I Will Not Tell Lies

Chapter 77: I Will Not Tell Lies

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

The first week after Scrimgeour’s arrival, Draco did not hear Harry speak.

Scrimgeour himself moved between Hogwarts and London often, sometimes several times a day. He was the only one in and out. With the Owlery locked, letters and news alike ceased, draping the world beyond the castle under a bleak veil. Six aurors were stationed in the Entrance Hall, along with an influx of so many patrolmen one would think they were forecasting invasion.

Just one, of thousands, had escaped the castle before the wall came down. Severus Snape was nowhere to be found in the castle. A full-fledged search of the dungeons by a dozen patrolmen failed to unearth his person, and with regret, it was concluded that Snape had fled the premises. To what end, and to serve what master — if any — no one knew, and not even Draco could guess.

Patience ran short. Each hour was a losing game of waiting. Through the windows, arrowed sunlight turned the common room stifling and hot, and the rich blue sky practically tasted of fresh air, but the only way to sample it was to open a window. No one could leave the castle. Nor did even lessons puncture the fabric of boredom: the faculty had been enlisted in the school’s defense. McGonagall and Flitwick stood as often as any auror at the school gates, their silhouettes thin and shallow on the lawns.

Without classes, students had their run of the castle, but with aurors at the doors, it was a shallow freedom. Prefects no longer ran patrols. Draco found himself restless and sleepless, sitting up reading old books of spells, or else practicing curses in bed with the drapes drawn. He fell asleep with his wand in his hand, lying shirtless on the coverlet, and woke up more exhausted than he had been before he slept. He went to the library and walked listlessly through the empty aisles, watching dust spin in the glare under grated windows. He went to the Room of Requirement and paced the dueling piste, rehearsing footwork until it was flawless, until the steps themselves seemed to move his limbs, like dancing. He went to the Great Hall, and the empty chamber sat still and peaceful, like a magnificent, sun-lit catacomb. He went to the fenced-off part of the seventh floor, where Seamus’s bomb had carved out a vast chunk of the wall and damaged the bridge to the Owlery; sparrows were roosting in the rough-hewn rock that used to be a spare classroom. He walked past the aurors on his way back to Gryffindor. Others they stopped and made to empty their bags, checking for contraband, but not him.

The Damocles sword of expulsion hung low over his neck. His best reassurance was that the administration seemed too occupied to fix on what happened the night of the Astronomy practical. This was not, as Hermione pointed out, an enduring fix, but with each day it seemed more and more likely that Umbridge’s plans for discipline had been overridden by some higher source intent on keeping all students inside the castle. The plans of Dolores Umbridge had been, at the least, shifted to the back cauldron, while the security of the wizarding world hung in question. It was an unpleasant irony that what had rescued them had been nothing less than the potential collapse of the Ministry itself.

The temper of the castle boiled low. Trapped, with nowhere to go and nothing to quench their stoppered aggravation, the students began to gnaw at the walls. Fights broke out in hallways. Draco lost count of the number of children he pried apart, split with a Stinging Jinx or restrained with rope, to prevent them from bloodying each other. House did not matter. Slytherin first years struck and tripped each other for the crime of laughing too loudly; they warred with Hufflepuffs over taking too long in the stall.

There was no order. How could there be? The adults disagreed openly with each other in the hallways. McGonagall had a shouting match with Dawlish over his effort to confiscate a second-year’s medication for boils. Umbridge and Scrimgeour never sat down to dine at the faculty table except in bad spirits with each other. There were no newspapers allowed in the castle. The Ministry might well have fallen altogether, for all the students were permitted to know.

Meanwhile, Draco thought of his mother.

He laid awake with a knot in his heart and thought of where she was; had she heard about the Ministry? Was Snape with her? Did she know of Snape’s betrayal, and had she arranged it? Fear commingled with fury at having once again been left out of their plans: if they had told him anything, he would have known now what to do.

But none of them knew what was happening outside; they were stuck. Children, infants. Gossiping and scheming at their little plots, pretending at games of war and politics, sheltered and caged by their ignorance. Some nights the possibilities left him sleepless; other nights he woke up choking on the start of a scream.

The day after the Astronomy exam was spent by most of the Weasley family in the Hospital Wing. Ginny and Fred returned forthwith. Pomfrey sent Ginny back to Gryffindor with a sling; a tendon had been severed in her throwing-arm. Fred stayed two nights. Angelina and Lee had suffered minor injuries from detonating Seamus’s bomb. Katie sprained her ankle, and Dean had his nose broken by a patrolman’s curse. Seamus sat with them in the common room with his jaw set in a rictus of sorrow and guilt, soothing Katie’s sprained ankle with a freezing charm.

The failure of Potter’s Army, such as it was, laid a silent film of desolation over the common room. Morale sapped, Katie and Lee halfheartedly tried to rally plans for another attempt at escaping, but with Ministry officials at every gate, they found few audiences. With Harry near-catatonic and Hermione in a bitter well of self-blame, there was nothing around which to organize.

Neville tried to apologize to Harry, but Harry was still not speaking, so Ron reassured on his behalf.

“You did your best, Nev. No one expected you to take down an auror.”

“About that. You don’t have to tell me, uh, everything, exactly, b-but — what h-happened?” said Neville. “Did Cho — was she informing on us the whole…?”

“Cho reported us,” said Hermione. She turned a page in her book and did not lift her head. “I expect she went to Cassius, who raised the alarm with Umbridge. She might have told them about the escape attempt, or she might have told them a good bit more — as much as she could have done, anyway, before the curse kicked in. I imagine they offered her what she thought were good terms.”

Harry exhaled. She lifted her head inquiringly. “Anything to add?”

Harry shook his head. Ron frowned at her, and went to sit with Harry in the window.

He was still the only one Harry would speak to. Draco had caught them several times in the evenings, in some shadowed corner of the common room, Harry muttering while Ron listened and nodded with intent.

It was known, for the same reasons that all things known by more than two people eventually became known, that Cho had betrayed them. It was less known what had happened to her because of it; Hermione did not speak of it, and Harry did not speak of all, and Ron and Draco independently arrived at the same conclusion, which was that it suited no one to know. Rumors of facial disfigurement percolated for some time, with particular enthusiasm by Victoria and the other first years, while Romilda assured anyone who would listen that Cho was gravely maimed. Regard for Hermione grew deep, but chilly like the pelagic; fewer came to bother her with questions about her homework in the evenings, and when she snapped at someone, students moved hastily to obey.

Hermione criticized, even by implication, was Hermione at her worst. In those long dog days of May, she became brittle and short-tempered. Speaking to her was a short-lived game of Exploding Snap, with no winning hands.

Sometimes she burst into the boys’ dorms, spitting furious at some minor sleight from Lee or Seamus, while he was reading there; from there she would proceed to wear a hole in the floor, stray flickers of magic snapping her robes, until the subject had been verbally beaten to death, resurrected, and beaten to death again. He watched her desolate an array of hypothetical criticism with vigor and precision, but he did not once watch anyone brave the risk of voicing it to her, and so instead he watched her bottled-up defenses sour under the rotting suspicion that perhaps no one was interested in them.

Once, and once only, she admitted: “I didn’t think it would do that much.”

It was evening, and the sounds of the common room burbled through the walls. Muffliato and Colloportus infused the boys’ dorm with what scant privacy was possible, in a shared space.

She was leaning against his bedpost, recovering from a few miles of pacing his floor, while he reclined against the headboard. Draco inclined his head, patient.

“I thought it would — I thought it would just take the memories of Defense Club.” Her voice was small. “The Army, I mean. I didn’t think it would take the whole year.”

Cho Chang had betrayed people she did not understand and was not really friends with for a boy she adored — though she also, perhaps, did not understand him — and a mother she loved. She had also come very near to getting Draco’s wand snapped, and Hermione’s along with it. For his own sake, he resented her, and found little to regret in the fact she had been punished for it; at the same time, he did not find her choices difficult to understand. She was the unfortunate victim of luck: she had chosen the wrong people to invest with what she held dear. It was a hard call. Sometimes he doubted his own ability to make it, himself.

Nevertheless, his sympathy did not obligate him to forgive her.

“The spell was extremely difficult.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“A Memory Curse is fiendish on its own. Setting a runic trap on the parchment to hold the spell indefinitely is another level of complication — based on the act of revealing certain information, which means you reverse-engineered half of a Fidelius Charm. And you managed not to trigger a memory cascade upon casting. The fact that her mind is intact is a marvel.”

“I’m perfectly aware how hard it was, thank you, I’m the one who did it.”

Her cruelty wasn’t aimed at him, nor was the fury, nor the disgust. Hermione practiced cruelty to herself in the hopes it would inoculate herself to it from others. It did not, and had never, but the habit was old, and enduring.

“She still remembers most of her life,” he said, electing to stick with the line of the obvious. “You ringfenced the spell, which is by far the most pernicious effect of a botched Memory Charm.”

“I took a year of her life.”

“Not a very good one.”

“Draco,” she snapped.

“Well, she spent half of it weeping.”

“Draco!”

“I’m not going to condemn you.”

She scowled.

“Do you want me to do that? I can,” he said, “but I won’t.”

“Why not? Do you not think it’s awful? Or are all these muggle-born scruples just pearl-clutching to you, because you’re so above it all, these silly little moral conundrums?”

He raised his eyebrows. Hermione pressed the back of her hand to her mouth.

“Sorry.”

“Fine.”

“No. I am — sorry. Awful. Awful thing to say, I’m sorry.”

“It is fine.”

“I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have said that to you. I shouldn’t — I don’t want to take this out on you, like I’m—”

Hermione swallowed. Abruptly, she sat down, and said in a tight voice: “Can you please— please just come and — and hold me, please. You don’t have to — but — please.”

He unfolded himself immediately and slid across the bed to take her by the waist, drawing her into the cradle of his lap. She folded herself tightly into him, clutching his arms where they wound around her waist, and bent her face to hide in her knees. She was shaking.

Hermione’s back arched into his chest. She was burning warm, furnace-bright, a line of fire down the half of his body. He bent his face into the nape of her neck, where citrus bloomed evergreen. She was so fierce, such a large person in everything but size, and he could fit her all inside his arms. She was frail and strong and defensive and regretful all at once. It was a marvel she even fit inside her own body.

He supposed that sometimes she didn’t, and that was where her panic came from. Sometimes there was too much of her, just like there was too much of him, to make sense of. Somewhere between the Golden Girl and the Chosen One’s pet cutthroat lived a very clever, very frightened girl named Hermione Granger, splitting her life among two worlds that each had no place for her.

She kissed Draco’s shoulder. The whole surface of his chest seemed to twinge with it.

“You thought, if we were betrayed, it would be a stranger,” he said. “You didn’t think it would be someone close.”

She did not reply at first.

Then she said: “A stranger wouldn’t have much to forget. It wouldn’t have hurt them — forgetting us.”

“You can be forgiven for overestimating the loyalty of your friends.”

“You would never make that mistake,” she said quietly.

No, he wouldn’t have; but then, he would not have done many things, if he had not been permitted to ride side-along on the bravery of others, freed by their courage to pretend that he was not really making a choice.

“You and I have different virtues,” he said, at length. “And different vices. Don’t wish for mine. I wouldn’t wish them on you.”

Hermione tilted her head away. The setting sun’s light struck her eye obliquely, slitting it with veins of gold. “And what,” she said evenly, “if we need yours more than we need mine?”

Her pupil shifted, and he found himself looking her in the eye.

“He has one of me already,” he said. “He doesn’t need two.”

It flitted back to the window. “What if I want yours?” she said unhappily.

He drew her hair over her shoulder. Her lid shuttered over the liquid gold of her iris. “Then you have me,” he said. It was easy to say, shockingly easy; it surprised him that it had ever been difficult. “Vices and virtues, and whatever’s left.”

---

“Do you think your father will be alright? Seeing as he was undercover at the Ministry.”

He and Ron were walking along one of the upper balustrades on the Tower, an open-air bridge between parts of the castle that offered a rare taste of fresh air. Below, the hills glittered in a sun-glazed quilt of moss and heather. They had shucked their ties in the heat; without prefect patrols, and with teachers otherwise occupied, uniform standards had slid to join other routines, by the wayside. In another time, Draco might have found some morsel of himself that cared.

Ron cleared his throat. “Sure, yeah. We had contingency plans,” he said. “What to do if the Ministry fell, if Hogwarts fell, if Dumbledore died. We’re s’posed to split up and head to different safehouses. Bill and Charlie with Ginny, Dad with the twins, Mum with Harry and me. If things got really bad, and we can’t get to the safehouse, we’re s’posed to rendezvous somewhere out of the country. So if the Ministry’s fallen, that means Mum and Dad are out there, somewhere, trying to find a way to get us out.”

“Prudent,” said Draco, a sincere compliment.

“Thanks.” He glanced at Draco. “You, then?”

“Do I have a plan, do you mean?”

“Yeah. You and your mum.” Ron paused. “You can always come with us, if you don’t. Or if you can’t … I mean, Mum wouldn’t… wouldn’t want you to be on your own.”

“Thank you,” he said, stilted. “I appreciate the gravity of your offer — deeply. I would be — more grateful — if you extended it to Hermione.”

“Course I did,” said Ron, offended by the presumption otherwise. “But she said she had other plans. I assumed they were with you — aren’t they? With the magical castle, and whatnot—”

“‘Plan’ is an ambitious noun.”

“You’re saying she doesn’t have one?”

“Such as it is,” he said, with over-articulated disgust, “it’s to return to her parents. In London.” He curled his fists on the balustrade. “Mind you, she’ll have the Trace on her until September.”

Ron snorted. “Bet she had a ball telling you that.”

“We have a difference of opinion, which we have litigated as far as is productive.”

“She’s aware that London’s not right safe, just now?”

“The point has been made to her,” said Draco, “in full force.”

Ron did laugh, then, though the sound was bleak.

“On the bright side,” he said, “I guess there’s your chance to meet the parents.”

The joke was too forced; it was too light; his heart was not really in it, but Ron was trying. He was trying to say, with whatever words he had, This is normal, and I will be normal about this.

“Good shout,” Draco drawled. “What charming circumstances. ‘Pleasure to meet you, Doctors, shame about the terrorists. My father used to lead them, but don’t worry, my aunt murdered him. By the way, I’m courting your daughter. Hope you don’t mind.’”

“Eugh,” Ron muttered. “Why can’t you just say ‘dating’ like everyone else? You sound like my Aunt Muriel.”

“Strictly, it’s inaccurate. Dating is a public form of courtship, which ours is not.”

“Strictly, you’re a priss for even knowing that. And her parents won’t care about your dad,” he added. “They don’t know the history there. As far as they’re concerned, you’re the scary wizard prince who keeps mauling people that bully her. And you know which fork to use at fancy dinners. They’ll go nuts. I’ve met them, I’d know.”

“I suppose you have.”

Ron glanced at him wearily from his periphery. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, with a twinge of pain. “You know that, right? She spent that whole summer talking about you.”

Though it had mattered, and did. It mattered that Ron’s family knew Hermione’s family, and that the Grangers had met Ron’s parents, eaten at their table. It mattered what Ron’s family was, and what it meant to her.

“It doesn’t matter,” he repeated. Then he shrugged. “Moot point, if we never get out of here.”

Ron laughed hollowly. An owl dipped out of the clouds overhead, skimming high among the turrets, but it made a wide circle around the wards and departed with the letter still clutched in its grasp.

“What do you and Potter talk about?”

“The weather,” Ron said evenly.

Draco raised his eyebrow. “He won’t let you tell me? Really.”

“You do not get to give me shit about keeping secrets.”

“Perfectly fair. Is it a secret, then, why he’s stopping talking to us?”

“Who’s ‘us’?”

“Don’t play the fool.”

Ron grimaced and made a little prevaricating gesture with his chin: yes-and-no. “Well, you know why he’s not talking to Hermione.”

“And I suppose you think he’s justified in it?”

Ron cut him a flat look. “So what? In his position, you wouldn’t have cared?”

“I would have been open to reason.”

“Like fuck you would’ve,” Ron exclaimed. “You realize it’s Hermione herself we’re talking about, in that analogy.”

Draco twitched, then waved his hand irritably, conceding the point. “Hermione would never have done what Chang did. One acted out of loyalty; the other, not. He’s punishing one for the sins of the other.”

“And who’s he supposed to punish? Cho? Who thinks it’s 1995? The girl who betrayed him doesn’t exist anymore. Hermione — kind of — killed her.”

Ron’s voice trailed off uncomfortably. Draco rolled his shoulders, feeling the heavy fabric of his shirt cling dense and damp to his skin in the heat.

“Don’t be hysterical,” he said flatly. “Cho’s not dead. She was relieved, if anything, of one spectacularly unpleasant year of her life.”

“Still her life,” said Ron.

Draco said nothing, and leaned forward against the post. A summer breeze ruffled the hair on the back of his neck. It was longer now than it had ever been; long enough to require binding back for unruliness.

“Will you advocate for her, at least? With Potter.”

Ron braced his elbows on the balustrade and leaned over. “Yeah. I mean, no. I tell him the curse backfired, that it wasn’t Hermione’s fault, that she didn’t mean it, but… I mean, Draco, she kind of did mean it.”

“Chang tried to expel us,” he snapped. “She meant it, as well.”

“Because she was piss-frightened they’d sack her mum.”

“From the paper that spent the year libelling her boyfriend. Where’s this outpouring of warmth coming from? I thought you were fed up with her.”

Ron threw up his hands. “I was. I am! I don’t think she’s this great person. I think she’s normal. I think that’s why Harry liked her, right, she’s pretty and normal and good at quidditch. Bloke doesn’t have a lot of normal people in his life, no offense.”

“If this is how they treat him, I can see why.”

“Okay, but like — I’ve been thinking on this, mate — are we sure if she even ratted us out?” Ron glanced over his shoulder, though they were alone on the balustrades, and the stakes of being overheard were, for once, null. “They could have tortured it out of her. They’re not above it. Remember the quills—?”

“Highly unlikely.”

“Why?”

“In the office, Warrington stopped Umbridge from hurting her. Her mother’s compliance still has value to them. At any rate, it would be unnecessary. They only needed Snape to replenish their veritaserum, which he didn’t.”

“Yeah, too busy spilling Order secrets to bother with ours.”

“I think it worth noting that no one from the Order has actually been caught, remember, as a consequence of that—”

“How would you know? Are you somehow getting owls we’re not?”

“You think Percival would have been able to refrain from mentioning if they raided your family?”

Ron smiled a slow, tired smile. “Right,” he said. “He would’ve thrown it in my face.”

“Never attribute to force what can be attributed to personal interest,” said Draco. “A principle that applies to Percival and Cho Chang alike.”

The smile vanished. “Yeah. I dunno if I’d obliviate Percy, either.”

“Would you give up Harry to avoid it?”

Ron rubbed his knuckles in his eyes. “Merlin. Kind of question — I’d let someone torture me before I gave up Harry, right? I’d let them torture me dead. And Hermione doesn’t — I don’t judge her for what she does to protect him. I don’t judge her for anything. She’s a damn sight smarter and braver than I’ll ever be, and I love her. Like, really love her. I’d let them torture me for her, too.”

The usual antipathy twinged in Draco’s breast, but it cooled swiftly. Ron said it without hostility and without possessiveness. It was a simple statement of fact: he loved her.

“And?”

“And sometimes she scares the shit out of me,” said Ron plainly. “I don’t know what to do with that. I’ve been angry at her, I’ve been intimidated by her, but I’ve never been scared of her.”

He was about to object, stridently, that of all the people in the world, Ron was among the last with anything to fear from her. But the oddity of it struck Draco at once — that the things he had once found frightening about Hermione, such as they were, had flowed only from the fact that Hermione was likely to ask things of him greater than what anyone else would, and he was likely to do them. Perhaps for Ron, it was the same feeling, merely pointed in a different moral direction.

---

The next time Harry spoke to him, it had been two weeks since the Astronomy exam.

By and by, the boy had stopped sleeping as well as talking. Instead, he spent nights perched in the window with his snowy owl, feeding her treats and stroking her feathers, staring expressionlessly across the moonlit landscape under the tower window.

After a certain amount of time, it became ridiculous for both of them to lie awake in silence. Draco drew back the hangings of his bed and lit his wand. Approaching the window, he stepped deliberately on the floorboards instead of their seams, so they creaked and announced his presence well in advance.

Harry turned to him. His glasses sieved moonlight into rainbows on the floor.

Draco settled himself on the window seat, extinguished his wandlight, and twirled his wand between his fingers. Harry followed the movement with his eyes for a moment, then returned to stroking the bird’s cowl.

“It wasn’t your fault,” said Draco.

Harry’s fingers stilled.

“You must know that. They all chose to fight.”

The moon washed Harry’s eyes so pale they were nearly blue. He lifted them over his glasses and nodded. The movement parted his hair over the snaking tendrils of his scar.

“There was no world where Umbridge allowed you to save them,” said Draco. “You could have turned yourself in. You could have turned Dumbledore in. You could have flayed yourself for her entertainment. It would have changed nothing. There is no middle ground in matters like these. Take it from someone who has learned it painfully.”

Harry shook his head.

“Do you think that’s what I dream about?” he said, hoarse and calm. “Umbridge? And turning myself in?”

It was too much of a relief — far too much to be admitted — to hear Harry talk again.

He indicated the window and their empty beds. “To the extent that you dream at all, I considered it.”

Harry smiled thinly and shook his head again.

“I see a castle,” he rasped. “The same castle, every night. And there’s a man with my voice, and he sounds like me, and he’s torturing people. It’s always the same man. It’s not always the same people.”

Draco’s heartbeat skipped. Not always the same people. Not always the same people?

“Who is it?”

“Pettigrew,” said Harry dully, “and Goyle. Travers, sometimes. There’s a lot of people — they’ve all come back to him, you see, and he’s angry at them. He’s angry that they betrayed him.”

He twitched with irritated urgency, verging to say: I don’t give a shit about Pettigrew or Travers. Is Snape there?

Is my mother?

Harry knew Narcissa. Certainly he knew Snape. He would tell Draco. That was a certainty.

Though he was not certain enough to stop thinking about it. Then again, not brave enough to ask. Never brave enough, Draco Malfoy.

“Occlumency will help.”

“I can’t do Occlumency.”

“Potter—”

“I can’t do Occlumency,” he said doggedly. “Give it up. That’s what your mum did.”

“My mother stopped lessons because she was called away. She didn’t give up. She would never.”

“Okay. Doesn’t really change things, does it?” Harry unfolded his legs and stood up, catching his owl on his arm.

Draco wanted to say something more about his mother — defend her, instinctively, although he really couldn’t think how, and did not even understand why it mattered to him so much that Harry believed him — but Harry interrupted his thoughts.

“Do you want to know the worst part?”

He didn’t give an answer; it didn’t require one. Harry helped the owl into her cage and snapped the latch. “I understood it,” he said. “How it feels to want to hurt someone. How it feels to want someone dead. That’s the worst thing Umbridge ever did to me. I wasn’t angry about the torture. I was angry because I wanted it to be someone else.”

“They’re the Dark Lord’s feelings. They don’t belong to you.”

“No. See, that’s the worst part,” he said. “I can tell the difference.”

With that, he drew the hangings.

Draco went back to his own bed, but the hours until dawn were spent thinking of castles and torture and resenting his miserable, starveling gratitude that Harry hadn’t seen Narcissa through the Dark Lord’s eyes.

Morning dawned the color of dust. Distant rains trawling over the moors like the drifting cloaks of faraway dementors. It was almost June, and the nineteenth day of not knowing what was going to happen to them.

Harry was gone for most of the day. Umbridge still had the Map, so no one knew where he went until late in the afternoon, when Harry dropped through the portrait door, swept off his Invisibility Cloak, and said: “Cho’s getting transferred to St. Mungo’s.”

The room stirred. Draco raised his head from annotating the sixth-year potions textbook. Hermione watched Harry from her armchair, head tilted, bitterness writ deep across her face. Her hair spilled down her shoulders, held uselessly by a clasp, framing her face; she had ink on her nose and a raw-bitten mouth and the haggard scowl of a sleepless week, and she was still so lovely it stilled him for a moment.

“They have a ward for magical neurology,” said Harry. “They’re going to see if they can do something for her.”

“Fine,” said Hermione tautly. “Maybe she can send word if the Ministry’s still standing. The rest of us wouldn’t know.”

Harry exhaled through his teeth. Ron snapped his head up and shot a sharp look at Draco, which Draco returned with a helpless glare.

“I see you’re talking to me again,” Hermione added. “Good of you.”

“I thought you’d want to know,” said Harry. “Since it was your spell.”

“Right you are, it was my spell,” she said. “My spell that protected the rest of Potter’s Army from being caught, by the way, if she’d gone on to list names—”

“Don’t call it that.”

“I’ll call it whatever I want, Harry. I don’t take orders from you.”

“I never SAID you did!”

A contingent of first years by the fireplace leapt up and fled to the staircase. Ron tipped his king against Dean and hastily rose from his chair. Harry raked his hands through his hair, and his voice rose louder and louder: “I never asked you to do any of this! You decided we were going to form a club, Hermione, and then you decided to jinx the roster, and you planned all the meetings—”

“Don’t you dare put this on me.” Hermione slammed her book down. Her eyes shone like slick oil under ice. “You could have said ‘no’ whenever you wanted . You could have stopped at any time. You didn’t. Don’t you dare turn around and claim it was all my doing — nobody would have joined that club without you. I couldn’t have done it by myself, and I didn’t.”

“You didn’t ask me before you used a Memory Charm!”

“Like you’d have cared if it weren’t Cho!” she shouted. “If Zachariah Smith forgot a few afternoons, you wouldn’t be shouting at me, you’d have been thanking Merlin for me like bloody usual—”

“Whoa,” said Ron nervously, jumping the couch. “Whoa, whoa—”

“Fuck off,” said Harry furiously. “Yes, I would. I’ve have cared that you were messing with someone’s mind, which you must have known, since you didn’t tell me—”

“Let’s everybody take a minute—”

“I didn’t tell you so you wouldn’t be at fault if someone caught us, Harry!” Hermione screamed. “Not to mention so that nobody would find out — and by the way, you knew full well the jinx was harmful, you never had a problem before it was Cho—”

“Mione, c’mon,” said Ron exasperatedly, “that’s not fair—”

“But it’s fair to hold her to the Queensberry Rules after the fact?” said Draco coolly.

“—see her side of things, and — okay, hang on, Draco. ‘Don’t do Dark magic’ isn’t, like, a new stance of ours—”

“Memory Charms aren’t Dark,” said Hermione.

“And Polyjuice Potions are,” said Draco irritatedly. “That was third year. Neither of you minded it then.”

Harry said, “There’s a world of difference between Polyjuice and obliviating.”

“Is it? You don’t see a problem, potentially, with impersonating someone?” Hermione shrilled. “You don’t see any moral issues there? Because it feels like the difference is actually between which victims you care about. Or maybe it’s the difference between saving me and saving Padfoot—”

Harry staggered back, blinking, but swiftly retorted: “That’s not fair — the difference is you snuck around behind my back—”

“Some sneaking,” Draco retorted, “she told everyone she’d cursed the thing—”

“Exactly! Exactly, thank you — you’re not deaf, Harry! And neither is she! Did I make it sound like it was anodyne? Did she think it was a Tickling Charm? Did you?”

“I thought it was a STINGING JINX!” Harry roared. “I thought it’d make them sick! Or raise an alarm, or something! Forgive me for not guessing my best friend was going around breaking things in people’s heads—”

“Oh, grow up,” Hermione breathed, scathingly. “A Stinging Jinx? You cannot be serious.”

She tore back her sleeve and stripped the bandage from her hand. The white sheaves parted and revealed the flushed ridge of scarring on the back of her hand: I WILL NOT TELL LIES. She held it up.

“You wanted me to fight this,” she said, “with Stinging Jinxes? Is that what you want? Because the people who want to kill me—”

“I want to trust my friends! I want to be kind to them—”

“—are not using Expelliarmus and Stupefy. They’re using Killing Curses, and Dark magic, and yes, sorry, Memory Charms—”

“—I don’t want the people who follow me to do it from fear—”

“—and you want to arm soldiers with what? Moral fiber?”

“ —of what I’m going to do to them — they’re NOT SOLDIERS!” Harry roared. “They’re my friends! I don’t want people dying for me, or killing for me, or doing horrible things in my name! I never wanted any war! You want a movement, find somebody else to lead it! You do it, if you want it so bad!”

“Did you ever think,” she said, with increasing pitch, “that it’s not about what you want? Actually. That I might not spend every minute of every day thinking about how to accomplish the things that you tell me to? That I might have aims of my own? Survival, for instance?”

“I never said that. I never even implied it,” Harry said incredulously. “Hermione, when in my life have I ever been able to tell you what to do? I’ve been doing what you tell me for five years.”

“And obviously you’ve somehow convinced yourself that wasn’t a choice you made,” she snapped. “Fine. But you’re not the only one they’re going after. I’m very sorry you’re the Boy Who Lived! It isn’t the least bit fair. But the war isn’t about you!”

“I never said it was!”

“And it is rank hypocrisy for you to tell me to fight with my hands tied—”

“You’re twisting the question,” said Harry furiously. “You’re muddling everything together. You didn’t have to curse Cho because of ‘the war’.”

“If they expel me, they take my magic. What happens to a mudblood without magic? I’ll tell you. There’s a song about it, actually, they sang it once at a quidditch game. You must have heard it, you were there.”

“Hermione—”

“Everything is about the war, for me,” she said, flushed and trembling. “The war is about me. People like me, who I will never stop trying to save, whether or not you want to help me—”

Harry’s anger visibly clarified into something purer. He slackened the grip of his fists and put a step of distance between himself and Hermione, as if he were laying the stage for something to fall.

“I would do anything for you,” he said steadily. “Probably I’d obliviate someone for you, Hermione, if you asked me to. But if you’re not going to let me in on things — if you don’t care what I think of your methods, which you’re right, you don’t have to — then keep my name out of your plans. And if I somehow made you think you have to protect me — if I ever told you to, or said something that made you think it was your job — then this is me letting you off the hook.”

Static flickered subtly over the carpet at Hermione’s ankles. She was staring at Harry like she had never met him before. Ron braced at Harry’s elbow as if he might have to jump between them. Draco touched his wand and felt a strange dark cousin to nostalgia, a nauseous feeling, memory stirring under the surface of the scene.

“Protecting you has been my job since I was eleven, you idiot,” she said thickly. “Nobody else was any good at it. Nobody was half as good at it as I was.”

Harry said steadily, “That’s true of a lot of things, Hermione.”

Her composure splintered. Her jaw trembled and she gave a quick, ragged gasp of air.

“I’m sorry for what happened to Cho,” she said. “Is that what you want me to say? I never thought she would be the one I hurt. I didn’t think of what it would do to her, because I never thought it would happen. I thought I understood her. I was wrong.”

“She forgot me,” said Harry.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“She forgot everything about me. I told her things I haven’t told almost anyone, and she doesn’t remember them. She thinks we’ve only had a few dates.”

“I know, and I’m sorry, I never intended—”

“She likes me better now,” Harry said, and his voice finally cracked. “She doesn’t believe she’d have done — what she did. She swears she wouldn’t. And you know, I really don’t think — the version of her now — actually would.”

“Oh, oh no, Harry — no, she doesn’t — she just doesn’t remember—”

She took a tottering step towards him, and Ron shifted back to give them space. But Harry did not reciprocate her gesture. He kept his arms folded tightly as a tourniquet. Draco noticed Neville in the corner of his eye, watching silently from the boys’ staircase, and Daphne, with her hands crumpled over her mouth.

“You’re too smart to finish that sentence,” said Harry. “And even if you did, I wouldn’t believe you. I shouldn’t have invited her to the first meeting. It was the worst thing I ever did to her.”

Harry’s eyes drifted blearily to find him over Hermione’s shoulder. An uncomfortable prickle of attention skittered over Draco’s skin. He felt as if he were being spoken to, in some oblique way, but had no notion of what was being said.

But Harry didn’t speak to him. He said, “I wish I had—”

The portrait-door unhinged with a gravelly declaration. Draco touched his wand from instinct and turned on his heel, but it was McGonagall, her head dipped low as she emerged from the stone tunnel in the wall. Her presence invoked in the gathering of already-quiet children in a wave of breathless silence. Her eyes moved from Harry to Hermione to the shape of the congregation around them, and a twinge of something registered in her face; Draco wondered how much, if anything, of the exchange she had caught.

“The headmistress has called an assembly,” she said. “You are to follow me to the Great Hall.”

“For what purpose?” Hermione demanded. She had blocked Harry with her body, and even after seeing it was McGonagall, she did not shift. “What does she have to say? Is she going to expel us?”

“She does not take me in her confidences,” said McGonagall, radiating a dreadful type of calm. Draco felt its twin settle over him. It was out of their hands; it was out of their teachers’ hands, to that end. Everything left to happen would happen because it had to, regardless of what he did. “That said, I doubt she would call an assembly to expel you, Miss Granger, remarkable though you are.”

“But you don’t know — I mean, professor, with respect—”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Harry. He was more calm than McGonagall. Perhaps more calm than Draco. He pushed past Hermione, sidestepped Draco, and mounted the portrait-tunnel. “Whether we’re here or there, it doesn’t matter. She can expel us in any part of the castle she likes. I’m going.”

He pushed back the portrait-door. Gryffindor House came down from its tower.

There were patrolmen in the halls, chequered between squares of fleeting sunlight, as the House moved in a slow processional down the grand staircase. The other Houses had been already assembled at their tables, and watched with a sea of piercing eyes as their classmates filed through the vast doors. Impossible to say how much of it was curiosity, pity, or contempt. Absences mottled the high table: Dumbledore, Snape, Trelawney, Burbage. He tried to remember if the second two had been there at the last meal, and couldn’t.

Beneath, Umbridge had taken the podium. Patrolmen filed behind her, their bodies making the vertices of a lilac triangle. Aurors in black greatcoats on the steps, at her feet. Warrington at her elbow. When Draco turned, he saw the doors gliding shut behind Rufus Scrimgeour. The Head Auror’s scowl revealed nothing. The glare and the greatcoat reminded him terribly of Moody, which he quickly dismissed as a kind of nostalgia he could not afford.

Umbridge was smiling, not her cheerful grin of artifice, but a small, private smirk.

A sweep of the room revealed little. No one was hurt; no one was crying. Perplexion seemed to be the general mood. At the Slytherin table, Theo was missing. Draco might have found cause for alarm in that, if he had not been under the anesthetic of such dreadful calm. He found a seat at the Gryffindor table. Impossibly, he made himself sit down.

The doors closed. Umbridge cleared her throat.

“Good evening!” she said. Her voice was higher than he remembered. She seemed shorter, as well. It was fathomless how much time had passed since the Astronomy practical. “Assembled students and faculty of Hogwarts School. I stand before you to report on the events of the past few weeks, and to reassure you of your continued safety and security in these strange times.”

Hermione tensed. In Draco’s view, this was innocuous enough to begin with; Ron was frowning; Harry was watching without any kind of expression at all.

“First,” said Umbridge, “it should be understood by all that the Ministry of Magic continues to function, and to administer effective governance to the many citizens of Wizarding Britain. You may have heard rumors of the disappearance of the Minister of Magic. These are unequivocal lies. The Minister remains in office. He wishes me to convey to you all his faithful dedication to his task—”

“Liar,” spat Hermione. She did not say it quietly; several students shot her furtive looks.

“—and his ongoing determination to defeat the forces that threaten peace and security in our society. What you have heard of is nothing more than a minor staffing turnover; several members of the Ministry, and of the Wizengamot, have disappeared with the help of aurors, in order to protect themselves and their families from the Order of the Phoenix, for whom they believe they are targets. They continue to correspond with the Minister from classified locations outside of the country, and wish their children to know that they will make arrangements for their care and keeping—”

“Liar,” repeated Hermione clearly. “That’s a lie, she doesn’t know where they are.”

Draco caught her wrist. Careful.

She flexed her hand, but didn’t rebuke him.

“I’m sick of being careful.”

“—and, in light of that fact,” said Umbridge, “we are pleased to announce that Hogwarts will — for the first time in history! — remain open over the summer, to provide protection for students while the state of public order is in question. We have consulted with some of your parents — that is, those of whom we can reach by owl — to solicit their permission for this measure. Please see your Head of House after this meeting to inquire about what your parents have decided for you. In the temporary absence of our Potions Master, Slytherins should report to Mr. Warrington; and to all of you, I am very sorry for the inconvenience this may cause to your summer plans.”

A local infection of whispering was metastasizing into a hubbub. McGongall rose from her seat at the high table and was hurrying down to the podium, though to do what, he couldn’t imagine. It was not, after all, like there was anything to be done.

“Order,” said Umbridge pleasantly, as if someone had interrupted her. “There will be order! Thank you.”

“Dolores,” said McGonagall. “Dolores!”

“There is another order of business,” she continued, deaf to it. “Over the course of the spring term, the Ministry Bureau of Education has been submitting the faculty at Hogwarts to a competence review. We are happy to announce that many members have passed; Professors Snape, Sinistra, Sprout, Grubbly-Plank, and Vector will be returning next year, as will Madams Pince and Pomfrey, among other staff. The rest—”

But there was neither need nor time for her to finish. Across the Gryffindor and Ravenclaw tables the hubbub had thrown off reins of decorum and sprouted into an uproar.

“McGonagall—”

“Of course not McGonagall, she’s decent—”

“What about Flitwick? What’s wrong with him?”

“—part goblin, if you believe the rumors—”

The blood had fled McGonagall’s face.

“In summary!” Umbridge called. “If anyone would like an academic consultation, they may arrange appointments on my calendar—”

“COWARD!”

She peered at the Gryffindor table. Harry had stood up.

Draco ripped out his wand. Hermione snatched his hand down.

“Don’t.”

“You’re joking—”

“I’m not.”

“This isn’t noble, it’s suicide by bureaucrat.”

“It isn’t that simple. I think Harry knows what he’s doing.”

“Do you know what he’s doing?”

Harry was stalking up to the dais, his robes sweeping the floor behind him. Green lighting behind his glasses, white lightning on his face. His hands were empty fists.

“You’re a fucking coward.”

“Mr. Potter!”

“Potter, stop!” McGonagall wrenched herself free and moved to intercept him, but the aurors caught her again and held her back.

“Minerva McGonagall is the best teacher at this school,” shouted Harry.

McGonagall whitened. “Harry Potter,” she said, “you must sit down, now — I beg you—”

“Ten times the teacher you are, if you even call yourself that — ten times the witch, ten times the person — only you know that, don’t you? That’s the point—”

Umbridge curled her lip, and slashed her wand.

“Silencio!”

He dodged it, a quick half-step that Draco had taught him on a sunny afternoon in January, and Draco felt — something. Sharp. Not pleasant, not exactly, but close to it. Harry kept walking.

“Best teacher at this school, and you sacked her because you couldn’t push her around. Hermione Granger, best student — best student, best prefect, bravest person I ever met — and you made her apologize to you for it in her own blood. Feel good, did it? ‘When people are strong, they do great things. When they’re weak, they suffer.’ Did you feel strong when you said that? Big ups to you and your great works, professor, winning fights with teenagers. They’ll put you down in textbooks. You know Angelina Johnson? She worked for six years to make captain, and you took it away from her because you wanted me off the field. Six years. It’s quidditch. You could’ve suspended me. You won’t do that, though. You were afraid of me.”

“Ignore him,” cried McGonagall. “He’s a child. A boy. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. Look at me—”

“He is a liar and a killer,” said Umbridge, thick with contempt, quick with anger. “He has spread insurrection in these halls, and condemned his peers to suffering on his behalf. A child? Do you hear yourself? He is a snake.”

“So you are afraid of me,” said Harry, with vicious triumph. “Don’t worry, professor. Lots of people are. You think I lied — you think I killed someone — right on all counts, professor. I’ve lied to people. I tell people ten times a day that I’m hopeful, because if I only said that when I believed it, I wouldn’t have lived long enough to meet you—”

“Cortwaite! Robard! Arrest him!”

But they did not respond to Umbridge’s order; they were preoccupied holding McGonagall, who had begun resisting furiously.

“And people died because of me,” Harry continued. “Two of them before my second birthday. One more last year. Probably others I don’t know about. I rack them up. Sometimes I play a little game where I count everyone who loved them, and then I lie a little more.

“You’re angry about that? Not as much as I am. You want people to stop dying for me? Not as much as I do. You wish the other kid left that graveyard? Not as much as I do.” Harry threw himself to a halt at the foot of the dias, his robe furling around him in a brusque beat like a raven’s wing. He spread his arms.

“Do something about it,” he spat. “What are you waiting for? Dumbledore’s gone. I’m not running. Prove you’re stronger than I am.”

McGonagall gave a wavering shout of warning, which might have been No, but cut short; Robard had silenced her with a curse.

“Come on, Dolores,” said Harry. “Do something great.”

Umbridge tightened her grip on her wand. Her chest heaved.

“If you learn nothing else from me,” she said, “it will be to address your betters with respect.”

She whipped her arm. A white streak flicked from her point like a piece of rope and lashed Harry across the face. He toppled to the floor. His glasses dropped from his face and cracked on the flagstones.

Screams erupted. McGonagall threw herself against the aurors’ hold, bellowing. Hermione had to fling herself over the table to stop Ron from erupting from his seat, and even that did not stop him from shouting profanities.

Harry scrambled upright. Blood dribbled from a short, deep cut crossing his lips, staining the whites of his teeth.

He spit, and scarlet splashed on the floor. Then he swiped his hand across his mouth, smearing the blood wide over his cheek, and grinned at her. He picked up his glasses, carefully, and settled them on his face. The cracked lens fractured his left eye into a fractal.

“I will not tell lies,” he said.

And he shifted, with a staggering half-step, into a dueling stance. For once, his form was flawless.

A shout pierced the air. Umbridge’s eyes flit with agitation across the hall, her wand aloft. The assembled students of Hogwarts School reached a frenetic chatter like a swelling cloud of hornets, but the shout came from Gryffindor — Ginny had climbed out of her seat and stepped up on the table. She struggled briefly to balance, with her arm in a sling, but the Creevey boys caught and braced her up.

“The Minister is a servant of Lord Voldemort,” she shouted. “I will not tell lies.”

Umbridge’s wand snapped in her direction. Draco reached for his hip. He did not have time to draw himself. Ron swept the dishes from his place and climbed up on it with a carillon of flying silver. Umbridge’s wand darted from Ginny to accuse him, even as he spoke:

“Viktor Krum died trying to save Harry. He was murdered. I will not tell lies.”

Umbridge’s eyes narrowed. She opened her mouth again. There was a stirring at another table.

Cedric Diggory dispatched himself elegantly from his seat, stood in the aisle, and unclipped his Head Boy badge. He set it down on the table, and said calmly: “I believe Harry. He’s my friend. I will not tell lies.”

Several of his housemates stood up with him, without speaking. Umbridge’s wand jumped again, though it faltered, it seemed, to accuse Cedric. But then it had to correct course to meet Neville, who stumbled and almost tripped his way from the bench, but righted himself. “I will not t-t-tell lies,” he said, and his voice was first among seven. Then it was first among nine, and fifteen, and twenty. Lavender Brown wrenched up her sleeve and clambered on the table. She put her hand in the air, and her bandages fluttered free, stark white against her tawny skin.

The Gryffindor table rattled as silverware scattered and fell on the stone. It was hard now to hear what was being said by whom, for it vanished into indistinctness under the deafening unison of those saying it, and then the litany, which was spat and shouted and lifted wordlessly on scarred fists: I will not tell lies.

At the Slytherin table, Daphne stood. She didn’t say anything, but she was shaking so badly that one could hardly expect her to. Someone tried to drag her back down again, and she threw their hand off.

Harry lifted his wand at Umbridge. “To the ground,” he said, barely audible at a distance. “Head to foot. Wands—”

Draco leapt free of the bench, moved by the sheer electric freight of his alarm. He was mad. He would die. “POTTER!”

The first patrolman threw a spell at Ginny, and she parried it with a form-perfect whirl of her wand; and with a wave like a black tide, the crowd spilled from the tables and thronged the doors, tipping the knife-edge from agitation into a riot. The Gryffindor table shrieked and listed onto one side like a barricade, sending a wave of people hurtling to the ground and scrambling to clear away.

I will not tell lies— I will not tell lies—

Screams crested. Their echoes fulminated like harpies in the vaulted ceiling. Spells flickered against the vast slab of oak.

The aisles filled with dark cloaks like the welling bottom of a sinking ship. McGonagall did something forceful with her elbow and the auror holding her screamed, clutching his wrist; she ripped out her wand and lashed the other in the face with a spell that knocked him flat. Scrimgeour was roaring orders. Stunners and Petrification Charms fired in all directions. But there were too many children, and too few aurors, besides which, it was difficult for the patrolmen to tell which students were fighting and which were fleeing. Tracey Davis made a dash for the doors and was caught by a patrolman who shoved her back into the crowd. Two of her housemates flew past her and tried to unbolt the doors,

Draco vaulted the table and darted through the crowd. He narrowly made it to Harry before he was trampled by a wave of students, hauling him up by the collar. They were lost in the crowd, thronged on either side by a hellish mass of shouting bodies.

Ginny landed a curse on a patrolman who held Lavender by the hair. She backhanded a pitch-perfect Flipendo into his partner and knocked him into the wall, but his partner’s Incarcerous threw her down in a tangle of rope; Ron uppercut him into the wall, and she wriggled free. The patrolman staggered into George’s Tarantallegra, and also George’s fist. The two of them hauled her upright, and with a war cry she took a running leap onto the back of a patrolman holding Seamus.

A bolt the size of a redwood trunk groaned into place over the doors, which sealed shut. Students surged up against it in a lemming-like wave.

The current shoved Draco against a wall of bodies and knocked the breath from his lungs. He gripped Harry’s collar and shoved him down in time for a curse to shoot over their heads.

Hermione shoved through the crowd and latched to Draco’s shoulder. “Doors,” she shouted, and he read it from her lips, hearing nothing over the crowd. “Have to get out— get everyone away from the aurors—”

He pushed through. The bodies were thick, thrusting errantly and violently like riptide, and he had to use jinxes to pry them apart as often as not. Curses landed indiscriminately. The inability to aim meant it was impossible to throw spells of much severity without fear of hitting someone on the same side. It was ambitious, at that, to think of hitting anyone at all. In the crush they were too close to even see where the aurors were before they were on top of them. Draco was flung by a surge of the crowd into Auror Cortwaite’s back, and barely got his wand up in time to parry a jinx. But it did not matter: Angelina leapt from the crowd and tackled Cortwaite from the other side, dragging him into another skirmish.

McGonagall and Umbridge were dueling on the dais — Draco watched, for a half-second longer than he should have, as a flurry of razor-beaked birds erupted from Umbridge’s wand, and shattered into fine red mist at the sweep of McGonagall’s arm; another sweep, and the pearls at Umbridge’s throat began to writhe and contract, tightening around the folds of her throat as she clawed at them — but then the crowd hid them. Beneath the dais, patrolmen had organized roughly into a formation, and were pressing a phalanx down the center aisle. Students pooled at the end of the room and pushed up against the doors and there were cries of pain from those being crushed against the wood. Hermione shouted something he could not hear and took off weaving through the crowd. She wriggled through the pack of bodies and he followed her into it, into the crush where the screaming was loudest and the pressure of hot thrashing bodies made it hard to fill his lungs.

No room. No air. No chance, no space, no breath for a spell. Even so, Hermione had forced herself close to the bolt and with her wand outstretched tried: “Wingardium—”

The steel bolt rattled, but she was jostled hard, and the spell broke.

“Damn, I can’t — it needs concentration, I can’t hold still enough—”

The crowd surged. The doors gave an earsplitting groan against the bolt. Draco shoved back against someone crushing him to the floor. “Ready a Shield Charm, then.”

“Why?”

“Because this isn’t a precision spell,” he said, and cast Bombarda Maxima.

Hermione’s shield flickered to life over the crowd just before the spell collided with the doors, and the world whited out.

A BOOM shattered the air. Splinters the size of spears exploded from the wood and thundered on an evanescent warping silver shield that extended over the crowd, unbelievably wide, ricocheting them into the walls and into the windows. The ancient slabs of oak flew outward from the Hall and tumbled on the staircase, dislodging a pair of sconces and clipping the chandelier, which swung wildly, dropping a helix of molten wax. The force drove a loud thunder of portraits from their hooks and sent them sailing down on the stairs. Students flooded out of the Great Hall and surged into the entrance, out into the courtyard, moving like one organism of a thousand feet.

The crowd carried them. There was no choice of where to move — no one was choosing; it was the crowd that decided, as one, on its freedom. In the entrance hall it whipped around to the courtyard and splashed against the grand staircase, and it was there that Draco broke out of the current, hauling Hermione by her waist over the balustrade, and following her with a neat jump. Harry and Ron were still behind in the Great Hall, fighting patrolmen; they were shoulder to shoulder with Ginny and the twins, five of them on two patrolmen, and making quick work of it. Ginny caught a curse for Harry on her wandtip and shoved him down to whip it back at a patrolman over his head; he rolled to his feet and rebounded a battery of fire against a Shield Charm.

Hermione gave a cry and dropped to her knees. He caught her.

“Hermione—”

“Fine! I’m fine, I think it’s sprained — listen. We have to get to the headmaster’s office. It’s the only place the Floo is open, we can call the Order—”

“Everyone else is still in there—”

“With aurors,” she gasped. “Maybe you could duel an auror — maybe, on his own — but we can’t, and there’s five of them, plus patrolmen. We need help. Draco, we need — we need adults.”

Her chest was heaving. Her eyes were wild. He took her hand, wordlessly, and ran.

They rounded the great landing and sped up the grueling courses of stairs, racing at a speed that rattled the floorboards and made portraits cry out. The sounds of the hall faded behind them as the stories disappeared beneath their feet.

The Transfiguration atrium loomed ahead of them like an empty cathedral. They were no more than a few turns from the Headmaster’s Tower and passing under the wide open space, carved from white stone, when the call came: “Stop.”

Cassius Warrington blocked the path forward. His Ministry cloak had been discarded. The indigo waistcoat highlighted the broad span of his torso, thick and imposing, and gold glinted at his shoulders and chest. His sleeves, which swelled from his shoulders like blooms of lilac, were in the process of being uncuffed and neatly rolled back. He fastened one at his elbow and smiled at Draco, disarmingly.

“We really have to stop meeting like this,” he said.

Draco pointed his wand at him, and it only made Cassius laugh, softly. The room seemed to shrink to the size of the two-foot stripe of space between them.

“Go down two floors,” he said quietly. “Secret staircase by the prefect’s bathroom. That corridor takes you around the long way to the bottom of Headmaster’s Tower. If you run, you can beat whoever he’s sent there.”

She was predictably furious. “If you think I’m leaving you here,” she hissed, “to fight him alone—”

“Then come back with Alastair Moody. Two-on-one is only an advantage until one of his friends shows up.”

Cassius tapped his cheek, thumbing the line of a scar Draco gave him. “You can always run,” he said, “but it’s less sporting.”

Hemrione gripped Draco’s arm. Her curls had been knocked free of her braid, and hung over her face like a lace veil. Behind them, her dark eyes were large and locked on him, expression unfamiliar. She looked as if someone held a sword to her throat.

“Don’t lose,” she said unevenly. “Just — beat him, will you? Don’t lose. Don’t you dare.”

He said, “I live to please.”

“Draco—”

He kissed her, quickly, to stop her from saying something that would convince him to lose his nerve. It wouldn’t be difficult, so it was critical not to let her.

Movement stirred in his periphery. Hermione screamed, “ Draco look—”

He twisted. The spell whistled past his head and shattered a piece of the cloister wall.

His nerves seared. Draco turned, slowly, and replaced his foot on the duelist’s line. Advanced a step. Carefully put Hermione’s ragged breathing from his mind. She cast a searing stare at him over her shoulder and then ran from the atrium, vanishing around the corridor.

Cassius smirked. A lock of golden hair wilted from its coif and fell over his eyes, which glinted with a clear and impersonal malice, the color of pondscum. With his hair grown long and tied back, he resembled someone else. Someone from a painting Draco had seen once, or a memory of a memory, twice removed.

Draco felt a wave of familiar loathing.

He pushed it down, taking a moment of pause, and studied Cassius.

The boy’s form was stiff, formal, and perfect. He was also taller, broader, and three years older. But in the Triwizard Tournament, he’d cheated on his preparations in advance, doing strategy by committee, and in consequence, his moves were rarely interesting. Everything he did was appropriate. Textbook.

The boils from last year hadn’t healed completely. At close range, pockmarks ran up the sides of Cassius’s face. They were the kinds of scars that healed slow and painful. Cassius was an eighteen-year-old with battle scars, and Draco had put them there.

They must have healed too easily, because Cassius had already forgotten the lesson of them: that he was a weak, clumsy bag of perforable organs, held upright by the mercy of dangerous men.

Say ‘thank you, Cassius.’ You’re rather clever, after all; you only need to learn to mind your manners.

Draco threw a curse.

With the whip-crack of a counterspell, Cassius deflected. Then he lunged, and they dueled.

Stones scattered around their feet as they met spell for spell. Chains crisscrossing the air between them in jagged lines, each one perfect and none of them landing. Draco parried, dodged, struck, and parried again, scampering up and down the duelist’s line, shifting his weight elegantly from foot to foot. He threw Stupefy on a backhanded lash and rolled under a spell that sheared a chunk from the wall, snapping a pipe. Water erupted in a high spout and fountained down in a jagged line over the corridor, splashing dark stains over the pale stones.

Draco whipped his wand and froze the spout into ice. He shattered it and swept the swarm of broken shards at Cassius, who melted and siphoned them away with a graceful sweep of his arm.

Cassius moved with the grace of a dancer, every pivot and arch of his wrist a thing of beauty, but he was not a duelist and his body didn’t know the things a duelist’s did. He knew it the instant Cassius ducked a curse by stepping off the duelist’s line.

If there had been a piste, the match would have been over.

There wasn’t a piste. In many ways, it wasn’t a match.

The air stung with the sulfuric, woodsmoke-aftertaste of magic. Mist swirled, sliced through by darts of color. Thoughts slowed and retreated in respectful observance of the body as it did its work. Power thrummed in his arm, moving up his hand in a warm current, loosed in bright hot bursts with each gesture and flick of his wrist. It was action with purpose. He wasn’t a person straining in the hash of counterposed duties; he was a thing doing exactly and only as it should. Without thought, without doubt, without question. He was glorious, and without pain or fatigue or any of time’s other quarrelsome fetters, he could be glorious forever. He could live forever, and never lose.

He let Cassius whip a jinx sideways at his uncovered flank. He folded himself sideways, pivoting his back foot around, and sliced his wand up in a backhand arc. He opened his mouth, and suspended in instinct, out flew the first spell to reach his tongue. He didn’t know what it did, so he took a guess: when forming the intention, he grasped the magic and thrust it towards the purpose of winning.

Maybe I’ll tell my father to take you on as a secretary. Might even let you have robes, like a real witch.

Cassius gave a strangled cry and clutched his temples. He staggered to the side, off-balance, so far off his line that Draco could have hit him in three different places before he lowered his hand. In the split second before he registered it, Draco thought: Technical concession — the duel was over, he had stepped off-piste — not that it mattered, not that either of them cared.

He twitched back his wand in suspicion. He hadn’t cursed him.

“Warrington,” he said warily. “What is this?”

Cassius gripped his hair in his fists, eyes screwed shut. “What did you do?” he gasped. “Malfoy, what are you doing — what are you—?”

“I’m not doing anything.”

He tore his hands from his face. There was fear in his eyes, terrible and sharp, such as Draco had never seen, and certainly not directed at himself.

“What are you doing to me?” he mumbled. “What’s happening? Why did you—”

He crumpled his eyes shut, groaning.

“Warrington—?”

“Why are we here? Why — why are we dueling?”

“Warrington, what — is happening to you?”

“I don’t know,” he snarled. “I don’t know! What are you doing here? You — you’re Malfoy.” He hesitated, uncertainty leaving its telltale signs in the slackening of his wand-grip. “You’re Draco Malfoy. That’s your name, you’re — why aren’t you wearing the right tie?”

“The right … tie?”

He was wearing a red one. He stared at Cassius, who appeared to not have the slightest idea what he had said wrong.

“No,” said Cassius, frowning. “You’re… you’re not Slytherin, that’s right, you’re…”

Draco said slowly, “What’s the last thing you remember?”

“I remember Pansy,” said Cassius, blinking. “Something… something about Pansy. Something important. She had to see me — I’m sorry, who are you?”

Draco stared at him. “Draco Malfoy,” he said, after a pause. Then he threw Stupefy at him.

It struck Cassius without resistance. He was too far off his line to parry, and too bemused to think of parrying anyway. He went down immediately, with a cold hard sound when his skull struck the floor, and Draco stepped over him on his way through the atrium.

It was an incredulous prospect to him that Pansy had managed a Memory Charm of such force it was capable of structural damage to Cassius’s mind, but he shelved his doubts for later consideration. The sound of shouting swelled around him and faded as he stalked through the corridors,

The gryphon was open when he arrived. At the top of the stairs, the doors were open, and there was a voice coming from inside. Umbridge’s voice.

“… did you call? Tell me!” A slap. “Was it Dumbledore? Or one of his spy cells?”

“You’re going to be sacked.” Hermione. Her voice was clear, and gave no evidence of being in pain. “Assuming the Minister comes back like you think he will. A riot like this? With aurors and patrolmen? Even Dumbledore never let it get that bad. And you’re no Dumbledore.”

He stepped silently into the doorway. The scene fell at once into full and grotesque clarity. Hermione knelt by the Floo hearth, where green embers still glittered in the ash. Umbridge gripped her in place by a tight handful of hair, in which was also clenched Hermione’s wand. The other hand braced a wand at Hermione’s neck. A ring of swollen red welts hung around Umbridge’s throat where her pearls had been, and blood eddied under her nostrils.

“You assume the Minister will blame his servant, instead of the vermin?” Umbridge hissed. “You believe there will be no consequences for you? The grand architect of the riot?”

“Oh, there will be,” said the grand architect of the riot, with a faint smile. “But the worst you can do is expel me. The rest of the students — what will you do? You can’t expel them all, you won’t have a school.”

Umbridge’s expression waxed at once from strained to glorious.

“I see,” she said. “You think that being expelled makes you safe. You think you have nothing else to lose!” She cocked her head and smiled, eyes twinkling. “But Miss Granger — do you not understand? Students who are expelled do not have permission to carry wands. And without a wand, you are not a witch.” She lifted her own wand, a short, stubby blade of a thing with a jeweled hilt. “Let this be your last lesson as a student of Hogwarts.”

Draco threw a curse.

It was a wordless, angry bolt of a thing, and he did not quite know what it would have done if it hit her; but it didn’t, for Umbridge jerked with surprising dexterity to parry it. She wrenched Hermione in front of her, a full-body shield; her head was wrenched back over Umbridge’s shoulder, baring the clean arc of her throat. There would be a dozen ways to jinx her if Hermione weren’t there — a wand pointed away from him and all the time in the world to choose his spells, in another fight he would have dropped her by now — but that fight wasn’t this one and in the time it took his spell to hit her she could whisper whatever curse she wanted into Hermione’s throat. Diffindo or Defodio or Confringo or anything that was flashing through his head in a carousel of green, green, green.

Green light. Green light, and the sound of a body on the floor, and not her and not me. A year ago in a different office than this one. Green light, every beat of his heart sent a new lance of pain through his body. Green light, green light, and his mind was a spinning coin, oscillating between two points in time. Green light, and Hermione was twitching with short high little whines of protest, each one a new screw driven into his memory to ache. Green light and Barty Crouch was staring at him from the corner of Umbridge’s office. Green light and Hermione took his place. Then back again. The past strobed into the present.

The smell of smoke and ash and the coppery tang of Floo powder rich on the air. He couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t a metaphor. His lungs were seizing, forcing a series of smaller, shallow breaths. His pulse quickened.

He raised his wand in desperation, but there was nowhere to point it that wouldn’t hit Hermione, nowhere that would be sure. It was an unacceptable risk. No clear shot. It flickered over her body and finally swerved to angle at the floor, the only place it wouldn’t hurt her.

Umbridge jabbed Hermione’s throat, and she choked. He caught himself moving forward and froze.

“Draco,” said Hermione, high and light with faith and pain, and it simply, effortlessly, broke him apart.

Focus. A prehensile knife. Something useful.

“Your wand,” said Umbridge. “Drop it.”

“Let her go,” he said. He didn’t hear his own voice, and he had no idea how it sounded. It came from the bottom of his chest, and it felt like gravel being rolled in his lungs. Hermione went still.

“Drop it first,” said Umbridge.

He should have been watching Umbridge. He wasn’t. He looked at Hermione as if there was nothing else in the room to look at. If he looked away from her the green light would flash her out of existence, or perhaps both of them, and then at least this would be the last thing he would see. He drank in every part of her he could: the deep kindling brown of her eyes, the wild cowl of her hair, the scrapes and ash-stains on her heart-shaped face.

“Hermione,” he said. Nothing in him was not on fire. If he had the magic or the power he would have stopped time, and stood there for a hundred years, just looking at her. A hundred years, to start.

“Draco,” she said “it’s going to be fine. Don’t give her your wand. Go find Harry. She’s bluffing.”

He didn’t move.

“Go! It’s your turn,” she snapped, and tripped a bit on it, but pressed on quickly: “Get him and take the Weasleys, they’ll help you. I’ll be fine — I’ll be fine! She can’t do anything, now, there’s no point—”

Bloody and ashen and furiously begging him to leave her in a torturer’s hands, there she was: Hermione Granger, hurricane wild, terribly brave, the worst thing that had ever happened to him, and the best.

I love you, he might have said then. I have loved you for years. I have loved you like I have loved no other thing on this earth; that is, almost selflessly. If I could have been selfless for anyone, it would have been for you.

His breath came back. He held out his wand, point-down, and dropped it. Hermione gave a cry.

“Let her go.”

Umbridge wrapped Hermione’s hair around her hand and knelt to pick it up, dragging Hermione down to her knees with her.

“Pick it up,” Umbridge ordered. She wedged her wand into Hermione’s throat and shook her by the hair. “Grip out! No tricks! Pick it up and offer me the grip.”

Hermione flashed him a furious look and bent down.

“Hermione—”

“Don’t,” she said, low. Her mouth was drawn tight. She swallowed against Umbridge’s point.

Then she grabbed his wand and slammed her head back into Umbridge’s face.

It sounded like someone stepped on a bee’s nest. Cartilage crunched. He hadn’t heard someone scream like that since Neville caught Ginny’s Bat-Bogey on accident, and it had been accompanied by the same whole-body flinch of pain. Umbridge keeled back and fell over clutching her face. Hermione wrenched her hair free and tossed up his wand, which he took easily from the air, like a clean chaser’s play.

Hermione dove out of the way. Umbridge barely hauled up her wand in time to cast Shield before the first curse exploded against it.

“Malfoy,” she cried thickly. Blood dribbled thick from her lips. “Stand down! Stand down!”

Another curse pounded down on the shield, which fractured briefly into scintillations and refused.

“Stand down! I order you — I command you—”

“See, I thought I might find you two here.”

Draco twisted sharply, but he already knew who it was. It was with resignation, and no small share of vicious anger, that he turned to see Theodore materialize from the shadows of the doorway, his wand held lightly and pointed downward at his side.

Draco pointed his wand at him. Hermione arrowed hers at Umbridge. The tension stretched thin and translucent.

Slowly, Theo raised his offhand.

“Drop your wand,” Draco snarled.

Theo smiled wryly. “You first.”

“Drop it or use it.” This challenge was of questionable wisdom, after he’d fought two duels already, but he was in no mood to prevaricate.

The corner of Theo’s mouth twitched. With an offensively languid lack of urgency he nudged the door shut with his heel, and rolled his robe off his shoulders. The movement revealed that his robes were drenched up to to knees in water; Draco narrowed his eyes, but Theo interrupted the thought. “Interesting as that would be,” he said, “I’m not in the mood for a mess. By the way, do you even know who’s winning, down there? You cut out pretty quick.”

“What do you want?” said Hermione harshly.

He laughed, lightless, more of an acknowledgement of a good question than a show of pleasure. “Actually,” he said, “I wanted a word with you, Granger. You’re a hard woman to get alone, what with your pack of guard dogs.”

“I’m a little preoccupied, now,” said Hermione.

“Yes,” he sighed, glancing at Umbridge, “so it appears. You’ve already called in the cavalry, I suppose?”

“As if I’d tell you,” she scoffed.

“Just checking. I want to know how much time I have.”

“Theodore,” gasped Umbridge, heady with relief. “Help me. Apprehend the boy. I will take the girl to the Ministry, to fetch more aurors, and we will take Potter together.”

Theo’s smile stiffened and turned brittle like rotted wood. “You know,” he said, “I don’t mean to be a pill, but I’m getting really sick lately of people giving me orders.”

He pointed his wand at her. She went as still as a mouse bathed in wandlight.

“Ladies first,” he said, and looked at Hermione. Hardly a beat of hesitation passed before she pivoted, with a cool fearlessness in the square of her shoulders, and fired a jinx that shattered Umbridge’s shield.

The duel was short and brutal. It could not have been otherwise. With three against one, even an adult, it didn’t matter. Hermione tossed a snare of ropes at her ankles, flinging Umbridge back against the hearth, dropping a baptism of broken porcelain around her shoulders. Theo flicked her weak countercurses out of the air with an almost bored assertion of the wrist. But Draco was faster than either of them. He batted away her Confringo, blowing out the window in a shatter of glass he barely heard. He sent three of Narcissa’s favorite curses in a battery up the side of her guard and sent her lurching against the bureau, drove her into the corner, and disarmed her.

The taste of blood filtered into his mouth, blotting out the ash. His heartbeat was slowing, or perhaps that was time dilating, offering him time to choose what he wanted to do. So he considered her, twining his wand between his fingers in a slow, pendulous pattern.

Umbridge wailed, shriveling into the corner. Her robes were stained and ripped, and her hair was a mousy thicket. Tears and blood and pain turned her face into a wet, sticky crumple of a thing, her nose bent badly, weeping blood and mucus down the purple silk of her robes. She really was a small person. It had never been so apparent before.

He cast Stupefy, and she slumped to the ground: a dropped puppet in rags of bloodstained tyrian.

He could do anything to her, now. The possibilities seemed to weigh physically in his wand-hand. He didn’t precisely like the way it felt.

“What are you thinking?” It was Theo at his shoulder, startlingly close. He looked at Draco with disinterested curiosity. “I need her fairly out of commission, if you don’t mind. We don’t have to kill her, but she shouldn’t be anywhere close to lucid. Hey, Granger, how about a Memory Charm?”

She threw him a sneer.

“No? Come on. Surely she deserves it more than Chatty Chang.”

“Fuck you,” she said, with a disgusted dignity. “Do your own dirty work.”

“Fine. I will. More to the point.” He muscled Draco out of the way and grabbed Hermione’s arm, tugged it when she tried to throw him off. “Listen. When you cursed Chang, how did you do it?”

“Let go of me — what?”

“How do you stop the memory cascade?”

Hermione stared at him for a moment, redolent with revulsion.

“I didn’t. Is that what you want to hear? I didn’t manage to stop it. I botched the spell. That’s why she lost the whole year. Now let go of me—”

“Merlin, I don’t care if it was your personal best. I want your method.”

“Why should I tell you? Look it up yourself—”

“I tried. Hogwarts doesn’t teach them. Raises the question of where you learned them, but I’ve seen the Malfoy library, so I’m not entirely out of ideas.”

She pried his hand from her arm. “Get off of me. I would be doing incalculably more damage to the world,” she snapped, “by helping you learn to cast a Memory Charm—”

“He’s already done it,” said Draco. “To Cassius Warrington.”

Theo closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Landing on some basement reservoir of forbearance, he opened his eyes and turned to Draco.

“Where is he now?” he asked. “Seventh year? Sixth?”

“He asked me for my name.”

“Fuck,” said Theo, brightly. He turned back to Hermione. “Let’s try again. Granger: memory cascade. Briefly.”

Her expression shaded from wariness to pity, but suddenly sharpened back to contempt. “If I knew how to modify memory retroactively,” she said, “do you really think I would have let Cho stay like this?”

“Does that mean you wouldn’t?” He paused. “Okay. Sure, you wouldn’t. Let’s just — where, supposing you had to learn—”

“Why did you mess with his memory in the first place?” she demanded.

“To protect Daphne Greengrass,” said Draco, “from being reported to the Ministry as a lycanthrope.”

Theo smiled in a way that was part flinch. His face was bright with exertion, dark hair washed gray with dust, and his eyes glittered with an electric, glassy panic.

“You should leave the country, by the way,” he said, apropos of nothing. “As soon as you can. I mean weeks, not months. Take whoever you can, and go as soon as you can. Don’t tell your friends where you go. Don’t tell anybody.”

“Have you lost your mind? What are you talking about?”

“Probably. Old news. Tell Daphne,” though he struggled palpably to say her name, like it was a presumption, or an offense— “tell her I. Tell her — never mind. She got Pansy’s letter.”

“She did,” said Draco warily. The hollows under his eyes could hold seas. “When’s the last time you slept?”

“Train ride to Hogwarts. Nineteen-ninety-one. Slept like a log. Would you please piss off? Go stop your pals from blowing up any more of my school.”

“Theodore, I don’t know it’s a good idea—”

Hermione was interrupted by a cry from outside the broken window.

A large red bird with glittering wings, streaked in gold, sailed past them, did a turn around the headmaster’s tower, and flew out of sight.

She clutched at Draco’s arm. “Dumbledore’s coming,” she breathed. “That’s Fawkes. His familiar.”

“And my cue,” said Theo. He fetched his robe from the ground and swept it around his shoulders. It was too large for him, and Draco wondered how much he was eating. “You were right,” he called back. “In Hogsmeade. There are still choices.”

Even by his standards, this was a strange parting. The boy melted into the shadows beyond the door.

“I don’t understand him,” said Hermione. In the aftermath of the fight, finally at liberty to stand at ease, he studied her: there were fingerprints on her throat and bits of blood freckled over her face. “Daphne made it sound like she doubted he even remembered her.”

“I’m not sure that Daphne understands him, either.” He felt weary. He braced himself against the wall and tried to focus. The sore hollow feeling of exhausted magic took up gnawing on his bones. He could not contemplate seeing the others, the full Defense Club, and beginning the inevitable count of injuries. “The Order will be here any minute, if they aren’t already. You should go meet with them. I’ll watch Umbridge. See that she stays Stunned.”

She looked at him and frowned. “No,” she said.

“You’ll want to make sure the others are alright.”

“I will. But I’m going to stay with you, at least until the Order comes.”

She sat down, her knees drawn up to her chest, and touched the floor beside her. “You have a cut on your face. Come here, I’ll heal it.”

“I mean it. Last chance. Going once.”

“Just sit down, would you?”

He sat down. As soon as his weight left his feet he groaned, and a pain kicked up in his left side. One of the jinxes must have caught him. He hadn’t noticed.

“You’re hurt.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re in pain, listen to you. Pull up your shirt, I’ll heal that, too.”

“There are easier ways of getting my shirt off.”

“You’re not allowed to flirt until you’re healed.”

“I’m allowed to flirt with you whenever I want. It’s in the contract.”

She snickered, and it drew a twitch from the corner of his mouth. Her wand left a warm radiant patch on his abdomen, and he rolled his shirt back down over the fading bruise. “That’s the last time I sign something without reading it,” she said.

“It was highly out of character. I assume it’s because I’m irresistible. Is the blood yours?”

“What blood?”

He reached out and thumbed away some of it on her temple. She pressed her face into his palm, briefly, and he let it linger.

“Some of it,” she said. “I hit my head when I was dueling her. Reckon there’s a cut.”

“Show me.”

She obligingly bent her head forward. A dark rivulet sprouted from between her curls. He rested his wand against her scalp, cast Episkey , and it sealed over. When he lowered his wand to her neck, she bent her head back, giving him more access to the pale column of her throat.

The marks faded at the touch of magic, though not completely. Hermione sighed in relief and rubbed her neck.

Slowly her head keeled to one side, and came to rest on his shoulder. Her face turned and burrowed into his side. He slipped his arm around her waist, turned his face into her hair, and closed his eyes. He could rest. He wouldn’t wonder if he slept for a hundred years.

The Order found them that way, by and by — alone, with their heads braced together, in the wreckage of the headmaster’s office.

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-In the interests of full disclosure, this chapter would not have been posted without bluebellandpie’s “Greenhouse Seven,” which was the bright point in my week and month and also a lot of the time when I couldn’t work on this fic. I can’t tell you how happy it made me, and still makes me, every time I open it. So: thank you, wonderful author.

-Happy fourth anniversary to this fic! Belatedly! I can’t believe it’s been four whole years, my God.

-I apologize again for the delay; the excuses I have are neither novel nor interesting, but they are mundane, and iterative. Sometimes I have good writing weeks, and good writing months; sometimes, the opposite. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting!

-I have written this chapter, from end to end, probably three or four times since its conception. It has fought me tooth and nail every part of the way.

-Next chapter title: “The Golden Hours.” To be published as soon as I can get my shit together, which will HOPEFULLY be much sooner than the last time.

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