Draco is a dragon | Dramione (Harry Potter) Fanfiction

Some curses cannot be broken by a spell. Some can only be broken by the last hand in the world you would ever expect to reach for you and by the last hand in the world willing to reach back. This story begins. The port key dropped her into wind. Not the soft wind of English meadows. Not the tame breath of Hogwarts grounds in summer. This was a Carpathian wind, thin and edged, carrying the iron scent of stone too long unwarmed by sun. Hermione Granger staggered a half step, caught herself on the hilt of her travel case, and breathed in mountain pine sap ozone. The distant, unmistakable musk of something large and reptilian that had breathed fire within the hour. The sanctuary sprawled below her on a terrace slope, low stone outbuildings, a paddock strung with warding posts that hummed at a frequency her teeth could almost hear. And beyond it all the Carpathians themselves, shoulder upon shoulder of larch and granite, their peaks already dusted with the first white of the season. Late autumn here had teeth. The gold of the trees was bleeding out into rust, and the sky above the ridgeeline wore that particular bruised violet that promised storm by nightfall. "You came." She turned. Charlie Weasley was walking up the path with his hands in his pockets and his red hair wind disheveled, and there was a quality to his grin that belonged to a childhood she had not quite finished mourning. burrow suppers, Quidditch in the orchard. Molly's voice calling them in through the long blue dusk. You asked, Hermione said, and let him pull her into a brief bone solid embrace. He smelled of leather and wood smoke and something faintly acrid. Dragonfire residue, she thought, absurdly pleased with herself for knowing. Ministry Owl was so dry I almost didn't open it. He took her case with that casual weasly assumption of help that she had long ago stopped resisting. How was the trip? Long. Two port keys and an international flu that smelled like wet goat. Sounds about right. He was already leading her down the path and she had to lengthen her stride to keep up. Come on, I'll brief you properly over tea, but I want you to see it first. See what? He glanced at her sidelong. The grin did not quite hold. The reason I asked for you, Hermione, not for the ministry's creature division. You? She did not answer. She matched his pace, and the wind pulled strands of her hair across her mouth. And somewhere above them, high, where the light was still bright on the peaks, something cried out. It was not a roar. She had expected a roar. What she heard was closer to a lament, a low rasping note, almost musical, that bent upward at the end, as though it were a question the creature had been asking for a long time, and had stopped hoping to have answered. Her steps faltered. Charlie looked up at the ridge line with a still, attentive quiet of a man reading a page he did not understand. That he said, "That's what you're here for." The briefing room smelled of pipe tobacco and parchment gone soft with damp. Charlie spread a map across the long oak table, weighted its corners with a chipped teacup and three dragons scaled paper weights, and tapped a point west of the sanctuary where someone had drawn a careful circle in red ink. Muggle village, Satar Deus. Small, maybe 300 souls. For two months now, they've been losing livestock. Sheep mostly, a few goats, one ox. Dragon? Obviously, a dragon. Except he pulled a second sheet from beneath the map. A field sketch, hasty but competent, of a creature in flight against the moon. Except every dragon I know. I know. Long horn, iron belly, ridgeback, viper tooth. I can name you the clutch by the wing shape. This one, he tapped the sketch. This one I can't place. Hermione bent closer. The sketch showed a long, sineuous body, narrower than a ridgeback, with wings that seemed almost too refined for the mass they had to carry. The scales, where the artist had bothered to render them, were shaded silver, not the dull puter of a Swedish short snout, something paler, something with light in it. Size? Roughly a young horn tail, maybe smaller. Fire. Charlie hesitated. That's the first odd thing. It won't use fire. It'll rake a flock. It'll take one animal and it'll go. No scorching. No territorial burn. I've had two of the handlers watching the approaches at night and they say it circles just circles for hours sometimes as if it's looking for something. She straightened slowly. Charlie dragons don't look. I know. They hunt. They mate. They hoard. They sleep. They don't search. I know. Hermione. The wind hit the outer wall and the shutters rattled against their iron pins. She became aware distantly of how cold her fingertips had gone on the edge of the map. What's the second odd thing? He did not answer at once. He pulled a small file from his coat pocket and set it on the table between them. Inside a single silver scale floated in a suspension of what looked like moon water, turning lazily, catching the lamplight. I found this on the perimeter ward three nights ago. It had shed it or left it. His eyes, when they met hers, were very serious. Hermione, I ran every diagnostic I know. That scale reads as partially human. The room seemed to take one long, slow breath around her. Partially what? Human. Not wizard adjacent. Not beast hybrid. Human. As if something that used to be a person is underneath. She did not sit down, but she reached for the back of the chair and her hand closed around the worn wood with a pressure that whitened her knuckles. Maladictus. That was my first thought, too. But Maladictus curses lock you into the beast once they take. No returning, no in between. Whatever this is, he nodded at the file. Is still changing, still fighting it or losing to it. I can't tell which. She stared at the turning scale. In the lamplight, it threw a thin, cold shimmer across her wrist, across the faded line of letters cut there long ago, and she felt the old scar prickle as though it remembered something her mind had not yet named. Why me, Charlie? Because you're the best researcher I know. Because the ministry's creature division would want to kill it first and classify it after. and because he stopped. He looked at her for a long moment with the careful, cleareyed attention she remembered from the summer after the war, when he had been one of the very few people who had not tried to make her feel better and had simply let her be unwell in his presence. because I have a feeling about this one and I didn't want to be alone with it. Outside the lament came again closer now, lower. She closed her fingers around the file without asking, and the silver scale tilted against the glass and settled, and she thought foolishly, because the thought had no business arriving then. It is the color of a winter morning at Malfoy Manor. She had never seen Malfoy Manor in winter. She put the thought away. Her quarters were in a converted stable at the edge of the compound. Whitewashed stone, a narrow bed under a narrower window, a desk that had seen three generations of Weasley cousins leave their initials carved into the underside. She unpacked by wand light. She set her books in order. Advanced transfigurative pathologies, curses of the old bloodlines, the maladictus. Question, a reassessment. She laid her quill and inkpot beside them with a precise almost ritual care of a woman who had long ago learned that when everything inside you was moving, you kept the outside still. She did not unpack the file. She set it on the window sill where the last of the bruised light caught it and made the scale inside glow like a small cold flame. Something was wrong with her pulse. She had felt this before. The last time had been in a courtroom at the ministry three years ago when she had been called as a witness for the defense in a trial she had not asked to testify at. She had watched a young man with a shaven jaw and an ill-fitting suit stand in the dock and answer questions in a voice she had not heard since sixth year. A voice scoured of the draw, stripped back to something quieter, more exhausted, almost unrecognizable. She had given her evidence. She had not looked at him when she gave it. When she had stepped down from the stand, she had walked past him, and some small traitor reflex in her had wanted badly to meet his eyes. She had not. He had disappeared within the month. The prophet had run three paragraphs. The ministry had closed the file with that particular bureaucratic shrug reserved for young men of bad families who went quietly abroad and did not return. No one had heard anything of Draco Malfoy in three years. Hermione drew her knees up on the narrow bed and pulled the blanket around her shoulders and watched the silver scale turn and turn and turn, and told herself firmly that she was tired, that mountains did strange things to the mind, that the shape of a thought was not the same as its truth. The lament came again, nearer than before, and this time she was certain the creature had come down from the high ridge. This time she could hear the beat of its wings, enormous, patient, slow as grief, passing somewhere over the sanctuary roofs. She got up. She pulled her cloak over her night dress. She did not light her wand. The corridor beyond her door was empty and very cold. The flag stones leeched the warmth from her bare feet within three paces. She went to the small outer door that gave onto the lower paddock and she eased it open and she stepped into a night that was all wind and storm promise and the smell of pine and something else. something she had read about but never smelled. The particular dry metal signature of a dragon passing low overhead. She looked up against the bruised sky wings silver edged where the last light found them. Long necks stretched out in that sineuous searching curve. And for one impossible moment, as the creature banked across the ridge above the sanctuary, it turned its head, and she felt clearly and absolutely the weight of its gaze settle on her in the dark. Not the flat gold stare of a beast, but something else. Something far older and far more tired, and far more terribly present. The creature held the look for one beat. two. Then it tipped its wings and climbed, climbed, and was swallowed by the cloud on the high peak, and the wind closed over the place where it had been like water over a stone. And Hermione stood in her night dress on the frost hardened ground, and found that she had one hand pressed flat against her own throat, and that she could not, for the life of her, remember when she had raised it. She did not sleep. She lay with her back to the narrow window, and her eyes on the whitewashed wall, and listened to the wind work its slow hands along the eaves. And every time she began to drift, the memory of that look rose up behind her closed lids. The tired, unbeastly weight of it, and pulled her back to the surface, as if she were a thing tied to the shore by a long, patient line. By the time the first gray began to seep into the stable quarters, she had abandoned the pretense. She dressed by wandlight. She braided her hair with hands that moved faster than they ought to have, tied it off at the nape, and pulled her field cloak from the peg. The wool was ministry issue, heavy, unflattering, and already beginning to smell faintly of pine sap, where it had brushed the door frame the night before. She found, pulling it on, that she was grateful for the weight. There was a comfort in being armored against the morning. Charlie was already in the briefing room when she came in. He was bent over the map with a mug in one hand and a halfeaten piece of dark bread in the other, and the lamp had been trimmed to a low, thrifty flame, because the sky beyond the mullion glass was beginning grudgingly to offer its own light. You're up early," he said without looking. I didn't sleep. He did look then. He took her in. The braid, the shadowed eyes, the cloak already on, and something moved behind his face that was not quite a smile. "I thought you might not." He nodded at a second mug on the table. "I poured you one. It's gone tepid, but it'll get you through to proper breakfast. She took it and wrapped both hands around the clay and let the faint failing warmth of it press into her palms. The tea was bitter and over steeped and tasted of the mountain of something mineral dark in the water here that Hogsme's well had never held. She drank it standing. "I want to see the perimeter," she said. I thought you might want that, too. Now, Charlie, before the lights full up, he set his bread down. He studied her across the map with the steady, patient regard accustomed to creatures that would bolt if approached too directly, and she understood, with a small prickle of irritation, that he was doing the same to her. "What did you see last night?" Nothing. Hermayan. She did not answer at once. She set the mug down with careful, measured precision, as though the placement of clay on oak were a matter requiring her full attention, and she heard in her own silence the shape of a lie she was not prepared to tell out loud. "It flew over," she said finally. Low. I went out. Alone. Alone. For Merlin's sake. It looked at me, Charlie. The word hung between them. He did not move. The wind outside threw a scatter of something. Sleet, perhaps the season's first, against the glass, and the lamp guttered and recovered. And in the small pale hollow of that pause she saw him weighing whether to be angry at her or frightened for her and settling at last on the same thing he had settled on the night before. I didn't want to be alone with it. All right, he said the perimeter, but you stay three paces behind me until I say otherwise. And if I tell you to move, you move without asking why. Yes, Hermione. Yes, Charlie, I heard you. The track that ran the sanctuary's eastern ward climbed through larch and thinning birch before it broke out onto the bare shoulder of the ridge. The light up there was cleaner, thinner, the kind of light that found every edge and made every edge colder. Frost had laid itself down in the night along the tops of the grasses, and their boots broke it with a small, brittle sound that seemed, in the hush, almost indecent. Charlie walked ahead with his wand loose in his hand, and his eyes moving in that restless, sweeping way she had watched him use in the paddocks the evening before. up to the canopy, down to the trail, out to the far slope, back again. It was not the vigilance of fear. It was the vigilance of long habit, of a man who had learned that creatures the size of barns could move without sound if they wished to. There, he murmured. He did not point. He angled his chin. A swave of the frost grass, perhaps 20 ft across, had been pressed flat, not scorched, not rad, pressed, as though something heavy had lain down there in the night and risen again before dawn, and the impression of its body was still legible in the bent stalks. a long curve of spine, the spllay of a folded wing, and at the uphill end, a kind of hollow where a head might have rested. She stepped past him without asking. He did not stop her. She knelt at the edge of the flattened grass and laid her palm flat against the ground inside the shape. The earth was warm. Not warm with the memory of fire. Warm with the memory of a body. It slept here, she said. It slept here, Charlie said. And the emphasis was his own. Hermayan, this is inside the outer ward. I see that. It shouldn't be able to cross the outer ward. No dragon I've ever handled could cross the outer ward without triggering half the alarms in the compound. I know. So either our wards are wrong or it isn't a dragon, she said. Not entirely. He crouched down opposite her across the bed of bent grass, and they looked at each other across the place where the creature had slept, and she watched him arrive at the same shoreline her own mind had been walking all night. She watched him hesitate at the edge of saying it. She watched him decide not to. She was grateful. She was not ready yet to hear anyone else say the word. She pulled a small glass vial from her cloak pocket and collected three of the bent stalks. And as she was stoppering it, her fingers brushed something in the frost. A small hard thing like a chip of shell. She lifted it. A scale, not the pale polished silver of the one in her window. This one was smaller, thinner, at its edges almost translucent. Under the ridge light, it read blue white, the color of winterglass. Of the sky above a snowfield at the hour before dusk. It's shedding, Charlie said quietly. Not all over, only at the edges. What happens to a dragon when it sheds? Nothing. Growth. New scale comes in beneath. And if it isn't a dragon, he did not answer. She closed her fist around the scale. It was cold against her palm, far colder than the morning warranted, and she felt very faintly a thrum passing through it, like the distant pulse of a tuning fork struck in another room. Charlie, I want to be out tonight when it comes back. No, I want to see it near. Absolutely not. Charlie Hermione. He stood. The wind took his hair and threw it across his eyes, and he pushed it back with the flat of his hand in a gesture so like Ron's for a moment she could not speak. I have watched dragons for 11 years. I have seen what they do to handlers who get cocky about proximity. I am not putting you in front of that thing at night because you have a theory. It isn't a theory. Then what is it? And there on the bare shoulder of the Carpathian ridge, with the frost beginning to let go in the strengthening sun and the pressed grass still warm beneath her kneeling weight, she found that she could not yet give the thing its name. "Let me work," she said instead, and her voice came out steadier than she felt. "Let me read today. Let me run diagnostics on the scale tonight. If I am wrong, I will stand down. If I am right, she stopped. She looked up at him from where she knelt. If I am right, Charlie, then what is out there is not a creature you can manage with a capture team, and you know it. He looked at her for a long moment. The sun climbed a hand's breadth higher and found the topmost larches and turned them briefly to brass. And in the new light she saw the small fan of lines at the corner of his eye that had not been there when she was 15. And she thought with an ache she did not want. The war cost all of us something and none of us got a chance to grieve it properly. All right, he said. Today you read. Tonight we talk about tonight. She spent the day in the sanctuary's small library, a slope roofed room above the mess hall that smelled of beeswax and old dragon hide bindings. She laid her books out across a trestle table, set the two scales side by side on a square of black velvet, and began. Advanced transfigurative pathologies gave her nothing. Curses of the old bloodlines gave her a thin chapter on hereditary afflictions bound to pure blood families who had in the 16th century sworn oaths over objects of power and broken them. and the chapter kept her attention for an hour before the material thinned into conjecture and stopped. The maladictus question. A reassessment gave her what she had half expected, a reminder in the clinical pros of a researcher she had corresponded with twice that a maladictus transformation was terminal. Once the beast claimed the body, the beast kept it. There was no half state. There was no fighting back to the surface. Which meant that whatever was out there curled in the frost on the sanctuary's ridge was not maledictus. It was something else, something older, perhaps, something the literature had not yet found a name for, something that shed. She pulled a fresh sheet of parchment toward her and began in her close, deliberate hand to write a list of what she knew. One, silver scale, partially human magical signature. Two, refuses fire. Takes livestock singly, never in excess. Three, circles, searches. Four, slept within the outer ward, warm. Five, looked at me, held the look. She stopped on the last line. She laid the quill down. She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes until she saw small red suns bloom against the black. Looked at me. She lowered her hands. She picked up the smaller scale, the translucent one, the winter glass one, the one that had thrummed in her palm, and held it up to the beeswax candle on the table. The flame behind it turned it briefly gold at the edges and there in its center where the scale thinned almost to nothing. She saw it a faint insized line. A mark something that was not natural scale pattern. She brought it closer. She squinted. A shape resolved. A narrow elegant curve. A letter perhaps or the tail of one. and beneath it, the beginning of another. An inscription pressed into the scale from within, as though whatever bore it had grown the scale around a mark that belonged to the body underneath. She reached without looking for a fresh piece of parchment. She took up the quill. She began to copy the shape. And as the ink took the curve, her hand remembered not her mind, her hand. The feel of a letter once written on a different parchment in a different hand. The loop and the surf and the small vain flourish of the terminal stroke. Her quill stopped. The candle guttered. Somewhere in the valley below the library window across the whole breadth of the sanctuary, the creature cried out again, low, rasping, bending upward at the end in that same long question. And Hermione Granger sat very still in a slope roofed room that smelled of beeswax and old bindings, and stared at the letter her own hand had just drawn, and understood at last why she had not slept. The letter on the parchment was an M. Not a clumsy M, not a printed one, a written M with a narrow, elegant curve at its opening stroke and the small decorative hook at its terminal foot. The hook that was not taught at Hogwarts, that was taught only in the school rooms of certain old houses by certain tutors to certain children of certain families who were told before they could properly hold a quill, that their name was a thing to be signed with care. Hermione sat with the quills suspended above the parchment and watched the ink dry on the letter and felt the whole of her chest go quiet. She knew that hand. She had seen it in the margins of a potions text once in sixth year when Harry had been laughing over the prince's notes, and she had in passing registered the small, tidy marginelia in a different hand further down the page, a name and a date written there by a boy who had apparently owned the book before it went back to the classroom cupboard. DL Malfoy 1993. The terminal stroke on the M had hooked in exactly this way. She stood up. She did not know at first that she was standing. She became aware of it only when the chair scraped against the boards behind her and the sound landed in the quiet room like a dropped stone. She pressed her hand flat to the table to steady herself. Her fingertips left small damp prints on the parchment. The candle gutted again. The wind had found the eaves. She sat back down slowly as though she were easing a wounded limb into place. She picked up the translucent scale. She turned it in her palm and she said the word out loud to the beeswax and the old bindings and the slope of the roof so that it could not go on being a thing she thought but refused to say. Malfoy. The name did not echo. The room absorbed it the way the frost that morning had absorbed the creature's warmth, as though the place itself had been waiting, patient, for someone to speak it at last. She did not go to Charlie. She told herself, folding the parchment into the inner pocket of her cloak and stoppering the scale in a fresh file, that she did not go to Charlie because she was not yet sure. That a single letter was not proof. That an M could be many things. That her hand had moved, yes, faster than her mind, but that hands were foolish organs and made mistakes. she told herself, pulling her hood up and stepping out into the bronze light of the late afternoon, that she needed more evidence before she could in good conscience set a name like that down in front of a weasly. She told herself a great many things. None of them were the real reason. The real reason was this. If she said the name aloud to Charlie, Charlie would do what Charlie ought to do. He would write to the ministry. He would write to his brothers. He would at some point within the following three days write to Harry Potter. And Harry Potter would come. And when Harry came, the matter would leave her hands, and it would be decided by men with parchment and seals, and the memory of a war, and whatever was curled in the high rocks with an inscribed M beneath its scales would not be rescued. It would be processed. She knew this about the ministry, the way one knew the shape of one's own shadow. So she walked instead toward the upper paddics, where the track narrowed and the warding posts thinned, and she let herself be seen by no one, and she went to find a place from which to watch. She chose a spur of rock above the western ward, high enough to see the full sweep of the valley, sheltered enough that the wind was taken by the rock and not by her. She wrapped herself in her cloak. She drew a disillusionment across herself with a practiced flick that turned her to the casual eye into a vague haze of the stone behind her. She settled in to wait. The sun went down quickly in mountains. The valley filled with shadow as though someone were pouring dark water into it from a great vessel at the north end. The larches along the ridge blackened against the last of the violet sky. A first star pricked through somewhere east of the highest peak. She counted her own breath because there was nothing else to count. Time passed. She did not check it. She knew from experience that a watched hour in cold weather was an hour longer than an hour. And then some while after full dark, when the stars had properly arrived, and the moon, nearly full, had climbed high enough to lay a thin silver wash across the tops of the larches. She heard the wings, not a beat at first, a pressure, a change in the way the air sat against her face. She did not move. The creature came over the ridge behind her, low, and she heard the long, slow stroke of its wings. Not the frantic beat of a hunting dragon, but the measured economical rhythm of a thing pacing itself across a vast dark. And then it was in front of her, above the valley, silveredged in the moonlight, and she saw it clearly for the first time. It was beautiful. The word arrived in her before she could stop it, and she found she could not take it back. It was beautiful the way certain wounds were beautiful, the way a cathedral after bombing could be beautiful. The lines of it, too fine for the damage they bore. Its body was longer and narrower than a ridgeback, sineuous with a high arch, the withers, and a long tapering tail that ended in a barbshaped almost like a flur deisely. Its wings outstretched were a color of wet slate on the unders sides and pale polished silver on the tops. And when the moonlight caught them, they threw back the light in a thousand small glints, so that the creature seemed in flight to be dressed in a male of stars. Its head was long and narrow. Its horns swept back from the skull in a pair of clean, elegant curves. Its eyes, when it turned them toward the valley floor, were pale, paler than any dragon eye she had ever read of. and she understood with a small sharp inward shiver that they were gray. The creature circled once, twice. On the third pass, it tipped its wings and began to descend in a long, unhurrieded spiral toward a clearing in the rocks, perhaps a quarter mile below her perch, a place she had not noticed in the daylight, a small hollow ringed by standing stones that the sanctuary records had probably classified as prehistoric and not worth the ink. It landed. It did not crash. It did not thud. It settled, wings folding with the particular fidious care of a creature that knew the length of its own body, and had no interest in breaking what was beneath it, and it lowered its head to the mos stone at the center of the ring, and it lay down. And then, and this was the thing that stopped her breath in her throat. It curled, head tucked to flank, tail drawn in around its feet. The whole long silvered length of it, drawn into a tight protective coil, the way a dog curls against the cold, the way a child curls against a nightmare. She had never seen a dragon curl. Dragons slept sprawled. Dragons slept in postures of threat. Dragons slept always, as though they wanted any watcher to know that even in sleep they were to be left alone. This creature slept like something that had been cold for a very long time. Hermione's hand inside her cloak closed around the file at her throat. The scale inside it thrummed once against her knuckles. that faint distant tuning fork pulse she had felt that morning. And in the hollow below, as though the creature had felt it, too, the silver head lifted a half inch from the stone. It did not look for her. It did not scent the air. It simply lifted its head a fraction, held it there a long beat, and lowered it again. She did not move. She watched. She watched for a long time, long enough that the cold began to work its way through the wool of her cloak and into the muscles of her back. Long enough that her feet in her boots had gone from cold to numb, to that distant, prickling ache that meant she would pay for this later. She watched until the moon had climbed past the central peak and begun its slow descent toward the western ridge. She watched until she was certain, beyond all the arguments her rational mind could muster of what she was seeing. It was sleeping in a ring of standing stones, curled like a child beneath a moon nearly full. And every so often, without waking, it made a small sound in its throat, a soft, almost human sound, halfway between a sigh and a sob, and the sound went through her like a fine blade cleanly, and she did not recognize at first the wetness on her own face as tears. She did not go down to it. She was not a fool, whatever Charlie feared. She knew the distance between this is a person and this person will not hurt you. She had read enough in her life to know that pain did not always make its bearers gentle, that creatures in extremity could lash out at the hand that reached. that even if the thing curled below her had once been a boy who had written his name in a potion's text with a hooked M, the thing itself was still tonight a beast with fire in its throat and claws that could open her from shoulder to hip in a single pass. She stayed on the spur. She watched. When the first thinning of the eastern dark began to suggest dawn, the creature stirred. It uncurled slowly with the stiff care of a body that achd. It stretched its wings once, the full breadth of them glinting in the late moonlight. And she saw in that stretch that one of the four wings bore a long pale line along its leading edge, a scar, the kind of scar a blade might leave on a body that had once been smaller and softer and made of skin. her breath caught. The creature turned its head. It looked for a long, steady moment toward the ring of stones around it, as though it was saying something in its own way to a place that had held it. And then it gathered itself and launched with three great unhurried beats into the paling sky. It climbed. It banked east into the thinning dark above the peak. It was gone. Hermione sat on the spur until the numbness in her feet became a pain sharp enough to trust as a tether. And then she rose very carefully and made her way back down the track in the gray hour before sunrise. her hand pressed flat against the pocket at her breast, where the translucent scale sat warm against her ribs. She did not go to her quarters. She went instead to the small scriptorum beside the library, a cell of a room with a good north-facing window, and a writing slope. and she sat down and she drew the folded parchment from her pocket and laid it flat and she picked up the quill. She began to copy from memory the full sweep of the inscription she had seen in the candle light the afternoon before the M the letter that had followed it. The curve that might have been an A. The narrow downstroke the dot above. Yes, an I. M A L. Her quills stopped. She set it down. She folded her hands on the slope of the writing desk. She looked out at the Carpathian dawn where the high peaks were just beginning to take a thin edge of rose along their eastern shoulders, and she understood with a calm so complete it felt almost like grief that she had known since the silver scale had turned in the file on her window sill the evening she arrived. She had known. She had simply not been ready to know. Somewhere in the compound, a door opened. Somewhere a kettle was set on a hob. Somewhere Charlie Weasley was waking and pulling on his boots and thinking about the day ahead. And about her probably, and about whether she had, in the end, done as she had promised, and stayed indoors. She got up. She put the parchment into her pocket. She went at last to find him. because the time had come to say the name out loud to someone who was not a slope roofed room. Charlie was at the kitchen table with a plate of fried black bread and a mug of something that steamed. He looked up when she came in, and whatever small polite inquiry had been forming on his face dropped away at once. He set the mug down. He pushed the plate toward the middle of the table as though clearing a workspace. "Sit," he said. She sat. "You've been out." "Yes, all night. Most of it." He pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead and held it there, and she watched the slow count pass behind his closed eyes. 1 2 3. before he lowered the hand and looked at her properly. There was no anger in his face. There was the thing that came before anger in a Weasley, the quiet, winded place of a person who had been braced for worse, and was only now beginning to let the bracing go. Tell me. She drew the folded parchment from her cloak. She smoothed it open on the oak between them. She turned it toward him. He looked at it. He looked at her. He looked at it again. An M, he said. A hand I know. Whose? She did not answer at once. She took up the mug he had been drinking from. He did not stop her and wrapped her cold hands around it and let the warmth come up through the clay into the bones of her fingers before she was prepared to say it. Draco Malfoy. Charlie did not move. He did not speak. The kitchen clock on the far wall ticked its small patient tick. And beyond the window, a jack door cried once and was answered from somewhere in the larches. And she watched his face go through three separate weathers in the space of a breath. Disbelief, calculation, and then very slowly a pale, unwilling acceptance. Hermione, he said at last, do you understand what you are telling me? I understand it perfectly. The ministry listed him missing 3 years ago. I know. Not missing. Gone. Case closed. No active inquiry. I know, Charlie. And you are saying to me that the creature in my sky is I am saying that the scale I pulled out of the frost yesterday morning has a hooked M inscribed beneath its surface in a hand that was taught in exactly two school rooms in Wiltshire. And that I watched the creature sleep last night in a ring of stones curled, and that it lifted its head when the file at my throat thr. And that its eyes are gray, and that I am not willing. I am not willing, Charlie, to write to anyone in London about this until I know for certain what we are looking at. She had not meant to speak that much. The words had come out in one long pressed breath, and when she stopped, the kitchen was very quiet, and she realized that her hands on the mug had gone white at the knuckles. Charlie drew a long, slow breath through his nose. All right, he said. All right, all right, I hear you. I am not writing to London yet. He held up a finger before she could speak. Yet, if I become certain, Hermione, I write, I do not keep something like this from my own family for the sake of of whatever this is. I would not ask you to, wouldn't you? She looked at him. He did not look away. I am asking you, she said carefully, for time, a week, perhaps less, enough to know. And if you are right, then we decide together. He studied her across the oak. The early light through the kitchen window caught the red of his hair and turned the ends of it briefly to copper. And she thought, not for the first time that morning, how much of what she trusted in the world was owed to the weasly habit of looking steadily at the thing in front of them and not flinching from what it turned out to be. a week, he said. And you do not go near it alone at night again. If you want to observe after dark, I come with you. That is not negotiable. Agreed. And if it moves on you, if it so much as turns in your direction with intent, I put it down. I do not care whose M is on the scale. Do you understand me? Yes, Charlie. Say it. If it moves on me with intent, you put it down. He nodded. He picked up his mug. He took a long swallow of the tea that must by now have been cold, and she watched him swallow, and she saw that his hand, where it gripped the clay, was not quite steady. "Merlin's beard," he said to no one in particular. Malfoy. They worked through the day. Charlie pulled the sanctuary's ward records from a locked drawer in the briefing room, and they went over them line by line, dates, magical signatures, incursion points. And the picture that slowly assembled on the table between them was not the picture of a predator hunting a territory. It was the picture of a creature pacing an edge. Each incursion had occurred within a two-mile arc along the western ward. Each had happened on a night within 3 days of the full moon. "Each had ended," Charlie confirmed grudgingly with the creature turning back toward the high ridge before dawn. "He isn't hunting," Hermione said. "I know. He's looking for a way in. Hermione. He came to the sanctuary, Charlie. He came here out of all the ranges in the Carpathians. Out of all the dragon grounds in Europe, he came to the one place staffed by wizards. He came to help. We don't know that. We don't know anything else that makes sense. Charlie rubbed the bridge of his nose. He did not argue. He reached instead for a fresh sheet of parchment and began in his blocky field notes hand to sketch a plan. "If you are right," he said, "and I am not saying yet that you are, then we need to do three things. One, we need to confirm it's him beyond your parchment and my gut. Two, we need to find out what kind of curse this is because if it's maladictus, we are in very different country to if it isn't. Three, we need to think very carefully about what we do if it can be broken. And if we don't tell London, and if we don't tell London, then we are, the two of us, responsible for whatever comes of this. Yes, Hermione. I know. I have been a Weasley for 32 years. I know what it looks like to take something on that is bigger than you are. She almost laughed. She did not quite. She bent over the parchment and began to write beside him. They agreed on the plan by midday. Charlie would handle the first item. He would ride out to the western ward that afternoon with two of his steadiest handlers, ostensibly to reset a warding post, and he would lay down a thin ribbon of diagnostic charm along the ground in the ring of stones she had described. Nothing that would register to a sleeping creature. Nothing that would harm it. Only a passive charm that would store the magical signature of whatever bedded down there and let them read it at leisure when the creature had gone. Hermione would handle the second item. She would go back to the library and this time she would read differently. She would stop looking for Maladictus. She would start looking for the other thing. The older thing, the half buried thing, the thing the chapter in Curses of the Old Bloodlines had opened a door onto and then failed to walk through. The third item they did not discuss. They both knew that the third item could not be planned until the first two were answered. The library by afternoon had filled with a thin bronze light that slanted in through the slope of the roof and laid long warm bars across the trestle table. Hermione pulled every volume in the locked case that bore on its spine any reference to hereditary curse, to bloodline oath, to the old covenants of the wizarding nobility. There were seven of them. Three were in English. Two were in Latin. One was in a Romanian she could manage with a dictionary. The last was in something older, a form of old French that had been out of common use in England since before the founding of Hogwarts. And she set that one aside until last because she did not at first trust herself with it. She began with the English volumes. She read past lunch. She read past the hour at which the kitchen sent up a plate of bread and cheese, which he ate one-handed without looking down. She read as the bronze light on the table softened to amber and then to rose, and then began reluctantly to withdraw toward the window. She read until the candle the librarian had left for her was the only light in the room and then she lit a second and a third and she read on. It was in the second Latin volume that she found it. The chapter was short, three pages. The hand was a scribal hand of the 14th century, faded to the color of weak tea, and the illuminated capital at the head of the chapter was a coiled silver serpent biting the letter it began. The maleficio draonis heritabil of the inheritable curse of the dragon. Her Latin was rusty. She took it slowly. She kept a fresh parchment at her elbow and translated line by line, her quill whispering, her lips moving faintly around the older syllables. The curse was called in this text the draconius vinkula, the dragon bonds. It was laid, according to the scribe, upon certain houses of the old nobility, who had sworn in the year of some unspecified oathtaking to hold a sacred trust, and who had within three generations broken it. The curse was latent. It lay in the blood, passed from parent to child without manifesting until the bearer committed an act. The text was delicate here, the Latin circling rather than naming. Contra sanguin inotentem against innocent blood. Then the scribe said the bond woke. The transformation was not immediate. It came in stages. At first only dreams, then on moons brief involuntary shifts of form that the bearer could disguise as illness. Then longer shifts, then and here the scribe's hand had grown smaller, as though he wrote the final lines in a tighter and tighter cramp. The shifts extended until the human hours became the interval and the beast hours became the rule. And at the last the bearer would wake one morning and find that he could not wake at all and the dragon would have him entire forever. Hermione's quill had stopped moving. She read the next paragraph. The scribe wrote in the careful almost apologetic tone of a man recording a thing he did not quite believe but had been instructed not to omit that the draconus vinkular was not unlike the maladictus affliction irrevocable that there existed a remedy that the remedy was and here the scribe used a phrase she had to read three times before she trusted her translation of it. a witness of chosen gentleness freely given from one who held just cause of enmity. She set the quill down. She read the line again. A witness of chosen gentleness, freely given from one who held just cause of enmity. She sat very still at the trestle table, with three candles burning at her elbow, and the wind beginning outside to work again at the eaves. And she understood, not all at once, but in the slow, cold rising way that certain knowledges arrived, what the text was saying, that the curse required for its breaking a particular human being, not any healer, not any kindly witch with a wand and the right intention, one who held just cause of enmity, one who had reason to hate. and that this person must of their own free will offer the sufferer a chosen tenderness and that the sufferer in turn must accept it knowing what it cost. She thought of a drawing room. She thought of a chandelier. She thought of a word cut into her own forearm in a hand that was not his, but that had been permitted in his house under his name. while he stood by a window and did not speak. She thought of the silver scale turning in the file on her window sill. She thought of the creature curled like a cold child in a ring of stones, and of the soft, almost human sound it had made in its sleep, and of the way her own face had been wet without her knowing. The candle nearest her guttered and went out. She reached slowly for the one behind it and drew it closer, and in the moving of the flame, the shadows on the page lifted and settled again. And she understood that the decision she had been circling for 3 days had, in the last hour, without her consent, already been made. She heard, distant in the compound below, the sound of Charlie's boots on the flag stones, returning from the western ward, from the ring of stones, from the laying of the diagnostic charm. And she folded her translation carefully, once, twice, and rose to go and meet him. and her hand closing around the parchment did not shake, though she noticed with a strange remote clarity that it ought to have. The diagnostic charm took 2 days to bloom. Charlie explained it to her that first evening over a supper neither of them quite ate. a thick potato soup that had gone tepid in their bowls, dark bread that had dried at the edges, a small wheel of sheep's cheese that sat between them untouched. The charm, he said, did not pull a reading all at once. It drank the way blotting paper drank ink. It needed the creature to lie in its bed and let the ground take its measure. And then it needed a second sleeping before the two signatures could be compared. And only on the third dawn would the ribbon release its stored impression to the wand of the caster. Third dawn, Hermione said. Third dawn. She looked down at her soup. A thin white film had begun to form across the surface. So we wait. So we wait. She did not sleep well. either of those two nights. She read until the candles gutted. She translated and re-ransated the Latin of the de maleitzio draconis heritabil until the scribes circling phrases had worn themselves into the grain of her mind. Witness of chosen gentleness freely given from one who holds just cause of enmity. She wrote the lines out in English. She wrote them in her own tidy hand. She crossed words through and rewrote them as though by finding the perfect translation she could perhaps render the thing they required of her into something small enough to hold. She could not. She sat on the narrow bed in her quarters the second night with the parchment flat across her knees and the translucent scale warm in her palm. And she tried in the honest dark of her own company to know what she felt. She was not frightened. That surprised her. She was not angry either, which surprised her more. What she was, she discovered, in the small hours when the wind had gone quiet, and only the distant crying of an owl kept her company, was tired. Tired in a way she had not allowed herself to name since the spring after the war, when she had put herself to work at the ministry, because work was the one country in which grief did not speak her language. She had not looked at her own scar in 3 years, except by accident in the bath. She had not said his name aloud in 3 years, except once in the ministry courtroom, and even then she had said Mr. Malfoy in the dry voice of the witness stand, and she had not looked at him as she said it. And here she was sitting in a stone cell at the edge of a Carpathian sanctuary with his scale in her hand and his name on her tongue and a Latin prescription that required her to offer him of all people of all possible people chosen gentleness. She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes until the red suns bloomed. Just cause of enmity. Yes, she had that. She had that in abundance. She had it written on her own skin. She lowered her hands. The question she understood was not whether she had cause. The question was whether she had somewhere beneath the cause the other thing. the thing the scribe had called gentleness and had insisted must be chosen. Because a gentleness that was merely given, merely reflexive, merely granger-ish and dutiful, would not be enough to break a bond this old. It had to be chosen, which meant it had to be something she could have withheld. She sat with that for a long time. On the third dawn, Charlie came to her door before the light was properly up. She was already dressed. She had been dressed for an hour. They did not speak on the track. The larches had taken the first hard frost at last, and the needles underfoot were bronze and brittle, and threw up a faint reinous breath as their boots passed. The sky above the ridge was the color of a puter plate, and the peaks were already lost in a low roll of cloud that tasted when the wind turned of coming snow. The ring of standing stones sat in a hollow below the western ward, exactly where she had watched it from her spur two nights before. In daylight, it was less impressive than it had been under moon. nine stones, none taller than her shoulder, gray with lychen, tilted inward by a thousand winters. But at its center the moss had been pressed flat in a wide coiled shape, and the shape was the shape of a body that had lain curled, and she felt, stepping into the ring, the small, distinct hush of a place that had been used for centuries by things that were not quite animal. Charlie knelt at the edge of the hollow. He drew his wand. He laid the tip against a thin, pale line of chalk she had not noticed until he touched it. And he murmured a word in what she recognized after a beat as dragonkeeper's Romanian, a trade argot passed from handler to apprentice that did not appear in any textbook. The chalk warmed. It glowed briefly, a color that was not quite gold and not quite green. And then above the line, the air resolved into a drifting shape. A translucent, slowly rotating impression of the creature that had slept there, rendered in the thin, wavering light of the charm. Hermione's breath left her. She had seen it in flight. She had seen it in moonlight at a distance. She had not until now seen the shape of it still, held suspended in a reading charm the size of a large dog. And she understood for the first time the true line of it, the long narrow skull, the back swept horns, the slender neck, the particular tucked curve of the body as it had lain. Charlie cast the second charm. A reading not of shape, but of signature. A column of sigils rose above the ring. They flickered in a pale spectral gray. She had seen the shorthand before in Ministry diagnostics. The small stacked runes that encoded magical classification, species marker, blood origin, transfigurative state. She could read it. Charlie was not the only one of them who had learned to trade Argot. She read dragon species indeterminate magical signature transfigurative partial source human origin British wizarding lineage pure blood lineage marker. The sigil for the name blurred resolved and settled. Malfoy Charlie did not make a sound. He did not move. She heard very clearly in the quiet the soft creek of the leather of his glove as his hand closed on the stock of his wand. She went down onto one knee beside him because her legs had decided without consulting her that they did not wish to continue standing. They looked at the slowly turning sigils. The charm held its reading for perhaps 30 seconds, which felt in the hush of the ring like a small long century. Then the light thinned. The sigils dissolved. The impression of the body drifted apart into moes was gone. Only the pressed moss at the center of the ring remained and the standing stones and the cloud thickening over the peak above them. Charlie sat back on his heels. He laid the wand flat across his knee. He pressed the palm of his hand across his mouth as though he did not quite trust what might come out of it, and he breathed through his fingers for a long moment, and then he lowered the hand. "Merlin," he said. "Merlin, Merlin." Charlie, I heard you. I heard you, Hermione. I thought I thought perhaps you had seen something that looked like a letter and your mind had given it a name because the war gave all of us a list of names we are still carrying. I thought he stopped. He shook his head once hard like a horse rejecting a bridal. I thought I was humoring you. I know I was not humoring you. No, Charlie Malfoy. Yes, he stood. He paced three tight steps to the edge of the ring and three back, and he stopped at the center and ran both hands through his hair and laughed. A short winded laugh that had no humor in it, only the sound a person made when the world turned out to be even stranger than he had in his long, strange life, learned to expect. All right, he said. All right, all right, Charlie. Give me a minute, Hermione. She gave him the minute. She sat on her heel at the edge of the pressed moss, and she watched him find the place inside himself, where the weasly steadiness lived, and she watched him draw it around his shoulders, the way she had drawn the Ministry cloak around hers. And when he turned back to her, his face had settled into something she trusted again. "Right," he said. "Show me the Latin." They sat in the briefing room with the shutters closed, and two lamps lit against the dim of the coming storm. And Hermione laid her translation across the oak between them, and watched Charlie read. He read slowly. He read the way he had read the ward records two days before with a steady line by line attention of a man who had learned young that skimming a text about a dangerous creature was how handlers lost their hands. When he reached the phrase witness of chosen gentleness, he paused. His eyes moved back up to the top of the line and read it again. When he reached from one who holds just cause of enmity, he did not look up, but she saw his jaw set. He finished. He laid the parchment down. He did not speak for a while. Hermione, he said at last, "Yes, this curse wants you. I know it names you. Not you by name, but you by every marker the text gives us. Just cause of enmity. You are the person in the United Kingdom with the most legitimate cause of enmity against Draco Malfoy, who is still alive and still willing to speak to a Weasley. I know, Charlie. Do you understand what it is asking of you? Yes. No. Hermione, do you? It is asking you to go down to that ring of stones on a night that he lies there and to offer him not mercy. Mercy would not be enough. tenderness, chosen, knowing, offered to a man who stood in his own drawing room and watched his aunt put a knife into your arm. She did not answer at once. She reached without looking and drew up the cuff of her left sleeve. The scar had faded in 3 years. The letters had whitened, softened, lost the raw pink of their first months, but they were still legible. They would always be legible. The word sat there in its crabed spidery capitals like a signature on a document she had not signed. Charlie looked at the scar. He did not flinch. He had never flinched in her presence at her scar, and she'd always loved him a little for it. "I know what he did," she said quietly. "I know what he failed to do. I know the exact layout of that drawing room, Charlie. I know where he was standing. I know he did not speak. I know he did not raise his wand. I know he did not leave the room. Yes, and I know, she said, and her voice did not waver, which surprised her, that the boy who did not speak in that room is the same creature that curled in a ring of stones two nights ago and made a sound in its sleep like a child. I know both of those things. I am not confused about either." Charlie looked at her for a long time. "No," he said. You aren't confused. That is what is frightening me. She almost smiled. She did not quite. What do you want to do, Hermione? She drew the cuff back down over the scar. She pressed the fabric flat along her wrist. She folded her hands on the oak. Outside, the first flakes of the storm had begun to come down past the shutters in slow, considering drifts. The kind of first snow that was not yet serious, that was only sending its outr rididers ahead to see whether the valley was willing to receive the season. I want to go down to him, she said. Tonight, if he comes alone, "No, Charlie, no, Hermione, not alone. Not the first time. If you are in the ring with me, the curse will not take it. The text is very precise. The gentleness has to be chosen. It has to be offered by the one with cause. It cannot be witnessed by a man whose family has no quarrel in it. Then I will be on the ridge. I will be within eyeshot. I will have my wand up. And if that creature so much as lifts its head in the wrong way. Agreed. I put it down. Hermione. I swear to Merlin. Agreed. Charlie. He studied her. He reached across the oak. He laid his hand once briefly on the back of hers, a dragon keeper's hand, warm, rough palmed, steady. And he squeezed and he let go. You are the bravest person I know, he said. And I am going to spend tonight pretending that I do not think that is also the thing that is going to get you killed one day. She did not answer that. She turned her hand over and caught his as it withdrew and held it for a single heartbeat. And then she let him go. And she gathered the parchments on the table into a careful pile. and she set them to one side, and she rose to go and prepare, because the moon was rising full tonight, and the creature, if the pattern held, would come. The snow thickened as the afternoon wore on. By the time the light began to fail, the Carpathian valley had softened into a white hush that blurred the edges of the outuildings and laid a clean, pale skin across the paddic posts. The larches bore their first loads with a patient, bentshouldered grace. The wind had dropped. It was the kind of evening in which sound traveled strangely, the clink of a kettle in the mess. Three buildings distant, arriving as though from the next room. The cry of a raven above the ridge, thin and close, though the raven itself was a mile up the slope. Hermione dressed for the cold, with the deliberate slowness of a woman dressing for an occasion. wool's stockings, her thickest tunic, a second under jumper beneath the first, the ministry cloak because it was warded against wind, though she no longer cared about the ministry. She braided her hair tightly against her skull, so that no strand might catch at a branch or a claw. She strapped her wand to her forearm in the quick draw harness Moody had taught her in fifth year, though she did not in any corner of herself believe she would use it tonight. She did not eat. Charlie did not press her. He came to her door at the hour when the sky above the ridge had gone the color of wet slate. He was in his field leathers, a heavier cloak over the top, and he carried, slung at his hip, a short brass horn on a leather cord. If I blow this, he said, "You come out of that ring, and you do not look back. Do you understand me?" "I understand. I want you to say it, Hermione. If you blow the horn, I come out of the ring and I do not look back. Good. He did not say good luck. He did not wish her anything. He reached up briefly with one gloved hand and touched her cheek, a brother's touch, warm through the leather, and then he turned and led the way out into the snow. They parted at the lip of the hollow. Charlie took the high spur where she had watched two nights before. She saw him against the snowed rock settle himself with the practiced stillness of a man who had spent his 20s learning to wait for creatures. And she lifted one hand to him, and he lifted one in return. And then she turned and walked alone down into the ring of stones. The hollow was quieter than it had any right to be. The nine standing stones wore thick white caps. The pressed moss at the center had been covered over by the snow and now showed only as a shallow dish in the smooth surface, a slight declivity where the creature's weight had over its nights carved out a bed. She did not sit in the hollow. She would not presume. She chose instead a place at the inner curve of the ring, just inside the nearest stone, where the likened granite at her back would break the wind if the wind returned. She sat down on her folded cloak. She unfastened the top clasp at her throat. She drew out the file on its thin chain. She held the translucent scale up briefly to the slow falling snow and watched the flakes pass around it. And then she lowered it and held it flat against her sternum inside the wool where its small thrum could be felt against her ribs. She waited. She did not, as a child might have count the minutes. She had learned long ago that time watched was time stolen from oneself. She sat with her gloved hands loose in her lap and her eyes on the mouth of the hollow where it opened toward the west. And she breathed slow and even the way Madame Pomprey had taught her to breathe during the months after the war when sleep had gone briefly from her like a bird from a hand. The moon rose. She did not see it rise. The snow was too thick for that. What she saw instead was the world around her begin very gradually to take on a second pal. A cold blue wash layered over the white, seeping into the spaces between the stones, silvering the edges of the larches on the slope above. The cloud had thinned somewhere overhead. Somewhere up there, the full face of the moon was unhooded, and its light was coming down, diffused through snow to lay itself on the hollow. The valley hushed further, and then, as she had known it would, the pressure came. She felt it before she heard anything. A small change in the air, a settling, a tightening, as though the valley had drawn in its breath. She did not move. She kept her hands loose. She kept her face turned toward the western mouth of the ring. The wing beat reached her a heartbeat later, long, slow, unhurried, the rhythm of a creature that had all night and knew where it was going. And then above the ridge, a shape against the paler sky, silver where the moon took it, shadow where it did not, banking down toward the hollow in the long, unspiraling glide she had seen before. It saw her. She was certain of that before its feet touched stone. Its head turned as it descended, and the pale gray eye tracked her where she sat, and for three beats of the great silver wings, it simply looked, and she saw the thought pass through the creature as clearly as if it had been a human thought in a human face. She is here. She has come down. It landed. Not at the center of the ring as it had on the other nights. not in the bed its own weight had made. It landed at the far side of the hollow, opposite her, as though it understood the geometry of a meeting, as though it understood in whatever was left of the Malfoy mind inside the long silver skull, that one did not land on top of a guest. It folded its wings. It did not curl. It sat instead in a posture she had never seen in any dragon. Hunches gathered, forlims braced, neck lowered, head angled slightly down, the way a large animal sat when it had been trained long ago in another life to be polite in a room. They looked at each other across the hollow. She had rehearsed in the afternoon a number of things she might say. Each of them had sounded in her rehearsal like a line from a bad play. She had discarded them one by one. She had understood by the time Charlie had come to her door that she would have to find the words in the ring or find no words at all. She found no words. What she found instead was her own name for him. Draco. The creature's head lifted a fraction. Draco. It's me. It's Granger. The pale gray eye widened. The long neck rose. She saw, and she was not imagining this. She was certain of it. She staked the whole of her rational faculty on it. A small, almost imperceptible tremor passed down the length of the silvered body. a ripple that began at the shoulder and moved along the flank and ended in the barbed tip of the tail, which twitched once against the snow. She drew her gloves off slowly, one and then the other. She laid them beside her on the cloak. "I know who you are," she said. The quiet of the hollow was so complete that her voice, pitched low, reached across the ring without rising at all. I know what has happened to you. I have read the text. I know what this is. The creature did not move. I am not going to hurt you. Nothing. A long slow blink of the gray eye. I know you did not want to be found. The head lowered fractionally. Not a threat, a concession. I am sorry. She had not meant to say that. It had come out without her permission. It sat in the air between them like a small bright coin dropped into a deep well. The creature made the sound. Not the full lament of the ridge, not the rasping song that bent upward at the end, a smaller sound, closer to what she had heard in its sleep, a low, almost tuneless hum in the long throat, a thing that was neither growl nor cry, that simply lived in the chest of a creature the way grief lived in the chest of a person who had stopped long ago pretending it was anything else. Her eyes filled. She did not wipe them. She did not think the creature would mind. I am going to come a little closer, she said. I am going to stand up and I am going to walk three paces toward you and then I am going to stop. If you want me not to, you only have to move your head and I will stay where I am. Do you understand? The long silver head did not move. She rose. Her knees complained. The cold had worked into the joints. She steadied herself against the lyken stone. And then she stepped away from it, out into the center of the ring, into the dish of snow where the creature's knights had carved out a bed. One pace, two, three. She stopped. She was now perhaps four yards from the creature, closer than any handler in the sanctuary had ever been to a living dragon outside of direct combat. Close enough that she could see the individual scales along the ridge of its jaw. The way they overlapped, small silver discs, each with a faint darker line at its base, where the new scale came in beneath the old. close enough that she could see the scar along the leading edge of the wing. A long pale seam, old, the kind of scar a sword would leave on skin that was underneath still human. She held her unglloved hand up between them, palm out, empty. Draco, look. The creature looked nothing. No wand, no hex, only a hand. the gray eye held on her palm. She saw the pupil, not slit as a dragon's pupil ought to have been, but round. Round Merlin, a round gray human pupil in a long, narrow reptile face. Contract and dilate again in the moonlight. I am going to lower my hand now, she said. I am going to lower it and I am going to sit down in the snow and I am going to wait. And if if you want me to go, you only have to turn your head away from me and I will rise and I will leave. I will not come back tomorrow. I will tell Charlie I was wrong. I will let you have this ridge. She lowered the hand. She sat. The snow soaked at once through the wool of her breaches. She did not shift. She put her bare hands palm down on her knees. She waited. The creature watched her for what must have been 3 minutes and felt like an hour. Then slowly, with a stiff care of something that achd in every joint of a body that was not the body it had been born in, it lowered its head to the snow. Not turned away, not in rejection. Down long silver jaw to the white pale horn against the cold. The hole of the enormous skull lowering itself into the space between her and it until the tip of its muzzle came to rest perhaps 8 ft from where she sat. It was the posture she understood with a small shock that went through her like a bell struck in winter air of a beast that had chosen to make itself small. It was the posture of trust. Her breath left her. She pressed one hand flat against the snow to keep herself upright. behind her, high on the spur, she knew Charlie was watching, and she knew what this must look like to him, and she knew that his hand on the horn had gone tight, and that he was counting forcibly against his own instinct to sound it. "Oh," she said very quietly to the long silver head in the snow. "Oh, Draco, what did they do to you?" The creature closed its eyes and then very slowly, so slowly that afterward she could not have said at what exact moment she began to move. She drew herself forward across the snow on her knees and reached out with her bare hand and laid her palm, warm and small and steady against the cold silver scale above the long bone of his brow. A shudder ran through him, the whole ridge of his back, the long line of his tail. A deep, involuntary tremor that was neither pain nor threat. That was the tremor of a body that had not been touched in human kindness in three years, and did not at first know what to do with it. Hermayan Granger kneeling in snow in a ring of standing stones beneath the nearly full face of a Carpathian moon with her hand pressed flat to the brow of the dragon that had once been a boy in a drawing room closed her own eyes and held against a face she could not see the first chosen tenderness of her life. She did not know how long she knelt there with her hand on the warm, cold brow of him. The moon climbed. The snow slowed. At some point she became aware that her knees had gone from pain to numbness to a distant throbbing heat that was not heat at all. And still she did not move because the creature beneath her palm had begun to breathe in a way that was not the breath of a beast. A long drawn inward pull held and released in a slow shaken exhale that stirred the powder near her knees into small lifting spirals. He was weeping. She understood that without understanding how she understood it. There were no tears. Dragons did not make tears. But the rhythm of the breath was a rhythm she had heard before in her own chest in the months after the war in the dark hours when she had thought herself beyond being moved by anything and had been wrong. She did not speak. There was nothing she could say that would be larger than what her hand was saying. After a long while, long enough that the moon had crossed a measurable arc across the thinning cloud, the creature stirred. He did not rise. He drew his head back slowly, the smallest possible retreat, and her palm lifted from the brow without her choosing to lift it. And she let her hand fall, and she sat back on her heels. The gray eye opened. it held on her face, and then with a movement so deliberate it could only have been deliberate. So human underneath the silver skull that she almost laughed aloud for the grief of it. The creature bowed his head. Once a nod. She nodded back. She did not trust her voice. The great silver body gathered itself. The wings unfolded with their quiet economy. He launched three beats, patient, unhurried, and was gone over the western rim of the hollow, back toward the high ridge, toward whatever bed of stone he kept in the hours when he did not wear the moonlight openly. Hermione sat in the snow until Charlie came down to her. She did not hear him until he was already inside the ring. He knelt behind her without a word, and drew her cloak, which she had folded beneath her, and which had gone half buried by snow, up around her shoulders. He lifted her gently by the elbow. She let him. Her legs beneath her were a set of distant hinges that did not at first remember their work. "You are hypothermic," he said quietly. "Don't speak. Walk." She walked. He kept his arm around her. They went up the slope in the altered hush of a world that had come out through a storm into starlight. And she could smell through the cold and the wool and the snow on her eyelashes, the warm human smell of his leathers. And she was grateful in a way she could not articulate for the presence of a body that was ordinary. He did not ask her on the way back what had passed in the ring. He did not need to. He had been, after all, watching. She slept for 16 hours. When she woke, it was late afternoon, and the shutters in her quarters had been drawn closed against the light, and there was a small cast iron stove burning in the corner that had not been there when she went out, and a mug of water on the bedside table with a sprig of something green in it. Charlie's hand. Charlie's careful, unfussy, weasly hand. She drank the water. She lay with her eyes on the low, dim ceiling, and let herself feel at last the whole weight of what had happened. She had touched him. She had offered the thing the text required. Now came the second half. She found Charlie in the briefing room with the Latin volume open in front of him and a fresh piece of parchment between his hands. He looked up when she came in. He looked at her for a long moment, the shadowed eyes, the slight unsteadiness in the hand that held the door frame, and he did not smile. He nodded. "You're up," he said. "Yes. Sit down before you fall down." She sat. She pulled the Latin toward herself and found the passage she wanted within a breath. The scribes close, cramped hand on the final paragraph, the line she had translated and re-transated and had not until now wanted to look at directly. The offering must be twofold. The hand extended, the word accepted. The bearer must of his own will speak his true name into the hand of the one who has chosen him and be heard and be named in return. She set her fingertip on the line. She read it aloud in her English. Charlie listened. He closed the volume gently when she had finished. So, he said, so he has to speak. Yes. With a human mouth. Yes. Which means we have to catch him in the interval. Yes. Charlie pressed the heel of his hand against his jaw and rubbed slowly. How long is the interval, Hermione? I don't know. The text doesn't say, only that the transformation lengthens over time. In the earlier stages, the human form held for days at a time. By the final stages, by the stage he must be in now after 3 years. The text suggests the interval may be hours or minutes. Minutes? Yes, Merlin. They sat with that for a while. The stove in the corner of the briefing room muttered to itself. Somewhere in the compound, a handler whistled for a hound. And the hound barked twice and was quiet. "We will have to watch the ring," Charlie said finally. "We will have to be there at the moment he turns. If his pattern holds, he comes to the stones near dawn. If the interval opens, it will open there." Yes. And when it opens, I go in. You go in. It has to be me, Charlie. The text is specific. The hand extended is the hand of the one who chose. No substitute. No witness by proxy. Me. He did not argue. He had stopped arguing with her about that particular point somewhere between the translation and the snow. He only sat now with his hand flat on the closed Latin volume and nodded. Dawn, then he said, "Dawn." They waited two nights. The first night he did not come. They watched from the spur until the eastern sky began to pale, and the ring below them stayed empty, and Charlie laid his hand briefly on her shoulder, and they went back down the track in a silence that was not hopeless, only tired. She wrote that morning in her field journal three sentences only. No arrival, pattern broken or paused, possible, aware of observation. She closed the journal. She slept badly. The second night the snow began again at dusk. A soft serious snow this time without wind, the kind that laid itself patient and thick on every surface and made the valley into a pale lit bowl under the cloud. And she knew, sitting on the spur with the flakes catching on her eyelashes that he would come. He came at the deep hour, later than before, past midnight, well past. He came low and tired, and his flight had a shorter rhythm than on the nights before, and when he landed in the ring, he did not sit in his polite posture. He sank. He lay down in the carved dish of snow at the ring's center, and he curled as she had seen him curl before, and he did not move. Charlie, beside her, on the spur, drew a slow breath through his teeth. Something is wrong. Yes. Look at the way he came down. He's exhausted. I know, Hermione. If he is weakening, the interval may come sooner tonight than we planned for. I know, Charlie. She was already rising. He caught her wrist. She looked at him. Be careful, he said. He is still a dragon. I know. He will not know himself in the turning. If the body shifts, it may there may be a moment when he is neither. He may thrash. He may burn. I have seen half transformations, Hermione. They are violent. I know. If he burns, you go to ground. You flatten. You do not run. Do you hear me? I hear you. She pulled her wrist gently out of his hand. He let her go. She went down the slope into the hollow for the second time, and this time, unlike the first, her legs did not feel like distant hinges. This time, they felt like her own. The creature did not lift his head when she entered the ring. That alone told her how tired he was. The silver flank rose and fell with the labored breath of something at the edge of its strength, and the great wings were folded unevenly, and she saw along the ridge of his spine patches where the scale had come in wrong, dull, matte, almost black in places, as though the body were forgetting in pieces what it was supposed to be. She went to him. She knelt beside his shoulder. She laid her bare hand against the scale just behind the horn. Draco. The pale gray eye opened. It found her face. I am here. I am going to stay with you. The eye held on her. She saw again the round human pupil, and this time against the lowered lid she saw that the pupil was, she was certain of it, smaller than it had been two nights before. The human in him was fighting up through the body. It was close to the surface. It was closer than it had ever been. She felt the first tremor a breath later. It began in his shoulder beneath her palm and ran down his flank in a long hard wave. And the creature made a sound she had not heard before. a high thin wine, almost a scream. That was not the voice of a dragon at all. She nearly drew her hand back. She did not. Charlie's voice above the ring in her memory. If he burns, you go to ground. But he was not burning. He was changing. The silver along his shoulder rippled. For an instant she saw, shot through the scale a pale seam of something that was not scale. skin perhaps raw and unfinished showing at the joint. Another tremor longer. The great body arched. The wings half opened, half folded, convulsed. The silver at the throat darkened. The horns. She saw it happen. She saw it with her open eye, and afterward could not say how the eye had borne it. The horns receded, shortened, drew back into the skull. The skull itself was shrinking. "Oh," she said, and she was not aware that she had said it. "Oh, Draco, hold on. Hold on. I am here." The creature screamed again. The long tail lashed against a standing stone and cracked the lyken off it in a spray of green dust. The wings beat once, twice, convulsively, and then collapsed. The body folded inward. She would never afterward find words for what she saw in the next 15 seconds. The scale thinning, parting, flowing away like water off a stone. The long neck shortening, the narrow reptile skull softening, the bones beneath it rearranging with a sound like small ice breaking on a pond. The wings, the great silver wings, drawing in, drawing in, vanishing into a back that was becoming before her eyes a human back, pale in the moonlight, marked along its spine with a long ridge of scar where the spine of the beast had been seated in it. The creature shuddered one last time, and then there was a man in the snow at her knees, naked, shivering. His arms folded across his chest as though to keep some essential heat inside the cage of his ribs. His hair, longer than she remembered, pale almost to white, plastered wet to his forehead with the damp of melted snow. His face, thinner than she remembered, sharper, the elegant bones she had always hated as a girl, now so exposed by years of this that he looked in the silver light, like a figure carved from the same stone as the standing circle around them. He was trying, she saw, to breathe. He was trying to make his lungs remember the shape of human breath. His eyes were closed. Draco. He did not answer. The shivering had taken him in a hard continuous tremor, and his teeth were set against each other, and she understood that he could not yet make his mouth do human words. She pulled her cloak off. She did not hesitate. She laid it across his shoulders, tucked it around him with quick, firm hands, and then, because the text required it, because the whole of the last three nights had been bending her toward this moment, cuz he was cold beyond shame, and she was past the point of caring what she was allowed. She put her arms around him, and drew him against her, and she held him. He was rigid. For one long heartbeat, he was rigid as a board, as though every muscle in his body had locked against the fact of contact. Then he broke. His forehead came down hard against her collarbone. His hands, thin, shaking, the knuckles bitten roar somewhere in the transformation, fisted in the front of her jumper and held. And the sound that came out of him was a sound she would carry to the end of her life. Not a sob, not a cry, a low, cracked, involuntary noise. The sound a voice made when it had not been used to make human sounds in a very long time, and had to learn in one breath how. She held him. She put her cheek against the wet, pale hair. She rocked him. She had not planned to rock him. She had never rocked anything in her life. And she said over and over against his temple, "I have you. I have you. I have you." Because those were the only three words the knight had left her. And then into the hollow of her throat, from a mouth that was remembering how to be a mouth, he spoke his name. Draco, a breath, a shape of sound. Draco, Lucius, Malfoy, and she, with her arms around the frozen, shaking length of him, and her face in his hair, and every quarrel she had ever had with him dissolving in her chest like sugar in rain, whispered back into the pale crown of his head, in the clearest voice she had used all night. Hermione Grande. Somewhere far above on the spur, Charlie Weasley saw the ring fill for one instant with a pale, clean, soundless light, a light that rose from the snow between the two figures in the hollow, and went up through the falling flakes, and dissolved into the moon above the valley. and he lowered the brass horn from his hand and set it down on the stone and pressed the heel of his palm against his mouth and did not for a long while trust himself to move. The sanctuary's infirmary was a lowbeamed room at the back of the messole smelling of clean linen and bruise and the thin reinous pine of the floorboards. They put him there because it was the warmest room in the compound, and because Charlie, with the practical tenderness of a man who had spent 11 years patching handlers back together, had understood at once that the body in his arms needed not a hospital, but a half. He had carried him up from the hollow. Hermayan had not had the strength. Her own legs by the end had done all they could. Charlie had come down the slope at a run when the pale light rose, and without a word between them, he had lifted the thin, shaking man out of her arms and into his own. And he had said over his shoulder as he climbed, "Walk behind me, Hermione. One foot, then the other. Walk." She had walked. They had laid him in the narrow bed by the stove. The sanctuary's healer, a softvoiced Romanian witch named Ilana, who asked no questions Charlie did not answer for her, had warmed him with long, slow charms, had coaxed a tincture between his bitten lips, had wrapped his hands where the knuckles had split in the turning. She had looked once at the long ridge of scar along his spine, and she had laid her palm flat against it for a wordless moment, and then she had drawn the blanket up over his shoulder with a gentle finality of a woman closing a book she had understood. "He will sleep," she said, for a day, perhaps two. When he wakes, he will be weak. He will be whole. whole, Hermione repeated. Her voice was not quite her own. The curse is gone, Dragamir. I do not know what you did in the stones. I do not ask, but the shape of him is settled. There is no dragon in him any longer. Hermione sat down on the stool beside the bed because her legs at last were finished. He slept for 31 hours. She did not leave. Charlie brought her food which she ate without tasting. He brought her tea which went cold before she drank it. Once he brought her a heavy knitted blanket, one of Molly's she recognized the stitch and he draped it over her shoulders without speaking and she put her hand up and caught his briefly as he withdrew. and he squeezed her fingers and left her in the quiet. She watched Draco Malfoy sleep. His face in sleep was not the face she remembered from school. The sneer was gone. Had been gone, she suspected, for longer than 3 years, and the fine bones beneath it sat very clean against the pillow. His lashes were pale and dark at the tips. There was a small old scar she had never noticed at the corner of his mouth. A thin silver line no longer than a fingernail. His breathing was slow. His hands bandaged lay loose on the quilt. Every so often his brow would draw faintly into the shape of some unpleasant dream, and she would lean forward without thinking and press two fingers against the frown until it smoothed, and he would settle and sleep on. She did not think in those 31 hours about what came next. She did not think about London or the ministry or the questions that would arrive with Harry's owl when Charlie eventually wrote it. She sat. She watched. She allowed herself for the first time in 3 years to do nothing useful at all. He woke on the second morning at the pale gray hour just before sunrise. She was reading by the stove. a battered copy of Persuasion because it had been on the shelf in the infirmary and because she had not had it in her hands since she was 16. She did not at first realize he had opened his eyes. She felt rather the quality of the room change, the way a room changed when one of its sleepers woke. She looked up. He was looking at her. gray eyes, tired, unbeastly, entirely present in a human face. Neither of them spoke. The stove muttered. Somewhere in the sanctuary, a door opened and closed. The first thin line of rose had begun to show along the eastern horizon beyond the infirmary's narrow window, and the light of it, when it reached across the floorboards, found his pillow first, and her bare hand second. You stayed, he said finally. His voice was very quiet and rough, and the Wilshire vows had thinned in 3 years of disuse, but it was unmistakably his. Yes. How long since we brought you up? How long in hours, Granger? 31. His eyes closed. He did not sleep. It was only, she understood, gathering himself. I remember, he said. the ring. Your hand. Yes, I remember saying my name. Yes, I did not expect, he said, and his voice caught and he stopped and began again. I did not expect to wake. She set the book down on the stool. Draco. He opened his eyes at his name. You did not expect to wake because you had decided some time ago that you would not. He did not answer. That was answer enough. You came to the sanctuary on purpose. A small tight nod against the pillow. You wanted to be seen. You wanted, if you were going to be ended, to be ended by people who would not enjoy it. Yes. And instead, you were seen by me. He looked at her. He said nothing. His bandaged hand moved a fraction on the quilt as though to reach for something and then stilled. "Why did you let me come near you?" she asked, and her voice at last was not steady. The first night in the stones, I told you it was me. I said my name. You could have burned the ring to glass, Draco. Why did you let me come near? He was a long time answering. Because it was you, he said, and because if it had to end, I would rather it ended under your hand than any other. She drew a breath that did not go all the way in. And then, and then you did not end it. No, you put your hand on me. His eyes closed again. He was not hiding. He was only, she understood, finding the courage to continue with his face uncovered. Granger, do you know what that was? Do you know what it was to be touched like that after? I know. You cannot possibly. I know, Draco. I read the text. I understood what the curse wanted. I understood what I was offering. That is not what I meant. I know it is not. He opened his eyes. The gray of them was wet. He did not wipe at it. He held her gaze across the small, warm room with the steady, undefended exhaustion of a man who had spent 3 years having no face to be seen in, and had decided now not to be afraid to have one. I am sorry, he said. For your arm, for the drawing room, for the years before, for every He stopped. He did not finish. He did not need to. I know that is not enough. It is a beginning. Granger, Hermione, he blinked. He had not, she realized, ever used her given name, and the shape of it in his mouth was a new thing, and it caught him. Hermione. Yes. I do not know what to do. Neither do I. A silence, long, not uncomfortable. Could I? He began and stopped and started again with a slow care of a man picking a path across thin ice. Could I ask you to sit closer if you are willing? I do not I do not want anything. I would only I have not been near a person in 3 years and I do not know when I will again have the nerve to ask. She rose. She moved the stool. She sat beside the bed close enough that her knee was a breath from the edge of the mattress. and she laid her hand palm up on the quilt beside his bandaged one. She did not reach for him. She waited. He looked at her open palm for a long moment. Then slowly, with a care that was almost reverence, he turned his bandaged hand over and laid it across hers. The linen was rough. The hand beneath it was thin. She closed her fingers very gently around his. His eyes closed. A breath went out of him that he had been holding, she suspected, for 3 years. They sat like that as the light climbed. Recovery came in small, ordinary increments. He sat up on the third day and ate a bowl of broth without assistance and was exhausted by it. On the fourth day he walked with Charlie's arm under his elbow the length of the infirmary and back. On the fifth he made it to the kitchen where Ilana had set out tea and where Charlie, with the studied casualness of a man deciding to be kind, pushed a second mug toward him across the oak and said, "We'll talk about London when you're ready, Malfoy." Not before. Draco had stared at the mug. He had not, Hermione suspected, expected to be offered tea. He had said, "Thank you, Weasley." He had drunk it. They walked out together, the two of them, on the seventh morning. The snow had settled into its proper deep winter shape, clean and patient, and the sun that morning was the kind of clean Carpathian sun that made every edge gleam. Draco wore a borrowed coat of Charlie's that did not quite fit him in the shoulders. His hair had been cut short the evening before by Ilana, who had declared in her softvoiced way, that three years growth was a thing a man ought to shed before he walked out under a sky. He looked in the new light, younger than he had looked in the infirmary. He looked, Hermione thought, like the boy she had once known before the war had taken its hand to all of them. Except not. Not that boy, because that boy had been clothed and cold and cruel, and the man beside her in the snow was none of those things. The bones were the same. The weather inside them had changed. They walked up the track that led toward the ring of stones. They did not go all the way. They stopped by unspoken agreement at the shoulder of the ridge where the track crested, and where below them the hollow lay in its white hush the nine stones like small hooded figures keeping a silent watch. He looked down at the ring for a long time. "I would have died there," he said. "Yes, you came down into the ring alone." Yes, Granger. He turned to her. He corrected himself. Hermione. I He did not finish. He was looking at her. She was looking at him. The morning light was in his face, and his eyes were at last the eyes of a man who had been returned to himself. and she saw in them the thing she had been half expecting and half denying since the infirmary, the thing that had no business arriving so soon, and which had arrived anyway, because grief and nearness, and the hand held through a long, quiet night, did what they always did to people who were brave enough to allow it. She did not step back. He raised one hand, slow, giving her every moment in which to refuse. He laid his palm bare now, the bandages long since off against her cheek. His fingers were cold from the air. The pad of his thumb brushed once the line of her cheekbone, and she closed her eyes for the space of her breath, and opened them again, because she did not want to miss any part of this. Is this? He began. Yes. You have not let me finish the question. I know what the question is. She saw for the first time in all the years she had known his face. Draco Malfoyy's smile. Not a sneer, not a smirk, a small, rofal, private smile that broke at its corner into something almost like laughter, and that she understood she was one of perhaps three people in the world who had ever seen. He bent his head. She rose to meet him. The kiss, when it came, was not a grand thing. It was not the kiss of old ballads. It was a small, quiet, warm meeting of two mouths that had been for 3 years and more carrying things too heavy to set down, and that in the meeting set them down, and were for the length of one slow, held breath, only two people on a ridge in the sun. His free hand found hers, their fingers interlaced. A cold palm against her cheek warmed by slow degrees against the heat of her skin. When they drew apart, neither moved far. His forehead came to rest against hers. His eyes were closed. She watched from the half inch between them the slow rise and fall of his lashes. I do not know what this is, he said very softly. Neither do I. I do not know where we go from here. Neither do I. Will you find out with me? She did not answer at once. She tilted her face a fraction and pressed her lips once to the corner of his mouth. An answer without words, the kind of answer the last weeks had taught her how to give. And then she drew back and looked at him and said in a voice that was her own and steady and unafraid, "Yes, Draco, I will." He let out a breath she suspected he had been holding since the ring. They stood on the ridge a while longer. The sun climbed. The sanctuary below them began to wake. A plume of smoke from the kitchen chimney, the distant laugh of a handler, the deep companionable call of a longhorn greeting the mourning from the paddocks. He kept her hand in his. She kept hers in his. Neither of them in that moment needed to speak. After a long time, he turned, still holding her hand, and they walked back down the track together into the warm smoke and the ordinary hour. And the two sets of footprints they left in the snow behind them kept pace exactly all the way down. Thank you for staying with this story until the end. I wanted to write about something simple. I wanted to write about what happened when we meet a person we are supposed to hate and we find under all the old anger a human being a tired one a broken one a person who needs to be seen. Hermione did not forget what Draco had done. She did not pretend the past was not real. She carried the scar on her arm into the ring of stones with her and she still choose to put her hand on him. That is what the story is really about. Not magic, not dragons, a choice. We all carry old woods. We all know people who have hurt us. And sometimes life ask us a very hard question. Can you be gentle with someone who does not deserve it yet? Can you let them become someone who does? I do not have an easy answer. I do not think Hermione did as but she tried and he tries back and that was enough to be. If this story touched you even a little, please leave a comment. Tell me what you felt. Tell me who you thought about while you're listening. And take care of yourself. You are someone's quiet miracle, too. Thank you for listening. I will see you in the next