There were black tendrils beneath his skin from the mixture of the venom and dark magic. She could see the poison in his veins, halfway down his back, up over his shoulders and around his ribs like a poisonous vine. Crawling into him and sinking into the core of his magic.
She summoned her satchel.
“I'm so sorry. I — can't heal this. But I think I can help contain it. Please let me try.”
Malfoy eyed her over his shoulder but didn't try to step away from her again.
Hermione cast a complex spell and then, gently as she could, traced the tip of her wand slowly over one of the long black tendrils. Starting near his lowest rib she gradually forced the poison back toward the incisions and then siphoned the tiny thread out of the rune it had spread from. As she drew out the poison and contained it in a empty vial, she had to sever the connection between the thread and tissue with a sharp jerk.
Malfoy nearly dropped to his knees as he screamed. It was a nearly soundless, guttural rasp of someone intimately acquainted with torture.
“What are you doing?” he half snarled and half groaned. “Is this somehow not already a sufficient amount of pain for you?”
Hermione laid a hand on his arm, trying to hold him steady. “I'm sorry. I'm not trying to hurt you. I have to pull out all the excess Dark Magic. It's poison. If you let it stay, your body and magic will try to assimilate it. And — when you have dark magic in you at a cellular level like that — there's no going back. It just starts eating you from the inside. Magic like that is why your Dark Lord looks the way he does. And — with the quantity of runes — you'll have a few years at most. Either your mind or your body, Dark Magic exacts a price.”
“I am aware of how Dark Magic works,” he hissed, his hands were balled into fists and he was shaking slightly.
“Then please, let me try to fix this.”
Draco dropped his head slightly and huffed faintly as though he were laughing. Hermione studied him for a moment. He didn't say anything else.
She traced out two more threads. By the third Draco collapsed to his knees. He was deathly pale and his skin felt cold and clammy to touch.
She laid a hand as gently as she could on the front of his shoulder. She could feel the arch of his clavicle under her fingers, and see the mad, pained flutter of his pulse beneath his jaw.
“Do you want me to stun you?” she asked quietly. “I can do it faster than way. It won't change the efficacy. But you have to trust me.”
Malfoy went still. Apparently considering.
“Go ahead,” he said after a minute. “You're already more than capable of getting me killed any time you happen to feel like it.”
She braced him against herself, his head pressed against her diaphragm.
“ Stupefy ,” she said softly, and caught him as his dead weight slumped against her. With a practiced lightening charm she eased him gently to the ground and laid his head on his cloak.
Hermione worked quickly. She had done the spellwork once before when she'd been training in a hospital in Albania. It had been a single, self-inflicted rune on an aspiring dark wizard who hadn't understood the Dark Magic he was trying to invoke until the poisoning nearly killed him.
With Malfoy unconscious, Hermione's guilt was able to strike her fully.
She should have realised. She should have come back sooner to check on him. She was afraid she was too late. The runes were set. Deeply.
She traced out all the dark magic until she had eight vials full of the mix of the curse and poison. She'd have to incinerate them in a magical fire.
She carefully laid a containment enchantment around all the runes on each shoulder. It was a spell Severus had taught her; he'd used it to contain the curse on Dumbledore's hand. Given that the magic was in Malfoy's back she was doubtful that it would have any affect, but she tried nonetheless.
Malfoy's injuries were not intended to kill him immediately; rather, they were meant to hurt, and corrupt his magic. A gradual death sentence. Dark magic like runic blood rituals was deep and old.
She read the oath.
It wasn't a typical runic oath. Voldemort, in his vanity, hadn't utilised a traditional vow of loyalty and honesty. Rather it seemed tailored to the specific failure. The runes bound Malfoy to be unhesitating, cunning, unfailing, ruthless, and unyielding; driven to succeed.
Hermione wasn't sure how effective runic blood oaths were; but she suspected that Voldemort's overconfidence in the Dark Mark had spared Malfoy's life. If Malfoy had been forced to have an oath of loyalty and honesty carved into his bones, he would likely have been forced to admit his betrayal. Instead Voldemort had accidentally used ancient magic to fuel Malfoy's drive to do whatever he wanted.
The excess in cruelty was horrifying. It wasn't like a battlefield injury; quickly inflicted, but slow to be repaired. The ritual had surely taken hours while Draco was strapped down and kept conscious for it. The precision and uniformity of the cuts. The steady invocation of the Dark Arts. Time taken to wipe away the blood before making the next incision. Driving the tip of the blade all the way into the bones was unnecessary; it had been done solely for the additional pain. It was an oath of the flesh; there was nothing that required it be written into his bones. He'd also been crucio'd, either before or after the ritual was performed, possibly at both points.
She felt she might vomit just thinking about it.
Hermione pulled out her Essence of Dittany. She only had a few vials of it left.
She pulled out her murtlap tentacles and crushed them together with ten drops of Essence of Dittany into a salve which she gently pressed into the cuts of the runes. She couldn't heal the incisions but she could ease the pain and reduce the potency of the venom so that they would recover faster. Then she cast a protective ward over Malfoy's back to seal everything in without bandages.
She ran her fingers lightly over his arms, feeling the rigid knots in his muscles from the cruciatus. It appeared he had at least gotten some therapy for that.
Voldemort clearly did not want to damage Malfoy to the point of ruining him entirely, but he had had no qualms about torturing Draco all the way up to that exact line.
Malfoy was a weapon for Voldemort. The decision to carve runes into him made Draco more deadly. They sharpened his edge, but also made him a short-term tool.
Heavy use of Dark Magic was eroding over the course of many years. There was a reason dark wizards didn't tend to reach a hundred. They went mad, or deteriorated physically. With the quantity of Dark Magic that had been emanating from the runes before Hermione treated them, Malfoy would be lucky to live a decade; possibly only a few months before his mind began slipping. He already tended to arrive drenched in Dark Magic.
Hermione's hand wandered up to her neck, and she twisted the chain of her necklace between her fingers as she stared down at him.
She drew his left hand into hers. His long fingers dwarfed hers. There were the familiar callouses from flying and dueling on his palm and fingers.
She lightly massaged his hand. The fingers spasmed slightly at her touch, even though he should have been insensate. She tapped her wand tip across his hand at the various pressure points, sending mild vibrations into the drawn muscles to help release the tension.
When his fingers fell open, she began bending and rubbing and massaging them until they could fully open and close without twitching spasmodically. Spasms like that could be life or death in a duel, interfering with a wand motion or a person's aim.
As she worked she tilted her head to the side and studied his face. Unconscious, his features relaxed from the hard, closed expression he usually wore. He looked sad.