A castle. They lived in a literal castle.
Lucius Malfoy dug his fingers into the silver snakehead of his walking stick, using the physical pressure to maintain his composure. It was a monumental effort. How could anyone be expected to keep their face impassive when confronted with the utter absurdity of his brother-in-law residing in a fortress?
Lucius had expected a manor. Something grand, imposing, and entirely predictable for a ducal house of the Blacks' stature. He had anticipated something like Blackwood, perhaps smaller with a few modern luxuries of their time.
Instead, he was staring at a sprawling medieval stronghold.
It was infuriating. The Malfoy Manor was a masterpiece of refined, elegant architecture, but a castle carried a primal, ancient weight of sovereignty that pure bloodlines dreamed of. To think that Sirius Black—the blood-traitor exile who had spent years turning his back on his heritage—was now sitting upon a throne of ancient stone. It defied all sense of aristocratic justice.
Lucius could not help but look around the moment he, Narcissa, and Draco crossed the threshold of Blacktide Castle.
Esmeralda had granted them immediate access via the Floo network, though she herself had remained behind at Malfoy Manor. Their father was rapidly nearing the highly infectious stage of Dragonpox, and Esmeralda was preparing for the worst of it. It would seem the timeline is more accelerated as expected. It could be due to his father's age, but no one knows for sure when it comes to Dragonpox.
Apparently, Esmeralda intended to harvest blood samples from Abraxas the exact moment the infection peaked for her Dragonpox cure research. Lucius still harbored deep reservations about the arrangement. In the sacred circles of the old nobility, the mere idea of an outsider possessing one's blood was completely abhorrent. Blood was the ultimate conduit. It could be weaponized in devastating dark rituals or can be used in many ancient potions that will affect the family carrying that blood.
Was that what Esmeralda was attempting? A specialized cure from the inside out? That has never worked before.
Lucius tightly gripped his walking stick, forcing down his anxiety. He took comfort in at least one indisputable fact. Esmeralda is family and knows to be cautious about their blood. She may be married to a Black, but her blood is still Malfoy and her children half Malfoys. If his father's blood had to be drawn for an experiment, it was far better that it remained in the hands of family rather than a stranger.
Sirius Black was currently guiding them towards the guest wing, dressed in casual, unstructured robes that made it insultingly clear he did not consider their arrival a formal affair.
Then again, Lucius thought bitterly, when had the man ever considered anything formal?
This was the same rogue who barged into Malfoy Manor and cheerfully introduced the Head of the House of Malfoy as 'Uncle Lucy' to his children and whose daughter had, only moments later, looked Draco dead in the eye and told him he was ugly straight to his face. Protocol, tradition, aristocratic decorum? Sirius Black trampled over them all with a smirk.
And this was the man destined to inherit the absolute peak of pure-blood society? The man who will take over the House of Black. The mere thought of it gave Lucius a pounding headache. The future of the British wizarding aristocracy was going to be an unmitigated nightmare.
"Here we are. What do you think, Cissy?" Sirius asked, swinging open a pair of heavy, dark oak doors to reveal the chambers where Narcissa and Draco would be staying.
Lucius stepped into the room, preparing to find some flaw, some sign of rugged, drafty medieval discomfort. Instead, his words died in his throat.
The suite was a masterpiece of aristocratic indulgence, seamlessly blending the fortified strength of the castle with unparalleled luxury. Large, enchanted bay windows overlooked the sea, bathing the room in a warm, gentle glow that entirely bypassed the typical chill of stone walls. Deep, plush velvet rugs in muted silver and midnight blue lined the floors, but it was the furniture that drew Lucius's immediate, sharp attention.
In the center of the room sat a massive, exquisitely carved canopy bed, accompanied by a sprawling, anatomically perfect chaise lounge. The wood was a rare, deep ebony, but it was the luminescent, pearlescent sheen woven into the joints and trim that caught the light.
Moonstone.
Lucius's eyes narrowed as he traced the immaculate silver-white veins pulsing faintly within the headboard and the armrests. Not just any moonstone. This was S-grade, flawless cut material, utilized as a high-end crafting exchange to manifest furniture of absurdly high magical durability and comfort. The magic radiating from the chaise lounge was specifically tailored for soothing physical strain. It was the ultimate luxury for a pregnant noblewoman, designed to alleviate tension and cradle her perfectly.
To use raw, priceless S-grade moonstone—materials that ministries heavily regulated and families hoarded for centuries—just to furnish a guest wing bedroom? It was a sickening display of wealth.
Narcissa stepped forward, her hand resting gently over her small bump. She was starting to show. A rare, genuine expression of relief softened her elegant features as she ran a delicate hand over the moonstone-infused fabric of the lounge.
"It is... magnificent, Sirius," Narcissa murmured, her voice carrying a rare note of genuine appreciation.
Sirius offered a casual shrug, though a smug, knowing grin tugged at his lips as he caught Lucius staring at the craftsmanship. "Only the best for my cousin." Then he turned, "Libby!"
With a soft crack, a house-elf appeared, bowing so low her long ears swept the velvet rug.
"This is Libby," Sirius said, gesturing to her. "She will be personally taking care of you during your stay here at Blacktide."
Sirius then looked down at the elf, his tone shifting effortlessly into casual authority. "Libby, you are at Lady Narcissa and Draco's disposal when they are here in Blacktide. Whatever they require, you see to it immediately."
"Libby understands, Master Sirius," the elf piped up, her large eyes shining with fierce discipline as she turned to curtsy deeply to the guests. "Libby will obey Lady Narcissa and Master Draco in all things."
"How about you, Draco? Want to see where your room is?" Sirius turned to his tiny nephew with a warm grin.
Draco didn't answer immediately, instead turning his large grey eyes up to his parents, seeking permission.
"Is his room far from here, Sirius?" Narcissa asked.
"Not at all," Sirius said, stepping toward a pair of beautifully carved adjoining doors near the master bed. "We figured it would be best to connect your chambers directly to his, so you can easily check on him whenever you need."
Sirius pushed the doors open, and Draco cautiously peered inside.
The room was bright. Whites and creams and soft silver accents, the stone walls covered in enchanted murals where mythical creatures drifted lazily across painted skies. A perfectly child-sized bed sat against the far wall. Lucius noted the moonstone in the frame briefly. Draco had already stopped listening to anything the room's craftsmanship had to say.
There was a stuffed dragon in the corner.
It was small and round and apparently emitted rings of lavender smoke, a detail Draco discovered within approximately four seconds of entering the room. He looked up at Narcissa with the expression of a five-year-old exercising enormous restraint.
Narcissa gave a small nod.
Draco crossed the room with considerably more speed than his usual formal stride and picked up the dragon. It puffed. He puffed back at it, his face entirely serious about this interaction.
Lucius watched his son investigate the reading nook, the bookshelf, the enchanted toys with the focused intensity of someone conducting an important survey, and felt the specific, complicated feeling of a father watching his child be effortlessly delighted by something another man had provided.
He said nothing about this either.
"Well." He adjusted his grip on his cane. "This is... adequate."
"Adequate?" Sirius turned to him, an amused brow arched.
"I simply did not expect you to waste S-grade moonstones on your guest quarters," Lucius said, his tone carrying the careful indifference of a man who had practiced it.
"Just the guest rooms?" Sirius chuckled, leaning against the doorframe. "Lucy. Did you not look at the corridor on your way in?"
Lucius frowned. While Narcissa settled into the chair beside Draco, watching him arrange his new dragon against the pillows, Lucius turned back toward the threshold and looked.
His breath caught in his throat.
Placed perfectly between the towering archways were exquisite marble console tables, each displaying priceless silver artifacts that practically hummed with ancient wards. Beside them stood towering, immaculate suits of armor, their joint-crevices gleaming with that unmistakable, pearlescent S-grade moonstone polish.
The only things devoid of the high-end material were the heavy oil paintings lining the walls. In the wizarding world, paintings could never be replicated or conjured by magic. They required an artist to painstakingly capture a fraction of a witch or wizard's living soul and conscious magic within enchanted oils. But everything else—every table, every torch sconce, every piece of decorative guard-armor, every light fixture—was laced with the legendary stone.
Sirius hadn't just furnished a bedroom. He had reinforced the structural and decorative magic of the entire castle.
The scale of it settled over him slowly, the way cold water settled. Not all at once but incrementally, each new detail adding its weight to the last.
The House of Black had always been wealthy. Everyone knew this in the abstract way they knew the sky was large. It was a fact that existed at a comfortable distance. Standing inside the evidence of it was different. The moonstones alone represented a sum that most noble families would consider a generational expenditure. Sirius had used them on corridor sconces.
Lucius thought of Malfoy Manor. Immaculate. Carefully maintained. Every expenditure considered, every acquisition deliberate, the fortune managed with the precision of a man who understood that wealth required tending or it diminished.
He thought of the maintenance fees. The accounts he reviewed each quarter with the careful attention of someone who could not afford to be careful, though he would have died before admitting it.
He said nothing.
"The children's wing is further along," Sirius said, with the easy tone of a man discussing something entirely unremarkable. "The children are already aware you are here. When Draco is ready to meet with them, I'll take him to the playroom."
"Mm," Lucius said.
It was not a word. It was the sound a man made when he had run out of safe things to say and had decided that silence was the only dignified option remaining.
Sirius looked at him for just a moment and then looked away.
"I'll leave you to settle in," he said pleasantly, and went back down the corridor the way he had come, hands in his pockets, entirely unbothered.
Lucius watched him go.
He was not envious. He was simply — recalibrating. Yes, recalibrating. Updating an assessment that had been operating on incomplete information. That was all.
He looked at the corridor one more time. At the moonstone catching the light in the torch sconces.
He was going to be recalibrating for quite some time.
*****
The trinkets had been accumulating for two weeks.
Abraxas had not asked about them. He had looked at them. The small, inexplicable collection gathering on the windowsill and the bedside table. There was a drawing, enthusiastically applied, depicting what appeared to be either a man in a bed or a particularly rectangular cat. Unsigned, though the style suggested the artist was very young and very confident about their work.
There was a smooth grey pebble, placed with the deliberateness of something chosen rather than found accidentally. Beside it, a small bundle of dried wildflowers tied with kitchen string, the kind of thing someone had gathered from wherever wildflowers grew and thought worth sending.
There was, inexplicably, a button. Large, slightly iridescent, of no obvious origin. It had arrived wrapped in a piece of brown paper with no note.
And there was a folded piece of parchment, covered in careful, slightly uneven handwriting that belonged to a child who had recently learned to form letters and was taking the responsibility seriously. Get well, Grandpa.
Abraxas had read it twice. He had then placed it back on the bedside table with the others and looked at the ceiling for some time.
Esme came in the morning as she always did. She drew her wand and began the diagnostic sequence she had performed every day for the past several weeks. It was the same careful passes, the same precise monitoring of the same indicators, her eyes tracking the results with the focused efficiency of someone who had done this long enough that her hands knew the work without being told.
Abraxas watched her from the bed.
She had her mother's posture. He had not allowed himself to notice this before and was noticing it now.
"La progression est stable," she said, more to herself than to him, making a note on the parchment beside the potions. "The fever has not risen since yesterday. That is — encouraging, for now."
"For now," he repeated.
"For now," she confirmed, without softening it.
He was quiet for a moment. She moved to the second diagnostic, her wand tracing the pattern she had explained to him once and he had not asked about again.
"Esmeralda."
She did not look up. "Oui?"
"Why did you come here?"
Her wand did not stop moving. The diagnostic continued without interruption.
"To treat you," she said.
"Non." He said it quietly, without accusation. "You came before you knew about this." He paused, gesturing to his scaling skin. "You came with a purpose. I have been wondering what it was since you arrived."
Esme lowered her wand.
She stood at the foot of his bed for a moment, looking at the parchment in her hand rather than at him. Then she set it down on the bedside table, beside Corvus's letter, and she looked at her father.
"Oui," she said. "I did."
She pulled the chair to the bedside and sat down. Not the healer's position, not the chair she used when she was monitoring him, the one angled toward her instruments and her notes. The other chair. The one that faced him directly.
"I came," she said carefully, "because of something that happened on Samhain."
Abraxas said nothing. He waited.
"I consulted a medium," Esme said. The lie was smooth, practiced, the version she had decided on before she ever walked through his door that first morning. She gave him the shape of the truth without the part that involved Lyra. "My mother came through."
The room was very quiet.
"She was, — " Esme continued, choosing each word with the precision she brought to things that mattered, "— furious. Not at me. At — the situation. She found out I was married to a Black." She looked at him steadily. "She seemed to believe that some arrangement had been made. Something regarding me. Something she felt had been violated." A pause. "She did not tell me what it was. She came through angry and she left angry and I still do not have an answer."
She folded her hands in her lap.
"So, I came to ask you."
Abraxas looked at her for a long moment. The expression on his face was not the one he wore when he was managing something; the careful, composed arrangement of a man who had spent his life controlling what rooms could see of him. It was something older than that. Something that had been sitting behind the composure for longer than this conversation.
He looked at the window. At the grey November light that Esme forced in every morning regardless of his opinion on the matter.
He did not answer immediately.
Which was, Esme had learned from years of difficult patients, its own kind of answer.
"Well?" Esme broke the silence. "Shouldn't you tell me?"
"I can't."
"Why not?!"
"It was part of the arrangement."
"That, — " Esme said, and her voice had the quality it had when she was past the point of precision and into something rawer underneath, "— is exactly the point!" She stood. "You and Maman made an arrangement that involves me. Me! Who grew up in France because of whatever that arrangement required. Who grew up without a father, without a brother, carrying a family name that meant something in the world I was living in." She looked at him with the flat, clear-eyed anger of someone who had been reasonable for a very long time and had reached the edge of it. "I came to every function I was invited to and was treated like a guest in my own family's house. I wrote to you when my mother died and you did not answer. You did not even bother to come."
The last two words landed in the room without drama. They didn't need any.
"I am a Malfoy," she continued, quieter now but no less precise, "in coloring and in blood and in absolutely nothing else. Because whatever you and my mother decided, it was decided without me, and I have been living inside the consequences of it my entire life without being told what it was."
"You are a Malfoy," Abraxas said. "Your coloring—"
"My coloring." She said it the way you repeated something that had just revealed itself as inadequate. "That is what I am to you. A coloring?"
"That is not what I meant."
"Then tell me what you meant," Esme said. "Tell me what the arrangement was. Tell me why my mother came through a medium after years of silence and the first thing she felt thinking you made some arrange marriage for me and broke a promise! Tell me what was worth all of this."
Abraxas looked at her.
The composure was still there. But underneath it something was shifting, the way old stone shifted when the foundation beneath it had finally been asked to hold too much.
"I can't," he said again. But it was different this time. Not a refusal, but something closer to an admission. "It is not — this is not only about you, Esmeralda."
"Then who—"
"Your sister." The words came out before he could arrange them properly, a rare slip in the perfect Malfoy composure. "Pandora. The arrangement is not about you. You were never — it was always about Pandora."
The room went utterly still.
Esme stared at him, the anger in her chest suddenly freezing over into profound shock. Pandora. Her younger sister. Pandora Malfoy.
A sickening wave of guilt hit her as the realization settled in. Esme was not proud to admit it, even to herself, but in the years of her self-imposed exile, she had completely compartmentalized her childhood. She had forgotten. She wasn't the only daughter of the Malfoys. There was another one, a sister left behind in the very house Esme had been barred from. The one sister her own mother refused to acknowledge and talk about it.
"What —" Esme started, her voice cutting off.
"Qu'est-ce que—" She caught herself, the French slipping out in her panic. She instantly forced her healer's composure back up like a shield, though the cold professionalism didn't quite reach her eyes.
"What does Pandora have to do with this?"
"Everything."
Silence.
"Well?" Esme's arms were crossed, the fury still present and entirely visible in her eyes.
"I can't tell you."
"Nom de Dieu—"
"I can," Abraxas said, "if you are all present."
Esme stopped.
"What?"
Abraxas looked at her with the expression of a man who had decided and found it, against all expectation, something close to a relief. "I am going to die anyway," he said, with the matter-of-fact quality of someone who had been sitting with this long enough that it had stopped requiring ceremony. "I might as well tell the truth. But everyone should be present to hear it." A pause. "I think you all deserve that."
Esme looked at him for a long moment.
The anger was still there. It didn't disappear simply because he had said something unexpected. But underneath it something had shifted — the quality of the silence between them changing from the silence of a confrontation into something that did not yet have a name.
"Everyone," she said carefully. "You mean Lucius."
"And Pandora."
Esme was quiet.
Pandora, who had not spoken to this family in years. Pandora, who existed at the edge of everything Esme knew about her own history and never quite addressed.
"I will have to find her first," Esme said.
"The Lovegoods are not difficult to locate," Abraxas said. The name came out with the careful neutrality of someone who had known it for some time and had chosen, until now, to do nothing with that knowledge.
Esme looked at him.
He did not look away, but he did not elaborate either. The implication sat between them without being addressed. That he had known where Pandora was, had always known, and had done nothing about it. Which was a complete opposite with Esme because her father didn't know where she was.
"No," Esme said, after a moment. "I imagine they are not."
She picked up her wand and resumed the diagnostic without another word.
The silver tip of her wand traced the familiar, glowing arcs through the heavy air, the soft hum of the diagnostic charm returning to fill the silence between them. It was the same routine she had performed a hundred times, but the rhythm felt altered now. The numbers floating in the air were no longer just indicators of decaying lungs and failing blood; they were a countdown.