Chapter 19: Hogsmeade, or: The Loyal Opposition
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
It took less than a month for Gryffindor Tower to fall helplessly in love with Remus Lupin. Rarely had Defense Against the Dark Arts ever been this good: aside from the bountiful scores of brownie points he earned by playing music in the classroom, he continued to bring in live creatures for them to vanquish, which instilled everyone with the feeling of heroism and productivity that, they agreed, ought to have been part of D.A.D.A. curriculum all along. He also liked field trips, which endeared him terminally to those students who struggled to focus in classroom environments, like Seamus and Neville. By late September, when he took them out to study a dead kappa on the shore of the lake, he had acquired a gaggle of admirers who stuck close to his side, headed proudly by Lavender Brown and Romilda Vane.
Harry and Ron had developed a remarkable interest in schoolwork. Hermione barely had to remind them to do their homework for Lupin’s class. Hermione, however, joined the lessons with less than her usual breathless thrill, and rarely raised her hand unless someone else had tried first.
She was still embarrassed about the boggart.
“You can’t possibly still be sore over that, Granger.”
The third years picked their way across the pebble beach, carrying baskets of sardines. Lupin had instructed them on the ways to bait grindylows from their hiding spots in the shallows. Every so often there would be a splash, and a student would yell, and Lupin would come hurrying over to verify if a grindylow had appeared.
It was a cold, cloudy morning in October. Dark arrows of geese passed overhead, baying forlornly. Hermione wore an enormous red scarf and a muggle knit cap that covered half her skull, making her hair poof out at the ears.
“It was horribly embarrassing,” she said tightly. “And you needn’t try to comfort me, I know I did terribly.”
“Terribly?” He wrinkled his whole face. “You successfully cast the spell. Full marks. What fresh hell of perfectionism is this?”
“The third time! After blowing up a piece of furniture!”
“Yeah, and it was awesome,” Ron said firmly, slinging his arm around her shoulder. “Are you kidding me? Seamus wants to marry you.”
“All right,” said Draco sharply.
“Truly, Hermione,” said Harry kindly. He flipped a sardine into the water, and it landed with a plunk. “Nobody cares if you didn’t get it right the first time. All that matters is you tried.”
Draco winced. Hermione, to whom there were as many kinds of failure as there were synonyms for ‘try,’ did not wince so much as dissolve what little stiff upper lip she had been weakly achieving. She flopped a piece of fish desolately into the water.
None of them brought up what her fear had been. Draco had been too horrified to possibly comment. The idea of a Hogwarts letter being revoked had never occurred to him in his wildest nightmares. It would be like someone showing up on your doorstep to announce you no longer got to use your legs. __
He considered trying to reassure her, or at least comfort her with pictures of the gargantuan lawsuit they would bring down upon the castle if they tried, but it never seemed like the right time, and anyway, he didn’t want to start a conversation about their boggarts; it was too likely to lead to questions about his.
Meanwhile, in contrast, Care of Magical Creatures became exceedingly dull. Someone had complained to their parents about the hippogriff lesson, and their parents had complained to someone who complained to Dumbledore, and they now began each week’s lessons with an hour of diligent study on flobberworm care. Draco still had no idea what they were supposed to be learning.
“I do think I’ll drop it next year,” Hermione admitted to him, in a low voice, as she ran over his Charms essay. He’d finished hers, and now lounged with one leg sprawled indolently over the arm of his armchair, reading a muggle novel he’d filched from her collection. So far it seemed to be mostly people sitting in chairs talking about murder, but it was slow going, because every few pages he had to stop and get her to explain a word. “I like Hagrid, and he’ll be a good professor someday, but…”
“But you don’t feel like waiting a few centuries for him to get there?” he drawled, flipping a page. “Or would you just rather do something more important, like watch paint dry?”
“But I don’t feel love for the subject,” she said defensively. “It’s not his fault, I’m just not… the ideal student for his class.”
“Of course you’re not, you have more than two brain cells to breed together.”
She sighed. “Perhaps Kettleburn might have been a better fit,” she admitted. He sniffed, and nodded with such vehemence it jostled its head. They were alike in this way, he and Hermione, in that they both learned perfectly well from a book. Why people like Harry and Hagrid seemed to believe that you could only learn to deal with danger by swan-diving right into the bloody thick of it, naked, wandless, and screaming, was a question for people with more time than Draco, and definitely less sense.
Rain started against the windowpanes, soft and inquisitive. The fire crackled cheerfully, and as the clock struck four, a tea set shimmered into place on the coffee table, accompanied with a plate of scones and roast beef sandwiches. Yawning, Draco swept his wand lazily at the tray and said, “Locomotor sandwich. ”
It drifted off the tray and settled into his hand. He bit off a corner, idly, while turning the next page. Hermione watched, one eyebrow cocked in amusement.
“What?”
“You use magic for the silliest things,” she said. “You could just get up and grab it.”
“Why?” he said, mystified. “I’m a wizard.”
“A legless wizard?”
“I’m sorry, are you new? This is a wand. It does magic when I point it at things. I bought it, fair and square, and use it in my own right. It is therefore my fundamental prerogative that I should never have to get up for a sandwich, if I don’t want to.”
“You’d die in the muggle world,” she laughed. He twisted his neck around so severely that something popped.
“I would not!”
“You’d take one look at a washing machine and faint away. I’d like to see you try to catch the Tube at rush hour.” Her eyes twinkled.
“What’s that, some kind of a disease?” he said warily.
A soft mrow introduced a third voice to their argument, and Hermione cooed, descending into the depths of soppy pet-motherhood without a second thought. She opened her arms as Crookshanks slunk up and crawled into her lap. “Hullo, precious,” she murmured. “Where have you been?”
“Does he often answer you, when you ask those questions?” He eyed Crookshanks with distaste, which only intensified when the cat began sniffing his sandwich. “Or do you share some kind of familiar telepathic communique?”
“Ooh, Draco’s quite testy today. Isn’t he, Crooks? Is it because his Charms essay’s rather sloppy? Is it? I think so, too.”
Crookshanks made an ambitious leap for Draco’s sandwich, narrowly missing, but very nearly clawing him in the ear. Draco made an irritated noise and, deciding that it wasn’t worth a game of keep-away, dropped it on the carpet. The cat pounced on the fallen morsel with a triumphant mew.
It was a mark of Hermione’s mind-addling devotion that she did not even object to the obvious mess. “He’s precious,” she sighed.
“I weep,” he said, “for your children. He that spareth the rod, Granger.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes,” she said, “and how often did your mother chasteneth you, exactly?”
“I resent that implication.”
“HERMIONE!” Footsteps thundered down the stairs. Ron burst out of the stairwell, his face dangerously close to the color of his hair.
“Ron,” said Hermione in alarm, putting down her quill. “Is everything alright?”
“I can’t find Scabbers!” he shouted.
She blinked. “Oh,” she said. She looked at Draco, who shrugged, and went back to reading his book. “Would you like me to help look for him?” she asked politely. “I can try a Summoning Charm—”
Ron leveled a prosecutorial finger at Crookshanks. Draco half expected his next words to be J’accuse. “He’s been sneaking around the Tower all day!”
“Oh.” Hermione huffed a laugh under her breath, which won her no points for tact, but several for cheek, in Draco’s book. “You’re being silly. Crookshanks wouldn’t eat Scabbers, he would never do that. He’s never even caught a mouse before.”
“I don’t care!” Ron was flying through shades of red at a breakneck pace. He would soon hit the purples, and beyond that, they were in uncharted territory. “Scabbers never went missing before! For two years, he’s lived in that dorm and never left his cage, and then that thing comes along—”
“For goodness’ sake!” Hermione laughed shrilly, with a tinge of venom. “Listen to yourself! Scabbers lives in a cage. Does Crookshanks sprout opposable thumbs when my back is turned?”
Draco snickered. Ron registered the noise through his anger, and merged Draco into his target without a second thought.
“Yeah, bet it’s real funny for you, Malfoy!” he shouted, swiveling his finger between the three so-called guilty parties. “If that cat had gone after your owl, you could just swan off and buy a new one! Hell, you could buy the whole Emporium! Isn’t that what you told Harry?”
Draco slipped his leg off the armchair, rankled. “Peace, Weasley,” he said curtly. “I’ve done you no wrong, here. If you want a new rat, what’s more, you can just ask—”
“I don’t WANT a new rat! I want SCABBERS!”
This was more affection than Ron had ever shown for Scabbers before, and it bewildered Draco, who thought — based on comments that Ron himself had made — that Ron merely tolerated the animal because his family had foisted the responsibility for its keeping onto his shoulders. But he saw that both he and Hermione had badly misjudged the depths of water over which they tread, and he fell silent, surrendering. Hermione did not do the same.
“Fine,” she said shortly. She snapped her books shut and dumped them on the table. “Let’s check, shall we? Let’s go have a good, long look for Scabbers, and I’ll bet you anything that we’ll find him holed up in your laundry or something. He could nest there for weeks, and you wouldn’t notice.”
“Go on, then!” Ron folded his arms with a satisfied air. He had before never so closely resembled his mother. “Have a look!”
Hermione flashed Draco an apologetic look, and handed back his Charms essay. She and Ron stomped upstairs with the same deliberately heavy steps; it was almost amusing. But when they came down an hour later, Hermione wore a slightly abashed expression, and Ron was stone-faced, silent, and sullen in his triumph. They had not found him.
“I’m sure he just holed up somewhere in the walls,” she blustered. “I can’t Summon him from another room, not without smashing him through a wall, and it wouldn’t be safe to try. But that doesn’t mean he’s gone, honestly — this happens, Ron, pets do run away—”
“After thirteen years, do they?” demanded Ron. “And why would that be? Not like there’s anything for him to be scared of around here, according to you!”
Draco squinted. “Thirteen years?” he repeated, though nobody was paying attention to him. “Where did you find this Methuselah of rats?”
While Hermione and Ron continued their highly productive and imminently reasonable discussion of the facts, the portrait-door swung open, and the quidditch team stomped in from practice. Rain darkened their red robes to crimson, and they all wore varying degrees of mud in their hair. Draco sighed in profound relief at the diversion.
“Oh, cracking, we’ve got sammiches,” crowed Angelina Johnson, descending on the platter. She stuffed two in her mouth and washed them down with a glug of tea. “M’starfink,” she explained to Katie, who pulled a face at her. Fred and George dramatically hauled their bodies through the portrait-hole as if returning from war, and flung themselves spread-eagle on the rug.
“When I die,” warbled Fred.
“Which will be soon, if Oliver gets his way,” groaned George.
“—tell the scientists they can have every organ in my body except my ass,” said Fred, “so that Oliver Wood can have the pleasure of beating it, one last time.”
Harry brought up the rear of the squad with Oliver. He still had to hop up over the portrait-door: though he’d grown since first year, he still lingered on the smaller side for his age, with a birdlike frame and inelegant, gangling limbs laced with ropey muscle.
“… think we ought to go over that last play again,” he was saying earnestly to Oliver, “because they could get it, really, with a few more goes. I know Angelina’s got the speed for it, and Katie could pitch the quaffle all the way to Ravenclaw Tower if she needed to, so it’s all down to timing…”
Draco closed his book and decided to read upstairs. He wasn’t jealous. He just didn’t much fancy watching the quidditch team loll around the commons, making such a ruckus that nobody else could hear themselves think, and generally fulfilling their reputation as the most annoying delegation of the most annoying House.
“Well done, squad,” barked Oliver. He carded his fingers through his hair, parting the wet strands. A table of girls in the corner gave a collective sigh. “Good performance. Eat a full dinner, and hit the bed early. We’re doing a double practice tomorrow. Malfoy, are you busy?”
Draco sniffed. “I might be. What’s it to you, Wood?”
“Need a word,” said the captain briskly. Draco sighed. He twitched his head in a way signifying assent, and they stepped into an alcove by the stairs.
“Right,” said Oliver briskly. “You wanted on the team last year, didn’t you?”
“Correct,” drawled Draco, polishing his fingernails.
“For both slots? Seeker and chaser?”
Draco’s lip curled. “If you want me to attend practices as the bloody Reserve Seeker, I’ll tell you something else—”
“No, no, that’s not it.” Oliver shook his head. “Although you should come to practice, really, you’ve left us in a terrible position if Harry ever — anyway. I know you ranked seeker first, but how’d you feel about playing chaser?”
His jaw dropped. He went scrambling for words like someone raking through drawers in search of a quill. “What? Yes,” he said immediately. “I mean, sure. Completely. I’m an excellent chaser. I fly like an eagle and throw like a cannon. Yes.” He took a breath, and said: “What happened to Alicia?”
“Nothing, but she’s on exchange at Beauxbatons,” said Oliver, in the somber tones of someone disclosing the death of a close personal friend. “Our Reserve Chaser graduated last year, and it’s policy to offer open slots to the reserves before we hold tryouts. Of course, this would mean that you’d have to come to practice — all of them. And you’d be Third Chaser, so you wouldn’t get to do any of that flashy pyrotechnic stuff you like, you understand? I run plays simple, and I run them clean. I don’t want to see my chasers acting like they’re trying out for the Globetrotters.”
“What’s a Globetrotter?” said Draco ecstatically. “Never mind, I don’t care. Yes, I can play Third Chaser. Obviously. No flash. Sure. I understand.”
“Good man.” Oliver slapped him on the shoulder, probably leaving a bruise. “Practice is four times a week, six to eight in the morning. That means you’re in the air at six, not out of bed at six, remember. I’ll have Harry loan you some robes until we get the next shipment, and if you need a broom—er—”
“I don’t.”
“Well, that’s one less thing to worry about. Oh, but no practice next Saturday, since that’s Hogsmeade,” he added dourly, expression darkening. “They don’t let us book the pitch on Hogsmeade trips. Says it’s bad for ‘student life.’”
“Fascists,” said Draco absently.
“Exactly!” Oliver slapped him on the other shoulder, which meant they would match, at least. “Tell you what, a team like ours could do with a little institutional support. Garrett Goyle is out there buying a platoon of Nimbus Two Thousands for the Slytherins, and I had to pitch a row with McGonagall for permission to practice on holidays… least Flint acts like they want to win, even if they don’t play like it…”
He wandered off, muttering mutinously about faculty rules. Draco remained where he was, shell-shocked.
Harry came over, eating a roast beef sandwich. “Ma’foy,” he said cheerfully, with a mouth full of meat and bread. “Talk to Woob?”
“Hmm?”
He swallowed. “Talk to Wood?” said the dark-haired heathen, grinning. “Did he pop the question?”
In his absentmindedness, he didn’t even think to chide Harry for talking with his mouth full, though it was a disgusting habit and he deserved friends who would tell him so. Draco worked his palm reflectively along his jaw.
“Potter,” he said thoughtfully, “how much could it cost to stock the Gryffindor team with Firebolts?”
It was one of those bright, silver-skied October mornings when everything was brown and golden. A trail of students in cloaks, hats, and scarves wound down the long wooded trail to Hogsmeade, and emerged onto a cheerful cobblestone street walled with Tudor-style buildings and market stalls full of pumpkins and squashes and apples bright as jewels, ruby and emerald. Most of Gryffindor had come, including all of the third years, for whom it was the first trip and therefore especially exciting. Dean and Seamus had brought a twelve-inch list and a shopping cart, which rattled industriously over dirt and cobble on their way through the village gate. Lavender, Parvati, and Romilda, who had formed a proper Pack in the time-honored tradition of teenage girls, dressed up in muggle clothes: tank tops, small pastel cardigans, and checked skirts that would never have passed muster with McGonagall. They seemed to be having fun. Notably absent from the merry crowd was Harry, who despite applications of hook and crook alike had failed to secure a permission form from his ghastly muggles.
McGonagall, the old gargoyle, had been intransigent in this. Draco and Ron had lobbied on their friend’s behalf with several well-argued pleas, but she received them all with equivalent indifference. “Parent or guardian,” she told Harry firmly. “Of whom I am neither. I am sorry, Potter.”
(“‘Sorry’ doesn’t polish my wand,” Draco muttered, on their way out of the office. “As my father would say. Potter, listen, give me two hours and a book on Forging Spells, this can all go away.”
“No use,” said Harry miserably. “She’ll know it isn’t real.”)
Ron had suggested the Invisibility Cloak, but Hermione shot that down with aim no less hateful for being faultless.
“Ron, no,” she said seriously. “Dementors can see through Invisibility Cloaks, and anyway, Harry, you ought to be careful of Sirius B—”
“Don’t say it,” groaned Harry, rubbing his forehead. “If one more person tells me to be careful of Sirius Bloody Black, I’m going to scream.”
Hermione sawed off a triangle of roast chicken, delicately but ruthlessly. “Careful of certain wanted persons, then,” she said primly, and popped the triangle in her mouth, ignoring how Ron was glaring at her.
Relations between the Weasley and Granger delegations of their friend group had not improved since Scabbers’ disappearance. With heroic effort, and herculean levels of diplomacy from Draco in particular, they had worked themselves up from ‘arctic’ to ‘amicable,’ but there was a hard ceiling imposed by the limited patience of everyone involved. The problem was (in Draco’s scholarly opinion) as follows: that Hermione, though brilliant and wry and witty and sweet, could not for love nor money admit to the mortifying state of being in error; and that Ronald, though funny and loyal and kindly and clever, could not for love nor money ever bear to forgive someone who had not first apologized to him.
Harry took it harder than Draco did. It was probably the Slytherin in him, but Draco had never found it difficult to pick favorites. Ron, as the sixth of seven children, seemed to intuitively understand this, and spared most of his wrath for the Cause, treating Draco instead with the gruff dignity of twin soldiers on opposite sides of a war.
So Ron, though he accompanied Draco and Hermione down to Hogsmeade, spent most of the walk in silence, kicking a stone in front of him, clearly wishing that Harry was there. Ron and Harry could keep each other entertained in a locked room until the heat-death of the universe, but Draco and Hermione, who liked to talk about things like novels and magical history and next week’s homework, could together hold his attention for an average of ten minutes before he wished to change the subject.
“Percy made a list of things worth doing,” said Hermione, searching her pockets, “and it’s extensive. The sweetshop, of course, I wouldn’t dream of missing it, but also the post office, and he mentioned somewhere called the Shrieking Shack…?”
“You asked Percy for recommendations?” said Ron tiredly.
“He is Head Boy. It’s part of his job to answer questions.”
It was a testament to how war had abraded him that Ron had nothing sarcastic to say. He merely sighed and said, “We’ve got to remember to bring candy back for Harry. Lots. You hear me, Moneybags?”
“I am going to pretend that question was not addressed to me,” said Draco, “for tact. I would like it observed, for the record, that I am choosing to be tactful.”
“It is so observed,” said Hermione.
“Thank you.”
Ron rolled his eyes.
Honeydukes looked like someone had set paper in front of a very hungry child and asked them to draw their ideal sweet shop. Barrels of candy ran from floor to ceiling on every wall, while boxes of sweets stacked high and overflowed, erupting a pyroclastic flow of candy in all the colors of a rainbow, crossbred with a tornado. Giant creatures made of jelly sat on shelves behind the checkout counter, flanked by chocolate bunnies the size of first years, and at the far back of the room, a giant brick oven blazed the October chill clear out of the room. It smelled of baked cookies and pure, raw sugar, in the almost unpleasant way that good sweetshops do. Draco pocketed a handful of chocolate sea-salt caramels with enchanted molten centers, and picked out a few bits of saltwater taffy. Ron went around with a bag, sweeping great armfuls of everything he could reach, but especially the things Harry liked.
Hermione found a shelf of heart-shaped strawberry lollies the size of her head, and after watching her admire them covetously across the room for altogether too long, Draco rolled his eyes and said, “Oh, get one, why don’t you, your teeth are done for as it is.”
He never claimed to be a good influence on his friends’ lives, Draco thought, as they left Honeydukes. (Hermione was smiling broadly in between each lick of her platter-sized sucker, and Ron’s happy-go-lucky attitude had reappeared when Draco dropped his coin purse in front of the cashier and said, boredly, “Give him everything he wants and whatever the rest of this will buy, I can’t be bothered with change.”) But he did occasionally make them more enjoyable.
After that, Ron wanted to go to Zonko’s (“Fred and George swear by it, they say the owner buys them drinks!”) but Hermione wanted to see Scrivenshaft’s, so they arranged a rendezvous at the Three Broomsticks and parted amicably. Hermione ended up buying a new eagle-feather quill, and Draco good-naturedly allowed the clerk to upsell him a probably fraudulent bottle of spell-checking ink. They left as the sun was painting long shadows under the eaves, and autumn leaves rustled around their ankles in dancing anklets of scarlet and gold. Gryffindor colors, Draco thought fondly, before reeling aghast at his own sentimentality and stabbing the emotion stone dead.
On the way to the Three Broomsticks, they passed a side-street that tapered off into a narrow hike through the woods. “Fancy a trip to the Shrieking Shack?” he suggested, nodding to it.
“Hm.” She eyed the severe uphill climb, and he suppressed a grin: Hermione dodged all tasks requiring athleticism with a dexterity her physical body lacked. “What is it, exactly? Percy didn’t say.”
“Most haunted place in Britain,” he said offhandedly. “Creepy as they come. Dead people by the armful. Simply redolent of ghost.”
“More so than Hogwarts?”
“Hogwarts isn’t that haunted, it’s only got twenty or thirty ghosts.”
“Only thirty!”
“Yes, and that’s piddling, for a castle old as Hogwarts. Even the Manor would have more than that, if we didn’t have pest control in.”
“Hmm,” said Hermione thoughtfully. “How do you take care of a ghost? Is it an exorcism, a casting-out procedure? Or is the spirit truly destroyed in the process?”
“See, that’s an interesting question,” he mused. “Naturally the magical energy would have to go some where, that’s Merlin’s First Law—”
“Newton’s, but carry on.”
“Call him what you like. Ghosts are palimpsests, they retain an image of a magical body, but without the body itself as a source of power… that’s why they draw their energy from a magical location, they can’t generate it on their own…”
“Theoretically you could create a stasis chamber for a ghost anywhere, couldn’t you? Say, a portable one?”
“Certainly, but the trick would be finding the power — it takes volumes of energy to sustain a Being, even a palimpsest of one, which is why ghosts tether to historical locations, where the magic is old and deep and self-replenishing.”
“Logistically, sure, but I’m right on the theory? You could tether a spirit to a material object, then.”
“Possibly,” said Draco, doubtful. “I’m not a necromancer. You’d have to ask my grandfather. But tethering is separate from possession, let’s be clear. Possession is when the spirit occupies a physical form. The spirit gets its energy from somewhere else.”
“That’s so interesting! I wonder when we’ll start learning about it in class?”
He snorted. “Never.”
“Never?” She was crestfallen. “Why?”
“Because it’s Dark Arts,” he said, enjoying how her jaw slackened. “Hogwarts doesn’t teach necromancy. Or spirit magics of any kind. Only Durmstrang does.”
“But that’s… I mean, that’s just excluding a whole category of…” She frowned, folding her arms. “Well, obviously they shouldn’t teach Dark magic, but a theoretical course of study, purely for academic purposes… if people are going to do it anyway, they might as well teach it responsibly…”
“Lucius would have agreed,” he said, and her scandalized look was its own reward.
They passed a vendor stall of steaming hot caramel apples. The vendor, a wizened dwarf with lime green hair, had fallen asleep on his stool, and Draco plucked one of the apples for himself. Whistling, he strolled away, ignoring Hermione’s clucks of her tongue.
But as they turned the corner, it flew out of his hand, and danced away down the street, bobbing mischievously. Draco exclaimed in disgruntlement.
Then the air rippled, and Harry’s grinning head emerged, bodiless.
Hermione gasped. “Harry, you didn’t!”
“Did,” he said apologetically, and took a big, gloating bite of the apple. “Sorry.”
“Oi!” said Draco indignantly. “That’s mine!”
“No, it’s not,” said Harry cheekily. He shrugged out of the Cloak and draped it over one arm. “You stole it, and then I stole it, fair and square.” He offered the bitten apple back to him. “Want it now?”
“This isn’t safe,” fretted Hermione. She glanced over her shoulder, as if Sirius Black might come hurtling out of the sky. “And how did you get past the dementors?”
“Secret passage into Honeydukes. Fred and George helped me out.”
“Of course they did,” she fumed. “On their head be it, if you get hurt. That’s all I’ll say.”
“Bet it isn’t,” muttered Harry, and then shot her an apologetic smile. “Sorry. If I get murdered, you can have the first ‘I told you so.’”
“What a comfort!”
Inside the Three Broomsticks, it was dim and cozy and smelled like bread and ale. They found a booth in the corner, and bundled themselves into the cozy nook, while a shower of golden leaves and sunlight trickled past the window pane. Draco sipped from a tankard of butterbeer, which tasted like warm spiced butterscotch, with a thick crust of creamy foam on top. Ron bought a basket of something fried and curly, dubiously titled “pork scratchings,” which Draco refused abjectly to eat after discovering a piece of hair on one of them.
Then Harry showed them just what Fred and George had given him. It was a piece of paper which, when tapped, revealed a working, complete map of Hogwarts Castle. Hermione gasped and snatched it up immediately, trying to study it. Ron gave a crow of delight and ruffled Harry’s hair.
Draco could do no more than put his head in his arms and moan in anger at the infuriating good luck of Harry James Potter, God’s Favorite Child.
“Bloody hell,” said Ron. “So you could see anyone hooking up? Or out of bed?”
“Ron!”
“I’m just saying! You could!”
“It’s an outrageous invasion of privacy. And here’s another thing, Harry. I don’t trust the intentions of anyone who would try to track the whole student population like that.” She drilled the map with her finger. “I mean, what did they use it for? These… Marauders?”
“Probably just sneaking out,” said Harry reasonably. “You’d want to know where Filch was, and the teachers, and the prefects on patrol…”
“Easier to do the enchantment on the whole castle,” Draco mumbled into his arms. “And less invasive to track everybody than to track only a handful. Nobody’s singled out.”
“Yeah. Hey, you alright, mate?”
“No,” he said. “I hate you desperately. I want you to die.”
“Take a number,” said Harry cheerfully. “Refill?”
“Yes, thank you.”
Hermione sipped her butterbeer, leaving a mustache of froth on her lip. Draco tugged out his handkerchief and dangled it, smirking, on one crooked finger. She pinked and snatched it, scrubbing at her mouth. “Well,” she said, “I will say this. I’ll be a lot less worried about Sirius Black, now we have a way to monitor the castle perimeter.”
“Comrade Granger,” muttered Draco, and snickered when she hit him.
“Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs,” read Ron doubtfully. “Odd names. Must be nicknames, right?”
Draco grunted. “Or purebloods, more likely,” he said. “Dodgy names come with the territory. I’ve probably got a cousin named ‘Wormtail’ somewhere.”
“Oh, here’s an idea,” said Hermione brightly. “Let’s check for Scabbers!”
Draco tensed. Though he kept the party line (being that Crookshanks was a maligned innocent under persecution from prejudiced authorities), he secretly found it probable that the facts of the matter laid on Ron’s side, and that poor Scabbers, after several weeks missing, had exited this mortal vale of tears. That is: he doubted, very much, that Hermione would find him.
“Does it show pets?” asked Harry hesitantly. “I suppose it does, for Mrs. Norris… oh, and there’s Crookshanks, in the girls’ dorm…”
But none of them saw Scabbers on the map.
“Wow,” said Ron frostily. “Look at that! He’s not there.”
“Let’s — look somewhere else, then,” said Hermione, paging through the flaps. “He’s certainly here.”
“Nah, it’s fine,” said Ron bitterly. “It doesn’t show any of the other ghosts, so.”
“Oh, please! Stop being so dramatic.”
“Dramatic, am I? How about I drop that beast from the Tower window, and then we’ll see how ‘dramatic’ you are?”
Hermione recoiled, turning pale, and abruptly wriggled out of the booth. “I’m using the loo,” she said shortly. “And if you can’t be civil, Ron, I — well, I don’t suppose I’ll bother coming back.”
Draco sighed. “Granger, don’t be—”
“Don’t be what?” she snapped. Then, seeing his expression, she softened. “Never mind,” she said. “I’ll just… go powder my nose.”
She disappeared into the sea of cloaks, leaving Draco with Ron.
Ron stared out the window sullenly, cold October light paving his face and leaching the color from his ruddy hair. Draco spun his signet ring around his finger, absently, while he debated whether or not to say something.
“Weasley,” he said, after a moment.
“What?”
He caught his signet ring and covered it with his palm. “Have you heard the one about the wizard in the bottomless pit?”
Ron looked up. Draco shrugged.
Sitting back, he cast his eyes over the Three Broomsticks, giving Ron space to compose himself. He noticed a dark-haired wizard and a blonde witch perched side by side at the bar, both of them stock straight, as if someone had surgically welded some iron to their spines at birth. As he watched, the wizard disembarked from his stool, and it was Theo, dressed out of uniform in a charcoal overcoat and sage green scarf.
He murmured something into Daphne’s ear, and ducked out of the bar, sounding his exit with a jingle of the bell. Draco turned and watched through the window as he crossed the street and ducked into the shelter of an alley, where he disappeared.
Draco frowned.
“Did Potter leave his Invisibility Cloak?”
“Think so,” said Ron. “S’here. Why?”
“Let me borrow it for a moment.”
Draco threw it about his shoulders and flipped up the hood. Moving carefully, he slipped out of the Three Broomsticks and crossed the street — ignoring the occasional cry of surprise when he bumped into someone who hadn’t seen him coming. He steered clear of puddles, and gripped the Cloak tighter when the cool wind threatened to rip it from his head.
In the alleyway, Theo had joined a pair of wizards in hooded cloaks. Draco didn’t recognize them, but they all had their cowls up, so all he could make out was the foremost tip of their profile. They huddled together in the alcove under the eave, shielding from the windchill of dusk.
“…word of Black’s whereabouts, as if it isn’t obvious…”
“Obvious, is it, Jugson? Please do enlighten the rest of us.”
“Going back to his family, isn’t he? His traitorous bitch of a cousin’s got her own mansion, and the Ministry won’t touch it with a— ow!”
The other wizard had backhanded him.
“Speak of Narcissa that way again, and I will make her a gift of your thankless tongue,” he said coldly. “She is a great lady. She is not to blame for the sins of her husband.”
“What sins?” said Theo boredly. It was the first time he’d spoken; he leaned against the wall, arms folded, staring at the ground. “Crying Imperius? Isn’t that what you did?”
The other two balked at his audacity; Draco was nearly impressed. The first wizard, Jugson, snarled, “I was in Azkaban while you mewled in nappies, boy—”
“And I weep for you, I truly do,” said Theo, examining his fingernails. “We all missed you at the christening.”
The second wizard cuffed Theo on the ear. He yelped and staggered away, clutching his head.
“Ow!”
“Mind yourself, Theodore.”
Jugson, pleased by Theo’s misfortune, returned to his original point. “If not his cousin, then the house,” he insisted. “Grimmauld Place, or Witherfell, even.”
“Witherfell has sat empty since the death of Regulus. It is cursed beyond habitation. If he returns there, he shall surely die, and he knows it.”
“But it is his by rights,” Jugson insisted. “Cursed or not, its walls and stones are his to break and bend.”
“Bellatrix’s,” said the second wizard sharply. “Not his. Never his. Walburga ensured it.”
“Bellatrix Lestrange, who’s in Azkaban?” Theo said, sounding amused. “Master of a house she’ll never see again?”
“The Laws of Blood are old and strange, Theodore,” said the second man coldly, ignoring this. “It is hers until death… unless, of course, Regulus named another heir.”
Jugson threw his hands skyward. “Not this, Sibby.”
“It’s plausible.”
“Regulus Black did not write a bloody secret will, and if he did, he wouldn’t name you, a man he never even met—”
“I never claimed to be the Secret Heir,” said the second wizard indignantly. “But for a man in his position, without issue, at frequent risk of life and limb, it would have been exceptionally strange—”
“He had two lawful cousins! Both married! One pregnant!”
“In the female line,” sniffed the wizard.
“You old chauvinist,” said Jugson amusedly. “If I had a galleon for every conspiracy theory I’ve heard about Regulus Bloody Black…”
“Are there many?” inquired Theo.
“Course there are,” snorted Jugson. “He disappeared, didn’t he? Walked out one day and never came back. No body, no will, evidence. Broke his mum’s sweet old heart.”
A slot opened in the wall behind them, and a pair of beady eyes peered out.
“Password?”
“Morsmordre,” intoned the second wizard. The slot closed, and part of the brick wall swung open, revealing a secret door.
The two wizards and Theo filed inside, and the door swung hurriedly closed behind them.
Draco let out a long breath he’d been holding.
A gaggle of Hufflepuffs passed by, chattering boisterously. The sun inched closer to the rooftops, carving half the street into a canyon of shadow, and storefronts blazed with the last rays of afternoon. The taste of butterbeer had gone sour in his mouth, and he laved his tongue over his teeth, wishing he could brush them.
He wished more that he could speak to his mother. He wondered if Snape would take a letter that evening, if he begged him.
Why didn’t you tell me Regulus was a Death Eater? Why didn’t you say he disappeared?
A trio of familiar heads bobbed out of the Three Broomsticks, one red, one black, one bushy.
“…don’t know where he went,” said Ron, fastening his cloak. “Took the Cloak and scrammed. Maybe he forgot something up at the castle.”
“Wouldn’t explain why he needed the Cloak,” said Hermione, worrying her lip. She peered up and down the street. “Did he seem worried? Was he all right?”
The concern in her tone would have warmed the cockles of his heart, if he cared about such things, which obviously he didn’t.
“He seemed fine. Bit mysterious, but that’s Malfoy, for you. Sooner gnaw his own arm off than answer a personal question, I swear.”
Draco waited for one of his loyal and generous friends to defend him against these scurrilous allegations, but each soundly disappointed him. Backstabbers, the lot of them. Deserving of punishment.
“Try the map?” Hermione suggested tentatively. “See if he’s gone up to the castle? Or at least check if he’s on the grounds— oh!”
Her hat leapt from her head. She squealed, spinning around, and made a grab for it, but he danced it out of her range, laughing.
“I — oh, Draco Malfoy, I can’t believe I was worried about you!” He let her snatch it back. Hermione scowled. The wind and the surprise had turned her cheeks the color of honeycrisps, and her hat-hair had reached heretofore uncharted measures of volume. It was sort of like getting glowered at by a winsome hedgehog. “Is that the big idea? A dumb prank?”
“Good one, mate,” Harry laughed, holding out his hand for the Cloak. “Got to give it to you, I didn’t expect it.”
Ron was snickering, too. Draco thought about telling them what he’d seen, but he didn’t even know himself what to make of it. He needed to put his thoughts in order. And Harry had said outright that he wasn’t interested in any more gossip about Sirius Black.
They waded back up to the castle through a striped corridor of sunlight, shadow, and fallen leaves. Ron and Harry jabbered merrily about their haul of sweets and the various ways the Marauder’s Map would make their life easier — “No more Percy!” Ron said happily, “no more Filch!” — and Hermione, embroiled in the fight of her life between curiosity and disapproval, was struggling not to join in.
As they cut through the last stretch of trail, Draco noticed a dark shape flitting through the trees. It was a stray dog, sprinting through the underbrush, tongue lolling joyfully from its mouth. At first, he thought it was Fang, but it was the wrong breed — it was a black German Shepherd, its tattered ears shaped like mountain peaks, its body thin and skeletal from underfeeding. But it ran with a breathless, breakneck speed, as if it were a mere puppy, and it let out little yips of excitement and joy as it careened through the sun-streaked forest.
“Did you see that?” he said, but the others did not; and when he blinked, it vanished into the coppery underbrush, leaving him to question whether it had been his imagination after all.
and… spooky season arrives to hogwarts castle. next chapter goes up this weekend! it will involve:
-quidditch!
-aerial action scenes
-oliver wood’s worst nightmare
-another pair of very special cameos
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