payment in lieu of her carrying out any actual mothering.
Money was thus never a problem. However, with the ban on magic placed over the estate, and the eventual (and understandable) desertion of staff who were unwilling to endure labouring without their wands, there had been only so much Draco could do to maintain his home.
Even with the aid of an extremely loyal and extremely elderly house elf, manually working three hundred hectares of land was impossible.
Draco didn't think his father blamed him for their situation. Resentment, however, was something else. Lucius was not a senseless madman, but desperation, disconsolation and very expensive brandy had brought out the worst in him over the past three years.
There had been a small sliver of worry that Lucius would use the news of the marriage as an excuse to finally snap. If he did, he wouldn't have been the only exiled wizard to take that route. Just the month before, Cadmus Avery had gone on something of a homicidal rampage through his own estate, decapitating three house elves with an antique samurai sword before being blasted to oblivion by the Aurors that had swooped down on old Avery's home.
Likewise, there were alarms over Malfoy Manor; charms and wards laid into the very foundations of the stone and brick. The smallest hint of dark magic would send Aurors Apparating in droves. Fat lot of good that would do if his father decided to pick up the heavy, onyx paperweight he kept on his desk and bludgeon Granger to death with it. But that was highly improbable. Grisly murder was not his father's style. Likely, the thought of soiling his prized Aubusson carpet with Granger's blood would turn Lucius off to that idea.
Draco stood on said carpet now, having just informed his father that he had recently gotten himself tattooed and married to the Muggle-born, Gryffindor witch standing beside him. If all hell was going to break loose, likely it was going to happen within the next few minutes.
At first glance, his father appeared to be taking the news of their drunken folly a great deal better than expected. Although with Lucius, first glances were often deceiving.
"How?" Lucius asked, managing to convey disgust, horror, and stone-cold fury in one, clipped syllable.
The older wizard stood in the middle of his study, still attired in a blood red, raw silk dressing gown, despite it being three in the afternoon. There was an empty, crystal decanter and a tumbler half filled with cognac sitting on his desk. His hair hung long and unbound, and a vein was steadily throbbing at his left temple. Not a good start to things, Draco surmised, but there was little to be done about that now.
To Granger' s credit, she didn' t so much as squirm when Draco' s obliged his sire by relaying his memory of events in a clear, monotone voice. She was probably clamouring to speak her mind, but had managed to grasp the unspoken plan that it was best for Lucius to be informed as quietly and as succinctly as possible.
Draco began with their escape from the graduation party, to their trip to the Serpent and Stone, skimmed over the events of the tattoo parlour and ensuing marriage ceremony, to their waking at the seedy, Muggle hotel in London.
Not surprisingly, his father didn't once glance at her, not from the moment Toolip had led them into the study, to when Draco eventually came to the description of their tattoos. She might have been invisible, for all the attention Lucius was paying her.
There was a terrible, lengthy silence once Draco was finished.
The only noise came from the dead leaves that were dragged across the courtyard outside by the wind, and from Toolip' s worried muttering. Lucius remained unspeaking. With a slowness that was maddeningly at odds with the visceral tension in the room, he slowly smoothed back a strand of his long, silver hair, and took a sip of his brandy.
"The spell, if I am not mistaken is called Fida Mia," Lucius explained, so very quietly that Draco might not have heard him if everyone in the room hadn't been holding their breath.
Trust Granger to choose that precise moment to be overcome by a fit of the 'but isn' ts' "But isn' t Fida Mia outlawed in Britain?" said the Brain of Hogwarts, "precisely because the spell can't be reversed? I mean, it originated as a tracking spell that feudal wizards used to cast on their indentured servants by