Chapter 47: We Cannot Sing Above the Ground
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Flitwick had them doing Banishment Charms, which was sorely needed stress relief. While each student had received a cushion on which to practice, it was almost impossible to enforce this rule against the base human appreciation for how very fun it was to hurl random objects as far as you possibly could. Only Hermione had calmly and perfectly returned her cushion to its bullseye, time and again, while Draco invented new ways to flick things at her without Professor Flitwick noticing. (This was not hard, since Neville had a tendency to miss his cushion and hit other, heavier objects, e.g., Professor Flitwick.)
When the fourth eraser bounced off the back of her head, she finally whirled around and hissed a Stinging Jinx at him, which he deflected harmlessly and smirked at her.
“Stop it! Prat!”
“Hm? Did you feel something?”
When she glared at him, it made her eyes into little dark wells of passion. She screwed up her whole face and did a thing with her mouth, like that one angry woman in the Caravaggio. It was lovely. It was also the first time she’d spoken to him with anything but monosyllables since last night, and frankly, it was a relief.
He twinged unpleasantly. Looking at her was reminded him of staring at a bad mark on a paper. It was a reminder of an egregious error that he ought to have avoided, but now could only hope to make up with time, given effort. It was, however, some comfort that she didn’t know about it; he could probably salvage the situation if he maintained decorum thereon. Whatever awkwardness she was feeling — not unreasonable, considering the frankly ghastly breaches of propriety they’d committed in the bathroom — would be temporary.
As usual, the world and everything important in it came down to his own personal ability to hold it together. He was hardly surprised.
Professor Flitwick docked them five points for being off-task. This left Hermione so apoplectic that she didn’t speak to him again until lunch.
“It’s a good thing you’ve got the knack of it, Harry,” she said pointedly. “That’ll come in handy with the grindylows.”
“Yeah,” said Harry, whose success had overdosed him with optimism. “Hey, think about this: you reckon I can just Banish the water and walk down?”
“Oh, bless, he thinks he’s Moses.”
“It’s a perfectly fair question,” said Hermione stiffly. “As I would say to Draco, if I were talking to him. But Harry, even if you could get one that strong, Bombarda is an acute spell, and once the force dissipates, the water would come back in. Which, at that volume—”
“Would be not dissimilar to dropping a building on your head.”
“—would be painful, probably,” she admitted, as Harry hauled open the doors to the Great Hall. “But it’s a nice idea.”
Harry considered this, thoughtfully, and then said: “What if I run?”
“Run… away from the water?”
“Yeah. Just like, run.”
“Harry,” Hermione began, in tones of strained kindness.
“No, let’s hear him out,” said Draco thoughtfully, who very badly wanted to watch Harry try it.
They found Daphne sitting unannounced at the Gryffindor table, where she was delicately annihilating a cask of French onion soup between pages of Witch Weekly. Some ways down the table, Ron made the fourth corner of a square with Dean, Seamus, and Ginny, the last of whom waved to Harry and the others as they came in — but she was the only one.
Draco dropped his bag like an anchor and sat next to Daphne. Harry stared longingly down the table, but when Draco cleared his throat he followed suit.
Then Hermione did a strange thing. She set her bag down next to Draco’s, stopped, picked it up again, and then circumnavigated the table to go sit on the other side, next to Harry. This put her across from Daphne, who looked up in oblivious cheer and said: “Hail and well met! You’ve got rubber in your hair. Where is Ronald?”
Hermione yanked out the offending article, mumbling an ungrateful thank you.
Draco studied her. She wouldn’t meet his eyes.
He frowned.
“Ron’s not here,” she said shortly. “We’re having a row.”
“A great pity,” Daphne said, and she sounded genuinely sorrowful. “Is he being a wanker?”
“It’s none of your business.”
“Dear me. Is it that kind of fight?”
Hermione flushed. “No,” she snapped. “Does everything have to come down to that?”
“Come down to what? Greengrass, explain yourself.”
“Oh, no. I believe I was told to butt out, thank you,” she said serenely, burying her nose in a goblet of pumpkin juice, “and I shall not be tricked into doing anything but.”
Having one know-it-all around was an amusement; two was starting to irritate him.
“You know what I reckon?” mused Harry. “I reckon our best plan is to say bugger it and Summon some scuba gear.”
With evident relief, Hermione turned away from Daphne. “And do what? You don’t know how to scuba dive.”
“I’d figure it out.”
“What’s a scuba?” Daphne inquired.
“Wheely thing muggles ride around on,” said Draco.
“Ah.”
“Scooter,” said Hermione. “Scoo-ter.”
“I see,” said Daphne politely. “And what is scooter diving, pray tell?”
“Lets you breathe underwater,” said Harry, “for a little while, anyway. Not that it’d work, Hermione’s right, you need weeks to learn. Aunt Petunia bought Dudley lessons for his fourteenth, he almost drowned.” He sighed.
“Take heart, Potter, it’ll happen eventually.”
“You always say that.”
“I see,” said Daphne, again, in the kindly tones of someone who understood nothing. “And why does Harry want to breathe underwater?”
“For the Second Task,” he said glumly, gazing into his bowl as if it contained the very waters that doomed him. “I have to go under the lake. Problem is, I don’t know how, and I reckon all the other champions are gonna use this one fancy spell I can’t do.”
“But it’s two weeks away! Cutting it tight, aren’t we?”
“We’ve been researching,” Hermione snapped. “We’ve done plenty of reading.” True. “We have lots of ideas.” Less true.
“Why haven’t you just asked the mermaids?”
“Why haven’t we — well, to start with, Mermish is an extremely hard language, and one that’s impossible to speak above the water, which obviously means Harry would need to know how to breathe water before he could ask them, so, return to Point A, about breathing—”
“No, I mean in the dungeons.” When she received no answer, Daphne leaned forward eagerly. “Ooh, you don’t know? This is delicious. I never get to tell you lot something new.”
“…There are mermaids in the dungeons?” said Hermione, dripping with skepticism.
“Not in the dungeons. But Slytherin’s under the lake. We’ve windows all over the place, and if you wait long enough, one will come swimming up and tap on the glass. I think they see us like goldfish,” she added thoughtfully.
“But you can’t possibly speak to them.”
“Not in Mermish! But they’ve got a hand language, to talk to land-dwellers,” she said, fluttering her fingers.
Hermione surveyed her with new interest. “Can you speak it?”
“All the Slytherin girls can. It’s something of a tradition. Holleen’s their favorite, they gave her a proper Mermish name and everything…”
“Can you translate?” There was a certain inquisitorial glow about her, which meant either an interrogation or an epiphany was swiftly forthcoming.
Daphne saw it, and so it was with faint alarm that she agreed: “If you don’t mind a bit of looseness with grammar, I suppose.”
Hermione beamed and leapt to her feet.
“Oh! You mean now?”
“Invariably,” said Draco, massaging his nose.
“Yes,” said Hermione, firmly. “Why not? You’re free, Daphne, aren’t you?”
Daphne looked mournfully at her bowl of soup. “Well,” she said.
“Wonderful. Come along, it won’t take a moment. Harry, put that down.”
Harry, who had been furtively reaching for the soup ladle, wilted.
“But I’m hungry.”
Without missing a beat, Hermione pivoted, pointed her wand down the table, and barked, “Accio.”
A Cornish pasty zoomed into her hand. She tossed it to a startled Harry, dumped his bowl of soup back into the pot, and threw back the last of her tea in one go.
Daphne falteringly raised her hand.
“What?”
“Can I have one?”
“Fine!” Another pasty was delivered unto its end, who nibbled it happily. “But hurry! Lunch ends in thirty minutes! No lollygagging!”
“Yes, sir, right away, sir,” drawled Draco.
Hermione pointed at him, opened her mouth, inhaled, and closed it; then, blinking quickly, and stalked away.
Bemused, he looked at Harry, who with palms raised to heaven he indicated that he was not touching it.
They followed Hermione down the staircase off the Entrance Hall, tripping down hairpin staircases with a haste that was perilous to ankles and necks. At first Daphne tried to offer directions, but soon fell into wondrous silence when Hermione forged ahead, taking turns unsuggested, and cutting through long identical hallways as if she had a map of them written on the back of her hand.
“Hermione,” called Daphne, “have you been to Slytherin before?”
“No. Why would I?”
“You just seem to know your way around, my dear.”
“Yes, I memorized the Map,” she said absently, peering around a corner. “It’s not quite the same, obviously, but once you get a sense of the pattern, it’s not hard to get a heading… this is it, isn’t it?”
She hooked around a corner without waiting for an answer, and they were in front of the Slytherin common room doors. Draco gave a slow, intrigued whistle, and she very slightly smiled.
Then she stopped and turned away. He scowled.
What was her problem? He hadn’t said anything— she’d been perfectly happy last night, right up until — anyway.
“I didn’t know there was a map of Hogwarts,” Daphne said idly. “Password’s ‘capricorn,’ by the way.”
The wall rippled, and a lacquered black door emerged from between unfurling wings of brick. Daphne hooked an arm around the handle and, with a playful flourish of a bow, she opened the door.
In the emerald vault of the Slytherin commons, the scent of tea cakes and mulled wine floated around the watery atria. Girls and boys in dark robes floated through the green light, exchanging cool murmurs that echoed on the stone. When the door creaked, half the hall fell silent, and a dozen pale faces turned like a den of arctic foxes to watch them come in.
Daphne took a sharp breath and quickly wove her arm through Hermione’s. Hermione made an indignant noise and tried to tug it free, but Daphne refused to let her go.
With a prickle of heat on the back of his neck, Draco noticed the pattern of the other Slytherins’ stares: they swept over and away from Harry in disgust, and flickered with dull disinterest over Draco himself; but wherever their eyes fell on Hermione, they stayed there.
Hermione made a small noise when he stepped in line next to her, as if he’d startled her.
“Come on,” Daphne said, quite calmly. “My room’s this way.”
She bundled them out of the common room, tripping down a narrow corridor to a tall oak door.
The handle was sculpted in the shape of an adder, and when she put her finger to it, the lock clicked open. Behind it lay a high-ceilinged stone chamber with chocolate wood floors, furnished in old world abundance: a green leather claw-foot sofa, a twelve-foot bookshelf in gleaming mahogany, against which rested a long silver cane; a writer’s desk sporting a tin of tropically colored quills. Throned amongst the quilts on the queen bed lounged the fattest, furriest, ugliest cat Draco had ever seen, and he included Crookshanks. It looked like someone had glued a face to a pile of cotton, and then punched it.
“You’ve a cat!” exclaimed Hermione.
Daphne threw the door shut behind Harry. “Oh, yes, that’s Duchess,” she said. “She’s my darling chubby baby girl, and you must pet her if you want to sit on the bed.”
Duchess peeled her ears back and hissed. Hermione cooed.
He’d forgotten that Hermione had a soft spot for small creatures of raw spite. Maybe she felt a kinship with them.
“Thank you,” said Daphne, quite proudly, and she locked the door behind them.
A giant window in the shape of a bay leaf was cut into the wall, and the turquoise waters of the lake strained green light into the room. Dark towers of kelp swayed in bleary distortion through the water, and schools of tiny silver fish glinted here and there across the glass. Daphne hauled a chair away from the desk and hopped up on it, where she lit her wand with Lumos and angled it around the window like she was searching for something.
“Normally I don’t do this,” she explained, “as they’ll come and go as they please, but in the interests of time — they respond to light more than noise, you see. Their eyesight is quite good.”
“It would have to be, at the bottom of the lake,” murmured Hermione, and she tapped her knuckles on the glass. Harry put his hand on the back of Daphne’s chair, carefully, to stabilize it. Draco leaned one shoulder against the glass and casually flicked a Knocking Charm at it, which made Hermione give him the silly sideways look she always did when he used magic for something she wouldn’t have.
He quirked his lip at her. She tilted her head and smiled with the corner of her mouth. The glow from the water turned her face a jeweled blue, and sent tiger-stripes of silver rippling over her. Her collar was still askew and the light went winnowing down across the shadows there, over the noticeable swell of her jumper, her slender legs skinned in black winter tights. It reminded him of the prefects’ bathroom.
He inhaled and turned back to the window.
A shape swelled out of the water. Daphne clapped her hands together and gave a yelp of joy: as a humanoid silhouette emerged from the lake’s indigo fathoms.
There were few words to describe how eerie it was: his brain told him, in some alarm, that there was a human being on the other side of the glass, but equally salient parts of his brain replied that it was wrong. The proportions told it for a lie. It had the chest of a starveling corpse, the ladder of its ribcage hanging over a ghoulish hollow of a stomach, and its bony arms were skinned in the leathery gray of dead flesh. An amphibious head perched on the pencil-thin column of its neck, with a wide frog-mouth and bulbous, watery eyes, the pupils dilated to the size of sickles, like fish. Its hips fused into a single, writhing snake of muscle, which it used like a rudder to steer itself through the current.
A hand slapped onto the glass. It was long, clawed, and webbed, its fingers more like bat-wings than human digits. Hermione jumped. Harry jumped, too.
Daphne, not startled at all, clapped again in delight. “Oh, good! She wants to talk!” she said. “Now, you all say hello, too. It’s polite.” She smacked her hand onto the glass, fingers spread.
Hermione and Harry tentatively placed their hands beside Daphne’s. Draco preferred to watch, until Hermione kicked him in the ankle, and rolling his eyes, he flicked his sleeve back and applied his palm to the cool glass.
The mer slid her hand along the glass, leaving a trail of something yellowy and translucent, and aligned her fingers with Daphne’s. When she peeled it away, it left a print in mucus. Daphne’s hand left a print in fog.
Daphne made some gesture that involved tapping her mouth and scooping her fingers along her cupped palm. This she traced a hook-shape over her face, dotting it like a question mark with a tap on her chin. The mer yawped, a deep, haunting croon, and then mimicked her.
“Oh, bless, she wants to help!” Daphne clasped her hands and turned to Harry. “What did you want to ask her?”
“Merlin,” said Harry wondrously, gazing at the mer with the same stupid amazement he’d found for hippogriffs. Give it teeth and magic and a spooky affect, and Harry would just about keel over for it. “What’s it like to live underwater?”
Daphne started gesturing. Mermish hand language involved a lot of finger movements around the body and head, interspersed with sketches on the glass, like a visual pictography. That intrigued him. Hermione had found her notebook and was scribbling so fast he was surprised the quill-tip didn’t burn off from friction.
The mer swiveled its head at Harry and gave another low-bellied croon. It darted its hand in a half-circle around its face, and then pointed with two fingers at Harry.
“She says, ‘Like you live, only wetter.’”
Harry laughed. The mer yawped again and swished its tail with a certain animalistic satisfaction, like a purring cat.
“How does she breathe?” he wondered. “What does she eat? What are those pebbly things she’s wearing?”
“Goodness, we don’t have time for all that. Read a book, my dove. Hermione—?”
“Yes,” said Hermione quickly. “We want to know what’s in the lake, first of all. Start with that.”
“Hm. I’ll try if you like, but I’m not… entirely positive that’ll translate,” she admitted. “Bit like asking, ‘what’s on the planet,’ isn’t it? Or a bird, ‘what’s in the sky.’”
Hermione frowned. “I see. Tell her… try telling her that some wizards are going to be coming into the lake, and we’d like to know if there’s anything they need to be careful of.”
Daphne obeyed. After a short flurry of gesturing, the mer cut her off with a squawk and smacked her skull twice with the flat of her hand.
“Oh! She says she knows about that!”
“She does?” Hermione was fascinated. She huddled closer to Daphne, as if she could siphon knowledge through osmosis. “How?”
“She says… the wizards have been building something in the lake. Kicking up dirt. Bad for the fish.” Daphne watched carefully, her pale brows dented with concentration. “And… she says… the purple man said it was for the wizard game. Sorry — purple officer? It’s got the formal case, but Mermish is so strange, I don’t know how you’d make ‘purple’ a formal word.”
“As a title? Purple is commonly associated with royalty,” said Hermione curiously, “so it could be a type of king, or a lord, or someone powerful. Only the context, ‘man,’ suggests it’s a wizard, so perhaps that means it’s an important wizard, a kingly wizard, someone with high standing—”
“Ministry representative,” said Draco. The others looked at him. “If I had to guess. Their robes are purple.”
Daphne cried and applauded. “Clever clogs! See, this is why I’m terrible at languages, I’m hopelessly literal. We should have had Pansy do it, she’s much brighter than me, and she’s got a lovely Mermish accent — ooh, I missed the participle there, this is going to be rough. It’s a list, I think? Grindylows, for one… lobalugs… a hippocampus, but it’s domesticated… and the squid.”
“Oh, good! Just the squid, nothing else?”
“Hark at her,” said Draco, “one dragon, and now it’s ‘just the squid,’ is it? Why don’t we take down a confederation of giants, while we’re at it? And a griffin for dessert? Just another breezy Tuesday, for Hermione Granger—”
“Shut up,” she said, a touch pink. “What, are you scared?”
“‘What, are you scared?’ What are you, nine?”
“At least I’m not quivering in my boots at the mere suggestion of tentacles—”
“I’ll show you who’s quivering, thank you—”
“Hang on,” said Harry, speaking over their undercurrent of nonsense, though, irritatingly, just as they’d begun to approach their normal rapport. Hermione broke off at once and went back to scribbling with suspicious focus. “I don’t have to fight the mermaids, do I?”
He sounded very sincerely worried. Personally, Draco could think of things harder than jinxing a creature that looked like a skeleton hopped into a hydraulic press with a newt, but for Harry, the prospect caused some distress.
“Good question!” Daphne smacked her palm with the flat of her hand, and the mer lashed her hand across her throat. “Oh, that’s a strong ‘no.’ They’re only there to supervise. She says—” Her lips thinned in suppression of a laugh. “She says it’s immoral to fight a baby.”
“…Am I the baby?”
“Only by implicature.”
“Can you ask her if she knows what the champions have to do?” said Hermione, while Harry grappled with this. “They have to retrieve something from the lake. It’s something they’ll ‘sorely miss,’ if that narrows it down.”
Daphne gestured again. The mer hesitated.
“She says no.”
“Drat,” muttered Hermione. She drew a line through something. “Alright. There’s still… oh, does she happen to know how Harry might go about breathing underwater? Long shot, but it’d be helpful.”
Daphne pointed to Harry, tapped her throat, made the half-circle gesture, and then the question mark.
The mer blinked, a slow shuttering of translucent eyelids. She swiveled her head back and forth, and Draco recognized it as a gesture of deep thought. It was thinking, he thought, abruptly; she was accessing her memory and using it to answer questions. It was capable of cognition and problem-solving and even some level of humor.
He didn’t know what to do with that. There was something unnerving about the idea.
“She’s asking whether you haven’t tried gillyweed,” reported Daphne.
“What’s gillyweed?”
Not unreasonably, Harry addressed this question to Hermione, who shook her head and, not unreasonably, turned to Draco — who didn’t know, because Herbology was an endurance trial and he hated it.
Daphne obediently relayed the question. “It’s a plant, apparently! It gives you gills.”
“Gills?” said Harry, slightly green.
“Gills,” breathed Hermione. “Perfect. Exactly. How do we get it?”
“She doesn’t know.”
“She doesn’t know?”
“Well, it’s plentiful at the bottom of the lake,” said Daphne, defensively, “but if you could nip down for a scoop, you wouldn’t have this problem in the first place, would you?”
“Can she get it to us?”
“It’s not harvesting season,” said Daphne, after a quick conferral. “She’d be willing, she says, and she’s very sorry; she likes… er. She likes ‘the polite baby.’ But it won’t be prepared for months.”
“Sorry,” said the polite baby, raising his hand, “but do they stick around? The gills? Do we know if they wear off?”
“So we’ll have to find a store somewhere,” murmured Hermione. “Or buy it, I suppose.”
Draco leaned his head back, thinking. “Hogsmeade doesn’t have an apothecary.”
“Snape does.”
“Snape’s not an herbalist.”
“We’ve stolen before—”
“Of necessity—”
“This is necessity—”
“Of course it is, but it’s not a victimless crime, is my point.”
“Some victim!”
“Again,” said Harry, “gills? Permanent? Anybody.”
“Not likely,” said Hermione.
“Acceptably likely,” said Draco.
“Hard to tell,” said Daphne, “but for her part, she says you oughtn’t worry about it; she thinks they’re quite fashionable, and you’d look good with them.”
“That’s great,” said Harry plaintively. “Wonderful. Ask her if she can convince Cho.”
In the last, long, black days before the Second Task — days that opened in peals of thunder to a sky dark as nightfall, peppered the world with lightning, and then slipped wrathfully back into night, leaving the windows dim and darker — Draco sank gradually into despair. He had thought, with the innocence of a child playing a puzzle game, that solving the egg would solve their problems. He was wrong.
Hook and crook met no meat on this issue. Not a sick fool in the world would gamble his life on Harry’s Bubble-Head Charm, which at the height of his concentration could produce only a semipermeable barrier for three minutes. Even Hermione’s version, a wholly impermeable shield, petered out around twenty-six minutes — though she blustered that she could have sustained concentration with less noise — which said nothing good about Harry’s chances of managing longer. The Second Task leaked dourness into the days that preceded it.
Somewhere in these vanishing hours, they all passed an unspoken threshold of time where even if, at this point, they discovered a spell or enchantment that could save him, Harry would lack the time to master it. Everyone understood this, but no one said so, perhaps for fear of hearing it confirmed back to them by one of the others; and yet that enforced silence intensified the cold spell of ennui. Evening study sessions at the library became futile and ghoulish. Stacks of antique spell indices assumed a certain penitential affect, like bars on a cage. Hermione churned out pages upon pages of notes about grindylows and hinkypunks that Harry would read and silently put away, because nothing in them would help him if he couldn’t breathe.
She had been friendly but religiously polite to Draco, ever since the prefects’ bathroom — a frightening development, because on a list of her many virtues, ‘politeness’ would not appear given fifty feet of parchment and a pixie-sized hand.
“She just misses Ron,” said Harry.
They had broken into the quidditch pitch. Steam rose from their bodies in the afternoon mist, the heat of their sweat melting the crust of frost on the bleachers below them.
Harry had grown into his Nimbus over the summer, and Draco often caught him marveling at its weathered name in gilt, the snitch-bright glitter of M.M. on the case.
His talent grew more disgusting every year, and Draco still, given his best efforts, could not beat him in an outright race.
He maintained cover by denying that any of these attempts were his best efforts.
“Yet again, you’ve classically missed the point,” he said. “We’re talking about me.”
He didn’t want to talk about Hermione, or how she might be missing Ron. They weren’t talking about her. Or her and Ron. Or whatever Ron’s sentiments for her were, which were none of Draco’s business and made him feel oddly, vaguely resentful for no reason whatsoever, being that she hadn’t shown evidence of returning them.
Which also would not be his business.
“It’s all mixed up, though,” said Harry. He leaned back on the bleachers and carded his fingers through his sweaty hair. “You and me and Hermione and Ron. In the hopper, right. Can’t be normal when Ron’s gone. Even though, again, it is his choice not to talk to me, which is, I guess, fine.”
“Why.”
“Why what?”
“I mean that doesn’t make any sense.”
“It’s because we’re all in the hopper together.”
“I am not in ‘the hopper’ with anything. Personally, politically, or spiritually.”
“Okay. But you are, though. Anyway, it’s obvious she misses him,” he said, “because now they’re fighting, they can’t pick on each other, and they’re both miserable.”
“She picks on me.”
“Not the same. You do your homework and iron your shirts,” said Harry, shaking his head, like this was an enduring character fault. “She’s gotta work for it, with you. Ron and I are open season.”
Fair. “Speaking of. She picks on you plenty.”
“But she doesn’t like to,” said Harry peacefully. “I’m a nice boy.”
“Oh, please.”
“I’m a sweet lad, Draco.”
“You’re an upjumped cuckoo bird, is what you are.”
“A perfect angel.”
“As was Lucifer.”
“You’d know,” said Harry innocently, and Draco was too lazy to do more than a rude gesture. “Anyway, Hermione’s going through it, just like the rest of us. The Task is driving her nutters, and now, with Ron, it’s all like a table. You cut one leg off a table, and like — it’ll still stand, but you can’t put anything heavy on it.”
“Legs do not generally part from tables of their own accord.”
“Wasn’t all his fault.” Harry bent forward, massaging his calf. “You two are a bit— you know.”
“Good Lord. Not this.”
“It’s true. He wasn’t imagining it, you two are always scuttling off to the library together.”
“To solve your riddle, thank you—”
“No. Before.” Harry smacked some dirt off his knees and turned to him, expression serious but not unkind. “You’re always partners in everything and you’re always gossiping about the homework before Ron and I’ve even looked at it. And then last year, with Arithmancy and Runes and the Polyjuice Potion… and then you two even dropped out of Hagrid’s class to go do your own thing—”
“I don’t recall McGonagall barring either of you two from Arithmancy,” said Draco coldly.
“Hop off my arse, wouldja,” said Harry, sounding strikingly like Ron. “I’m not trying to be mean. Just look at it his way, right? How’s he supposed to feel, with me in the Tournament, and you two going off on your own all the time?”
“He can feel however he wants about it. So long as he keeps it to himself, it’s none of my concern.”
“Right, so that’s a lie,” he said patiently. “Unless you can look me in the eye and say you don’t miss him, which I still wouldn’t believe. You’ve got to miss doing the little nose-wrinkle thing with him when me and Hermione act like muggles. You haven’t done the nose-wrinkle thing in weeks.”
Ron’s vow of silence had dragged on into the new month. It was making relations in the Gryffindor common room somewhat strained, especially for Fred, George, and Ginny, whose lack of insight into the situation warred with a desire not to cross an emotional picket line. Everyone knew that there had been a fight of some kind, but no one knew what exactly about, and no one but Colin Creevey was tactless enough to come outright and ask.
Draco wished they would. At least Colin had taken his Ear-Expanding Hex on the chin, like a man, and been on his way.
“Plus,” said Harry, “you were a real twat about the Burrow.”
“He was something of a twat, himself.”
“It’s not different.”
“Who was it that started the fight? Was it me? I don’t remember that happening.”
Harry granted this with an uncomfortable jerk of his head. “Wasn’t just him,” he muttered. “You missed the beginning. He came in with the article, right, and he was a good sport to start with — we all sat around and had a good laugh. But then he — I dunno — he started asking all these questions, about how Colin got the picture, and if we talked to any reporters, or if Hermione and I had been spending more time together — you know, weird questions, but not offensive, not really. Only Hermione kind of took it the wrong way—”
“Shock. Surprise.”
“—and she said, ah, if he thought she and I were — er — I think she said ‘closet snogging,’ every time his back was turned—”
Draco choked on a snort.
“—then he was an idiot, et cetera — and then I said something about wishing they’d both shut up, which, you know, really set them off—”
“With diplomacy like that, who needs war?”
“Yeah, yeah. So they got to shouting, and I — you know, I shut down, because I can’t — when people shout, my brain goes all—” He shook his hand vaguely over his ear. “And then he said something about snogging Krum and Hermione really blew up, and she told him — er, I’m not gonna repeat what she told him, if that’s alright—”
“English lacks a sufficiently strong synonym for ‘thank you.’”
“But anyway, that’s what had him fired up before you came in. And he’s been feeling shit all year. He’s been doing his best to tamp it down, but it’s not like any of us have really had time to notice, with the Tournament everything.”
“How dare you be distracted by fighting for your life in a deadly game of skill and chance? Shame on you, for neglecting poor Weasley’s feelings.”
“I’m not saying we didn’t have good reasons, but he has good ones, too. And we all know he can get mean, he and Hermione fought all through third year. The point is, we should take it easy on him.”
“No.”
“…No?”
He chose his words carefully.’
“He has a bad habit,” he said, “of going after Granger when he needs a free hit.”
Harry frowned.
“No—”
“I wouldn’t mention it,” he said neutrally, flicking dirt from his knees, “but he won’t hurt you if he can avoid it, and evidently can’t come up with much to hurt me, so she’s caught the brunt of it. It’s why he spent so much time yelling at her, did you notice? I did.”
“She bites back more than you or I do,” said Harry, “maybe that—”
“More than I do? Really.”
“But he just—”
“Wanted to do damage? Certainly. Oh, yes. The only reason he mentioned me at all was to bother her. It’s a fine strategy, it’s the target I don’t accept. ”
“Yeah,” said Harry, “and— okay. That was a shit thing to do, but one, you’ve got a thing with muggles and everybody knows it, including Hermione, who sticks her neck out for you way more than you deserve; and two, going after his house, especially when you’ve got a mansion—”
“It isn’t my fault that I have a mansion.” He wasn’t going to touch the thing about muggles. Hermione understood how he was. Harry and Ron didn’t get it, which wasn’t their fault, but they just didn’t.
Harry gave him a look.
“It isn’t,” he muttered.
“Yeah. Okay. Well, do me a favor and don’t say that to him, whenever he comes back, right? If you ever want to talk to him again, that is.”
“The jury is out.”
“No, it’s not,” yawned Harry. He stood up and stretched so high that the joints in his shoulders crackled.
“What makes you think so?”
“A feeling,” said Harry, naming his favorite form of evidence. And he smiled a smile of rare confidence, an expression Draco had seen only sometimes, which took as its source the conviction that the gears and levers of the world worked in an inexorable rhythm towards goodness, and they would soon return to it, and when they did, the smile’s owner would have the double pleasure of being both right and happy about it. This was an expression Draco had never made and never would, and so whenever Harry showed it he had the faint awe of witnessing something impossible.
Which was not to say he didn’t look stupid. He did. Jammy moon-eyed git.
Harry turned the smile relentlessly up at the broad ceiling of clouds, and slinging a leg over his broomstick, he kicked off through the glacial winter morning, sailing up into the sky as if gravity had flipped and drawn him home.
The next time he saw Hermione was in Potions. She wanted to talk about the Second Task, which was about the only subject she would discuss freely with him anymore, and so he indulged her, mostly because the alternative was brittle decorum the likes of which made her seem frankly possessed.
“If you don’t want to steal, you could always ask him outright, you know.”
“Being known for his generous disposition.”
“He is your godfather.”
“Raise your voice a little, I don’t think the court reporter heard it—”
“Don’t be a worrywand. It’s worth a shot.”
“Fine. I have to ask him to take a letter to my mother, anyway.”
It had been three weeks, with no word from her. When he let himself think about it, it put him half of a mind to march himself home and see what all was going on, but Snape didn’t exactly make himself available for consultation. He’d canceled four in five office hours, and rarely stayed after class longer than it took to make an excuse and hurry out. His lessons had become somewhat hurried in tenor — even Neville was starting to relax, free from supervision, and his brewing showed improvement from it — while his interest in normal sources of joy, like docking points for sloppy Windsors, had plummeted alarmingly.
He looked tired. Draco worried about him.
She blew some smoke off the cauldron-lip and frowned. “Why would Professor Snape take a letter to your mother?”
“He’s my godfather,” he said evasively, slitting a murtlap’s belly with a deft stroke of the knife. “Pass the forceps.”
Forceps were passed. “I know that,” she said. “I’ve a godfather, too, but I don’t use him as a postal service.”
“Really? Such strange creatures, muggles.”
She scowled. He splayed his fingers, not quite an apology — more of an easing-off — but it acknowledged the ice was thinner than he’d seen.
It was a joke. She understood that.
“You’re avoiding the question,” she said brusquely, and poked him with a stirring rod. “Tell me.”
He thought about not telling her — Snape probably would have advised against — but Snape was a crotchety old bugger, and anyway, Draco didn’t see the point in hiding anything. It wasn’t as though she could change it, one way or another.
“The Ministry watches owl post.”
“What.”
She had stopped stirring. He made a distressed noise and repossessed the rod to remedy her mistake. “Some of it, anyway. I quite agree, it’s a devil of a thing—”
“That’s illegal!”
“Oh, Lord.”
“You have rights!”
“It doesn’t feel like it right now.”
“They watched you? For how long?”
“It doesn’t make a difference, to be honest,” he said. “Unless you’re worried about people reading your Christmas notes, which are, I admit, politically loaded—”
“I’m worried about people abusing your civil liberties.”
“The only person I let abuse my civil liberties is you,” he said, annoyed, “for reasons that currently escape me, as I’m working my fingers to the bone stirring this cauldron by myself, while you foment revolution.”
“I’m serious.” She touched his arm. He glanced at it and then at her and then at the cauldron, which was fascinating, or soon would be, once he remembered what he was doing with it. “Why didn’t you complain?”
“…To whom?”
“To Dumbledore! Or, fine, not Dumbledore, but someone important. Your lawyer! Or — you know — to me,” she said, faltering. He dropped his eyes to her hand, and she hastily withdrew it. “You never said anything—”
“About what? It doesn’t matter.” She was staring at him like he had missed something unfathomably important. Then she seemed to relocate her hand remained on his arm, and snatched it away, almost knocking over a beaker in the process. She resettled herself in her chair and did not look at him again.
“I would have told you if it were important,” he said tartly, wondering if she were peeved about being kept out of a secret. But it was his mother, and his post, so he frankly didn’t see where she was entitled to know any of it, except that Hermione usually felt herself entitled to all the information in a particular room.
She ignored him. It needled him for the rest of class, her silence, and he was about to resort to pitching things at her when the hour-bell groaned.
It preceded a shriek of chairs and footsteps, including Hermione’s, who removed herself with a polite goodbye like the cracking of crystal. And Draco excused himself to go talk to his godfather.
He hated this. It would be preferable, in his mind, if they could reset everything to the way it had been right after the First Task, when everything was simple and delightful and he felt like the god-king of knowledge and adventure.
Snape’s cauldron was empty. The Potions Master erased the blackboard with a sweep of his wand and set about strapping his knives into his kit. His book lay open on the desk, beside the cauldron, the instructions ringed in familiar doilies of black scrawl. Even the title, ‘Choking Solution’ had been struck though, and replaced with an uneven line: liquid benzonatate (c30h53no11). Beside it lay a spindly chain of hexagons.
“It is a formula,” said a voice behind him. “You should familiarize yourself. They will appear on your N.E.W.T.”
The door swung shut, and the candles in the potions classroom flickered. In the dim, smoky room, studded with green luminescent bottles and burbling cauldrons, it felt like a sunken study, or an underwater cavern. With not an ounce of daylight, it could have been any time at all. Draco didn’t understand how one could tolerate a whole day without sunlight. It would do things to his brain. In fact, maybe that explained a good deal about Snape, come to think of it.
He turned around. Snape stood with his arms folded in a militant shield over his sunken chest. His brittle black eyes peered out from a face of malnourished thinness. The long, bony fingers of his right hand pinched the handle of his wand, which he pointed at the desk, where the book snapped shut.
“Hello, Uncle Severus. Does this mean you think I’ll pass my O.W.L.?”
He couldn’t help it. Fishing for compliments was one of his hobbies.
Snape made an irritated noise in his throat. Draco smirked and hopped up to sit on the desk.
“That is not a chair.”
“My mistake, sir.” He didn’t move. “Can I ask you a question?”
“I lack the time to instruct you on what a chair is.”
Sometimes he nearly suspected his godfather had a sense of humor.
“You’re hilarious, sir. Do you happen to have any gillyweed?”
“Why do you ask?”
Draco weighed his options, and decided for the rare honest play. “Potter needs it for the Second Task,” he admitted. “It’s rather rare, we don’t know where to find it. I thought you might have some.”
His godfather’s voice grew an edge. “And you think I would simply give it to you, if I did?”
“Please. I would remunerate you, naturally. I’d not waste your time with begging, nor mine, sir.”
Snape slowly lifted his hand to his face. Because his back was turned, it took a moment to realize he was massaging his head.
“Do you know, Draco,” he said, quiet with unhappy memoria, “sometimes you remind me so strongly of your father that I feel rather haunted.”
“Really? How?”
Oh, and hang him for that, honestly, that naked and humiliating pitch of eagerness. Stuff a sock in his throat and keep it there. Gag him until he was of an age to stop embarrassing himself.
Snape took a while choosing his next words. “A perhaps unreasoned confidence in his own powers,” he said, “and a truly remarkable collection of synonyms for bribery.”
To his ear, it sounded like Snape was calling him shallow, and he didn’t care for that at all. “Tosh. Bribery is the financial manipulation of a public servant,” he said, clipped. “What I’m suggesting is embezzlement, if anything.”
A mysterious tremor broke out in Snape’s cheek. “Another sentence that might come from beyond the grave. But I cannot help you. I have no gillyweed left.”
“Oh,” he said. Then: “What do you mean, ‘left’?”
“Precisely what I said. Ordinarily I should have several bushels, but the school apothecary has been mysteriously pilfered, of late, and several ingredient stores were eradicated completely. Gillyweed was among them. I am sorry to say that Mr. Potter will simply have to hold his breath.”
“Someone stole it?”
“Obviously.”
“Who? Do you know? Did they leave clues?”
“I have not the slightest idea,” said Snape delicately, though his eyes cut sidelong at Draco. “I had suspected the same anonymous personage responsible for the disappearance of my prize boomslang skin, last spring. I inferred that it might prove similarly… of use… to them.”
Draco cleared his throat and lifted his chin.
“Seems unlikely, sir.”
“Mm.”
“Just based on — probability, you know. The same person striking twice. I wouldn’t put my money on it, personally.”
“No? That is concerning.”
Draco drummed his fingers restlessly on the desk. “You might… and sir, I don’t mean to point fingers.”
“How rarely that refrain precedes anything but.”
“But before the First Task, the Restricted Section of the library was cleared of books on dragon-taming. Now, under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest sabotage—”
“Then you are more a fool than I had believed,” said Snape curtly. “Of course it is sabotage; it can be nothing else. This is the Triwizard Tournament. The prize, far greater than money, is the sort of glory that makes one’s career. Books will go missing, potion stores will be stolen, and if Potter’s competitors have not already conspired against him, I would be shocked at their lack of competitive acumen.”
“Yes! Exactly!”
“Your exuberance is unmerited. It takes precious little cunning to infer. Potter is the youngest, the smallest, and the least legitimate, by any reckoning; he is the obvious target for a conspiracy. In eliminating him, each stands to raise their own chance of victory by eight percent. They will attempt to cut him out of the running in the Second Task, mark me, and compete amongst themselves in the Third.” He jabbed his wand at the board, and the last few instructions sprang out of it in a pellet of chalk.
“Sir, I couldn’t agree more. Now, about that—”
“You should let them.”
He stuttered. “What, sir?”
Snape finished the inscription with a sharp flourish. “I do not repeat myself. Be candid: have you given any thought to what happens if Potter wins?”
Draco fumbled for an answer that wouldn’t embarrass him.
“He gets a thousand galleons,” he suggested. “Rita Skeeter writes several indecorous news features.”
“No. Cassius Warrington will be humiliated.”
That rankled. “I don’t know about ‘humiliated,’ sir. It’s a hard tournament, at the risk of redundancy.”
“You cannot truly think it matters.” It was the same scorn offered to students who gave exceptionally creative wrong answers. It stung. “Potter may be Merlin’s gift to magic — I happen to know for a fact he is not — but politics is nine tenths optical. Cassius Warrington is a pureblood adult. Potter is a half-blood. The thesis of Albert Runcorn’s political career has been that one of these things is indubitably superior to the other. This Tournament,” he said, “is an empirical test of that hypothesis.”
Which was a sobering kind of thing to hear, but not particularly helpful. He respected his godfather tremendously, but he was concerned that Snape severely underestimated the perils of ‘let it ride’ as a strategic game plan. Or he just didn’t care. Considering his remarks about Harry, it was quite possible he didn’t.
The hour-bell tolled again, signaling the start of dinner, and with a riotous complaint, his stomach reminded him that he hadn’t eaten lunch.
“Professor. About my mother—”
“You worry for her.”
“A bit,” he said. “Occasionally. From time to time.”
“She has been occupied, of late. She sends her regards.”
“So — you’ve seen her, then?”
“Just last week.”
“At the Manor?”
“Do you imagine your mother has been elsewhere?”
But she hadn’t sent a letter? Not even a note?
He tilted his head. “Did she mention how the roses were doing, sir?” he said lightly.
Snape gave him the wary look of someone stumbling into a burgeoning lunacy.
“…Sir?”
“She did not,” he said icily. “Indeed, most anthological matters fell outside the scope of our concern, as I thought they did yours.”
Snape was lying.
His mother wouldn’t have sent Snape back without a message for him, even a coded one. The white roses are flourishing in the rains, or, the reds will wilt soon. Something to indicate if she was in danger. No message spoke louder than any could.
“I see. Well, when you see her next,” he said coolly, “would you tell her I asked? For politeness.”
“Do you presume that I have nothing better to do—”
“Never, sir. I just think she’d be glad to know that I haven’t abandoned her. She hasn’t replied to my last two letters, you see.” He slung his bag over his shoulder and said, casually, “Ostensibly because she was traveling. But if you say she’s at the Manor — I suppose I should believe you, shouldn’t I?”
Snape said nothing; he didn’t need to. The silence in the classroom turned gelatinous and oily, like a solution on the verge of breaking.
“Your mother is not well.”
He was sober, but sincere.
“She’s been—”
“Worse. Yes.”
Another silence. He wished the first one would come back.
“Is she…”
“Before I ask a question,” said Snape quietly, “I always inquire first, of myself: how much would it suit me to know?”
Which was its own kind of an answer.
“Thanks,” he said roughly. “Sorry to bother. Will you tell me—”
“Please understand,” said Snape, and he abruptly jolted into new levels of terror heretofore unknown, because that was worse than anything else he could have said; Severus Snape saying please was one of Armageddon’s klaxons. “I take no joy in keeping secrets. It is an onerous, convoluted, and deeply unpleasant duty, and one that I should never have undertaken, had I a life that better suited me.” He paused. “As it is, I never go to the effort except from obligation.”
Draco nodded. He understood. He did. She was his own mother; he knew how she felt. If he were mad, he wouldn’t have wanted his son to hear about it, either.
He trotted down the stairs from the dais, hands in his pockets, while his insides fused into a single large knot of frustration and worry. He wondered if he could reach his mother directly, without having to pass through the medium of Snape, with all his apparently bothersome discretionary vows. Perhaps Hermione had some muggle contraption that could trace letters — of course, that would require telling Hermione why he was worrying for mother, which would raise questions, and that only made the knot bigger — what conclusions she would draw about a man with madness in his family line, it was impossible to tell, and unpleasant to contemplate.
He would solve the problem by himself. He was clever enough.
If some part of his brain was wary of the impossible arrogance of this task, it was at least decent enough to keep it to itself.
-EVERYONE LOOK AT THIS!!!
-I want to walk around holding this on a giant poster and standing outside of people’s windows like in Stand By Me
-you know how i said some people predict things in the comments? sometimes i’ll see like, an interpretation of a non-POV character’s thoughts, or a long-running motif, and i start uncontrollably barking and clapping like a great white seal. happened twice this week, it’s grand. Writing serial fiction is the best.
-Draco: okay. it’s getting serious. time to start suppressing my feelings, for real now, on purpose. [immediately turns around and flirts]
-Obviously, your author is a big fan of the “I Am In Control Of This [He Was Not In Control Of This]” phase of a slow-burn arc. We’re going somewhere with this, though.
-Okay. Enough talk. Next week, we ARE getting our second task chapter, and it’ll end what I think of as the “second act” of Book 4. Upcoming: “The Black Lake.”
-It will contain… well, a whole lot of stuff. And Rita Skeeter.
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