Eine Kleine Nachtmagik

Chapter 43: Eine Kleine Nachtmagik

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

He did not see Hermione again for several days. He only saw evidence of her, in a pink cardigan draped over a sofa filmed in cat hair, or a flier for S.C.R.U.M.B.Y. that appeared, thrice, on the common room notice board, despite persistent graffiti attacks. The third time, he caught a first year named Hooper going after it with a quill, and from irritation and curiosity, he tried out a strange little spell he’d picked up from the margins of Moste Potente Potions, which turned out to make the victim’s teeth grow until they met a solid object, e.g., the floorboards. The success of this experiment was the highpoint of his weekend; the rest was dreadfully dull, composed mainly of listening to Harry complain about homework he wasn’t doing and Ron sulk over dates he hadn’t gotten.

He heard that Hermione had taken up in the library, but he was wary of disturbing her. So he cast an Anti-Vandalism Charm on the S.C.R.U.M.B.Y. poster and gave Crookshanks a scratch behind the ears, and went about his days as normal.

The result of this process was an accidental and unpleasant revelation of just how many hours in the day he spent with, or thinking about, Hermione Granger. It was a daunting hole in his schedule that he struggled to mortar in. There was always plenty of homework to do, but wheedling away too many hours on homework alone made him feel like a pathetic hermit. He flew a few quidditch scrimmages organized by Harry and Cho; he finished reading the fifth year Runes textbook, and did a little work on the egg, though it was slow-going, because Hermione kept their notes in her journal. He played games of Exploding Snap with Ron and the twins in the common room, which always ended with a redhead’s eyebrows getting blown off, and in a true fit of boredom one day he taught Ginny how to cheat. He went through Seamus’s record collection. He listened to Lavender complain about her volumizer. He put on his Walkman and wrote a long letter to his mother complaining of everything in great detail. Then he burned it and penned a short sequel asking why she wouldn’t be home for Christmas. She didn’t answer. He was starting to worry.

On Monday he found a note on his favorite armchair demanding his opinion on a particular Runic script from Ancient Mesopotamia, and his relief was embarrassing.

He burned it and waited four hours before sticking an answer to her favorite desk, under the window. Then he sat down across from it, put up his feet, and practiced Summoning Charms to pass the time. By the end of the hour he was so good at them that he could vault something across the common room, Summon it, and whisk it back into his hand before it landed.

She came down from the girls’ dorm fussing a spray of damp curls into their clamp, and then froze.

The inkwell came hurtling over, and he caught it.

She’d bathed. Her hair was dark and stringy, and her face dewy from the heat. There was something vaguely indecent about seeing her with her hair wet, though it had happened before at the Burrow and he hadn’t thought anything of it then. He blamed it on recent events. She was the one acting oddly; of course he was going to stare.

Some internal debate crescendoed and resolved, because after setting her mouth in a firm line, she stomped over and picked up his note without a word to him.

Her vow of silence was not long for the world.

“Doesn’t work?”

“And a good morning to you, too, Granger. How was your weekend? Mine was wonderful.”

“It was perfectly lovely, thank you, I feel quite refreshed, I slept for an age and still got heaps done and what do you mean, it doesn’t work?”

He tossed the inkwell from one hand to the other. “Precisely what I wrote. It doesn’t work. Work, it does not. Work is the thing it does not do.”

“It checks every box.”

“Except the one where it has to work.”

“How would you know? We haven’t even cross-referenced it.”

“That would be a waste of time. We agreed the runes have to have a grammar, that’s what the accent marks are.”

“I’m positing,” she gritted out, “that we were wrong about the grammar. Obviously.”

“So I gathered. And I’m saying you’re wrong,” he said, “obviously.”

She ripped the note cleanly in half and fed it to the fire.

“We’re getting nowhere.”

“No, really? I thought we’d cracked it.”

“I’m half convinced it doesn’t translate at all,” she said pensively, wringing out a strand of hair. “That it’s supposed to represent something else. We haven’t skimmed the surface of potential symbology.”

“We dismissed symbology because it was too random. Three schools, three nations, and a clue that hinges on someone happening to recognize a precise item of cultural trivia? We can go through it all again, if you’d prefer, but we weren’t stupid then and we aren’t stupid now, so—”

“I know that, but one of us is wrong somewhere, and if we don’t sort it out soon, Harry’s going to be flattened or eaten by whatever horrible thing they’ve got lined up for him, and would you stop throwing that stupid thing— Accio!”

It zipped neatly into her palm. He closed his hand around nothing.

“Twitchy.”

“Prat,” she said.

He cocked his head at the chair opposite him. She hesitated.

“Ronald found a date,” he said, by and by.

She blinked. “Really? He asked someone?”

“Apparently Chang has a friend.”

“I see,” she said. “How’s her nose?”

He held his hand so it bisected his face, dead center.

The corners of her eyes turned up the way they did when she wanted to smile. “Well. That’s one less thing to worry about.”

“Her name’s Padma.”

“I see.”

“Patil.”

“Yes, I know.”

“And yours?”

“Nice try.”

“I won’t tell.”

“Yes, you would,” she said, insufferably smug, like she took pleasure in knowing something he didn’t. Scratch that: he knew she did, and the fact that he would’ve done exactly the same in her situation didn’t make it any less aggravating. “If you knew. You really would.”

Horrible, sneaky woman.

He held out his hand. She tossed the inkwell, and he caught it.

“If he doesn’t ask to match your dress, take Ronald,” he said, and went to go get his Runes book. He could feel her watching him as he left the common room, and that, too, was nearly as satisfying as the last word.

Increasingly, he felt there was a payment of some sort they were delaying. It was racking up behind them, all that debt, but for the life of him he couldn’t find it in his heart to pay it; not today, with the snow coming down so gently on the window, and the fire was babbling like it had a secret to tell. He let it go.

---

The ball was on Christmas Eve. That morning, the twins held a snowball fight in the courtyard, which started at nine o’clock and went twelve hard-fought rounds — a pyrrhic siege of snow golems and frozen artilleries that chased wherever you ran — until noon, when most of the girls departed to make preparations.

“What are you going to do?” said Ron, bemused, when Hermione went with them. “And — hey! Who are you going with?”

She threw a laugh over her shoulder and skipped ahead to join Ginny and Katie Bell. Draco landed a Bombarda that shattered a ten-foot snowman into a twinkling snowfall.

There was music in Gryffindor Tower that night. In the yellow rooms girls and boys hurried to and fro in whispering flocks like the migration of butterflies, half-dressed and half-drunk on excitement. At five o’clock a tea setting appeared in the common room and the boys came down for meat pies and fruit cakes with cups of hot strong cider, chatting about snowball fights and pretending vainly to have no interest whatsoever in what was going on upstairs. Seamus Finnigan put on an album by Blur, and bouncy guitars zigzagged up and down the staircase with the footsteps and the shrieks.

“They’re putting it on,” griped Ron, white-knuckled on his armchair. “There’s no reason to make this much noise.”

There was a crash, followed by giddy screams.

“What are they bloody doing up there? Animal sacrifices?”

“If only it were that easy,” said Katie. She lounged in an armchair with a snifter of brandy, in a three-piece suit of black satin, looking effortlessly sharp and masculine, and somehow, her tie was still better than Ron’s. Merlin wept. “Lavender’s eyeshadow alone would take three goats.”

“I would contribute at least one to fix Ronald’s robes,” said Draco, adjusting his cufflink. He wore a wizard’s white tie, exactingly traditional, down to a white rosebud boutonniere his grandfather might have plucked for himself: a black tailcoat, a neat silk hourglass of a tie, and a waistcoat that sculpted the arch of his waist like it was painted there, in the same marble white as his hair. In the mirror, the black of his suit flushed like the first bloom of ink on parchment against the pale column of his throat and wrists. He slipped on his signet ring, and wondered whether his father had seen something similar in his mirror, down in a different part of this castle, twenty years ago.

Ron adjusted the spangled epaulets of his dress robes, and sighed gloomily. He did not wear a wizard’s white tie, or any sort of white tie at all, but a camel hair suit borrowed from the husband of his Great Aunt Muriel, and it looked like just the sort of thing someone married to a Muriel would wear. Bill had kindly mailed Harry his old set of white tie, in the interest of “not embarrassing himself” during the Opening Dance, but since Ron had no school to represent, he was allowed to embarrass himself in solitude.

“Me, too, mate,” he said glumly.

A knock came at the common room door. Harry went to get it.

“Er. Draco? Your date’s here.”

“We’re not to leave for an hour.”

Harry shrugged and held the door. Daphne wandered in, her eyes sweeping wondrously over the common room.

“So this is where you all throw parties,” she said. “I’d always wondered. Those stairs! Gryffindor calves must be fearsome.”

She was wearing a green dressing-gown. She carried several carpetbags that could have comfortably packed a small household.

“Draco, you look wonderful. Don’t think I’m going in this, of course; I’ve brought three dresses, I want your opinion — I didn’t know if there was a corsage that I ought to match—”

“Don’t push it.”

“Then don’t make it so fun to try! Would the girls mind, do you think, if I went up and — oh, I don’t know, found a corner, or something? I swear I won’t peek. I’m very good at not peeking. And I’ve brought goodies, if they want to share—”

“Slytherin’s still being twats, are they?” said Ron. Daphne faltered.

She rallied bravely. “Why, Ronald! Your suit is so individual. I love it.” She gave him a smile on full wattage. “No one will mistake you for anyone else. A bold statement. Well-made.”

“It’s pish.”

“Oh, thank God. Yes, it’s very bad, and I’m sorry, but I don’t have a moment to help you fix it. Do you think the girls will mind, if I go up, by the way? I wouldn’t ask, really — but I need a third hand to do my hair, and it’s just — the girls’ bathroom in Slytherin, they won’t — I couldn’t—”

Katie stood up. “Sure, I’ll take you,” she said. “It’s jam-packed up there, nobody’ll mind one more.”

Daphne looked her up and down. “Oh! You’re a girl!”

“Most days,” she said, grinning, and offered Daphne her arm.

Daphne looked at Draco, who shrugged. With uncharacteristic timidness, she took Katie’s arm and was led up the staircase. As she went, he heard her murmur: “Now, are you one of those girls who…?” followed by a burst of Katie’s laughter.

The lights grew brighter as the last vestiges of sunset dimmed from the windows, and the music grew louder, rowdier, dripping with the confidence that young partygoers were trying to leech like honey from the air. One of the seventh years sent a flask of firewhiskey rotating around the common room and it loosened the air with laughter, which now flowed eagerly from even the dullest remarks. Already there were vanguards, couples polished and primped ahead of schedule, such as Fred and Angelina, who was sleek and stylish in a sleeveless shift of pink silk, which matched both Fred’s tie and George’s. They formed a constellation with Katie and Lee Jordan, twinning in suits, around whom the younger students coalesced, faces bright with naked yearning. Ginny and Neville hurried down at ten to eight, she in a fluffy blue number with cap sleeves, he in a slightly sloppier vision of Draco’s tails. Cho appeared in a champagne-colored robe with red blossoms embroidered up the skirt, and her hair freed, for once, from its trademark ponytail. She chatted with George and Parvati while they waited for Harry to haul his brain back online.

Suddenly the clock tolled eight, and the will of the crowd asserted itself with a firm gesture toward the exit. Draco, caught up in the current of the colorful flock, checked the sea of heads for a familiar nest, but didn’t find it.

“Hang on, we’re missing someone,” called Ron.

“They’re fine! Go on! Hermione had some trouble,” gasped the arriving Lavender, and when both Draco and Ron stared at her, she snorted and flapped her hand. “Oh, she’s alright. Silly thing thought she could pick up makeup in an afternoon, because of course she did, and then we had to scrub it all off — anyway, Daphne said they’ll catch up.”

“She’s alright, though?” said Ron, in a tone Draco vaguely resented, though he had no good reason to. He decided to blame it on Ron’s jacket.

“She will be, once Daphne figures out how to get mascara on her without getting jinxed. As for me, you couldn’t pay me enough — HELL-O, Finnigan, are you going to carry my heels? Because otherwise someone better bloody levitate me, I am not walking those stairs.”

The entrance hall mulled with people he didn’t recognize. In their finery, it was hard to tell these apart from the true foreigners, who swirled and eddied among the Brits with only a sneeze of French or Bulgarian to differentiate them. Not here, the dominion of House, for a glimmer of green could as well be a Hufflepuff’s ballgown as a Slytherin’s, and there were at least as many Durmstrang students in red fur dress uniforms as there were Gryffindors sporting the color.

A group of Slytherins emerged from the dungeons in dark finery. Theo led the group, his hair slicked in the knife-edge part of an old muggle movie star, dressed to the nines, and perhaps the tens and elevens, in tails, a cane, and a silk scarf. Pansy wore a sleeveless sheath of shimmering jet that made her body into a thin black knife, the same lightless color as her hair. Her mouth puckered in stylish boredom, but it curved up slightly when someone called out a compliment on her haircut.

“Is that Fleur?” whispered Cho, going up on tiptoe. A group of blondes from Beauxbatons had come in, sparkling in white dresses. “With Roger? Roger Davies?” An anonymous whisper assured her that it was. “But he’s a skirt-chaser!”

“Is he really?” said Parvati, with interest.

Professor McGonagall’s augmented voice cut through the chatter. “Champions over here! Over here, please!”

“That’s us,” said Harry nervously, and offered Cho his arm. She beamed and fluttered her hand at the other girls, as if to say: Can you believe it? and they went off to stand with Fleur and Roger. Krum and Cassius had yet to make an appearance.

He turned around again to look for Hermione, and it felt a sting of irritation when she wasn’t there. It was one thing to be late. It was another to lag so far behind that you missed the opening.

“Can you see Granger?” he asked Ron. Did she intend not to show at all? It wasn’t like her. Pride alone wouldn’t keep her upstairs; if it were a matter of courage, she’d be charging down any minute at a dead sprint in pajamas.

“No. Say, there’s Daphne, though,” said Ron suddenly, and pointed.

Daphne rounded the curve of the grand stairwell and stepped into the light. Her hair fit in scalloped golden shells on the side of her head, a pale rose mounted atop the marble shelf of her naked shoulders. Two glittering straps rose from the bodice of her pale blue gown and twined around her neck, dangling a diamond pendant at the center of her naked back.

The amount of bare skin revealed the path of her scars from one ear all the way down into the neckline of her dress, a long canyon of undisguised wounds, and there was whispering all across the hall.

On a guess, he glanced at Theo. The result was gratifying and amusing in the extreme: he was staring at her as if he had never seen a girl, or indeed another human being before.

Then Daphne winked at Draco, and then turned and said something to someone out of sight on the stairs. She held out her hand and beckoned.

A girl stepped timidly into the light. It caught and scintillated on the petals of her skirts, which bloomed in a wide gold bell from the stem of her waist. Gold sleeves like translucent leaves of champagne flowered from her shoulders, like the corselet of gold boning that encircled her waist, and it matched the sparkling tail of the gold wreath that wove in and out of her hair, like a naiad’s crown. Her hair was dark and shimmery and soft as billows of melted chocolate being poured, some braided, and some left to curtain her heart-shaped face, which was bright and smiling and lovely.

It was Hermione.

At that moment it didn’t occur to him that he was staring. It didn’t occur to him that he was doing much of anything at all. Warmth invaded his stomach and trailed its tongue up the inside of his ribs. Everything was moving very slowly, except, of course, for Hermione, who was timidly creeping down the stairs under the hazardous rim of her skirts.

He crossed the room.

He felt himself move before he thought about it. There was static in the parts of his brain that were usually sharp. He really did think he’d been Confounded, but the trouble with it was that he was so distracted he couldn’t concentrate on that, either.

She reached the last steps, which were bigger than the others, and a longer jump in heels, and in her hesitation a hand pressed out of the crowd. She peered at it, and then broke into a smile and accepted it.

It didn’t belong to Draco. It belonged to Viktor Krum.

The champion wore a blood-red cloak and a uniform with polished black boots. The difference in size between them was never more obvious. He was taller than Draco, taller than most of the professors, too, and her hand vanished in the glove of his own.

He leaned in to say something, a distance of approximately several miles, and spoke so close to her ear one would think she was deaf. She giggled back at him. It was all wrong on her. Hermione did not giggle, or wink, or anything that could be described by a theoretically short-lived poet as flirtatious. She was intense and serious and peppery and sly, and dryly funny, but she did not giggle, and if she did, she did not do so girlishly.

Or maybe she’d found a reason to.

It was a normal thing to do. Giggling. She could do it if she wanted.

She could flirt with Viktor Krum, if she wanted. Couldn’t stop her.

But — but — it was perverse for Krum to encourage it. He was seventeen. There was a full two year difference, for God’s sake, it was absurd. One could only infer that Durmstrang had so few girls he had to resort to cradle-robbing at Hogwarts.

Hermione was wearing makeup. There was gold on her lids, a sheen of pearl pink on her lips, and her eyelashes were unusually long and fluttery, all the better for batting at Bulgarian delinquents.

“Do try and give us a smile, darling,” said Daphne. She was at his elbow, somehow; presumably she’d teleported. “I didn’t spend two hours on that for you to scowl like she gave you the croup.”

“Did you know her date was Krum?”

“If I did, I still wouldn’t answer questions put to me in that tone. And yes, she told me. You can thank me for that dress, also, it’s mine, but I’m simply a goddess with a needle and stitching; I dropped the bust two sizes and took in the waist four inches in the span of half an hour. I should be carried cheering through the streets of Rome. Frankly, for the hair alone I think I deserve awards.”

“You deserve something,” he said thinly. Krum had taken Hermione’s arm and was introducing her to Karkaroff and Maxime, who stood in a group with Fleur and Roger. Roger kept glancing at her waist. If he did it again he would get knocked off his broomstick the next time he played Gryffindor, and Draco would not be dispatching any Weasleys to catch him.

“Ah,” said Daphne wisely. She took his arm. He gave it to her, distractedly, in the same way he probably would have handed over his wallet and wand, if she’d tried to take them. “Well, don’t worry. She’s not in love with him, I don’t think. I gave her a thorough interrogation.”

“What?”

He hadn’t even considered the possibility. The shriveled little chamber of her heart reserved for things like romance and kissing was filled with petitions and Arithmancy textbooks and the smell of fresh ink. He knew, because — because he knew these things. And Viktor Krum didn’t. So she wasn’t.

“I said, she’s not in love with him,” said Daphne patiently, steering him along, though where he didn’t know. He was twisting his neck to keep an eye on Krum’s hand, which was drifting dangerously low on her back, and if it took further liberties it would receive a curse currently being deliberated on. Perhaps something to do with fingernails. “I don’t know about him, though. I don’t think she knows. For his part, he seems to be a gentleman.”

“He seems to be nine-tenths giant and one-tenth bear. If he’s a gentleman, you’d need a telescope to find out.”

“Mm. They do make a handsome couple, don’t they,” sighed Daphne, who was now being mean on purpose, he thought. “The gold and the red? Gryffindor colors? And it’s such a lovely story, all the newspapers will swoon for her. La belle et la bete. The little swot and the international celebrity.”

“What are you, their publicist? Shut your mouth before you drip ignorance on the flagstones.”

“And you shut yours before you drool jealousy on my dress. I didn’t agree to come tonight with a sourpuss. Pick that jaw up and smile at someone before I hex one onto your face.”

He twisted his cheeks into a stiff smile and aimed it at a random Slytherin second year, who quaked and turned around. “Don’t make me laugh, ‘jealousy.’ I’m concerned for her. If it’s jealousy not to want a seventeen year old putting his paws all over your friend, then I suppose I’m guilty.”

Krum’s hand was toying with one of the lace petals on her skirt. Fingernails and toenails, he decided. And possibly a blood curse, as a reminder. Or he could hex the hand off altogether. He had no right to do that. He didn’t care.

What was wrong with him?

“I’m sure I wouldn’t know,” she said faintly. “But do me a favor? If you see Theo, tell me, and whatever I do, don’t comment on it, please. I’m going to say hello to Pansy.”

“What?”

But she had slipped off his arm and into the crowd. This left him standing alone, and he didn’t know whether to be glad or dismayed, for Hermione turned and saw him, and her glow redoubled. She slipped away from Krum and Karkaroff and bobbed through the crowd, wading like a lantern cut loose on the tide, until she crested again beside him, and he was standing there, and she was in front of him, and for the love of anything he had ever known he could not figure out what to say.

“Hi,” she said.

Something happened in his ribs.

She drew her eyes down his suit, approvingly. “You look very nice.”

“Yes.” As if that was any sort of answer whatsoever.

Her mouth curved. “Of course,” she said. “As I learned from Daphne earlier this evening, ‘humility is so middle-class.’”

“What?”

“Never mind. Are you alright?” She turned over her shoulder. “Is someone there? Oh, did you want to talk to Vikt—”

“No. I don’t want to meet ‘Viktor.’”

“Really? I think you’d have plenty to talk about. He was very interested when I said you played quidditch. And I’m sorry, but if I hear one more person say the words ‘Scottish Pincer,’ I’m going to tear my hair out.” She fidgeted with her fingers. It was so familiar that it rooted him gratefully to earth. It was Hermione. Hermione Granger. Nervous and fretful and tightly-wound, with more fidgets than a Pekingese. The girl on the train.

“Well?” She twisted her hips in a way that made her skirts swirl. It was a very small and girlish gesture that didn’t seem like her at all. “What, nothing? I thought at least you’d say something about the hair. ‘Well done, Granger, but where’d you hide the rest of it?’, that sort of thing.”

Her imitation of him was highly nasal and unsporting; also, very funny.

And now she was looking at him. Merlin.

“You look — you look like—”

“It’s a bit much,” she said quickly. “I didn’t realize. I had to borrow it from Daphne. She said it would be perfect, I didn’t know any better.”

“Of course she did.”

“Oh, dear. What’s wrong? I look silly, don’t I?”

“It’s perfectly appropriate.”

“Ah,” she said, confused. “Alright. So—”

“You look like you’re getting married.”

His mouth was dry. He wet it. Hermione was staring at him with all-consuming attention, which was good, and horror, which wasn’t, and the slack line of her mouth spelled a dismay so profound it erased all traces of levity and sparkle from her face. He kept looking at it.

“What?”

“In the wizarding world,” he said thickly, “gold is — it’s got a particular cultural — that is, as a color, it’s rather significant.”

And if she were getting married, her husband wouldn’t be wearing red. Her husband would be in traditional dress robes, probably with gold accents instead of white, but that wasn’t important; he would be waiting for her at the end of the stairs, and he’d take her arm and — and she’d smile, with her wide shining eyes, when he put a cloak over her shoulders — and the sunlight would be catching the gold in her skirt, because wizarding weddings took place at dawn, the kind of rosy light that always loved her, like fireplaces and lanterns and the candles that guttered on library tables at night.

And she would — theoretically — kiss him. The person she was marrying. There would be that, and he was thinking about it, unwillingly, and unhappily, but there it was. Because he was distracted. Because he wasn’t well.

“You’re lying,” she said, and he tried to remember what they’d been talking about.

“Cheers, you look well,” Ron said gruffly, appearing with a sour-faced Padma on his arm. One sympathized. He didn’t comment on Krum, though Draco didn’t know how he could have missed it. “Nice dress, too. Worried there was a funeral happening, though.”

“She put me in a funeral gown?” said Hermione faintly.

Draco narrowed his eyes. Ron backpedaled like he was going for a medal. “No! It’s not just for funerals! It’s like, for special occasions. A proper show-offy dress.”

“So I am overdressed!”

“Not really,” said Padma. “Cho’s in gold and red, and nobody thinks she’s out of place. Besides, you’re coming with a Champion. S’pose you’d want to look fancy.” It was more than a little jealous.

“I didn’t want to stand out! I asked her to give me a suitable, normal wizarding dress! Oh, I’m going to kill her. I’m sure she thinks this is hilarious.”

“Nah, I don’t reckon she does,” said Ron. “She brought that dress for herself, remember? You ought to trust her a little. She’s a real sport, Daphne, if you give her a chance.”

Hermione still seemed skeptical. Draco was about to lie and say it didn’t make a difference anyway, but Viktor Krum chose that moment to lumber over and loom behind her like a bodyguard.

Draco found it necessary to count back from ten.

“Hermynee,” said Krum, and Padma gave a high, freewheeling giggle that appeared to flow involuntarily from her throat. Draco and Ron cut her twin stares of disgust. “The headmaster calls us to dance.”

“Oh, God. Alright. I thought I’d have more time.” Hermione touched her hair, her sleeves, her waist, a flutter of shivery hands. “I warned you, I’m no good at dancing, so I’m probably going to embarrass you and say ‘I told you so’ afterward.”

“She really will,” said Ron, who was uncharacteristically sullen in the presence of his quidditch idol.

“Is good. I am not good also. Ve vill be not good together,” said Krum, smiling at her a little, and Draco was struck by a searing fork of feeling.

It was like dropping into a dive on the broomstick, the dizzying rush of fear and danger with none of the thrill. Like gravity, he was helpless to it, and like all helplessness, it irritated him. Draco couldn’t stand irrational people. It was a humiliation to be made one of them against his will, and he blamed her.

“If he drops you, I’m going to laugh,” he said coolly to Hermione, and then stepped away. Stares followed him. He didn’t care. If he stood next to her and Viktor Krum for a moment longer he would have said something he regretted even more, or possibly said nothing, and done something worse.

She was his friend. It was natural to want to protect one’s friends. Especially from overdeveloped Bulgarians with a taste for younger women.

He couldn’t find Daphne, but was hailed by Pansy and Theo near the entrance, standing in a circle with Goyle, Crabbe, and Marcus Flint. Crabbe had brought Millie, and Marcus was with a girl whose name might have been Gemma, from one of the up-and-coming pureblood families in Surrey.

“Good show, my boy,” said Theo grandly. They shook hands. “Trotting out the old reliable, I see.”

“Apparently more modern than I realized. Did you come straight from the coronation, or have you scheduled a revel of aged dandies for the afterparty?”

“I’m not sure what Dumbledore’s evening plans entail, but I quite intend to stay out of them. This is my father’s scarf, and it’s young ruffians like yourself who are letting the side down. Granger’s a revelation, by the way, not bad at all.”

“Go to hell.”

“That was genuine,” said Theo mildly. “Merlin. Can’t hardly say anything around here. She looks nice. Everyone’s saying so.”

Terrible news for his headache. He considered going back to bed.

“What do you mean, everyone? Are you taking a poll?”

“Everyone means two people,” said Pansy, rolling her eyes. “And he was one of them. If you ask me it’s a bit gaudy—”

“Hark at her, ‘a bit gaudy,’ she wanted to come as a nun—”

“—but better overdressed than under, and far better than the things I’ve seen on some of these muggle-borns. Thompson looks like she forgot to put a skirt on before leaving, Bell’s bloody crossdressing—”

Pansy had a remarkable knack for finding a sore nerve and whaling on it. He didn’t understand why it was so difficult for her to keep her mouth shut, at least when they were in public, about muggle-borns. It wasn’t as though she could really believe much of it. She’d gone to the same school as him and Hermione.

“Bell’s not a muggle-born. And she wore it correctly, so what do you care?”

“Because it’s not done,” said Pansy plaintively. “You think I wouldn’t like to wear pants to one of these things? I’d shoot someone to get this stupid skirt off, but you can’t flaunt the rules. It’s rude to the people who do follow them.”

“Be nice,” said Theo, flicking her ear. “If you wanted to borrow my trousers, you should’ve just said.”

“Sod off.”

“Have you seen Daphne?” said Draco, deciding it was time for a change of subject.

Theo closed his mouth and turned his head away. Pansy also turned her head. The group found a panoply of fascinating objects on the floor. It was testimony to the deep space carved by her absence that it was marked in silence by a group ill-disposed to be silent on any subject, at any time, ever.

“So you have, then,” he said, thinking of her carrying her own carpetbags up all fourteen flights of stairs, and feeling particularly ungenerous.

“I’m glad you took her,” said Theo quietly. “I was worried she wouldn’t come.”

“Don’t thank me as if it’s some favor, you embarrassment. Why didn’t you take her, that’s my question, she’d obviously rather go with you—”

Pansy cringed. Theo gave a short unhumorous bark of a laugh. “Would she?” he said. “If she did, she might have said yes when I asked her, old chap.”

“…She rejected you?”

“Mmhm. I believe she’d rather strip naked and ride in with Hagrid. Paraphrasing.”

“You’re being mean,” muttered Pansy.

“Ring the presses. Local man expresses his personality, more at eleven.”

Draco marked the time and location on his watch when he admitted it: he officially understood nothing about the social dynamics of Slytherin House.

A kettledrum boomed, and a harmony of horns shrieked out over the babble of the chamber. From atop the stairwell, Dumbledore spread his arms and spoke in a voice that resounded against the walls:

“Dear friends! Peers! Special persons! Welcome to the Yule Ball! For our opening number, we will have a waltz from the four champions, who I am assured have prepared assiduously to demonstrate for you.” There were titters. Draco caught Harry’s eye, and found with satisfaction that he was already shining with sweat.

“The waltz is known,” he concluded slyly, “by its dear composer, a wizard not of magic, but of skill; and a personal favorite of mine, whom you may blame for the choice, if you disdain it: Jonathan Strauss’s ‘The Blue Danube.’”

“A muggle composer?” whispered Pansy. Applause blanketed her next remark, and the doors swung open.

Someone had struck down the Great Hall, and raised in its place an enchanted garden. White trees sleeved in frost and fairy lights and diamond chains drew back their frost-feathered skirts around a wide dance floor. Their arms tangled overhead and formed a silver lattice, like a bridal veil, through which a river of blue and purple stars strained down from the bespelled ceiling. A menagerie of animals wrought in ice and furred in snow migrated, shining clear birds and foxes with coal for noses, deer with long intricate horns sculpted to glittering tips, and dormice with cups of holly for ears. On buffet tables, anchored between levitating trays of hors-d’oeuvre, baked hams glowed like small fat suns among a planetarium of roasted pig, scalloped potatoes, purple gelatins, tall whipped snow drifts of trifle, and circus salads brimming with Christmastime colors. A champagne fountain nine tiers tall poured in the shadow of a chocolate fountain four tiers higher than that, so tall that most of the guests could not crest it on tiptoe.

The champions were dancing now in small circles of varying grace. Fleur and Roger swept fashionably through a rotary waltz, while Harry and Cho executed a mechanical box step. Next came Cassius, looking tastelessly handsome in a classic tailcoat, holding the arm of a sandy-haired girl in a green pinafore, her thin, fox-like features trained into an expression of intensely concentrated gloat.

“Hm,” said Theo. “Well, it’s not a bad match.”

“Not a good one, either,” said Pansy.

“Think he was nervous about losing the spotlight?”

“Or he wanted to keep his options open. At least this way, there’s no rumors of engagement.”

“Not sure this does help the rumors, Pans. Why would he take her if he’s not shagging her?”

“Oh, he wouldn’t, but that doesn’t matter. The gesture proves he’s not obligated, and the rumor makes her seem desirable. Good business.”

“Perhaps,” suggested Theo, “they’ve fallen madly in love.”

She barked a laugh and clipped his arm with her elbow, and he shouldered her back, tussling like a pair of colts.

“Pardon the fool,” said Draco tautly, “but whom are we mocking?”

“Oh. Right. Pans, d’you want to help the neophyte?”

“That’s Flora Carrow,” said Pansy, indicating the blonde with one indolent pinky finger. “If I’m not wrong, that is, I can’t barely tell the twins apart.”

“Mm. Do you think Cassius can?”

“Shut up.” She was smirking. “Pig. Anyway, Draco, they’re not suitable, which is why we’re speculating.”

Draco lifted an eyebrow. “Carrow is on the Sacred Twenty-Eight,” he pointed out. “‘Warrington’ isn’t.”

“Well spotted, but the twins don’t stand to inherit,” said Theo. “Only daughters of a thirdborn son, and the Carrow estate’s entailed, so the heirs couldn’t help even if they wanted to. Plus, their mother’s a loon—”

“Manners, Teddy, quite literally everyone is here.”

“What? She is. Elea Carrow was born a Lovegood, and they’re quacks each to each. How else can you explain marrying a thirdborn with an entail?”

“Somehow, I don’t suspect the Warringtons are cash poor,” said Draco dryly, after a moment. “And if they were, I don’t suppose they’d send their seventeen-year-old heir out with a shopping list and a dance card. But perhaps I’m old-fashioned.”

Pansy rolled her eyes. “Lord help us,” she said, “sometimes I forget you’re rich.”

“We’re all rich, Parkinson.”

“Yes, but some of us have estates that will expire before the heat death of the universe. We have reputations to uphold.” She nodded at the waltzing couple. “But I still wouldn’t marry a Lovegood for all the gold in Gringotts.”

“She seems perfectly lucid to me.”

“Neurosis can skip a generation,” she said. “With my mother, I’m not taking chances.”

After a few turns, the conductor turned, and beckoned other couples onto the floor. Dumbledore came first, escorting Minerva McGonagall in the most unsensual waltz of all time, and then came Cedric Diggory, with — Draco blinked — a mousy-haired boy.

“Who’s that?” hissed Pansy.

“I’ll be damned. That’s Neil Macdonald.”

“Who?”

“Hufflepuff seventh year. I wouldn’t have… well, I will be damned,” said Theo thoughtfully. “I wouldn’t have thought he’d try it on.”

Under the omnipresent grin, Cedric looked faintly nervous. Neil didn’t, however. He held Cedric’s arm like it was a shillelagh and smiled, serenely, like he was more than willing to use it. They settled into a form-perfect rotary position, Cedric leading, and slid gracefully into their waltz.

The sweep of whispers that followed them almost overshadowed Hermione’s second waltz with Viktor Krum. Hermione’s face was drawn with mixed excitement and dread, and she proceeded to give a presentable, if inelegant, demonstration of a waltz. It turned out that she was the stronger dancer of the pair, for Krum, never much one for land-based activities, was only charitably ‘dancing’ at all.

Draco watched. He couldn’t help it. There was nowhere else to bloody look.

She wasn’t unhappy, he thought, which was a minor miracle, considering the crimes she was abetting to the art form of dance. In fact she was very nearly happy itself, if anxious, which of course she was; she hated being stared at. He knew that. Krum didn’t, naturally.

After the first movement of the song, other couples joined them, and they disappeared among the colorful skirts.

He ought to find Daphne. He made excuses to Theo and Pansy, and pushed through the hex of swirling couples to a table where she sat chatting with Ron and Padma. Also with them were Percy Weasley and Mad-Eye Moody, who was stiff and imposing in a starched auror uniform.

“Did you see Hermione?” whispered Ron, leaning across the table. Padma sent a disgruntled look at him, which he ignored. “With Viktor Krum?”

“Oh, is that what his name is? I thought she’d transfigured a brick wall.”

“What’s she on about?” he hissed. “He’s from Durmstrang! He’s the enemy! She could be giving away our secrets!”

“What secrets? That we haven’t solved the egg yet? That Potter is, in fact, as lamentably ill-prepared as one could possibly suspect?”

“Among other things! And even if she’s not, she might have gone with someone from Hogwarts, instead of fraternizing with the enemy.”

“I simply must disagree. Young Miss Granger has come precisely in the spirit of the event,” sniffed Percy. “The tournament is an opportunity for international cooperation—”

“Ronald,” said Daphne, quite abruptly, “what do you think of Hermione’s dress?”

Draco sent her a dark look. Ron stuttered out, “I didn’t — but that doesn’t — it’s not bad, I guess,” and Daphne puckered her lips as if she were trying to work a length of pipe out of her mouth.

She turned to Draco at once. “Dance with me?”

Glad to get away from the table, he agreed. When they were whirling a clockwise rotary around the outer circle of dancers, she sighed and sagged into the hand on her waist. She was, as he recalled, an able dancer, and they moved in swift eddies around the ring that would have dizzied someone else, like Hermione. She did not lean on his arm as if she required it, or indeed, as if she would move any differently had he disappeared altogether; she was the sort of follower whose great talent was in letting the lead imagine he was making any of the decisions at all.

Hermione had never once let anyone imagine they were making a decision for her, in her life, and had been distraught at the idea that she might have to even pretend. She led from the following position, for Merlin’s sake. She’d kept bracing her weight on his shoulder, as if unconsciously, to drive him back where she wanted him. And she probably could have managed it, if she’d had ten more minutes and a partner less stubborn. His lip quirked.

“Draco, does Ron fancy anyone?”

“Merlin’s flea-ridden beard. No, and vital fractions of my will to live are predicated on my never finding out, so step carefully.”

“He’s never said anything about fancying that lovely Lavender, or Parvati? Or Romilda? She’s growing up quite pretty.”

The gut revolted. He really should have taken an antacid before he came down.

“I don’t know what you imagine we talk about, when you’re not in the room, but the dubious allure of Romilda Vane is so far down the list as to have not been touched in three years of middling-to-acceptable conversation. And if you lived with Lavender Brown, you would understand from whence comes the strength to resist her charms.”

“So your theory,” she said skeptically, “is that a fourteen-year-old boy, living in immediate proximity to dozens of girls his own age, has never had a crush?”

“No. I don’t think about it one way or another, and I resent the attempt to break my streak. Why the hell are you interested in Ronald, anyway? I thought you were obsessed with Theodore.”

“Lower your voice! Merlin! Are you talking to someone in the Astronomy Tower? No! I thought not! Good! Shut up! Thank you!”

“Calm down. He hasn’t got bat-ears.”

“You’d be surprised! And I’m not ‘obsessed’ with him. I don’t even like him. I do think he’s fit, but so would anyone.”

“I’d mourn your taste, but considering fate has cruelly pitched Cho Chang into the throes of passion for Potter, it seems you’ve caught what little luck you can.”

She clucked her tongue. “Oh, but Harry’s fit, too. Don’t make that face. He’s not my type, but you’d be barking not to see it. That bit with the dragonfight was terribly daring.”

“I am asserting my inviolate right not to hear you lust after my idiot friend.”

“You can’t be jealous of everyone,” she said mildly, rounding off a promenade. “I’ll agree not to remark on your thing about Hermione—”

“I thought we’d ascertained the Astronomy Tower has no part in this conversation.” He spun her. “And I don’t have a thing about Granger. It’s Krum I don’t like.”

She huffed. “You and Theo are sopophorous beans in a pod, you know that. If I locked you both in a room with Anti-Irony Charms, I think you’d both leap out the window before you said a word to each other.”

“You made that up.”

“Anti-Irony Charms? Why, have I frightened you?”

“I’ll trip you.”

“Do it, I’ll scream.”

The waltz ended with a round of clapping, and the orchestra struck out a hearty mazurka. Dinner had begun, and enchanted automatons dressed as nutcrackers danced plates to each table. The champions ate at a table with the headmasters, Fleur’s long golden arms striking the air in emphasis, Hermione’s head bent intently towards Krum — and at their table, Ron, George, and Angelina were having an argument about the Weird Sisters, while Padma sulked and eventually drifted off with a boy from Beauxbatons. The dinner was sumptuous and accompanied by small fizzing cocktails that foamed different colors each time someone sipped, and afterwards a host of ice ballerinas in white tutus carried trays of spiced Turkish coffee and brandy with chocolates and cheeses for dessert. The orchestra jazzed it up and the mannered whirls of strictly ballroom ceded to the clumsy undulations of modern dancing, ‘Hungry Like the Hippogriff,’ ‘Compliments on Your Curse,’ interpolated with covers of muggle music.

Three girls came by to ask Draco to dance, which did nothing for Ron’s mood.

“He doesn’t want to dance with you,” he said bluntly to the last one, a short brunette from Hufflepuff, who purpled in mortification and practically Apparated out of sight. Draco didn’t disagree, but kissed his teeth in silent disapproval, to which he snapped: “What? You don’t,” and stole a gulp of one of the twins’ punch, which made him erupt in coughing.

“God,” he gasped. “That’s neat petrol, that is.”

Draco frowned and took it. One whiff had him steering it as far from his nose as possible.

“Spiked.”

“Course it is, it’s the twins. But where the hell do they get the alcohol?”

“Outside the castle, I expect,” he said distractedly, for Hermione had broken out of a knot of dancers and was coming over.

Roses had bloomed in her cheeks, and hair had started its inevitable ascent out of its gelled coiffure, forming a feathery corona around her face, but for all that she merely looked flushed and hearty. It was so rare to see her disarrayed or out of breath that he felt taken aback all over again, which was frankly getting annoying, at this point.

“Hello! It’s hot, isn’t it?” She was fanning herself. “You’d think the ice would do something, wouldn’t you? Viktor’s gone to get some drinks.”

“Viktor,” muttered Ron. “It’s Viktor, is it?”

She toppled into Padma’s empty seat. “I think it’s going well,” she said, “as far as I can tell. Harry and Cho wanted to keep going, but I had to beg off. Daphne, these shoes are obscene.”

“Oh, aren’t they just? You should show off your calves more often,” said Daphne serenely, proving that she held nothing but hatred for Draco in her heart.

“I meant obscenely uncomfortable,” Hermione amended, hiking up her skirt to rub at a small red mark on her ankle. “Waltzing’s already a nightmare in flats. Who decided witches ought to do it backward? And in heels?”

“It’s not backward, from the follower’s perspective,” he said, faintly amused.

“It is from mine. All the books teach you the steps from the lead’s position, and then they just say, ‘for the follower, do this, but backward,’ like that’s any help at all. Oh, just do it backward! Wonderful! I’ll be a ballerina by morning. Good Lord.”

“You read books on it?” Daphne sounded utterly charmed.

“Well, I wasn’t going to go in fresh on one lesson. Especially one lesson with him.”

His lip was twitching. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That you’re hardly a consummate teacher.”

“Excuse me, I’m a wonderful teacher. Ask Longbottom.”

She laughed. “He says you yelled at him for three years.”

“Correct. And then what happened?”

“Nothing like what will happen if you yell at me, I assure you.”

He did smile, then, and was more or less resigned to it. He pointed it at the far wall, for deniability’s sake.

“Did you see Neil, by the way?” she said into his ear. He leaned in to hear her over the music, and accidentally smelled whatever it was Daphne had put in her hair: something starchy and perfumed that overwhelmed the usual smell. He wrinkled his nose. “With Cedric? I got to talk to them a little, at the table. Dumbledore thought it was wonderful. You should’ve seen Fleur’s face, though, I think she a bit fancied him.”

“It’s a bold move, on Diggory’s part. He’s made himself rather vulnerable.”

“You think so? I thought the opposite,” she said reflectively, reaching behind him for a water glass. “I saw it as a great show of strength.”

Another lungful of scent. He turned his head toward her and was nearly elbowed in the face. The makeover had failed to imbue her with any grace, agility, or regard for his personal space, and it was deeply reassuring. No fairy-girl, this; just a bossy swot who didn’t respect him half as much as she might have, if Merlin had garnished her massive brains with a drop of common sense.

She pressed the glass to her cheek, and condensation melted against her skin. He pivoted to face the dance floor.

---

By ten o’clock the Yule Ball had committed that triumphant metamorphosis from a dance into a party. The Weird Sisters thrashed away on guitars while their singer wailed into the microphone as if she intended to swallow it; the dance floor’s subtle ecosystem had sprouted microbiomes, circles of girls with bare legs rolling their hips, shuffling couples penguin-walking in their private corners, wide dance circles where those with talent or courage broke into frenzies of pantomime for the amusement of their cheering friends — in which no one was partaking with more enthusiasm than Fred and George Weasley, who were throwing it back in the center of the dance floor as if they had but one night left to live.

A group of muggle-born seventh years were attempting to teach Dumbledore something called the Macarena, a task he undertook with bewildered delight. Cho had enticed Harry to Charleston, and he was making her laugh by doing it wrongly on purpose. Ginny and Neville were doing something that would have been humiliating if either of them gave the slightest evidence of taking it seriously. Theo, Pansy, and the Slytherins presented a row of uniformly mannered disdain at their own table, although Crabbe’s foot was tapping.

Hermione peered around. “Ron, where’s Padma?”

“Oh, remembered me, have you?”

“What?”

“Nothing. Nice of you to drop by.”

“But — what do you mean?”

“Nothing. Forget it. Ronald’s been into the punch—”

“Excuse me,” said Ron, outraged, but he was interrupted by Harry, who broke out from the crowd and shouted something to Hermione about the song playing — she laughed, and took his hand — and he swapped her for Cho, who fell into her chair with a giggle and shooed them away.

“Did you see what happened with Lavender?” she said hoarsely. “I’ve never seen Seamus so red in my life. Wow! That’s a brave lass.”

“What did she do?” Ron wanted to know, but they were interrupted by a shadow roughly the size of a building.

“Vhere is Hermynee?” said a voice. Krum materialized from the crowd, dual-wielding cocktails.

“Lost her, have you?” said Ron, addressing him somewhere around his boots.

“Yes. If you see her, tell her I haff drinks.”

“Tell her yourself,” said Draco shortly. “She went to the powder room. First left out the door, all the way down the hall.”

Krum dipped his head and departed.

“I didn’t know there was a girls’ room on the first floor,” said Cho thoughtfully.

“There isn’t,” said Ron, sounding conflicted.

Draco shrugged, draped an arm over the back of his chair, and sipped his coffee.

Harry and Hermione were not so much dancing as jumping rhythmically up and down to a muggle song whose contents were mostly incoherent to him, peppered with refrains about starting a fire. She was laughing. Harry was disheveled. Angelina and Fred were shaking their arms like they were in some sort of religious ecstasy.

“Excuse me. It’s impolite to hoard all the pretty girls at one table.”

Theo appeared from the swirl of dark coats. Daphne set down her goblet and splattered punch over the tablecloth.

“It’s impolite not to dance with your own date,” she said. She sounded indifferent, but her knee was bouncing.

“I quite agree. Tell Pansy,” he said. “But do it after you’ve danced with me. You might as well, since I’ve come all the way over here, and if you reject me now, everyone will see it.”

“You’re despicable.”

“A despicable fellow who gets his way.”

“That’s what makes you despicable.”

Nevertheless, she got up slowly, ignoring Draco’s stare of judgment, and followed Theo onto the dance floor. The hand she offered to Theo had a braid of scars. He took it and tucked it into his arm.

“You don’t mind, do you, Draco?” he said off-handedly.

“I don’t,” he said, “but I won’t if she hexes you, either.”

“Good man. Have her back in a nonce. Meantime, why don’t you go rescue some pretty thing for yourself? If fifty galleons can buy anything these days, the music’s about to change.”

On his cue, the song ended, and a sad, sweet little waltz drifted out of the orchestra pit.

“Oh, I hate you,” said Daphne, with thrilling warmth. “This is my favorite, you beastly little man.”

“Is it?” said Theo indifferently. “Good Lord, that’s lucky. I just asked for a waltz.”

He drew her into the dissipating pack of dancers. All across the enchanted glade girls were canting up against their partners and leaning teasingly into their arms, and indeed the very crowd itself, from which some boy almost always appeared to catch them. And Draco was alone at a table with Ron Weasley and Cho Chang, both locked in a zealous symposium on the future of the Chudley Cannons.

He made an apology under his breath and stood up. Neither of them noticed him leave.

Beached aside the whirlpool of waltzing couples, caught in a conversational bubble with Harry and Parvati and Angelina, Hermione still glittered through the crowd like a lighthouse. When she felt the tap on her shoulder, she turned, and he thought it might have flickered with pleasure when she saw him; but since dancing had disheveled her, it was hard to tell under the changing lights, which marbled her face as if under the ocean.

“Dance.”

Her eyebrows pinched together. The music might have drowned him out, or she might not have understood, because she shuffled closer.

“WHAT?”

He rolled his eyes and held out his palm.

Her face cleared. “You want to dance?”

“You should have at least one with a decent partner,” he said. He was only half thinking about what he was saying. The whole affair was a mad impulse gone rogue, and he wondered a little when the other half of his brain would come back to check in on it.

“I’m not good,” she said immediately.

“Believe me, I know.”

“I was bluffing about the books. I read them but they didn’t help. I’m still rather bad.”

“Is that a no, then?”

“No — no,” she blurted. She laced her fingers and fidgeted with them. “I’m only telling you so — you know — you don’t expect me to be good at it.”

“Believe it or not, Granger, you don’t need a license to do this. No one will arrest you for fumbling a box step. Now, give me an actual answer, or I’ll go find McGonagall or something.”

“Is that a promise?”

“Keep standing there if you want to find out. At least a gentlewoman of her stature wouldn’t leave a fellow hanging like this. Speaking of which, if you don’t take my hand right now, I swear to Merlin—”

She huffed, as if she weren’t the one stalling. “Fine, then,” she said, “but only for McGonagall’s sake.”

The cheeky twit. As if she were worried he might get ideas.

But she gave him her hand, and her pulse nudged his fingers hello.

Fast, it was — from dancing.

Her hand laid across his like a limp gold leaf. He put his hand on her back and discovered, in a small supernova of synaptic activity, that part of her dress was backless. That was fine. It took some steering to put her into place for a rotary. She was no easier to partner with than she’d been in class. The books really hadn’t helped. God bless them for that, because otherwise he would have had nothing to think about except the bloody dress.

The waltz was slow and sweet like thick wine. He saw Hermione in a glittering streak of gold under his periphery, and saw her, too, when he released her for a spin. In the crowded whirl of couples it was impossible to see or focus on anyone else. And when he did let his eyes slide down, her face was pointed firmly at his collarbone, as fierce and independent as it ever was, but struck now and then by furtive glances of bewilderment and happiness, like the expression of a cat enjoying being petted more than it wanted to admit.

“Viktor Krum?” he muttered, for want of anything better to say.

“Oh, don’t you start.”

“I’m not saying anything.”

“You wanted to. He asked me, for your information.”

“So did Neville Longbottom. Of course, his performance in the World Cup final was just a hair shy of adequate, so I can see where you’d draw the line—”

“Very tasteful, Draco.”

“I’m dead serious. He didn’t even score once. You can never marry him now.”

“Marry him?”

He liked when her voice hit a pitch that threatened glass. It hurt his ears, but he still liked it. “Oh, heavens, no. He’d never suit. What would the papers say?”

“I expect they’d be too interested in your rendezvous with Daphne Greengrass,” she said snidely, and trod on his toes — possibly on purpose, but probably not.

He swore and corrected her footwork with a sharp turn, which she obviously thanked him for not at all.

“You realize, of course, that she only asked me because she didn’t know anyone else who wasn’t in Slytherin.”

“Anyone else ‘suitable,’ that is,” she muttered.

“If you’re sore she didn’t ask you, I’m sure it’s a failure of creativity, not of malice.”

Hermione was trying not to smile. But the smiling distracted her from her feet and she stumbled against him. He caught her against his chest and for a moment had her whole body curled inside his hand and his arm, her head spilling against his shoulder, while she righted herself. She gave an inelegant snort of derision and he could count little beads of sweat on her forehead, count them on her bare golden arms, on her shining chest, on the spirals of free hair swelling at her temples, shining on the valleys of her knuckles and the light brown plains of her hands, all over her, like a caravanserai of fairies come to take him in a bizarre and fearsome thrall.

He had a vague premonition that something stupid was about to happen, and he was going to be at fault. He was as helpless to stop it as she was.

“You should thank her.” His voice, to his own ears, sounded curt.

“Thank her? For what?”

“How you look. People have been looking at you all night.”

“Have they?” she said skeptically. “At me? I think they were looking at Viktor. Or Harry.”

“They weren’t,” he said.

“But how—”

“They weren’t.”

She blinked three times in quick succession and gave a bark of surprised, awkward laughter, as if trying to turn what she’d said into a joke. He said nothing more, and the waltz came to an end, which was a mercy. When the waltz changed tempo there was a clearing of a throat, and Krum stepped out of the crowd behind her, like the Masque of the Red Death, stony, drinkless, and unimpressed.

“Why, hello,” said Draco pleasantly. “How was the powder room?”

“It vas quite charming,” said Krum, equally civil. “I must thank you for showing me more of your castle’s great beauty.”

“I can give you a heading, if you’d like to see some more.”

Krum ignored him. “I haf been looking for you,” he said to Hermione. “They vant the champions to take pictures with their partners.”

“Oh, God,” she said in alarm. “Now? My hair isn’t — yes, well. I suppose we’d better go, shouldn’t we?”

She turned to Draco, of all things, as if he might have some sort of objection. Silly. Stupid idea. He let go of her and stepped away with his hands behind his back.

“Go on,” he said coolly. “I’ve had my turn.”

She rolled her eyes and began to say something, but the revival of the music drowned her out, and with a posture of gentle insistence Krum drew her hand over his arm and led her away.

The high point of the party had crested and smashed the undulating wave of dancers into pools that eddied around tables and in corners, nursing old drinks and laughing too loudly, too often, to suggest anything witty had been said at all. Lavender had welded herself to Seamus and was dancing, not so much ‘with’ but ‘on’ him; Ginny had fallen asleep on George’s shoulder, and Fred and Angelina had slipped out of the Great Hall without company or goodbyes. Whenever there was a new song the groups dissolved and reformed as dancers traded places. The main set was over and now all the songs were slow, as if coaxing the night to sleep.

Pansy popped out of one of these dissolving crowds and seized his elbow. “Have you seen Theo?” she demanded. “Or Daphne?”

“And a splendid evening to you, too, Parkinson,” he said. “No, I haven’t. He made off with my date, and I haven’t seen him since.”

“Oh, good, you’re useless,” she snapped. “Where have you been? I leave him alone for five minutes, and he totters off to find her, like a toddler who can’t help it— and why did you let her dance with him?”

“Shouldn’t I have?”

She threw up her hands. “Useless!” she cried. “Use! Less! I should have known. She’s been avoiding him for weeks, and there you go, throwing all that good work away!”

“I ask again — drawing on reserves of patience that are, I warn you, very nearly exhausted — why? It’s not my fault no one tells me bloody anything.”

“I didn’t think I needed to!” she said shrilly. “Because it’s obvious to anyone with half a brain! A quarter, even! Don’t they let you keep a quarter-brain, up there? For posterity?”

“Did I say ‘very nearly’? I meant entirely.”

“Because she’s supposed to be getting over him!”

The supreme underwhelming-ness of this revelation rendered him rather apathetic to Pansy’s woes.

“So?”

“So? So, it doesn’t help her when Teddy — who knows fully well what she’s doing, by the way, and don’t think for a moment he doesn’t — flounces around serenading her and dancing with her and being nice to her—”

“Yes, God forbid anyone be nice to her.”

“If that’s your idea of a barb, scrape it up and go flop it at someone else. I can’t help what Millicent Bulstrode does, and if I could, I wouldn’t have turned my room into a bloody rookery trying,” she said, ferociously, all at once. “I’ve come around to the idea that isolation really is best for her, even if it’s hateful, because it means none of the other girls can do anything, which has been my personal nightmare. A small price to pay, you’d think, when she knows we still love her, and I’ll say it, even if he won’t: so what if she can’t come to our sodding tea parties? I told him, ‘Let her vacation with the Gryffindors, it won’t kill her.’ But no, he’s got to be Sir Luckless about it, trying to mate water with oil. If he could pull his head out of his own arse I do think he’d see that and stop bothering her.”

She hoisted up her dress strap with the grim determination of one snapping down a helm. “Listen, if you see her, don’t let him talk to her. Just — jinx her, or snog her, or something. Anything. And if you see him, send him straight to me. I’ll set him to rights,” she said, with a gentling, softer confidence. “I always can.”

“Managing this farce can’t possibly fall to me,” he said incredulously. But her glare informed him that he was wrong, and she burrowed into the crowd, calling Theo’s name.

He looked around, without much enthusiasm, for Daphne. Currents of older students in slackened ties and short dresses made a glittering railroad up to the countless echelons of afterparties. In the Entrance Hall a seventh year boy was talking with desperate speed to a weeping girl on the steps, though the color of the lipstick on his collar didn’t match the one on her mouth. A draft of fresh delicious air wafted from the open doors, and he steered toward it at random, trying to escape the stuffy hysterics of the party, and leave behind all the stickiness that came with it.

On the front steps, he passed a huddled Dean Thomas, who had curled his knees under his chin.

“Night, Thomas.”

Thomas scrubbed a hand across his face. “Night, Malfoy,” he said gruffly, and Draco decided to leave him be.

The flowered labyrinth of the rose garden glowed ice-blue. Fairy lights hovered like rivers of stars over each courtyard and kissed each babbling fountain in white. He found a stone bench and a large fountain with an immodest cherub sprawled atop, far enough from the party that the voices had dimmed. No sooner had he bent to sit down than the bushes rustled, and he held up his wand, not from fear, but from wariness of being disturbed.

As a figure emerged from the bushes he put down his wand and suppressed a sigh. It was Daphne, her pale shoulders ice-blue in the fairy light.

When she saw him she took a wet gulp of air and smiled, a little miserable, but mostly relieved. He sympathized. He began to ask her if she’d just spoken to Theo, and if so, what she’d said; but then he considered that he more or less knew the answer to both questions, and decided not to indulge in needless cruelty.

“Oh, good. It’s you.” She swiped a glittering figment from her left eye. “If it was anyone else I would’ve had to drown myself.”

“I’ve had enough theatrics for one night, thank you.”

“Me, too. Care to join me in some meditative compartmentalization? I’m rather good at it, but don’t be intimidated.”

She draped herself across the bench. He joined her.

The water burbled lustily from the cherub’s lions. Midnight announced itself with a sad peal of the hour bell. After twelve tolls the silence settled in, and the wind skated off the frosted plain of the lawns.

“Do you want to kiss me?” she said abruptly, turning.

He blinked, absolutely thoughtless.

“I beg your pardon.”

“Do you want to kiss me,” she repeated. “Or would you mind, terribly, if I kissed you? Barring objection? I’ve had quite a bad night, and it would all be much more bearable if I could walk away saying I’d at least been kissed.”

He fumbled for an answer.

He didn’t want to, in truth. It wasn’t that he found her unattractive. She was obviously extremely pretty. But it simply wasn’t something he had ever thought about, and it still didn’t exactly excite him, now.

But then again: he was fourteen years old, and he’d never kissed a girl before. It might be an ideal environment to try it out and get it over with.

And it was Daphne, anyhow. She’d know it didn’t mean anything, and she’d have a sense of composure about it.

“Fine,” he said. “But be quick.”

“Just what a girl wants to hear,” she sighed, and scooting across the bench — he stiffened — she pecked him on the lips.

It was a very strange first kiss. He was so stiff that he didn’t feel much happening on his mouth, except a firm and deliberate pressure from her own. He still took a careful catalog of sensations, for thoroughness: the heat from her face, the jitter of anxiety, and the inevitable weirdness of feeling a part of his body that had never made contact with its like before. That made him prickle, but there was nothing more than that, nothing supernatural, or even moving. He wondered what it was about this that made everyone stupid. The reports of lunacy had been greatly exaggerated.

Her nose bumped his, and he made an irritated sound, and then she drew back, snickering. She dabbed a parting kiss on his cheek. He made another skeptical noise and shifted away.

“Thank you,” she said politely.

“You’re welcome.”

They sat in meditative silence.

She sniffled.

Draco had never cared much for meditative silences. They bored him.

He leaned forward on his knees. “So. What’s the matter with you and Nott?”

“Good Lord. How to start?”

“Briefly,” he suggested, eyeing her.

She giggled.

“Nothing,” she said. “Everything. The same.”

“…A little less briefly.”

“I’m in love. And he isn’t.”

“Oh.”

He turned back to the fountain, wondering if she would be content to leave it there.

“But you want to know why we’re fighting, I take it.”

“Conceivably.”

“Well, I’m furious with him, you see.”

“Sure.”

“Because he proposed.”

He hadn’t known it was possible to choke on air before.

“To you?”

“No, Professor Snape. The nuptials are in June. Yes, to me, you numpty.”

“Why?”

She rubbed small neat circles into the inner beads of her eyes. “I haven’t a clue, darling, except that he gets desperate when he can’t solve a problem, and when he’s desperate, he’s stupid. The way he explained it, however—”

“You’re fourteen!”

“Fifteen, actually, but the point is taken. The way he explained it—”

“Haven’t your parents anything to say about this?”

“Oh, they’d be thrilled if anyone would have me,” she said neutrally. “Better still, one of the Twenty-Eight. Best of all, a Twenty-Eight heir. And fifteen isn’t that young. We’d do it like Vince and Millie, have a three-year engagement, marry after graduation. It’s a very good match. And it would get me away from my parents. If we were engaged, he’d have some liberty to move me around. Take me on holidays, chaperoned visits, that sort of thing.”

With a considerable degree of mental effort, he pocketed the hard cringe of wrongness that reared at someone of his cohort contemplating matrimony, and he considered it neutrally.

“If it was such a good match,” he began slowly, “then why not—”

“Take it?”

“…Well.”

“Apart from the fact that he doesn’t love me?” she inquired matter-of-factly, without resentment or sorrow.

“If there are other reasons.”

“Because it doesn’t solve the problem. Even if he did love me, he couldn’t make everyone else do it, just by wanting. The way these things work, it wouldn’t… it’s harder to move up than down. We’d end up closer to where I am than where he is, socially. Which is something I know and he doesn’t, because he’s never been down before, so I had to be the sensible one.” She sat up straighter. “I don’t know if I can have children, anyway. Medically, I mean. The soul is willing and all, but there are two different blood conditions clobbering each other to death in my circulatory system, which means I’m in incredible pain three weeks of the month and given to smashing furniture in the fourth, and it doesn’t seem like it would leave one’s womb a welcoming environs for wee tots. Not that it would be a deal-breaker, but it does create logistical problems, and his father wouldn’t approve.”

That was its own rancid, molding vessel of worms. “Good Lord. You’re not honestly thinking—”

“Yes, because those are the sorts of things you have to think about, when someone proposes,” she said firmly. “As I have recently discovered. And I decided I wasn’t going to submit us both to all that just because it would make my life easier right now.”

“Is it bad?”

“Oh, who’s to say? Spells and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me. My pants keep going missing in the wash, but if that’s human malice or house-elf incompetence, I never do know how to tell—”

“Your condition, Greengrass.”

“It is what it is,” she said, with schooled neutrality. “There’s pain, of course, but when isn’t there? I can move around now, which is the important thing.”

“What about full moons.”

“I’m human. I told you, I’ve always been human. The worst I’ve ever done is throw a tantrum, which is scary, but I’d challenge you to do anything else when your bones start chiseling themselves away.”

“So there are changes, then.”

“Some,” she admitted. “It hurts, mostly. But I don’t transform. It’s not… enough, for that. The healers said it was something to do with cell counts.” She paused. “Some said it was possible it’ll get worse.”

“But that’s not a certainty.”

“‘Not a certainty.’ You sound like Theo, he didn’t want to think about it, either. By the way, is it all right if I tell Theo I kissed you? I want to see him do the thing with his eyebrows.”

“…Parkinson said you weren’t to talk to him.”

“Oh, well, if you’re going to let her boss you around.”

“Bite your tongue. Tell him, don’t tell him, what do I care? I’m not your keeper.”

“Indeed not,” she agreed. “On the subject, do you mind if I tell him I let you get a leg over? Just to make him mad. And only if he does something to deserve it.”

He closed his eyes, marinating in discomfort.

“You have the impulse control of a ravenous wolverine.”

“Old news. Can I?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be getting over him?”

“Aren’t you supposed to take my side? Besides. I’ll say you were really good.”

“Please don’t.”

“I’ll say you rocked my world.”

“You have taken ‘don’t’ in the wrong direction.”

She laughed. A more tired laugh he had never known from anyone so young.

“Do you want to know the saddest thing?” she said. “Sometimes I think you’re the only real friend I’ve got.”

He snorted, thinking this was an attempt at humor. But she had stopped laughing.

“I thought we held a moratorium on theatrics,” he said.

“No, really. Pinky swear.” She kicked off her heels and lifted her feet onto the bench, perching her chin on her knees. “Theo and Pansy might as well have shared a womb, and no matter how much I love him, even if he ever loves me back, it’ll always be Pansy, Pansy, Pansy — and it’s the same for her. They grew up together, did you know that? Running wild in the forests of Knotscliff, two terrible angry little children. You can’t get in late on love like that. It’s the kind that you only find when you’re young and lonely, when you’ll let someone carve himself into you just so you’ll remember him. Me, I grew up with Tori, and I’d live for her, but she worships me. She can’t be that way with anyone yet, she’s too young, it isn’t fair.

“But everyone else I’ve ever known, I’ve been too late or too little to get in — even you, too, you useless wonderful boy, I like you so much, but I already know if I get to liking you any better you’ll break my heart, too, won’t you?”

He had no idea how to respond to that, and chose silence.

“Yes, you will,” she said, eerily serene. “I think you’d try, just to be nice. And we’d both get smashed up, because nice just won’t do, for something like what I want. I’ve already taken more than I should; see, I made you come as my date, when I knew full well I shouldn’t have. I knew what I was doing, but I didn’t care. That’s my problem. I’ve never cared for rules, when it came to getting what I wanted.”

“Don’t be daft,” he said curtly. “You didn’t force me to come. I could have said no.”

“Could’ve isn’t would’ve,” she said. “And what did I get from coming? A few hours of make-believe? Not even. Neither of us think you’re here for me, and I knew that from the beginning. I saw her face, you know, when I asked you — I hope I never forget it, maybe I’ll finally learn — but I remember thinking, ‘Daphne Greengrass, you perfect bitch, you would’ve mauled a girl for doing this to you, and you well know it.’ And so I went back and tried to make up for it, but it didn’t work, and I still felt horrid afterwards. Isn’t that awful?” She sounded wondrous. “I came over and stomped on something pretty because I wanted one for me, and then I wasn’t even happy about it.”

A spider of nausea skittered up his stomach. “You’re not… Greengrass, if you’re trying to suggest… to attempt some sort of confession— I’m flattered, but—”

“Confession!” She tipped her head back and spilled laughter into the canopy of false stars. “Confess? No, I’m still very much heartsick for a boy who thinks marriage is the answer to a bullying problem, I’m afraid. You’re just an entertaining hypothetical.”

“Thanks,” he said tartly, one part insulted to all other parts profoundly relieved. “Glad to be of service.”

“Oh, you’re grateful, admit it. I’ve saved us both a lot of pain and suffering by not being in love with you, you know. I thought it out beforehand. I was practical! It would be fun, for a while, and I really would give you a good time — but I want someone to live and die for me, you see, and you’re far too busy living for someone else.”

“What?” He jerked his head at her. “Who?”

She smiled. “Drat. I owe Pansy five galleons. Don’t tell her we had this conversation, would you? I’m cash-poor; Daddy’s taking the Bulstrode settlement out of my allowance.”

“I don’t know what you mean, and my hypotheses about it range from indecent to offensive. And I don’t live for anyone, you daft tart,” he said. “I live for the sole purpose of pleasing Draco Lucius Malfoy. I fulfill it, daily, with vigor.”

“Do you really?” Her voice was rich with amused toleration of a lie. “Well, then, I’m very sorry. I was going to congratulate you for finding someone who’s quite obviously living for you, too, it’s a rare coincidence and most of us would kill for it; but if you haven’t, then I stand corrected, and I hope the food is good in Bulgaria.”

She stood up before he could parse this snippet of nonsense. “It’s late,” she said, “and it’s bloody gelid, and I’m wearing a backless dress. We should go in.”

It was the first sensible thing he had heard all night.

But the evening’s last piece of chicanery was still unspooling. At the foot of the grand staircase stood Hermione and Ron, having an exchange that could be easily heard before it was ever seen, from well through the oak doors and outside the building.

“—don’t like it, you know what the solution is, don’t you?”

The heat in her voice could have scorched the skin off someone’s face. She was so angry it had closed up her throat, and left her choking, almost weeping from it.

Draco broke into a run, and shoved through the ring of stupid gossips goggling at them. He nearly mowed down Harry, who was struggling to mediate between them.

“—BEFORE someone else does—”

“But that’s not the point! That’s not the bloody point!”

Draco pulled his wand, which on reflection might have been an escalation, but it wasn’t necessary: the fight slammed to a halt when Ron caught sight of him over Hermione’s shoulder. His expression crumpled, mixed frustration and relief, and Hermione saw.

She whirled around. Her face was wet. Not just nearly weeping, then.

“Granger,” he said, helplessly. He didn’t know what to do when she cried. Hermione cried so rarely, and hated it so deeply when she did, that it occupied the same place in his brain as most forms of natural disaster. One simply weathered it, recovered, and moved on.

“There you are,” she snapped, and then her eyes slipped briefly over his shoulder — to Daphne, who had come in from the gardens just after him, shivering from the cold air coasting over her shoulders.

“What’s going on?” Daphne said warily, when she realized that several people were staring at her.

“Nothing,” snarled Ron. “Where’ve you two been?”

“We were… out in the…” She blinked. “Hermione, are you quite alright?”

“Fine,” spat Hermione, and violently scrubbed her hand across her cheek. She turned on her heel and started up the staircase, but wobbled; Draco caught her elbow, and she tore it free with a vehemence that shocked him. “I’m just fine. It doesn’t matter. Go back to — whatever you were doing — I need to get up these godawful stairs—”

“Darling, your shoes, they won’t — let me help you—”

“That won’t be necessary, thank you!”

“Hermione,” said Ron, with traces of regret, but she cut her hand at him as if to slash his throat.

“Oh, shut up!” she snarled. “Go find Viktor, if you want someone to yell at! I’m sick of it!”

He recoiled.

“Fine! Maybe I will! Maybe I’m sick of it, too!”

“Good! Then go!”

“Great!”

“Fantastic!” She leaned forward to shout at him, wobbled, and Draco caught her again. Her skin was hot from dancing and shouting, and almost all of her hair had sprung back to its usual self.

“Potter,” snapped Draco, and jerked his head at Ron. Harry hurried forward and grasped Ron’s arm, muttering something under his breath while he steered him away; but Ron wrested himself free, and stormed down the hallway, away from the party.

“Ron! Wait!”

Harry gave chase down a random hallway into the dungeons. Once the two were gone, some of the fire went out of Hermione, and she stumbled again on her heels.

“They’ve got to come off,” said Daphne hurriedly, tripping up the stairs. “You’ll hurt your ankles. Here, sit down.”

“I said I was fine.”

“Let her help, Granger.”

Hermione shot him a nasty look, but she sat down hard on the staircase and drew up her skirt to let Daphne wrangle the buckles on her heels. In a moment, her shoes went clattering over Daphne’s shoulder, and she stood barefoot on the marble stairs.

“There you are,” said Daphne hopefully. “Now, we’ll get you up—”

“I don’t need your help,” she snapped, which would have been more convincing had she not listed immediately onto one foot, and hissed, whisking up her ankle. This time, when he caught her elbow, he refused to give it back, and braced her up by force.

“You’re not climbing fourteen flights of stairs like this,” he said flatly, something he took for a statement of fact, but turned out to be unexpectedly provocative.

“If I don’t want to sleep on a bench, I’m going to have to, since unlike any civilized muggle building, this monstrosity of a castle doesn’t have a lift.”

“Or we could carry you,” said Daphne, who seemed to think she was being helpful. “Between the two of us. In fact, I’m sure Draco could carry you himself—”

“He will not,” she said, with an insulting degree of horror.

“…or he won’t, of course. But there are other ways! If you give me your arm, you can use us like crutches. Trust me,” she added brightly, “it’s easier than it looks.”

Hermione’s expression became cryptically pained. “You don’t have to,” she said, but the amount of weight she was leaning on Draco’s arm belied it. “You should go back to the party. It’s silly. I’ll be fine.”

“Personally, I can’t think of anything I’d like less than to go back to the party,” he said. “But Greengrass can decide for herself.”

“No,” she agreed. “I’ve had quite enough party for one night.”

Probably unconsciously, Hermione’s hand had wrapped around his wrist. He put his hand over it and used it to pull her up. It was all quite clumsy and ill-coordinated, but at least she wasn’t about to topple over and crack her head open, which she might have done just to spite him, now he thought about it.

At last, when Daphne offered her arm, she took it, and gingerly hopped up one of the stairs. “I don’t know how you manage in heels,” she muttered mutinously. “They’re torture devices.”

“They’re fashionable.”

“They’re ridiculous.”

“They’re sexy.”

“They cause back problems.”

“So do the men who like them,” said Daphne, and Hermione made the same discovery he had earlier, about choking on nothing.

He glared at her. Daphne simpered.

“Be that — as it may,” said Hermione in a strangled voice, and Daphne’s laughter skittered all over the hall.

The orchestra floated away beneath them as they wound up the many staircases to Gryffindor Tower. He held Hermione’s arm and sometimes her waist and bits of gold film from her dress flaked off on his hands, gilding his palms, his fingers. The snippets of shouting and laughter dwindled beneath them like the last swirling dregs from a wine glass, and in the higher atriums of the castle, a sudden emptiness descended from the long hallways and unoccupied stairs, while the palimpsest of music and chatter lingered in his ears.

The Pink Lady had fallen asleep, and came awake only on a full-throated exhortation of “fairy lights.” Draco jumped up and helped Hermione into the portrait hole, while Daphne lingered in the hallway.

“If you stay there, I’ll show you back to the dungeons. I’m going to help Granger to bed.”

“That won’t be necessary!” came the shrill rejoinder from the portrait-hole. He shrugged at Daphne.

“Go on,” she whispered. “I’ll wait here. Goodnight, Hermione! Sleep well! You looked gorgeous! And ask Lavender to help you with the straps!” She turned to Draco. “She needs help with the straps,” she informed him.

“Alright,” he said, entirely at a loss as to what he was supposed to do with that information, besides smother any thought of straps, Hermione, or the combination thereof.

Offput, he left the giggling miscreant to her own devices outside the portrait-door.

The common room was empty. Word had it the afterparty would occupy the Astronomy Tower until four o’clock, and the hour-bell was striking one. The fire guttered low in the grate, sending red light swimming across the walls.

At the foot of the girls’ stairs, Hermione hesitated when he offered her his arm, and then pushed it away. “You should go help Daphne,” she said firmly. “She ought to get to bed.”

“In a moment.”

“It’s not polite to leave her waiting,” she pressed.

“She’ll live.”

“So will I. You didn’t have to help me in the first place. This is more than enough—”

“Granger, it’s this or Levicorpus, and I don’t really need the temptation.”

“But she’s waiting—”

He stepped towards her. She yelped and skittered away.

“Don’t you dare!”

“Very good, then.”

He held out his arm and smirked at her. She sighed.

At the top of the stairs, she was deposited safely within limping distance of the fourth year dorm, and he was two steps back down the staircase before he heard her call his name.

“Draco?”

“Mm?”

He turned. A halo from the lantern atop the stairwell glazed each of her loose curls with white, and made her dress scintillate, the way it did when she came down the grand staircase. He lost his train of thought.

“I said thank you,” she said hesitantly. “I mean — I had a good time. Even though the ending was rushed, a bit, it doesn’t — I, er — I didn’t think it would be fun. But it was.”

“Splendid. I’ll tell the organizers.”

“No, I…” She yawned. “Never mind.”

She put her knuckles to her mouth while she yawned again. He followed the movement with his eyes.

“Happy Christmas, Granger.”

“Happy Christmas, Draco,” she said, and ducked out of sight.

Several seconds passed while he stood on the staircase, feeling cold and strange and scatterbrained. It was late, and he was tired, and he had suffered more ordeals in one night than he thought any human being could be asked to tolerate.

On his way down, for some reason, he thought about the kiss. It was his first kiss. He’d done it, and it was over, and it had been nothing to bother with.

But he thought about Hermione — his heart beat faster at the memory of her face gliding out of a muddied watercolor of other couples, sharp as film — and thought of her in moonlight, on a bench in a courtyard. He wondered if it might have been different, in a different garden, on a different sort of night, if they had by some accident found themselves secluded, when he could have crossed that small distance between their faces and done it differently. The idea throbbed inside him like the beat of a tuning fork on his ribs. The reverberation continued, a jarring, constant thrum of an idea that would not leave his mind’s eye, following him down the stairs — the many, many stairs — that separated him from its completion. Distance failed to ease it; no amount of space seemed to shake it free. It lived in his head, a physical thing, and when he folded himself into bed it continued humming in his chest, a gnawing persistence, like he had invented a new species of hunger. He feared that if he let himself think about it, deliberately, he would never stop: there was something terribly real behind that thought, something more than parties and ballgowns and the make-believe courtships of a school formal. If he set it free, then it would bury him under its monstrous weight — that dark and dense and terribly real hunger.

---

-[clapping idiotically]: prom chapter. prom chapter. prom chapter

-There’s a lot of good-faith criticisms you can make about the books. But. We did eat with the prom chapter. We were FED with the prom chapter. There was no plot reason to do that, but it was put in there for us.

-Further notes on the soundtrack. I believe that Lavender introduced Daphne to Shania Twain while they were getting ready and it rocked her world. how could it not. Imagine you’re a pureblood teenage girl, the only music you’re used to string quartets and Puccini, and then one day someone throws on “I Feel Like A Woman.” Instant radicalization.

-Thank you for the warmest reception, and for endlessly encouraging comments! I wish all of you a very fine, sad, slow waltz with a person of your preference at some point in the near future. Or, alternately, spiced Turkish coffee and brandy with chocolates and cheeses for dessert.

-The next chapter is called “The Golden Trio.” In which teenage heartache shall never end, Theodore Nott continues to play hopscotch with the moral event horizon, and Ronald Weasley has a Moment.

---