Chapter 57: Summer’s End
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
[img: https://i.postimg.cc/qMq98vqc/Book-5-1.png]
I can remember standing by the wall
And the guns shot above our heads
And we kissed, as though nothing could fall
—David Bowie, “Heroes”
The sun laid in patchwork on the Manor’s striped lawns, creating a chessboard of emerald and gold. The sky bubbled with champagne clouds, beyond which a spill of burgundy waited in the west. Pale peacocks came and went cooing among the trees like ghost brides, trailing their ever-fixed trains of vestal white, and in the cradle of the gardens, where a long ribbon of sand cut into the grasses by the lake, Draco practiced.
Heat had driven him out of his jacket, and the billows of pale Egyptian cotton around his elbows twisted like dove’s wings. Sweat veined white hair with lines of straw, the long coil of it descending from its coif to hang ragged in his face, and the nascent lines of fresh muscle laid faint shadows on the surface of his back. With each lash of his arm, a black garnet on his finger caught and held the fleeing sun.
He rolled his weight onto his left foot and executed a ducking feint that had taken him the better part of a month to learn — a month subsequent to the one he’d spent learning where to put his feet so a sharp duelist couldn’t knock him squalling on his back in the first movement, and where to hold his useless offhand arm so that said duelist couldn’t hack it off in the second. These and other lessons were hard-won with time: how to flatten himself on the piste and somehow run sideways, as if that was a thing human legs were suited to gracefully do; how to diffuse a curse at speed; how to take a curse, if you knew you had to, and where to land it for least harm. On the few occasions that a human opponent condescended to spar with him he was rewarded with a new list of things he had failed at, and he knew it was a good day if it was a substantially different list than the last.
Other days, when the human opponent made herself scarce, he trained by himself, with only the peacocks for company. Each night he fell asleep before he could dress the blisters on his feet or the sunburns on his face, and he woke to a tinkling bell in his ear, a tray of eggs and coffee placed unobtrusively on his futon, and the retreating steps of their housemaid.
The last week of August came swimming out of these days like a brute awakening. The heat reached a peak and broke in a stream of sweaty, sleepless nights, in which green lights danced behind his eyelids, and he came to with shouts that brought lights stirring in opposite wings of the castle. He had stopped using Dreamless Sleep in July, when he realized how difficult it was becoming to sleep without it, and besides which it unnerved him to slip into the perfect oblivion it brought: no dreams, no thoughts, just a slow descent into nothing. Taken when wide awake, it felt dizzying and eerie, like something far more permanent than sleep.
A flutter graced the lawns in his periphery. A woman came striding out of the shade, her black skirts a fantail around her waist, her heels silent on the soft earth. A black summer robe of embroidered gossamer foamed behind her like a train of smoke.
He planted the tip of the dueling wand on the ground and inclined his head, resting his weight on one foot.
“Well done, my darling,” she called. “Your name shall live in infamy among the bulrushes.”
“Good evening, Mother.”
“It must be quite pleasant to spar with an opponent made of air and bullrushes.” She reached out and kissed his sweat-filmed cheek, smiling a wide guileless smile that put stars in her eyes, like he had done the very finest thing imaginable just now. It was pleasant; he preened. “Though it must be tedious to win every bout.”
“I would do better with Briselda, but certain authorities forbade me to engage the staff.”
“The help have responsibilities more important than serving as your whipping post. Besides which, I do worry that embarking on a train of abuse would alter the edibility of our food.”
“Dueling wands don’t leave injuries.”
“Mm.” She hummed noncommittally and cast around through the bullrushes. “Where’s the other one?”
He located the second dueling wand where it was buried in the sand, flipped it up with the toe of his boot, and caught it. He offered it to her, smirking.
“Formal challenge, Mother?”
She gave the instrument a flick. It came to life, spitting sparks.
Then she smiled at him again, the same guileless beam, and gestured widely. “Why don’t you call? It’s your practice, after all.”
He took several paces back and parted his feet, sideways, aligning the tip of the wand with his eyes. He shifted the grip to the western underhand. The dueling wand was slightly longer and heavier than the real thing; it was meant for older wizards. “To the wizard’s disarm?”
“Mm. I never did know what that meant,” she said idly, whisking the dueling wand back and forth, as if feeling for the weight. “What is a ‘wizard’s disarm’? It’s getting the wand out of your hand, isn’t it? In my day, the duels were always to the blood, or to the ground, rather. It was simpler.”
“Which carries all sorts of implications for why so few duelists of that generation remained to pass on their traditions, but for immediate purposes, I’d rather not shed any of your blood today, or ever, if I can help it.”
“I certainly share your preference, if not your concern.”
He swung the wand around in a loose circle, rolling out his wrist. “Are you saying I’m going to lose?”
“I would never bet against you,” she said mildly. “It is a lucky mother who lives to see herself surpassed by her children.”
He smirked at her. The corner of her mouth echoed the expression.
“Do you feel lucky, Mother?”
“Not today,” she laughed, and twisted sideways, her hand arched in a long overhand grip.
“Clavicle to navel. Wands only. C—”
The first curse nearly caught him in the stomach. It took him several seconds to realize that his mother had moved. While he came to that painfully slow realization, she moved again. It was three awfully fast-moving seconds before he came to the important judgment, however, which was that her speed was only the third or fourth thing that he needed to worry about.
She fought like rivers moved, seamlessly, inexorably, without any sort of hesitation or pause for thought. The economy of movement was faultless. By the time he had hauled his wand into place to target her, her parry — a lateral cut that sawed down his own wand’s red sparks with a blade of gold — could have eked as much applause from a ballerina as it would a soldier. Her advance was a movement so fluid that her feet seemed magnetically attached to the duelist’s line.
He blocked the first curse, and in his surprise at having succeeded, forgot the second. Gold soared in a whirling braid for his face, piercing the sloppy uppercut of his dueling wand; the sparks clipped his shoulder and sent a hard pulse through his chest, like a tuning fork had whacked his spine. By training or miracle he kept hold of the dueling wand and sprang into what was an equally perfect lunge, darting a spell under the overhand guard — whose main defect, per the duelists’ manuals, was the holes it opened in one’s defense — and a radial sweep of her wrist snapped her point around to catch it, crackling, on the tip of her weapon. The opposite motion whipped it back at him. His riposte was the kind of thing that an auror might describe to get a laugh at a party.
Of the few opponents he’d ever raised his wand against, his mother was by far the least pleasant. Fighting Marcus Flint was at heart a question of two very simple tasks: remaining upright and not fucking up colossally. With his mother, in contrast, not fucking up colossally was a prerequisite to remaining upright at all, after which began the real task of exploiting holes in a guard that didn’t have holes to begin with.
If he had his real wand, he would have thrown a Shield Charm and sprinted for the hills at the first suggestion he was fighting someone of her level. But he held a mechanical instrument designed to help train aurors to duel without Shields, so instead, he had to duck and jump and backpedal like he had some sort of palsy. At some points his mother returned to her starting position and fired jinxes at him in volley, dancing him up and down the piste for seemingly no tactical value but her pleasure.
The heat sapped energy from his limbs. He tasted metal in his throat from exertion and his hair hung in his eyes. His mother smoothed out her skirt, idly, like she was fixing an unflattering fold.
“You’re toying with me.”
“I’d say you’re allowing yourself to be toyed with,” she said archly, pinching a bit of soot from the wand tip. Then she advanced again, and he slipped back into the fugue of parry and counterstroke, giving step after step on the piste until his heel staggered back and met grass.
He was hot and achy and sick of losing, and so it wasn’t altogether sporting, what he did next.
He advanced three rapid steps up the piste, swept his wand up the line of a chest strike. Her wand shifted unerringly into place for the most textbook parry of all time.
Which was when he took a hard sidestep off the duelist’s line, snapped his arm out, and whipped a curse sideways into her uncovered flank.
The parry missed — he was thrilled — but the curse never landed. When red sparks came scissoring at her left, his mother neatly folded herself sideways, pivoting her back foot around as if the piste itself had rotated ninety degrees, and her wand came arcing around to slice up the side of his guard — the wrong side for a parry — and with a sickening jolt he realized why duelists stayed on the piste in the first place. To parry from this position would require him to either Apparate or spontaneously manifest a new joint in his elbow, neither of which he could do, and so he opted instead for a clumsy lunge out of the curse’s path, planting his other foot soundly off the piste. The momentum threw him sideways and as he fought for footing she stepped into his guard, where he was so busy keeping his wand somewhere vaguely near proper position that he missed her left offhand coming around to smack him in the head.
He stumbled back with a yowl of indignation, more from shame than hurt.
Narcissa stepped back — with nothing more telling than a slow breath to signal her exertion — and put down her wand, smiling a wide and complacent grin. It was his grin, he realized, with a start. That was his smirk, the curl of his lip. No wonder it got a rise out of people; it was properly infuriating.
“You’re slow,” she said.
“You’re fast.”
“It’s not altogether your fault. Your clothes are too heavy.” She reached out and plucked at his collar. He grumbled and swatted her hands away. “You’re not Robespierre, darling, you can’t fight in a dress shirt.”
“You’re wearing a dress. And robes.”
“Which I certainly would not, if it gave me as much trouble as it does you, dear.”
He scoffed.
Bells crooned sweetly from the house. Five o’clock.
“I should change,” he said abruptly.
“Oh, yes,” she said, and there was a subtle closing-off in her: nothing so indiscreet as a change in expression, but a retraction of energy, a subtle drift in tone, as if her mind had been called away on urgent business. “I recall. You’re hosting.”
“If you’d like to voice an objection—”
“Why would I object?” And still there was that airiness, frustrating as anything, as she floated over the subject and out of the conversation, her skirts sailing over the lawn. “On what grounds? It is your house. As you remind me.”
It had been a bad row. He wished he hadn’t said it, but that didn’t make it untrue, and it didn’t make her position any more reasonable.
“It’s only a few days.”
“I know how long a week is, Draco.” Her voice floated over her retreating shoulder. He caught up with her. The summer had been kind to him, and given him height enough to close the distance without difficulty.
They reached the veranda and moved through bay doors into an airy sitting-room, past an ornamental piano that sprang to life with a tinkling Chopin when they passed by, and several portraits that burst into furtive whispering at their appearance. The hearth erupted in flames and then died down again when they left the room.
A hall of marble statues craned their necks to peer curiously as they stalked past.
“I’ve given you ample notice—”
“You mean you’ve given me time to make myself scarce.”
“If you want to. This situation is only a problem because you think it is.”
“The problem is not what I think,” she said, with the first hint of tartness, and wheeled a corner. Several autonomous dustpans scampered out of the way, and a row of curtains snapped back, pouring sunlight into the freshly lit corridor. “I did not engineer society to my whim. I did not lay out the world’s many orders according to personal preference. I am not the reason Miss Granger experiences certain political inconveniences, and I increasingly resent being treated as such by you.”
“Attempted murder is a bit more than an ‘inconvenience,’ no?” His tone was thin. “Wouldn’t you say?”
“Not for some of us,” she muttered, and swept up the staircase. A carpet unfurled at her feet, hastily beating out clouds of dust.
“And that’s another thing, thank you. Why won’t you tell me—”
“Not now.”
“—where you went last week? You promised you would, and you never did. I understand you have secrets—”
“Draco.”
“—you can’t say it all, but a man has a right to know where his mother’s disappearing off to, especially when she comes back—”
“You’re retaliating.”
“—with blood on her clothes — did you expect me not to notice? Do you think I’m entirely dull?”
She turned around at the entrance to the master suite, which unfolded its oaken doors at her approach.
“Draco, when I inform you that something is unsuitable for you to know, it is not a remark on your intelligence, but a solicitation of your trust. It means there is no conceivable way in which having that information could make you safer.”
“Which might be easier to believe if you explained why it’s dangerous. Or don’t you trust me, either?”
Her lips thinned. A shutter slammed somewhere in the room behind her.
“If you would like to be trusted, then I advise you conduct yourself more— did you do that?”
“The window? Didn’t you?”
“Never mind. We can discuss this at leisure,” she said, “after you have received your guest. In the meantime, I must dress for company.”
“Oh, please—”
The doors closed over her retreating silhouette.
“Well done,” he snapped. “Now who’s retaliating?”
This was not exactly a decisive blow, and its whinging delivery failed to elevate the material. The doors, being doors, took it on the chin.
He arrived in his chambers in bad humor, and punted his shirt somewhere vaguely in the direction of the laundry bin. The wardrobe unfolded its wares in anticipation of his arrival, unveiling a balustrade of freshly laundered shirts in all shades of white from bone to beige, black sport coats embroidered with gold, tunics of leather striped with purple velvet, and a caravanserai of jewel-tone robes cut wide at the shoulders, because his father had been a broad man.
It was a decision of convenience, not sentiment. He’d grown that summer, and he hadn’t been in the mood to shop. And they were his clothes, anyway, from a legal point of view.
He stripped down another dress shirt and, with some consideration, a black waistcoat with shiny little onyx beads for buttons. It drew taut around his lower back, the fabric supple, and cut a stark V across his chest. The white shirt plumed like a sort of crest over his shoulders, a touch broad but no matter, it made for a dramatic silhouette — he hadn’t figured out the thing to do about his hair, which had grown too long for gelling and liked to loiter in the neighborhood of his eyes, vaguely disheveled, but not yet long enough to bind with ribbon or ties. Ordinarily the thing would be to cut it, but his mother’s hairwitch in Diagon Alley had lost her license under the new regulations, and the last time he’d let Dobby at it, he’d worn hats for six months.
A rake of his fingers made it flop over in a plausibly intentional sort of way. It would do.
He arrived at the gates in the fashionably late vicinity of five thirty, and found to no particular amount of surprise that there was a carriage idling in the drive, drawn by a quartet of thestrals, shaking their reptilian wings out in somber repose. And disembarking from the carriage, sweeping her eyes around the vista as if she harbored devious cartographical impulses, was a girl — a sharp, neatly dressed, lovely girl, with hair the size of Saturn, and eyes somewhere thereabouts, dark and warm and full of cleverness and gold, her tongue a pink slip held thoughtfully between her teeth. She wore a short-sleeved blouse of dusty pink linen and a pair of sensible brown boots, suitable for walking.
The wind blew her hair in her face. Hermione drew it back, a bit like a veil; and then saw him, and she smiled with her whole face, thirty-two teeth and two cheeks and a wrinkled-up nose.
He had been concerned about this.
Anxiety was an ordinary element of anticipation in seeing one’s friends after some time apart. Anxiety was why the road from the Manor steps to the gates had never quite seemed so short, nor the hours of the day preceding so swift, as they did knowing what laid at the end of them. This wasn’t anxiety. What happened was some rebellious and desperately fond part of his head made a violent leap for freedom, and several aurors of his better judgment had to be dispatched to cudgel it.
The distraction meant he almost missed what she said.
“You’re alive,” she remarked, in the same way one might say, Mild evening.
He had been prepared for a dozen opening volleys, including the dangling threads of at least four arguments left hanging in their letters. This had not been one of them.
“Pardon?”
“Oh, you suggested— I don’t suppose you remember— in your letter, your invitation, you said I ought to make good time, or you might manifest an aneurysm from boredom.” She tucked her hair around her ear. “But you haven’t.”
“Right. Sorry to disappoint.”
“I’ll recover.” She was still touching her hair, twisting it. “Your hair’s longer.”
“My hairwitch is out of service.”
“On strike?” Her mouth curved.
“Why, yes. Didn’t you hear? Yours started a union.”
The curve split into a wide, sunny crescent. She laughed, and then said, hesitantly: “I missed you.”
He inclined his head at her. He opened his hand and extended it, palm-out, and she took it hesitantly. A sharp tug brought her stumbling through the gates, and against him, where she was wrapped, yelping, in the sort of embrace one might expect from a perfectly well-adjusted friend with nothing to hide.
She wriggled around and got in control of the situation, making her arms free, and then hauled him in for a proper bone-cracker of a hug. Just so. He put his head against hers and the scent of her hair was there, the same as it always was, flowers and citrus. The world was warm and sweet and soft.
Probably a little while after he should have, he disengaged and put his hands in his pockets. She put her hand over her eyes to inspect the house behind them, which from outside the gate was invisible; it was some bespoke variation of a Notice-Me-Not, layered so thickly and for so long that he would be surprised if it hadn’t warped into something else altogether.
“You live here?”
“No, there’s a shed out back we kip in. Ow— yes, Granger, we live here. Welcome to Malfoy Manor.”
She gave him a serious glance, snorted, and began hauling her trunk up the drive. He liberated her of it, because manners, but his pace obligated her to trot to keep up, because turnabout.
“Cozy, isn’t it?”
“A nice starter home, one thinks,” she deadpanned.
He didn’t know what a starter home was, but context made it sound suspiciously middle-class, so he ignored it. He pointed at the facade. “My suite is right up there in the east wing. Of course, the master’s is on the other side, that’s for the head of house. My mother uses those rooms herself, and probably will even after I’m of age. Mine are quite comfortable enough, for the time being.”
“What do you mean, your ‘suite’?”
“My rooms. What? Don’t look like that. There’s only three or four of them, it isn’t obscene.”
“What on earth do you do with ‘three or four’ rooms?”
“I live there,” he said, truly and genuinely bemused. “I’ve a bedroom, an office, and an en-suite. You’ll see.”
“You have your own office?”
“It doubles as a sitting room.”
“Oh, good. Wouldn’t want to waste space.”
“I’m quite economical,” he agreed pleasantly, and she marched on with a dogged shake of her head.
Instead of cutting straight up to the front door, he took a course that arched sideways around the west wing, which rotated the whole face of the building into the light of the setting sun. With some eagerness he pointed to this or that element of the Neoclassical silhouette against the lavender sky, admiring the Venetian windows that glinted like diamonds in settings of bone, flush against the bloodred layers of brick, the relief where sea dragons braided their bodies in fashionable torment, the buttery scent of jasmines and the unctuous scent of pine and fern and the eternal perfect scent of roses, twined in thick locks over the walls and the gates. It was strange to reach the veranda, overlooking a small acropolis of gardens and courtyards, and not find a garden party waiting for them there, no chorus of girls in white dresses watching men in shirtsleeves play croquet, no welcoming cries but the croon of the peacocks sounding invisibly through the trees.
Inside they went through the sitting room and into the entrance hall from the back, emerging from between the curved white arms of twin staircases to the marble vault beyond. Two stories of shining granite lifted from the chequered marble floor and unfolded overhead into a wide gallery of balconies, through which the ghostly eyes of a hundred statues leered or swooned or fountained water into small basins. Somewhere a piano was trilling faintly at them, and its mate crooned back to it from another room, sweet broken chords that flowed in and out of the hallways like the echoes were waltzing.
Hermione stepped into the hall slowly, revolving on her heel.
“What do you think?” he said impatiently.
With some palpable effort, she drew her eyes down from the crystal ziggurat of the chandelier.
“It’s so… grand. It feels like a museum.”
“You like museums.”
“I don’t live in one.” She seemed apprehensive.
He set down her trunk and stepped into the entrance hall, examining it again for himself. He hadn’t thought it was so grand, really; presentable, of course, but they hadn’t even laid out the welcoming banners.
“Yes, but it’s good, isn’t it? It’s quite nice, and everything.”
“Nice — it’s absurd. People have been guillotined for less than this.”
“Don’t get ideas.”
“Don’t tempt me, then,” she suggested, with an amused look over her shoulder. She ambled around the room, peering into paintings and marble carvings of achaean men in contrapposto, their wands arched gently over their thighs.
“I’d delay judgment until you see the library.”
“Please,” she laughed, “I’m not that shallow — I’m not going to swoon just because you have books—”
“It’s three floors.”
“Three?”
“Ah, we’ll make an elitist of you, yet.”
She was prevented from answering by the click of heels somewhere in the gallery overhead.
His mother came in. He suppressed a sigh.
She wore a formal gown of sleeveless, lightless indigo, draped in layers of intricate and vocal beading that whispered against the gauze, crowned with a velvet choker and an emerald like a wide sightless eye. Her hair gathered in an intricate staircase of curls ascending to the diamond circlet that glittered atop the peak, a few white hairs feathering the rest like snowfall, and the overall effect was the sort of extraordinary artistic beauty that required at least three pairs of hands. Black gloves plunged up to her elbow, and on each hand gleamed a different ring, one black, one diamond. It was really quite old-fashioned, even for her. There was little about her silhouette that couldn’t have been said of her grandmother’s, in a different hallway, fifty years ago.
“Hello, darling,” she said. “I see that you’ve found your friend.”
Her voice was flat and airy and dry as desert wind. It expressed no interest but the presumptive fulfillment of the obligation to speak.
“Hello, Mother.”
He fought the temptation to say: Really? and instead gave her a knowing glare as she descended, her heels marking each step. She ignored this, and tilted her head inquisitively at Hermione. Hermione offered a thin, flagging smile and cut him a sideways stare, obviously — as any reasonable person would be — at a loss for what to do with this. He felt trapped.
“Hello, Mrs. Malfoy,” said Hermione quietly.
At Mrs., Narcissa’s cheek twitched.
“The exceptional Miss Granger,” she said.
Hermione said, uncomfortably, “Well—”
“The revolutionary Miss Granger,” she continued, drawing up the sleeve of her glove. “The groundbreaking Miss Granger.”
“I don’t know what Draco’s told you,” she said, “but there’s nothing revolutionary about getting good marks. And he does very well for himself.” She smiled thinly.
“I didn’t mean your marks,” said Narcissa, leaning against the banister.
There was a long beat.
She arched her eyebrows and sauntered away, lingering under the great arch where the staircases clasped hands. “Dinner is served at seven o’clock,” she said. “Don’t delay on my account; I may be late.”
“Fine,” he said.
They stood there for a moment, on opposite sides of the hall, like chess pieces stationed on the starting lines of a chequered terrain. Then he spun on his heel and clipped off, “Come. Give you the tour.”
A full tour of the Manor would have taken several years and an archeological dig. He fashioned an abbreviation. The Cole Room, named for a five-panel series of vast oil paintings hung on the walls, received a brief visit to store her trunk, and then back out again, through parquet hallways and marbled music rooms, Gilded Age salons, and galleries of portraits that burst into whispering at the sight of a visitor. He walked close to her shoulder and sent them narrow looks, which silenced them, but the susurrus followed them through sunny terraces and halls filled with mirrors and westward windows that seemed to blaze with an interior sun. Doors opened at his approach and shuttered behind him, giving the impression of a train of poltergeist footmen racing ahead of him at every corner, his steps a herald of moving drapes and unfurling carpets in every room.
Downstairs, they disembarked from the curl of a wrought-iron staircase and moved through sitting rooms tanned in pastel silks, blooming roses and jasmines from vases the size of house-elves, and bathrooms with sunken baths the size of wading pools. In one smoking room a candelabra guttered sweet-smelling smoke that changed color, and a liquor cabinet unfolded itself from the wall, offering up a treasure of arcane and bejeweled bottles with glasses of Swarovski crystal. It decanted a glass of something frosted and pale green, which tasted of mint and sugar, with a bright pepper of rosemary.
From the corner of his eye, he could register how Hermione was reacting, and she seemed to have settled down. The initial burst of wonder had cooled off, and now she stepped into each room with a slightly wary anticipation, as if prepared to jump out of the way of a moving suit of armor, or duck a swinging candelabra. She tried to talk to the portraits, who were so bewildered by this effort, after years of being ignored, that some of them simply lost composure and ran away; she interrogated him about the age and pedigree of the furniture, quizzed him on the enchantments that animated the curtains and the cabinets, and had to be dragged bodily away from every bookshelf.
It was, all in all, a great time.
“I’m cross at you for lying, you know,” she said, her voice skittering down a row of antique watercolors. “You told me there wasn’t a dress code. I could’ve brought white tie.”
“No, that’s just Mother. And it’s a good thing you didn’t. If you’d come in silks, she’d have had to up the ante, and she’d have been parading around in her wedding dress by dinner.”
“She made me feel downright bohemian for wearing a skirt that showed my kneecaps.”
“The dress requirements are exactly as you like them to be. Or as I like them to be, rather, and I say that kneecaps will fly.”
A bit more than that could fly, if she felt like it; but he didn’t mention it.
“I hope it’s not going to bother your mother, my being here,” she said. It was a laden suggestion, though not in the least apologetic: the implication, made very clear, was that she did not have much sympathy for any bother caused.
He considered this, weighing his words carefully, and when he spoke he did so with measured lightness.
“My mother is an intelligent, mannered, and capable grand lady of the old school. She has a pain tolerance that would cripple hippogriffs. I have seen her flay men from the waist down with a well-placed excuse about powdering her nose. She walks away, and five minutes later, their unmentionables shrivel up like desiccated figs while bleeding copiously about the nose and ears. Things she dislikes have a habit of vanishing mysteriously. She will,” he said, “get over it.”
Hermione cleared her throat.
“Well,” she said, “for a moment there I thought she was going to eat me, so desiccated unmentionables has to be an improvement.”
“Tosh. She’d never, too pedestrian. Come here, I want to show you something.”
Having heard this a dozen times since she arrived, she followed without any particular urgency. They went out to the lake, with its punts and the summer wildflowers and the deep bullrushes where pixies and moths swam dreamily through the glowing air. Hermione yelped when one floated up and tried to yank on a strand of her hair, and he batted it away, laughing.
“It’s a fairy!”
“Pixie, Granger, come on. We haven’t been out of Magical Creatures for that long.”
“It didn’t look like a pixie!”
“That’s because it’s not Cornish, it’s Welsh.”
“What did it want with my hair?”
“For its nest, I expect.” He pinched a stray bit of dust from her hair and tossed it out, glittering, on the breeze. “We get infestations every summer. They lay their eggs in the trees, and then there’s no getting rid of them, you just have to wait for the dugbogs to come out of hibernation and eat them.”
“It’s interesting that you’d see that much genetic drift — oh!”
A group of peacocks had crept out of the fir trees, their feathers queer and silvery in the dim light. Crests foamed from their backs like the bustles of an evening gowns, and they drifted, faintly warbling, around the edge of the lake.
“They’re mutants,” said Hermione curiously, which was not exactly the sort of poetic epithet he’d have chosen. But she never did have the sense of atmosphere that Merlin gave a rock. “There’s rather a lot of them. Are they inbred?”
“My grandfather reared them, and I think the term is ‘purebred.’”
“They mean the same thing,” she said absently, and shaded her eyes to watch them.
“Do you want to touch one?”
“Oh, love to. I have too many fingers as it is.” She paused. “You’re serious?”
“A good deal less so than before you were all cheeky about it.”
“You’re not, are you? They’re wild animals. And they do bite, I’ve seen documentaries.”
“They’re bred not to attack us,” he sniffed. “Anyway, they’re used to me. Come along.”
He caught her arm and led her — ‘led’ was probably not the word she’d use, considering the amount of friction her heels were generating with the ground — around the side of the lake, to the base of a vast elm tree where the birds hid their nests. The peacocks held court on the roots, and though a few scattered at his approach, the others flicked out their tails and examined him with a cool, judicious eye, as if considering a guest who had turned up to tea uninvited.
“I don’t have to do this. We really don’t have to do this.”
“We’re Gryffindors. Have a little mettle.”
“I have plenty of mettle. I like to keep it right here, inside my body, with as few perforations as possible. Don’t—!”
He held out his hand, clucking his tongue, and one of the peacocks arched its neck at him. Another step brought his fingers into contact with the soft white feathers of its head, and it trilled warningly, but permitted him to stroke its crest with his thumb.
“See?” He flashed her a smirk. “Well-bred.”
“Clearly,” she said flatly, her hands on her hips. Concern for his safety was warring with her disapproval, and nobody was winning. Except him. He was winning, always, because the expression on her face was lovely and ridiculous and a rich temptation to laugh. “Very good. Well done! I hope you don’t get rabies. For Ulysses’s sake.”
“Come here.”
“Tempting! No,” she said brightly.
“Yes. Or aren’t you scared?”
“I’m not scared.”
“Hark at her,” he told the peacock, “she thinks you’re terrifying.”
The peacock croaked judgmentally.
“I’m not scared of the bird.”
“What, then?”
“Zoonotic diseases!”
“Tosh.”
“It’s not! There are studies!”
“Tosh, I say. I never took you for a timid witch.”
With the helpless irritation of the hopelessly predictable, she shouldered past him. “Fine. I’ll show you timid.”
“I wish you would.”
She flashed him a narrow look and edged closer to the bird. He grew tired of waiting, and caught her wrist, which immediately stiffened.
“Come along, Granger,” he said. Her pulse was an arpeggio on his fingers. Her skin was smooth and thin and he could feel the veins under it, the shape of her joints, the thin clefts between her fingers. He’d held her hand before. He knew what it felt like. He hadn’t forgotten; it had just been a while.
Hermione was staring at him like he’d gone mad. He didn’t blame her. He had no idea, whatsoever, what he was doing.
He slipped her hand into his other, and placed both palm-down on the peacock’s neck. The bird crooned and fluttered its wings. The fan of its tail sprouted and fanned lazily on the breeze. Hermione’s eyes were wide.
He was standing close to her. A shift in posture could bring his chest flush to her back, and the outer range of her hair brushed his face. Her hand was small and soft, pressed between his hand and the animal. In his chest there was a kettledrum about to split from the force of each beat. She smelled very nice.
She always had, he’d known that. It had just — been a while.
Hermione said, quietly: “It’s tame.”
“I told you,” he said, “it knows me.”
She turned her head, abortively, and seemed to realize that she had to look distinctly up in order to see him. They weren’t so very far apart in height, but being close together made it obvious. He looked down. There were her eyes, the absolute weapons, the train of summer freckles like a smile from cheek to cheek, the heart-shaped thing of her mouth. There was sweat on her face, that felt indecent. Her skin was shiny and — flushed, and — sticky. There was nothing intrinsically appealing about that, so it didn’t make sense that he wanted to — touch it.
It was a primeval sort of want, like thirst. It was a need whose name he knew without ever having learned, and wasn’t that an eerie thing, like waking up with a brand new limb.
“I missed you, too,” he said, like an idiot. And abruptly felt as though he’d given away far more than he meant to, because the skin beneath her freckles colored brilliantly, almost blotting them out.
“I meant to come earlier, but my parents wanted me to stay,” she said. “They know it’s getting bad.”
This was how they talked about it in their letters, obliquely, with phrases roomy enough for the truth and deniability. It’s getting bad. It’s getting worse. It’s been a bad week, a bad month, a bad year.
Because they both knew what bad and worse meant, and no amount of detailing would make it better. Ministry regulations. Dementor sightings in the streets of London, three in the last month. Muggle kidnappings in Surrey and North Ireland, and Harry’s letters, coming every week: P and M said I couldn’t go flying today… or tomorrow… M had to use the Cloak to go to the shops…
A door slammed on the veranda. Birds erupted from the trees, and through the coursing shadows on the lawn he turned to see his mother emerge from the house, in clear view of the lake.
Narcissa stopped at the end of the veranda. As he watched, she adjusted herself, visibly, and turned her head across the landscape, as if taking in the evening view. Then she looked at him, and lifted her chin; in her stare there was a command he couldn’t parse, from a woman he barely knew.
Hermione snatched back her hand and stepped away. He glanced down at her and withdrew his own, twisting his signet ring back into place, but spared another look behind him at the veranda, where his mother stood with jaw uplifted, her silhouette foregrounded against the immense and ornate frame of the Manor, which glowed in sunset behind her like the palace of Versailles. Then she went back into the house and out of the light, leaving them together in the cooling dusk.
The last week of August swelled into hazy detail like a watercolor by Watteau. Having her there was an opportunity to inspect the house as he had rarely done before, to preen while she failed to feign unimpressment at its gaudy architectures, to relish long-winded answers to her questions about the magic and the decor and the art. They went spelunking in the dusty ghost parlors of rooms covered in white sheets and attics filmed in cobwebs like snow, climbing long ladders into airy gables long abandoned, edging around the vertiginous sides of a widow’s walk to rooms that only opened from balcony doors, and wading through the forests of enchanted objects inside. Hermione simply didn’t accept the premise of a locked door; if a room refused to offer up its secrets, she eked them out by wriggling through a servant’s passage, hunting down the caretaker’s keys, or once — memorably — cracking a window, shimmying around on a balcony, and slipping in through a shutter left ajar. In the library he lost her twice around the reference section and had to haul her out of a book on eighteenth-century conjurers with promises of a first-edition Bagshot, which she was terribly irked to find were false, though by then he had found the good sense not to let her back inside unless he wanted a few hours of quiet. She could read anywhere, and did, and he began keeping a mental list of all the amusing places he found her curled up with a volume of something rare and deathly old: window-seats and staircases, perched on banisters, balanced on the bathroom sink, and once, memorably, just standing in the middle of a hallway, lost in thought, as if she’d cracked the book on her way to some other task and stalled in her tracks. He mocked her for it. She mocked him for falling asleep on any piece of furniture that could bear his body weight, as if it wasn’t his house, and he didn’t deserve to nap where he damn well pleased without being harried for it by impertinent guests.
It was nicer with her there. Louder, also. Much more bothersome — he woke several times from a truly magnificent nap to a witch badgering him to get up and locate where he kept the stationery — but not intolerable, for the benefits it afforded. One of which was having someone to bother about his ideas on cauldron plating when his mother was gone on business — and to boot, the kind of person who would turn right around and have a full-throated opinion on the subject, complete with subpoints and footnotes.
Sound carried in the Manor. One could hear her echo whole rooms away. Sometimes, when he heard her from afar, it was like the house itself was murmuring.
Usually, during August’s blistering worst, Draco preferred to retreat to his room with a bucket of ice and ask the nearest amendable adult to enchant a fan for his comfort, but Hermione refused to bother anyone about it — “They’re called the help for a reason, it’s what they’re paid for,” was met with a blunt and irrefutable: “Don’t be a prat,” — and so they went down to the lake, where the proximity to water created the impression of coolness, if perhaps not the thing itself.
Reflecting on the incident, this was his first mistake.
A silver tray of lemonade and tonic sat on a divan by the water. Hermione was folded neatly into a white lawn chair, reading under the shade of an enormous straw-brimmed hat, and wearing a long white dress shirt over what was, in his own wholly uncritical view, a set of undergarments with pretensions. He had swum for a while in the cool green waters of the lake, tearing white rifts in the scalloped surface of the water with a front crawl, and then waded out of the water to fetch a towel.
There was a small cough. Through the curtain of his fringe, he caught Hermione with her head decidedly out of her book on pagan magics, idly staring.
There was a pulse of feeling, like some stone tenet in his abdomen had melted, and the whole structure verged on collapse.
The lemonade pitcher tipped over. She hadn’t touched it.
Hermione snapped her book shut and stood up. “I’ll take it up.”
“Don’t bother. We’ll take it in when we go.”
“No, I can. I need more sunblock, anyway. Do you want anything from the house? A towel? A shirt, perhaps?”
“Is that a suggestion?”
“No,” she said heatedly, and then: “Actually, yes. You’re pale as wax, you’re going to burn. And then you’ll get melanoma, and you’ll be sorry you didn’t listen to me.”
“Is that a kind of curse?” He hiked out of the water and dusted a towel indifferently over his arms. She wrinkled her face and turned away from the splatter of droplets when he shook it out.
“Yes, actually. It’s a special curse for wizards with shirt allergies.”
“Mm. ‘And if unfit for tombs and hearse, our legend be, it will be fit for verse.’”
She glanced at him curiously, pleased. “John Donne?”
“Who’s that?” he said, and flicked up the tip of her hat, which the wind obliged to catch and whisk away. It was like the world’s least fair game of mugwump-in-the-middle: she snatched for it, missed, and with a burst of exasperated laughter, went chasing it barefoot over the sand and the rolling green lawns, her hand always a grasping inch shy of the hat’s flapping brim. The wind flattened her shirt against her body, and through the white billows he caught fleeting glimpses of a shape underneath it — the arch of a waist, the hip, a white and full bandeau — and then she leapt up and caught the hat, and turned around, laughing, as the wind shook out her hair in dark coils over the white bed of her shoulders. Laughter making her loose and free. And himself, the very opposite, standing there tense as a board and shifting uncomfortably against his briefs, sort of dizzy with the heat and the image and his mouth open and his face probably doing something he couldn’t even think about, having been outplayed by nature.
The wind was blowing cool, but it didn’t matter. He felt the heat throughout that afternoon and well into the night, while he lay in bed hot and sleepless, holding very still, trying to ignore the friction of his pants against the mattress.
He should have been asleep when the owl came.
Wasn’t his fault he wasn’t. He would’ve been asleep, for preference, instead of spread-eagle on the bed, waiting for the heat to go away. Thinking about distances. It wasn’t his fault he could hear the creak of floorboards when someone moved on the other side of the house. Wasn’t his fault he knew where her room was. Her room, and its bed, and the girl in it, whose pyjamas he’d seen on the route back from the kitchen for a glass of ice. A look for which he took no blame, in looking. He’d only wanted a glass of ice. It was hot. He wanted something cool — something to deal with the heat — not a flash of a girl in the door to her suite wearing a long boatneck shirt that was not remotely pretending to be about its business on her shoulders, really reprehensible, it was, stupid girl, stupid not- stupid girl with pretty eyes and a pretty face and soft pretty—
Wasn’t his fault, being the point.
The owl alighted on his window almost silently, deposited a small parcel in the sill, and alighted again before he could even sit up.
It was wrapped in brown paper, and the envelope bore the Hogwarts crest. He padded barefoot into his sitting room and found a letter-opener to slit the crest, settling down in a pool of moonlight to read.
Dear Mr. Malfoy,
I am pleased to inform you that you have been selected to serve as Prefect for Gryffindor House. Please find enclosed your Prefect badge, which should be worn on all occasions in which your Hogwarts uniform is required, and report to the Prefect Carriage of the Hogwarts Express on September 1, 1995, for a full accounting of your responsibilities.
I am certain that you will take your new duties seriously.
Congratulations.
Sincerely,
Minerva McGonagall
Head of Gryffindor House
Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
Draco sat back, the letter in one hand, the parcel held slack in his other.
He’d never given particular thought to making prefect. For one thing, it was hard and thankless work, which wasn’t his forte. Gryffindor prefects were also something of a joke, by and large; with few exceptions, like Percy, they were ineffectual at best and enablers at worst, with less interest in discipline than protecting group morale and making sure none of the firsties perished on accident. Which was a meatier job in Gryffindor than in other houses.
He also hadn’t thought McGonagall would choose him.
Harry was her favorite. That wasn’t a resentful suspicion, it was a fact. Nobody else received so many of her thin-lipped not-quite smiles, nor was so often the target of her reminders to tuck in his shirt and fix his tie. He had been certain that Harry would take the prefect badge and any other bauble it lay in her power to bestow. If he’d been in Slytherin, he’d have expected no less of Snape.
Then again, maybe the old goat had a bit of a taste for mischief, herself.
He slit the twine with the letter-opener and shred the paper in eagerness.
The prefect’s badge was a little crest of scarlet and gold, a banner twined around the letter ‘P.’ He rolled it over in his fingers, and watched his reflection race and disappear in the lacquer.
Gryffindor prefect. There was something the Manor hadn’t seen before. Another first.
Come to think of it, there were two firsts in the Manor, at present. He stood up and was halfway to the door before he realized that it was a quarter to four, and the owl had come soundlessly to his window — the only way she’d be up was if she’d been awake, too. But there was simply no way that a second letter wasn’t waiting on her windowsill. There was only one possible candidate for the other prefect, or they’d have to have poor McGonagall committed.
No sooner had he touched the handle than a soft tap came through the wood. He jumped, badly jarred, and took a moment to calm his racing heart — green light green light green light — mad fucking idiot, it was a knock, it wasn’t a fucking spell — and then, setting his teeth, he cracked it open and peered through.
Hermione stood in the hallway, her face halved by shade and moonlight. It was flushed and her hair was high with excitement. One hand fisted a crumpled letter and the other pressed something small and golden to her breast.
“Did you—” She was breathing quickly; she’d run. “Did you— did you?”
He let her vibrate in anticipation for a moment, mostly enjoying how she bounced on her heels; then he lifted his badge between two fingers.
“I knew it!”
His door banged open. The pretense of tranquility was punted into the doorjamb. She leapt into him — into was the right word, socked right into his stomach, nearly bowled him over — and he stumbled with her into his room, laughing. “I knew it! I knew it’d be you if they went by marks, I only worried she might choose Harry for preference! No offense, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
“I’m so glad it’s you. I mean I would’ve been glad if it was Harry, too — but I secretly wanted it to be you, though don’t tell him that, please. You really do deserve it. And this means we’ll get to work together— I hope this won’t spoil anything in seventh year, though,” she said, with passing pensiveness, and he looked at her inquiringly, dangling from the rear carriage of her train of thought by a finger. “They don’t like to choose a Head Boy and a Head Girl from the same house, if they can avoid it. McGonagall said it looks too much like favoritism and it makes the other houses jealous. Usually. Of course, there have been cases — but I don’t suppose we have to worry about that for two years.”
“No, so I say we start on it next week.”
“Rather,” she said, glowingly.
He tired of holding her up, and sat down on his divan. She tumbled down next to him, a happy universe of bare skin and hair.
“I wonder who else made prefect,” she said, fingering the badge like an Order of Merlin. “I’d guess it’s Padma, from Ravenclaw, she’s very clever… and Ernie, even though I don’t like him much, unfortunately has the best grades in his house.”
“It’s not all grades.”
“That’s true,” she said. “It’s also a judgment of character.”
This came with a furtive, meaningful look in his direction. He hummed noncommittally. The wind swelled the curtains like a pair of ladies’ skirts, whispering softly.
“I didn’t wake you up, did I?” she said suddenly, as if she’d only just noticed what time it was.
“My owl came at the same time as yours. I was awake anyway.”
“No. I meant before.” She was picking at her fingernail. “When… actually, never mind, it seems I didn’t, so that’s that.”
He tilted his head. The pieces slotted together without much difficulty.
“Trouble sleeping?”
“Sometimes.”
“Loud trouble?”
“Not when I’m here, so much,” she said, fidgeting with her hands.
He wished he knew what to do with that. If he had figured out anything better than ‘get on a broomstick and remain there until barely conscious,’ he would have gladly told her.
“What do your parents recommend?”
“They sent me to a sleep doctor. Who referred me immediately to a general therapist, when I told them a bit of what happened.”
“…Which was?”
“That there was a very tragic accident at my elite, unnamed boarding school,” she said carefully, “which cost a friend of mine his life.”
“Do they have something for that?”
“Well, it helps. But it doesn’t feel like I’ve gotten very far. I still scream at night, I still flinch at odd things, I still don’t…” She broke off, scowling. “One doctor said that wasn’t even the goal, ultimately, to be ‘over’ it, because it wasn’t something that would just go away, but I don’t know. I don’t like that idea at all. I mean — so what, right? I’m stuck like this?”
“That’s absurd.”
“Well, it’s not, according to them—”
“I’m sure the lawyers only make them say so for insurance purposes. ‘We make no promises of X and Y,’ et cetera, it’s a classic. Of course you’re going to get better,” he said, annoyed. “What’s the point of a healer if they can’t eliminate the problem?”
“That’s what I thought,” she said, slightly relieved.
The moonlight lay in floral shapes over her clothes, interpolated with shadow. She leaned her head back on the sofa and exhaled a long note.
“Are you afraid?”
Her voice was very quiet.
“Of what.”
“Anything. School. The Ministry. What happens when we leave your house. I have a list, if you want suggestions.”
He extended his legs, settled his head on the sofa beside hers, and inspected the ceiling. It was easier to speak this way.
Of course he was afraid. The Dark Lord was immortal, his mother was hunting pieces of his soul, and he had no idea how to save anyone. The last time he’d tried, a boy was killed. Only by raw luck did it turn out the dead one wasn’t the one he tried to save.
There was no winning the war that was coming for them. There was fighting, and there was surviving. He was a survivor. He was the last scion of a House that had lasted longer than the ruling family by being survivors, and not fighters. He wasn’t ashamed of that. The people who died for causes were noble folk, but he wasn’t one of them. There was nothing worth dying for. On the other hand, there were some things worth living for, and he had several: to (1) continue the name of Malfoy, in perpetuity, by not dying young and beautiful; (2) to keep alive all those persons whose end he considered unthinkable, the most important of whom was holding her prefect badge and talking about fear as if, by miracle, she might just be developing a sense of self-preservation. Which meant that so far, he was succeeding gorgeously.
He refused to envision the bloody crucible of the world where he was not.
“My father once said there was only one thing worth a Malfoy’s fear,” he told the ceiling, “and it was death. Nothing else should have the reach.”
Her expression was thoughtful. “Do you believe that?”
“I’m attempting to.”
“I think there’s a lot of things worse than dying.”
“You have an unusually athletic imagination.”
She smiled slightly and curled her legs up underneath her, wrapping her arms around her knees. “I keep thinking about Viktor’s mother. At the funeral, how she… And at least, for him… Harry said it was quick.”
“I never understood how that was supposed to be a comfort,” he said, counting whorls of crown molding.
“What do you mean?”
“‘It was quick.’ I should prefer the option that lets you live longer, really.”
“Well, if you know you’re going to die anyway,” she said quietly, “it’s better not to spend your last moments… suffering. I suppose.”
“For someone who’s consigned themselves to dying, maybe. Which I certainly hope I never do.”
“I mean, no one hopes they’re going to die.” She laced her fingers over her stomach and lolled her neck over the sofa-back. “They just do.”
He lifted his head and arched his eyebrows at her.
“Oh, really?”
“I— shut up.”
“‘People die.’ A pearl without price from Hermione Granger, please do tell me you’ve more—”
“I didn’t sleep! I’m exhausted!”
“Never. You’re going to tell me nargles aren’t real, next.”
“As if you’ve never had a slip of the tongue—”
“My tongue’s not quite so clumsy.”
“Yes, I’m sure it’s quite dextrous,” she muttered. His sideways look intercepted the back of her head as she crawled over to pillow her head on the arm of the sofa. “That’s why those… those…” She yawned. “French girls. Were so chatty.”
“What French girls?”
“You don’t remember?” She was mumbling now into the upholstery. “Three Broomsticks. Had a spirited conversation.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Then: “That was a year ago.”
“I’m sure they haven’t forgotten.”
“I don’t take your point,” he informed her, but she didn’t reply.
Her side rose and fell deeply. The moonlight fell on her legs, which were splayed sideways on the sofa, like some sort of Elgin nymph.
He looked at them. He warded off the guilt with spite: if she didn’t want him to witness her in states of dress inapt for polite society, she oughtn’t have fallen asleep on his furniture.
“I don’t want things to change,” she mumbled. “Whenever I think about things changing, I get… anxious.”
“What things?”
She wriggled around on the sofa. “Nothing,” she murmured. Her foot stretched out and connected with his leg— a plausible accident, until she left it there.
If she had a tenth of the guile Merlin gave a manticore, he’d suspect her of doing it on purpose — parking herself on his sofa in the middle of the night and accosting him with about a country mile of naked skin. If she hadn’t passed out cold in the middle of it, she’d have the makings of a not wholly unsuccessful seduction.
Dispiritingly, however, he doubted the idea had even occurred to her. It was too subtle. Hermione Granger’s efforts at seduction would probably be unmistakable, like a lace set of lingerie nailed to the front of a locomotive.
Although it was late, it was a long time before he found his way to sleep that night.
In the morning he woke up to an ache in his back like someone had stolen all his vertebrae and replaced them with sea urchins.
Light filtered cool and pale through the blinds, still too dim to be later than five or six o’clock. Birds crooned obtrusively at the window, and he fumbled blindly for his wand before remembering where he was and why he couldn’t, and sat up, mildly bewildered, on the floor of his sitting-room.
Hermione was sprawled on his sofa, her face buried in the utter nest of her hair. She slept on her side, with her knees crooked, but her hand spilled off the side of one cushion, and the light caught it in a strange, interesting way, illuminating the soft planes of her palm, the narrow silhouettes of her fingers.
Her shirt had also ridden up considerably, and there was more than one rib visible. The arch of her waist was soft and steep and hidden by precisely nothing.
Some amount of time probably passed, but with a wand to his head, he could not have said how much.
She stirred, mumbling, and drew her hand underneath her face. Her lips parted and a soft little sigh escaped them.
He hauled himself upright and staggered, somewhat wildly, out of the room.
Broomstick. He needed a broomstick. He needed to be in the air. He was in his sleep clothes, and that was fine.
The Nimbus vibrated under his touch. He slung his leg over it — ignored a twinge of pain somewhere south of the waistline, that probably wasn’t supposed to happen, but whatever — and kicked off from the veranda, rocketing high, banking right, cutting through a tuffet of rose-white clouds, and the cold slap of water vapor left him doused and chilled and brutally awake, soaring deep into the heart of the morning.
There were three problems, as he understood it.
Problem the first. Hermione Granger was the sort of person without whom the rest of his life, all else being equal, quite simply didn’t work. He did not contemplate the ways in which it could be made to work, either, because it was quite simply not a pleasant way to spend his time.
Problem the second. If he muddled things up for no reason, then he had lost something irretrievable and necessary. And she was busy, and stressed, and grieving, and heavily preoccupied with large portions of the world wanting her dead; and even if not, he doubted someone as brilliantly, ruthlessly tough as Hermione Granger allowed nonsense like feelings or boys to break the first hundred things that she thought about on a given day. If she did, she certainly hadn’t let a fellow know about it.
Problem the third. Problems the first and second tended to disappear from memory the moment she took off any of her clothes, or showed an inch of skin above the knee, or touched his back when she was passing behind him in the library, or — any number of other things, comprehensiveness being unnecessary for the point — and remembering them was harder every time.
Friendship was valuable. Friendship was also, crucially, sustainable. The alternative was not. The alternative was a steep drop with darkness waiting at the bottom, and he had no clue how long the fall was. The alternative ran the risk of discouraging her from speaking to him, or sharing his space and his confidences, and generally dampening their friendship with awkwardness and humiliation. Which was apocalyptic, naturally, because it had already been established that their friendship wasn’t a sustainable loss. There was a balance to be preserved.
He could be patient. He would wait for — something. A sign, one way or another.
Or she would fall in love with someone else, and he would just kill himself or something.
By the time he came down again the sun was full and hot on his back, and his whole body was tired and too wrung-out to do anything except on explicit command, which was exactly as it ought to be.
He landed, wobbled hard on the dismount, and was contemplating his gratitude that Hermione wasn’t around to see that when Briselda came hurrying out onto the terrace, visibly disheveled.
“Young master! You must receive your owls!”
“My owls? What—”
“It is not acceptable! It cannot be borne! I cannot prepare the breakfast table in such conditions! One,” she said, with quivering gravitas, “has eaten the lox.”
“Merlin forbid. Hang them all.”
Letters of congratulations, perhaps, on making prefect? But only McGonagall and Dumbledore could have known about it, and Hermione couldn’t possibly have owled someone already.
He picked up the first. It was cream-white stationery with his name fashioned in a colonnade of dramatic loops. The crest on the back was mint green wax, and bore the emblem of a stag and two G’s, entwined.
Dear Draco,
If you make another joke about my not being able to find a quill if it signed my arse then I will simply not bother finding it again. NO TIME TO WRITE so forgive all this. Am well but Tori not so much. Daddy and Mummy think may need transfusion. Healers have poked me all over doing tests trying to see if yrs. truly has blood OK for T. I say yes yes yes try please but D. says run more tests and healer says “not sure.” What!! Hell do we pay you for if not SURE?? Likely a fraud I fear.
Other news must wait for school for am in dreadful crunch. Have stolen owl from T. to impart news urgently. As you know I am masterful snoop of 1st caliber and I have overheard Daddy remark something big is happening at the M.O.M. involving a “Mr. Potter.” Perhaps it is too much to hope it is not our own? I would not risk letter if I did not fear for him. Situation in Bulgaria makes all things very dangerous for him also.
Also PSPS did you hear Parkinson announcement?? Am horrified. P in great distress. But now I suppose this is what happens when Teddy is gone.
Please write back and tell me how you plan to solve these problems. If impossible then please solve Harry’s as they seem most serious.
Love or what you will,
Daphne I. Greengrass
The other letter was addressed with a brusque “MALFOY MANOR” in handwriting that was unmistakably Ron’s. He ripped the unmarked blob of wax and withdrew what appeared to be a Sportswizard Illustrated clipping with some ink scrawled on the back. Before he could read it, however, his eyes fell on the day’s Prophet headline. Beneath an article about brewing civil unrest in Bulgaria was a single sentence bearing a familiar name:
HARRY POTTER WILL BE CHARGED IN MAGICAL MURDER OF VICTOR KRUM
In contrast, Ron’s letter was the soul of brevity.
Draco,
Harry arrested come to London NOW bring your lawyer
Ron
Merry Chrysler, everyone.
Back, and it feels so good. Thanks to everyone who read, commented, kudos’d even in my absence, for keeping the home fires burning. You’re the reason this exists, naturally, if it even needs saying — and I’ll say so even if it doesn’t, because it still astounds me just to think about it. All the love in the world, plus half.
—GT
Bình luận
0