The Grey Ledger

Rain has followed the October evening into Whitehall. From the street, the Annex looks like what the Muggles think it is: a shut Ministry of Works building with soot on the stone and red buses hissing past its locked front door. Inside the ward it is the Auror Academy. Ministry stone, flat white lamps, a long assignment hall that smells of wet wool and floor polish. A brass plaque by the door lists the Aurors lost in the war. The names are three years old and still bright.

Most of the 2001 cohort has already read the board and gone, charcoal coats and wand cases heading down the corridor toward the practice yards. A portrait of a retired Head Auror dozes above the board and repeats raised voices whenever it wakes.

The evening postings are pinned in fresh ink.

EVENING PRACTICAL - Tuesday 9 October 2001
Escort: Gringotts to Whitehall Annex. Evidence crate 19.
Trainees: Malfoy, D. (probationary) / Tyler
Escort waits outside the vault. Crate to be logged on receipt.

There is no surname after yours. There never is.

Draco Malfoy is already at the board. Twenty-one, tall, pale, platinum hair pinned back for work, grey eyes on the posting as if she means to wear it down. Her coat is the same charcoal as everyone's, cut better, with a silver thread stitched around one cuff. Everyone in the hall knows what the thread means: probation, a midnight signature in the duty book, a hearing if she slips.

She looks you over the way she would check a forged signature, starting at the boots.

"They've paired me with the American."

She unpins the slip and reads it again, as though a second reading might improve it.

"I'm Draco Malfoy. You're Tyler. That's the whole posting, and the rest is barracks talk. I've heard what they say you did over there. I'm unconvinced." She folds the slip along one clean crease. "If you're slow, I won't carry you. And don't perform for Potter. He's already looking."

Harry Potter is across the hall with a dueling instructor, twenty-one, scarred, and plainly tired of being recognized. He has seen the pairing. He gives you one short nod, trainee to trainee, and doesn't come over.

Draco turns the slip over. On the back, in small upright handwriting, someone has added a line since lunch.

Reconciliation requests crate 19 be logged unopened. Tonight. - H. Granger, DIMC

"Granger," Draco says flatly. "Not even this department. She wants it sealed because she wants to read it first."

Her nail rests on the word Tonight.

"Here's what the posting leaves out." Her voice drops below the portrait's hearing. "The crate holds a ledger. My father surrendered it for time off his sentence. Pardons, payments, names. I'm the only one in this building who reads the family shorthand, which is the only reason I'm allowed in this building. Gringotts weighed the crate at dawn. Fourteen ounces light. And someone has scraped the lid and inked over it in a hand that wants very badly to look like ours."

She tucks the slip into her coat.

"If it arrives short with my name on the receipt, I'm out by Friday. If it arrives short with yours, you're just the American who lost a box. So you'll forgive me for caring more."

She crosses to the side door. Beyond it, the courtyard lamps show a black Ministry car idling in the rain, its driver reading a folded Prophet.

On the threshold she stops, one hand on the frame, and doesn't look back. She is waiting to see whether you mean to be a partner or an audience.

Gringotts' evidence hall is cold enough to show breath. A goblin clerk in a high collar sets crate 19 on a brass scale for the second time today, and the needle settles where it did at dawn: short.

Draco Malfoy stands at your shoulder in the charcoal coat, silver thread at her cuff, platinum hair pinned for work. She watches the needle the way other people watch a wand.

"Fourteen ounces light," the clerk says. "Weighed at dawn. Weighed now. Gringotts does not misplace ounces, trainee."

He turns the crate. A strip of the lid margin has been scraped pale, and over it someone has inked three looping strokes.

"Family clerks' shorthand," Draco says, too quickly. "Ours. Or a decent copy."

The goblin's eyes go to her cuff, then to you, and stay on you.

"The paperwork names two trainees. One of them is a Malfoy reading Malfoy marks on Malfoy evidence." A long finger taps the release form. "Gringotts would like the other signature to mean something."

Draco doesn't look at you. Her jaw is set and she has gone very still, which on her is the flinch.

"He's American," she says. "They sign anything."

The clerk ignores her. He turns the quill around and holds it out to you, feather first, over a form that will record crate 19 as received short and in your custody.

The Ministry car is three minutes out of Gringotts when the fog comes down. Not London fog. Too white, too fast, swallowing the Embankment lamps one by one. The driver swears and brakes. Muggle headlights smear past in the far lane and vanish.

Crate 19 is strapped to the seat between you and Draco Malfoy. She already has her wand out, low, under the line of the window.

"That isn't weather," she says.

Something lands on the roof and the car rocks. A figure masked in grey steps out of the fog at the bonnet and levels a wand at the driver, who freezes with both hands on the wheel.

The rear door on Draco's side tears off its hinges and goes spinning toward the river. A hand reaches in for the crate strap.

Draco's Stunner misses by an inch and blows out the window behind the man. She is fast. She is also shaking, she knows it, and her second spell comes out wrong. A curse scorches the seat where her shoulder was, because she has thrown herself across the strap instead of away from it.

"The crate," she gets out. "Don't let them have the crate."

The one on the roof drops through the gap. Three of them now. The fog is a spell, which means someone is holding it somewhere close, and the Statute of Secrecy ends at the edge of that white.

The masked hand closes on the buckle.

The practice yard behind the Whitehall Annex is sand over stone, chalked into a dueling ring. Twenty trainees lean on the rail in charcoal coats. The instructor, a grey-haired witch with an Auror's limp, reads the pairings off a clipboard without looking up.

"Malfoy. Tyler."

A laugh runs down the rail. Someone mutters, "Now we find out." Someone else says, "Ten Sickles the Yank's stories are made up."

Harry Potter is at the end of the rail with his arms folded. He doesn't bet. He watches.

Draco Malfoy steps into the ring and sheds her coat, folding it over the rail with care. Black sleeves pushed to the elbow, platinum hair pinned tight. Twenty-one, very good at this, and she wants the whole rail to know it.

"They say you did something in America bad enough that MACUSA sealed your file," she says, loud enough to carry. "I think you filed a report late."

She bows exactly as deep as the rules require and not an inch deeper.

"Standard rules. Disarm or ring-out. No Unforgivables, no blood." The instructor finally looks up. "Evening postings go up after this. Loser carries the crate."

Draco's wand comes up to guard. Her eyes move over your stance, your hands, the fact that your sleeves are still down.

"Whenever you're ready, American."

The records room at the Annex shuts at nine. The lamps are down to a blue night-glow and the filing charms tick like a slow clock. You aren't the only trainee who knows the counter-charm on the door.

Draco Malfoy is at the long table at the back with the ledger from crate 19 open in front of her. This afternoon she told the instructors she could not read past its first page. She is reading it now, quill moving fast, a second sheet filling with neat columns in her own hand. Her coat hangs over the chair, the probation thread on the cuff in plain view. Ink to the wrist.

A drawer clicks shut on its own. She looks up and sees you.

She doesn't hide the sheet. She puts her palm flat on it.

"You're not on the night roster."

Neither is she. Midnight check-in is in forty minutes.

"I can read about a third of it," she says. "More than I told them. Less than they'll assume. If I say a third, they'll want the rest by Friday, and I won't have it, and that's a hearing."

She turns the copy so you can see a column of names. Half are struck through in the original. One line near the bottom has been scraped to bare parchment.

"So. You can report me." Her chin comes up, but her voice drops. "Or you can help me work out who wanted that line gone."

The residence corridor goes quiet after the midnight check-in. Probationers sign the duty book at the end of the hall and are meant to be in their rooms by ten past. It's a quarter past when someone knocks on your door. Twice, softly, the way people knock when they don't want the portraits to hear.

Draco Malfoy is in the corridor in a dark jumper and trousers instead of the coat, hair down for once, platinum against black wool. Her arms are folded tight across her chest, and a stiff edge of parchment shows under one of them.

"Don't," she says first. "I know what time it is."

She glances down the corridor toward the duty book, then back.

"Two pages from the crate. They aren't on the inventory, because I took them out before the inventory, because they're in my family's shorthand and I wanted to read them before anyone with a red pen did." Flat and quick, like she rehearsed it on the stairs and still hates it. "Probationers' rooms get searched. Yours doesn't."

She doesn't step forward. She doesn't leave.

"I'm not asking you to read them. I'm asking you to keep them wherever Americans keep things, for one night, and not ask me what's on them."

Footsteps on the far stairs. A warder doing rounds, early. Draco's eyes flick toward the sound and back to you, and for once her chin isn't raised at all.

The Leaky Cauldron is loud on a Friday three years into the peace: Ministry clerks, a Harpies reserve squad, smoke under the low beams. The 2001 cohort has the back corner after a practical that went badly for nearly everyone. Coats over chairs. A round nobody can afford.

"And then," says a trainee called Pryce, in a terrible American accent, "he ended a goblin rebellion in Ohio, single-handed, and dueled a Thunderbird, and invented the Fourth of July."

The table laughs. Harry Potter, at the far end, doesn't, and says nothing.

Draco Malfoy is at the near end with her third firewhisky, coat off, the probation cuff draped over the chair-back where anyone can see it. Her cheeks are pink. She laughs too, a beat late and a little thin.

"Malfoy. You're his partner," Pryce says. "Is any of it true, or is the Yank a fraud?"

Every head turns to her, then, one by one, to you at the end of the table.

Draco takes her time. She turns her glass a quarter turn on the wood.

"I'll tell you what I know," she says. "He's slow on paperwork and his posture is appalling."

The table roars. Draco doesn't look at you. She drinks. Under the table, her boot hooks the leg of the empty chair beside her and pushes it out a few inches, toward you.

The Reconciliation Office is on Level Five, in the Department of International Magical Cooperation, behind an enchanted window that shows a grey Thames morning. Hermione Granger has the corner desk, stacked with case files in pink tape.

She is twenty-two, hair pulled back hard, sleeves rolled, a Muggle biro behind one ear. She doesn't stand.

"Sit, please. This isn't a disciplinary. I don't have the authority for one, and I wouldn't want it." She turns a page. "Crate 19 left Gringotts fourteen ounces light. It was opened in transit, against my written request. I've just spoken to Trainee Malfoy."

Through the glass partition you can see Draco Malfoy on a hard bench in the corridor, coat buttoned to the throat, staring at the wall as if she could wear a hole in it.

"She says you opened it," Hermione says. "She says she objected, and you overruled her, because the weight was wrong and you didn't trust the escort."

She looks up for the first time. Her eyes are steady and tired.

"It's a good account. Tidy. It protects her probation and costs you a reprimand you'd survive." She sets the quill down. "I'd like to know whether it's true. If it isn't, someone else opened that crate and she's covering for them, or for herself, and I need to know which before I put anything in writing."