A/N: It is important to remember throughout the story that the Trace on underage wizards can only tell when magic is being performed around them, not who actually performed it. So the ministry is unlikely to bother any underage wizard in the company of wizarding adults, trusting the parents to keep the children behaving.

Prologue: Godmother

Lucius Malfoy was not a man who liked taking "no" for an answer. He was a wealthy, influential pureblood wizard with friends in high places and a cut-throat reputation that frightened nearly everyone he met, and he was comfortably used to getting his way.

It was odd, looking back, to think that it was his own greed and ambition that started it all…

-0-

It wasn't like he wanted anything particularly difficult from the reclusive Draega Black. He simply felt that, as his wife's aunt, the eccentric old lady ought to floo into London once in a blue moon, get a little involved with the family, perhaps endorse his particular branch of it, help out the Dark Lord in his effort to elevate purebloods such as herself—simple enough, for her, or so Lucius thought, anyway. However, at eighty-two years old, the witch had absolutely no desire to leave her New Zealand estate, and even less desire to have anything to do with the Malfoy family, or Lord Voldemort.

And so, in true Slytherin fashion, Lucius decided to go at the problem from another angle.

"We would be so honored if you would agree…" Narcissa had a way with inflections, Lucius marveled—not for the first time—as he listened in on her fire-call to her aunt. It probably helped that she was six months pregnant, sitting in a rocking chair, and presiding over several pairs of magical knitting needles as they looped pastel green yarn into baby socks and receiving blankets. The perfect picture of maternal health, the wizard thought approvingly. In front of the pregnant witch, the Malfoys' tall fireplace blazed with white flames, showing a slightly flickering image of Draega Black herself, seated comfortably in an overstuffed armchair in her living-room at Dragenwold manor.

"If it's a girl, she'll be Draega, and if it's a boy, he'll be Draco," Narcissa continued conversationally.

"I'm rather too old to be anybody's god-anything," Draega grumbled, but Lucius could hear her caving.

"Nonsense," Narcissa chuckled. "You're the picture of health. Besides, father always spoke so highly of you. I want my child to have close ties to both sides of the family. Diversity is such an asset, don't you think?"

It took a three hour conversation about child-rearing and middle-name-choosing and post-natal care before Draega was willing to at least think about Narcissa's proposal, but Lucius knew that she was leaning towards saying yes. No one could refuse his wife anything, if she wanted it badly enough to put her mind towards getting it.

"Are you sure this is a good idea?" she asked him after the sixth pinch of floo powder had burned out and they'd disconnected the call.

"Of course," Lucius responded with a raised eyebrow. "All ulterior motives aside, think of the advantage this will bring to our child." And to the Dark Lord, he added privately. If he could get Draega to come out of seclusion, his master would reward him beyond his wildest dreams…

"It just feels like we're… bartering her away before she's even born," Narcissa murmured, stroking her stomach gently.

"He will be the better off for it," Lucius assured her, and she glared up at him playfully.

"She had better not curse us for naming her Draega," The witch observed, selecting some pale gold yarn and weaving it onto a free pair of needles.

"He will love the name Draco," Lucius shot back.

Although Draega Black did not attend Draco Malfoy's birth, preferring to remain comfortably in her home and receive an announcement, she did, at last agree to be his godmother.

"It's slow going," Lucius explained respectfully to the Dark Lord, "but you, My Lord, did say that she didn't respond well to a direct approach." Draega Black was, apparently, so paranoid that someone—such as the up-and-coming Lord Voldemort—would try to get her to join the outside world that she'd put up a fortress's worth of protective enchantments on Dragenwold, and almost never left. Voldemort would've had to spend days and an immense amount of power breaking them just to get in to talk to her.

"You have done well, Malfoy," the Dark Lord murmured, and pride filled Lucius's veins like alcohol as he left the room.

Draega Black, for her part, was no fool. She knew when she was being manipulated, and there was a part of her—the part that had gotten her sorted into Slytherin house almost three-quarters of a century ago—that missed this sort of mind-game. A much larger part of her—the part that had developed as she matured and realized that she never wanted to be confined by all this traditional pureblood codswallop—simply wanted what Narcissa had unwittingly offered her. A chance to pass on her beliefs and values to a new generation. Since she'd never had children of her own (being unable to settle down long enough, when she was younger) she'd never had the chance to shape a young mind and watch it grow. She coveted that chance.

Anyhow, she knew she could beat anything Lucius Malfoy threw her way—she had decades of experience on him when it came to pulling other people's strings.

-0-

It was a little less than two years later that revels in the streets and shooting stars in broad daylight heralded the completely unexpected fall of the Dark Lord. The most devoted—and most foolhardy—of the Death Eaters were sent to Azkaban. The cleverer and more connected followers feigned awakening from trances, or else simply sold out their comrades for their own freedom. Narcissa's people skills withstood the greatest test of her life when she and her husband stood trial, and she unabashedly blamed every wrong they'd ever been caught committing on her fanatical, already-imprisoned-for-life sister and her abilities with Unforgivable Curses. The Malfoys returned home that night, free and clear, but without any clear direction about what to do next.

The years passed by in a hazy blur of lying, bribing, and watching Draco grow. When he was five years old, Narcissa brought him to visit his godmother in person for the first time. He stayed for a week, came home, complained that it was boring and he hated it there, and begged not to be made to go the next year. However, as his mother firmly explained to him, purebloods did not whine, and they respected their elders. So, a few months later, he went back to New Zealand for a two-week stretch. Then, that summer, he spent a month with his great aunt.

By his seventh birthday, he wasn't complaining about it anymore. In fact, he'd come full circle and started demanding to spend the whole summer with "Aunt Dee" every year, an idea that Lucius would have opposed—if Narcissa hadn't preempted and agreed to it before he got home. She knew that her aunt was an odd bird, and that she and her husband were doing everything in their power to raise Draco right. But she liked what she saw in her son when he came home from his visits. Somehow he seemed more vibrant—more alive. When she asked her aunt what the secret was, Draega would get a little gleam in her eyes, and give a different answer every time, saying anything from "baking cookies" to "battling dragons," always with the same expression, so Narcissa could never quite tell which responses were jokes and which were serious answers.

Draco was nine when his godmother's health became so frail that she was confined to a wheelchair. Lucius thought for sure the he would lose interest in visiting her, but Draco still insisted on spending the summer with her. Narcissa would fire-call on weekends as usual, and see Draco sitting on a pouf near Draega's knee, reading to her out of old storybooks, or else across from her at a low table playing an unfamiliar card game that he later identified as "blackjack," (whatever that was).

The summer Draco turned eleven, Lucius insisted that he remain at the main estate, and only visit his godmother for two weeks. They wouldn't see him all year while he was at school, his father explained, and Draco complied… after throwing an epic tantrum and pretending to have the flu so he could stay at Dragenwold for an extra two days. The truth of the matter was this: it was all very well and good that Draco enjoyed his aunt's company, but Lucius was deeply concerned that if she was the last person to influence him before he formally entered wizarding society for the first time, he would most likely embarrass the family.

And right he was to be concerned, though he wouldn't know it until much later.

Draco did well in school, and conducted himself as a respectable pureblood ought to do. He visited his godmother two weeks each summer, and minded his manners when he was home. Then, as Draco's fourth year wound to a close, the unimaginable happened. To Lucius and Narcissa's equal terror and joy, the Dark Lord rose again from the edge of death. He and his fellows flocked to their master's side as he awakened in the graveyard, and their brotherhood prepared to climb again to power.

The Dark Lord explained to Lucius some of the forms of magic that he had studied while in exile, and told him briefly about the incredible power that Draega Black possessed. Personally, Lucius was unable to understand the difference between "Empathy" and Legilemency and the Imperius Curse, but if his master wanted an eccentric, reclusive, crippled and almost blind old lady with some kind of legendary power on his side, Lucius was hardly going to refuse him. Using the floo connection they'd set up for Draco, he brought his master right into the heart of Dragenwold.

"I'm ninety-seven years old, and can neither see nor walk," Draega Black had informed the Dark Lord in the same crisp, no-nonsense voice that she would have used to tell Draco that it was much too rainy to go to the swimming hole. "I'm far too old and fragile to fight in any war. Now if you would please get out of my house and leave me to my quiet retirement."

It was the wrong thing to say.

Voldemort, you see, was also accustomed to getting his own way.

A/N: X