands, each wealthier than the last, each deceased under circumstances that had never produced any actionable evidence. The Ministry had looked, more than once, and found nothing. She moved through those investigations with the same charming, slightly bewildered expression she was currently directing at the fountain, as though the very idea of suspicion was a mystery to her.
In his previous life, Draco had understood her only vaguely — an amusing curiosity on the fringes of Blaise's family history. In retrospect, he had been looking in entirely the wrong direction. What most people saw when they looked at Mrs. Zabini was the beauty and the gossip. What they missed was the acuity behind it, and the formidable network she had assembled using the wealth inherited from each late husband. The Zabini family's rise in recent years had been rapid and deliberate, and she had engineered every step of it.
Draco answered her questions about the garden and the house with polished courtesy, aware that the whimsical enquiries were doing quiet, thorough work.
At the entrance, the house-elves bowed and opened the doors.
Mrs. Zabini stepped into the foyer and tilted her head back to look at the chandelier. "Oh, I adore this. Baroque, isn't it? French?"
"Quite right, madam," Draco said.
Her gaze moved across the carved marble fireplace, the gilded mirrors, the depth of the corridor beyond, and the quality of the carpets underfoot with the practised sweep of someone conducting an inventory. Whatever conclusions she reached, she kept them pleasantly to herself.
Draco guided her upstairs.
"Narcissa!" Mrs. Zabini entered the drawing room and went immediately to her hostess, taking her arm with the warmth of a lifelong friend and squeezing it as she looked around the room. "This is utterly magnificent — the garden alone nearly undid me. If I lived somewhere like this, I should never leave!"
Narcissa received this with a composed smile, and glanced briefly at her son. The faint look on his face confirmed what she suspected: yes, she is always like this.
The other ladies seated around the room wore similar expressions of mild surprise. Narcissa and Mrs. Zabini had no previous acquaintance — Draco's friendship with Blaise was the entire basis of the invitation — and the presumption of intimacy was not lost on anyone in the room.
Narcissa, however, was too accomplished a hostess to show it. She did not withdraw her arm.
"And this must be Blaise," she said, turning her attention to the dark-eyed boy standing behind Draco. "A very handsome young man."
Blaise inclined his head slightly.
"Draco is the impressive one," Mrs. Zabini said, glancing back at him with a bright, conspiratorial smile. "Such impeccable manners for his age. Such patience. You must have worked very hard with him."
"You're too kind." Narcissa's manner eased perceptibly — there was nothing a mother could do, Draco had long observed, against a well-aimed compliment to her child. She took Mrs. Zabini's arm and steered her toward the sofa. "Draco, take Blaise and show him round. The library, the workrooms, the pitch — whatever he prefers. Have the elves bring you something to eat."
Draco bowed to the room and led Blaise out.
---
They walked through the verandah in a comfortable silence.
"You're exactly the same at home," Blaise observed, after a moment. "All that careful courtesy. Doesn't it wear on you?"
"You get used to it," Draco said.
"I don't think I would." Blaise surveyed the grounds with an expression of studied nonchalance that failed to conceal his interest. "Show me the library first. Pansy told me about it."
"As you like."
Blaise Zabini.
Among the Slytherin boys Draco's age — and outside of his childhood friendship with Theodore Nott — Blaise was the only one he had ever found worth speaking to as an equal. In his previous life, they had arrived at something approaching genuine friendship late, beginning sometime in fifth year, and progressing slowly from there. This time, Draco had moved things along.
He had his reasons.
During the worst of it — when Lucius was in Azkaban and the Malfoy name had become something people avoided — Blaise had been one of the very few who hadn't treated Draco like a liability. He hadn't been kind about it. Blaise was constitutionally incapable of kindness without at least a veneer of superiority. But he had stayed.
Draco remembered the conversation still.
"So what if your father went to Azkaban?" Blaise's face had shown a rare, briefly unguarded look. "My father is dead. People have always said my mother killed him for his money. I live with that every day and I manage perfectly well with my head held up."
"That's different—" Draco had started.
"It is different!" A flash of genuine heat. "I don't even know if my mother loved my father — I genuinely don't know! But yours waited for yours. Worked for him. Stood by him when everyone else was looking for somewhere safer to stand. Everyone knows it. And you — you wretched, pampered idiot — you don't even appreciate what you have. Open your eyes." He had stopped, jaw working, then pushed on. "At least your father is alive. At least they love each other. At least it isn't just calculation."
It had stopped Draco crying, at the time. He had stared at Blaise and not known what to say.
Blaise Zabini: proud, self-absorbed, occasionally infuriating — reaching across the gap of his own complicated bitterness to say the one thing that managed to land.
Draco permitted himself a faint smile at the memory and nodded to the elf at the library door, who stepped aside to open it.
"Spells. Potions. Herbology. Magical Creatures. History of Magic. Ancient Languages. Astronomy and Divination. Alchemy." Draco moved through the stacks, indicating sections as they passed. "The dark magic texts are in the far corner, with the older and rarer material in the alcoves. Some of those haven't been catalogued."
Blaise followed, his usual studied detachment visibly straining against the reality of the shelves around him. He stopped in front of a carved mahogany case holding a row of volumes that looked older than Hogwarts itself.
"Merlin's beard," he said, after a moment. "Pansy actually undersold it."
"What exactly did she say?"
"She said every serious reader in the British wizarding world would give anything to spend an afternoon in here." He glanced at Draco. "She wasn't wrong."
"Sit down," Draco said, with a hint of amusement. "Try the sofa."
They settled on the leather sofa at the library's centre. An elf appeared with Earl Grey and a plate of Welsh biscuits, and disappeared. Blaise leaned back and looked at the ceiling — painted in intricate Renaissance-style patterns — and then back at Draco.
"You've been spending your whole summer here, haven't you," he said. "I'd wager the homework was finished in the first week."
"It wasn't particularly demanding," Draco agreed.
He didn't elaborate. The homework had taken him perhaps two days. The rest of the summer had been spent on considerably more complicated questions — the matter of the Horcruxes specifically, which he had been working through with limited success. He had read through Selected Eighteenth-Century Spells, Curses and Counter-Curses, A Guide to Medieval Sorcery, and several other volumes that the Hogwarts library's Restricted Section would have regarded with suspicion, and had found nothing new. Fiendfyre, the Sword of Gryffindor, basilisk venom — those were the methods he already knew. There had to be others. Magic powerful enough to cause damage that couldn't be magically repaired. He simply hadn't found them yet.
He had found a satisfying number of useful curses in the process, which was some consolation.
---
After the library, Draco took Blaise downstairs to the potions-making room in the manor's basement.
Narcissa had commissioned the renovation herself, and had, in Draco's view, approached it with the same slight excess of enthusiasm she brought to Christmas decorations. The central workbench was large enough to conduct a small conference at. On the shelves along both walls, ingredient jars were arranged by category and preservation method — dried, preserved in solution, stored at low temperature, stored at room temperature — each labelled with the precision Narcissa had demanded from the house-elves who managed the inventory. On the wall by the entrance, the potions texts were stacked two rows deep, and ran considerably darker and more obscure than anything on the Hogwarts curriculum.
Blaise stopped in the doorway and looked at the room in silence for a moment.
"Extreme," he said finally.
"A bit," Draco said.
"If Snape walked in here, he'd weep," Blaise said, with a low whistle.
"He visited last week, actually," Draco said. "He found a text he'd been trying to track down for about fifteen years. The response was somewhat more restrained than weeping, but the point stands."
Blaise moved toward the large workbench, where a cauldron sat on its stand with the lid releasing a thin thread of steam. He reached for the lid with obvious intent.
Draco stepped casually into his path. "That's a private experiment. Nothing interesting."
Blaise raised an eyebrow, withdrew his hand, and asked no further questions — which was one of the things Draco found tolerable about him. He wandered on toward the wall of crystal bottles, which caught the candlelight and scattered it in shifting patterns across the stone floor.
He would go back to the cauldron the moment Draco's attention moved elsewhere. Draco knew this with certainty.
"Quidditch?" Draco asked. "There's a pitch behind the east wing. I have spare brooms."
The effect was immediate. Blaise turned from the crystal bottles with the expression of a boy who had just remembered where his priorities lay. "Which brooms?"
"A Nimbus Two Thousand and a Comet Two Sixty. Your choice."
"Lead the way."
Draco closed the potions-room door firmly behind them and confirmed, as he passed, that the locking runes were holding.
---
They flew for the better part of an hour, passing a Quaffle back and forth above the pitch. Blaise had natural talent — good instincts, quick reflexes, slightly reckless — and pushed Draco to match him.
"You've been practising," Blaise called, catching the Quaffle one-handed and pulling a tight turn. "Every morning?"
"Most mornings." Draco came around in a wide arc and held out his arms for the return throw.
He had been flying since the start of the holidays — early, before the day's heat set in — and it was the one part of the summer that asked nothing of him except to be fast and present. No Dark Lords, no Horcruxes, no calculations. Just the broom and the air.
In his previous life, he had spent every summer of his early years with the same obsessive focus on Quidditch, training relentlessly with a single fixed goal: to make Seeker and beat Harry Potter. He had made Seeker, and he hadn't beaten Potter, and by sixth year, Quidditch had become a distant memory against the weight of everything else.
This life, he couldn't afford to spend his summers that way. There was too much else that needed doing. The Horcruxes. The Elder Wand — another thread he was pulling at slowly and cautiously. The Chamber of Secrets, which would be opened again in second year unless he did something about it, though precisely what remained unclear.
He reminded himself of this as he caught the Quaffle on the first pass and sent it back cleanly.
Quidditch was not the most important thing.
He reminded himself, and kept flying.
---
That evening, after the Zabini family and Narcissa's other guests had been seen off at the gates, Draco said goodnight to his mother and went back down to the potions-making room.
The cauldron was as he'd left it, the lid releasing its thin, steady breath of steam. He checked the colour of the vapour and the consistency through the glass indicator on the side, and felt his shoulders drop slightly with relief.
He had been working on a Mandrake Restorative Draught since the beginning of the summer — intermittently, carefully, with results that were best described as instructive rather than successful. The Malfoys had recently acquired a batch of mature mandrakes from growers in Southern Europe and had resold the bulk of it to Slug & Jiggers in Diagon Alley. Narcissa had, entirely of her own accord, decided to retain some for Draco.
"He's only going into second year," Lucius had said at dinner, with the patience of someone who had lost this kind of argument before. "He doesn't need mandrakes. Can he even manage a Swelling Solution yet?"
Draco had nodded obediently.
"Our son should have what he needs," Narcissa had said, with serene finality. "Reserve the best of the lot and bring them home."
"Cissy, you'll spoil him beyond recovery—"
"Yes, I expect I will."
Draco had kept his expression neutral while feeling genuinely grateful. He had been wondering how to approach the subject of acquiring mandrakes without raising questions he didn't want to answer.
The Mandrake Restorative Draught was notoriously difficult to brew correctly. The proportions were unforgiving — a gram's excess of one ingredient, a degree's fluctuation in temperature, mandrakes even slightly mismatched in maturity — and the result could be compromised entirely. Most advanced potioneers said it could not be reliably produced below seventh-year skill level, and some said not even then without significant practice.
Draco was, in terms of formal schooling, going into second year.
He had, however, been consulting Professor Snape's annotated notes — the Christmas gift that had turned out to be one of the most useful things anyone had ever given him — and cross-referencing with the older texts in the room. Snape's refinements to certain preparation techniques were genuinely illuminating, the kind of thinking that separated a great Potions master from a merely good one.
It still wasn't going smoothly. Each failure taught him something. He took notes after every attempt.
The reason for all of it was simple, and he didn't care to examine it too closely or for too long.
In his second year, the Chamber of Secrets would be opened. The basilisk would move through the pipes and corridors of Hogwarts, and there would be victims — Muggle-born students, petrified and motionless and utterly dependent on the Restorative Draught to be brought back.
Hermione Granger would be one of them.
She had written to him before the end of term. She had remembered his birthday — the fifth of June, in the middle of examinations, a date that even he had approached with uncertainty, unsure whether to count his second twelfth year or his psychological eighteenth — and had sent him a broomstick maintenance kit, practical and characteristically thoughtful, with a note in her clear handwriting.
He had no intention of watching her lie in the hospital wing, stone-faced and still, for a moment longer than necessary.
He took up the stirring rod, checked his notes, and reached for the next measure of dried mandrake root.
Let's try again.
The pile of mandrakes was diminishing. He would make it work before term began.
He gritted his teeth and continued.