Abraxas knew the two mansions that belonged in the Malfoy family had been adapted from French designs. He'd visited his cousin Thaddeus, both as a child with his family and as an adult, with his own business to deal with, and has seen the style adopted by contemporary french wizards.

However, to his shame, this was the first time he had seen a wizarding house outside of Britain or France, and he felt as if he had missed an enormous part of his life by remaining in England. Perhaps part of his apprehension to travel with Margot had been that she, much like Bogdan, was a travelled person.

The Gregorovitch house, nestled alone on the side of a mountain, looked more like a fortress, with an enormously high gate in front of which they Apparated.

Margot lightly tapped her wand against the wooden gates, and they opened slowly, revealing an assortment of white-painted houses, all with dark wooden roofs and balconies. The gate opening also let in all the voices from the inside inundate his ears in a cacophony of languages.

Most of the lodgings were three-stories tall and enormously long, to the point some of them were U or L-shaped. They housed an array of wizards and witches who were making themselves busy with various errands, which Margot explained were various apprentices or servants.

"Rich of you, from someone so against house elves, to have people serve you, my love."

"It's different here. And we pay them." she answered, putting her arm around his as she led him through a garden tended by two young witches. Margot saluted them both in German in a sweet tone, before continuing in English. "And give them board, and food, and they are treated well, on top of it all. At least the servants are. The apprentices are at the mercy of my father."

A plain square house in the middle, three stories tall as well, but painted yellow, was the main house, Margot explained as they entered it. The moment she closed the door behind them, they were back into the same oasis of silence as beyond the gates, and Abraxas could only hear the wind blowing through the trees, and a pair of starlings fighting over a bunch of stale bread placed on a windowsill. Abraxas looked around the living room, decorated and painted in a bright, rococo style, adorned with various paintings and sketches both moving and unmoving alongside its walls. He wondered if any of them were of Gregorovitch, before slowly realising that for a man of his fame, he had no idea what the man looked like.

"We pride ourselves in being a family of artists - that's how my father views wandmaking as well. A powerful art, but an art nonetheless. That's him." she pointed towards a sketch that appeared done in a hurry, a fuzzy portrait that outlined a dishevel beard and thick eyebrows, and a look of annoyance directed at the artist. "He doesn't like his portrait taken no matter the medium, so this is quite a rarity." Abraxas wondered if it was a Muggle painting, before seeing a slight roll of the eyes coming from the sketch.

Later, when the two men met, they could not be more surprised with one another.

Smoking lazily from a pipe, with a thick beard and thicker eyebrows, his white hair caught in a braid, and dressed in white linen robes, Mykew Gregorovitch was the complete opposite of Abraxas Malfoy - clean-shaven, his silver hair parted at the side and pomaded in place, dressed impeccably, and instead of smoking, indulging in a coffee which had been served to him by Mykew's wife, before she retreated back inside the house.

"Margot told me you don't entertain your guests in English."

"There's many things my daughter misunderstands about me. They like to think they know it all, women, poor things, and I like to entertain them - why wouldn't I?" To Abraxas's surprise, Mykew spoke not only passable English, but he even had a tinge of a Londoner's accent. "But on this account, she is right. With guests, I don't care for their understanding, or to understand them."

And with that, a slow friendship started budding between the two men. To the surprise of his own wife, Mykew started getting out of his workshop more often, especially as night would start falling, and he would watch the apprentices and servants retreat to their lodgings, accompanied by Abraxas. They would both drink coffees on his porch, whilst waiting for Margot to return from her endeavours in finding her lost ballad.

"What would I be considered then, Mikew, if not a guest?" Abraxas had asked at some point, pondering on what the other man had said the day before.

"What would you like to be considered?" Mykew asked as he puffed on his pipe as warm, orange clouds billowed out of it.

"I haven't been asked this question in some thirty-odd years, since I got married last." Abraxas said amused, flashing a smile as he thought back on when he asked for Aurora's hand in marriage from Hector Rosier. It had been a tense affair, one for which no instructions or rehearsals with his own father could have prepared him for, not after the sleuth of poison Walburga Black had spewed. If she had been a more damned woman, she would have used literal poison, Abraxas would later lament to Cygnus.

"You got off easy, if that was all." Mykew laughed, beating at his chest as he coaxed a coughing fit out. He looked around towards his estates, before turning to Abraxas. "This stays between you and me, because apart from Iliana, there's no one alive to tell the tale. I had to kneel down in front of my wife's father, right in the middle of their village, to ask for his blessing. Never stepped foot in that village square in my entire life, in my own forty-odd years, and I never will."

Abraxas furrowed his brows, and looked over at Mykew. Knelt to a Muggle, knelt in front of Muggles? He opened his mouth in disbelief, unsure of how to phrase his question, but Mykew cut him off, with a shake of his head.

"I know what you are thinking, and I don't care for it."

"Ah, I would not want to be misunderstood, Mykew, before the Statute of Secrecy was signed, my own forerunners married Muggles, and not as an exception, but never below their station." Abraxas stated, before clearing his throat. "I believe both parties in a marriage have to be equal, you see. Misfortune is easy to arise from inequalities between parties."

"Spoken like a true politician." Mykew chuckled.

"I've dabbled."

Gregorovitch knew, even if he was not showing it, that Abraxas Malfoy had dabbled in politics, as he had to listen to his Muggle nephew's tirade in describing him as 'a nobleman, you know, jobless, you know, a ne'er-do-well'.

"Heard he was involved in politics too, uncle Miki."

"Is that so, Dadan?" He looked over to his nephew, who had just finished his impassioned speech on the apparent innumerable faults of Abraxas Malfoy.

"Oh, you wouldn't believe half the things my buddies in London say!" Dadan replied, almost slamming his fist onto the table, before realising whose house he was into, and instead pretending he was smoothing the tablecloth.

"I believe what they say, Dadi, because they are in London and are wizards, but as for you, my dear..." Mykew grumbled, before leaving his nephew to stew alone in their summer kitchen.

Night fell and the servants and apprentices all started making their way to their living quarters, with Mykew found himself only now hearing their goodnights, individual voices rising from the uniform chatter, words in different languages used to describe how their day went reaching his ears, ranging from exhausting to awful, boring to 'better than yesterday, when I got bit by my own wand', a remark which almost made Mykew choke on the smoke of his pipe.

"It surprises me every day that they want to be here. I'd hate working for myself."

"They consider it a high honour, don't they? To work for a wizard like you." Abraxas proposed, as he looked up towards the sky. "I think they must like being away from it all as well. "It's as if time stops here." Abraxas was aware that he had been in Mykew's home for months, yet it felt like mere days, and he wondered at times if the entire place had been charmed on purpose to that effect. After all, Mykew himself was over a hundred years old at that point, yet he was still working day and night in his workshop, researching and experimenting.

"There's no war here. No politics either, Abraxas." Mykew added quickly, raising a brow. "Our business here is wandmaking, not politics, and I don't care to be bothered by them long as they don't affect my research and my business."

Abraxas had heard about his stance before from Margot, and he couldn't help but be amused at how well she managed to imitate her father, down to the curl of his eyebrows as he made his point. Yet the more time he spent with him, the more he realised that when he would find himself in one of his solitary phases, nothing, short of war outside his door, could bother him.

"And yet… I've been hearing about the war in Britain. Tell me, must I worry?"

"Why should you worry, Mykew?"

"Should I?" he repeated, and Abraxas shook his head.

"Margot is here, you see her each night, safe and sound."

"She'll want to return back to Britain. That's where her home is, that's where her friends are. When my wife says wizards are brash and impulsive, she means Margarita is brash and impulsive."

"And she is - she picked violin as an impulse, only because teachers of every other instrument were readily available, every kind apart from violinists of wizarding tradition. I don't think I have ever taken such a break in the middle of my research - I was researching Veela hair to refute some aberrations that British wandmarker of your kind, Ollivander made - only to find Margot a teacher. We spent months across Central and Eastern Europe, weeks only in Poland, all for the whims of a teenage girl.

Even my wife said I was mad to entertain this, but I think the moment a Muggle doubts us as wizards, we get even more mad in proving them wrong. When my Muggle nephew Dadan went to London to work and Margot wanted to tag along, he told her she'd come back home in tears a month later- and twenty-odd years later, I sometimes think she's living in London only to spite him." he said, grinning.

"You love your daughter, Mykew, don't you?" Abraxas smiled as he heard the man passionately speak about spending months travelling only to fulfil his child's wishes, especially as he had never heard this story before.

"From what you've told me about your son, you don't seem to care for him so."

"Family is family, and if my son needed me to be there for him, I would go there at once, no matter how stupid of an idea must have brought him in that position… but as for love- well, I imagine it is easier to love a daughter than a son. Not when your son also embodies this impulsiveness... In a war as uncertain as the one over there, you don't want to outwardly hold too much onto one side or another. I told him time and time again, if tides turn, you need to be able to ride onto the ones from where you won't fall and drown, but he's young and brash."

Yet Lucius was still his son and his family, and when an owl had arrived to announce Narcissa would give birth soon, he knew he had to announce his departure. He had fallen by then into a routine, and had even accompanied Margot on several trips to Bulgaria, visiting places where she spent her childhood, meeting those who raised her, and feeling… oddly endeared by how he was welcomed by all of these strangers, by the shows and feasts they would put on.

But alas, it all had to end. He felt that he would miss even Iliana Gregorovitch, despite them having been at odds ever since his arrival.

"You know what they call her, back there?" Iliana asked once, when they were alone on the porch.

Abraxas always felt at unease when faced with Margot's Muggle mother. Iliana, or 'Lili', as she was called by both her daughter and husband, was a small woman, with a dark green headscarf from where two long, dark braids emerged, who smoked short, stubby cigarettes. She barely spoke English, but was fluent enough in French for them to communicate easily, yet he was not sure what he and the Muggle would have in common, enough to communicate. And the more he learnt about her and her opinions on wizards, the more his disdain of her grew, a sentiment which he was sure she shared.

"The thief. Because she stole techniques and songs, and makes her fortune abroad, while they starve back in their abodes." Lili answered, and explained that after Margot had graduated from Durmstrang, she and a Muggle cousin of hers left for England together, more than twenty years ago - he returned, but she remained, and has since been making a profit by singing songs that have only been heard before on the valleys of their creators. "They won't give her the ballad."

"Do you find wizards to be that spiteful, Iliana?"

Yet perhaps she was right, because Margot had still not managed to find the other version of the Ballad of the Snake by the time he received the letter from Lucius. But no matter how comfortable he felt in this new environment, he knew he had a duty to return, especially as he understood from reading between the lines that the new Minister, Millicent Bagnold, had started to sniff around his family. And the last thing his family needed was a Minister putting their nose where it did not belong, however Abraxas knew Millicent, and doubted Lucius's ability to swat her away from their business.

It was then he figured that his connection with Margot, her status as a halfblood would come in handy in taking some off the heat off his son and his family. And there was one thing that could strengthen their connection even more…

During their last night together before his departure, Abraxas found a book review of Bogdan's book in the Daily Prophet, and waited for Margot to change into her nightgown and join him in bed, before handing the newspaper to her. He pulled her closer in his arms, and laid his chin against her head as she read it.

"I wonder… what would you have thought of me, if you hadn't met me before reading that interview?"

"I would have thought - who does that spoiled brat think she is and how much has she paid, to be featured in a book with such virtuosos and maestros?" Abraxas laughed, taking her hand in his own. "I would have searched for you only to have you look at me and entrance me in your snare. And then, I would have been just as in love with you. And perhaps there will be such men indeed, looking for your gaze like madmen. How does it go? Tell me, beautiful girl, how many men madly cried for you, how many died of your gaze?"

"Of your kiss, if only I could die myself." she continued, half-singing, and Abraxas chuckled bitterly.

"You may have laughed, but that was not your laugh." she finally said.

"After all, it is called 'Mourn me and love me'." Abraxas responded drily, and tugged at her hair, pulling her head back until he could look at her face. Each time he thought he had tired of her, her gaze would pull him back, and he would find himself craving to be next to her. "I was made a widow once, my lovely dove, and I still bitterly mourn the days I am not with Aurora and she is not with me, as you very well know. If we were to continue this dalliance, you and me, Margot…"

"And why would we not?"

"As a man and a woman."

"Which you are, and I am."

"As a man and his wife."

Margot paused for a moment, furrowing her brows. If this was his way of proposing, she would have to reconsider her choices in men.

"And if I were to die."

"Which all men do." Ah, she could breathe easily - mentions of death rarely lead to proposals in the same breath.

"I couldn't imagine leaving you a widow."

"Are you denying me the right to mourn, sir? My given right?" she mocked offense, and Abraxas shook his head amused, this time without hiding bitterness in his gestures. She continued, in the same tone, arching her back and adopting a concerned posture. "Do you fear these alleged wizards, driven madly by my sketched picture, coming to claim me?"

"I've seen the wizards churned out these days from Hogwarts. If they are a threat to me, my love, I will die peacefully in my sleep when my time finally comes."

"And I would be honoured to mourn you." she proclaimed with a hand on her chest, against which he pressed his own. "But before mourning comes loving, does it not? Come, my love, I must know one last time before you leave, why I should find my ballad and return to England quickly."

"What if you don't find your ballad, my love, what then? Would you return just as quickly?" he pondered as Margot climbed over him, and pulled her hair aside. He thought she would certainly return, everyone seemed to think so, but a seed of doubt grew in his heart as he watched her eyes - did anyone really know? She may have needed the ballad, but he needed her - physically, yes, but he also needed her, especially now, as leverage.

"What reason would I have to return quickly?"

"What if I were to give you a reason?" he asked, and pulled Margot close to him. "What if you were to return a woman of another name, of another standing?"