Binding

Golden light suffuses the atrium where Narcissa Malfoy sits, heating the green leaves and hungry flowers that writhe behind her, honeying the boards beneath the rockers of her chair; no dust motes dare to float within that sunshine, however, and it does not so much as touch the hem of her chiton. White, pure white, the cylindrical garment is of her own spinning, her own weaving, her own sewing. It has not known scissors; she gnawed off the last thread with her own fine white teeth. It is held to her long white arms with silver fibulae, and is girt between breasts and gravid belly with that same pale metal, studded in its turn with milky moonstone and clear, clear diamonds. The wealth of her hair is muted by the severity of its braid; the only colour about her is the chilly pink of her mouth and the blue of her veins.

It is difficult to move, now. Even the chair rocks softly, and she's prevented the house-elves from spelling away its faint squeaks. In the first days of realizing she was with child again -- at last -- she had not permitted hope; it took the moon's circling twice more for her to realize that yes, this time, this time it might have happened. She might have made it happen: she might be able to... keep it. Not like the others, small and unformed, washed away with the ebbing of the tides.

With that slow hope, when she donned her white and silver of a morning, and ate her white bread and drank her clear water, it became less the requirement of ritual and more an offering. Her husband loves her; but she had known with witchly prescience and her own pragmatism that soon he would have been pressured to find an heir for his house in any way he could: to, if he must, put her aside. And that she would not allow. She loves him, in her way, but it is not only that; potions have always been her favorite means of magic, and she has wished to see what may be made of the two of them. Together.

And so, for this one grand trial, she contains herself: she sits and rocks with her other experiments put aside -- for now, just for now -- and calls it rest; she walks only as often as she must, which is very little, and even that is not precisely safe. She smoothes into her skin unguents of her own crafting, and allows sun's gold only so near. She avoids the sight of ravens, and she steps not on cracks.

Certain of these things shall pass; but she does not question that, in the end, when the deed is accomplished or failed, the moon will drink her dry. So has she bound herself, trading the potential of future children for this one, this one son, this heir. This child that is as much hers as Malfoy's. Her boy will live.