Chapter 68: Policy of Truth
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
The decree went up on the last day of classes before the winter vacation.
All students remaining in the castle will report immediately to the Hogwarts Special Inquisitor or a member of the Hogwarts Inquisitorial Squad for their end-of-term Performance Review. Students with special permissions may instead report to their Head of House.
“Hogwarts Inquisitorial Squad?” said Ron. “Filch got a promotion?”
“Hope it doesn’t mean Ministry people,” said Ginny grimly. She shouldered between Ron and Harry to peer at the sign. “She’d love an excuse to haul in more patrolmen. By the way, if you need the twins, they said to tell you they’ll be on the lam — they’re hiding out in the Room until the train leaves.”
“Hey, that’s not a bad idea,” Ron exclaimed. “Think they’d mind if we popped up, too—?”
“They said you’d say that. They also said, ‘Tell him to piss off and find his own hidey-hole.’”
“Bugger them! I helped them set up the bloody thing, least they could do is help— anyway, it’s not their hidey-hole, if anything it’s Draco’s.”
“We have a policy about invoking my name in intra-Weasley disputes.”
“I have a policy about you being a pill,” said Ron.
“It’s not Ministry people,” said Hermione. She wasn’t listening to them, wisely. “It’s other students.”
Ginny, who was somewhat less accustomed than the others to Hermione manifesting knowledge spontaneously from thin air, gave her a curious stare. “How’d you figure that, eh?”
“Because Theodore Nott,” she said, “has a different tie on.”
“Wha—?”
Wordlessly, Hermione touched Ginny’s shoulder and turned her to face the stairwell.
At the foot of the staircase, Theo leaned with his hands in his pockets. His tie was not the usual green and silver, but a sharp black tie with a gold tie pin in the shape of an IS, with a spear of ivy crosshatched. A queue of first years and second years flocked around him, waving permission slips.
“Anyone have a special permission?” said Hermione at last. “I don’t.”
Draco raised the small pink scroll that had been delivered at breakfast. He was the only one.
“Right. That’s… to be expected, I suppose.”
“Always wondered what getting flayed would feel like,” said Ron. “Oh, hullo, Harry.”
The other boy had come trotting down the stairs, silent. There were dark circles under his eyes, and he walked with a slouch. He read the announcement in silence, scowled, and turned his back on the notice board.
“Harry?” said Ron in alarm. “Harry — hang on, wait up a minute—”
“Blimey,” muttered Ginny. “Did a skrewt crawl up his arse?”
“We had a bit of a row,” said Hermione stiffly. “ Draco — don’t forget, we’ve got another patrol tonight. Prefects sweep the castle before the last train.”
“I remember.”
“Lovely. See you then. Say hello to Professor McGonagall for me.”
She touched his arm, absently, and then shouldered into the crowd and made quick work getting away. Ron offered Draco a curious, somewhat wary stare, and loped after, his long legs easily catching up.
Draco watched her retreating back, distracted and restless, and deeply unhappy about the orbital pattern of Ron’s hand hovering around her elbow. Then he snapped at a passing Ravenclaw first year for forgetting his tie, docked him five points, and stalked off for the Transfiguration classroom.
There were no classes in the afternoon. Students were straggling through the Great Hall under the weight of vast leather-buckled trunks and stiff lacquered hatboxes down to the main atrium. Throngs of students in heights of agitation and impatience thronged between these mountains of luggage. Draco struggled his way through and found Ron and Hermione tucked in at the end of the Gryffindor table, along with Harry, Ginny, Daphne, and a number of people from Defense Club. He thought of griping at them about the ill-advisedness of sitting together, but thought better of it. Umbridge and Filch were still conducting interviews in their offices, and the club had enough of Gryffindor in it that it was difficult not for them to sit together.
“There he is. How’d it go with McGonagall?” called Ron.
“Entirely dull. We had tea.”
“Lucky you. We stood in line for three hours. I’ve got blisters.”
“Lucky you,” said Hermione curtly. “They’re going alphabetically. At this rate, I doubt she’ll make it to ‘Weasley’ before the train leaves.”
“Has anyone we know been interviewed yet?” said Ginny, through a mouthful of beans on toast. Draco eyed her and mimed shutting his jaw with one hand; she grinned at him and took a larger bite before continuing. “Do we know what she’s doing? She can’t have everyone on the quills, right?”
“No idea.”
“Seamus might know. He would’ve gone in not much before Hermione.”
“Think I saw him go in with Filch.”
“Anyone seen him since?”
“I could go ask Michael, he’d know—”
A flurry stirred the students at the door. Cho pushed her way through the crowd, throwing elbows like it was a quidditch final, and with a shrill cry she threw herself down at the Ravenclaw table, nearly bowling Ernie Macmillan off the bench. Her face was mottled with tears.
There was a collective pause. Harry was the first to rise, shoving back his seat, and then Hermione leapt up to follow him a heartbeat behind. Draco rose and made three.
At the Ravenclaw table, they were greeted with mixed warmth. Ernie, Terry Boot, and Michael Corner received them with friendly nods, but Marietta scowled and drew her arm closer around Cho, who was shuddering into her shoulder.
“Cho,” said Harry, as if at a loss, and she flinched.
“Oh, hullo, Harry… I… Hermione… Draco.”
He slipped out of the crowd with a nod and came to stand behind Hermione, his hands in his pockets.
“S-s-sorry,” she said. “I just got out of the interview—”
“We gathered,” said Hermione impatiently. “What happened?”
“No, she — she didn’t touch me. Or h-h-hurt me. B-b-but she sat me down and asked me a q-q-question, and I d-d-don’t know what happened, I couldn’t s-s-stop talking—”
“What do you mean, you ‘couldn’t stop’? What did you say?”
“I mean she started asking — where I w-w-was last night, and I told her — I told her I was at quidditch practice, which was t-t-true — and then she started asking about H-H-Harry, and if I liked him, and I started telling her everything— I mean literally, actually everything, like, stuff I wouldn’t even tell my M-M-Mum—”
“She wanted to know about your love life?”
“No,” said Harry. It was the first thing he’d said since that morning. “She wanted to know about me. Isn’t that right?”
Cho swallowed and nodded.
A pit of ice opened in his stomach. Cho knew everything. She’d been to every Defense Club meeting since the beginning of the year.
Draco leaned over the table. Ravenclaws shifted and cringed out of his looming shadow.
“What exactly did you tell her?”
Cho’s eyes grew moonlike and dark with apprehension. She wet her lips and sent a panicked look at Hermione, then Harry.
Hermione touched his arm. “She didn’t say anything about the club,” she said quietly.
He caught her eye. “No?”
“No. I’d know.”
He wanted her to say more about that, but Cho interrupted. “I didn’t rat,” she cried, hoarse and somewhat indignant. “Especially not about the you-know-what. I said I answered her questions, not that I started blabbering anything secret that came to mind — I’m not dull.”
“Neither I nor Veritaserum cares if you’re dull or not,” he snapped. “What I do care about is whether you’ve said something that could get us expelled. Or imprisoned.”
“You think it’s Veritaserum?” Hermione whispered.
“What else?”
“She’s seeing hundreds of students. She’d need liters of the stuff. Not even Snape would keep that much on short notice.”
“Perhaps she’s not giving it to everyone.”
“…She knows Cho is seeing Harry.”
“And took the opportunity to see what he was doing.”
Cho sat up rigidly, cheeks flaming. “I didn’t say anything that could hurt Harry.”
“What did she ask about, then?” said Draco coolly. “Which broom closets you like to snog in?”
“She asked me about my mother, you arse.”
Hermione frowned. “Why does she care about your mother? She’s got nothing to do with anything.”
Cho gave a humorless cry of laughter.
“Because her mum’s on the editorial board for the Prophet,” said Marietta, raising her voice. “Cho’s only brought it up a dozen times. But I guess maybe other people’s families don’t matter as much as meeting logistics, to some people.”
“What do my parents do for a living, Marietta?” Hermione said coolly. The other girl balked and fell silent.
Hermione raised her eyebrows at her, and then turned back to Cho. Draco’s mouth curled in an amused sneer.
“What did she want to know about your mother?”
“I dunno. What she was writing, I guess. I mean, you know Prophet’s been rough lately, the editorial board’s really s-s-stepping on them, and you know what they’ve been p-p-publishing—”
“Drivel,” supplied Draco, shortly.
“Yeah, but that’s not her fault. She’s pretty fair, compared to everyone else. She knows Harry’s my boyfriend — I mean, everyone does, it’s humiliating—”
“Is it, now?” said Hermione crisply. “Is it terribly humiliating to be seen with him? I find it perfectly easy.”
“Hermione,” Harry muttered.
“I didn’t mean it like that! I’m not embarrassed of Harry! Obviously! But that doesn’t mean I like my name being in the papers!”
“No one likes it, Cho,” said Hermione, bridling, “but it’s not like they’re writing anything nasty about you. I’m sure having a parent on the editorial board makes certain of that.”
“It’s still not been easy for me, you know! I get hate mail! Someone sent me an envelope full of bubotuber pus the other day! And people stare at me funny in the hallways,” she ran on, “and Umbridge hates me, and I get detentions for every little thing, and I never asked for any of it!”
“None of us did,” Hermione said tartly. “I’m sorry about the bubotuber pus. I had someone send me a little rag-doll with pins in it, and I agree, it’s dreadful. But all of us had a pretty bad run in the papers last year—”
“Wow! Good for you!” Cho snapped. “It must be nice to be as brave and tough as you are, Hermione—”
“For God’s sake, what do you want us to do? Wave our wands and make it go away?”
“I wish you’d be nice!” she cried. “I wish people would be nice to me, and don’t act like that’s such a stupid, silly thing to want! I want you to admit that it’s not easy to stand up in front of all your friends and know they think you’re dating a murderer!”
Hermione went still. She stepped forward, abortively, and stopped when Draco caught her shoulder.
“Murderer?”
“No — I didn’t mean that. I mean, I know the truth, and that it wasn’t — that he died because — I mean, not Harry, but — oh, Hermione, I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to bring up Viktor.”
“It’s fine.”
“No, it isn’t. I know you probably think I’m really selfish and stupid, sitting here whinging about popularity when someone died. And you’re right. It’s stupid. I’m being stupid and silly.”
Hermione was expressionless. “It’s fine.”
“It isn’t.”
The bell groaned, and benches screeched with the force of hundreds rising to their feet. It mercifully smothered the silent dregs of the conversation.
“Cho—”
“Drop it,” snapped Harry. He worked his jaw like he meant to say something, but then thought better of it, and shook his head. “Would you just… drop it? Please? Listen. Draco, do me a favor. Go tell Ron and Ginny that they’ve got to find a place to hide until the train leaves tonight, and don’t drink anything Umbridge gives them.”
“I’m not an owl.”
“Did I say to deliver it personally, dolt?” said Harry. He spoke in a different register, a lower one, more businesslike and far less interested in dispute. “Get some of those first years in your fan club to do it, if you want—”
“I do not have a ‘fan club.’”
Hermione snorted.
“Not my problem. Now, where can we hide people until the trains leave?”
“I don’t know, I left my pocket dimension in my other trousers. There’s thirty of us, I don’t know what kind of palatial broom closets you hide in—”
“You wouldn’t need one,” said Hermione suddenly. She was drumming her fingers on her arm in the particular rhythm that meant her mind was running a few hundred miles an hour. “There are at least seven secret passages out of the castle. One’s caved in, of course, and another one’s by the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom, so it’s likely buried under the swamp, but there’s one on the first floor, by Gregory the Smarmy, and another by the West Well, and one on the Hieroglyphic Hall— it’s the one everyone uses for snogging—”
“Granger,” said Ernie, scandalized. “I didn’t take you for the type.”
“I liked you better when you raised your hand,” said Draco, and Ernie nearly swallowed his tongue. “What are you doing here, anyway? This is the Ravenclaw table.”
“I’m — sharing notes — with Padma,” said Ernie, strangled. Padma, unhappy to be invoked thusly, sipped her pumpkin juice with a powerful air of minding her own business.
“The point is,” Hermione said, “there’s at least four we could use. We could go in groups, ferry everyone out, and then hide out in Hogsmeade.”
“For hours?” said Marietta. “Until the train? What do you expect us to do?”
“Bring crayons,” said Hermione in annoyance. “I don’t know. The plan itself is simple; the real difficulty is a coordination exercise. We can’t all use one passage at once, they’re not big enough, and we’d be bound to attract attention. We need rotating shifts — and someone who knows the passages has to lead them, me or Fred or George… ought to do it alphabetically, too, so that the students first called by Umbridge will be first out.”
In clipped tones, Harry said, “I’ll tell them.”
He turned to leave. Hermione caught his arm. Then she turned to the Ravenclaws, and said haltingly: “Sorry, could you—”
“The bell rang five minutes ago,” Draco interrupted. “Make yourself scarce. Or useful. Preferably both, but I have realistic expectations.”
With a shriek of benches, the Ravenclaw table emptied. Marietta shot Hermione a final glower as she went, but she still hurried out of the hall.
“Harry, I’m—”
“Cho was right, you know.”
“What?”
“About being nice.” He set his jaw, and spoke with difficulty. “You were right. You’re always right, so it doesn’t — cost you — anything — to just let someone have it.”
“Harry—”
“It’s fine. Yeah? Yes, you’re smarter than I am. You’re better at this than I am. You’re the brains, and I’m the great useless idiot with the scar on his head who keeps mucking his way into danger and forcing other people to jump in front of curses for him. I know. I do know, actually.”
“That’s not what I think!”
“Whatever. I can’t win arguments with you,” he said tiredly. “I never have. Just… you didn’t need to go after Cho, and you didn’t need to snap at Marietta, and you really didn’t need to throw that thing about Padfoot in my face. You can admit that, right? Everything’s miserable enough without you biting our heads off.”
Hermione tightly folded her arms around her chest, holding herself like a small and delicate explosive.
“I’m sorry I said those things,” she said. “I shouldn’t have done. But my life hasn’t been completely un-miserable either, if you’d noticed, and I’m not the only one who’s been nastier than usual.”
Harry sighed and rubbed his eyes.
“I know,” he said. “Yeah. Sorry.”
The Great Hall had nearly emptied out, and the distant susurrus of footsteps on the grand staircase filled the atrium with echoes.
Hermione made a noncommittal noise. In fairness, Draco couldn’t think of anything to say to this, either. What could one possibly answer? Yes, it was hard? Yes, he lived a life in which people his age could and did die, and there was not a night he went to sleep without green light flaring behind his eyelids? That those were the lucky nights when he slept at all?
“It’ll be better when you’re home,” she said. “With family.”
Harry made a funny expression: not quite a smile, not quite a grimace. Maybe it unsettled him, too, because he abruptly rubbed his mouth like he was trying to get it off.
“What?”
“Nothing, I… You know, I used to have that thought, when I was with the Dursleys,” he said. “‘It’ll be better when you’re home.’ All the time. Only I was always talking about Hogwarts.”
It was a slow, wretched afternoon. Queues that babbled distantly from the hallways outside Umbridge’s and Filch’s offices, and the chilly atria threw eerie echoes at the slightest footstep or groaning stair. Through the frost-embroidered windows the grounds were monochromatic and silent, lit in the dull blues of an overcast afternoon. The lawn was like a sheet of marble before the sculptor’s first stroke, unbroken, unformed.
At one o’clock, Hermione had led a group of first years from the Defense Club down the passageway behind Gregory the Smarmy, most of whom could barely speak for the excitement of getting a prefect to sneak them out of the castle. Fred and George led a cohort of older students down the West Well, a long and winnowing passage that had to be rappelled at several points, while another group with Harry and Ron in it departed from the Well an hour later. Draco, being one of the few at liberty to move freely about the castle, was stuck with the job of lookout, which he loathed completely. It involved a great deal of nothing important, only wandering around the empty hallways and flicking Trip Jinxes at members of the Inquisitorial Squad whenever they had the misfortune not to see him around the corner.
At five, he levitated his trunk down to the Entrance Hall and left it there for the house-elves to ferry onto the train. Then he walked to the library, fingering the Marauder’s Map in his pocket. Now and then he ducked into an alcove to check the Map, following the peppery trail of dots drifting through the secret passages. HERMIONE GRANGER floated in and out of the edge of the map near Hogsmeade, along with dots marked POTTER and a whole confusion of WEASLEYs. She and Ron were meant to come back and meet him by the statue of Gregory at five-thirty in order to lead the final group, which included Luna, Padma, and Zacharias Smith.
Luna and Padma were dutifully waiting at the statue on time, their robes drawn up and wands out, but Smith was nowhere to be found. This would have been substantially more irritating if Hermione and Ron hadn’t been equally late, and Draco checked the map increasingly as the minutes ticked past, eyeing the dark jots of their names at the end of the tunnel.
“Gosh, I hope they’re alright,” mused Luna. “There were all sorts of wrackspurts wandering around in the air earlier, I don’t wonder that it’s slow-going.”
“What’s a wrackspurt?” said Padma, who was knitting idly while they waited.
“It’s a malign spirit. They hover around people in emotional distress and cause bad decisions. We’ve been swarmed with them all year. Look at Draco, for example.”
“Piss off.”
“You see?”
“Oh, dear,” said Padma. “Do I have them?”
“A few, but that’s because you’re visiting your grandmother for the holiday, and it makes you anxious. What’s the moon phase, again?”
“Waxing gibbous.”
“ Definitely anxious, then. But you needn’t worry, it’s going to go well.”
“Oh, good,” said Padma happily. She turned to Draco. “Luna’s top student in Divination, you know. She’s better at reading astrological charts than Trelawney.”
Hermione would have regarded this kind of statement as a dueling-caliber insult, but he kept that to himself.
The hall was drenched in shadow, alive with the echoes of settling floorboards and skittering footsteps through the distance, torchlight, ghosts, and cool whistling air.
The hardwood under their feet vanished into an inky pool of darkness at the far end of the hall. Oil portraits murmured softly from the walls above them, and their wands poured dim Lumos- light in shallow puddles around their legs, casting the underside of Luna’s face in silver, her eyes in dramatic sweeps of shadow.
When the statue moved, the shriek made them all twitch.
Hermione emerged from the passageway, her face daubed here and there with soot, her hair crowned with a tawny cap of sawdust. She wriggled out, face bright from exertion, and stepped out of the way from Ron, who grimaced and massaged his neck as soon as he emerged into a hallway that could accommodate his height.
“Sorry we’re late. There were patrolmen at the other end of the passage, and we had to wait for them to leave, it was completely awful on the nerves, I think Harry almost jumped out and jinxed them—”
“Where’s Zacharias?” said Ron, peering around.
“Lying at the bottom of a stairwell with a broken neck,” said Draco curtly, “or worse, if he knows what’s good for him.”
“Don’t say that. He could’ve run into the Inquisitorial Squad.” Hermione grabbed the Map. “Did you check the Hufflepuff dorms?”
“I say, what an idea.”
“Fine, silly question. Filch’s office? Umbridge’s?”
“Have you tried checking the grounds?” called Luna. “Zacharias likes an evening walk.”
“In pitch darkness?” muttered Hermione, rifling through the Map. “With the train leaving in thirty minutes?”
“No, she’s right,” exclaimed Ron, pointing at a blotch of ink moving swiftly over the Great Lawn. “Look. He’s just here, by the carriage depot — lazy bugger, bet he wanted to catch a carriage instead of walking.”
“Then he’s an idiot, because carriages are long gone,” snapped Hermione, checking her watch. “They would’ve left at four. He’s going to be out there, all alone, in the dark, and they’ll have locked the Hogsmeade gates at sunset. What a nitwit! Ron, show Luna and Padma back to the train station, we’ll meet you there with Zacharias.”
“Don’t love the splitting-up part of this plan,” said Ron in alarm. “Least favorite part of this plan. Right after the bit where you’re stranded in an empty castle with Umbridge and Filch. If she catches you—”
“So we’ll take the Map. It’ll be fine.”
“I still don’t like it.”
Draco felt distinctly peeved on at least two different fronts. Then Ron stepped past him and touched Hermione’s elbow, and a whole new front of irritation opened up at once.
Hermione didn’t appear to notice, being preoccupied tying up her hair.
“I’m a prefect,” she announced, as if that explained the whole matter. “Don’t worry about me. And anyway, I’ll have Draco with me, I’ll be fine.”
At first, she didn’t seem to realize what she’d said. Draco, whose whole chest had flooded with a buoyant, incandescent wave of pleasure, schooled his expression in order to avoid smirking.
Evidently he hadn’t succeeded, because she glanced at him and then scoffed. “Not that I couldn’t handle myself, I might add!”
“Never doubted it in the least.”
“I mean it! I could do it perfectly well on my own, I know the castle better than you do — oh, would you stop smirking, I didn’t say you were bloody Lancelot, you’re just handy with a wand—”
“A bit more than handy, thank you.”
“Handy,” she repeated firmly. “Useful. Not wholly inept. That’s all. Which is more than I can say for you lot, who ought to get going, or we’ll all be buggered!”
With a warning mutter of discontent, Ron clambered back into the passageway and led the girls down the narrow, ashen chute. Hermione watched them go, and then closed it with a brandish of her wand, slotting the statue back into place.
“Well,” she said, turning to Draco. She wiped her hands on her skirt, apprehensive, and there was a beat in which they regarded each other with the twin expectant stares.
Dirt from the passage smudged the rise of her cheek, covering one of his favorite freckles, and it bothered him. He wanted to remove it. One touch was all it would take.
She blinked first, and gestured to the corridor. “Let’s hurry up. I’d like to get out of here.”
The grounds were deathly still, shadows pooled under the white antlers of jagged and naked branches, shrouded in the smell of rich wet soil and the cool, fresh wind off the moors. The trees arched to and fro in the arms of the wind like skeletal creatures nodding to a silent symphony. The dark windows of Hagrid’s cabin reflected the icy pinpricks of Lumos-light, sparkling in the darkness like landlocked stars.
Their wands cast narrow fans of light that reflected almost blindingly from the snow, turning the path ahead of them into a dull sheet of black-and-white film. Snow fell slowly in a trickle of salt grains, coalescing on their shoulders and hair. Their boots crunched on loose snow and frozen pebbles. Hermione held the Map in one hand and her wand in the other.
“Does Veritaserum have an antidote, by chance?” she said. Her voice fell like velvet on the snow.
“Not one that’s nearby. It’d take three weeks over a cauldron, not to mention a small fortune at an apothecary.”
“Which means I’m going to spend my afternoon hiding in a broom closet somewhere. We got off on pure luck with Cho, by the way — if she’s dosed everyone in the Defense Club, we’re absolutely scuppered, I like Seamus alright but he’s not exactly the soul of discretion—”
“She can’t dose everyone.”
“Why not?”
“Because she’d need more of the stuff than exists on the planet at a given time. Veritaserum is diabolically complex. Snape’s one of maybe a hundred people alive who could render a passable batch, and that only yields a few doses.”
“Hm. I suppose.” She stepped away and ventured a few steps down the hillside, and then turned back at him, and with a sort of quick, darting glance, touched his arm. “It’s slippery here. Watch out.”
Her hand stayed there as they picked their way down the slope. Her small fingers were cold and tight on his arm.
He could have pointed out, in the interests of fairness, that there were charms to make the surface dryer, or more even, or to lift their steps. But he didn’t, and she didn’t use them. When she slid her arm through his at the bottom, he kept silent on the subject, as if the silence was giving them both permission to do something that couldn’t happen outside of it.
At the depot where the carriages usually waited, Zacharias was nowhere to be found. Hermione put away the Map and swept her wand over the surrounding trees, her light darting over a ribbed vista of white wood and coal-black bark.
“Zacharias?”
“Don’t go yowling for him, someone could hear.”
“There’s no one out here. It’s pitch black and snowing, everyone sane is indoors.”
“I quite agree. Ow.”
“You deserved that. The Map ends just here, I think, but he’s gone… He must’ve tried to walk to Hogsmeade to catch the train. Here, this way.”
The shadows melded and coupled behind them in sinewy ropes. Light from the castle sent a pale spill over the hillside, glinting here and there on a frosted leaf, a jeweled twig, a glittering snowbank. Wind moaned through the branches, and then went abruptly silent, as if it had been drawn into a void.
Something tightened in his inner ear. It was hard to describe, but magic — even benign magic — had an energy, a tension. If one cast a spell often enough, one gained a sense for what it felt like. Muffliato, for instance.
He pivoted on his heel. Four silhouettes darkened the hillside under the castle, framed by the black brackets of trees. Their overcoats stirred silently in the wind. For a heartbeat, he thought they were teachers, but their frames were too small.
Hermione lifted her wand. Light paved the faces of Theo, Pansy, Blaise, and a tall girl with black curls who could have been Blaise’s twin. It was Tracy Davis, one of the girls that Daphne had rowed with in the Three Broomsticks.
“I have to admit, I enjoy this angle,” called Theo. The gold pin glinted on his tie. “I didn’t give you half enough credit. I’m beginning to understand your obsession with the high ground.”
Draco found his voice carried quite easily up the hill. “Some of us prefer not to make our home in the dungeon.”
“Some of us weren’t invited to.”
Blaise yawned. “Lord help us, they’re doing subtext,” he murmured to Tracy. “Let’s go get a drink, perhaps they’ll be ready to get on with it when we get back.”
Pansy drew her wand. Though she was the shortest of anyone present, the angle of the hillside drew her shadow into a forty-foot creature.
Hermione twitched her wrist. Her Lumos faded.
“Granger was supposed to report to Professor Umbridge’s office this morning,” said Pansy.
“The train’s leaving soon,” said Hermione.
“You’ll be put on a carriage to London next morning.”
“Actually, I rather think I’ll be taking my train,” she said.
Pansy pursed her lips. Then she turned to Draco. “Tell her why she needs to come with us,” she ordered. “She isn’t going to get flayed or anything.”
“Parkinson, I don’t know who you think you’re taking that tone with, but it’s certainly not me.”
Pansy’s face crumpled with childlike frustration: a girl who hadn’t got the doll she wanted. She ground her heel into the earth. “Come on!” she whined. She whirled on Theo, and addressed her next to him: “Do something! It’s cold! I should be in front of a fireplace getting my feet rubbed, not slogging after delinquents in the woods!”
“Hear, hear,” said Tracy. “You heard the woman, Theodorus. I’m bored of this.”
“Shut up, Trace,” said Pansy at once. “Nobody asked you to come.”
“I wanted to be involved.”
“With whom?” said Blaise innocently. Tracy threw him a breezy smile and a brutal elbow. He keeled to one side with a grunt, and Pansy sprang clear, grabbing Theo for balance.
Draco blinked. Memory flared like a camera’s flashbulb, and he was staring at a brilliant vista in southern France, while a dark-haired girl watched a dark-haired boy do giddy loops on his broomstick in a sun-flushed azure sky.
It vanished, and it was a snowy evening in Scotland, and the light was pale and thin.
Theo drew his wand. So did Blaise, massaging his abdomen, and Tracy.
Draco rolled his wand across his fingers and stepped into a duelist’s position. Hermione gave an irritated huff, and her fingers closed around his offhand in a cold band.
“Draco.”
“What?”
“There’s four of them. And two of us.”
“Which will make what I’m about to do much more impressive.”
“Draco!”
“This is the part where you start running.”
“Oh, like hell.”
“Granger,” he said, verging on a snarl — Theo was starting to climb down the hillside, now — “they’re coming after you, not me. Run.”
“Yes! Let’s!”
“I’ll catch up.”
“No, you won’t! You’re going to pick a fight,” she snapped, “because Theo’s up there and you’re pissed at him, and you’ve been spoiling for a fight with him since June!”
“That’s not why.”
“Yes, it is! You want him to hurt, and so do I, but one of us has to think clearly—”
He wrenched his arm out of her grasp, and she made an outraged sound when he broke free of her.
“Hermione, run.”
She gave a shriek of exasperation, wheeled away from him, and lashed her wand into the air.
“Confringo!”
Blue flames blossomed into the air like a tide of dragonbreath, radiating waves of rippling heat. They seared back layers of snow at a touch, sending clouds of billowing steam up from the hillside. Blaise and Tracy sprang back with high, panicked yelps as boiling steam surged from the ground at their feat. Fog and steam and smoke fused into a thick white bloom that erupted between them and the Slytherins, blotting out their silhouettes and the lights from the castle, plunging the whole world into darkness save for the flickering blue of her firelights.
He couldn’t see; visibility was next to nothing, and the world tasted of smoke. He coughed into his arm, ducking back from the row of guttering flames; and something closed around his hand, and wrenched. He was hauled back into the forest by the arm, and fumbled into a run, towed along behind a madwoman’s headlong deadsprint into the shadows.
“What the devil are you doing?”
“Solving a problem! You might try it!”
“You set the lawn on fire! You little maniac—”
“And your solution was shoving me behind your back and trying to fight everything that moved!”
“What can I say,” he snarled, “I learned from the best,” and he overtook her, racing through the stinging cold.
A jinx slit the air behind them, red-white and sizzling. Hermione cried out and slipped, tearing her hand free, and when he turned back there was another jinx that made him leap aside. It was pitch-dark without Lumos to light the way, and he could barely see in front of his feet on the ice-slick ground, let alone the branches that seemed to come soaring down from the darkness and swing for his face. He lashed up his wand and cast a Shield, catching a jinx in an explosion of sparks. Hermione scrambled to her feet and took off again. He threw two Stunners back into the trees and then followed her.
The total darkness made his nerves smolder with fear. Hermione bobbed in and out of view between the trees, her hair a dark blur against the gray sheet of snow. Flying spells collided with underbrush and trees and detonated small explosions of wood behind them. Muffled voices echoed harshly through the trees, like the shrieks of hunting birds.
The path swung down through a gorge and up a hill on the other side. A Stunning Spell cut between them and soared overhead, its red gleam illuminating the sharp bend in the earth.
It happened inside the space of a heartbeat, in the time it took him to check over his shoulder for someone following: there was a yelp, a loud skitter of falling rocks, and when he turned, Hermione had vanished.
“Hermione? Hermione!”
He threw himself to a halt. His lungs screamed from the strain and a sudden inability to draw enough air.
Lights flickered off in the distance, drawing away. Footsteps drifted out of earshot. He waited, but no answer came.
“Herm—”
“Flipendo!”
A bolt of force collided with his legs. It threw him backward and dropped him on his back. He threw up his wand and thrust it into the darkness, heart hammering.
“Stu—”
“Expelliarmus!”
His wand leapt out of his hand and soared into the awaiting fist of Pansy, who stepped out of the trees and caught it neatly, her small, haughty lips peeled in a sneer. She tugged down her sleeve, under which a crust of blood winked, tellingly.
Pansy was no great hand at charms, but she had her tricks.
A gold tie pin slitted her coal-black tie, the same color as her short, choppy hair. Without the trappings of Slytherin House, Pansy seemed older. Her cloak was tattered along the undersides with mud, slightly singed. He couldn’t recall when he’d seen her in such disarray.
They regarded each other in dull shock for a moment.
“You idiot,” she said bitterly, breaking the silence. “You could have just come with us.”
“There is no world,” he said, his voice uneven from exertion and anger mixed, “where I take her to Umbridge. None. That you would think otherwise for a moment speaks to how very little you understand about me, or indeed anything.”
“Merlin’s sake! Umbridge? This is about Umbridge?” She threw up her hands, which each gripped a wand, hers and his. “Are you serious? She’s a nothing, a sycophant, a middle-class bureaucrat, she’d wash my boots with her tongue if I told her to!”
“Maybe word of this hasn’t reached the dungeons yet, but your school’s under martial law.”
“Because your quidditch team was suspended? Because you have detention? I wake up praying for days like that! Some of us have real problems!”
“Like planning a wedding? Dress fittings? Choosing napkins?”
“Oh, go fuck yourself, Draco.”
“You first.” This was not a slice to the jugular as much as a fumbling paper-cut to the thumb. “I can name people who wake up praying for your problems, too.”
Twigs shattered behind them. Pansy whirled, and Tracy’s broad silhouette came trotting out of trees.
“You got him! Good shot, Pan-Pan!”
“Gag yourself, please,” said Pansy at once, politely. “Call me that again and I’ll show you what your tongue looks like when it’s not connected to the rest of you. Did you get Granger?”
“No, Theo went after her. Blaise thinks he sprained his ankle in the fire, so he went back.”
“God, he’s such a pantywaist.”
“I was proud he even came.”
“Quit gloating, you’re still one too. Now run and get Teddy, make yourself useful.”
“What, now?”
“No, actually, how’s your Tuesday — yes, now, moron!”
Tracy scowled at her and sauntered out of the clearing. “I’m telling him you were mean to me.”
“Good! It’ll cheer him up.”
“I hate you desperately, Parkinson.”
Pansy lifted her wand. Draco braced himself, but the point drifted away from him, and settled on Tracy’s retreating back.
“Bully for you,” called Pansy. “Someday, I might even care. Stupefy.”
There was a muffled cry, and a thud.
Pansy pointed at Draco. “Stay,” she ordered, and then darted into the woods in the direction Tracy had gone. Moments later, she returned, picking her way through the underbrush with the awkward distaste of someone more used to parquet and marble.
“Got her,” she declared. “My Stunner’s quite bad, unfortunately, so we’ve only got a minute. If she asks, I’m going to tell her that was you, so be a good fellow and don’t rat.”
“Because I’m flush with reasons to do you favors.”
“Yes, because I’m about to do a mammoth one for you,” she snapped. “I’m going to let you go. Alright? Look at me, I’m a humanitarian. But first I’m going to ask you for something, and you’re going to nod your head and say yes like a good little boy, or I’ll park you here while Teddy and I drag your mudblood back to the castle by the ends of her bloody big hair — don’t you try and hit me, either, you shit, I told you I’m being nice. Here.” She dropped to a crouch, placed his wand carefully out of reach, and withdrew from her breast pocket before a boxy envelope sealed in emerald wax. It was unaddressed.
“You’re going to give this to Daphne,” she said flatly, holding it out. He gave it an unimpressed sneer, and then gave her another. “You’re — no, yes, you are. You’re not going to open it, either — don’t be offended, I’d be nosy, too — but the sealant wax is jinxed to slice your fingers open. I thought of everything, you see. Don’t let her do anything dramatic like pitch it out the window, and you know she’ll probably try to, the silly goose. And once you’ve made her read it, you’ll tell her to burn it, and you’re going to watch her burn it, because I adore her, but she is a lying, simpering little viper who could find a way to cheat in a coin toss.”
“And you’re that plus presumptuous,” he said. “You don’t seem to get how this works. I’ll be doing you a favor if I don’t jinx you into a pile of ashes.”
“One thing I like about you, Draco, is I can count on you for a laugh.”
She stuffed the letter into his robe pocket and then scrambled back, putting a clearing’s worth of distance between them.
“When I give you your wand back,” she warned, “promise you won’t try jinxing me or anything.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Fine. But when you Stun me, try not to pitch me into a tree or something; please recall that I hit you with very easy jinxes to undo, and there’s an Eyeball-Melting Jinx I’ve been dying to try for ages.”
“You’re a saint.”
“I keep saying it, but no one believes me. Catch.”
She pitched his wand at him. Unfortunately, she had a terrible arm, and it flailed awkwardly into the dirt some distance from his hand. He leaned over and snatched it up, then dispelled the jinxes on his legs and ankles with two sharp flicks. He stood, brushing dirt and snow from his robes.
“Answer me something,” he said. “You want to get a message to Daphne? You have an owl. You also have legs and a passable mastery of English. Explain yourself.”
She gave him a flat look. “The post’s being watched,” she said. “And even if Daphne were talking to me these days, which she isn’t, the castle’s not safe for that. The walls have ears. The ears in the walls have ears. There’s no such thing as a secret at Hogwarts.”
He considered this explanation, and accepted it. He nodded.
He stood up — straightened his shoulders — and then whipped a curse past her ear, glittering in barbed red.
She shrieked and balked, throwing her arms over her head.
“That’s for threatening me.”
“Was that supposed to hit me? That was a proper curse! A real one! Stun me, I said!”
“I heard you.”
The Stinging Jinx snapped her head around. She shrieked, clutching the swelling ridge of her bottom lip.
He crossed the clearing briskly and plucked the wand out of her hand, pitching it into the forest.
“That was for ‘mudblood,’” he said. “The next one will be worse.”
Her stare was one part anger to many parts shock. “Tha’ hurt, you twat,” she garbled out.
“Stupefy.”
Pansy folded into the dirt.
He turned on his heel and swept out of the clearing, his cloak stirring a billow of snow in his wake.
The path winnowed wearily up towards Hogsmeade under a glacial ribbon of frost. He slit open long flanks of forest underbrush with Diffindo and stepped through them, moving quickly and making little noise. He couldn’t hear Hermione or Theo and he didn’t know if that was better or worse than the alternative. His pulse beat hard and fast, like someone had a hand around his throat, and it tightened with every heartbeat.
Slick slabs of thick mud ran up to Hogsmeade. Somewhere, the train crooned. He ran up the path and then swung around the corner, breaking onto the last straight-away to the Hogsmeade gates and the train station. The path was empty: a muddy track up to a distant bead of yellow lamp-light, dappled in woods.
He lit his wand and swept it around. Seconds raced by with cruel haste, like the cold wind snaking across his neck.
“Hermione?” he said. He loathed how his voice sounded, flat and small, crushed into almost nothing by the vastness of the forest. He hated the desperation in it, the need. It was constricting, consuming. It was hellish.
The sky was so dark that he couldn’t tell where it ended, and the trees began. The trees creaked, murmuring to each other in low conspiracy.
Suddenly there was a sound, an echo of a voice, rippling from between the trees. He cut a path through the brambles with a Withering Charm that ripped back vines like burning paper.
A watery silver light hovered at the base of an oak tree the size of Gryffindor Tower. Images of will-o-wisps, fairy creatures, the things that lured lone travelers away from safety, and into the dark — but on approach, it resolved into the plain, cold beam of Lumos.
“Draco?”
“Hermione.”
She was braced against one of the vast roots, her arm cupped in the cradle of her lap, knees bent and crushed against her chest, as if to make herself as small as possible. Her cloak pooled around her, shockingly dark on the snow, like a radius of oil. Her wand was gripped tightly in the wrong hand, and in the thin light it took a moment to notice the dark red stain — the weak light turned it nearly black — soaking through the white of her shirtsleeve.
“Hermione—”
“Fine! I’m fine,” she exclaimed, eyes widening, and scrambled up — he didn’t know what his face looked like to make her move up like that, but she was halfway to her feet when he caught her and all but shoved her back down again. “I’m fine! It looks worse than it is—”
He stripped back her both and sleeve with a carelessly forceful movement, ripping both. “What,” he said tautly, “and where?”
“Just the wrist. The arm. It’s a superficial wound, more blood than you’d think, honestly, I’ve already healed some of it myself.” She was talking too much to be convincing.
“Nott did this?”
“No. Well, not exactly. He threw some sort of jinx, and I blocked most of it but I lost my footing and fell, and I must’ve cut myself on a rock or some broken ice or something. Of course, then I was in the bush and my light had gone out, so he didn’t see anything.”
He drew her arm into his lap and glided his wand across it. The blood coursed off her skin in dark ribbons. Underneath it lay a long, deep, but relatively thin cut across her forearm.
“I lost him, though,” she said, thick with triumph. “It didn’t take ten minutes, altogether, after we were separated. And I’m pretty sure I got him with a Horn-Tongue Hex, which probably wasn’t as useful as some other spells, but it was the heat of the moment and I chose the nastiest thing I could think of. To be honest, I doubt he was trying that hard to catch me, though that’s not terribly surprising, they’re none of them known for their love of hard work—”
“You’re rambling.”
“Yes,” she said, “well. It hurts.”
His hand flexed on her wrist, but he set his teeth and made it still. “Brace yourself.”
“For wh– OW! Ow ow ow ow stop it.”
Episkey wasn’t enough for a deep cut. He had to pull the skin back together, which required a different kind of spell, and then put in a row of stitches; not good ones, but ones that would hold until they could find someone qualified to do better ones.
Hermione was squirming unhappily, and almost kicked him in the legs. Briskly, he caught her knee and flattened it, then knelt across her, pinning her down.
“That stings,” she said breathlessly.
“I know. You’re alright.” In want of a better bandage, he flipped her hand over, tugged his handkerchief out, and folded it across the shiny raw scars. “You’re going to be alright. It’s fine.”
She set her jaw. “Did you — ah — did you run into the others?”
“Parkinson and Davis. I dealt with them.”
“What does that mean? Where are they?”
He carefully pulled her arm away from her body, inspecting her for other cuts or injuries. She seemed well, not to mention a bit unnerved at the inspection; she withdrew and folded her arms over her chest, eyeing him.
“They’ll be fine.” He would revisit the idea at length later. “Can you stand?”
“Yes, because I’m fine,” she said pointedly, rolling to her feet. He slipped an arm around her waist to guide her up, partly because it was an excuse to do so, and because he was skeptical of her claims to being unaffected; she swayed when she stood up, and he ran a mental calculation on the amount of blood that she could have lost before he came. Not as much as she would have if he’d been faster, at any rate. He was slow, a slow idiot, to let Pansy prattle at him for God knew how long.
“You’re such a fusser,” she muttered, though that didn’t stop her from sneaking an arm around his shoulders to lean on him. “You’d think I lost a limb. You’ve come back from quidditch matches in worse shape than this.”
“That is a bar one clears by crawling.”
She stood up gingerly, using him as a sort of brace. He caught her other arm. She was warm, radiantly warm, although he’d been in the cold so long that his hands likely would have taken pleasure in anything that wasn’t freezing. Their breath was white silk in the air.
His heart still ran at an unusual pace, but at least it didn’t feel like he was about to give himself a stroke anymore.
She started to pull away, then stopped, turned back into him, and put her head against his chest. He caught the back of her head with his hand and held her there, assuming, for an alarmed moment, that she was about to collapse.
“What? What’s the matter?”
“Nothing’s the matter. Why do you assume every time someone touches you, it means they’re in peril?”
“Because they’re touching me. Ergo, they are in peril.”
“I touch you,” she retorted.
She was irresistibly contrary.
“You live in a state of peril,” he said. “You can afford the risk.”
She broke into a giggle.
The train interrupted them with an urgent groan. Hermione froze. He lifted his head.
“Fuck.”
“Fuck,” she agreed, spinning around.
She broke into a run. The snow burst up in white artilleries at their feet. Branches snapped on his arms and face, thin stinging whips on his skin. The train gave another shout, and smoke burst from its pipes like the trilling mouth of a volcano. With a groan of machinery, it thrust itself into motion.
He tore out of the woods and broke onto the clean pavement of the station, desolate and empty. The train rolled away, gathering speed. Hermione gave a cry.
The end of the train glided past them. The platform was running out in front of them. He jumped and caught hold of the rail at the viewing deck, and the jolt almost tore his arm from his socket. Hermione shouted and jumped after him — he caught her by the waist, pulling — and then she was scrambling over the railing, tumbling to the ground, letting out a thin high sound that he recognized as relief. He hurled himself over the side and then dropped to one knee on the safe side of the railing, breathing quickly, as the station shot away behind them, and the train soared off into the Scottish highlands with both of them onboard.
The lights of the station receded. The gas lamps became a smear of oily yellow in the darkness. The air was a grainy blur of snow, washed white in the light from the train. He stilled for a moment, breathing in and out, while the carriage rattled with each bend and sway in the track.
By and by, Hermione gave a shuddering gasp and then sat upright, reaching for his arm. The train hit a bend and jolted them both, sending her scrabbling for purchase on the rail.
“Oh, God — Christ, thought — make — were… alright?”
“What?” He could barely hear her over the shriek of the wind outside the train.
“Are you alright?”
“Fine.”
“Good! God — can’t — believe!” Every third word was stolen by the shriek of the train. That was why he didn’t immediately realize she was laughing. Her face shone ruddy from exertion and adrenaline, her hair stirred to complete wilderness by the wind. There was a feral kind of joy in it, along with the fear and the relief, and he pitied the fool who forgot that she was a Gryffindor, and had always been. When the train hit another bump she caught the front of his robes for balance. He caught her wrist. Her gaze flickered, caught, and held him.
“You—alright—” she repeated. He didn’t hear her, but he could see her mouth the shape of the words.
The train dove into a tunnel, and the light plummeted. The wind died, and suddenly he could hear her again. She was saying: “—to take a car from Aberdeen, and I would’ve had to drive, would’ve killed us both if you didn’t try to do it first—”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Who cares!” she exclaimed, flinging out her arms. “We made it! It’s Christmas, we won, and we’re going home!”
He returned her smile, thinly. “Steady on. You’re going to set something on fire.”
“I already did!”
“Well, that’s Granger for you, can’t go five minutes without immolating something.”
She shrieked in laughter and hugged him.
Nothing felt real; there was an unreality to the light and the cold and the rattling train, dreamlike, an impressionist’s tundra. One moment he was speaking, and she was watching him in exhilaration, her shoulders rising and falling as she struggled to draw breath. Her beam was electrically bright and glassy.
Athena glaukopis. Lady of the shining eyes.
“Admit it was clever,” she said. “It was good. Wasn’t it? I didn’t — I didn’t freeze up. I was good. Tell me it was good.”
“Needy little thing, aren’t you? Like to hear the obvious?”
“Yes. Yes! So what? I want to hear you say it.”
“As you like,” he said, helplessly compelled. “Here’s the obvious: that went improbably well; it’s fucking freezing out here; the Channel is wet; and you, Hermione Granger, are a very clever girl.”
With a high, happy chirp of laughter, she jumped up and kissed him.
There was a long blank second where there was nothing in the world.
Her mouth was warm and slightly parted and she made a gentle noise of surprise, which was a shot of pure energy into the white clear center of his drifting brain. He floated.
The train sailed out of the tunnel in a sudden douse of wind and moonlight.
Before she had time to find her head, he took her waist and pulled her into him and kissed her back. Her hands on his neck were cold and insistent and pulling him down as he pulled her up, like a mermaid drawing him down into dark, warm waters. The snow-capped crag of the moors vanished. Annihilated by disinterest. He bent her back over his arm and kissed her the way he’d wanted to yesterday and last week and all year and possibly forever, nudging open her mouth and locking it into his, moving together like they’d been doing it for years. She was shaking and had one hand in his hair, gripping it and the front of his shirt like she was backed over a cliff and for some reason that made sense, it all made sense, for once there was nothing in his body that didn’t make perfect, spectacular, brilliant sense.
It was almost more urgent than it was pleasant. It was good, but it was serious, it was important, it was vital that he continue it for the rest of his life. He turned his head and kissed Hermione Granger again, and the second time was better than the first. The third made them both look childish.
She broke off and jumped apart, breathing hard.
“Sorry,” she gasped, while he stared at her with not one single thought in his entire fucking head. She raked her hair back from her face. Her shirt had wrinkles where he’d touched it, like it remembered him. He looked forward to having thoughts about that, sometime, when he resumed having thoughts.
She smoothed her hands down her neck and exhaled, blinking. Abruptly, she shook her head.
And then Hermione — daring, clever, sensible, and meticulous Hermione — threw open the door to the carriage and ran away.
Hey, guys. Sorry about the wait. I… yeah, I don’t have more than that right now.
Taking any hopes, prayers, or survival tips.
Miss ya. Love ya. See ya soon as I can.
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