She pushed herself off the floor, went to her room, and climbed under the covers of her bed; burrowing into them and hugging them around herself.
Even her brain felt tired and listless. As though even thinking took too much out of her.
She glanced over at the clock. It was nearly nine o'clock in the evening. There was a tray with dinner on it beside the chair, but Hermione had no appetite.
She wondered why Malfoy was in France; presumably it was to kill more people.
Would he still be masked, or would he do it openly? She wondered what he looked like when he cast the killing curse. Most people's faces screwed up in a revolting grimace when they cast the Killing Curse. Even Voldemort. But Malfoy's hatred and fury was so cold. Perhaps he looked the way he had when he was killing Montague.
Hermione wondered if getting exposed as High Reeve were intentional.
If Malfoy were moving to seize power from Voldemort, he'd need to be known. Known and feared. Being revealed had been a calculated risk perhaps; banking on Voldemort's need for a public figure to spare his life. If things in Romania were as unstable as had been implied, Voldemort couldn't kill Malfoy now — even if he wanted to. It would leave a power vacuum, destabilise the entire Death Eater army, and give Europe the opportunity to break free.
There were no other figures in Voldemort's army that were even vaguely comparable. Voldemort had local government figures, but Malfoy was Voldemort's only visible crutch on a continental level
The most powerful General in the Dark Lord's army was what Astoria had said. A General for years; that was what Malfoy had said about himself.
Hermione paused puzzled. Malfoy had been a General during the war?
She didn't remember Malfoy being a General. She didn't remember much of anything about him after Dumbledore died. She had assumed his ascendance in rank had occurred at the end of the war, but perhaps that had been wrong. It had been hard to get good information toward the end of the war. Hermione hadn't been included in most of the specifically strategic Order meetings. It must have been a detail she'd missed.
There were so many things about Malfoy that felt incomprehensible. His power. The point of his ambition. His ironic talent for healing. His apparating ability.
A ritual intended as a punishment...
Hermione turned over the mystery in her mind.
It was probably what Voldemort had been referencing to when he'd spoken of Malfoy deeply disappointing him. Hermione wondered what on earth it could be. Dark magic rituals were generally physically corrosive and mentally eroding. Malfoy seemed suspiciously, even unnaturally, intact.
In fact, as she thought about it further, Malfoy was impossibly sane.
With the quantity of Dark Magic he was exposed to, both through his own use and Voldemort's, he should be poisoned by it. Unless he was spending all his time undergoing purification rituals, his relative health seemed impossible.
Hermione had been ill just from entering Voldemort's Hall, while Malfoy had seemed entirely indifferent to it; and he surely went there multiple times a week. People didn't become indifferent to Dark Magic. It was like a poisonous drug. Addictive. Effecting.
Deadly.
Dark Wizards tended to use more and more, and stronger and stronger types of dark arts until they eroded themselves away the way Voldemort was, or went mad the way Lucius and Bellatrix had.
But Malfoy was intact. Physically and mentally he was — pristine.
And capable of apparating across an entire continent.
How on earth was that possible?
Hermione kept turning the question over and over until she finally gave up. She had too little information to enable any guesses.
She moved on to a different problem.
She couldn't figure out how she fit in. Whatever Malfoy's scheme was, it seemed like she must be somehow included in it. Malfoy was too devoted to her care and maintenance for it to be otherwise. Hermione had thought it was simply because he was doing as ordered, but she was beginning to strongly suspect his attention went beyond that. He seemed personally and emotionally invested in her. The way he stared at her; the undivided intensity of it was almost undeniable. She was significant to him or to his plans.
Where did not getting Hermione pregnant fit into the strategy?
He hated raping her; didn't appear to enjoy it at all and didn't try to. It made him ill. So, wouldn't he want her pregnant as soon as possible?
Unless it had to do with her memories. The idea that a pregnancy would unlock the memories was theoretical at best. But if Malfoy suspected there were something in her memory that he didn't want unlocked... that could possibly explain it.
But even without a pregnancy, the memories were slowly beginning to re-emerge.
If she were pregnant, it would buy him nine months of exclusive access to them. So long as she was not pregnant, arbitrary memories might emerge for Voldemort to find.
Why would he keep forcing them both through five days of monthly trauma?