The Mystery Wife

It didn't take Draco more than an hour to fall in love with Paris.

Oh, he'd seen it with his mother on the occasional shopping trip as a child, but he'd never noticed the profusion of flowers in windowboxes, the blossoming, carefully kept trees, the smells of baking bread and sweet pastries and brilliant food, the ancient cobblestone streets and gas lamps in the Wizarding Quarter on the Left Bank, the pastel colors of everything.

His parents had been better than their word, and conjured them an utter dream of a home. An attic laboratory with enormous skylights, fully stocked as promised. A library, already stocked with Sevanna's hundreds of Dark Arts and potions texts, with two desks, two insanely comfortable leather chairs and a large round walnut table between them. A livingroom, done in celadon, taupe, ivory and black in Narcissa's notoriously exquisite taste. A kitchen so well-stocked and completely perfect that even Sevanna couldn't find fault with it, already sporting its own wine rack and a balcony with potted cooking herbs, and baskets upon baskets of food in the cold cupboard. Four enormous bedrooms with their own private Floo connections, two of which Draco and Sevanna had already claimed and settled into.

Draco hadn't stuck around to enjoy it, beyond an initial poking into every room to see what was there. There was too much to see outside, and after having been cooped up in Malfoy Manor for most of the last year, 'restless' was too sedate a word.

It was beautiful. It was all beautiful, it was warm, the sun was shining, and he knew absolutely no one, and absolutely no one knew him. Girls were smiling at him, strangers would nod at him politely as he passed, and not one of them knew he'd been Voldemort's personal torturer, or the master of the Elder Wand, or a terrified idiot who'd been unable to get himself and his family out of Hell.

That thought began to cast a pall on the beautiful pastels and flowers, the sounds and the delicious smells, and Draco resolutely forced his thoughts to veer away from the edged and dangerous and too-bitter-for-seventeen.

He'd be eighteen in a week. He chose to focus on that, and started mapping out an entertaining birthday for himself out of the shops and restaurants in the Wizarding Quarter, as he wandered and explored. A rather promising huqqah bar called Al Kazim's, on the corner of the Rue des Serpents and the Rue d'Alcheme. An actual, honest-to-Merlin bar and nightclub called Le Caveau. A small, black-walled Muggle cinema where something called Rocky Horror played at midnight on Fridays. Cafes and patisseries, curious little shops, churches (best avoided, really, as he didn't particularly want to be struck dead by lightning), and the Seine beyond.

The streets of the Wizarding Quarter in Paris were oddly interlaced with the Muggle streets, between them, beneath them. They were alleys the Muggles overlooked, cellars and catacombs unknown to them. The wizards and witches of Paris knew how to hide, better, perhaps, than any others in the world. From the purge of Parisian magicians during the Affair of the Poisons to the excesses of the French Revolution to the arrival of Grindelwald during the Second World War, Parisian wizards had become truly superb at going to ground and hiding for years.

They might just be the perfect neighbors, Draco thought.

He set about to meet them Malfoy style, by going shopping. He started at the first wand shop he found, LeClair's, a promising little hole-in-the-wall, dark, in a style he thought of as Tudor, with crooked wooden beams and thick, dusty bottleglass windows.

"Bonjour," he called politely as he opened the tiny, creaking, too-short door and headed inside.

"'Ello," the shopkeeper responded. She was petite and blonde, and her mouth was a thin impatient line. "Eenglish, no?"

"Canadien, en fait." Draco noted that irritated white line, and added lightly, "J'espère que c'est une certaine petite amelioration, à votre avis." He'd done something about his hair, at least, thank Merlin--it no longer looked like a pack of jarveys had nested in it. A feathery black lock of it fell over his eyes, and he gave her a deliberately charming smile from behind it. "Not as rude as the Americans, not as stuffy as the English. Is this a bad time? I can come back later..."

"Zis is fine," she shrugged. "Canadien? I 'ad 'eard zat Sevanna Prince was planning on taking up residence in ze Quartier des Sorciers. You are 'ers, per'aps?"

Oh, don't I wish I were. "Her apprentice," he said, with a nod that was closer to a bow.

"Ah," the woman said knowingly. "'Ow fortunate you are! You must be an excellent brewer, or Sevanna Prince would not 'ave taken you on, lovely as you are, Monsieur, uh..." She held out her hand, clearly looking for an introduction.

Draco smiled again at the compliment and took her hand, bowing over it. "Szarkany. Draven Szarkany. I am fortunate. Obstinate, as well. It took some doing, to make her look up from her research for long enough to take notice."

She returned his smile with interest. "Rosalie LeClair," she said. "A pleasure. Did you pester 'er 'orribly?"

"Bother, bother, bother," he said cheerfully. "I think she took me as an apprentice simply to get me to shut up."

Draco deliberately allowed a faintly wicked sparkle to surface in his eyes, turning his smile up to 'Sin Incarnate,' suggesting the method she'd chosen of shutting him up.

Rosalie's smile widened, and Draco could see her already mentally composing the brilliant gossip. "Eet sounds like a love match, zen," she pried gently.

There was no deliberateness about it this time. Draco actually couldn't stop the blush.

"It would be most disrespectful of me to presume so, madame," he murmured. "I am her Apprentice." A glimmer of the impish smirk stole back, though. "Ask me again in three years."

"But 'ow adorable!" she beamed effusively, all traces of her earlier disapproval evaporating entirely. "I am so 'appy for you both! But you did not come in 'ere to share such delicious gossip; you must be looking for a wand, no?"

"Oui," Draco agreed. "My mistress will need one also, but she is busy arranging things just so in our new home. She is very particular about her lab, naturally."

"Bon, je comprends," the woman nodded. "For you, I think...'olly or 'awthorn, zat last because you have known great sadness and survived it. I would have thought dragon heartstring, but, no, zat sadness around zose so beautiful blue-green eyes is telling me it must be phoenix fezzair. You are undergoing great and profound changes in your life, I think."

The beautiful, newly blue-green eyes widened, and they were the only part of Draco that moved for a heartbeat or two. Then he gave her another bow, a much more respectful one than the semi-flirtatious one earlier.

"You see... very clearly, Madame LeClair," he murmured, and his mouth quirked at his own unintentional pun. "May I try hawthorn? I don't know if holly and phoenix feather will fancy me much, but hawthorn... yes."

She nodded and bustled into the back room, emerging a minute or two later with a gorgeously intricate hawthorn wand. Celtic knots were woven into it in a spiral pattern reminiscent of the Trajan column, so complex as to be nearly indecipherable, and Draco instinctively knew he'd spend hours staring at them and picking them apart.

"May it 'elp you move forward," said Rosalie, handing Draco the wand. She watched him keenly, her expression one of haughty certainty.

He took the wand, waved it, and a glittering shower of red gold sparks trailed along in the wake of its tip. Right in one, apparently.

Her smile returned. "Zis one, I think. Zis one was meant for you. The LeClairs are seldom wrong in such matters."

His smile also returned, rather lopsided and bemused, but real. "Phoenix feather. I... wouldn't have guessed that. It's beautiful," he admitted, turning it lovingly over in his hands. "Yes, this one, if you please...I'm pestering my mistress into visiting your shop today."

"Bon," she nodded, once and sharply. And then that elusive smile returned. "I shall get to meet ze famous Sevanna Prince for myself, and I will be ze envy of all in ze Quartier, you realize."

Draco left LeClair's with wand in sleeve, feeling considerably better than he had, and he made a mental note of the acceptable clothing stores on the way back home.