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Jiang Fengyue stood quietly in the covered corridor.
Abraxas had brought him this far, patted his shoulder once in reassurance, and walked straight into the great hall, leaving him alone in the courtyard.
A House-elf from Voldemort’s Manor appeared with a soft pop, dressed in a finely made uniform with a small hat perched on its head.
It guided him eagerly to the sheltered corridor and offered him a chair and a plate of small pastries.
Jiang Fengyue declined gently and stayed where he was, standing obediently outside the door, waiting.
He genuinely hadn’t expected this.
The books said Voldemort despised House-elves, yet the estate kept quite a number of them.
Glancing out across the vast grounds now, he could already count several tending the lawns and flowerbeds.
He appeared to be standing still, but his eyes moved constantly, covertly mapping the enormous manor, absorbing its almost severe decor, the dense forest in the distance stretching on and on until it dissolved at the edge of his vision.
After a length of time he couldn’t measure, an elderly House-elf bowed to him and invited him inside.
Its green arm extended, and the black walnut doors swung open in response.
A small knot of nerves formed in his chest, the same feeling he’d had at twenty-three, standing at the bell on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange listing floor.
He drew a slow breath and stepped through.
A damp, clinging cold wrapped around him immediately, sinister and close.
Faint incense drifted through the air, tangled up with a pressure that had no name but sat on the chest like a hand.
On either side of the hall, twelve massive chairs of dark ebony stood in a stern, unbroken row.
Every chair was occupied.
Every occupant was silent.
They were the heads of the Sacred Twenty-Eight pure-blood families, the true inner circle of the Death Eaters.
They raised their chins and watched the slowly approaching sole heir of the Malfoy family with the unhurried calm of people whose scrutiny was itself a weapon, invisible needles, probing for something soft to pierce.
Jiang Fengyue glanced up.
A tall man with black curly hair was watching him with open, venomous contempt.
The head of the Parkinson family.
Yaxley’s father, standing just beside the row of chairs.
Further ahead, Abraxas sat in the first chair on the right, one hand resting on his serpent-headed cane, slowly stroking the carved head.
When his grey eyes found Jiang Fengyue, the cold in them softened, barely, but enough.
At the far end of the hall, nine stone steps rose to an elevated platform.
At the top sat a single chair.
Its entire form was deep and darkly lustrous, almost absorbing the light around it.
The figure seated upon it had merged so completely with the throne’s shadow that only a tall, still silhouette remained, its edges traced by the uncertain flicker of candlelight.
It was exactly like…
a sovereign holding court.
Jiang Fengyue walked forward.
Under that crushing weight of authority, he kept his spine straight and his pace even, neither servile nor defiant, until he reached the foot of the stairs.
He hesitated.
Then he set his foot on the first step and climbed all nine.
Abraxas’s eyes flew open.
He stared at the boy still moving upward, unable to stop himself.
A sharp sound pulled his gaze sideways, long fingernails dragging slowly down an armrest.
Bellatrix Black was staring across the hall with barely leashed fury, her eyes locked on the platinum-haired boy’s back as if she intended to burn through it.
The look she then turned on Abraxas was a silent, furious indictment.
How dare he.
What kind of father are you?
Abraxas felt the weight of the room’s collective attention settle on him.
He closed his eyes.
He had no answer.
He hadn’t known Lucius would dare walk up there, hadn’t the boy always been frightened of the Dark Lord’s reputation?
At the hunting banquet, he’d done nothing but stay behind his father’s back, unwilling to come within sight of him.
Abraxas’s hand moved of its own accord to the serpent-headed cane, where his wand rested inside. This chapter is updated first at novelping.com.
He could only hope the Dark Lord, for the sake of the Malfoy family and the fact that this was Lucius’s first audience, chose not to be angry.
At last, Jiang Fengyue reached the top of the steps.
He lowered his eyes.
He pressed his calves tight.
In a place no one could see, he bit the inside of his cheek.
Then he bent one knee and knelt.
His knee met the floor with a sound that was soft and yet heavy, a muffled thud that seemed to carry.
He bowed his head.
Before his eyes: the man’s crossed legs.
His gaze dropped further, to a pair of dragon-leather shoes of considerable expense, the feet of the Dark Lord who trod upon the wizarding world, planted squarely before him.
How could this not humiliate him?
This posture, so completely like a servant’s, dragged up something from long ago, his childhood, poverty, the feeling of being pressed into the dirt until there was nothing left of him.
Truly…
unbearable.
He buried the fire in his eyes, let his gaze drop to his own hands.
His knuckles had gone white with tension.
Over them lay the extravagantly brilliant hand chain, its small serpent looking back at him directly.
The platinum-haired youth lowered his head and bared the nape of his neck — the most vulnerable place on a person’s body — fully and without reservation, to the sovereign before him.
He raised his left hand to his chest and bowed.
“Lucius Malfoy sends his greetings to you, Your Highness.”
The hall pulled in a sharp, collective breath.
Every pure-blood family head stared in horror at the boy kneeling on the steps.
None of them dared look at the throne.
They could only round their eyes at Abraxas.
What did you do to this child.
Every Death Eater knew: the Dark Lord permitted only one form of address.
Master.
It was an absolute, the symbol of his dominion over all others, his ownership, his right to command.
It was not a preference.
It was a rule.
Call him anything else, and the Cruciatus Curse was your answer.
Abraxas’s eyes had snapped open at the word.
He didn’t understand why Lucius would say that deliberately.
He began to rise, ready to beg forgiveness on the boy’s behalf, and then he stopped.
His grey eyes had caught two things at once: the boy’s head was lowered, but his back had not bent.
And the Dark Lord had not moved at all.
Abraxas settled slowly back into his chair and held very still.
Jiang Fengyue knelt in silence.
A few strands of platinum hair slipped forward beside his ears.
A long moment passed before the voice came from above him, clear and cold, with a low, carrying resonance.
“Your Highness?”
No fury.
Not yet.
Abraxas exhaled.
The Dark Lord had been in a reasonable temper tonight, then.
For the Malfoys’ sake, he was allowing this breach to be explained.
Jiang Fengyue spoke without hesitation.
His voice was still young — cool and clear with the edge of youth — but what it carried was pure, unfeigned reverence.
“But ‘my lord’ is far too small for you.
You are the sovereign of the wizarding world.
The greatest Dark wizard in all of history.
The one who stands above everything else.
In my eyes, you are the most powerful, the most exalted being that exists.
I beg you to forgive me for the presumption of this address.”
Silence.
The kind of silence that means the air itself has stopped moving.
No one made a sound.
No one dared.
The Dark Lord had given nothing, no word, no gesture, and so no one breathed.
Then, after what felt like a very long time, the crossed legs before him uncrossed and settled to the floor.
A slender length of dark wood came into his line of sight.
Jiang Fengyue went rigid.
The Dark Lord’s wand.
But it carried no trace of active magic, he could feel nothing from it.
He held his position and watched as the wand came to rest beneath his jaw.
And lifted.
He let his face be raised.
His eyes filled with carefully constructed adoration as he looked up at the greatest villain the books had ever described, and then every thought he’d ever had simply stopped.
His breath cut off, not from fear.
From something that hit like a fist to the chest, a sudden, complete seizure of the heart.
The Dark Lord was devastatingly, ruinously beautiful.
High cheekbones carved deep shadows across his face.
Thin lips were pressed into a cold, precise line that managed to be elegant anyway.
In narrow, elongated eyes burned something red and dark, the amusement of a creature that toyed with human lives because human lives were all there were to toy with.
The Dark Lord sat high above him and did nothing but tilt his wand, tilting Jiang Fengyue’s face with it, unhurried, almost playful, and those eyes, dark as congealed blood-amber, looked directly into his.
Legilimency.
Jiang Fengyue cleared his mind completely.
He gathered every fragment of conscious thought and pressed it outward, concentrating everything on the face before him, the sharp lines of it, the terrifying beauty of it.
He let the intrusion move through him unchallenged, let it turn over whatever it found.
When the Dark Lord withdrew the spell, he cast a lazy look at the youth still holding his face up, entirely unaware of how close he had just come to the edge of something.
The platinum-haired boy was slender, slight even, wearing nothing more elaborate than a simple shirt.
But on his hand blazed a hand chain of extraordinary craftsmanship, and against the backdrop of all that platinum hair it caught the eye and held it.
His face had gone pale, exquisitely, precisely pale, with only the corners of his eyes touched by faint red.
Against that pallor, his lips were vivid, red and lush and almost shocking in their color.
The hand chain gleamed at his chest.
The combination of it, cold pallor, brilliant red, shining gold, landed like something painted rather than real.
Like a moon rendered in oils, coldly luminous, too deliberate to be accidental.
Jiang Fengyue felt the presence recede from his mind.
Through the lingering haze of it, he saw the man before him do something very slight with the corner of his mouth.
The wand moved, slowly, no hurry at all, drifting from his jaw to beside his cheek.
Then it tapped his cheek twice, lightly, the way you might tap something you found interesting.
Two faint marks bloomed on pale skin.
Jiang Fengyue heard the Dark Lord speak his second sentence of the evening.
“Good child.”
➤ Next: No Permission Granted