The next week, Hermione got up even earlier to go foraging. She took vials and trays, and fully prepared the potion ingredients before packing them away in her satchel. She couldn't afford to waste a week's supply again.

When she apparated to the shack she took several deep breaths, trying to brace herself before opening the door. She had concluded that there was a fairly decent chance that Malfoy would repeat the same dueling method again.

The cruel, satisfied glint in his eyes the week before as he'd stashed his wand made her expect it.

The room was empty when she arrived.

She set her satchel in a corner and warded it. Then she stood waiting. Her fingers kept nervously tapping against her leg. She felt almost faint.

She hated waiting. She hated being left to dread things. Her mind always began running wild with scenarios of what would happen. Usually her imagination was worse than reality.

But Malfoy had an unusual talent for blindsiding her.

He was nearly five minutes late.

She wasn't sure if she was supposed to keep waiting. He'd said he would only wait five minutes for her, but he'd never said anything about how long he expected her to wait for him. She didn't think he was going to abandon the Order just because he'd finally gotten to hex her.

She was nearly ill with anxiety. She couldn't—

She wasn't going to just sit there waiting for him to lash out at her again.

She turned abruptly and took the wards off her satchel and slung it over her shoulder. She was stepping through the door when he appeared in the room with a crack.

She stopped and stared. The mere sight of him gave her a sinking sensation. She felt like something was lodged in her throat and she could barely swallow around it.

He stared at her. He didn't look irritated. He looked—awkward.

"I'm late," he said.

She nodded and stepped back into the shack, closing the door. There was a pause.

"The same again this week?" she asked quietly, glancing away from him.

"No." He said it so abruptly that she looked up sharply at him.

He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. It was the most overt gesture of discomfort she had ever seen from him.

"I—overstepped," he said, which was not an apology. "I won't do that to you again."

"Alright," she agreed automatically, not trusting him at all. She was sure that if given enough time, he would find some new vindictive action that he could rationalise.

He stared at her for several seconds. Hermione suspected she still had a slightly wounded expression on her face. For some reason, no matter how much occlumency she used, she wasn't able to wipe it entirely away.

He opened his mouth as though he wanted to say something else, but then swallowed the words.

"What?" she asked bitterly. Bracing herself for whatever he was about to do next was the worst part.

"I—said I wasn't going to hurt you," he said in a low voice. "And then I did. I'm sorry."

She looked at him in confusion. He was such a pile of contradictions.

"I always expected you would."

His eyes flashed with irritation. Ah, she'd clearly offended his moral code again.

"And yet here you are," he said.

"Yes." She shrugged and met his eyes. "Because if the Order loses this war, I'm going to die. And Harry, and Ron, and Ginny, and everyone else that I know. So—being hurt by you doesn't really matter."

"No, I suppose not," he agreed, his expression cold.

"If you're going to do it again, just do it. Don't make it a farce by having me try to fight it off," she said woodenly. "Just own it."

His mouth twisted slightly. His rage suddenly rose a little closer to the surface. Hermione braced herself.

He abruptly subsided.

"The first thing we need to work on is your aim," he said, changing the subject.

"Alright."

He drew his wand and conjured up a practice dummy. With the tip of his wand he carved an X in the center of it and then sent it across the room.

"Whatever spells you want, just do ten. I want to see your accuracy rate," he instructed her.

She put her satchel down and got into position beside him, feeling keenly aware of his proximity.

The target was about fifteen feet away.

She aimed for the X and cast a stunner, a petrification hex, several stinging hexes, and a immobilising spell at it. She hit it eight out of ten times but only got four directly on the X.

She stopped and braced herself for Malfoy's scathing criticism. He was silent, which felt even worse.

"You do mostly close spellwork, don't you?" he inquired at length.

"Yes," Hermione said stiffly.

"Thought so," he said, and nodded thoughtfully. "Your spell technique is fine but you're so precise you pay unnecessary attention to controlling your wand tip and then forget to focus on where you're pointing. Hexes and curses don't require that much fine motor control; most of them don't have complicated wand movements. Your over-attentiveness is doing you a disservice in combat."

"Oh..."

"On the upside, that's a fairly easy thing to fix. It's much harder to train a poor caster. Try a curse with a complicated wand movement and remember to aim your wand tip while you're finishing it."

Hermione cast about in her mind for a curse with a complicated movement. Malfoy was right, most curses were simple. Stabbing, slashing, there was rarely more to them than that. She hadn't realized what a reversal in technique that detail was from healing.

A spell came to her.

Taking a deep breath, she whipped out the motion and made sure her wandpoint was over the X as the final words of the incantation slipped past her lips.

A scarlet light darted across the room and landed squarely on the X. Immediately, a small jet of hot, black tar exploded from spot where the spell had made contact. If it had been an actual person, the tar would have kept producing itself, but on a practice dummy it promptly ceased.

Malfoy chuckled. "My, my, Granger, does your Order approve of the curses you know?"

"No," Hermione said in a bitter voice. There was no point in lying. The Death Eaters couldn't possibly be unaware that the Resistance almost exclusively used non-lethal spells.

"I imagine not. Tell me, Granger, are you willing to kill someone?" Malfoy was staring intently at her as he asked.

She looked up at him, meeting his eyes. He was only a few inches away from her. His expression reminded her of the moment before she'd kissed him. Intent. Amused.

"I don't want to be cruel. But—if it's between me or them, or to protect someone I care about, I'll do it."

He kept looking down at her for another moment, before smirking faintly. The cold deadliness of his eyes glimmered, and Hermione suddenly realized how very close to each other they were standing.

"I imagine you would," he said quietly, then he turned to look at the target again. "Ten more spells. See if your accuracy improves now that you understand why you were missing."

Hermione cast another series of simple hexes across the room and hit the dummy each time, six times directly over the X.

"Keep going," Malfoy instructed her.

She kept casting but got distracted when he moved behind her, and she couldn't see him anymore.

"Keep casting," his voice was directly behind her.

Hermione steeled herself and tried to keep casting, but the nervousness of not being able to see him while still able to feel that he was close put her on edge. Her spells went wide.

Malfoy reappeared on her other side.

"Keep casting," he said again.

She continued and her accuracy improved again.

"You're too planted," he finally said staring at her feet.

She glanced down.

"What is that?" he said, cocking his head to the side and looking snide, "A fencing pose?"

Hermione blushed and shuffled her feet.

"With dueling in a battlefield, particularly one without apparition wards, there isn't really any advancing. You can be anywhere you damn well please so long as it gives you a clear shot of everyone else. The important thing is to be able to move quickly. An attack can come from any direction—unless you've got a dueling partner who's covering for you. You have to be ready to move."

He cast a spell across the room at the dummy.

"Stick to non-lethal spells now," he said, "They'll ricochet directly back to where they were cast from."

Hermione cast more slowly as she tried to keep on the balls of her feet and move rapidly away as soon as the spells left her wand. She got quite absorbed in it and half forgot that Malfoy was circling around behind her, watching her technique.

"Merlin, Granger, you're so tense," Malfoy muttered from directly behind her. She started and jumped so violently she moved back into the path of a stupefy that was flying back across the room.

Rennervate.

She awoke to find Malfoy kneeling over her with an expression of simultaneous amusement and aggravation.

"Tense—as I said," he reiterated.

She sat up, shaking her head to clear it. She was unbruised—which implied that she hadn't fallen to the ground. Malfoy had quite possibly caught her. The thought of Malfoy holding her while she was unconscious was terrifying. She wondered how much time had passed.

He stood and offered her a hand. She awkwardly accepted it and got up.

"Again," he instructed, "And try not to hex yourself when I speak."

She rolled her eyes and continued.

When her pace managed to increase from glacial to sloth-like, Malfoy decided it was sufficient progress for the day.

"Practice, if you can," he said.

"I have been," she said quietly. "I was even worse a few weeks ago. If you'll believe it."

Malfoy refrained from indicating whether he did or not. He just stared at her thoughtfully.

"You're too scrawny," he said.

Hermione folded her arms defensively.

"There's considerably more to fighting now than just dueling technique. Particularly if we're primarily focused on keeping you alive while you go traipsing about the countryside. You're more likely to meet hags or werewolves than a band of Death Eaters."

"Well, there is always apparition," she reminded him.

"No, there is not," he said shortly. "As the dark creature population here in Britain continues to grow due to the war, there are anti-apparition wards being laid over huge swathes of the countryside. If it's somewhere you're likely to find magical ingredients then it's likely that hags, or harpies, or vampires, or someone else is going to want to live there. There's a very good chance you're going to be wandering someday and discover that you can't apparate away."

Hermione felt herself pale.

"Do you know where?" she asked.

"A few of them. I'm not in charge of it, and since no one else regularly goes ambling alone through dangerous forests before sunrise, most people don't consider it very relevant information. So be careful. I'm assuming you aren't going to stop."

"I can't."

He stared at her, and gave a resigned nod. He withdrew a scroll and handed it to her.

"I'll come up with some sort of fitness regime for you that won't take up too much of your precious time and won't draw attention."

"Fine," she agreed, not looking forward to such a thing at all.

Malfoy suddenly looked slightly awkward again.

"Was there anything else?" she asked.

With a flick of his wand, a large book bound in faded black leather appeared. He handed it to her.

She accepted it tentatively.

Secrets of Darkest Arts.

"You found it," she said quietly.

"Hopefully it will be useful," he said. Then he vanished.

Hermione slipped the book into her satchel and hurried back to Grimmauld Place.

She was elated that Malfoy had found it. It had been the only known book on horcruxes that she had been able to find any reference to. Slughorn has said that Hogwarts used to have a copy, but he had only admitted such details after the school had been shuttered and taken over by Voldemort.

Stashing all her prepared potion ingredients in her closet, she rushed into the library of Grimmauld Place to start reading.

Hermione had been away training as a healer when the revelation regarding Voldemort having horcruxes had been made. Horace Slughorn admitted that Tom Riddle had questioned him on the subject, and Severus had revealed that Dumbledore had been mortally wounded by a ring from the Gaunt House.

Gradually the Order concluded that Voldemort had somehow created even more than one horcrux, although how he had done so was a mystery because no one knew how the dark objects even worked.

It was, they were almost certain, the reason that Voldemort had been able to revive himself after trying to kill Harry as a baby. Tom Riddle's journal which had nearly killed Ginny had been one. The Gaunt Ring.

But they weren't sure if there were more than that, or what the objects were, or where they could find them.

They had created a timeline of Voldemort's life following his graduation from Hogwarts, trying to guess if there were other points at which Voldemort might have created more.

She read through the sections on horcruxes that the new book had. It detailed exactly how to create them. A murder was required to tear the soul, and then an incantation to remove the piece of the soul and bind it to another object. There was no mention of creating more than one. Hermione wondered whether the soul containers had to be inanimate or if they could potentially be living vessels, considering Voldemort's strange attachment to his snake Nagini.

She outlined all the information onto a scroll and then carefully placed everything into a warded briefcase. She slipped it beside the desk and left it for Moody to pickup. They tried to keep actual meetings limited to diffuse suspicion. There was no particular reason for Moody to meet with the Order's healer every week.

As she headed up to her room she evaluated Malfoy's interaction with her that day.

He'd apologised. It had been quite surprising.

She pulled her notebook out from under her bed and considered.

The previous week she had made a page in which she detailed her best guesses regarding Malfoy's moral code. She reread the comments she had made the week before.

Better than Voldemort. Conceit in his morals. Believes in choice. Rationalises cruelty. Doesn't believe he is vindictive.

She added a note, "Considers his word somewhat binding. Tries to make amends when he thinks he has broken his rules."

The book on horcruxes had probably been his way of trying to buy her forgiveness. She wondered if he'd been holding it for a while or had only gone to the trouble trying to obtain it because he'd felt guilty over hexing her so many times.

She added, "Thinks forgiveness can be bought." That was a very useful piece of information.

Then she closed the notebook and put it back under her bed, replacing the wards carefully.

She lay back on her bed and stared at the ceiling. She felt exhausted. She'd only gotten a few hours of sleep before getting up at four in the morning to go gather potion supplies.

She had run out of Severus' potion for the acid curse already. She had no more acromantula venom to make more.

The curse was awful and slow healing. The damage it inflicted was immediate and hard to reverse. The potion Severus had invented was an analgesic that helped to neutralise the acid and stop it from continuing to corrode the body once the curse was cancelled.

Severus had been correct about how easily it was used. A strong shield could stop it, but it had become the most frequent injury the hospital ward dealt with. It didn't matter where on the body it struck, the recovery was slow.

Hermione had brewed every single other analgesic and alkalising salve she could think of but their efficacy paled in comparison to the potion containing the acromantula venom.

She was getting so desperate she was considering trying to hunt down an acromantula. She knew that Voldemort had their service along with all the rest of the dark beings.

Her eyes suddenly popped open.

Perhaps Malfoy would be able to get his hands on some. If he still felt like he owed her a little, he might agree to it.

The next week her aim had improved considerably. She had been practicing with the ricochet charm on the practice dummies at Grimmauld Place and had grown more adept at moving around as she cast. Malfoy seemed vaguely pleased.

He critiqued her form more, and stalked around her scrutinising her technique in a way she found unsettling. When she finished, he handed her a scroll of things she was supposed to do in order to get in shape. Pushups and jumping and crunches and something called a burpee which Hermione vaguely recalled her cousin having once introduced to her. There were a half dozen other things included as well.

"Your aim has improved enough; getting your stamina up somewhere reasonable is more important. Whenever you have time, do repetitions of these," he said, gesturing at the scroll.

Hermione grimaced slightly but stuffed it into her satchel without a word.

"Any information?" she asked, looking up at him.

His expression hardened and his mouth twitched as though he was hesitating.

"The Dark Lord will be secretly out of the country for the next week. Which means that the response to Order activity will be somewhat delayed. If the Order has been waiting for an opening, it may be the edge they're looking for. I wouldn't suggest trying to retake the Ministry, but if the Order were to attack multiple prisons simultaneously, the response will be—less cohesive."

"I'll tell Moody," she said. Then she stared up at him and started to open her mouth.

He quirked an eyebrow and waited.

She almost asked him about acromantula venom, but lost her nerve.

"I'll be going then," she said, dropping her gaze.

He apparated away before she was out the door.