Chapter 83: Toujours
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Emerging from the pensieve, he found the study drenched in dawn’s soggy blues. Waking brought a moment of bewilderment as he struggled to place himself in space and time. It helped when Hermione stirred beside him, groaning. By appearance, she might have slept for two weeks or not at all; a coronet of bristling curls hung shaggy in her face, and the bruises under eyes had grown fresh rings of ash. She looked completely terrible. Tenderness cut him in the ribs. He sat up, and caught his reflection in the blown mirrors of her pupils: hair mussed, collar askew, but sixteen and recognizably himself.
It was a relief. For a moment he’d doubted what he would see.
“Hey,” she said hoarsely.
She made a bleary grab for him before remembering, apparently, what had happened to them, and then she mastered herself and sat on her knees and simply looked at him. “My head’s killing me,” she said. “I feel — hungover, rather, but without any of the fun.”
The voice that came out of him was dry and rusted. “How would you know what that feels like?”
“I have a concept,” she said. “Lavender’s had one, and she’s a devoted imagist. Are you alright?”
“Not very.” He closed his eyes and braced his forehead on his knuckles, waiting for the headache to abate. His synapses felt overheated. He had overtaxed the system, and the alarms drummed insistently on his skull. Somehow he found the wits to say, “I’m sorry I made you do that.” In the double scrutiny of daylight and retrospect the decision seemed far more unconscionably selfish; not with respect to his mother, but to Hermione, about whom his mother’s life had reported nothing kind.
“Don’t be stupid, you didn’t make me do anything,” she said immediately. “You asked me, and I agreed. You didn’t know what was in her memories.”
“I knew it wouldn’t be pleasant.”
“Yes, hence the point of me coming,” she said, and her irritation helped his headache by spawning a second, smaller headache to duel it. “I knew it wouldn’t be pleasant, either, I’d met the woman before. And having done it I can’t say it was, but Draco — she wasn’t my mother.”
“You—” He winced around the snag in his throat, and exhaled until the air flowed relatively clean. His tongue throbbed dry and fat between his teeth and he could not fathom how pathetic it was to ask her for anything, after that, having had the audacity to ask at all. “You’re alright, then?”
Hermione gave a high, uneasy laugh, and he watched in a pained daze as she crawled over and kissed him, quite businesslike, on the cheek. It had the quality of someone trying to stamp her opinion through the skin. “Of course I’m alright,” she said. “I could have lived quite happily without seeing Snape as a teenager. And I found your teenaged father uncanny, in an uncomfortable way, he does look rather like you, only with the wrong smile, and gestures, and posture, and— anyway. But I’m going to be fine. I have a hundred questions about what happened, and in a moment I’m going to run and get a pen to write them all down, and then I’m going to have a fairly good time badgering you about it.”
It had every appearance of honesty. She could not, in truth, be trusted to foreclose any statement for tact. He took comfort in this, and kissed her. She said: “Mm,” and let him, a bit, before pulling back and wobbling to her feet. She extended her hand, and he used it to pull himself up.
“You should rest,” she said. “I doubt skimming forty years of memory constitutes adequate sleep hygiene.”
Exhaustion reared up to affirm that she was correct. He suppressed it and smoothed his hair back from his face. “The guest room should be ready for you,” he said. “You can take my bed, if it isn’t. I have to speak to Snape.”
She opened her mouth to ask about what, but thought better of it. “Yes,” she said, “of course,” and: “Come find me. After.”
The servants pointed him in the direction of the dining-room. Snape hunched at the right hand of the table’s head. He was dissembling a plate of toast and sausages with the swift carelessness of the starving.
Draco sat down opposite and reached for the coffee. Snape watched him over the surgical decapitation of a toast point.
On the distant trees, a yellow luster spread, filming the pale green leaves at the top. Sweet green air whispered through the high windows. The drapes bucked gently, like breaking crests of seafoam.
Snape’s jaw worked ruthlessly on a bit of fat. Recognizable in his homely, bone-gaunt stare were all the ingredients of his adolescent face, veined with more creases of age than his years would rightly give him, a long jaw, a crooked slash of a nose that, with hindsight’s knowledge, must have been broken at some point after his fourteenth birthday. Even staring, his eyes twitched iterantly to the exits, neither of which Snape had placed behind his back.
Draco sipped his coffee. Snape waited.
“Will you go back to the school?” said Draco. His voice was still rough from the pensieve.
“For a time.”
“And then?”
“I will go where I am needed,” he said. “I have a few talents left besides spycraft.”
“I assume that means hunting horcruxes.”
“The Dark Lord will begin moving them, soon,” agreed Snape, reaching for the coffee. “The ones he can locate. It will be hard for him to judge what I knew of their whereabouts, and safest to insure them all against me. If so, perhaps my years of labor will not have been entirely laid to waste.”
“You might take care, with that,” said Draco flatly. “He’ll be seeking to punish you. My aunt implied death was preferable to his methods.”
Snape kindly ignored his sentimentality. “I have some experience moving without notice,” he said, “and I have my headings. Albus tells me that Potter has at least a rudimentary sense of the Dark Lord’s location, which, if exploited, may help him atone for the consequences of his recklessness.”
“I thought he wanted Potter to Occlude.”
“That was his strategy a year ago. Your mother volunteered to me her opinion that the channel between Potter’s mind and the Dark Lord’s may not operate at a conscious level.”
“Why?” said Draco sharply. He settled his cup in his saucer. “What is it that happened to him, that night at the Potters’? My mother showed me the memory of her death. Father said that Lily Evans drew a pentagram—”
Snape sat back in his chair, stone-faced.
“—used her own heartsblood, completely anathema, midnight on Samhain. I understand the mechanics. But runes can’t hold detailed enchantments. Even an Oxford master couldn’t draw a pentagram that would sever someone’s soul.”
“It was a simple inscription,” he said, toneless. “Protection. Elhaz. A rune can do anything, theoretically, that its maker can; the chief limit is resources. ‘A rune’s energy field scales exponentially with its complexity.’ The Poisson-Bernadine equations. You should know them by heart, given your marks on the O.W.L.”
“I understand that she killed him,” he said. “I struggle to grasp what happened after.”
Snape swept his wrist over his mouth and pushed aside his plate. “The process for making a horcrux requires a physical sacrifice from the host,” he said. “You may imagine — electricity is an imperfect metaphor, it will serve here — to cleave the soul requires an enormous infusion of energy. It requires a jumpstart — a death — a murder, in practice, but I do not know that it must be — and uses the dead soul as grist for the cleaving. Then one binds the severed piece to an object, to prevent it from reunifying with the whole. A part of the host’s person must be severed also. When the spell destroyed the Dark Lord’s body, it completed the ceremony. The piece of his soul he had meant for the horcrux entered the body of the creature he had attempted to kill.”
“But Potter survived.”
“So he did. I theorize that the Dark Lord’s own death fulfilled the spell, and his soul cannibalized itself. It would explain why his resurrection was imperfect — though that may also be attributable to flaws in the ceremony — I do not think he did it right, but that can be of no substance to us now. Albus has another theory, but our best arguments are still venturesome. These matters are at the far edge of experimental magic, beyond anathema, and no one has written even speculatively on the subject.”
“What does Dumbledore think?” said Draco, wary.
Snape’s cheek twitched in a shadow of a grimace. “He believes there were two horcruxes made that night,” he said. “The first, using her death, to sever the soul of the Dark Lord. And the second — using the Dark Lord’s death—”
“To sever Harry’s.” Draco set down his cup. The coffee burned in his stomach. “Why do you find that tenuous?”
“Because, as noted previously, the host requires his own sacrifice,” said Snape briskly, “and Potter’s scar does not strike me as sufficient injury, even for an infant. The Dark Lord’s sacrifices were considerably more dramatic, by comparison. Also, I have been in the company of a horcrux-host far more often than Albus, and I do not detect the signs. His faults, generous though they are in number, strike me as typical for a tender young moron.”
Draco tapped his finger on the white tablecloth. The door creaked, and they both fell silent as Briselda came in to take Snape’s tray. She cast a Warming Charm on the coffee pot, replaced the sugarbowl, and left.
“Did you try to save her?” he said quietly. “Or did you let it happen? For your cover?”
There was a palpable ripple of emotion that Snape suppressed under a flat stare. “I was too late,” he said, toneless. “She cut out her own heart.”
“I don’t follow,” said Draco, his eyes narrow. “James died first. Then the Dark Lord prepared the horcrux. She had time to draw a full pentagram. You had time—”
“We would never have made it.”
“Do you tell yourself that?”
It was cruel. Well, so it was: he felt cruel today. It was his house. There was no one to chastise him for being cruel at the breakfast table.
Snape spoke in a voice so hollow it had no capacity for feeling. “The Dark Lord wanted only the child. And he favored me, in his way. He would have made me a Knight of Walpurgis if I had not volunteered to spy for him in the Order. I think he regretted that he did not.”
Draco’s laugh was a sharp, bitter sound. “You asked him to spare her?”
“I did.”
“And you believed he would?”
“I believe to this day that he would have,” he replied. “It is the prerogative of the king to indulge hypocrisies his inferiors cannot be seen to tolerate — indeed, it helps him to be the only creature above reproach. It was not unknown for Death Eaters to have paramours, or kept women, of questionable blood. The Dark Lord would not be the force that he is if he did not understand, in his way, the things that love demands.”
“A kept woman—”
“I had no such aim.” Snape cut over him. “That night should have marked my disappearance. I intended to end my career as a soldier, one way or another, the moment Lily Evans was safe.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“Because she died,” he said, and the flint in his voice chipped. “And she left her world in my keeping.”
He thought of the sound that had come out of his godfather’s body after seeing Lily Evans dead. He would have preferred to have never heard it. It was haunting.
“You’re not the world’s keeper,” said Draco.
“If I believed that, I would not have labored so long to stay alive,” said Snape, with a cool and disorienting forthrightness. “Draco, this pretense is beneath you. You have no interest in the death of Lily Evans. You are angry at me for your mother.”
Draco’s finger stilled on the tablecloth. He turned his head away.
“You wonder that I did not rescue her; you do not believe that I could not. I had lost my strength and wand-arm; I could die or flee. Nothing that I say will satisfy your suspicion, and perhaps it never will. I will carry that weight. Worse still, I seem unfeeling. My habits do not accord with the common language of grief. I have no recompense for that except to say that I have a soldier’s habits, and I grieve her in our way. If it matters, she would not expect me to do anything else.”
“I don’t want to talk about my mother.”
“Understood,” said Snape, and mercifully said no more.
It was true, he didn’t. He wanted to know everything she had ever said to Snape without talking about her, or acknowledging in any way the fact that she was dead.
He wanted to know enough that he could imagine what she would say now, if she were at the table. He imagined her sitting between them, at the head, but in his mind’s eye she was silent. It made part of him trill in panic. He wondered if he had ever known her at all.
“Bellatrix Lestrange offered to make me a Death Eater,” he said.
Snape said nothing, waiting.
He cleared a hard snag in his throat. “She’s arrogant.”
“Yes.”
“Arrogant and vulnerable, where I’m concerned. It makes her a poor judge of character. My mother could manipulate her. To a point.”
“Your mother knew Bellatrix from infancy. I caution you against analogies.”
“I don’t want advice. I want to know if she’s going to kill me if I try to speak to her.”
“One is rarely sure,” said Snape thinly. “If she believed you regarded her in sincerity as friend and kin, she might be moved by sentiment to help you. The Blacks have long memories. Note that I dislike what you are contemplating.”
“Not half as much as I do,” he said, over-elocuting around the tightness in his throat. “But that’s neither here nor there. She’s in the inner circle, isn’t she? She has the Dark Lord’s favor.”
“I would not underestimate her. You have spent half a decade in the public company of Harry Potter. She is not a fool.”
“You’re right. Half a decade with the Boy Who Lived; he doesn’t have a secret I don’t know. What fool would be interested in that?”
Snape’s stare grew an edge.
The attack came presently: a searing pinpoint of pain at the surface of his mind. Draco threw down the black glass of Occlusion barely in time to prevent a burning claw of fire from tearing through his thoughts. Snape’s mind scrabbled over the shield, a dull wave of pressure on his skull, and then receded.
Draco winced, glowering at him. “Satisfied?” he snapped.
“Not remotely,” Snape said coldly. He stood up. “That is a candle beside what the Dark Lord can do. You are unwise to consider this. Your mother would not have permitted you to speak of it.”
“Well, I have terribly convenient news.”
“Don’t be insipid. It would have destroyed her to imagine you doing this. She would have bled to keep you from it.”
“Fancy that.”
“Listen to me. This is not an atonement,” Snape hissed, leaning over the table. Draco tipped his head back, watching him warily. “You will not find penance in this. You will not find peace. You will destroy everything that is left to you. You would ruin your life, barely begun, in one reckless act of spite for a dead woman.”
“And you’re a hypocrite. It’s your job I’m considering.”
Snape stepped back. His nostrils flared.
“There was a man named Severus Snape, once,” he said, at length. “That man gave himself over, twice, on different altars. I bear his name; but I do not know if the man remains.”
Draco pushed his chair back and stood. “I’m not you,” he said, with all the disdain that could fit in three words. “I don’t know where you find the audacity to imply it. If I was all that was left between the Dark Lord and Hermione, she mightn’t live, but at the very least she would outlive me.”
He turned and swept out of the dining room, his footsteps rapping sharply on the wood.
Someone had drawn the drapes in his bedroom; dust spun in the needles of sunlight between. A lump in the coverlet sported a mane of hair, and when he shut the door behind him, it stirred and made an inarticulate demand of inquest. He toed off his shoes and sat on the bed beside her.
Hermione nosed out of the sheets and scrubbed her eyes open. “God,” she mumbled, “tell me it’s not tomorrow already.”
“No. It’s the first of September. You’ve missed the train.”
“Fine,” she muttered, drawing one of the pillows over her head. “Tell Draco I’ll miss Potions.”
The corner of his lip twisted so far it hurt his cheek. “The prefect? He’s got a reputation. I wouldn’t like to disappoint him.”
“It’s good for him,” said the pillow, drowsily. “Usually he gets whatever he wants because he’s cocky and handsome. It’s horrendous.”
He stripped away the pillow, and she made an anguished noise. Her clumsy grab to recover it probably would have failed even if his reflexes were not considerably better than hers. He tossed it aside and, in recompense, allowed her to wriggle over and perch her head on his shoulder as a replacement.
“What did Snape say?” she yawned, scrubbing her eyes. He moved one of the curls out of her face, pinning it uselessly behind her ear. The ragged spill of them was thick and soft over his throat, and her body was curled up around him, heavy and warm, and when he ran his hand through her hair she sighed hot into his neck.
An imprint of the sheet’s wrinkles lay in pink on her cheek. Sleep clung to the corner of her eye. Looking at her he felt everything so acutely it hurt him, like a hot iron to a raw nerve.
“We spoke about the horcruxes. Things that are going to happen next year.”
“What about next year?” She lifted her head. He nudged her back down.
“I don’t know yet. I have to speak to Dumbledore.”
That cast off the dregs of sleep. She pushed off him and sat up, alert. “About what?” she demanded. “What don’t you want to tell me?”
“There’s nothing I don’t want to tell you.” That was true.
Hermione’s face wrinkled deeper every time he spoke. “Well, good thing that’s not at all a suspicious answer to that question,” she said. “I’m wholly satisfied and definitely reassured. Don’t worry about explaining further, I’m actually a colossal moron.”
“I’ll tell you.” His heart beat hard against his chest. “I need to have a think first. I’ll tell you before I do anything.”
Hermione searched his eyes, her brows folded tightly. He watched the problem play out in micro-gestures on her face, and all at once he felt so stricken with tenderness it left him in pain. It was completely inconceivable that anything should ever hurt her. It was equally inconceivable that nothing would. There was a world outside his room. It was dreadful and inevitable.
And there were other people. There were children in Hogwarts Castle and they were full of rage and magic, and he himself had taught a dozen of them to duel, showed them where to put their feet, how to hold their hands. When they fought, they would make his mistakes, because he had shown them how.
He’d learned to duel from his mother. His father had been a soldier, but every move Draco knew he’d learned from Narcissa Black.
“Granger?”
She hummed, tilting her head at him.
He twisted his signet around his finger, biting a line into the skin beneath. “What would it take for your parents to leave the country?”
“I don’t know,” she said, belated. “Their lives are here. Their families are here, their jobs… And I would have to go with them. They would never leave without me.”
“What if you did?”
“I wouldn’t,” she said immediately.
“Even for your parents?”
Her head gave a stubborn, reflexive little shake. “Not even for them. No.”
He didn’t ask the corollary question, which would have been: Even for me?
When she spoke, the hoarse edge implied she’d heard it anyway. “I’ve been fighting with my mum,” she said. “She doesn’t believe me, when I tell her what’s happening. It’s not on the muggle news. All they’re reporting is terrorism. And the thing is, the Prophet’s not reporting it either, so I can’t even show her a wizarding paper to prove it. She thinks I’m a bit mad, and when I’m thinking rationally, I don’t blame her.”
It had occurred to him, over the last twenty-four hours, that among her reasons for staying at the Manor there might be something she was running away from.
“If my daughter was a witch, and I wasn’t,” he said, “I would treat her as an authority on what is happening in the magical world.”
“You have to think of it the other way,” she said unhappily. “If a muggle came to you and tried to tell you something really dangerous was happening in their world, and you had to leave your home because of it, would you take it seriously?”
He wouldn’t, of course.
“No, of course you wouldn’t,” she said, after his silence. “Because they don’t know anything about how you live. Because they’re gone nine months of the year, and also most vacations, and they barely know you, and you’ve never seen a muggle do anything so dangerous you have to be afraid of it. That’s my mother. That’s the position she’s in, which I’ve put her in, and I haven’t helped her one bit by telling her so little about it, because if it was really dangerous, all those years, why wouldn’t her daughter tell her? And I know that,” she said, her voice cracking, “I know exactly why it’s difficult for her. So then I try to talk to her, thinking this is it, this is the time I’m going to get through: I’m going to be patient with her, this time, I’m going to be reasonable and persuasive and calm. And then something happens and we’re screaming at each other. I don’t know why. I’m right, and I can prove it. It’s that she’s so incredibly stubborn, and she doesn’t listen to me, really, I mean she listens enough, but she clearly doesn’t care to be convinced, so it’s like she’s just tolerating whatever I say until it’s her turn to talk and she gets to explain how I’m wrong. She’s so stubborn I’m amazed she doesn’t try to drive through red lights. I don’t know how my dad stands it, some days, I really don’t.”
Draco, tactfully, said nothing. She glared at him.
“Shut up,” she said.
“I said nothing,” he said, tactfully.
“That’s the least tactful way of saying nothing I’ve ever heard!”
“Take notes. You’ve already found the least tactful way of saying everything else.”
“You should meet my mother,” she said, her throat tight. She cleared it. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’m not leaving Britain, so it’s not a question with teeth. And I have until September to figure out what… to do with them. When I’m away.”
“When do you intend to go back to them?” He tried to sound indifferent.
Hermione took a deep breath. “Not immediately,” she said. “If you’ll have me. Not to impose. Sorry. I didn’t just assume that you would—”
“Lord Merlin. Had my tongue down her throat twice in twenty-four hours and she’s worried about ‘imposing.’”
“You can’t just swan up to someone’s house and snog them and expect them to put you up,” said Hermione, with the firm indignation of a person with baffling psychologies. “It’s bad form, and worse, it’s unreliable. But. I don’t want to go home until I have a plan, and I don’t have a plan, so… I’ll go back once I have one. I just don’t. Yet.”
He looked at her with wary intrigue. “You know, I’m not altogether persuaded you’re not running away from them.”
Hermione curled into herself, slightly sulkish. “I’m not,” she said. “I’m going back. Just.” Her face crumpled. “I’m so tired of fighting. I’m so tired. I’ve been fighting all year. I fought to come here, I’ll fight to go back to school. I’ll have to fight when I’m there, too, and it might very well be real fighting — we don’t really know how to do that, I’m realizing, and that’s also terrifying. Most times we’ve actually fought people it’s been other students, or we’ve had the element of surprise, or there have been so many of us it doesn’t matter. When Rookwood pointed his wand at me,” she said, with strangled laughter, “I thought — God help me — the first thing I thought was, ‘I hope Draco does something,’ because if I’d been alone I don’t know what I’d have done. Throw a Shield Charm, maybe.”
“You underrate yourself,” he said distantly. He didn’t like to remember those moments; he had to keep tearing back the cassette of his memory to keep it from rolling into the next scene. “You had an excellent curse. And for what it’s worth, the Shield Charm would have worked.”
“Right,” she said doubtfully. “Yeah, it would’ve.”
She turned her head into his chest, her cheek pillowed on his collar. He closed his eyes and lifted his foot from the neck of exhaustion; it roared up to meet him, hungry and waiting. A warm breeze marched through the still, dusty air.
The city of Salisbury had an old-fashioned squat brick train station, a wide parking lot, and rows of cottages in brick and white plaster suspended colorful pennants, curving away along the winding country lanes. At four thousand people, it was not a city by size; the Crown had conferred the title with letters patent in acknowledgement of “ancient prescriptive right,” which, by Hermione’s account, essentially meant that people persisted in calling it a city for long enough that the statisticians gave up and went home. Their ensuing argument, which carried them through breakfast, lunch, and up to the very Manor gates, debated whether this constituted a win for linguistic descriptivism.
She talked when she was nervous. She’d been in a talkative mood when he left.
The London train arrived at five o’clock, though he never saw Dumbledore himself disembark. Instead, he emerged from the thronging crowd, wearing an unusually drab and donnish set of master’s robes, with a blue tie and soft cap hiding his long white hair. The gold crescent on his earring matched his pince-nez.
He approached Draco with his hands behind his back and stood politely, as if waiting for instruction. Draco jerked his head outside the station, and he smiled in understanding.
“I have always wished to visit the cathedral in this city,” he said. “It is astonishing how even the truly decrepit can put things off. Will you permit me?”
The cathedral sat cushioned by a lush setting of green, its facade an ornamented braid of glass and chiseled stone. The spire perched high on a series of ascending roofs, like steps for a giant to come and claim his spear. Inside, cloisters of smooth sandstone ensconced shining pews of dark wood, and the stained-glass clerestory strained afternoon light through the scalloped ceiling.
Draco hung back by the door as Dumbledore made a showy, delighted examination of the ceiling, and exclaimed appreciatively at the windows, though both were smaller than those in the Great Hall. He inspected the pews and read the inscriptions on the stone tombs. He followed patiently in the wake of a walking tour, and returned to Draco after an inspection that lasted, by his lights, far too long.
“Remarkable,” he said. “Built without magic. Can you imagine?”
Draco glanced at the group of muggles who had come in. They wore loose jeans and large plastic jewelry, and they spoke in loud, turbulent Essex.
“I shouldn’t worry,” said Dumbledore. “Most people know better than to concern themselves with the mutterings of strange old men. Moreover, my countrymen are dispositionally averse to oddity. Whenever I am in London, a few full-throated remarks about unicorns will cure me of virtually all eye contact.”
“Remarkable,” he repeated. “Have you finished?”
“Have we another appointment?” Dumbledore inquired. “I do apologize; I thought we were meandering. By all means, lead on.”
There was a bench under an ash tree beside the cathedral, with a view of the spire and the street beyond. Draco cast up a set of preemptive wards. Dumbledore sat and watched him, twiddling his thumbs. Draco wondered more than once if he was the subject of an unspoken joke.
The last Muffliato settled with a ripple over the tree. Draco sat down, slipping his wand up its sheath in his sleeve. Dumbledore crossed his legs, humming.
“Severus Snape is burned,” Draco said, attempting a tone of disinterest. His heart twitched, anyway. He felt as if he had approached a steep cliff and leaned over it, and as he spoke, his balance was slowly shifting. “The Ministry fell. You don’t have power. You don’t have an army. And you don’t have eyes on the Dark Lord.”
“For preference, I use ‘He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named,’” he said. “I assume the Ministry will reinstate the taboo, if it has not already, but I do not use tyrants’ chosen epithets. Politics aside, they are usually quite silly.”
“And a bound relative clause sounds better to you?”
“It gets us nowhere, vis-a-vis: silliness,” admitted Dumbledore, “but it takes us away from ‘Lord,’ which, I think, is good practice. Draco, forgive me my presumptions, and I will hear from you whatever you wish, but I fear I know what you intend to say.”
“Do you? Good,” he said, clipped. “Saves me time.”
“Yes. I also fear that I cannot conscience it.”
Draco nodded. He had expected that. It was necessary; in negotiation, the first answer was generally for appearances.
“You are sixteen,” said Dumbledore, like it was news. “You have recently buried your mother. You want to do something. Of course you do. You are a brave young man, and you care for your friends. You want to do what you can. But you are sixteen, and your mother is dead, and you are not prepared to undertake a decision of any gravity.”
“Lily Evans was sixteen when Alastor Moody admitted her into the Order of the Phoenix.”
“She was a tall sixteen,” said Dumbledore blithely, and when Draco began to speak, he sighed. “No. We are not negotiating. I question, in truth, whether I should have let you bring it up to begin with. I suspected from your letter that this was your goal; I came here in the hopes that it would be more effective to dissuade you with a firm and direct negative answer.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Why?”
“You didn’t come from Scotland to tell me no.”
“I did,” said Dumbledore mildly, turning. “Apparently, I came to do it twice. You are not adequately educated to undertake a decision of this gravity. You are uniquely unprepared in this moment, when you have more anger than prudence, and more fear than sense.” He shook his head. “Wait a few years, Draco. Prove to me you will still want it when you are old enough to know what it means.”
“Some of my friends are going to die in the next few years, Professor.”
Dumbledore blinked at him, his expression even.
He added, a touch vicious: “I’m old enough to know what that means. How many would you like me to watch? At what number of bodies do I become an adult, in your eyes? My parents aren’t enough, I take it. What will be? And how many years will I have to wait, then, to have thoughts you won’t dismiss as the fruit of juvenile grief?”
“The last, I could not say,” said Dumbledore. “Perhaps I will know when I am older.”
Draco curled his lip and turned away. Dumbledore watched him intently.
“How did you imagine it would work?” he said gently. “Did you expect a hero’s welcome? The childhood friend of Harry Potter? Who came with him, for his protection, to Grimmauld Place?”
“Where my mother died,” he spat, and used the bleary pain of it to ground him. “Where she was killed for boy Potter’s hopeless cause. Where my family tore itself apart over a worthless outcast’s dying dream. How better to teach someone the lesson of loyalty? What else could be enough?”
It was easy to say the words, because he almost believed them. “Harry Potter is the reason my mother is dead,” he added bitterly. “And with her, all schoolyard dreams of glory. There’s nothing noble in death, nothing worthy. Let someone else catch Potter’s curses for him. I’m ready to grow up, my lord.”
Dumbledore winced. Draco was glad.
“And I’m Draco Malfoy, by the way,” he said, “in case you’d forgotten. He won’t have, I assure you.”
“I never do.”
“The lord of House Malfoy, and the last male heir of Black. Two of the Twenty-Eight. Two of them. Dead, but for me. You think he wouldn’t take me? You don’t know purebloods like I do.”
“Nor do I know Hermione Granger, as you do,” said Dumbledore, effortlessly gentle, which was — not unfair, considering, but still — spectacularly vicious, really quite something. If he weren’t furious he might have been impressed.
He said harshly, “I can Occlude.”
“I’m sure you can.”
“I don’t have to hide everything. Snape didn’t. The Dark Lord knew his feelings for Lily, he didn’t care about them.”
“Severus’s feelings for Lily did not bear great inspection,” said Dumbledore, “being that their friendship ended before he took up the service. I do not take this as the case for you.”
“I could pretend, to the extent I had to. I’m sure Snape did his share of that.”
“Pretend what?” Dumbledore inquired. “Pretend to quit her company? Pretend not to know her, nor desire to know her, except as an inferior object for which you experience the occasional wayward tenderness?”
“Don’t.”
“I marvel that you rebuke me; it’s your own suggestion. You will have to say much worse than that of her, if you do as you intend. And what would your aunt think of your predilections, if she discovered them?”
“Nothing I can tell her will be worse than the truth,” he said shortly. “She would be far less dangerous to Hermione if she thought I didn’t care about her.”
“Does Hermione agree?”
“That’s between her and me,” he said tightly, “and not you, and if it was somehow, conceivably, your business to ask, I would assure you that Hermione would do whatever it took to win the war, including what I’m offering. If this were possible for her to do, she would have done it already. She might consult me. If I asked her not to, she wouldn’t listen.”
“I grant you that the situation, reversed, bears little doubt,” he agreed. “As it is: I am not certain your logic holds.”
“I am.”
“You think she would sacrifice you?”
“I think she would sacrifice herself. Which is functionally the same thing.”
“In many relevant ways it is not.”
“It’s the same thing to me. You understand? If she did, it would be the same as — what would happen — it would be the same.”
He found himself stumbling, and shut his mouth, loathing himself. Dumbledore tilted his head sadly.
“Your mother was very dear to you, wasn’t she?” he said, apropos of nothing. Draco gave him a scathing look.
“Must you?”
“I apologize,” he said. “I forget myself. This is not the first time I have had this conversation.”
The tone evoked his sparring with Umbridge under the Entrance Hall: My justice has been much delayed.
He was sick of that, too. Relentless nostalgizing, naval-gazing, soliloquies about the first war. He had heard enough of them. He had long since ceased to find anything romantic in the idea of being anyone’s resurrection.
Draco said, “If you don’t want me to do this, then tell me how you’re going to win the war.”
Dumbledore clasped his hands over his knee. “I wish I could. I wish I had a great and secret plan to play upon the world’s many threads. I wish I lived in Pushkin, and could ‘sing Freedom to the world, and strike vice upon thrones.’ But I fear Tolstoy had the better argument, and I have always been at heart a Pierre.”
“Well, then.”
“Well, then,” he agreed. “You know the number of the beast. The horcruxes must be found, and destroyed. An army must be raised, trained, and sent to die. The Order numbers between twenty and a hundred, depending on how you count its membership, and I do not know who else will answer the call. The enemy rallies the oldest and richest families in the Wizarding World against us, and adds to their number the dementors, the werewolves under Greyback, and most of the giant clans… Still, all is not lost. I have a general. I have a Minister. I have a castle.”
“But you have no spymaster.”
Dumbledore shrugged. “One manages.”
“One doesn’t. In fact. Rather, one doesn’t have to.”
“Explain this to me,” he remarked. “Why do you want to spy? It is not a glorious species of heroism. It would ask for all of you, ceaselessly. It would be cruel. It would be cruel to everyone you love.”
Because there was nothing left of him. Because his father had died and his mother had died and the only people left to him would die, too, if something did not happen, if someone didn’t do something. Because Harry and Ron would die, if something did not happen. Because Hermione would die, and if he stopped long enough to think about what he was without them the answer yawned ragged and bottomless.
No one had saved his father. No one had saved his mother. No one would save anything loved by Draco Malfoy except himself, and it was a hard lesson, but he had learned eventually. If he wanted the world to stop killing things he loved, it had to be fought. It had to be beaten. Well, he was good enough. He was the last of his house, and the best. He was the last best thing between her life and the fire.
He looked at Dumbledore. He knew how to make his voice sound like his mother’s. It was a certain texture in the drawl, a crispness in the consonants, an arid aspiration in the vowels.
It was his same accent, though, and the same cadence. His mother’s voice was the spine of his own.
“Because they’re the only thing that matters,” he said.
His reward for the performance was the closest Dumbledore ever came to a flinch: a flicker in his composure, a shift of the eyebrow, a shadow in the eyes. It was thrilling and unnerving to have that ability.
“Deeply noble,” remarked Dumbledore. Then: “Serve them, then, by keeping yourself alive. None of them will thank you for what you are suggesting.”
Draco smoothed his trousers and stood. “It occurs to me that I don’t actually require your permission,” he said. “I could do this, and you wouldn’t stop me. My legal guardian is in hiding. You’re acquainted, of course, with my next of kin. If I went to Theo Nott and told him to take me with him the next time he saw his father, what would you do about it? Would you bar me from Hogwarts? No, you wouldn’t.”
“I categorically rebuke that idea,” he said, frowning, and leaning forward on his knees. “I disavow it. Draco, if I thought it would make a difference, I would beg you not to do it.”
“I’m not asking you to beg,” he said, struck by the thrill of having the upper hand. It was so nice to have any sort of power, at all, that it was difficult not to lean towards it. “Technically, I’m asking you to threaten. What would you do?”
“I would mourn,” said Dumbledore tiredly, “if you want my honest answer. And I would do everything in my power to save you from yourself, however difficult you endeavored to make it for me.”
Draco considered this, and nodded.
“I understand.”
“You do not,” he pleaded. “You do not know. It may be years before you understand what you are doing to yourself.”
Draco drew the wand from his sleeve and cut down the wards. Birdsong swelled lush and loud as Vivaldi. The road burbled from across the green, chattering tourists, muttering cars.
“If I live that long, I’ll remember you told me so,” he said acidly. “If I don’t, I’ll try to remember to be relieved.”
When the carriage deposited him back at the Manor, the sun sat almost level with the earth. He found Hermione reading in the garden, a stack of books from the Manor library piled beside her lawn chair, one of them supporting a porcelain tea set. She had filched one of his shirts, dark blue with a wide lapel, and mended a pair of his old school trousers to sit properly on her waist. The sleeves kept slipping off her elbow and down her arms, and she fidgeted them back up absently while reading.
He arrived at her back and watched, for a while, as the wind tossed the jasmine behind her like snowflakes. Some of them caught in her hair. Most things did, at some point.
She turned a page. “You’re going to give me a complex,” she said. “Staring.”
“Suppose I want your other ones to have a friend.” He came up behind her, his hands in his pockets, and read over her shoulder. He reached over to take it from her. “Is that the dueling manual?”
She snapped it closed and held it away. “You are so annoying,” she said, craning her neck to scowl, but her voice glowed with how pleased she was to see him. He smiled at her. “I’m sitting here reading this, minding my business, and you think, ‘oh, I wonder what that is, how should I find out? Take it from her without warning, or, more radically, asking—’”
“It’s my book.”
“You think that means you can just take it whenever you want, do you?”
“That would be the legal understanding of ‘mine.’” He leaned down and spoke in her ear. “That’s also my shirt.”
She dropped the book in his waiting hand and said, declaratively: “Well. That’s. And I mean. It would be. In one sense, even so.”
“Even so,” he agreed, leaning on the chair. Her eyes made a desperate appeal for him to forget her tragic and sudden aphasia. He denied it with a sad shake of his head.
“Starting over,” she said. “Hello, Draco. It’s lovely to see you. This is your book; I borrowed it. Thank you terribly. Tea?”
“I liked your first try better. But I’ll have some.”
He drew the other wand chair over with a swish of his wand. She followed it curiously. “Trace?” she murmured.
“Difficult to tell, in a house like this, and I doubt the Ministry can be arsed. None of the purebloods will be keeping that custom, especially if they don’t go back to Hogwarts.”
“Yet another advantage,” she remarked, handing over his tea.
“Hardly bears thinking about.”
“On that idea,” she said, and reached for the book again. “I’ve been reading the dueling manual. I want to make a go at learning, if you’ll teach me. I think if I had some sort of system, or knowledge — I thought it was specious, trying to make fighting into a precision exercise, but I’m reading this, and at least it gives you some sense of what to do.”
“I’ll teach you,” he said, and as if it was the same thought: “I went to see Dumbledore.”
Hermione paused, waiting. By and by, she set the book down.
“I’m going to—” He tested the words out, but the words were clumsy and didn’t say what he wanted them to. Instead, he said: “I offered to spy for him.”
“Did he accept?” she said calmly.
“No.”
“Oh,” she said. “Good.”
They waited for each other. Her silence had a brittle, interrogatory quality.
“I don’t know that it matters,” he said. “I don’t need his permission.”
“His opinion might be valuable, though. Among others.”
“That’s why I’m asking for yours.”
She nodded, tongue probing her cheek. “Alright,” she said. “Tell me what you’re thinking. I’m not sure how this would work. Would you still be at Hogwarts? Would you leave, to go — spy, and come back?”
“In principle.”
“And you would pretend to be—”
“Yes. I could explain more of my thinking, or we could acknowledge the fact that if I’ve thought of this, it’s already occurred to you twice.”
Hermione stood up, her arms folded, and began walking a slow circuit of the garden. The seconds ticked past, and she did not reply; he began to tap his foot. Her expression was pensive. It was not immediately furious. This could be read as more alarming.
Abruptly, Hermione drew her wand. She pointed it at the ground. “Expecto Patronum.”
The silver otter appeared in a fission of starlight. It frolicked across the rosebushes, carried through an invisible stream. Her hand gripped her wand like the hilt of a knife.
“That was my letter,” she said. “Eleventh birthday. September nineteenth, 1990. I kept the letter under my pillow for a year.”
She swished her wand and cast another. The first otter disappeared, and a second swam out over the fleet.
“That was my Sorting. I was only the third or fourth Gryffindor, after Lavender and Seamus. Expecto Patronum. That’s the mountain troll in the girls’ bathroom. You brought me a sandwich. It was,” she said, “a terrible sandwich.”
“I beg your pardon. I’m sorry the lady’s bathroom sandwich inexplicably failed quality control.”
“It was so bad,” she said tenderly. “I saved the crusts until they went stale.”
She swished her wand again. A fourth patronus hopped out and curled around her feet, subdued.
“I don’t suppose you’d ever have heard about a book named Peter and Wendy,” she said. “It’s a muggle book. I wouldn’t have told you about it, it’s for children. It’s about a girl named Wendy, who’s quite bossy and patronizing and takes care of her two brothers; and there’s a magical boy named Peter who comes to her window one night, and teaches her to fly. He takes her away to Neverland, which is a magical island where no one ever has to grow up, and the four children have adventures.
“But she goes back to London at the end of the book,” she said. “Because she can’t stay there forever. She misses her parents. And she needs to grow up.”
The otter drifted into dust and floated away.
“‘You need not be sorry for her,’” she said absently. “‘She was one of the kind that likes to grow up. In the end she grew up of her own free will a day quicker than the other girls.’”
A hollow yawned in his abdomen. Cold poured from it like oil from a well.
“We could run away,” she said, looking at him. Her eyes were bright and fervid.
He almost laughed. “No, we can’t.”
“We can do anything we want,” she said intently. “You taught me that.”
“Yes, but you don’t mean it,” he said, strained with the unfairness of having to say so.
Hermione didn’t allow herself to want things she couldn’t have. That was why her plans worked. It was why they’d wasted months of skittish dancing around each other, while time sieved like Floo powder through their fingers.
“I do mean it.” She moved so fast she tripped, and caught herself on the arms of his chair, bending to speak quickly and earnestly in his face. “I mean it. Run away now. We don’t have to go back to school. We don’t have to tell anybody. We could go, now, and we would make it. You and me. You know we would.”
“But you don’t want to,” he said tiredly, aching. “Do you?”
She faltered.
The rest of the world reintroduced itself with a thatch of starlings shooting into the evening sky. Facing defeat, she slackened her grip.
Hermione eased upright to stand on her feet again. In her gaze was a guarded mingling of reprimand and longing, her pupils blown wide, her cheeks flushed. His heart was going as if he’d done a lap around the castle and he was struck low again by the sight of her, how badly he wanted her, how much he would have been willing to do for her to just kiss him.
“We’re not running away,” she said, as if she’d just realized it herself. “I can’t leave Harry. Even if he makes me furious. Even when I hate him. I won’t leave him, I never could.”
Somehow, inconceivably, this still managed to surprise him. In her voice were long, deep strains of the love she bore for Harry Potter — strains that welled from the very root of her, a promise they would find filigreed in her heart on the mortician’s table. From the moment they’d met, she’d been sewn to Harry’s side by a tether of material Draco had never seen clearly, and she’d always had half a mind to hang herself with it.
“It was a silly idea,” she said. She glanced at him, checking. “Wasn’t it?”
“The queen and the rook don’t run off together,” he said. “It’s a nice thought, but it’s not what they’re for.”
Hermione nodded, biting her lip. She lowered her head and started to cry.
The color of the sky at dusk was a drowning, pelagic blue. The rhythm of his heart collapsed from looking at her.
“You promised,” she said. “And I’m furious at how dumb it is to care, given everything else. It’s the least of all the things I could possibly cry about. But you promised you would stay. Because I asked. Do you remember?”
He caught her hand in a tight grip. “I’m not leaving.”
“I know you’re not. I know it’s not real. I’m not mad at you.”
“You could ask me not to do it.”
“You know I won’t do that,” she snapped, “that’s why you told me, isn’t it, you knew I’d listen and a part of me would think, ‘That would be really useful for a lot of reasons, if he doesn’t get himself killed.’ You knew I’d thought about it, and I did. And I thought, ‘God, I hope he never thinks of that, what a fucking horrible thing to think about your boyfriend.’”
He stood up, and took her arms at the elbows. “From a different vantage,” he said, aware it did not remotely suffice for comfort, “all it expresses is a certain faith that I won’t get myself killed.”
“It was a horrible thing,” she said. “It still is. It’s worse to hear it, because I trust you, and I think you’re right.” Her nails bit into the skin of his neck and bound themselves in his shoulder, so tightly he’d have new creases in his shirtfront. “You can’t. You can’t leave. You just can’t. You — I — please. You can’t.”
“I won’t. I’m not. I won’t.” Her fear dislodged his agitation and cast him into anxious disquiet. He looped his arm around her waist and held her there, her heartbeat rabbiting against his chest like an accusation. “I’m not going anywhere. You have me. While you want me, you have me. I promised you that, and I meant it.”
“Promise again.”
“I promise.”
“Promise again,” she said, hard-edged.
“I promise. And I promise.”
He slid his hand into her hair and she shuddered, burying herself in him.
“You can’t leave,” she whispered, nearly inaudible. “Don’t leave me here. Not when it’s like this.”
“I wouldn’t.” He meant it as much as he had ever meant anything. He meant as he meant my name is Draco, and much as he’d ever meant my name is Malfoy, perhaps more.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he added. “Where would I go without you?”
She gave a little laugh and drew back, searching his eyes. Hers were bloodshot and rimmed in pink.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I wouldn’t be there, so I wouldn’t know.”
“Nor I.” He kissed her forehead, and then her mouth, gently, because it hadn’t been kissed in a while, and needed to be. She relaxed in his arms when he kissed her. It slightly amazed him.
“You’re still unforgivably stupid,” she whispered against his mouth. “I hate this. I hate this. No one should ever feel this way about anyone. Least of all anyone noble.”
“It’s not my fault you have a type.”
She throttled her own laugh into a throaty noise of warning, and then she was laughing and crying and kissing him, roughly. It had the hard, unsophisticated pressure of someone still learning how, a young girl’s clumsy kiss, and thought how odd it felt that they should be so young still. That he should be standing in his mother’s gardens, his heart beating quick, and have under all that a thrumming layer of grief that seemed older than he was.
He was sixteen. The sun was setting fast and low.
When he reached the gates of Knotscliff Peak, the air thundered from the ocean beating the cliffs. The road to the gates led through the forest, and obscured the entrance until the last possible moment, at which point it whisked away a curtain of shrubs to unveil the file of wrought-iron that enclosed the green. On the hilltop, silhouetted with eerie contrast against a featureless sky, sat three squat turrets of rain-washed stone.
Theo didn’t open the gates. He stood behind them, his arms folded, his weight on one hip, bearing the expression of one debating whether to call the aurors or the hounds. He had slept since he’d seen him last, and seemed less jittery, which made a dire improvement on his usual mode of asylum chic.
“Hark at you,” he called. “You don’t look like you’re having a psychotic break.”
“Contain your disappointment,” said Draco. “The day is young.”
“But I so looked forward to you going mad,” said Theo mildly. “I’ve always said you’d make a fine nutter. In some respects, you’re already one of the greats.” He lifted his chin, and his voice hardened. “I heard about Narcissa.”
“Did you,” said Draco, toneless.
“Yeah,” he said. “I suppose you buried her.”
“Generally happens.”
Theo set his jaw. Draco slipped a bit of metal out of his pocket, turning it over in his hands. Theo watched it.
“Pansy says I’m a fool for inviting you,” he said. “I’m open to that possibility. But I told her I wouldn’t let you in unless I had a bloody good reason, and then, I’d still make you ask me nicely.”
He fell silent and waited, with furtive expectation, framed by the towers of Knotscliff. Draco recalled something Daphne had told him once, about Theodore and Pansy, running wild in a house with no adults to notice it, or care.
Theodore Nott had disarmed Barty Crouch in the moments before his death, and he had broken a boy’s memory to pieces for the crime of knowing something he shouldn’t. He could be violent and supercilious and brash. He also had a soft streak for things he’d known as a child.
How deep the streak cut, it was difficult to say. It was at least deep enough to make it to the front gate.
Draco tossed him the bit of metal. The snitch flipped through the bars of the gate, and Theo caught it. Freed, the wings peeled from the sides and buzzed, straining against his grasp.
“I’m thinking of selling the house in France,” said Draco.
Theo raised his eyebrows. “It’s not a bad little property,” he said. “Good for a getaway, if you want one. You might want to wait for a good offer.”
“You wouldn’t be interested in it, of course.”
His eyebrows twitched together faintly. “I’m not on the market,” he said. “No capital, old boy. My father sees to all that.”
“I imagine he gives you a wide latitude to negotiate.”
“Couldn’t say,” said Theo thoughtfully, thumbing the snitch. “Wouldn’t help my position, you understand. Draco, I hate to kill a good rhythm, but I’m drawing a blank on how to translate ‘I don’t know what you fucking want from me’ into a real estate metaphor.”
That would have to suffice, as a move to sentiment. “I know what you did to Cassius Warrington,” he said, and Theo’s face gave a half-wry, half-angry twitch. “I want you to do something for me.”
“Ah. Blackmail! Here I was being cute, thinking I’d get something out of this.”
“What you get is the confidence that I won’t tell anyone that Warrington’s hippocampus is going supernova. That’s something.”
“How do you know he’s not dead yet?”
“Please. It would’ve been announced, and Parkinson would have to go into mourning.”
“So they do get newspapers in England.”
“Maybe they do. I don’t read the gossip section. I get enough from Meadowridge.”
Theo’s composure visibly calcified. “What did you tell Daphne?”
“Nothing, yet.”
“I should trust you?”
“I mean, you could always ask her.”
“Fine. For the record, this is not ‘asking nicely.’ What do you want?”
Draco waited. The waves shattered against the cliffside, and at their heights, the roar softened to a murmur. It could have been voices, at that distance. Someone could have screamed from the bottom, and it would reach them as a whisper. They were fathoms above what a normal voice could reach. Knotscliff was like a small Olympus, tucked high on its dark little crag.
“To make the right choice,” he said.
Theo stared at him. He rolled the snitch over his palm, pressed the wings flat, and pocketed it. When he smiled, it was without happiness.
“Dad’s out,” he said. “What say we go have a brandy and talk it over like grownups?”
Draco nodded. Theo clicked his tongue. The gates pried open. Draco had to step back from their path to move forward and through, to where Theo waited for him.
He extended his hand. Theo took it with a pleasant expression of surprise. The band of Draco’s signet pressed cool between their fingers. The gates screamed when they closed, iron grinding against iron. The bolt moved like a peal of lightless thunder.
END OF VOLUME TWO
-Obligatory needle drop, for the end of the volume, because I can’t help myself.
-It just wouldn’t be Book 5 if it didn’t fight back and demand copious gut-deep content edits in the last possible stretch. Goodbye, my darling. You were consistent to the bitter end.
-More specifically, Chapter 82 had to be killed completely and rewritten no less than three times. I think Narcissa did not appreciate my attempt to describe her personal life.
-I pushed myself to the absolute limit to get this one out on time (kind of? technically?) because I really wanted to deliver on schedule. I’m going to take a bit of a writerly break and try to refill the juices. More information to come on the Book 6 update schedule on my Tumblr, when the time arives.
-This would not exist, ever, in any iteration, without all of the wonderful people who are kind to me, and are patient with me, and forgive my mistakes. I’m just a human plugging along trying to make something kinda halfway maybe good, and if I manage part of that, I’m grateful.
-And hey: Thanks. Love you. See you soon.
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