They ran into Narcissa on their way back to their rooms. "Have you seen that horrible Amycus Carrow?" she asked. "He was supposed to come by today to pick up some paperwork and no one's seen him."

Hermione narrowed her eyes and studied her mother-in-law. Narcissa gazed back with a steady, unreadable expression. "No," she said at last. "Though I doubt I'd be the first person he'd try to find."

"Hmm," Narcissa said. She tapped her fingers along her thigh and summoned a look of significant, aristocratic annoyance. Her nose wrinkled, and she pursed her mouth, and for all the world she looked as if she'd bit into a strawberry and found it wasn't perfectly ripe. How dare this peasant be so inconsiderate, that look said. "If he doesn't arrive by dinner, I may send an owl to Yaxley. It's very inconvenient to have his little servants trooping in and out. The least he could do is ensure they arrive when he says they will."

"Do that," Draco said.

"He was probably in town engaging in the same sorts of disgraceful behaviors we've seen written up," Narcissa said. Her lip curled. "Don't you agree?"

"I would never dare argue with you," Hermione said. She glanced at Draco. This was all very surreal. She wanted nothing more than to get back to their room and instead she was discussing the punctuality issues of a man she'd just murdered. Carrow wasn't off harassing women. He'd never harass another woman again. Hysteria began to bubble up and she bit down on the inside of her cheek in an attempt to control herself. Now was not the time to break down.

"Were you out at the rose garden?" Narcissa asked,

The conversational pivot that left Hermione reeling and she could feel her mouth get strained. What had possessed the woman to decide this was the right time to accost them with idle chit chat? She wanted a shower, and a bowl of soup, and a good cry, not to chit chat about the landscaping. Narcissa must have seen her tension but she ignored both the clenched jaw and tightened shoulders to drag them both off to one of the endless small rooms in this manor. She had garden plans spread out on a table and Hermione blinked a few times as she looked at them.

"Did you do these yourself?" she asked. The work looked professional but the ink seemed barely dry. In fact, when she touched a finger to the paper, a tiny bit of blue smudged onto her finger.

"I was playing around this morning," Narcissa said. She waved her wand and uttered a charm Hermione didn't know and the smear she'd left on the plans disappeared. "Landscapers never seem to be able to translate my ideas properly. You tell them one thing and they hear another."

Hermione was wholly unfamiliar with the problems of hired help but she tried to look interested as Narcissa went on. The sketch showed a second wall curving out from the rose garden. "I was thinking to make that a raised bed," Narcissa said, touching the tip of her wand to the paper. "I will make the entrance more dramatic, and I think the roses would like that."

It would leave the Amycus Carrow's body under a stone wall and several feet of additional topsoil. Hermione looked at the drawing. It was just too perfect. When she glanced back up at Narcissa's face, the woman looked utterly unperturbed. Only the smallest twitch of her nose suggested this was anything other than a very convenient coincidence.

"You'll have to teach me those blueprint charms," Hermione said. "They seem very handy."

"The best time to work on the walls is now," Narcissa said. "If you think the placement is pleasing, I will have the gardeners start working tomorrow and we will plant in the spring."

"It looks perfect," Hermione said. She knew the words came out a bit faintly and she cleared her throat. "I'm sorry," she said.

Narcissa sniffed. "You are surely still recovering from the unpleasantness of last night."

Unpleasantness. That was one way to put it.

"I will have another bowl of soup sent to your room. You should rest."

She turned away and muttered, loudly enough for anyone trying to listen to hear, "I am going to have a word with Lord Yaxley about Amycus Carrow. The nerve of that man, not arriving on time."

Hermione didn't say anything about the events of the morning, the garden plans, or Narcissa's manufactured fury with Amycus as they walked through the halls of the Manor. She waited until Draco had shut the door of their suite behind them, locked it, and checked the lock not once but twice. Then she opened her mouth. "Your mother is -."

"Terrifying," he said.

She began stripping off all her clothes. She never wanted to wear these again. Killing a person in battle was one thing. She'd done that and hadn't walked away with this feeling that she would never be clean again. Rendering a man helpless and then slaughtering him like a pig was another feeling altogether and one she didn't ever want to have again.

"You did well," Draco said softly as she pulled off first one sock and then another. She stopped to stare at him. She'd call what she'd done a lot of things but the word 'well' hadn't occurred to her. "Did you think we'd be able to legislate them away?" he asked. His voice stayed quiet. There was no sneer. Nothing but truth. "He controls the Wizengamot. The members who aren't already in his pocket are frightened of vexing him. It's going to take an uprising."

"I know," she said. She didn't want it to. The little girl who'd read a book on how the House of Commons worked still believed, somehow, that if you were just right, if you just had a law, if there were just a rule, you could make it all better. But the world wasn't rational like that. The world made bad laws and then hid behind them. The world was filled with people who were afraid.

She was afraid.

"We should go -," she began to say, but Draco stopped her, a single finger over her mouth.

"Not tomorrow," he said. "Tomorrow you need to rest from the crucio. We'll get the papers and read through the last few weeks, find out what's going on." He began to grin. "Maybe go flying."

She had to have heard him wrong. "Flying?" she asked.

"You know," he said. "On a broom. You are a witch, right?"

She began to wonder if murdering two people in one day was really that much worse than murdering one.

"Don't worry," he said. "I'll go slow."

The next day was bright and clear and any hope Hermione had he forget about the idea to take her flying died over breakfast. He already had a play Snitch in his hand, moving it between his fingers in a way that reminded her too painfully of Harry. Seekers. They were all the same in the end. They loved brooms and they went too high and too fast. "I won't go too fast," he said as he smirked at her.

That was a lie. Or maybe it was true compared to the maniac way Quidditch players usually flew. That didn't mean she liked it. She felt Quidditch was best viewed on the ground, from the safety of a magically stabilized stand, team flag in one hand and butterbeer in the other. She didn't like flying, had never liked flying, and, she was pretty sure, would never like flying.

The broom was too narrow. The wind was in her eyes. Draco kept swooping down to the ground in huge arcs that left her stomach somewhere high above her. She knew she wasn't going to fall. She knew intellectually this was safe – safer by far than many of the things she'd been doing the past few years – but it felt terrifying and as he pointed the broom up at an angle she could see was about 10 degrees but which her gut insisted was straight up, she tightened her arms around him in a way that a less generous person might have called, "clenching" or "strangling."

"Want to go faster?" he yelled, and she dug her fingers into his side. She was going to kill him. She was absolutely, 100% going to kill him. As soon as they were back on solid ground. She glanced down at that blessed, unmoving, stable earth and Antonin Dolohov smiled back up at her. Even from here she could see the amused twitch to the side of his mouth. Was her fear of flying really common knowledge?

She pressed her mouth to Draco's ear and said, "Higher, too."

He laughed with an utter, pure joy and the broom danced up. Higher. Faster. Antonin Dolohov could go to hell. She let out a laugh of her own and reached a hand up to tug her hair free so the curls would stream out behind her. Miserable, rotten Death Eater wanted to see her afraid? She'd see him dead first.

Unfortunately, before she could see him dead, she had to see him on the lawn. He didn't leave and he didn't leave and at last she sighed and muttered into Draco's ear, "I suppose we should see what the bastard wants."

Draco seemed as unenthusiastic about that as she felt but he spiraled down in a slow, lazy descent that left them a few feet away from the senior Death Eater. "Mr. Dolohov," Hermione said. "What brings you over?"

"Lucius said he had a new wine shipment," the man said. "We like to do a tasting together now and then."

"Pleasure, then," she said. "Not business."

"Not everything in life is governing," Dolohov said. "Now and again, young Mrs. Malfoy, I indulge in recreation."

Recreation for Death Eaters could mean so many things, none of them pleasant. It was impossible to keep her mind from running from one unsavory idea to the next. Murder. Rape. Assault. Theft. Terror. Mayhem. Some of her disdain must have appeared on her face because his own studied her and his mouth twisted into a wry smile. "The certainties of youth," he said. "How I miss them."

"I beg your pardon."

It wasn't a question – more of a condemnation – but he answered it anyway. "When we are young the world seems so simple," he said. "We know what is right and what is wrong. Age brings more shades of grey. When we are older we recognize nuance and, perhaps, earlier mistakes."

It was appalling. It was infuriating. It was beyond maddening to be condescended to about nuanced thought by a Death Eater. She still had the scar on her shoulder from when he'd attacked her in her teens. She'd been tortured in this house more than once. So had Draco. And this…this upright piece of filth, this cretinous mass still walking… had the cheek, the gall, the nerve to suggest she was naïve and that she'd understand complexity as she aged.

"If you are having difficult distinguishing black and white," she said, "I suggest you get your eyes examined by a Healer."

He laughed. "It's always a pleasure, Mrs. Malfoy," he said. He nodded his head toward Draco, turned on his heel, and was absorbed by the house.

She clenched her fists and ground her teeth against themselves. "Hermione?" Draco asked. He sounded concerned and uncertain.

"How dare he," she said. Her eyes were glued to the door he'd disappeared through. "It has been a long time since I've had the… the luxury of seeing myself as being… being unblemished in the light, and -."

"No," Draco said, interrupting her. "That's Ronald."

She whirled and glared at him. She had enough fury boiling through her to let some spill out onto him.

"Ronald," Draco went on, as if she weren't almost spitting at him, as if her eyes weren't warnings to be silent. To be still. Later she'd think how brave he'd been to go on at that moment. Later she'd add that to her list of ways Draco Malfoy was far less cowardly than he believed. Now, however, she just thrust out her jaw, a firm set of bone and sinew that should have scared him off. It didn't.

"Ronald," he said again, "Who is in France, out of reach, saved from having to compromise or make hard choices."

A bird screamed off in the distance and her nails dug into her palms. "You're a wonder, Hermione," he said softly. "People who keep their hands clean don't get things done."

"I'll get them all done," she muttered. "I'm already filthy. What's a little more dirt now? They can all burn."

"Soil," Draco said. She didn't control her annoyance at that because he added an explanation. "When you are growing new things, you use soil."

"Pedantic," she said but she liked the distinction. She wasn't down in the dirt. She was running her hands through the rich soil of a garden, planting seeds that would bloom in the spring.

"Town, then?" Draco asked. "Shall we go get a feel for the will of the crowd?"

Hermione wondered if she could imperious an entire population into overthrowing the government. "Town," she agreed. "Let's go get lunch at someplace with outdoor seating."

"It's a fine day," Draco said. "A day for people to be shopping and walking about."

He put the broom away and she fixed her hair and they left. Narcissa was arguing with a man Hermione assumed was one of her landscapers. They managed not to see Dolohov again on the way out.

. . . . . . . . . .

A/N – Thank you all for your ongoing enthusiasm. You make my heart happy.