Draco Malfoy's conscience was clean. Or it should have been. His mother had gone to great lengths to spare him the indignity of having Albus Dumbledore's blood on his hands. And in her quest to foil the assassination of the headmaster, Narcissa Malfoy had orchestrated the downfall of the Dark Lord along the way. The Malfoys were their own masters once more, no longer servants to a dark and capricious master. The Dark Mark on her son's arm was nothing but an ugly scar now; it would never burn again.

As far as Draco's mother was concerned, her job was done. It was time to return to Malfoy Manor, where her most pressing concerns were charity fundraiser seating charts and which frock to wear to the next soiree. She could finally wash her hands of her three foolish sisters, at least for now. They could clean up their own messes for a while. Cressida and Andromeda were blood traitors, but could usually be trusted to live their shameful lives quietly, behind closed doors. Bellatrix had always been too cruel to be a true confidant or friend to her sisters, and too unpredictable to be of much use to the family. But at least with the Dark Lord gone, she might be less of an embarrassment. It was probably good for her to be a big fish in a small pond. How much harm could she do in a tiny witch's commune in Devon?

After Narcissa returned home, Bellatrix invited Draco to stay at the Circle a little longer, and he accepted. It seemed as good a place as any to spend his summer, and it would certainly be a brief respite from the claustrophobic pressure of Malfoy Manor. Auntie Bella had always doted on her nephew, and she never chided him for what he wore or ate or said. Besides, she would probably be too wrapped up in herself and the Dark Lord, whom everyone insisted on calling Tom now, to pay Draco any mind.

Draco fully expected an idle summer spent sleeping in, sunning himself, and devising ways to bully the younger girls. So he was annoyed when Bellatrix took a more active interest in him, at first. He wasn't allowed to sleep in, meal times were stricter than at Hogwarts, and he was expected to perform manual labor according to the whims of something called a chore wheel. Bellatrix was apparently a sincere convert to the ways of the Circle, and not even the raven queen's nephew was exempt from the rules of the community. Auntie Bella had always been a zealot, but Draco suspected she was motivated by more than earnest belief. She had finally tasted true, undiluted power. After spending years as the Dark Lord's lieutenant, Bellatrix finally had a chance to play at being the general.

As the weeks passed, Bellatrix cared less and less about the child called Tom. Draco thought this was strange until he realized that her new found glory distorted everything like a funhouse mirror, making even the person that had once mattered most to her in the world seem like a footnote in the annals of the raven queen. The baby was the only remnant of her days as a Death Eater, one of many of the Dark Lord's followers. Now she was the one and only raven queen, and what did the raven queen care for a fallen Dark Lord? Bellatrix gave no indication that she understood that her beloved Dark Lord was one and the same as the weeping, drooling baby whom she treated mostly as an annoyance and occasionally as a plaything. The others took it in shifts caring for Tom, even Draco, who grimaced every time the baby ran his chubby fingers over the Dark Mark on his forearm. Cressida took a particular shine to the boy, so Tom spent much of his time playing with the skeins of yarn under her loom as she weaved.

Despite his aggressive, pointed apathy, his aunt seemed determined to take Draco under her wing. Bellatrix tried to teach him some blood magic, but he was squeamish about hurting himself. He didn't have her bloodlust nor her fanatical zeal to test the limits of the old ways. His interest was only piqued when she gave him a much more interesting task: being her eyes and ears around the Circle. The others seemed docile enough, but Bellatrix could sense that unrest roiled just beneath the surface. They weren't ready to revolt against her just yet, but they didn't trust their new raven queen.

So Draco spied on them. He lurked around corners, listened to their conversations, stole their research notes. While the others were gathered for some meeting or other in that dilapidated old pile they called the chapter house, he rifled through their trunks and fished their diaries from underneath their pillows and mattresses. His aunt wanted him to tell her anything of true importance, but there were countless small secrets that Draco hoarded all to himself. Being Bellatrix's lieutenant and chief spy was electrifying. This was what getting a special mission from the Dark Lord should have felt like. He loved to sit at the dinner table and tally up everything he knew about each person in his mind: their lies, desires, nightmares, and petty squabbles that they themselves forgot within hours or days. Draco never forgot anything; he counted it all like a goblin counting his galleons.

Collecting secrets was what truly thrilled Draco, but Bellatrix also set him a much more vital and unpleasant task: collecting blood. He ran his finger along the rims of the cauldrons at the end of crafting sessions for traces of stray blood. A few of the younger, more forgetful girls made it easy by neglecting to clean their blood knives and leaving them strewn across the laboratory tables after hours. Draco's pockets were always full with at least three or four empty vials for this purpose, and he took to stuffing his robes with tufts of cotton to muffle the tell-tale tinkling of glass. Later, he labeled each bottle and placed it carefully on the shelves of Bellatrix's library of blood samples. She had a secret room especially for this purpose, an innocuous mahogany wardrobe enchanted with an undetectable extension charm. This was her inner sanctum, her true office within the drafty, decrepit room that passed for an office in that backwater dump.

Bellatrix did not tell her nephew what she used all that blood for, but he could guess. Sometimes when he came into the wardrobe room unexpectedly, he found his aunt hunched over a vial and a cauldron, muttering incantations with a blood knife pressed to her skin. Often one of the women would have a mysterious coughing fit just when she was about to speak, particularly during a disagreement. One time, Mrs. Patil lost her voice for nearly an entire week. Draco suspected his aunt must have spilled too much blood during that particular binding. When there was an uproar about Draco being allowed to stay at the Circle after the Mudblood men were asked to leave, Bellatrix locked herself away in the wardrobe for two full days. When she emerged, the arguments stopped, even though the women had been on the verge of a mutiny. Draco was still subjected to glares, but the others could do nothing but wheeze and clutch their throats when they tried to raise their objections.

The mission extended beyond the crumbling ruins of the Circle. Bellatrix sent him out into the world to collect blood from anyone he could get his hands on, from heads of Ministry departments to the disappointing sons and bored socialites of the Sacred Twenty-Eight. Word of blood magic and the prophecy about Bellatrix began to spread through the upper echelons of wizarding society. No one had seen hide nor hair of the Dark Lord for months, and rumor had it that Bellatrix and the resurrection of the old ways had something to do with it. Blood magic became something of a fad, and Draco was its reluctant ambassador. He found himself attending fashionable events and having his cheeks squeezed by patronizing old society dames, the very things he had been so intent on avoiding when he accepted his aunt's invitation. But he did his duty. He invited his captive audience to prick their fingers. They marveled at his paltry blood magic tricks and applauded. They did not notice when he slipped tiny vials into his pockets, barely the size of his fingernail and glimmering with drops of their blood.

As the shelves in the wardrobe filled with more and more rows of glinting glass bottles, the world began to rearrange itself more and more around the will of Bellatrix Lestrange. At first it was little things: a surprisingly good deal on potion supplies, a cancelled visit from the Ministry department that was supposed to inspect the Circle before the start of the new school year. Then Draco began to see the hunger in his aunt's eyes, the intoxication of control, the gratification of indulging every passing whim. The brilliance of blood magic was supposed to be that the pain and inconvenience was a natural counterweight to its raw power. Most people considered every spell carefully, because there was an upper limit to how much they were willing to harm themselves to achieve their goals.

Bellatrix did not have such a limit; she even seemed to get a thrill from the pain. It was all Draco could do to keep her constantly supplied with fortifying potions so she didn't pass out from blood loss, or worse. But it was never enough. Bellatrix needed more blood, more power. She recruited some of the more fanatical members of the Circle to donate their blood for her personal use. The Dark Lord's deliberately decentralized style had clearly influenced her, as she developed a similar practice of telling the others bits and pieces of the spells, enough so that their blood would be imbued with the correct intention, but not so much that they suspected her true purpose.

Things accelerated to a fever pitch, and the humid summer air crackled with magic. Bellatrix sacrificed one of her toes to quash a critical exposé about the Circle that was due to be published in the Daily Prophet, then two fingers to dissolve the Department of Magical Education entirely. It had been a thorn in the Circle's side ever since Draco's father planted the idea in Fudge's head at the girls' Ministry hearing.

Bellatrix's grudge against the Ministry ran vicious and deep, as deep as the despair she had endured at the hands of the Azkaban dementors. Rufus Scrimgeour and his Aurors were not as easily deflected as bumbling Fudge, who fell over himself to accept invitations and flattery. The Auror Office was still insisting on at least pretending to track down Bellatrix and the other former Death Eaters. Annoyingly, all of the Aurors had the foresight to keep a closer eye on their blood than other Ministry officials.

One day, the raven queen took her Circle to the sea during a new moon to put a blood curse on the Ministry of Magic. The sky was pitch black apart from a sliver of silver moonlight and the white caps of the waves. They all shivered as their robes swirled around them in the icy water. Bellatrix held out her blood knife and instructed her nephew to cut off her left hand. Draco hesitated. His aunt raised her eyebrows at him, waiting. Her right hand shifted, imperceptibly, towards her pocket. She might have been reaching for her wand or for a vial of blood with Draco's name on it.

Draco thought of Wormtail's silver fingers; at least his aunt had not asked him to cut off his own hand. He hated his hands for trembling as he worked. Bellatrix barely flinched. As the flesh came away and fell into the roiling depths of the ocean, Bellatrix let out a cry of pain and ecstasy. Draco turned his back to her and vomited bile, hot and acidic into the cold water. His hands smelled of blood and salt water for days, no matter how much he washed them.

As the summer was drawing to a close, Bellatrix asked her nephew to stay permanently. Draco cleared his throat and nodded; he did not dare attempt to give her any other answer. He had been planning to drop out of Hogwarts to serve the Dark Lord anyway. It was not like he particularly needed NEWT qualifications, not with family connections like his. His parents ought to admire his cunning in making himself indispensable to the next great power. They had, after all, chosen the losing side last time.

Draco had to believe that he was choosing to stay of his own volition. He had to believe that Bellatrix chose him as her second-in-command because he was a capable, trustworthy servant. He had to believe that his aunt did not have a vial of his blood tucked away somewhere. She needed him. She was the puppeteer and Draco was the strings. He had to be the strings, or he'd be forced to admit that he was nothing but her favorite puppet.

Draco Malfoy's conscience was clean. Or it should have been. His mother had moved heaven and earth to keep it that way. So why did he wake up each morning with blood on his hands?

Luna watched her owl fly away until the white tips of his feathers blended into the wispy early autumn clouds. She didn't know if Aberforth would answer her letter, but she had to try. She had stared at the old documents Urgnok gave her for hours, but it was like trying to decipher the doodles of a child from another planet. Luna could not read the handwriting and suspected the text might be in another language, or at least another dialect. With her father gone, Aberforth was the only person she knew who loved the chase of research as much as she did. Whenever they hit a wall, he always knew exactly the right question to ask to unlock a new source, a new hypothesis, a new interpretation.

Aberforth didn't respond to her letter. Instead, he Flooed directly into the fireplace of Xeno's office at the Rook. It was strange to see him outside of the Circle. Luna had a pang of awkwardness, and suddenly felt very small. Aberforth had always known her as the raven queen, the girl who brought a bouquet of dead flowers back to life and rediscovered the old ways of blood magic. Now she was just Luna, finally exposed for what she had truly been all along. Nothing.

"Holding up alright, kid?" His robes were so shabby and faded gray with age that Luna could hardly tell the difference after he dusted ashes from the folds.

"Mm," Luna said, pressing her lips together and avoiding his searching gaze.

"C'mere," Aberforth said as he pulled her into a hug. He was not an affectionate man, and Luna could not remember if he had ever hugged her before. She stiffened before softening into the generous paunch of his belly. He smelled of goats and straw and stale ale.

"Are you getting soft in your old age?" she teased, but she couldn't quite keep the warble out of her voice.

"We don't have to talk about it, I'm just going to say this once…"

"Then let's not talk about it." Luna flapped her hands and tried to lead him to the desk.

"Listen to me." His big calloused hands caught her small ones and held them until she looked him in the eye. Luna blinked away tears.

"It was never about the Circle. It was always about you. I don't give a fig what some prophecy says. Don't you ever apologize for writing me a letter. If you need me, I'll come. Unless I'm dead, of course." Aberforth chuckled.

Luna nodded, flushed with blushing and hot tears.

"Then we'll leave it at that. Now where are these papers you were telling me about?"

"Over here. I've not wanted to turn the pages too much, they're so fragile."

Aberforth whistled as he stooped over the crumbling sheafs of parchment, "You weren't kidding! These are old. Very, very old. See that mark here? Do you recognize it?"

Luna squinted, but it looked like nothing more than the stray stroke of a quill to her, one long line with a slight curve at each end. She was transported back to her childhood, when she would sit at the kitchen table trying to force the marks on the page to transform themselves into letters, words, and sentences while her father clacked away on his trusty old typewriter beside her. She shook her head.

"It's the Anglo-Saxon rune eeoh. If you learned the elder futhark, you know it as eihwaz. See?"

"Oh!" Now that she knew what it was, it was difficult to see anything else, "But eihwaz represents a yew tree. What does a tree have to do with anything?"

"Magical contracts and documents in Britain have been sealed with this rune since before the Conquest. It's akin to an oath, like saying 'cross my heart and hope to die.'"

"Because yew represents death!" Luna said, "And I guess now that I think about it, eihwaz can represent honesty and trust."

"Precisely."

"I thought it must be some kind of legal document! But I could hardly make out anything, the handwriting is so difficult."

"You were right, it is a legal document. And it is very odd, like nothing I've ever seen before."

"I think that letter there might be a 't,' it sort of looks like a crooked cross and it turns up a lot in that word that gets repeated a lot, that one there. I think it might be 'item,' like in Latin, you know?"

Aberforth made a noncommittal humming noise as he turned the pages with the tip of his wand.

"And there's one other word I thought I recognized, I think it was on the second or third page…"

"Hush, child. I can mostly read the script. No, that's not what puzzles me." He cursed under his breath, turned to the last page, then back to the first. It was incredible to Luna that a master duellist who could untangle ancient legal documents had ended up running a pub. Sometimes she longed to ask Aberforth if he had any regrets about his life, but she did not dare. He probably did not like being reminded that he could never escape his brother's shadow. Or perhaps, like Luna, his abilities exceeded his ambitions. Aberforth had never seemed unhappy with his simple life: his pub, his goats, and his books.

"What is it, then?"

"It's a very strange document, almost like a mix between an indenture contract and a treaty. You can see here, the signatures at the bottom. Some very old families. Carrow. Ravenclaw. Flint. And all these marks here, which is how illiterate people signed because they couldn't write their own names."

"So many signatures! Were these all Ministry people? I don't recognize the seal on the last page; it doesn't look like the Ministry seal."

"Ah, but you see! This isn't a Ministry treaty. This is a treaty between families. Several families."

"And that's not normal?"

"Not for treaties or indentures, no. Indentures are usually between individuals and treaties are between governments. Why would an entire family indenture themselves to another family?"

"So all these people, the marks of the people who couldn't sign their names, were they like...swearing fealty to the poshos?" Luna guessed, lightly brushing her fingertips over the wobbly X's that were the only traces of the illiterate whose names were now lost.

"Not quite fealty. There's a lot of preamble about wars and conquests and the little people being driven underground. It seems they were worried about their safety, so they pledged themselves and five generations of their descendants as servants to the richest families. After five generations, their descendants would be given a pouch of white tin and a bolt of good cloth as thanks for their service."

"So that's where the blood comes into it? They were using it to trace the descendants of these people? I guess that's okay, then. If it's as old as you say, it must be way more than five generations ago. The indenture is over," Luna said slowly, "They must have gotten their tin and cloth, right?"

"Yes, perhaps. Maybe." Aberforth drummed his fingers on the table, thinking. Something was bothering him, a nagging question buzzing around the corners of his mind. Luna could feel it too.

"But then why go to the trouble of keeping the papers and blood locked up in Gringotts for hundreds and hundreds of years?" she asked.

"Why, indeed."