Serpent & Stone

The alley behind the Spindle & Spoke reeked faintly of singed wool and old cabbage, a scent that clung to brick the way nights clung to memory. Harry stood with his wand lowered and the glow of a spent Revealing Charm fading from the broken lock. The latch had been cursed to scream when tampered with—clever, petty, and not remotely dangerous. The charm dissipated under his touch like a sulk. He flicked a look to the shopkeeper, a broader witch with wind-rouged cheeks and needles sticking out of her bun like spears.

“So it wasn’t a poltergeist,” she said, arms crossed tight over her apron. “Told my cousin as much.”

“Someone enchanted your latch,” Harry answered. “Then got bored and forgot to come back to see it work.” He crouched and traced the lingering pattern on the iron—a sloppy rune spiral, borrowed and misdrawn, the magical equivalent of a copy of a copy. “I’ll file it. We’ll monitor for repeat activity. Replace the lock, and don’t use the back entrance at night for a bit.”

She grunted. “And that’s that?”

“That’s that.” He forced a small smile. It didn’t land.

He walked her through a simple ward placement, watched her draw it wrong twice before gently taking her wand hand and guiding her spell, the wash of pale blue steady under their palms. He heard himself explaining basic ward-protocol in the polite cadence he used when people were frightened or cross. Her shoulders dropped. Gratitude pinched at the corners of her eyes. He knew the shape of this scene too well: fear, reassurance, resolution. It should have felt like a job well done.

An Auror trainee would have written it up in three lines. Harry took the long way back to the main road anyway, folding the case into parchment in his head. A neat ending. No danger. No reward beyond the clean click of closure.

The brass of his Ministry badge was warm against his ribs through the shirt. He touched it reflexively, as if it could confirm something he no longer asked for. The street opened out onto the morning swell of the market, the ordinary thrum of lives that didn’t need him most days. A boy ran past with a sugared bun and a sugar-dusted grin, chased by a girl with two plaits and a glare worthy of Professor McGonagall. Someone called Harry’s name around a mouthful of scone—Mr Potter!—and he lifted a hand without stopping, the smile quick, practiced, and gone.

Back at the office, the lift shuddered down, the voice announcing floors in a tone that felt like it had changed to mock him over the years. The Auror Department jolted into view in a wash of ink and black coffee. Robards’ door was closed; Proudfoot argued with Savage over a map of Bristol; a green memo fluttered past Harry’s ear with a sound like a lazy bee. He dropped into his chair and pulled the report form from the stack. Quill in hand, wand still on the desk beside it, he filled the lines with tidy facts.

Alley. Enchanted latch. No perpetrator on site. No injuries. Ward set. The handwriting was steady. Always steady. The scar on the back of his hand tugged as he signed his name. The old letters—etched at fifteen, screamed at sixteen, carried at thirty—caught the light and then were just skin again.

“Minor,” someone said behind him, and a memo pecked at his shoulder like a bored bird. He brushed it aside. On the wall above the noticeboard, the framed photo of his class at the academy waved and laughed and jostled—frozen at the moment just before they all scattered into different futures. Harry looked at the younger him in the back row. He was trying poorly to look like he wasn’t uncomfortable, arms crossed, chin a little high. He remembered how he’d thought it would be harder and therefore better. He remembered thinking there would be an after that felt like a beginning.

He turned back to the parchment. The column for “Resolution” waited blankly. He wrote: concluded.

“Potter.” The door to Robards’ office cracked open. The Head Auror’s gruff voice carried even when he didn’t raise it. “In a moment.”

Harry nodded. “Sir.”

The door shut again. He bent over the form as if the shallow case might expand into something worth attention if he stared valiantly at the ink. He thought of Grimmauld Place: the cold footprint of its rooms, the way the stairs creaked in certain places like they remembered him. There would be tea he’d forget to drink and a fire he’d forget to light. Kreacher would tell him to sit down and eat in a tone that brooked no argument, and Harry would, and it would taste like nothing.

Savage’s voice cut through from a few desks over. “You all right there, Potter? You look like you got hexed by boredom.”

Harry huffed a laugh because it was expected. “Close,” he said. “Cursed latch.”

“Living the dream.” Savage saluted with a biscuit. It crumbled over the file he and Proudfoot were worrying like a bone.

Harry put the quill down before he snapped its nib between his fingers. Something in him folded neatly along creases he couldn’t unkink: obligation, competence, the precise weight of other people’s relief when he showed up. He didn’t resent it. He didn’t want to be anywhere else, and the wanting nothing made him feel like an impostor inside his own life.

He stood and carried the report to the inbox. The young witch manning intake glanced up and flushed pink, the way young witches sometimes still did when he stood within three feet of them. He nodded, polite, and slid the parchment into the tray. “Thanks, Mr Potter,” she said.

“Harry,” he corrected, as he always did. He couldn’t keep the automatic softening out of his tone. It made them less awed and him more at ease. It didn’t make the corridor between his chest and his throat feel less hollow.

He straightened his robes and knocked on Robards’ door. “Come,” Robards said, without looking up, then did look and set down his quill. He had a file open, thick with ribbon ties and creased corners. He gestured to the chair opposite. “Close it.”

Harry closed the door. The muted hum of the office dimmed to a low room-tone, the kind that makes the shape of silence in the spaces between words. He sat.

Robards steepled his fingers. “That minor fiasco behind the Spindle & Spoke is over, then?”

“Yes,” Harry said. “No threat. I put a ward on the entrance and filed it.”

“Good.” Robards studied him like he always did, as if Harry might crack along some old fault line if pressed too hard. Robards didn’t soften, and Harry appreciated that, even when he wished for it. “You look like you slept in that chair.”

“Didn’t,” Harry said. “Just an early call.”

Robards grunted. “All right. Good. Because I’ve got something that’ll wake you up.” He laid his palm on the file at his elbow and slid it a fraction of an inch forward, as if feeling the weight of it before he lifted it. “When you’re done catching your breath.”

Harry watched the file move. He knew, before he touched it, that it would be heavier than it looked. He wasn’t sure if he felt relief or dread coil low, a familiar serpent that used to be called purpose and now had no name. He rubbed his thumb against his forefinger once, grounding himself on the drag of skin on skin, and reached for the folder.

Robards didn’t relinquish the file until Harry’s hand was on it. “Sensitive,” he said, as if the word had edges. “And ugly. You’ll keep this close.”

Harry loosened the ribbon and scanned the first page. Photographs slid under his thumb: a jeweled hair comb on silk, tarnished silver, a dark sheen on its prongs; an oil portrait of a stern witch whose paint had run in streaks like tears; a ledger excerpt with names blurred by scorch. Each image pulsed faintly in the wizarding way, and the margin notes were a lattice of dated entries, spells attempted, spells failed.

“Three incidents in three weeks,” Robards went on. “Montague, Travers, Rosier holdings. Curses tied to heirlooms of some significance—things that should have been warded to the rafters. We’ve got paralysis in one case, progressive aphasia in another, and in the Rosier vault, a chain of ignition hexes that refused to respond to any standard quench. The curses present as dormant for decades. They wake when they’re handled and key to blood.”

Harry’s stomach tightened at the names. Old money, old politics, old grudges. He flipped to the report from Magical Forensics. The quillwork was crisp and discouraged. “The comb—Montague—what happened?”

“Lady Montague set it in her hair for a dinner. Minutes later, her scalp tore in streaks and she went limp from the crown down. Breathing preserved, everything else gone to stone. St Mungo’s reversed most of it with very old revival rites and potions, but there’s still a lag in her hands. The curse nested in the metal. Counter-curses slid off like water.”

Harry glanced at the spell list. “Finite series, Severing, Purging, Dispersal, Unbinding by lineage call. No reaction. Curse signature… this looks like an overlay. Potion anchored.”

Robards nodded once. “We think so. Forensics tasted aconite residue and something we haven’t identified. When the potion’s component reacts to a blood marker, it unlocks the hex array. And the array isn’t in any of our catalogues.”

Harry turned a page. The portrait stared up at him, its frame charred. The witch in the painting had melted features that tried to reform and sloughed again. He read: Travers. Portrait of Euphemia Travers, 1781. Result of activation: aphasia, family head; portrait self-immolation event when subject attempted communication; containment failure for seventy-two minutes.

He grimaced. “They tried a binding cord?”

“Three cords. The painting burned through. The curse speech-tangled Henry Travers until he couldn’t conjure his own name. He can speak now, but he loses nouns. He called his wand ‘the stick that answers lightning’ to his Healer. He’s furious. They’re all furious.”

“Someone’s targeting them,” Harry said. “But why now?”

Robards lifted one shoulder. “That’s what you’ll find out. If it’s political, it’s delicate. If it’s personal, it’s uglier. Either way, it’s someone with hands steady enough to weave this and a mind patient enough to lay it years in advance, or clever enough to make it seem that way. We’ve had our best curse-breakers on it. The arrays are composed of archaic fragments. We think they’re borrowing from seventeenth-century feudcraft and pre-statute potioneering. It reads like a palimpsest. And it resists anything newer than 1850.”

Harry sifted the parchment until he reached an analysis with a grid of runic shapes, then another with ingredients hypothesized in a spidery hand. “You’ve got Slughorn’s notes?”

“Hermione Granger bullied him into contributing under the guise of ‘academic curiosity.’ He’s got guesses. He’s also got a party next Tuesday.”

Harry huffed, half a smile. It didn’t last. “Coverage? Media?”

“Contained, for now. We’ve impressed upon these families that screaming to the Prophet will only alert the perpetrator and scare off buyers. They’ve agreed, for a fee. There’s a lot of old gold moving to ensure silence.”

Harry’s fingers rested on a page marking the Rosier incident: a silver reliquary triggered a series of heat blooms that cracked ward stones and set a velvet cushion on fire. He could almost feel the trapped hum of the curse in the ink. “Any common source for these objects?”

“All privately held, all catalogued in private ledgers. That’s another problem. Whoever set this knew what to target and where it lived. Either there’s a leak, or the cursemaker belongs to that world.”

Harry looked up. “Inside the circles, then. Or someone who used to be.”

Robards’s mouth flattened. “We’re not making accusations we can’t back, not with these names. We need discretion, and we need someone who knows how to look at a thing and feel where it’s wrong. That’s you. But you won’t be alone.”

Harry waited. The file was heavy in his hands. The room hummed faintly with the ward at the edge of the door.

Robards leaned back, eyes going to the map on the wall and back. “If it were just hexes, I’d keep it in-house. It isn’t. This has a potions spine, and an old one. We need a specialist who can taste an infusion out of metal and pick apart an array that doesn’t want to be seen. We’ve brought in outside consultants before.”

Harry’s jaw worked. He guessed where this was going and resented that his body reacted before his mind. “Who?”

“Hold.” Robards lifted a palm. “You’ll object. I’ve got little patience for it. He is the best at what he does. He’s been useful to us off the record for three years. He knows more about the intersection of hereditary wards, potion-binding, and artefact lore than anyone on payroll. And he’s not optional.”

Harry didn’t blink. He felt the shape of the name arrive like a draft under the skin. “Say it.”

Robards slid a thin supplemental file from beneath the case file and tapped it once with his forefinger. A photograph in the corner showed a pale man in immaculate robes at a counter lined with glass vials, head turned slightly as if listening for a bell. “Draco Malfoy.”

The name landed and sat between them. Harry knew the exact feel of it in his mouth and still didn’t say it out loud. His gaze fell to the line below the photograph: Proprietor, Serpent & Stone Apothecary. Consultant, historical dark artefacts and curse-lore. Ministry Registry Clearance: Conditional, Level Three.

He exhaled through his nose. “You want him on this.”

“I want this solved and no more people hurt,” Robards said. “He can help you do that. He’s been doing quiet penance for a very long time, Potter. He has access you don’t. He can see things you won’t. You’ll keep him on a leash if it makes you feel safer. But you will loop him in.”

Harry’s throat tightened with something he didn’t care to name. Memory flickered—a boy with pointed words and colder eyes, a man in a courtroom, a wand trembling in a hand that had signed papers to save his mother. Then other images, newer, something Hermione had said in passing about the apothecary on Bow Street that had the cleanest draughts in London.

He closed the case file and kept a finger inside to mark his place. “All right,” he said, because refusing wouldn’t change anything but his job. “I’ll speak to him.”

“You’ll meet him,” Robards corrected. “At his shop. Keep Ministry presence down. You’ll take the file, and you’ll keep your voice low. If he says it’s potion-bound beyond our usual tools, you believe him. If he says you’re handling something wrong, you listen. He isn’t your friend; he is your expert.”

Harry nodded once, sharply. “When?”

“Now,” Robards said, and that was that. He stood to signal the end of the conversation, but stayed Harry with a last look. “This is one of those that either ends clean or ends everywhere. Don’t let it grow teeth.”

Harry tucked both files under his arm. The weight dug into his side in a way that felt like a purpose he wasn’t sure he wanted but knew how to carry. At the door, Robards added, quieter, “Whatever you think of him—keep it out of the work.”

Harry paused with his hand on the knob. “I can do that.”

“Good. Owl me when you’ve got something I can take to the Minister without giving him hives.”

Harry let the corner of his mouth lift. “So… never.”

Robards snorted. “Get out of here.”

In the corridor, the office noise rose to meet him. He ignored the way the trainees’ chatter dimmed as he passed. He ignored his reflection in the glass of the conference room—tired, recognizable, inevitable. He kept his grip on the files until the ribbon edge bit his palm and the sting anchored him to the moment. He’d deliver the report to intake later. For now, he angled toward the lift, pressed the brass for the Atrium, and thought, against his will, of polished glass vials arranged like soldiers and a voice he hadn’t heard in years saying his name in a way that had always felt like a challenge.

Robards didn’t waste time pretending pride wasn’t already in fragments on the carpet. “We brought in Burns from Curse-Breaking. Park from St. Mungo’s. Two goblin consultants who insisted on calling us children. They all found patterns and none of them held. We put together a working group this morning. They ran through six models—lingering oath resonance, embedded lexeme locks, a class of dormant sentience keyed to a surname. Every time, the structure shifts when you try to pin it. I’m done burning hours to watch clever people look tired.”

Harry’s fingers drummed once against the folder, then stilled. “So you want a different clever person.”

“I want the right bastard.” Robards’s mouth quirked and fell flat. “This is old work wrapped in something newer and meaner. When you strip the glamour, there’s a potions skeleton. Whoever built this knew exactly how to teach metal to remember blood and how to make a curse sit quiet until it was stroked the right way. We don’t have that alchemy in-house.”

Harry’s jaw tightened. “We’ve got Potions Masters on retainer.”

“On retainer who brew in glass and write papers. We need someone who learned at a table with a knife and a mother who could smell aconite from a corridor away.” Robards reached into a drawer, pulled out a slim file bound with a grey ribbon, and set it on the desk like a small, crucial wound. His finger tapped the top once, a sound dull against leather. “External specialist. Historical dark artefacts. Potion-bound curses. He’s worked for us, you just didn’t see the signatures.”

Harry stared at the ribbon. He didn’t want to touch it, as if contact might make something irreversible. “You’re not saying Rookwood. He’s dead.”

Robards ignored that. “He’s precise. He’s discreet. He knows how these families catalog their rot and where the rot breathes. He won’t be welcomed in their parlors, which makes him hungrier to be right. He has a stake.”

Harry said nothing. The older man slid the file across the desk. The parchment rasped. Harry didn’t reach for it, but the corner handily caught under his palm anyway, traitorous, familiar.

The photograph on the first page wasn’t moving much. The man in it had the practiced stillness of someone who dealt with glass and heat and other people’s regret. Pale hair clipped shorter than it used to be, the expensive slope of his cheekbone no less sharp. A fitted waistcoat, sleeves shoved to the elbow, ink faint on his right wrist like he’d had to make a note with wet hands. His head was turned to listen for a bell, mouth relaxed, not sneering, not smiling. The apothecary behind him gleamed. The name under the photograph was clean, printed, the letters neat: Draco Malfoy.

The room narrowed. Harry became aware of the way his hand had curled slightly over the image, not a grasp but something like it. He pulled his fingers back. “No.”

Robards didn’t look surprised. “Yes.”

“You can’t be serious.” It came out flat, the voice he used with witnesses who lied with confidence. “Malfoy? You want me to—”

“I want you to take the file down to Bow Street and speak to Draco Malfoy like you speak to any expert whose life experience happens to be extremely inconvenient,” Robards said. “He’s the one you call when a ward speaks an old dialect you don’t like hearing. He’s taken enough of our coin to replace the marble in his shop twice over. He’s done the work. He does it well. And he keeps his mouth shut.”

Harry’s heart kicked, anger getting its hooks in because it was easier to carry. “He kept it shut when it mattered, too. In a manor with a vanishing cabinet. For months.”

“Save it,” Robards said, brusque. “Save your war for your therapist. This is not about what he was at seventeen. This is about what he has taught himself to become to keep breathing in a city that would rather he hadn’t. He’s done things we couldn’t and wouldn’t. Those cursed combs and portraits? He’ll taste the residue in a hair as though it’s wine and tell you which decade, which recipe, which vendor used a faulty distiller. He’ll look at those arrays and see the threading. He can smell it when somebody has braided a protection oath through a binding curse and hung it off a bloodline like a poisoned charm.”

Harry’s throat went dry at the word bloodline. He looked down at the analysis sheets he already had, runes he half-knew and others that slid off the mind like oil. He thought of the Travers portrait burning in its frame, the way Henry Travers’s mouth might try to form a word and fail. “There are other apothecaries,” he said, weak in his own ears.

“Not with his fluency in dark lore and his access.” Robards didn’t look away. “There are doors in that world that stick for you and open for him. He has a ledger older than your Ministry employment. He can call in a favor from a mad widow in Knockturn who would hex your eyebrows off for breathing near her wardline. He can tell you which heirloom would have been within reach of a cousin with a grudge. We need that intelligence, and we need it yesterday.”

Harry swallowed. The photograph’s corner had lifted, the man in it shifting his weight, tapping a stopper back into a bottle with a soft click. He refused to feel the old teenager’s heat fizz at the back of his tongue. “And if he’s involved?”

“Then you’ll have him under your eye,” Robards said. “Which is better than under nobody’s. He’s not. We’ve run him until the parchment frayed. He’s been dull and domesticated in all the boring ways that make my job easier. He opens his shop at eight, goes home at eight, wards like a paranoid, and pays a charity stipend to an orphanage because he thinks it’s what people do when they’re trying to be good. He is not our suspect. He is our tool.”

Harry bristled at the word even though he’d used it himself about men he respected. He flipped the page. There were notes from previous consultations, redacted but still readable between the lines. A cursed signet ring unbound from a dead Earl’s finger after a three-hour negotiation with a residing spirit and a vapour infusion. A portrait stabilized with a recipe that smelled of bay and grave dirt. The magics were as clean as they got when you touched old filth.

“He works under conditional clearance,” Robards went on, tone all business again. “You’ll keep the Ministry out of his shop’s front view. You’ll manage the evidence chain so nobody can accuse him of handling what he shouldn’t. You’ll treat him like a contractor. You do not bait him into a fight and then send me an owl about how it went sideways.”

“I don’t bait,” Harry said automatically, knowing he did, sometimes, when the mirror looked back and he forgot he didn’t have to be seventeen and bleeding anymore.

Robards’s eyebrow lifted. “You do when you’re tired. Don’t be. I need you sharp. We can’t afford more families on the list. We can’t afford a trial in the papers.”

Harry pressed his knuckles against the folder until bone threatened to show. He didn’t want to be the man who refused help because it came in a shape he despised. He didn’t want to be the man who invited a viper to his wrist. He wasn’t sure which he was more afraid of becoming.

“What do I say?” he asked finally, because the work always began in small, humiliating steps like that. Because the world kept insisting you talk to people you didn’t want to talk to and then you got on with it.

Robards’s mouth curved, wiped away. “You say: we need your eyes. You say: we can pay your fee. You say: this is bigger than your pride and bigger than his. You show him the Travers array and the Rosier reliquary and the Montague comb and you ask him what you missed.” He paused. “And you listen.”

Harry nodded. It was slow, and it hurt. He slid the file to stack with the larger one, aligning edges with a compulsive care he knew meant he was buying seconds. The name on the file looked stark and ridiculous, like a curse in a schoolbook.

“Serpent & Stone,” Robards said. “Bow Street. Unmarked except for a serpent carved into the lintel so subtle you’d miss it if you weren’t looking for snakes. He keeps the place cleaner than the Ministry lab. He’ll look you in the eye and make you feel as though you’re being weighed. You are. Don’t blink.”

Harry didn’t promise he wouldn’t. He slipped both files under his arm, their weight familiar now. The strap of his satchel caught the edge of his scar through his fringe and dragged, a phantom itch he refused to scratch.

Robards’s voice softened, not by much. “Potter.”

Harry glanced up.

“Whatever else he is, he’s useful,” Robards said. “Don’t punish your case for your history.”

Harry looked back at the photograph one last time. Draco Malfoy’s mouth was in that neutral line he’d seen once in a courtroom when the verdict had landed and the world had rearranged itself in his head. He closed the file on it.

“All right,” he said, and he meant it enough to stand. “I’ll go.”

Harry made it as far as the door before the words burned up his throat, too sharp to swallow. “No,” he said again, the metal cool under his palm. “You can’t expect me to—Robards, it’s Malfoy.”

“Close the door,” Robards said without looking up.

Harry didn’t. “He helped Death Eaters get in and out of Hogwarts. He stood in a manor while people screamed in the next room and said nothing. You want me to walk into his shop and ask for a favor?”

Robards lifted his gaze, grey and unblinking. “I want you to do your job.”

“My job isn’t rehabilitating Draco Malfoy’s reputation.”

“Good thing,” Robards said, dry, “because it doesn’t need you. He rehabilitated it by keeping his head down and doing work nobody wanted to admit they needed. He’s already consulted on six cases you’ve signed off on. You just didn’t know the signature behind the reference number.”

“That’s different from being saddled with him,” Harry said. The heat in his face felt adolescent and humiliating. “We share history. It’s—”

“Ugly?” Robards’s mouth didn’t move much. “Yes. And not unique. Half this corridor has history with him. The other half has history with you. They still show up to work.”

“You weren’t there,” Harry said, throat tight. “You didn’t see the way he looked at me. Like I was—”

“Seventeen,” Robards supplied, unimpressed. “So was he.”

“He had choices,” Harry snapped.

“And then he made different ones,” Robards said. “In case you missed the part where he risked his life in my foyer to bring us a wand and a murderer. In case you missed the part where he stood in front of a Wizengamot that wanted his head and took conditional service instead. He did his years. He took every foul job we gave him until he’d earned a license to sell sleeping draught to widows and salve to idiots who charm their own eyebrows off. He’s done his reparations. This is the part where we use the skills that came out of it.”

Harry shut the door. The click sounded like loss and relief. “People don’t change that much.”

“You have,” Robards said, mild. “At least I hope to God you have, because otherwise I hired a boy with a martyr complex and not a man with judgment. Potter, listen to me. We have household names getting blackened by curses that should not exist. We have signatures that talk like seventeenth-century vendettas and smell like something bottled in a basement where a child learned the difference between aconite and arsenic before he knew what it meant to be kind. We need a mouth that can speak to that. Ours don’t.”

Harry stared at the file under his arm as if it might change its name if he glared hard enough. “And if this is him, circling? If he’s using us to clean up his own mess?”

“Then he’ll be under your eyes and my audits,” Robards said. “He’s been under both since the day he walked out of that courtroom. His Floo. His owls. His purchases. His donations. His wards trip our alarms if he sneezes wrong. He knows that. He still consults. Because every time he delivers the right answer, he buys himself one more day where the Prophet doesn’t print his name with a skull beside it. He has incentives. And we have leverage.”

Harry thought of the Travers portrait, its paint puckering when the curse surged. He thought of the Greengrass matriarch’s letter, tight script and tighter fear. “You’re asking me to trust him.”

“I’m telling you to trust the work,” Robards said, voice level. “Trust your own eyes. If his answers are wrong, if his behavior stinks, you’ll see it. But if you refuse to walk into a shop because the owner once sneered at you on a train, you’ll be the boy I don’t have time to babysit.”

The insult slid off; it was too true to sting. Harry braced a shoulder against the wall and let the fury spend itself in quiet, ugly breaths. “You know what it’s like for me,” he said finally, quieter. “To be seen walking in there. To be seen working with him.”

“Yes,” Robards said, and there was something almost like understanding in it. “Just like he knows what it’s like to have you show up and make his day worse by existing. You think the old families will applaud him for helping you? Half of them will hex his doorstep and the other half will call him a turncoat. Both of you will be uncomfortable. Excellent. You’ll be evenly matched.”

Harry barked a humorless laugh. “You’ve been waiting to say that.”

“I’ve been waiting for you to stop making this about you,” Robards said. He leaned back in his chair, the leather creaking. “Malfoy’s expertise is not a courtesy. It’s not a favor. It’s part of the package he agreed to to keep out of Azkaban. He signed on to consult when we ask and shut up when we tell him. He’s been good at both. You don’t get to opt out, either. Refusing this partnership isn’t on the menu for either of you.”

Harry flinched at the word partnership; it felt too much like something else and not enough like what this needed to be. “So I go to Bow Street. I knock. I… what, ask nicely?”

“You take the case file,” Robards said, crisp. “You lay out the facts. You say what I told you to say. You don’t posture. You don’t dredge up schoolboy taunts. You don’t call him names and you don’t pretend you’re friends. You keep it clinical, you keep it documented, and you keep the leash in your hand on the chain of evidence. He will test boundaries. So will you. Keep it professional and you bring me a lead by tomorrow. Or we add Montague’s mother to the casualty list.”

Harry exhaled through his nose. His grip on the file eased. The paper settled against his palm like surrender. “You really think he can see something we missed.”

“I know he can,” Robards said. “He sees the little cuts where the curse stitches into the object’s history. He reads recipe the way you read a Quidditch play. He grew up watching men make these toys and he taught himself how to undo them because he had to. I don’t have that in my roster. You don’t, either.”

The truth landed with a dull, resistant acceptance. Harry let the anger cool to a core. It would keep him from being soft. “If he refuses.”

“He won’t,” Robards said. “He might make you wait while he serves a customer. He might charge you double for the Ministry’s arrogance. He won’t refuse. Not when it touches bloodlines and reputation. He cares about that. Use it.”

Harry’s mouth went tight. “I won’t beg.”

“I’m not asking you to,” Robards said. “I’m telling you to be precise. Be the Auror he can’t argue with. If he tries to pick a fight, don’t. If he needles you, let it die. You’ve shaken hands with worse men for less noble reasons.”

Harry thought of hands he’d taken, cold and dry and necessary. He thought of a pale boy’s face in a burning room and hated that his chest still remembered the heat. He shoved it all away. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll go now.”

Robards nodded once. “Good. Bow Street will be busy. He likes it when you notice he runs the cleanest shop in the Alley. Pretend you noticed.”

Harry didn’t promise anything. He tucked the files under his arm, squared his shoulders, and reached for the handle. Robards’s voice stopped him.

“Potter.”

He didn’t turn fully. “Sir?”

“You don’t have to like him,” Robards said, tone stripped of everything but purpose. “You do have to work with him. Bring me something worth the pain.”

Harry stared at the wood grain as if it could offer a different answer. It didn’t. He opened the door and stepped out into the corridor’s hum, the file heavy and fixed against his ribs like a second heart he hadn’t asked for. He headed for the lifts, already mapping the clean, discreet doorway on Bow Street he’d been ordered to find.

The Ministry’s corridors swallowed him, a rush of robes and the soft scrape of parchment on stone, the lift groaning as it carried him down. He stared at his reflection in the brass numbers while floors ticked past, and saw the set to his mouth he recognized from the Prophet’s photographs: stubborn, tired, unhelpfully heroic. He looked away.

The Atrium’s fountain glittered with the same smug calm it had since the renovation. Wizards drifted by, glancing and then glancing again when they recognized him. He angled his body, made himself smaller without admitting he was doing it, and cut a line to the Floos. He could have Apparated, but something about being spat into Diagon Alley covered in green ash and someone else’s conversation felt easier than the crack and hush of arriving alone in the street like bad news.

The hearth flared, and he stepped out into the belly of the Alley’s afternoon. It was busy, familiar in a way that always felt false now. He saw the shops like ghosts of what they’d been—Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes shouting colors into the air two doors down from a quiet, respectable bookshop selling new printings of old names; Madam Malkin’s windows displaying neutral robes and careful tailoring for people who liked to pretend nothing stained.

He adjusted the file under his arm and set off. Bow Street was a turn off the main, the stones there cleaner, the signage discreet. The noise thinned as he walked, replaced by the murmur of money and the soft clink of glass. He tried to keep his thoughts in order and found they slipped sideways, back to a boy in a corridor with white hair and a mouth made for ugliness, back to a manor where the wallpaper tasted like fear. Robards’s voice threaded in: trust the work. Do your job.

He passed an antique wandmaker with a window of polished walnut and a jeweler who arranged silver like it might bite. “Serpent & Stone” sat between a tea shop and a conservatoire that sold charmed violins. Its front was all clean lines and spared ornamentation, charcoal paint framing a single pane of glass. The name was hand-lettered in matte gold, elegant and spare. A bell hung over the door, small and practical.

Harry stopped on the pavement and took in the display. No skulls. No wands bound in conjugations of bone. The shelves behind the window held apothecary jars in frosted glass, each labeled with a neat, precise hand in ink so black it looked wet. There were dried ferns suspended in clear solution, a twist of dragon sinew coiled like a question, a mortar and pestle of dark stone that matched the counter within. The smell from the door seam was clean, astringent, like rosemary and a winter sky.

He could feel the shape of what would happen when he stepped inside. Malfoy’s eyes lifting, cool and empty. The first curl of disdain, maybe that faint, surprised flicker if he let himself be surprised at all. Harry pressed his tongue to his molars and told himself he didn’t care about any of that. He did a quick inventory of his temper and found enough to manage if he kept his mouth shut.

He pushed the door. The bell made a sound like a drop of water.

Inside was bright. Light pooled across a long counter of polished black stone, every bottle behind it arranged with a geometry that made his fingers itch. Labels faced front. Scales gleamed. A copper still in the corner was quiet, its coils cool. There were customers—an elderly witch in dove-grey asking in a whisper about sleeping draught, a young man with ink-stained fingers explaining what he needed for parchment restoration. The witch behind the till was not Malfoy. She had dark hair caught in a clip and an expression like polished steel.

“Welcome to Serpent & Stone,” she said, voice pleasant but distant, a professional buffer. “Do you have an order for collection?”

“No,” Harry said. His voice sounded too loud in the clean air. He put the file on the counter and laid his palm on it before he could look like he was presenting a warrant. “I’m here to see Mr. Malfoy. Ministry business.”

Her eyes skimmed his scar and then did the polite thing and ignored it. “One moment.” She lifted a finger to the elder witch. “I’ll fetch the proprietor. Please forgive me.”

She moved through a doorway hung with bead charms that didn’t clack or tinkle, only split and returned, silent. Harry forced himself to look, to catalog like an Auror instead of a boy counting losses. The ward lines in the corners were subtle, etched into the baseboards with runes that would only glow if provoked. The air had that hum old magic did when it was contained and content. He read a label—pulvis umbrae, powdered shadow, rare and expensive. There were no books out where hands could touch them. No ornament that didn’t serve a purpose.

He heard the door behind the counter open again before he saw him. He knew the cadence of his stride without wanting to. Malfoy came out in a waistcoat the exact blue-grey of a storm about thirty miles off, sleeves rolled to the elbow. His hair was shorter than Harry remembered from the last time the Prophet had used him for outrage—tapered at the sides, a clean fall at the top, like he’d cut away anything that could be grabbed. A thin scar marked his wrist, a pale line that flashed as he adjusted his cuff.

He took in the scene with one glance that swept and sorted. He didn’t look surprised. He looked like someone who had learned to expect intrusions and had designed his doorway to control them.

“Potter,” he said, not putting a question into it, not putting anything into it. He stepped behind the counter, his hands not touching the file, not touching the stone. “If this is about the Bulstrode order, you’re early. I told the clerk to inform the Ministry they’d get their draughts tomorrow.”

“It isn’t,” Harry said. He kept his tone even. “I need to speak with you about an active case. Privately.”

Malfoy glanced at the two customers. The young man was studiously not looking. The old witch had the contained curiosity of someone who could afford not to be told things. Malfoy nodded once to his assistant. “Clara, please finish Mrs. Knott’s order and retrieve the bezoar tincture for Mr. Fielding. I’ll be in the back.”

He didn’t wait for Harry, simply turned and let the bead curtain part around his shoulders. Harry followed. The room beyond was a workroom—long tables, bound journals stacked with edges aligned, a rack of knives sharp enough to make clean decisions. The smell was stronger here, a foundation of alcohol and herb, something dark like myrrh. It was warm without being oppressive, contained heat from carefully charmed burners.

Malfoy shut the door with a click that was probably habit and not the ward snapping that Harry felt anyway. He didn’t lean on anything. He didn’t cross his arms. He looked at Harry like he was a list to be evaluated.

“Let’s make this efficient,” Malfoy said. “What mess have you brought to my doorstep?”