Sequel Preview: The Princess's Guide to Popular Statecraft

a/n: Hi, me again! In case you haven't heard, I have begun writing the sequel to this fic: The Princess's Guide to Popular Statecraft. Below is a preview of the opening chapter, the entirety of which is now available in my profile. Hope you enjoy!

Chapter 1: A Lady Will Find a Compromise

DAILY PROPHET, The UK's Top Source for Breaking News
ProphetOnline

ROYAL FAMILY IN CRISIS! Fmr Palace source cites Hermione Granger's difficulty; terrorizing staff, refusal to appear at State functions, forcing a rift between Prince Draco and Prince Lucius
— "I made a terrible mistake!" Exclusive coverage of Prince Draco's heartbreak and regret!
— King Abraxas 'very disheartened' as tension mounts; how Draco and Hermione have 'lost all perspective' while The Firm struggles to stabilize floundering public approval
— Just WHO is advising the soon-to-be Princess of Wales? Inside the staffing nightmare and costly renovations at Kensington Palace

3:25 PM - 30 Jun 2018
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Well, as you can see, everything's going swimmingly. Ironically it isn't not, minus all this about me being some sort of Antichrist—which you'd think would be nothing new, and you'd be right. Though even I sometimes find myself grudgingly impressed by the Daily Prophet's necromancy when it comes to reinvigorating the same dead horse.

Before we get into my latest assault on Britain's constitutional monarchy and/or the apocalyptic disintegration of the Commonwealth, I think it's important to focus on the good. True, the abdication of Prince Lucius (the man) incited something of a broad institutional crisis, but he, at least, is happy, having decided to give up his claim to the throne in favor of loving his wife, reasserting his health, and working towards resolution with his father. Narcissa is also happy, having recently been reunited with her previously estranged husband (and also having escaped prosecution for the abduction of any insidious celebrity journalists, much to my considerable relief). Pansy and Harry are happy, being deeply enamored with their precocious daughter and newly thrilled for the impending birth of their son. Theo and Daphne are happy, one being deeply invested in growing the Transfiguration Project while the other expands her massively successful business. My parents are happy, having recently stepped back from their dental practice in favor of taking a sabbatical to travel the world. Blaise is Blaise, which means we think he's happy, though we won't know for sure until he tells us or we die, whichever comes first. Rita Skeeter and Gilderoy Lockhart are currently too distracted by their ongoing social media rivalry to focus on destroying our lives; Luna Lovegood is somehow one of the sought-after political pundits in the U.K.; Prince Lucius (the dog) is starting to regrow the small patches of fur lost to a recent skin infection; Hortense and Thibaut are wanted for war crimes (I assume, anyway—with them, no news is ideal news); and of course, Draco and I are happily wedded, and blissfully—revoltingly, according to Pansy—in love.

All's well that ends well, as the poets say, and they're not wrong. Or they wouldn't be, anyway, if our wedding had actually been the end.

But love is tricky, isn't it? It's not exactly something you do alone, for one thing, and it's also—even with the best intentions—somewhat blind, which might be why I left out certain pieces of the story until now. In my defense, it wasn't so much failure to notice the existence of any simmering turmoil as it was having no reason to suspect any of those things would ever become my problem. After all, how was I to know that one of my friends had some foregone family history that might suddenly pop up with the arrival of an old vendetta? Or that the politics of the country I'd left behind might somehow bleed into my personal life? Or that I was going to have to be someone's employer, much less in need of an entire household staff?

Love is beautiful, and it isn't just blind; it's also really forking stupid. So, seeing as we've got a lot of ground to cover in terms of all my so-called misbehaviors, let's just jump right in.

June 5, 2018
Clarence House, London, England

"I suppose one might be wondering what a new wife does for her husband on the occasion of his twenty-eighth birthday," Hermione said aloud, surveying the still-covered furniture in the house she was to occupy temporarily for the next unknown period of time. "Difficult enough without consideration of the fact that one's new husband is the soon-to-be formally invested Prince of Wales, and therefore already in possession of most giftable items—"

"And certainly not aided by any other facts," contributed Theo, adding offhandedly, "And is it Draco's birthday again? I swear he just had one last year," before falling onto a peach-colored chaise and stretching luxuriously outwards, ankles dangling below the edge.

"Oh, he did, but just the one," said Hermione, before adding in an afterthought: "And remind me why you're here again?"

"Because I'm Draco's emotional support animal," said Theo. "And also, Daphne's not home."

"Right," Hermione said. "Just checking."

"I told you you didn't have to get me anything," said Draco with a heavy sigh, entering the room behind them and pulling Hermione in with one arm. He kissed the top of her head soundly, adding, "Marrying me was plenty—and besides, I think at this point I'm rather stupendously in your debt."

"You do make an excellent point about that," Hermione agreed, leaning into his shoulder. "I can't say I ever pictured my honeymoon being punctuated by daily conference calls with your father and Dobby. Nor did I suspect we'd be moving in with your parents."

"Well they're not actually here, and it's only temporary," Draco reminded her, looking moderately racked with guilt. "Just until our rooms are finished at Kensington Palace, I promise." Then, with his hands gripping remorsefully at her waist, he added quietly, "You don't regret it, do you?"

Silly man. "Not even a little," Hermione said, twisting around to face him. "Not for a moment."

"Well… hold that thought, would you?" Draco sighed, lifting her chin with a finger. "And give me a solid five seconds of affection before I'm forced to ask something else of you."

"Oh, happily," Hermione agreed, at which point Draco pulled her into his arms and kissed her as shamelessly as he might have done if Theo were not plainly there to witness it. (In fairness, Theo was busy pretending to read something that purported to be a very old and probably quite valuable edition of the Bible, which Hermione was intrigued to discover had not spontaneously crumbled to ash in his hands.)

Since the wedding, Hermione and Draco had come to establish a rhythm in which bad news was preceded by a five-second romantic interlude. True, it worked most obviously to Draco's benefit to soften her up before announcing something newly unsavory, but over time it was proving to be mutually beneficial. Generally speaking, a brief foray into the love that had lured her here in the first place was enough to remind Hermione that there were worse career choices to make, whatever the subsequent bad news happened to be.

"So," Draco said when they parted, smoothing a curl behind her ear, "remember how much you loathed those calls with Dobby?"

"Oh no. Do we have another one?" she guessed, grimacing. It was certainly no secret that while her new family was in the best shape it had been for decades, it was also politically in crisis. Ever since Lucius' decision to renounce his succession to the throne, there had been renewed public outcry from several anti-monarchy journalists and MPs. What was the purpose of maintaining a system of primogeniture when the role of stewardship could be so easily declined? Hermione could practically recite the contents of certain pro-Labour articles in her sleep; in fact, she wouldn't have been surprised if she learned that she actually had been. Already, Draco had picked up a habit of stress-induced, systematic teeth-grinding that now required him to wear an absurdly unsexy (albeit intensely endearing) mouthguard at night.

That was the odd charm of marriage, wasn't it, knowing that? Threaded adoringly alongside the fault lines of their union was the privilege of intimacy with him, the granular details of what he truly was, the problems that kept him awake that were also, willingly, hers. To everyone else, Prince Draco was a rich man in a navy suit who offered photographs and gave speeches; his position in the world was, to many, the result of class prejudice, archaic tradition, and very, very little else. To Hermione, however, he was the sometimes half-unintelligible boy with bleary, tired eyes, her favorite companion, who cared about his country and his family's legacy so much he nearly broke his teeth every night just to keep them safe. Her husband, simultaneously the Prince of Wales, was a man who adored time with his goddaughter and displayed unfaltering self-possession in all circumstances and who leapt at the chance to fetch Hermione a glass of water if she even hinted at being thirsty. That some might not think him deserving of every privilege in the world the same way she did was… politically reasonable. But it was also incredibly distant.

Hermione couldn't honestly say whether she would have thought much of the monarchy if she had followed the path she'd always intended to take. What had she thought of King Abraxas before marrying into his family? She struggled to remember, given everything that had come to pass, but she suspected that an alternate universe Hermione might not have batted an eye if she discovered the United Kingdom had suddenly done away with kings and queens altogether. Sometimes, secretly, Hermione's biggest source of stress was that she couldn't disagree with some of the arguments: the monarchy was a vestigial organ, a foregone source of governance that existed primarily to bloat public funding and to persist in celebration of a baseless hierarchical tradition. Do away with the aristocratic class, by all means! Democracy would always bear more fruit—or so another version of Hermione might say, had she not also hypocritically salivated over her wedding tiara.

But since she so dearly loved the man who would have sacrificed everything to fulfill the duties he was tasked with from birth—and because she really didn't want some grand institutional failure to come down like a guillotine on his beautiful blond head—Hermione figured she ought to join him in his fight to keep his family's reign alive. At the very least, she certainly owed it to him not to point out that maybe, possibly, the reason so many people took issue with his family was because they were a teeny, tiny, little eensy bit… right.

Luckily it wasn't about right or wrong; not anymore. She'd chosen her side when she chose to be Draco's wife, his partner, and now she was also his colleague, the newest member of the British Royal Family and suddenly (depending on the day) both its favorite scapegoat and its only hope. True, at times Hermione was still considered too radical, too common, too aloof, a mere distraction from its deep systemic failures—but on better occasions she was a fresh perspective, a thinking woman, an inspiration to new generations of women and girls.

There was never any telling which it would be on any given day, or which of her qualities might be called upon to dominate the narrative. So to say that even a phone call with Dobby might disrupt her newly-wedded bliss for any number of reasons was really quite a forking understatement.

"Do you want the terrible news first, or the bad news?" asked Draco, dragging her back to the point.

"Mm, terrible news first," judged Hermione.

"Oof, this Job guy," commented Theo nonsensically, turning a page. "Yikes."

"Well, thank you for that marvelous refresher on the importance of perspective, Theodore," offered Draco wryly, "but more to the point, our first formal State visit after the ceremonial investiture has been scheduled for August."

"Oh," said Hermione, surprised by how harmless 'terrible' had turned out to be. "That's not so—"

"It's with President Bagman," said Draco.

"—ba- fork no," she said, belatedly registering the name of the American president for whom she had resolutely not voted two years prior. "No. No. Are you joking? No, Draco Lucius Abraxas Wales, absolutely not, not a chance—"

"As for the bad news," Draco continued, clearly attempting to rid himself of all his burdens at once, "Dobby and Winky will be remaining on staff with my mother and father, which means we will actually not be hearing from Dobby much further and will, in fact, be needing a new chief of staff as soon as humanly possible. You will also need your own staff, ideally someone from the peerage, obviously a wom-"

"I am not sitting in a room with Bagman," Hermione cut in frankly, before retreating with sudden alarm to, "Wait, a whole new staff?"

"No, no, not an entirely new staff, or at least I very much hope not. We're good people, we don't, I mean we haven't—Nott, any assistance?" Draco stammered in a panic, sounding a lot like he was flinging a very hot potato across the room.

"You know, I hate to be predictable, but I think Satan makes an excellent point," replied Theo, crisply turning a page.

"Okay, thank you Theo, very helpful as ever—look, Hermione," Draco said, seizing one of her hands in what appeared to be a fervent attempt at reassurance. "I was really hoping to find a way out of dinner with Bagman, believe me, but perhaps there's a way to see it as a possible… advantage?"

Hermione's mind was reeling far too distractingly to produce anything sensible. "How on earth could there be an advantage?"

"I—" Draco broke off, wincing. "Well, I—"

"Here's a thought," Theo said, glancing up from his apparently very riveting text. "What if you tried considering that divine wisdom is simply… hidden from human minds?"

"Are you having some kind of delayed religious awakening?" asked Hermione.

"Of course not, I'm much too far gone," said Theo curtly, snapping the book shut and rising to his feet. "Anyway, I'm off. Dinner at ours later? Excellent. Good luck with the renovations, by the way," he added, resting a hand on Hermione's shoulder. "I hear your new neighbors have a certain… joie de vivre," he mused, and then smacked a kiss to the side of Draco's ear, strutting out of the room and whistling as he went.

"Wait," said Hermione, frowning. "Wait, did he say—? Wait. Wait." She blinked. "WAIT—"

"Right, so," attempted Draco, staring mournfully after Theo as if he hoped the latter might suddenly change his mind and come back. "I suppose it's possible I may have… neglected to add there was actually calamitous news in addition to the bad and terrible. But it's a palace, isn't it?" he offered Hermione in a desperate Hail Mary. "There's so many rooms—so many rooms, truly. Enough to stage a revolution over, I promise—"

Hermione glanced over at Draco as he stumbled to a halt; she looked, specifically, at the crispness of his fading sunburn and the newly sun-bleached tips of his hair. She recalled the mindless euphoria of their holiday, the delight of waking each morning to sit down to breakfast with him. The way he'd made her come four times in the span of ten minutes yesterday, an episode of magnanimity in the middle of an otherwise unremarkable afternoon.

Very confusing, really, to be so annoyed and yet so helplessly attracted to one's somewhat frustrating coworker. She couldn't say she'd ever experienced that specific sort of annoyance with Oliver, and certainly not with Minerva.

"You might have told me all of that sooner," she grumbled.

"I know." He looked away. "I had my suspicions about some of it, but I only just got off the phone with my grandfather and—" He sighed. "It doesn't help, I'm sure, but most of it was news to me as well."

She considered him again, optimistically recounting the bounty that had been their recent nuptials. Not that the sex hadn't been good while they were dating, but there was something different about it now. A certain… freeing sensation. He had promised himself to her, body and soul, and now there was something newly primal in it—in the ownership factor, the indebtedness. The joining of souls, the melding of lives, the braiding of two fundamentally disparate experiences. Sure it was mildly terrifying, the idea that nothing they did could possibly sever themselves from the other, but it was exciting, too, wasn't it, that everything they did from here forward was inextricably bound?

He's a job, Pansy's voice said in her head, and protest as you will, but neither of you are any good at it.

"Can anything be done about it right now?" Hermione asked him.

Draco shook his head, somewhere between guilty and relieved. "No."

"Then let's not," she suggested, taking his hand and tugging him down to the peach-pink chaise to delight for the time being in their mutual ineptitude.

a/n: In which: a classic tale of newlyweds vs. in-laws gets messy. Media scrutiny continues, an unexpected arrival resurrects a dead family feud, and new fears turn a political tide that even a monarch is helpless to stop. How to move forward with your new life without forgetting where you've been? A guide to international diplomacy, maintaining a stiff upper lip, and doing some actual good in the world.

The full first chapter, should you choose to pursue it, is available to follow now. Thank you for reading, and hope you enjoy!