There were two staircases leading to the basement of Malfoy Manor.
Arthur Weasley, of the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office, believed he knew precisely where both of them led. He had, in his own estimation, conducted a thorough inspection.
One staircase descended to the potions-making room that Narcissa Malfoy had recently fitted out for her son. It was well-supplied — rows of ingredient jars, preservation shelves, a workbench of considerable size — and the collection of cauldrons, including several in pure gold, said something about the Malfoy family's approach to equipping their heir. Arthur paused in front of those cauldrons briefly and moved on.
The second staircase led to what was clearly an old dungeon. The iron fittings on the doors and pillars bore the marks of long use, and the floor had accumulated a layer of dust that suggested years of genuine disuse.
"What exactly was this for?" Arthur walked the perimeter, raising a small cloud with each step, and sneezed. He looked at the walls with professional scepticism.
"A relic of history." Lucius remained in the doorway, which was as far as he had any intention of going. He stroked the head of his cane with the composed ease of a man who is accustomed to waiting for unpleasant things to conclude. "We haven't used it in a very long time. I'll grant it isn't decorative, but architectural age alone isn't grounds for a restricted classification, is it?"
Arthur looked around once more. There was genuinely nothing here. Dust, stone, and the residual embarrassment of having been brought to look at dust and stone by a tip that was becoming less credible by the minute.
He glanced at Perkins, who was pressing one hand to his lower back and suppressing a third sneeze.
"Nothing here," Arthur said. "Let's move on."
Lucius led them up the stairs. His expression as he walked ahead of them was that of a man exercising considerable restraint.
"The Malfoy family has always maintained a cooperative relationship with the Ministry," he said, as they crossed the entrance hall. "I confess I find it difficult to understand why a department would direct its resources toward inspecting households with our record of compliance. If your office continues to arrive unannounced, I will consider discussing the matter with Cornelius directly."
"An unannounced inspection is the point," Arthur said, without breaking stride. "You can't conduct a meaningful surprise inspection by notifying people in advance. The Ministry has sanctioned the method. As for why the Malfoys — we received reports, and they weren't without substance."
The grey eyes turned on him then — flat and very cold.
Lucius Malfoy did not raise his voice. He rarely needed to. "If you treat every piece of slander your enemies produce as credible intelligence, you'll spend the rest of your career searching empty rooms and breathing other people's dust. I hope, at least, that they compensate you accordingly."
His gaze moved, slowly and deliberately, down the length of Arthur's robes.
"Evidently not."
Arthur's face went red. "We have very different ideas about what constitutes a waste of a Ministry official's time, Malfoy."
"Clearly. A man who devotes his career to protecting the interests of Muggles — who don't know he exists and therefore cannot thank him — while his own family wants for decent robes and proper school supplies." Lucius's smile was pleasant and perfectly calibrated. "I simply wonder if they'll share your priorities, when they're old enough to have their own."
It was the kind of remark that couldn't be effectively answered and wasn't meant to be.
Perkins tugged at Arthur's sleeve. "Let's go."
Arthur straightened, squared his shoulders, and looked directly at Lucius. "We'll be back if more reports come in. That's the job, and I intend to do it."
"Goodbye," Lucius said, and closed the gate.
The sound of it shutting carried rather well.
He stood for a moment in the drive and then went inside.
"Arthur Weasley," he said to Narcissa, who was descending the staircase as he entered. "That family ought to have been removed from the Sacred Twenty-Eight long before it happened. He lives in what amounts to a field, he has seven children he cannot adequately provide for, and he stands in my doorway discussing the relative merits of pure-blood tradition."
"Don't give him the satisfaction of taking it personally," Narcissa said, with the calm of someone who has seen her husband angry before and knows precisely how to manage it. "People like that are occasionally useful to someone else's agenda — I suspect this inspection wasn't his own initiative. Someone pointed him at us. He's too guileless to have constructed a strategy."
Lucius's expression shifted fractionally. "Fudge didn't sanction this."
"I doubt it. Cornelius would have mentioned it, or found a way to delay it. Weasley went around him." Narcissa reached the bottom of the stairs and brushed an imaginary speck from her husband's shoulder. "Which means someone else is the problem, and Weasley is simply the instrument. He's committed enough to the instrument role that he's not going to stop on his own."
"Wonderful," Lucius said drily.
"Be careful," she said. "Be thorough. And don't underestimate him simply because his motives are sincere rather than calculated — sincere men are often harder to discourage."
Lucius was quiet for a moment. Then: "Draco."
Draco, who had been standing at the top of the second-floor landing for the better part of the exchange, looking down through the balusters, straightened.
"Come down for dinner at the usual time," his father said, and turned toward the study.
---
The following morning, Lucius had not entirely let go of the previous day's irritation, though it had matured overnight into something more analytical than reactive.
"The fundamental problem with Weasley," he said, over breakfast, without preamble, "isn't his politics. It's that he's an irresponsible father."
Narcissa looked up with polite interest.
"A man who cannot provide adequate material conditions for his children, who cannot give each child sufficient individual attention, who cannot ensure a proper education — that's not a principled choice, that's negligence dressed up as character." Lucius cut his toast with some precision. "Seven children. Seven. How much of your day can you dedicate to a single child when you have seven? Can they receive adequate tutoring, targeted development, meaningful guidance? I've heard they wear hand-me-downs and use secondhand textbooks."
"It does seem impossible to do it properly," Narcissa said thoughtfully. "Raising Draco has required constant attention. Preschool education alone took years of planning. Tailoring his development to his particular talents. I cannot imagine dividing that across seven."
"You've had enough difficulty with one." Lucius reached under the table and took her hand. "I have no wish to repeat the experience."
Narcissa returned the pressure of his hand, saying nothing.
"Draco." Lucius turned to his son with a sudden, slightly ferocious air of parental feeling. "You understand, don't you, the effort your mother put into bringing you into the world? You are not to make her angry. Do you hear me?"
Father, Draco thought, this is a somewhat unconventional way to express family feeling.
He nodded seriously and met his mother's eyes with what he hoped conveyed adequate filial appreciation.
"Lucius, don't alarm him. He's always been very good." Narcissa smiled at Draco, then looked back at her husband. "I don't regret a moment of it. He is the finest child in the world."
Draco lowered his eyes over his breakfast plate.
He knew better than to say what he was thinking, which was that the Weasley children were, individually, rather accomplished — Bill with his Gringotts career and twelve O.W.L.s, Charlie and his near-professional Quidditch prospects, Percy bearing down on the Ministry like a force of nature. They had not had Draco's advantages and had done rather more with less.
But Narcissa only had eyes for her son, and her son had the sense to eat his breakfast quietly.
---
Several letters had accumulated in the mechanical desk by the time he got to them.
The first was from Ron — short, slightly misspelled, and entirely characteristic: he'd gone to get Harry. He had a plan. Thank Draco for the heads-up.
The second was from Hermione. Harry was rescued, which was wonderful. When exactly had Draco and Ron become friends? She would be in Diagon Alley on the twelfth of August. Harry and Ron would be around the same time. Was there a chance of seeing him there?
The third was from Harry.
He didn't mind about the house-elf — he was more curious than anything else. He knew Draco had been worried. If Draco hadn't tipped off Ron, he'd likely have lost his temper and tried something with magic, which would have made everything considerably worse. He'd had a good time at the Weasleys'. They were all going to Diagon Alley on the twelfth. Was Draco coming?
Draco set the letters aside and went down to the basement.
---
Arthur Weasley had been correct about two things.
The potion-making room was where he believed it to be, and the old dungeon was where he believed it to be.
He had not been correct that those were the only things in the basement.
Draco passed through the hidden door behind the potion-making room's bookshelves, moved along a passage that ran parallel to the outer wall, past the broom room and the wand room, and arrived at a blank expanse of stone.
He pressed a small, unremarkable protrusion in the wall. A door opened.
This was the restricted collection room, situated directly beneath the drawing room above. It was the room Dobby had mentioned — the one where the nameless Horcrux notebook had been found.
A curl of pale smoke emerged as the door swung inward. Draco took two steps back and waited. When the smoke dissipated, Dobby extended a candle through the opening, held it steady, and watched the flame with the focused attention of someone who has done this before and is not interested in repeating past mistakes.
"Safe," Dobby said, with quiet certainty. "The candle stayed lit. We can go in."
Draco gave him a small nod of approval and followed him through.
"You come here regularly?" Draco asked, holding his own candle up to see by.
"Every two weeks, little master." Dobby moved between the marble shelves — carved with interlocking snake patterns, he noticed, in the Slytherin manner — with the ease of familiarity. "To clean and maintain the artefacts. The other house-elves didn't want the task. It has always been Dobby's."
"Why didn't they want it?"
"Because it's dangerous." Dobby said this with the matter-of-factness of someone for whom this consideration had long since become irrelevant. "One wrong step and you could be seriously hurt. After a while, no one else would come, so it became Dobby's job."
Draco looked at him. He had not previously given much thought to the question of which tasks the Malfoy house-elves preferred and which they avoided.
"And you simply accepted it?"
"Dobby had no choice, little master. But now—" A small, genuine smile crossed the elf's peculiar face. "Now Dobby has wages and days off. The others don't. They used to spit at Dobby for being different. Now Dobby thinks he has the better arrangement."
Draco turned to look at the shelves.
Bloodstained playing cards. Glass eyeballs, dried and clouded with age. A noose, coiled around its own hook. Rusted instruments whose purpose he preferred not to examine too closely. A skull with something small and sharp embedded in the back of it.
He recognised two things immediately: the opal necklace and the Hand of Glory. He had assumed, when he'd seen them in Borgin and Burkes in his previous life, that they had been sourced through the usual channels. Apparently not.
How many such items had his father moved through that shop? How many were still here, and how many had been quietly dispersed before yesterday's inspection?
"The number of items has decreased," Dobby said, as though reading the thought. "Dobby overheard some of the other elves. The master took several pieces to Knockturn Alley recently."
Draco had anticipated this. He had given his father sufficient warning that an inspection was likely; it would have been unlike Lucius to make no preparations at all.
He moved along the shelves, examining things without touching them.
Then he stopped.
On a lower shelf, between two tarnished silver candlesticks, sat a small, slim notebook. The cover was black, and when he held the candle close he could make out faint lettering on the front.
T. M. Riddle.
He looked at it for a long time.
"Is this the one you brought me before?" he asked Dobby.
"No, little master. The first one has been taken away by the old master. This is a different book." Dobby's voice dropped. "Dobby tried to open it once, to clean it. It was blank. But touching it — Dobby felt afraid. Very afraid. There is something wrong with it."
Draco did not pick it up. He crouched and looked at it from a few inches away in the candlelight.
T. M. Riddle. A name he had never encountered in any pure-blood family register. A name that meant nothing to him — and yet his father had kept this notebook in the most secure room in the manor, in a collection that contained some of the most genuinely dangerous objects he had ever seen.
Whatever Tom Riddle had done to this notebook, it was not ordinary. And his grandfather had been muttering about Horcruxes.
He straightened, took a last look around the room, and led Dobby back out through the stone door.
The corridor beyond was long and dark. He knew there were other doors along it — other rooms holding valuables, restricted texts, things the Malfoy family had accumulated and did not advertise. None of them would open to anyone without Malfoy blood, which was presumably why Arthur Weasley had gone home empty-handed.
He pressed the mechanism behind the bookshelf and listened to the stone settle back into place.
It was getting late. He climbed the stairs slowly, thinking.
"Dobby," he said, without turning around.
The soft patter of bare feet behind him paused. "Little master?"
"The nameless book you found for me — the one about Horcruxes. Did you ever hear anyone in the manor mention what my grandfather intended to do with the Riddle notebook?"
Dobby was quiet for a moment. "Dobby overheard a little, little master. The old master came looking for that book once, while Dobby was nearby. He was muttering to himself." A pause. "He said the word Horcrux."
Draco nodded, said nothing further, and continued up the stairs.
He went to his room and retrieved the nameless notebook from its hiding place — not the Riddle diary, but the old volume Dobby had found in the collection that contained the Horcrux research. He lay back on his bed and opened it.
It was, on reflection, less a book than a working document. Handwritten throughout in at least two different hands, fragments in what looked like Ancient Greek alongside partial English translations, with annotations in the margins that sometimes contradicted the main text and sometimes merely complicated it. Some pages were blurred past reading. Some of the translated passages broke off mid-sentence.
Someone, at some point, had been trying to produce a complete English translation from the Greek source material. They had not finished.
To understand the missing sections, he would need Ancient Greek.
He closed the notebook and put it face-down on his chest and stared at the ceiling.
He was already managing the Horcrux problem, the Riddle diary, the Chamber of Secrets, the Restorative Draught, the question of Quirrell and the remnant of Voldemort, the long-term issue of his father's allegiances, the investment in the Weasley brothers' venture, the ongoing matter of Ravenclaw's diadem, and at some point he also had to sit examinations.
And now: Ancient Greek.
Draco put the notebook aside, rolled over, and pressed his face into the pillow.
He did not, in fact, give up. But he permitted himself thirty seconds of thinking very seriously about it.
Then he got up and went to find a dictionary.