HPSlashFics - 8 The Master of Malfoy Manor

When Draco was six years old, his father had given him a bird to carry his mail. The other children Draco knew had friendly owls, or the occasional bluebird, but Draco's father gave him a falcon, with bright black eyes and a beak that curved like the mark on a Sickle.

The falcon did not like Draco, and Draco didn't like it either. Its sharp beak made him nervous, and its bright eyes always seemed to be watching him. It would slash at him with beak and talons when he came near: for weeks, his wrists and hands were always bleeding. He did not know it, but his father had selected a falcon that had lived in the wild for over a year, and thus was nearly impossible to tame. But Draco tried, because his father had told him to make the falcon obedient, and he wanted to please his father.

He stayed with the falcon constantly, keeping it awake by talking to it and even playing music to it, because a tired bird was meant to be easier to tame. He learned the equipment: the jesses, the hood, the brail, the leash that bound the bird to his wrist. He was meant to keep the falcon blind, but he could not do it - instead he tried to sit where the bird could see him as he touched and stroked its wings, willing it to trust him. He fed it from his hand, and at first it would not eat: later it ate so savagely that its beak cut the skin of his palm. But he was glad, because it was progress, and because he wanted the bird to know him, even if it had to consume his blood to make that happen.

He began to see that the falcon was beautiful, that its slim wings were built for speed of flight, that it was strong and swift, fierce and gentle. When it dived to the ground, it moved like forked lightning. When it learned to circle and come to his wrist, he nearly cried with delight. Sometimes the bird would hop to his shoulder and put its beak in his hair. He knew his falcon loved him, and when he was certain it was not just tamed but perfectly tamed, he went to his father, and showed him what he had done, expecting him to be proud.

Instead, his father took the bird, now tame and trusting, in his hands, and broke its neck. "I told you to make it obedient," his father said, and dropped the falcon's lifeless body to the ground. "Instead, you taught it to love you. Falcons are not meant to be loving pets: they are fierce and wild, savage and cruel. This bird was not tamed; it was broken."

Later, when his father left him, Draco cried over his pet, until eventually his father sent a house-elf to take the body of the bird away and bury it. Draco never cried again, and he never forgot what he learned: that to be loved was to destroy, and that to love was to be the one destroyed.

Blaise's trunk was overturned; the contents spilled out onto the floor at Draco's feet. He sifted through them with a leisurely hand - books, makeup, jewelry, parchments, stacks of photographs. Nothing terribly interesting. He'd pulled the drawers of her bureau out as well, and her clothes were tossed haphazardly on the bed in a heap of blouses, skirts, camisoles, and expensive silk underthings. Her journal, a pale green book with a butterfly-shaped lock, had also fallen onto the bed, but some obscurely motivated chivalry prevented him from opening it.

"Are you done yet?" Blaise asked, breaking a half-hour's worth of silence. Her tone was cold and sharp. She sat where he had put her: propped against the wall, her hands still bound behind her back. The look on her face was one of such withering contempt that even Draco, no slouch at sneering himself, was somewhat daunted.

"And did you find what you were looking for?" Her voice held so much frozen scorn, it could have kept a year's supply of Ice Mice from melting.

Draco sighed. If lime green push-up bras had been what he was looking for, he would have been in business. Alas, they were not. "How come you never wore any of these things while we were dating?" he asked, lifting a transparent black something or other off the bed with a crooked finger.

"Disappointed, are you?" Draco dropped the transparent lace object and looked narrowly at her.

Draco decided to let that one pass. He got to his feet and went to crouch down beside her so that their faces were on a level. Her dark green eyes, minus their usual sparkle, looked into his with loathing. "In answer to your question," he said, "no. I didn't find what I was looking for. Which leads me to another question."

Her eyes widened with disbelief. "Why, do you want them back? You cheap son of a bitch, Draco Malfoy - just because I broke up with you -"

She called him a very rude name. Draco was impressed. "Nice one," he said. "This is not, however, addressing the matter at hand..."

"The slippers. Where are they? Remember them? They were very expensive, embroidered, raw gold silk -"

"They were not pure silk," Blaise snapped, looking haughty again. "They had some cheap material mixed in that irritated my skin. I couldn't wear them."

Draco expelled a long breath. He wasn't sure if he felt relieved or not. "I didn't really think it was you," he said slowly. "But I had to make sure."

"I thought maybe you were trying to throw the blame on her, because it was you. You're devious enough."

Draco shrugged and stood up. He pushed aside the hand-painted screen that separated Blaise's side of the room from Pansy's. Blaise's half of the room was slightly bigger; Pansy's was more crowded with things - several chairs, a sofa, a vanity table with a curved mirror. The surface of the vanity was thickly covered with jars, bottles, and tubes of unguents and cosmetics, just as Blaise had told him weeks ago. Why hadn't he known? I knew she had to be a prefect, he thought. And a Slytherin. Only a Slytherin would think of this.

He turned away from the vanity table and went over to the enormous, brassbound trunk at the foot of Pansy's bed. Blaise leaned around the screen and glared at him. "You can't open it," she snapped vindictively. "It's got sixteen different anti-Alohomora charms on them and only Pansy knows the passwords -"

"Sixteen?" Draco said softly. "Really? That many?" He took another step towards the trunk and looked at it consideringly. With the tip of his dragonhide boot, he nudged lightly at the lock. Then he raised his foot and brought it down hard. Once, twice, three times, putting all his pent-up anger into it - a fourth time, and he heard the creaking protest as the wood began to splinter - a fifth time, and the lock ripped away from the wood and clattered to the floor. The lid of the trunk sprang open.

Blaise said nothing. She seemed to have set herself to ignoring him. Still, she stared as he knelt down by the trunk and began to rifle through the contents. Books tumbled out first, neatly piled, and underneath them were empty jars and bottles, and underneath those were a pair of pale gold silk slippers and a neatly folded set of white pajamas sprigged all over with blue and yellow flowers.

Draco's heart began to pound like a triphammer. He'd been right. He had known he was right, but not that the proof would present itself so readily. She must have been positive that no one would guess. He plunged his hands into the trunk, shoving the pajamas and slippers aside - there were folded papers underneath them; he took them and shoved them haphazardly into his cloak pockets. Under them was a long enamel box, which sprang open when he put pressure on the ends. Folded inside was a long swath of multicolored fabric, which shimmered when he touched it...

"An Invisibility Cloak," he whispered under his breath. A smile came and twitched the corner of his mouth. Clever Pansy. He rolled the cloak into a small ball and stuffed it into his pocket. He was sure he was beginning to look extremely lumpy. He put his hands back into the trunk, but there was nothing else, just grit gathering under his fingernails. He stood up, and went back past the screen into Blaise's room. She twisted around to glare at him.

"You're a thief," she said. "And a bastard. Turning on the members of your own House for a bunch of Gryffindor scum -"

Draco knelt down and looked into her eyes. Face scrubbed clean of makeup, hair free of its jeweled barrettes and tangled around her face, she looked much less polished than he'd ever seen her. "Do it," he said evenly, "and I'll tell everyone exactly why you agreed to this dating charade with me in the first place."

Her breath hissed between her teeth. "You unbelievable bastard. You'd blackmail me?"

"Just keeping things fair. I don't like power imbalances. Unless, of course, I have the upper hand, which right now, I do."

"Maybe right now." Her eyes narrowed. "But not forever. Everyone knows where your loyalties really lie, Draco. And if there's one thing Slytherin House hates, it's a backstabbing traitor."

"I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, Blaise. Are you suggesting that I no longer have a shot at winning Most Popular Slytherin of the Year?"

"I protected you," she snarled at him, and he was startled to see that for a moment, her eyes were oddly bright, as if she might be about to cry. And for that moment, they reminded him so strongly of another, dissimilar, pair of green eyes that he felt a spark of sympathy for her light inside his chest. "You never paid attention, but I protected you - I lied for you - I covered up how much time you really spent with Potter and his little minions, invented reasons for you to be with him - lose me and you lose the last person in this House who had any faith you might come back to us. Lose me and you're on your own, Draco."

He sighed. "Then I'm on my own. Thanks for protecting me, if you really did, but it wasn't necessary. I'm not afraid of Slytherin House."

He fought back another sigh. He felt very tired. "I'm going to untie you now," he said. "I want you to promise not to hit me the second your hands are free."

"I promise," she said, without looking at him, and the moment that her hands were free, of course, she hit him anyway.

A light touch on the shoulder awoke him. Harry rolled over and blinked. The world was blurry, but he knew the shape hovering above him was Draco. He reached for his glasses and sat up slowly. His muscles were stiff and sore from falling asleep on the common room couch, but he had not wanted to go upstairs and face Seamus, Neville and Dean. "Hey," he said, his voice slightly rusty. "Is she...?"

"Hermione?" She's gone," Draco said, crouching down next to the sofa. The fire was high in the grate, and the room was very hot. Draco looked bright-eyed and almost feverish. A hectic red color flushed his high cheekbones. "I have to tell you something."

"Oh, God," said Harry, with finality. "Not something else." He looked at Draco more closely, taking in the disheveled hair, the muddy boots, the scratch marks along his left cheek, as if someone had raked him with their nails. "Is it something bad?"

"That depends." Draco cocked his head to the side, fair hair falling in his eyes. "Do you want to know?"

Harry sat up straighter. It was very quiet in the common room. He could tell it was extremely late, just from the quality of the silence and even of the lightless dark he could see through the windows. The crackle of firewood was loud, like shattering ice. He could hear Draco breathing. Very tentatively, he reached towards Draco's mind with his own, trying to gauge what the other boy was feeling about the news he had to tell. Guilt, rage, pain, terror, amusement, horror? Was he afraid to tell Harry, did he worry that Harry couldn't handle it? Was it very bad? Not exactly, he had said. Whatever that meant.

"Is it someone I know well?" Harry asked softly, finally. "Is it a friend of mine? Is it someone I care about?"

A wave of relief so intense it was almost nausea passed over Harry. "Was it about me? Did it have anything to do with me?"

Harry crossed his arms over his chest, although it was hot in the room. "What are you going to do?"

"Investigate," Draco said simply. "The uh, guilty party has already left school. But that's all right. Gives me some time. I have to look into things. Opportunities, motivation. Accomplices. Purpose."

"Read a lot of Auror comics as a kid," Draco said. "Always wanted a trenchcoat."

Draco shook his head. "I don't need your help, not right now. If I do, I'll tell you. And if you want to know, I'll tell you. But maybe right now you don't need any more on your mind." He got to his feet, a swift graceful gesture. Harry looked at him hard, remembering Draco's weakness in the Quidditch game and while they were fencing. However, he did look much better. There was high color in his face, and his eyes sparkled. Hopefully he was over it. "Go to sleep," Draco said, and headed towards the door. "I'll see you -"

"Will you make them sorry?" Harry said. He had gotten to his feet without realizing it, and he put his hand out to steady himself on the sofa arm. His legs prickled with waking-up pains.

Draco turned, one hand on the portrait door, and looked at him curiously. Even disheveled and tired he had an elegant remoteness that Harry vaguely envied. He knew he wore his own heart on his sleeve, not as a badge of honor but because he knew no other way to be. Whereas nothing ever seemed to touch Draco so much, or so deeply, that he could not control his expressions. Nothing ever put a slump in those straight shoulders. "Will I what?"

"Make them sorry," Harry said. His voice rasped slightly. "I know...that you can do things I couldn't do. You're ruthless in ways I could never be. And you know about revenge."

"Oh, I know about hating," Harry said, his voice flat and empty. "But I'm not clever about it, like you are. I couldn't think of a really imaginative way to make anyone suffer. Not like you could."

"Is that what you want?" Draco asked. His eyes were flat, metallic gray. Nothing came off him: no emotion, no fear or worry or regret. He stood where he was, illegible as a parchment written in Gobbeldygook.

"Then I'll do it," Draco said, and he smiled, and for a moment a faintly wicked inner brilliance illuminated his expression. If there was any bitterness or sorrow underneath it, Harry didn't see it. He was too busy fighting his own relief. "I'll make them sorry."

Ginny had once read somewhere that the difference between memory and recall was that with memory, you knew empirically that you had been in a certain place in a certain time, while with recall you once again felt that you were there.

When she looked back on those last few days before the end of winter term her sixth year at Hogwarts, it was always with a sense of recollection. She could not have said exactly how the days proceeded, but various images and moments were burned into her brain - she remembered the cold that descended on the castle, both literal and figurative, after Ron and Hermione had gone home. The flowerlike slivers of ice that formed on the windowpanes overnight, the water freezing in the mug beside her bed. Sitting at the Gryffindor table with Seamus, waiting for Harry to come downstairs. Watching him sit alone, not saying anything. And Draco. Always with Harry, or watching him from across the room if he was not beside him. He seemed to have taken the words Dumbledore had spoken to him weeks before - "Harry is strong and can endure much, and for what he cannot endure he has you" - as if they were some sort of sacred trust. She wondered if he was trying to expiate some sin he thought he had committed; she could imagine such devotion came only from guilt. Of course, she did not know until later that Hermione had made him promise to stay with Harry always - and he tried to, as best he could given the obvious restrictions. The professors, in those final days, turned a blind eye to the fact that Draco was sometimes in the Gryffindor common room. He never tried to go further than the common room, however, sensing probably that he was not welcome.

Harry seemed to notice all this only barely. He went through everything in a dazed sort of sleepwalking manner, probably because during the night he did not sleep - Seamus had told her as much. Apparently he spent the night sitting in the widow embrasure, looking out over the snowy grounds. He was starting to look translucent, as if he had been very ill, the bones showing sharply under his skin. Ginny had seen him walk accidentally into Draco several times, as if he'd forgotten Draco was there at all.

One afternoon she came into the common room and found that Harry was there, lying on the couch, a blanket over his legs, apparently asleep. She walked towards him, and reached to pull the blanket up over his shoulders, when a hand darted out of nowhere and seized her wrist.

"Shhh." It was Draco's voice. She turned her eyes towards him. He had been sitting sunk into the shadows of an overstuffed armchair next to the sofa, and had blended so completely with the darkness that she had not seen him. "Do not wake him up."

"I wasn't going to," she whispered back, annoyed. "I was just going to pull up his blankets."

Draco, looking weary, released her wrist. "Just...let him be," he said. "He hasn't slept in three days."

"I know," said Ginny. She looked down at Harry and her feeling of annoyance vanished, buried under a flood of sympathy. He looked like a little boy, curled sideways on the couch, his head pillowed on his arm, his pale cheeks flushed with feverish sleep. His dark hair curled all around his head in tangles like licks of dark flame. "How is he?" she asked, sitting down in the chair next to Draco. "How is he really?"

Draco looked considering. "Rotten," he said finally, and his voice was flat. "Pretty much like you'd expect."

She bit her lip. "I wish there was something I could do," she said. "he's had so much suffering in his life - I wish I could take it for him, you know?"

He looked at her, his gray eyes dark, slightly unfocused with tiredness. "You still love him," he said.

"I always will love him," said Ginny, "if not that way. We all do. He's like that."

Ginny sighed. "Especially my brother," she said. "I wouldn't expect you to understand."

"I don't want to understand," Draco said. "And I can't be bothered - I've got enough to be bothered with without pondering your brother's motivations for creating this fucking mess."

He shrugged. "It's not so bad. I hallucinate occasionally and I think that takes care of the problem. Yesterday I thought I was a teapot. Which wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't also thought that Malcolm Baddock was a teacup..."

Ginny smiled at him. The warmth of the fire was making her sleepy, and she was conscious of the slumbering form of Harry on the sofa. She wanted very much to hug him, and some part of her almost wanted to hug Draco as well, despite him being a prickly non-hugging sort of person. She recognized it was simply stress that was making her feel close to both boys when really, it was Hermione who loved and mothered them, and was loved in return. But Hermione wasn't here...she shoved that thought down. "Draco..."

"Maybe I will take a walk," he said, his eyes going past her to the window. "I feel like I haven't seen the sun in days."

A flicker of relief passed across his face. "Would you?" He stood up, and she held out his cloak, which had been draped across the back of the sofa. Their fingers touched briefly as he took it and shrugged it on, closing the heavy fastenings across the front. "I'll just be outside..."

Ginny settled herself into the armchair he had vacated. She was about to reach for the paperback book in her pocket when a sudden movement startled her. It was Harry, who had lowered his arm from his face. His eyes were open.

"Yeah." Harry sat up and reached for the glasses propped on the arm of the sofa. "Sorry if I scared you."

"No, you were right. He should go for a walk. Get some air. It's got to be boring, watching over me all the time."

Ginny was fairly sure that Draco did not consider it boring, per se, but held her tongue.

"Anyway," Harry added, "I wanted to ask you something, and I wanted to ask you when we were alone."

Harry looked just past her at the fire. "I was wondering if you'd do me a favor and touch something for me."

Harry smiled. "Let me start over. I know that you can sometimes sense Dark magic if it's present in objects, or people. I was wondering if you would take a look at something for me, let me know if you feel anything unusual about it."

"Thanks." Harry bent his head, then looked up at her again, quickly. "It's on my belt," he said, "hang on one second," and went back to sliding his leather belt through the loops on his trousers. As he bent his head, his hair fell away, showing the nape of his neck, cleanly exposed between the dark hair and the round collar of his black sweater. The knobs of his spine were faintly visible beneath the skin...he had gotten so thin. "Here," he said, and held out his hand.

She took what he offered: it was a heavy circle of what looked like red glass. But it was much heavier than glass. Its weight in her hand was as substantial as if it had been carved out of stone. She turned it over slowly between her fingers, marveling at its smooth texture, despite the engravings all around the edges.

She shook her head. "No. Nothing." She handed it back to him, and he took it unsmilingly. "You weren't hoping it'd be something evil, then?" she asked, half-jokingly, but he seemed to take the question seriously.

"No, not really, but I was hoping for some kind of clue as to what it is," he said. "I hate not knowing things."

"Tell me about it," Ginny said. "I've about given up on feeling like we ever know anything, though. I mean, that cup you guys took from the museum - what did Hermione do with it?"

She immediately regretted the question. At the sound of Hermione's name, Harry stiffened and visibly retreated back into himself like a rabbit fleeing down a rabbit-hole. "I don't know," he said stiffly. "I have no idea what she did with it," and he stood up suddenly, tossing the covers back onto the couch. "I think I might go upstairs for a while," he said, shoving his hands into his pockets. "I'd probably benefit from some time alone. And I need to pack."

Ginny felt obscurely hurt. By now, however, she was a past master at hiding hurt feelings. All she said was, "When are you leaving, then?"

"Tomorrow morning, same as you," said Harry. He reached out and ruffled her hair lightly, as if she were a little girl. "Thanks," he said. "I appreciate you looking at the bracelet."

"You could go keep Draco company. It'd be good for him, I think, to spend some time with someone who actually talks."

Harry's eyes unfocused for a moment. "The lake," he said, took the blanket off the couch, and with a nod, headed towards the boys' staircase.

It was a brilliant winter's day outside. It had snowed the night before, which made it easier to follow Draco's distinctive boot prints in the snow. Ginny pulled the hood of her cloak up - it was very cold out, despite the sunshine glinting off the snow - and headed out to the lake.

She was halfway around the perimeter of the frozen water when she realized with an odd pang that Draco seemed to be following the exact path that Harry and Hermione usually took around the lake's edge. She could not count the times she had looked out a classroom window and seen the two familiar figures walking together, shoulder to shoulder, around the same track. She wondered if Draco realized it.

It was not hard to find him. She rounded a bend and there he was, sitting on a black tree stump. Later, she could not remember exactly what he'd been doing at that moment. Tossing stones at the iced-over lake, or denuding an evergreen sprig of its last leaves. She stood for a moment and looked at him, at leisure to examine him without him noticing. Under his black cloak he had on slightly worn corduroys and a dark red pullover - she had rarely seen him look so un-put-together. He wore a strangely pensive expression, alert yet dreaming. It made her wonder what he was thinking about.

She took a step forward towards him and a patch of ice cracked under her boot heel. He looked up, and when he saw her, looked startled. He began to rise to his feet. "Is there a..."

He didn't relax exactly, just shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at her with an expression almost of resentment.

She blinked at him, then down at her cloak. It was in fact new, her mother had sent to her as she had complained she was growing out of her last winter cloak. It was long, made of a pale yellow wool, not particularly distinctive. Draco noticed clothes more than other boys did, but she was surprised that even he would be struck by it. "Yes, early Christmas present."

"Huh. It looks familiar." He sat back down on the tree stump, hands still in his pockets, and looked away from her. Ginny turned to go, when his voice prevented her, "Wait," he said. She turned and saw him looking at her, an odd sort of pleading in his eyes. "Stay."

With a sigh, she went and joined him on the tree stump. For a moment they sat and looked out at the gray lake together in silence. The sunlight touched it here and there through the pattern of bare branches, casting lucent patches of gold against the silver.

It was Draco who broke the silence. "Something in your robe pocket," he said evenly, "is banging against my leg."

"Oh." Ginny reached into her pocket and pulled out Passionate Trousers. She was about to tuck it into the pocket on the other side of her robe when Draco stopped her with a hand on her wrist.

Ginny threw him a miffed glance. "Well, if I didn't keep getting interrupted by mad love triangles and grand-scale larceny I might be making better time."

Draco released her wrist and shrugged. "I just have to ask myself whether you're trying to punish yourself, or what. If you want a book, I have plenty of good books I could lend you. A Tale of Two Wizards, Great Incantations..."

"Because they're predictable. You can tell what's going to happen just by looking at the front cover illustrations."

"Oh, really?" Draco leaned forward and looked over her shoulder at the book cover. "How do you figure that?"

"Well, look." She moved her finger across the page, acutely aware of his eyes following it. "That's Rhiannon, the girl in the white dress. She's the heroine. She'll go through some hard times, but basically, she'll win out in the end with her one true love by her side. And that guy, the one in the breeches, that's Tristan. He's brave and dashing and he only wants to be with Rhiannon, but sinister forces keep them apart. Not forever, of course. The girl in the tight red leather corset, that's Lady Stacia. She's evil and rather slutty, and she'll definitely die in the end, but not till she's shagged half the male characters first. And the man in the black cloak, that's the Dark Wizard Morgan, he's evil too."

"That's not a dress, they're robes of state. And that's Geoffrey Montague, he's a childhood friend of Rhiannon's and very dependable. It's touch and go there. If Tristan dies, she'll probably wind up with him, but she'll always really be thinking of Tristan. If Tristan lives -" Ginny broke off. Draco's shoulders were shaking with silent laughter. "What is so funny?"

Draco made a sweeping gesture with his hand. "Let me tell you what really happens," he said. "Given the available information and these fabulous illustrations, I predict that Montague there will finally come out of the closet and run off with the Dark Wizard Morgan, who wasn't really all that evil, just lonely. They move to the country, buy a tower with a view, and spend the next sixty years renovating it and purchasing antiques. Rhiannon opens a convent school for young witches and installs Lady Stacia as the headmistress, where she amuses herself by trying to get the dress code changed to include leather corsets and spanking the girls when they get out of line."

"Oh, him. he's far too vain to be a decent love interest for anyone. Look at his boots. It takes hours to polish boots like that. No, Tristan is better off alone."

Draco grinned at her. "Well, for that all he really needs is a pile of naughty magazines and a door that locks."

"Aaargh!" screamed Ginny, and threw the book at him. "You make it all sound so dirty!"

Draco tilted his head back and looked consideringly up at the sky. "Well, it is dirty," he said. "It's not some holy, exalted thing, you know. It's about appetite and wanting and need and all those other things that make people do ugly things to each other. There's no betrayal without love, no loss without it, no jealousy. Half the ugliness in this world comes from it. It cuts and burns and makes wounds that don't ever heal. Give me hatred any day. Now there's an emotion I can get behind. You always know where you stand with it."

"Oh, it was," Draco said. "I saw his face when he looked at her. He was in love with her, whatever you might think."

"Well, at least he was sincere about it," Ginny snapped. She knew she sounded spiteful. "He didn't pretend he didn't care."

That made Draco sit up. He opened his eyes and splashed his cold gray ice-water gaze over her. "Oh, and I do?" He shrugged. "Maybe you're right. Maybe I don't really care about anybody. Or maybe it just looks that way to your idealistic eyes, did you think about that?"

"I'm not idealistic. Just because I think it's ridiculous of you to pretend you don't care about anyone when you obviously do, doesn't make me idealistic. People can't live without someone to care about."

"No, people can't live without food, water, shelter, and in my case, 3000-thread count cotton percale sheets. Other people are a luxury and not a necessity."

Ginny felt suddenly very weary. There seemed no point in having this conversation. It was impossible to win an argument with Draco, especially an argument like this one. She had no idea why she kept bothering; it would be equally productive to try to tunnel her way into the Chamber of Secrets using a spoon. "I'm going back to the castle," she said, and stood up abruptly, shielding her eyes with one hand - she didn't want him to see how close she was to crying. She held out her hand. "Could I have my book back, please?"

She heard a rustle of crackling snow, and then he was getting to his feet. "Are you all right? You're not crying, are you?"

"Oh. Come here, then." With brisk professionalism, he took her wrist and drew her towards him, his other hand under her chin. He tilted up her chin, and his eyes searched hers for a moment. "Stay still," he said.

She held his gaze without blinking. She hadn't stood this close to him since the night of the Yule Ball. (Later she realized this was not strictly true - she had been this close when he had kissed her in the museum, but that had been such an obvious attempt to annoy Seamus, that she barely considered it a real kiss.) In fact, she had just about never been this close to him in daylight. She wanted to not stare, but she couldn't help it - some part of her mind seemed determined to print this moment on her memory, as if somehow she felt as if she might never see him again. She tried to concentrate on the things that were wrong with his face, the imperfections - the scar under his eye where Harry's ink-bottle had cut him, the fact that his eyes were slightly different shapes, that one side of his mouth was higher than the other, which accounted for the fact that he smirked so well, even the fact that his hair wanted cutting and was falling in his eyes. No, he wasn't perfect looking when you took it all apart, Seamus was just as handsome - more if you liked them less delicate-looking. It didn't matter, of course. Seamus couldn't send reverberations shuddering up her arms just by touching her wrists.

His eyes grazed her face like a touch. He spoke slowly. "I don't see anything," he said.

It took a moment for her even to realize what he was talking about. When she recollected herself, she firmly detached her wrist from his grasp and stepped away, barely noting his surprised look.

The next day was the last day of term. Ginny rode from Hogsmeade back to King's Cross station in a train compartment with Dean, Seamus and Charlie. She could tell that Seamus was eager to talk to her alone but that the presence of Dean embarrassed him and the presence of her tall, muscular brother terrified him.

At one point she saw Harry and Draco pass by through the compartment window, but was not particularly surprised that they didn't come in - Harry would hardly want to be around Charlie, and Draco's loathing for Seamus was unabated. She waved at the two of them once they had disembarked onto Platform 9 3/4 at King's Cross. Harry waved back; Draco turned to see what he was looking at, and then they were blocked from her sight by Sirius and Narcissa.

Ginny turned away to see her own family coming towards her from the other end of the platform - her mother and father, the twins, Percy, (Bill, she knew, was still in Egypt) - but Ron was not with them. She felt a pang but supposed she could hardly blame him for not coming.

"Ginny..." said a voice in her ear. She turned and saw without surprise that it was Seamus. He had his hands in his pockets, and a black watch cap pulled down over his light hair. She realized she hadn't properly looked at him in days - he looked tired and downcast, but managed to smile at her. "I just wanted to say Merry Christmas."

"Oh, Merry Christmas," she replied awkwardly, but before she could say anything else they were engulfed in a sudden tide of Weasleys. Mrs. Weasley descended on Ginny and hugged and kissed her; Mr. Weasley clapped Charlie on the back, Percy made officious welcoming noises, and Fred set off a miniature Filibuster Firework that played 'Jingle Bells' at obnoxiously high volume. Only George seemed to notice Seamus' presence amongst them.

Mrs. Weasley released Charlie from her embrace and turned a friendly glance on Seamus. "Oh, hello," she said. "And you are...?"

"This is Seamus, Mum," said Ginny pitching her voice an octave higher so that her mother could hear her over the sound of Jingle Bells. "He's the same year as Ron and he's a Chaser on our team and," she added, without having the faintest idea why, "he's my BOYFRIEND."

There was a startled silence. Everyone looked shocked, no one more so than Seamus.

"Well, well," said Mr. Weasley, and held out a hand to Seamus. "Nice to meet you, son."

Some of the color had come back into Seamus' face. "Nice to meet you too, sir," he replied, and shook Mr. Weasley's hand firmly. "My parents have always spoken very highly of you, my mum especially. She says you're the best Minister of Magic Britain's had since Felonius Plum."

Mr. Weasley flushed with pleasure and pumped Seamus' hand with renewed vigor. "Well, well," he said again. "That's good to hear, very good to hear. Will we be seeing your family at the wedding?"

Seamus shook his head regretfully. "No, I'm afraid not. Renovations on the family home..."

Seamus smiled at her. "Yes, you know how these big old castles are, always a bit tumbling down here or there. "

Seamus flashed a bright smile at Mrs. Weasley, who dimpled in a way usually reserved only for Gilderoy Lockhart. "It must be lovely in Ireland in the winter," she said kindly.

"Oh, it is, although it's very cold," Seamus said, somehow managing to sound as if he found the conversation fascinating. "I could certainly use one of those wonderful sweaters you're always knitting for Ron and Harry, Mrs. Weasley; I'd be the envy of my whole town."

Ginny thought her mother might be about to asphyxiate with joy. She knew Mrs. Weasley was excessively proud of the sweaters she knitted every Christmas. She also knew that Ron annually attempted to give his sweaters away to Seamus, Dean and Neville with no takers. "What use have I got for a sweater with a bloody great RW embroidered across the front?" Dean had demanded last Christmas with his usual diplomacy.

"You could pretend it stood for Royal Wanker," Harry had suggested amicably, and then he and Ron had fallen about laughing and making further suggestions, each ruder than the last.

Ginny snapped out of her reverie to find her mother gazing at Seamus as if he were a long-lost child. "Call me Molly," she was saying. "And Ireland sounds really lovely. I'm sure Ginny would enjoy a visit there."

"Muuuuuuuuuuuuum," Ginny wailed, scandalized, but her father had thankfully begun tugging her mother towards the far end of the platform, suggesting that they say a quick hello to Narcissa, Sirius and Lupin.

"You two say your goodbyes," Mrs. Weasley beamed at Seamus and Ginny as her husband drew her away. Charlie and Percy followed them, and George and Fred sloped off to greet a few of their friends who had not yet graduated.

Ginny turned slowly to Seamus, who was wearing a smirk that would have done a Malfoy proud. "WELL," she said, in an accusatory tone. "What was that all about?"

"Hey, you started it. I didn't even know I was your boyfriend. Was there a memo I didn't get?"

Ginny was suddenly contrite. "Oh, I know, I'm so sorry. That was awful. I have no idea what came over me."

Ginny looked at him quickly. She could tell he was nervous, because when he was nervous his soft Irish accent reasserted itself more strongly.

"Well," he said, "you haven't spoken to me in three days. I haven't even had a chance to give you your Christmas present."

"That's all right," he replied with a smile. "You can bring me something when your mother makes you come visit me in Ireland."

"Don't." His voice was firm. "I want to give you this. I've been thinking about it for yonks, and well…there isn't anyone else I'd rather give it to. And it was kind of expensive, and it would look stupid on me."

"Hardly. Anyway, I look fabulous in lacy underwear." He reached into a pocket of his cloak and drew out a small box. It was not the sort of box you put books or clothing in. It was, most definitely, a jewelry box. She hesitated. "Take it," he said gently.

She took it, vaguely wondering if her family was watching all this and hoping desperately that it wasn't a ring. She herself was rather hoping it wasn't a ring, as she had no idea what she'd do if it was.

"Go on," he said, "open it," and something occurred to her. No boy who wasn't her brother had ever given her a present. Not once. Not ever.

She opened the box. Inside, on a bed of brightly colored tissue, lay a bracelet. And not just any kind of bracelet...the tag attached proclaimed it to be a Porte Bonheur Enchanted Charm Bracelet. Ginny almost dropped the box. Charm Bracelets were both very expensive and very famous, because each charm had to be handcrafted with intricate spells, then Transfigured into an object that could be activated later. In fact, she'd never met anyone who owned one.

"One of my uncles makes them," Seamus said a bit shyly as she took it out of the box and held it up to the light. The bracelet itself was a delicate but unremarkable band of silver links, but the Charms themselves were what was interesting - a tiny musical note, a small gold candelabra, a miniature arrow, a glass heart, a dish and spoon, a little quill, and a dozen more. "Just throw the charm into a fire to activate it - here, let me help you put it on..." She held out her hand and with a deft motion he snapped it closed around her wrist. He glanced up at her through his eyelashes. "Do you like it?"

Ginny realized she had not said one word for the past five minutes. "I am such a git," she gasped, without thinking. "Oh, it's wonderful. - I love it, and I -"

But her family was back, surging around them in a wave of red hair and loud voices, and now they were tugging Ginny towards the car. She had time to grasp Seamus' hand briefly before they were pulled apart as Ginny's mother led her away, taking excitedly into her ear as they walked.

Ginny made out only some of the words, "Castle, so polite, such nice manners, and so handsome too!" She nodded without replying as she looked back towards the platform, watching Seamus recede into the distance until he was lost from view. I love it, she had told him. And she had nearly added that she loved him too. What, she wondered, had prompted her to nearly say that when she was almost positively sure that it wasn't true?

Two days after arriving at the Manor, Draco lay on his back in the middle of his bed, staring out the window at the clouds racing across the pale-blue winter sky.

Lately he had decided that he rather liked his new bedroom. He had been initially annoyed when Harry had destroyed his old room. Then he had remembered that he'd never really liked it, with its ugly heavy dark furniture and gloomy black curtains. (He had once had somewhat fond memories of the wardrobe, but Harry had reduced that to matchsticks.) So he'd gathered up what belongings he wanted and relocated to a room farther down the hall, one he had always preferred. It had dark wood wainscotting, and the walls were painted a blue so light it was almost gray. It reminded him of winter sky, which he liked. He also liked the sizeable marble fireplace along the north wall - Harry had been right, Malfoy Manor could have used a better central heating system. The fireplace was hooked to the Floo Network, which had proved, lately, to be very useful.

"Are you listening to me, Draco?" Hermione's voice had taken on a slight edge of impatience.

Draco rolled over onto his stomach and rested his head on his crossed arms. "Do I ever do anything else?"

Hermione scowled at him through the flames. He supposed he didn't blame her; he knew it cost money to use the fireplaces at the Leaky Cauldron for private Floo Communication, and the service wasn't the best. Occasionally they would be interrupted by other people's conversations, and the day before, Hermione had reported to him, pink-faced, that she'd been taken to "quite the wrong fireplace" where she'd seen "really shocking things." To his great disappointment, she refused, despite being plied with curious questions ("Did they involve balloons, marmalade, or a live marmot?") to elaborate on what the shocking things had been.

"You were," said Draco in a bored tone, "telling me about Rhysenn and Nicholas Flamel."

"Oh, right, and the Four Worthy Objects...you know he was the last person ever to have assembled them all together?"

"Oh." Hermione consulted a book he could not see. "After. Although, like I told you, she did die in 1616 but that's not the last reported sighting of her."

"Considering that I sighted her last week, I'd think no, it wouldn't have been."

She did. It appeared that Rhysenn, who had other surnames besides that of Malfoy, reappeared again and again in the illustrations of the books on alchemy Hermione had checked out of the big library on Diagon Alley. She was often in crowd pictures behind one Malfoy or another, dressed in the fashion of the day, instantly recognizable with her narrow pale face and waist-length black hair.

"So she trails Malfoys around, leaving a trail of blood, death and devastation in her wake, is that it?" Draco asked when Hermione was halfway through her recitation. "That's encouraging."

Draco thought of Harry in the graveyard, being sick after Rhysenn had touched him, and the drugged look in his eyes. "You might not want to give her what she really wants."

"I've been thinking what she wants must be something in the possession of the Malfoys, since she seems so fascinated with your family. There are all sorts of examples of people being magically linked to objects, unable to be away from them. Souls can be embodied in various heirlooms, precious stones -"

"Mmm." Draco plucked at his duvet cover. "What's the last recorded sighting of her?"

"In 1824, she was engaged as a nanny for the children of Octavian Malfoy - some great-uncle of yours - in Romania. She left when...oh, dear. The manor house he was living in burned down."

"Only Octavian died. He went back into the house to save his children...they all survived."

There was a short silence. Draco lay where he was, gazing dreamily at the fire. It licked up around Hermione in tendrils of blue, green, and dark violet. "I'd like to die like that," he said, a little distantly.

Hermione dropped what she'd been holding. "Burned to death? No you wouldn't, Draco, it's an awful way to die."

"No, not burned to death. Saving someone else's life - if you have to die, that's the way to do it, isn't it? Saving someone else's life."

Hermione's intake of breath was so sharp it sounded like snapping firewood. "Don't say that. Don't talk about death like that."

Another wave of tiredness rolled over Draco. "I guess you haven't had any luck researching..."

"Your injury? No," Hermione said in a small voice. "I'm telling you, I'm about reduced to cross-referencing "injury" and "magical things that glow" and just seeing if I come up with anything."

She squinted narrowly at him. "Are you really or are you just saying that to shut me up? And are you still having those dreams?"

"Draco..." Hermione's voice came out on a wail. "Honestly, I don't even know what aspect of your life to worry about first."

Draco was spared answering as his bedroom door swung open with a bang, and Harry came in, scowling. "Malfoy, have you seen -"

He broke off, his eyes widening fractionally at the sight of Hermione in the fireplace. Hermione herself paled but said nothing. There followed several moments of a Very Uncomfortable Silence.

"I'd better be going," Hermione said finally. "They close the library at five o'clock, and I wanted to get in a few more hours of research. Give Sirius my best," she added, and with a slight wave, in the general direction of both Harry and Draco, she vanished.

Draco rolled into a sitting position and looked at Harry, still half-in and half-out of the doorway. The stricken look was gone from his face; now he looked as if he'd forgotten what he'd come for.

"I'm not going to sulk, it's just...I thought...her house wasn't connected to the Floo Network."

"It's not. She's in Diagon Alley at the Leaky Cauldron. She told her parents she had a research paper to work on. Which, I suppose, is partway true. She's looking into the Four Worthy Objects. Life goes on, you know."

"Right." Harry finally seemed to make up his mind, and came into the room, shutting the door behind him. On the small table by the door stood a collection of antique toy wizard soldiers; Harry picked up one desultorily and pretended to examine it. "So how often do you talk to her, then?"

"Every day," said Draco, who saw no reason to lie about it. They did talk every day; today had been the first time that the majority of the discussion hadn't been about Harry.

"Ouch," Harry said. It was a moment before Draco realized Harry wasn't reproaching him, but was in fact reacting to the fact that the toy wizard had stabbed him in the thumb with its wand. He dropped it back on the table and stuck his bleeding thumb in his mouth, which had the instant effect of making him look about eight. "Well," he began slowly, as if the words were being dragged out of him. "How is she doing, then?"

"Rotten," said Draco, quite honestly, "you're both doing rotten; not eating, not sleeping, thwarted young love, very tragic. Here, borrow my quill, you can go write a poem in your journal all about it."

Draco grinned evilly and knelt upright on the bed, one hand placed over his heart. "Woe! The pain that is my life," he declaimed.

"He did NOT SHAG HER," yelled Harry, turning approximately the color of an eggplant. "I hate you, Malfoy, and I hate your stupid poem!"

Draco looked vaguely offended. "I was simply taking artistic licence. Come to think of it, your life makes an excellent epic poem - in a pathetic kind of way. I wonder what rhymes with 'cupboard'? Or 'lonely nights of wanking off in the Gryffindor dormitory'-ow! OW!" he yelled as Harry launched himself onto the bed and vigorously attacked him with a green embroidered pillow. A furious but silent fight ensued, which ended when Harry managed to jam an elbow into Draco's solar plexus while simultaneously sitting on his legs.

Draco made a face at him. They were nose-to-nose, and Harry was looking even more wild-eyed and wild haired than usual. "I'm sorry I said you were a tart," he said.

Harry ignored this. "You know what I mean! Why are you bringing up -you know - Ron and all that? Aren't you supposed to be being sensitive and brotherly and -"

"Yeah, well, I tried that but it didn't seem to be working. So I thought maybe I ought to just keep mentioning it as rudely as possible until you get desensitized."

Draco struggled to prop himself up on his elbows, putting himself at eye level with Harry, who was still kneeling on his legs. "Look, Potter," he said evenly. "This wedding is tomorrow. And you know who's going to be here. Weasley, for one. Half Slytherin House - their parents are all friends with my mother. I know Blaise and Pansy will be here. You're not going to be living in a world of people who don't know or are too polite to say anything, not any more. And the way you are these days, the first nasty comment anyone makes will cut the legs out from under you. Better you start getting used to it now, and hearing it from someone who doesn't really want to hurt you."

The anger vanished from Harry's expression like a candle blown out. "You know, Malfoy," he said grudgingly. "You're probably the only person in the world who could be a huge jerk to me, then turn around and convince me that they're actually doing me a favor."

"Argh," said Harry, and rolled off him. He flopped onto his back and lay next to Draco, staring up at the ceiling. Draco manfully quashed the urge to tell Harry not to put his feet on the bedspread. "I guess..." Harry said slowly, his gaze unfocused, "I guess I have been a bit mopey lately..."

"You call that a bit mopey? I suppose you'd say that the inhabitants of Pompeii were a bit surprised when the top blew off their local hill and buried them all in ash? Or that the crew of the Titanic was a bit annoyed about hitting that iceberg? Or that -"

"I get it," Harry interrupted, wriggling slightly with annoyance. "So I've been mopey."

"I'll tell you, Potter," Draco confided, "there've been times lately when I've been tempted to go hang about with Moaning Myrtle just to have someone upbeat to talk to."

"Well, why bother hanging around me at all then -" Harry began irritably, then caught himself. He bit his lip. "Look, I'm sorry," he said more quietly. "I know it hasn't been pleasant for you. I don't want to seem like I'm not grateful -"

"Grateful," echoed Draco, his voice faintly tinged with disgust. "Whatever. Look -"

"You think I don't notice what you do for me," Harry said flatly. "Well, I do notice. It might not seem like it, but I do notice."

Draco felt suddenly self-conscious. "I know," he said. "Look, I wasn't complaining -well, I was, actually, but now you've made me feel stupid about it. I hate that."

Draco blinked. "Already this conversation has had more alarming twists than Snape doing the rhumba." He shrugged. "I'm all ears."

Harry looked sideways at him, his expression open and confiding. It was that look that was very hard to say no to, because it made you want to trust him, and to believe that whatever idea he had was the right one. "I need you," Harry said, "to take my memories away."

"You don't have a choice about this, Ronald Weasley," his father said, in a tone that clearly indicated that he would brook no argument. "Do you understand me?"

"Yes," replied Ron, and his tone was as implacable as his father's. "But I'm still not going."

Ginny looked with mute appeal at her mother, who returned her gaze with one that was equally despondent. The two Weasley women sat together at the kitchen table; through the open door to the living room they could see both Ron and Mr. Weasley. Mr. Weasley was pacing furiously up and down on the hearthrug; Ron sat quietly on the sofa, his clasped hands dangling between his knees. His head was bowed, his tangled hair falling to hide his expression.

"Don't fret, love," said Mrs. Weasley and patted her daughter's hand across the table. "Your Dad will make him see reason."

Ginny just looked at her silently. For the first time in her life she felt briefly sorry for her mother, who really had no idea what was going on with her youngest son. Not as sorry as she felt for Ron, of course. She didn't blame him for not wanting to attend the wedding. Not at all.

"...At least offer me a decent explanation!" Arthur was thundering, having moved on from All the Arrangements Have Already Been Made and But The Whole Family Is Going to the more general, but still effective, There Is No Reason For This Kind of Behavior.

"I told you," Ron said in a monotone. "I had a fight with Harry. He won't want to see me. It'll make the whole wedding awkward. It's not fair on Sirius."

Mrs. Weasley sighed. "Poor baby," Ginny heard her murmur under her breath. She had no idea if her mother was referring to Ron or to Harry. Of course Mrs. Weasley adored her youngest boy, but she was also positively ridiculous about Harry, worrying over him as if he were another one of her children. Ginny thought to herself with an inward smile that it might perhaps be a good thing that she and Harry had never dated - her mother would have taken his side in any arguments, and she would have wound up hitting her mother over the head with a plank, or wanting to. For Mrs. Weasley, the idea of Ron and Harry not speaking was as distressing as Fred and George or Bill and Charlie not speaking - a horrid warp in the familial weft.

"And I told you," Mr. Weasley replied furiously, "that I received an owl from Sirius just this morning. He told me how much they're looking forward to seeing us at the Manor and how much, in particular, Harry is looking forward to seeing you."

"No, he doesn't! And if you two really did have a fight, then maybe this is your chance to patch it up. You've fought before. It never lasts."

"Your absence would really mar the happiness of this event for Sirius and Narcissa," Mr. Weasley said calmly. "It really would."

Ron's head snapped up at that. He stared at his father. "You can't honestly expect me to believe that they'd care. Why would they?" he said, and his voice was so toneless that it was hardly a question. "Why do you?"

"Of course I care!" Mr. Weasley began explosively. Then he threw up his hands. "I can't talk to you," he glowered. "I can't talk to you at all!" He spun on his heel and stomped out of the study into the kitchen. He paused to glare at Ginny and her mother, his face tomato-red. "TEENAGERS," he announced, in the same tone Wizard Wireless Network reporters usually reserved for reporting an outbreak of goblin fever, and flung himself out the kitchen door and into the garden.

Mrs. Weasley's face was the picture of dismay. "Oh, dear," she said, gazing anxiously out the window at her husband, who had begun a violent and probably unnecessary de-gnoming of the lettuce patch. "I suppose I'd better go talk to Ron."

"No." Ginny got to her feet with a sigh. "Let me do it. I think I understand what's going on."

She left the kitchen without another glance at her mother, shutting the connecting door to the study firmly behind her. Was it her imagination, she wondered, or was the temperature in the study actually several degrees colder than the temperature in the rest of the house? Certainly a chill seemed to be emanating from Ron, who was still sitting on the sofa in the same position he'd been in for the past two hours - head down, shoulders bowed. She went and sat down on the sofa next to him. He didn't move.

His head went up and he looked at her, betrayal evident in his eyes. Ginny winced. When she'd been eleven, the summer after the diary incident, she'd been plagued by nightmares. Her brothers had taken turns sleeping on the floor by her bed so that she wouldn't be alone. Her parents had offered to do the same, but Ginny had wanted her brothers there. Brothers were for protecting you. It was what they did.

"Harry? Harry's the reason I want to stay away! He can't possibly want me there."

"No," Ginny admitted. "Possibly not. But think about it for a minute, Ron. Harry is famous. Draco is famous. Sirius and Narcissa are both famous. This wedding is going to be a huge media event and there will be reporters there. If you don't go, they'll have a field day with it. 'Harry Potter's best friend, son of the Minister of Magic, was conspicuous by his absence from the gala affair...'"

Ron buried his face in his hands with a groan. "Don't," he said. "Anyway, fine, maybe I have to go to the wedding but why do I have to go a day early with the rest of you? I thought the luncheon thing tomorrow was supposed to be top secret anyway, there won't be any reporters there, nobody even knows about it except the people who're invited."

"I know, Ron, but don't think they won't ask around at the wedding and find out who was there the day before."

"They would," Ginny replied flatly. "They'll dig around, too, and they'll find someone willing to talk. And then they'll splash it all over the gossip pages of Teen Witch Weekly just like they did third year with that Krum business, and fourth year with that whole Harry and Cho thing - and none of that stuff was even true. And Harry will be humiliated all over again. Do you want that?"

"No! No, of course I don't!" Ron flung himself to his feet and paced over to the fireplace. The hearth was empty and cold; there was no fire lit. In the momentary silence between them, Ginny could hear that it had begun to rain outside. "If I could go back and change things, don't you think I would?"

"It doesn't matter. You can't," she said. "You can't fix what you did in the past. But you can maybe make the present a little more bearable."

"If you had told me a year ago," Ron said quietly, still staring down into the empty fireplace, "that I'd be expected to go to Malfoy Manor on my Christmas holidays, to attend a wedding of all things, and that Harry would be there too because he lives there now - and that I'd be expected to be happy about this, because everyone else is - I would have laughed at you. I hate Malfoy. I hate all the Malfoys and everything they stand for. And sometimes, still, I wonder if Draco is the only one besides me who remembers how things used to be. I can tell by the way he looks at me - like he's gloating about how he's finally won. He always wanted Harry on his side and now he's got him. I miss him, Ginny -" Ron's voice broke, and she stood up, wanting to go over to him, but she could hear the live undercurrent of pain in his voice, and was afraid that any expression of sympathy might crack the last of his self-control. "I miss my best friend," Ron said, more quietly. "He loved what I loved and hated what I hated, and always put me first. And now - now I don't know. If we had to go through that Second Task again right now, who do you think he'd be rescuing from the bottom of the lake? Not me, that's for sure."

"I don't. I don't change." Ron looked at her and through her; she knew he wasn't really seeing her at all. "I'll go," he said. "I'll go to the wedding, for all the reasons you said. But I have a bad feeling about it. Something is telling me that there's darkness coming. Bad things are going to happen - terrible things."

Ginny was suddenly on the alert. "Bad things? Are you just saying that, Ron, or do you see something? Because if you do -"

Ron smiled bitterly. "It doesn't matter what I do. It doesn't matter what any of us does. What's coming will come and we can't stop it."

"Uh-huh," Draco said. "Would this be select memories, or do you want them all gone? Planning to start life over again as somebody else? Going to enter the Wizarding Witness Protection Program? Spend the rest of your life wondering where that funny-looking mark on your head came from, are you?"

"Yes you are, and anyway, I never said anything about you taking all my memories away. I don't want you to take all of them away, or even most of them. I just want to not remember..." His voice trailed off.

Draco sat very still. In the past seven days, he had only once heard Harry say Ron's name, and that had been because he was angry. He had not said Hermione's name either, referring to her only as "she" and "her" when he absolutely had to. Despite Draco's light words about desensitization he was, on some very deep internal level, badly frightened by Harry's reaction to everything that had happened. He would never have admitted it to himself or anyone else, but he was.

"I just want not to remember all of that," Harry finished. "You know. Just for tonight, because it's Sirius' party and I don't want to ruin it by being miserable. I ought to be happy for him, and I am, it's just..." Harry closed his eyes, and for a moment, held his breath. Eyes shut, his eyelashes brushed the tops of his cheekbones in fine black penstrokes. "I'm so tired," he said finally, wearily. "It's such an effort, acting normal."

"I know," Harry replied, opening his eyes, "and then there's the next night, and the night after that, and I have to get through them all, and I will - I will. It's just tonight - tonight is special. It's Sirius, you know?"

His last sentence hung in the air with a plaintive sound. Draco did indeed know. Sirius was indeed special, even more so now when Harry felt he had so little left to depend on. Draco cleared his throat. "No," he said. "I won't do it."

"Because I'm not trained to do Memory Charms. Because they can backfire. You might lose the wrong memories, or lose your memories altogether."

"Memory Charms aren't a Dark Art!" Draco almost yelled. "And I can't believe you'd be dim enough to think that if they were a Dark Art, I'd go about practicing them on you!"

"Sirius would kill me, for a start," Draco said angrily. "Anyway, think how it'd look if, in the middle of the party, you forgot his name or something."

"How about a Cheering Charm?" Draco asked grudgingly. Internally it was his opinion that asking Draco Malfoy for a Cheering Charm was not unlike asking Snape for a love potion, or Filch for a pink-iced birthday cake. "It couldn't do you too much damage."

Draco sighed. "Against my better judgement, yes I will. But not right now. I need to look them up, and anyway, I don't want you going around grinning like a lunatic all afternoon."

Harry grinned - in a calm and un-lunatic-like manner - and rolled off the bed, landing lightly on his feet. "Thanks. I'll come back before the party, then."

Malfoy Manor was so huge, Harry thought crossly, that he wished Sirius would just break down and draw a Marauder's Map for the place. He seemed to be able to find his way around fairly well when he didn't think about it - probably another leftover from the botched Polyjuice spell, an echo of the little bit of Draco still lodged at the back of his skull. Hey there Malfoy, he thought with dark amusement as he approached a drafty intersection of two corridors, which way do I go?

He went left, partly because instinct told him to, and partly because Draco was on his mind and he associated Draco with all things leftwards and sinister. The turn brought him to another corridor, this one lit by candelabras in jade brackets. It didn't take a Hermione-level genius to realize he was in the Green Wing - green tapestries depended from the walls, and the floor was overlapping tiles of white and green marble. Green, green and more green. Bleh, Harry thought. At least he was going the right direction, however. The conservatory was in the Green Wing.

He ducked past a sour-faced Malfoy ancestor glaring from a green-framed portrait and around another corridor, and there he was, in the conservatory.

Harry looked around him in quiet wonder. He knew Draco's family had money. They were money, almost the richest wizarding family in England. But he himself was possessed of such an abstracted nature, especially lately, that he had never really paused to think about, or notice, the Manor's grandiose interiors. Probably because most of the house, while impressive, was coldly ornate without being beautiful; the conservatory, however, was beautiful. The walls were tinted glass, rising high above his head, and the pale winter sunlight poured through, turning the air to a silvery-gold haze. Hyacinths floated atop still pools of water. Huge trees rose overhead, wreathed in melancholy moss; there were palms, tree ferns, a pine and a giant bird-of-paradise plant. And of course, this being the home of the Malfoys, one wall was devoted to carnivorous plants which Harry recognized from Herbology class: among them sundews, butterworts, pitcher plants, Venus flytraps and bladderworts.

He whistled through his teeth, and the sharp sound echoed off the glass. It recollected him to his task. Quickly crossing the conservatory floor, he knelt down by a freshly turned bed of earth, like an altar boy kneeling at a railing. He reached into his cloak, and began to draw the objects he had brought with him out, one by one, placing them on the marble floor by his right knee.

He had no idea what he was doing, really; he was proceeding almost entirely on instinct, but then what he was trying to reproduce was an instant of the most instinctual magic he could imagine. So the objects he had brought with him had not been collected with a specific purpose in mind, exactly. They were simply what seemed to him right at the time: the Pensieve Draco had given him for his birthday and the album Hagrid had once given him full of photos of his parents. The eagle feather quill that had been his twelfth birthday present from Hermione. A playful line drawing Sirius had once sketched for him, showing the Gryffindor team on their broomsticks. A letter from Lupin.

He had wanted to bring something Ron-related as well, but had been unable to look at any of the gifts his best friend had once given him. He could have forced himself, but it would have required a soul-searching he felt himself incapable of. He didn't want to think too much about what he was doing. Thinking might destroy the fragile web he was weaving here, a web spun out of instinct, love and desperation. It was as if the instructions he was following had been laid down for him in dreams. He had not consulted any spellbooks, had not been to the library. His mouth twitched as he imagined how horrified Hermione would be by what he was doing.

Hermione. The thought of her brought a sour taste to the back of his throat. He looked at the small scatter of objects on the floor at his feet, then stretched out his right hand. "Apparecium incendio," he whispered, and a fire leaped up from the stone floor in front of him, making him jerk his hand back quickly. It was hot, hotter than a normal fire. He waited a moment to see if it would spread, but it remained contained within a small, inviolate space about the size of his own outstretched arms making a circle. Keeping his mind blank, he took the eagle feather quill and hurled it into the heart of the fire.

The flames burned blue for a moment. Harry took hold of Sirius' sketch, and tossed that in as well. The letters from Lupin followed, the ink showing up black and brilliant as the pages crumbled away into ash. Harry lifted the photo album - hesitated a moment - threw it in. Tears he was unaware of spilled from his stinging eyes as the fire turned a violent azure color, flared up, and went out, leaving a handful of ashes behind.

Harry took the handful of ash, and slowly sifted it through his fingers into the bowl of the Pensieve. His heart was beating hard against his ribcage. The inchoate white smoky stuff inside the Pensieve turned to scarlet, and began to swirl faster, like angry thunderclouds.

Harry reached into his back pocket, and took out his much-used pocketknife. He flicked the blade open, wrapped his fingers around it, held out his hand, and squeezed tightly. A zinging silvery pain shot up his arm, and a slow thread of scarlet blood unraveled from his clenched fist and spilled into the Pensieve.

The smoke's scarlet color deepened. Now it was the color of old blood. Harry felt it was time. He dropped the knife, and with his bloody hand reached inside his shirt, and drew out the small glass vial of dirt on the end of its frayed cord. He uncapped it and poured the dirt into the Pensieve, then threw the vial aside. He heard the glass smash on the stone floor; it sounded like distant rain.

The next words Harry spoke left his lips without any conscious thought at all. The smoke, the dizziness of not having eaten for days, the pain in his hand, and the instinctual magic he was conjuring had put him into almost a trance state. In that state, his mind reached back into itself for what was almost his earliest memory - his mother, leaning over him and singing softly, and the song she sang was one of magic and protection.

There was a soft sound, like the threads of a frayed rope parting under strain. The smoke in the Pensive suddenly shot upwards, out of the bowl, like a serpent rising up under the ministrations of a snake charmer. The scarlet smoke rose up and up, winding around Harry. It wound around him three times, tightly, and he felt the pressure as if the smoke were a silk cord binding him - once around his forehead, once around his throat, and once around his heart. He was, for a moment, blinded by the red smoke, and deafened by it, too. He saw only scarlet shadows, heard only the beat of his own heart.

Then the silence was broken. He heard a voice inside his head. It spoke to him as he had thought only Draco could speak to him: without words, but saying everything.

And the smoke vanished, funneling back into the Pensieve like water being sucked back down a drain. Within a moment, the smoke had returned to its previous color, and the Pensieve looked just as it had an hour before, entirely untouched.

Harry blinked and gasped in air - his throat burned from breathing the acrid smoke, and his face was sticky where his tears had made tracks in the dirt and soot that covered him. He felt worn with exhaustion, but strangely relieved. Slowly, he lowered his head, and rested it on his bleeding hand. It's done, he told himself, echoing the voice in his head. I am protected. Now I can do what I have to do. What I was born to do.

Hermione scrubbed the back of her hand wearily across her eyes. This was the third afternoon she'd spent inside the Althea Thoon Memorial Library in Diagon Alley. She'd never thought she'd feel this way, but she was sick of the inside of the library. Probably because her research wasn't getting anywhere.

Hermione had always been able to bury herself in work, the more complicated the better. But she had never been quite so preoccupied as she was now - thoughts of Ron and Harry crowded her mind, compounded by worry over Draco, who looked worse each time she talked to him - and didn't anyone else notice? Didn't they care? She knew he was clever enough to hide things from Sirius, but what about Harry, the one person who should have known instinctively, the one person who might actually be able to get Draco to do something about it. She itched to owl Harry but she knew perfectly well that he'd tear up any letter she sent without reading it. Oh, he was stubborn. Damn it.

She glanced up and around her and sighed. The library walls were paneled mahogany, very dark, and hung with paintings of famous witches and wizards. Hermione had taken a seat underneath a portrait of Rowena Ravenclaw in dark blue robes, hoping it would give her inspiration. Instead she was haunted by the lingering feeling that Rowena looked disappointed in her.

She stood up, stretched her aching muscles, and went back to the floating card catalogue along the east wall. She'd already asked the bookworms to do at least four searches for her, and she was fairly sure they were tired of her requests - it was hard to tell, though, when dealing with worms, even extremely intelligent, magical, slightly fuzzy ones.

One slithered over along the top of the catalogue and waved its pale gold antennae at her curiously. Hermione sighed again. She'd already run searches on poison, injuries, blood, glowing, silver, weakness/debilitation spells, and phosphorescent. She hadn't come up with anything - there didn't seem to be a potion or poison that caused blood to glow. There were potions that caused people to glow, and several cosmetic spells that promised glowing and revitalized skin, but she had a feeling that this wasn't a cosmetic spell gone horribly awry. (Although, with Draco, anything was possible.)

The bookworm waved its antennae impatiently. Hermione sighed again and gave it her last shot, "Could you search the Magical Armaments section for me? I want to know what weapons glow themselves, or cause glowing injuries to be inflicted."

The antennae waved again, and the bookworm wriggled busily away. Hermione watched it go, stifling a yawn. She knew it could take hours for the worm to scour all the books in the Weaponry section, and she really was deathly sick of being indoors. With a resolute shrug of her shoulders, she went back to her desk, retrieved her blue wool cloak, and hurried out the doors of the library into the weak winter sunshine.

Diagon Alley was a hive of activity. Less than five days were left until Christmas, and it seemed as if every witch and wizard in England had descended on the narrow maze of shopping streets around the Alley. Floating red and green ribbons wreathed the tall metal lanterns, tiny enchanted gold angel statuettes trilled from the tops of Christmas trees. Hundreds of owls swooped overhead, carrying packages emblazoned with the WPS logo (the Wizarding Postal Service, for those who didn't own owls of their own - the owls were notorious for losing packages en route, and Ron tended to call the WPS "Whoops" for short.) Hermione passed a brass colliery band energetically playing "Adeste Fidelis" as she rounded the corner of Petticoat Lane.

The windows of the Lane were devoted now to displays of beautiful winter dresses and dress robes. Hermione slowed her pace, looking in the windows. She had never been terribly interested in clothes, and still wasn't - she liked to look nice and clean and presentable, and every once in a while to wear a smart skirt or sweater, but the sad truth was that everything she owned tended to get ink stains on it after a while. She liked pretty things but never seemed to have the time or inclination to work tirelessly on her appearance the way Blaise or Pansy did, unless it was a special occasion.

Having Harry in her life a boyfriend had made her think about her appearance more, but now...she looked at her reflection in the nearest shop window and sighed. Tangled hair, draggled face, nubby old sweater and wrinkles in her tights. Ugh. Her gaze drifted upwards towards the dresses in the window display. She narrowed her gaze. Hermione loathed frothy party dresses, anything covered in lace or beads or masses of flowers made her queasy. But these were really rather nice - straight clean lines and jewel-colors, dark reds and greens and blues. And she did need a dress for the wedding. And she didn't want to arrive looking like she'd been dragged backwards through a jungle of Fluttering Ferns, since Harry was going to be there. She intended to look fabulous and sweep past him with a haughty glare that would crush him like a bug. Well, she didn't want him crushed, really. Perhaps just slightly squashed. Dented, maybe.

It was decided. Hermione squared her shoulders and pushed the shop door open, smoothing her hair down as best she could with her gloved hand. She knew she didn't look her best, but it was unlikely she'd run into anyone she knew.

Unlikely, but apparently not impossible. Hermione took a few steps into the store, her eyes adjusting to the dimmer light. Rose-shaded lamps threw a pinkish glow over everything: elegant dresses were displayed like bonbons under glass cases and hanging on walls. There were daring short dresses, long dramatic black sheaths, and confectionery-pink frocks with lace edgings. Over by the window, a shorthaired brunette girl stood patiently which a tall witch with an iron-gray bun deftly applied Pinning Charms to the hem of her rose-printed dress.

The bell chimed as the door shut behind Hermione, and the tall witch turned. "Hello, dear," she said. Her voice was cool and remote, belying her warm words. "I'm Madam Magsby, and this is my shop. If you'll wait, I can be with you in a moment."

Hermione didn't reply; she was too surprised. For the girl in the rose dress had turned around, and was staring at her with a look of utter horror on her face.

Draco stood and surveyed himself in the mirror that hung on the inside of his wardrobe door. He looked good - well, this was a given. He always looked good. He would probably have possessed the same amount of natural arrogance had he been born plain or even unfortunate looking; the fact that his arrogance, looks-wise, was justified, was something he rarely even thought about. The Malfoys were a good-looking family and always had been. Girls had started staring at Draco (and some boys, too) around the time he was fifteen; before that, as his mother kindly put it, he hadn't quite grown into himself yet. He'd always been small and slight, like Harry, and had started to grow at the same time Harry had. He suspected he'd willed himself into it - he couldn't have borne being shorter than Harry Potter.

He made a minute adjustment to his tie, tilted his head, and gave himself a last critical once-over. He wasn't sure what one was supposed to wear to a stag night that wasn't really a stag night. Sirius had been very clear on that point. There would be no naked witches lunging out of pastries, he'd said - just a quiet night at the Cold Christmas Inn with friends and some of the locals from Malfoy Park, who Sirius was hoping to become more friendly with. The Park denizens had always had a touchy relationship with the Malfoys of the Manor, and Sirius was hoping things could be patched up. Draco knew Sirius was doing this for his own benefit, and was grateful. The idea of Sirius at the Cold Christmas Inn also made Draco smile - the Inn had been a staple lounging-place of his father's for years.

"Quit fiddling with your tie," said a voice behind him. "You always fiddle about with it and it always winds up looking just the same."

He spun around. Harry stood just inside the doorway, an inquiring look on his face. He wore Kenneth Troll dark blue trousers and a dove-gray pullover under a long wool winter cloak; Draco recognized the clothes as ones he had suggested Harry ought to buy. Harry had no fashion sense of his own, Draco mused, but at least he could take instruction.

Harry looked indignant. "I did knock. You were too busy admiring your own reflection to notice."

"Knock twice, then. Don't just come waltzing in. What would you have done if I'd been sitting here stark naked covering myself in tapioca pudding?"

An alarmed look passed over Harry's face. "I don't know, is it the sort of thing you're likely to do?"

"Well," Harry said diplomatically, "to be honest, I'd have to say I'd think you were very strange."

"Oh, you had a point? I'm sorry, it must have gotten buried under all the pudding."

"Ahem." The sound of a polite cough interrupted their discourse. "I'm not even going to ask what this is about." It was Narcissa, peering in around the open door and looking amused. "Draco, darling - five-minute warning. Sirius is waiting for you two downstairs."

She left with a smile. Harry looked anxiously at Draco. "We'd better do it now," he said,

"What? Oh - the Cheering Charm. Yeah, all right. Come over here." Draco sighed and reached for his winter cloak, shrugging it on while Harry came slowly across the room towards him. "You sure about this?"

"All right." Draco finished fastening the gryphon-shaped brooch that held his cloak together in the front, pushed his sleeves up, and regarded Harry for a thoughtful moment. "Close your eyes," he said.

Harry sighed and shut his eyes. Draco reached out and hesitantly put his forefingers to Harry's temples; Harry didn't react at all, just bent his head so his dark hair fell forward over Draco's hands. It was still damp from being washed, and the strands were cold on Draco's skin. Just below Harry's temples, there were streaks of soot; Draco wondered what on earth that was about.

"Stay still," Draco ordered him, and thought as hard as he could of cheerful things - the more cheerful the thoughts of the spellcaster, the more effective the spell, in this particular case. He thought determinedly of Quidditch victories, Christmas presents, amusing jokes...the look on Seamus' face when, somewhere in Ireland, he unwrapped his Christmas gifts and found that an anonymous benefactor had sent him a brand new shovel set...

A small smile came and tugged at the corner of Draco's mouth. He bent his own head and concentrated as hard as he could on sharpening his will into a point as sharp as the point of a knife, as strong as unbendable adamantine. Tension like a strung bow tautened along his nerves, gathering - he shut his eyes -

He felt the magic leave his fingertips like an exhaled breath. Harry stiffened; Draco dropped his hands and stepped back.

Harry grinned. It was a happy grin, full of life and light and joy, the sort of grin no one would possibly fake. "Amazing," he said.

"I feel like a thousand pound weight's been lifted off me," Harry said, staring down at himself, then back up at Draco. "I feel - normal. Thanks, Malfoy." He looked at Draco, wide-eyed. "I mean it. Thanks."

"Sure," Draco said. A sense of vague disquiet had settled on him. "Glad it worked."

"Worked..." Harry seemed to be speechless, and possibly on the verge of dispensing hugs, flowers, bunnies, and God only knew what else. Draco backpedaled hastily, picked his gloves up off the table, and gestured at Harry.

"We ought to go," he said. "Isn't your adoptive father downstairs waiting for us?"

"Right, right." Harry nodded and headed for the door. He paused there, hand on the knob, and swung around to look at Draco. "You've done a good thing, Malfoy," he said simply.

Draco paused and stared at him, arrested in the act of putting on his gloves. Harry's eyes were full of light; he hadn't seen him like this in months. He was not sure if Harry was looking at him or through him - What is he seeing? Not me, someone better than that.

"I hope so," Draco said, and followed Harry out of the room with an unshakable sense of profound misgiving.

Pansy did not reply. Hermione looked at her in astonishment. All the blood had drained out of the other girl's face and the bright, pretty color of her dress stood out in stark contract to her papery skin. Her dark brown eyes were wide with horror, as if Hermione were some hideous ghost.

"I take it you two know each other," said the witch with the iron-gray bun, looking amused.

"Y-yes," Hermione said, since Pansy appeared to have been stunned into silence. A strange idea was beginning to take shape in Hermione's head. But no. That was ludicrous. "Seventh year."

"I take it you are also attending the Malfoy-Black wedding on Saturday?" the witch began, but this time Pansy interrupted her.

"You're going to the wedding? I thought you --" Pansy began, then snapped her lips shut. Color had come back into her face in a flood; she was as pink as one of the roses on her dress. "I mean, after -"

"Of course I'm going," Hermione said evenly, struggling to conceal her annoyance. It wasn't entirely amazing that Pansy would know about her breakup with Harry - surely the whole school knew that. Still, it was rude of Pansy to bring it up. Then again, when had Pansy not been rude? "I wouldn't dream of missing Sirius' wedding."

"Well," Pansy said, her voice unnaturally shrill, "Just a word of advice: it looks a bit pathetic showing up at the family home of a bloke who's just binned you. I wouldn't do it if I were you."

It took Hermione about four seconds to go absolutely rigid as she digested Pansy's truly appalling remark. When she spoke again, her voice had a rasping note, as if she were struggling to keep it even. "I don't like you, Pansy, and I never have," she said. "But it seems to me that lately you've been even more vicious than usual. What, exactly, is your problem with me?"

Pansy's features thickened, her eyes hardening and almost sliding together. "What do you care," she hissed, and the seamstress who'd been fixing her gown stepped back, her eyebrows raised. "You, with your perfect little life and your perfect boyfriend, and Ron and Draco drooling over you as if you were something special, which you aren't. You treat them like they were less than you are, and they're pureblood wizards. How dare you? Mudblood!" she yelled at Hermione, in a paroxysm of abandoned rage. "Mudblood!"

"Pansy, has it ever occurred to you that none of those boys like you because you're a complete bitch?" Hermione snapped, fed up at last. "I don't treat them like they're less than me, but I don't drool and fawn over them just because they're boys, and purebloods - you even fawn over Ron, and he hates you -"

Pansy screamed aloud, and seemed for a moment as if she'd throw herself at Hermione, but Madam Magsby caught at her and held her back. "Now, now, dear," she said. "You'll damage the material."

"You're pitiful!" Pansy cried at Hermione, her eyes wet. "Dangling Potter and Draco along after you like you have all the time in the world to make up your mind, you think we all don't look at them and laugh? You've made a laughingstock out of them, and they're pureblooded wizards, whatever else they might be. Everyone thinks you're so special and clever - well, I see right through you. Just because you're popular and you're Head Girl doesn't mean -"

"You want to settle this with a duel? Is that what you want?" Hermione interrupted, her voice careening upward. "I'll duel with you, Pansy - I'll duel with you, and when I'm done with you there won't be enough left of you to stuff a Pumpkin Pasty!"

Pansy burst into tears. As Hermione looked on in astonishment, she tore herself away from the seamstress, raced across the room, and flung herself into one of the dressing compartments. The door banged shut behind her, and the sound of loud crying was audible therein.

"Well, well," said Madam Magsby, a small smile crossing her face. "Very impressive, my dear. Would you like to try a dress on now?"

"I..." Hermione wanted nothing less. She wanted to go back to the Leaky Cauldron, get a pillow, and cry. But she was determined not to let a snob like Pansy drive her out of the nicest shop on Petticoat Lane. "I suppose I could."

"Well, stand over here by the window, then, and do take off that cardigan. It's frightful."

Hermione did as she was bid, and was soon swathed in layers of a peach-gold chiffon material printed with tiny birds. She felt tense all over, waiting for Pansy to emerge from the dressing room, and Madam Magsby kept sticking her in the neck with pins. Hermione held her hair away from the collar of her dress and sighed a martyred sigh.

The bell at the front door of the shop sounded. Hermione craned her neck around and was rewarded with another pin in the neck. A tall, stylish-looking witch had entered the shop. She had a tight, attractive face and lacquered-looking blond hair. Her eyes scanned the room quickly, and landed on Hermione. "Darling, have you -" she began, then broke off. "You're not my daughter," she said, as if Hermione had somehow affronted her personally.

The door to the dressing room banged open. "Mummy!" exclaimed Pansy, and ran towards the tall witch. "You're late."

Mrs. Parkinson looked down at her daughter with amusement. "You cannot possibly be getting all those dresses, Pansy."

"Oh," Pansy gasped, and glanced down at the pile of clothing she'd removed from the changing room. "No, I - I -"

"Do decide quickly, darling, Daddy's waiting at Nutkin's Beauty Supply; he's just delivered a shipment and you know how he hates to wait."

"I'll - I'll take this one," Pansy declared, and seized a dress from the pile, obviously at random: it was a hideous pale green with frilly cuffs and collar. She tossed the rest of them over the back of a padded chair.

"It fits fine, Mummy," Pansy said, so obviously eager to leave that even her mother noticed.

"Very well," Mrs. Parkinson sighed. She glanced up at Madam Magsby, "Put it on our account," she declared, took the dress from her daughter, and swept regally from the shop like a boat departing from a harbor under full sail.

She is the strangest girl, Hermione thought to herself, as the door banged shut behind Pansy. Now, what was that all really about?

The sun was going down outside the windows of the Cold Christmas Inn in a torrent of gold and blood: a Gryffindor sunset. Sirius watched it through the diamond-paned windows from his place at the bar next to Lupin, and felt that all was well with the world.

"Try some elm wine," Lupin said, and pushed a glass towards him. It was filled with a pale-gray liquid that shimmered like mother-of-pearl and smelled vaguely of socks. "Romanian wizards swear by it."

"I bet they do," said Sirius with deep suspicion. "I bet they say, 'What the bloody hell is this stuff'?"

"True," said Lupin. "Only they say it in Romanian." He grinned, and his gray eyes lit up. "Come on, you have to try it. The Mayor bought a whole bottle of it in your honor."

Sirius groaned to himself. This particular gathering was something of a political move, along with a social one. He'd invited both the Mayor of the town of Malfoy Park and the bailiff as well, since the township had rarely gotten along well with the Manor - Lucius had kept them crushed under an iron boot heel. He was hoping they'd have a better relationship with the Manor's current occupants, and inviting them to the party seemed like a step in the right direction. He waved down the bar at the Mayor now - both he and the Bailiff were tall, spare, gray-faced men - and reached out for the glass of Elm wine.

Lupin chuckled again, and puffed on his cigar. Blue smoke swirled up from the tip. "You could go sit with Snape," he said. "He looks bored."

"He sucks at darts. He's always sucked at darts. And he uses 'Expelliarmus' to cheat."

Sirius hushed. A moment later a faint "Expelliarmus!" could be heard from the far end of the bar, and he glanced up to see a badly aimed dart go zooming back into Snape's hand.

"I invited everyone here," Sirius said. "I seem to know a lot of gits, don't I?" He smiled politely and waved down the bar at the Mayor again. The Mayor waved back; the bailiff, a Mr. Stebbins, just glowered. "See what I mean? Gits."

Lupin pointed again, and this time Sirius followed his gesture and saw that he was pointing at Draco and Harry, who sat apart from the rest, over by the enormous dressed stone fireplace that occupied most of the south wall. Sirius hadn't been particularly surprised that they'd wanted to sit off on their own; they were fifteen years younger than the rest of the partygoers, after all, and Harry especially had been very quiet lately.

Sirius smiled. "No," he said, turning to study them more closely. "No, they aren't."

The two boys sat side by side on one of the long, pillow-strewn couches, both looking into the fire, both silent, or apparently so. Sirius knew, however, by the intent, inward expressions on both their faces, by the half-smiles that came to tug at their mouths at the same time, prompted by some unseen and unheard joke, that they were not silent at all; they were talking, inhabiting a locked world of conversation only they could hear. Like any teenagers, he thought with amusement, they have their own private world - take the secretiveness of ordinary adolescence to its logical extreme, and it would look a lot like this.

Not, of course, that they were ordinary, either one of them. Sirius looked more carefully. The candles and bracketed torches, coupled with the fire in the grate, seemed to catch them both in a net of dark gold light, turning the drinks in their hands to transparent jewels. He could not really see the details of what they wore, only that they were dressed similarly, in dark clothes of expensive material, elegantly cut. It was a little odd, or perhaps just interesting, that Draco, who had always been so careful about his appearance, had lately let his hair grow untidily too long, while Harry, who always looked as if he got dressed in the dark and cut his hair with nail scissors, had finally seemed to come to some understanding and appreciation of clothes: what looked good on him and what didn't, what colors did and didn't suit him. He dressed well, now. They even had some of the same mannerisms, although who was mimicking who, Sirius couldn't have said. It all contributed to that peculiar juxtaposition of like and unlike that characterized them when they were together. Dark and light, candle and shadow: two halves of one imperfect whole.

"So I've been told." Sirius looked away from Draco and Harry and back at his friend. "Do I look fatherly, then?"

"Well, you look a bit like I remember my father looking. Pleased and worried at the same time. Of course, my father had reason to worry about me."

Lupin made a face at his cigar and spoke quietly. "No. You do. They're very special, your boys."

"My boys? I suppose they are that," Sirius said. He waited a moment, wondering how he felt about that, and decided he felt good about it. "Not boys very much longer."

"Oh, I don't know." Lupin put the cigar down, still frowning. "They're very young."

"That's not what I meant. I meant, think of all they've dealt with. Loss, parental death, difficult decisions..."

"I know. I'm glad they have each other to talk to." Lupin smiled. "Remember when we were that age and we used to talk about everything?"

Sirius nodded. "I do remember. I wonder what they're talking about right now? Something of life and death significance, I'm sure..."

Harry snorted, in the process almost inhaling the rest of his drink through his nose. "It so is. Look at it. It's pink. Why do you drink that stuff? It even tastes nasty."

"Oh, yeah?" Harry plonked his own drink down on the table, reached out, plucked Draco's glass out of his unresisting fingers, and drained it. He coughed, made a face, and handed the empty glass back to Draco. "It tastes like lighter fluid," Harry said. "Lighter fluid with sugar."

"Oh all RIGHT!" Draco yelled. "I didn't know Mai Tais were pink! I thought they were green! That's why I ordered one that time - and now I can't go back. It's my thing. It's my signature drink."

"Can I just say what a prat you are for having a signature drink? I mean, you're seventeen, you should be allowed to change your mind. What's next? Signature outfits, signature broomsticks, endorsing lines of products, soon you'll be such a pillock that no one will be able to stand you -"

Harry grinned. "Yeah, really." He waved a hand at a passing levitating silver platter. "Apple martini," he said, and a cocktail glass appeared. The liquid inside it was, indeed, pale green. He handed the glass to Draco.

"Harry? No, no he doesn't. I appreciate you telling me, by the way," said Sirius, taking a sip of Archenland beer to wash down the taste of the elm wine.

"No," Lupin said slowly, "not in so many words, no. But I think he was probably right. I think that Harry would take it badly. I think whether it made logical sense or not, he'd feel somehow that he couldn't talk to Draco about it and he really has no one else to talk to right now. He's very dependent on Draco. I think he'd feel terribly alone."

Someone in the vicinity cleared their throat. "Pardon me, Mister Black, Mister Lupin." It was the round, gray-haired Mayor and his ever-present sidekick, the rail-thin bailiff. Sirius recollected that the Mayor's proper name was Michael Gray, which seemed to fit, as his hair, eyes and skin were all a grayish color. The bailiff, thin as a reed with a narrow, beaklike nose, was also gray all over. Sirius had never once heard him speak, even though he had met him before at the Manor when he'd come by to officiate over the notarization of some papers. "I just wanted to thank you, Mister Black, for extending us an invitation to this event. I'd always wanted an opportunity to meet the inhabitants of the Manor socially, so to speak."

"Ah, yes. It's a pleasure to meet you, too," Sirius lied. "Did you, er, meet Harry yet?"

"He's exciting all right," Sirius agreed, deadpan. There followed at least a quarter hour of polite and slightly stilted conversation. The Mayor wanted to know if Sirius found the weather too severe; Sirius replied that it was quite pleasant to have a white Christmas. Lupin asked about the history of the town, and the Mayor shared some salient facts. The Mayor then opined that the fellow over in the corner in the black cloak was cheating at darts by using the Expelliarmus spell, and Sirius told him in confidence that the fellow in the corner was his distant cousin Dunforth who had a reputation for eccentricity and tended to grow violent when harassed. The Mayor sidled away, and the bailiff followed.

"And it only took fifteen minutes for you to scare them off," said Lupin. "A new record!"

"It's Snape you ought to apologize to," began Lupin with mock severity, then broke off as a echoing crash sounded from outside the Inn. He blinked. "What on earth was that?"

Sirius sat up straight, and stared. Out of some newly acquired paternal instinct, his eyes went immediately to the sofa by the fireplace to see if the boys were all right. The sofa was empty. "I don't know," he said. "But...where are Draco and Harry?"

He didn't look fine. Draco felt anxiety stir in a knot underneath his ribcage. Harry was sunk down in the armchair beside him, staring vaguely at the fire. He seemed taut and strung up and feverish. Bright spots of color burned atop his angular cheekbones and his eyes were very bright. There were three empty glasses on the table beside him.

"I know," Harry said. Draco noted with growing alarm that Harry was very flushed, and that his dark hair was pasted down to his forehead with sweat. "It's just hot in here - because of the fire -" Harry unknotted at the tie around his neck and tilted back his head as if he were having trouble getting enough air. "Doesn't it bother you?"

"No. You just drank too much. It's the alcohol. Maybe you should go in the back and lie down."

"I don't want to. I want to go outside. I need air." Harry got to his feet, using the back of the armchair to brace himself. "I need a walk."

Draco wondered if Sirius would notice them leaving, but he seemed to have fallen into a deep conversation with Lupin and the Mayor, and did not look up as they went out into the anteroom. Harry paused to pull down their cloaks from the rack, then pushed the door open. The fierce cold hit Draco so hard he was dazed for a moment, drawing his cloak on over his head hurriedly. When he emerged from it, the doorway was empty. He ran out onto the front steps, looking around for Harry, his feet skidding on the iced-over brick.

He was down at the bottom of the path already, his cloak pulled awkwardly about his shoulders. He seemed to be staring at something just beyond the border of hedges. Draco went slowly down the stairs and joined him.

Draco looked at him in surprise, and then back at the winter landscape. The moonlight had the clear unblemished purity peculiar to very cold winter nights. It lit the surrounding snow to white fire and silvered the dark air and the tops of the distant trees. Above the trees a mass of winter stars glittered with crystal flashes of vivid green and icy blue, while down at the bottom of the hill, Draco could hear the water of the river running underneath its shroud of ice. It was indeed a very beautiful night, although he doubted he would have thought to notice it if Harry hadn't pointed it out.

He turned to look at Harry. In the darkness he could see the other boy only as textures of light and shadow: dark hair, white skin, dark clothes. His eyes had lost some of their smoky hollowed exhaustion and were alight behind his glasses.

"I know where some are," said Harry, and sat down on the frozen ground rather suddenly. "Ouch," he said. "Help me up - I'll show you."

"I'm not drunk," Harry said very clearly. "I'm just happy - let me be happy. It's been a long time since I last was."

Harry took no notice. He had managed to get his legs back under him, and held up his hand. "Help me up," he said again.

Draco took the proffered hand and pulled Harry up to his feet. Harry smiled at him. It was a smile filled with light and happiness, and yet Draco knew that it was almost entirely artificial. Draco felt a little sick. "What are we doing?" he asked.

Draco followed him. He was getting used to this. It seemed to him that all he did these days was follow Harry various places. It was like having a toddler, albeit an oversized and crabby one.

The lawn sloped down behind the Cold Christmas Inn to the service road. The carriages they had come in were lined up along the low kerb, in an orderly procession. Harry skidded sideways down the last of the incline and fetched up alongside Sirius' carriage. Draco saw him tap the boot with his right hand, and it popped open. Harry reached into and drew out two objects, both wrapped in colored paper. They were long and narrow, each flared at one end. The shape was unmistakable.

"Our Christmas presents," Harry said. "I heard Sirius telling your mother he got us these. They're Cloudbursts. Brand new."

"I know what Cloudbursts are." The prototypes for the Cloudburst broom had been featured in the last issue of Quidditch World News. They had been designed by a well-known company and featured a number of experimental additions, the unremembered details of which were nagging at the back of Draco's mind in an annoying manner. "I read the same Quidditch journals you do."

Harry tossed one of the wrapped packages to Draco, who caught it instinctively. Harry turned his attention to ripping the wrapping paper off his own broomstick. It came away quickly under his swift fingers, and he looked up and grinned. The grin vanished when he saw Draco was still standing staring down at his own broomstick, without moving.

Harry made an impatient gesture with his right hand. "Relasio," he said, and the wrapping paper melted away from Draco's broom like snow under sunlight.

For a moment, Draco forgot all about Harry and the cold air and his burgeoning anxiety, and just stared in admiration. The Cloudburst was a sleek, narrow object that felt almost more like metal than wood under his hands, it was so dense and so smoothly polished. The shaft was black, the twigs at the far end jet-colored and banded with silver. It hummed when he touched it, a sound like the purr of a curious cat.

Harry's voice. Draco looked up. The wind whipped his hair across his face. For a moment, he could see nothing. "Oh, yes. It would have been a great surprise gift." He reached up a hand and pushed back his hair, and saw that Harry was already sitting astride his Cloudburst, and his grin was back. "Potter, what are you -"

Harry pushed off, and his Cloudburst rocketed into the air at approximately the speed of a hurtling comet.

"...doing?" Draco finished. He sighed. "Goddammit," he said wearily, swung his leg over the stick, and kicked off from the ground.

Immediately it felt wrong. The broom soared upward after Harry's on a near vertical pitch with a soundless, slippery, gliding motion that made Draco feel as if he were about to fall off. He grabbed desperately at the broom, which succeeded only in canting him violently to the right. He held on tightly as the Cloudburst spun once, righted itself and subsided into stillness.

Cold air whistled in his lungs as he gasped mouthfuls of oxygen. His heart was pounding. I'm sick. I shouldn't be doing this. I'm sick. I can't fly properly. Harry knows that. Where is he?

Draco tilted his head back. The icy air stung his eyes to tears, but he could see Harry just beyond the immediate blurred field of his vision, hovering above him, a patch of darkness against the silver clouds. Harry looked down at him, laughing, then took off again. Later, Draco would wonder why he'd followed; at the time, it seemed the only thing to do. He leaned forward and the Cloudburst exploded under him, rocketing up into the sky like a meteor in reverse.

In winter, the Hogwarts teams usually flew in heavy sweaters, with shin guards and elbow guards and high leather boots. Now, the elegant party clothes Draco was wearing provided hardly any barrier to the cold. He shivered as he soared upward and the wind cut through the fabric of his shirt like so many tiny knives. His cloak blew back; up ahead, he could see that Harry's cloak was doing the same, snapping behind him like a flag in the wind. He fixed his eyes on that as a target and willed his broom forward.

Draco's hands, icy and numb with cold, clutched convulsively at the broomstick's shaft. His heart was pounding. He had remembered, suddenly, what he had read in that issue of Quidditch World News.

The new Cloudburst models carry a unique anti-theft charm. Before being used, the broomstick must be calibrated to its specific user, or it will not respond properly to attempts to fly it.

"Hell," he muttered. "Bloody, bloody hell." He threw his head back. Harry was a disappearing speck high above him. "Potter!" he shouted, and pulled back on his broom. It jerked upwards several feet, went into a lazy slow roll, and righted itself reluctantly. "Potter!" he shouted again, leaning far forward.

This turned out to be a mistake. As if shot from a cannon, the Cloudburst hurtled forward so swiftly that Draco had no chance to do anything other than clutch at it blindly. It veered hard to the left, and then to the right, and then shot forward, as straight as an arrow.

Draco jerked hard at the Cloudburst, but it would not be budged from its course. He thundered towards the tree as inexorably as the Hogwarts Express - the branches scraped at his face - he threw his arms up - and something hit him hard, not from the front but from the side, knocking him decidedly off his broom. The same something tangled in his cloak and then he was falling, which felt almost like flying but was far more terrifying.

It only lasted a moment, though. He hit soft-packed snow and the impact knocked the wind out of him. He choked and rolled over, spitting snow, blinded by it. There was a sharp stinging pain in his arm.

"Hey - Malfoy -" It was Harry, of course. Draco sat up, pushing wet hair out of his eyes. Harry was kneeling on the snow next to him. His glasses were frosted with snow; so were his clothes. "Sorry about knocking you off your broom, but you were going to hit the tree. Why didn't you steer away from it?"

"I'm fine, thanks for asking," Draco said, through his teeth. "Potter - where are the broomsticks?"

Harry waved grandiosely in the direction of the oak tree they had narrowly avoided smacking into, and almost overbalanced. "They weren't as lucky as we were."

A feeling of foreboding in his heart, Draco got shakily to his feet and looked where Harry had indicated. At first he didn't see what Harry meant; then, craning his neck back, he saw both broomsticks, high above their heads. The force of impact had driven them into the tree; they looked like two oversized arrows that had been fired, willy-nilly, through the branches and into the tree's trunk.

"Those Cloudbursts must be made of something really tough," Harry observed, with desultory interest. "You'd think they just would have shattered, really."

"You mean like our skulls would have, if we'd hit that tree?" Draco said, seething coldly. "Is that what you mean?"

"No thanks to you, you daft bloody Gryffindor!" Draco exploded. "'Let's just ride these broomsticks, shall we, never mind that they need to be calibrated first, never mind we're going to get ourselves killed--'"

"Five more seconds and I would've been splattered all over like an Impressionist painting. 'Head Smashed Into Oak Tree,' you could've called it."

"Don't joke about that. Look, if you knew they needed to be calibrated then you should have said -"

"Good God, what's all this yelling?" said a voice, and Draco whirled around to see Sirius standing just behind him, Lupin at his side. Several other figures were standing on the path back where the carriages were; Draco couldn't see who they were, but knew that they were staring.

His heart sank as he stared up at Sirius. Sirius looked absolutely furious. "What on earth have you been doing?" he demanded coldly.

The two boys looked up at Sirius with their mouths open. Draco had never really seen his stepfather-to-be angry before. He seemed to loom over them, his eyes black with anger. "And just what is this meaning of all this noise?" he demanded.

In answer, Lupin pointed upward. Sirius turned to follow his gesture, and gaped up at the two broomsticks embedded in the tree. "I see," he said slowly, his voice flat. "I knew you two were flying. But I didn't think you'd be quite such bloody fools as to fly two uncalibrated Cloudbursts!"

"We didn't know they needed to be calibrated," said Draco in a small voice. He turned to Harry for some assistance, but immediately realized there would be no help from this corner. Harry had his hand over his mouth and appeared to be laughing.

"Ah, but you still felt qualified to fly them? Not even addressing the issue that those were your Christmas presents, which I will certainly not be replacing. Of all this damn fool, impetuous, thoughtless, rash and stupid things you could have done -"

"We're sorry," Draco interrupted desperately. Harry was still giggling beside him. He resisted the urge to smack Harry across the back of the head.

The laughter finally escaped from behind Harry's hand. "Sirius," he said. "Your name means two things. Hee."

"He's fine," Draco said in a small voice. "It's just an, er....a Cheering Charm. I put it on him earlier."

To his surprise, Sirius reacted as if he'd said "It's just a bucket of poison" instead. "A Cheering Charm? You gave him a Cheering Charm and then you let him drink alcohol?"

"Er..." Draco said, watching Harry out of the corner of his eye. "Well, yes a bit. Sort of. Why?"

"You, Draco - you of all people should know better than to mix Cheering Charms and alcohol."

"Why? Why should I know better? Cheering Charms wouldn't exactly have been something my father would have accepted. They're for weak people. According to him. Why should I know about them?"

Some of the anger died out of Sirius' expression. "Yes, but still. Couldn't you see there was something wrong going on with Harry?"

Draco almost shouted. He wanted to say that of course there was something wrong going on, there'd been something wrong going on for months, and this was in fact the most normal he'd seen Harry in ages. But he couldn't. He swallowed the words, and his resentment along with them. "It all happened fast," he said, instead. "Besides, I didn't even know what I was supposed to be looking out for."

"Probably," Sirius said, bent down, and helped Harry to his feet. "He just needs to sleep it off, is all." Harry swayed slightly, and Sirius' expression softened further. He bent down to lift Harry up into his arms as if he were still a child who weighed next to nothing. "Come here," Draco heard him whisper, in a gentle tone. Draco would have thought Harry was long past hearing much of anything, but at the sound of Sirius' voice, Harry turned his head into his godfather's chest, made a little sighing noise, and went limp.

Sirius straightened up, cradling Harry in his arms, then looked up and over at Lupin. "I haven't carried him since he was a baby," he said, "he hardly weighs anything, even now."

Lupin said something back, so softly that Draco didn't hear it, and then both of them turned, and began to walk back towards the lights of Malfoy Park.

Sirius turned and looked back at Draco. "Are you coming?" he demanded. "We're taking a carriage."

Draco shook his head. "I'll Floo back on my own," he said. He wanted to be alone to think for a bit.

Alas, it was not to be. No sooner had he reached the door of the Inn than Snape stepped out of the shadows and accosted him. "Mister Malfoy," said Snape. "A word with you?"

Draco gazed dispiritedly at his grim-faced Potions professor. "I don't suppose," he said, "that if I passed out right here, you'd be likely to carry me home?"

Snape's eyes had narrowed, and he raised a black-gloved hand. "What," he said coolly, "is that?"

Draco looked where Snape was pointing, and felt a shock like a punch at his heart - the right sleeve of his shirt, where his cloak fell away from it, glittered with threads of silver that seemed to glow in the moonlight. Blood. He pulled his cloak closed quickly but it was too late; Snape had seen.

"Let me see your arm, Mister Malfoy!" Snape barked, and Draco jumped. "We may not be at Hogwarts, but I can still take points from your House!"

This seemed monstrously unfair to Draco, who gaped. "But it's Christmas holidays!"

"Yes," Snape concurred. "And my Christmas gift to you will be that I will not immediately take points, but will instead give you a second chance to show me your arm." He tapped a booted foot on the snow. "I'm waiting."

With a rebellious glare, Draco stepped forward and threw his cloak back over his left shoulder. He held his arm out towards the Potion Master, who took hold of it - much more gently than his fierce expression might lead one to believe he would - and peeled back the sleeve of Draco's sweater. His immediate sharp intake of breath was loudly audible in the still air. Reluctantly, Draco glanced down and saw what Snape was looking at: a long, shallow gash ran along his forearm where he had thrown up his arm to shield his face. The gash itself didn't look serious; what had caused Snape to gasp was that the blood leaking from the wound was dark red-silver, the color of mercury seen through scarlet glass.

"What is this?" Snape demanded. "Is this the first you've seen of this? You don't seem surprised."

"I find it very unlikely that it is nothing." Snape dropped Draco's arm, took hold of his shoulder, and steered him forcibly back towards the Inn. Draco stumbled slightly on the uneven snow but Snape didn't slow his rapid pace until they reached the nearest lantern, where he paused, turned, took hold of Draco's shoulders, and thrust him under the bright pool of light cast by the lantern. Draco blinked in the sudden bright light and tried to twist away, but Snape held him fast, his coal-black eyes studying Draco's face with an unblinking intensity. "How long has this been going on?" he demanded finally.

Draco tried to hold his professor's gaze, and failed. "How long has what been going on? The blood thing? Because - I can explain that."

"Yes? Overdosed on Jelly Glow Worms? Got sozzled and ate a pack of fairy lights? Tried to practice on of those charms on yourself that assures you'll light up a room with your smile, but got one of the incantations dreadfully wrong?"

"Explain yourself, Mister Malfoy, and truthfully. It is cold, and I would like to go back inside."

"Well, so would I," Draco muttered. "Look, I don't know what it is. I'm meant to see a mediwizard, and I will, it's just..."

"I rather thought so." Snape released his hold on Draco's shoulders, and out of nowhere, it seemed, produced a white handkerchief. He handed it to Draco. "Bind this around your cut," he instructed. "And then tell me how long this has been going on."

"How long what's been going on?" Draco demanded, doing as instructed. "The funny-looking blood thing? I don't honestly know. A few weeks maybe. It's not serious -"

"The hell it isn't serious. You're ill. You know that. I'd say you look like you're suffering the effects of a serious Dark curse or hex -"

Draco nodded. "I'm sure." He suddenly felt very tired. "It's not a curse or a hex - or if it is one, it's not one that I've been able to detect, and you know I'm not ignorant where Dark magic is concerned. I don't know what it is."

"Well, you look like death." Snape spoke bluntly. "I shall speak to Sirius Black immediately."

"It is out of your hands, Draco. And Black is your guardian. Were we at school, I would speak to Dumbledore -"

"The wedding is the day after tomorrow," Draco said desperately. "Guests start arriving tomorrow for the rehearsal dinner. Can't it wait two days?'

"I cannot help but feel that with some unknown magic affecting your health, it would be irresponsible of me not to -"

"Please," Draco said. "I'm not that sick, I'm not dying right now. It would ruin the wedding - my mother would panic - and for what? For me to find out that there's something terribly wrong with me a few days earlier? I already know that. Thanks but no thanks."

"Please," Draco said again. He could think of no elegant argument, and no grounds on which he could logically appeal to Snape. Snape was probably right; Sirius should know. It was just that Draco hated the idea. Once everyone knew, it would become real. Something with which he would have to cope. And there would be mediwizards and infirmaries and people panicking and none of it would help - of that he was sure - and he wouldn't be any use to Harry after that. "Isn't there anything..."

"I said very well. We will wait until after the wedding. It will give me time..." Snape removed the handkerchief from Draco's arm, folded it, and slipped it into his pocket. Draco watched with wide eyes. "It will give me a chance to run some tests on your blood. I'm hardly a mediwizard, but I can certainly detect if a potion has been used on you."

Snape's coal-black eyes glittered. "Do not thank me. It is unnecessary. I will return to my laboratory and run some tests on the blood. It will give me an excuse to miss the rehearsal dinner."

"I do not enjoy parties," Snape ruminated. "Unless, of course, there is karaoke."

"In any case, you should return to the house. You should not be out in the cold when you are ill. Shall I Apparate you back?"

For a moment, Snape seemed to hesitate, and Draco had the thought that Snape might pat him on the shoulder - but the moment passed, and the thought with it. Snape released his hold on Draco's arm, nodded briefly, and Apparated away, leaving Draco standing in the snow under the lantern, lost in thought.

Harry had recovered enough by the time they reached the Manor to make it up the stairs to his bedroom without any assistance. He left Sirius and Lupin looking half-worried, half-amused in the entry hall, staggered up the steps, found the door to his bedroom, yanked it open, and half-collapsed inside.

Someone had lit the fire in the grate and the candles bracketed on the walls. Usually this sort of thing bothered Harry, who liked to do things himself, but now he was happy not to have to fumble for a light. Dizzy and swaying on his feet, he stripped down to his boxers, folded his clothes and left them in a neat pile outside the door for the laundry elves, and crawled between the sheets on his bed.

He had thought he would drop off instantly, and he would have, if only the bed would have stopped spinning. He could feel it rotating under him, the world tilting slightly. The buoyant happiness of the Cheering Charm was fading, replaced by a whirling pale-gold dizziness. It felt a little like flying, if one could fly lying down.

Harry would have expected it to fade as he sank towards sleep, but it did not. Instead, it intensified. Eyes closed, he saw again the vast and inky winter sky above him, the shards of stars, the broken clouds; he felt the icy wind in his hair, tearing at him, heard his own voice cry out as he fell. I cannot die, he had thought, tumbling through the air, I cannot die, because I have not yet done what I must do. Therefore I must be invulnerable. And if he was invulnerable, surely Draco was also immune to harm, because it was impossible that one of them might cease to exist and the other one would still continue. Draco's anger had confused him for this reason. Didn't he understand?

And Harry had not died. Here he was, and he felt better than he had in months and months. He both seemed to have left his body and to be acutely aware of every molecule. The soft rasp of the wool blankets against his skin as he turned over; the loud crackle of the fire popping in the grate, the heat in the room pressing down on him, pressing down, as if a heavy weight had settled on top of him. It was all part of the same dream of ice and fever.

Something brushed against his face. Eyes still shut, he turned his head aside, but the light touch on his face remained. He raised his hand to brush it away, but stopped: it felt pleasant. Where he had been too hot, he felt cool fingers brush across his skin - and they were fingers, he realized that - and the same light cool touch at his temples and at his throat and in his hair. Someone was brushing his hair back, softly. Only one person had ever done that for him. Hermione, he thought, and then, I'm having a dream. I don't want to wake up.

He kept his eyes shut, firmly. He was dreaming, of that he was positive. He had dreamed of her several times since he had come to the Manor again. Each time he woke up against his will, miserable at leaving the dream world behind. This, though, this felt realer than anything he'd ever dreamed. He felt the light touch of hands on his face again, and then a shadow moved beyond his eyelids, and he felt lips against his own lips, cool and smooth. His breath caught in his throat; he was suddenly dizzy, so dizzy he felt as if he were tumbling off the edge of the world. He fell through a radiating cool darkness; he felt pleasure, and the pleasure was sickening; he felt pain, and welcomed the pain. He hurt, he burned, he froze and shivered; he felt - and he had not felt in a long, long time. This was what he had been reaching for that night in the alley with Hermione; this was what he could not bring himself to tell her he wanted, because she would hate him for it. But now he was dreaming, and he could have this from her in dreams; she would forgive him for that; she would never know.

"Harry," she said. He opened his eyes; he could see only crazily swinging shadows. Her hair fell down around them both like a tent. She was a genie in a bottle: a dream born out of loneliness and alcohol. It was a dream, and he knew it was a dream, but he did not want to leave the dream, and could not have if he had wanted to. Lassitude like nothing he'd ever experienced had invaded his body; his blood had been replaced by slowly flowing golden syrup. It burned in his veins. "Keep your eyes open," she said, and her voice was as sweet as poisoned candy. "Look at me."

He tried to, and maybe he did. He would never know, later, if he had. A darkness as black as her hair came rolling down over him; he fought it for a moment, but the current swept him away and he remembered nothing else after that.

Draco woke early the next morning after passing a restless night to find the rest of his Christmas present from Sirius in a small envelope next to the bed. It was the instruction manual for a brand-new Cloudburst broom. "Here's the rest of your bloody present," said the note attached. "Hint: it doesn't fly."

"That's what you think," Draco announced rebelliously, and proceeded to make a paper airplane out of the front cover.

He abandoned this amusing pastime when an eagle owl bearing a rolled letter tapped on the window with its beak. He threw the window open, letting in great bursts of cold air, and took the parchment from the bird. Propping his elbows on the windowsill, he read aloud to himself:

Albus asked me to send along a word of reassurance as he was afraid you might be worrying. I say worry is good for a growing boy. However, he wanted me to let you know that all the plans are in place for tomorrow and we have everything under control. The Constant Vigilance Synchronized Auror Auto Response Team will be at your disposal in case of any unexpected or unwanted guests who make it past our wards system. Enjoy today, try not to worry about tomorrow. I look forward to the wedding itself and will be sure to wear my festive leg.

"Mad as a brush," Draco announced, and tossed the crumpled-up parchment onto his bed. Still, he did feel somewhat reassured although a small knot of nervousness did form in his stomach when he thought about the wedding. It was likely to be somewhat socially awkward, and on top of that...

The sound of wheels on snow interrupted his thoughts. He glanced down to see a carriage pull up at the base of the enormous stone staircase that fronted the Manor. It was one of the hired carriages from the village that had brought them to the Cold Christmas Inn the night before, and would be bringing all the guests from Malfoy Park to the house today. The carriages were black, with the Malfoy Park emblem on them - a wand crossed with a dagger on a silver field. Draco had already watched several guests arrive, including the Parkinsons and the Zabinis. Blaise had not been with her parents; Draco suspected she didn't think they should see each other, which, it seemed to him, was probably the one opinion they had ever held in common.

The carriage pulled to a halt and the doors opened. The occupants began to pile out. A witch and a wizard in dark blue cloaks with the hoods pulled up exited first, then a tall wizard whose hood was down, his red hair bright and unmistakable in the bright winter sunshine. Charlie Weasley. He turned and held out a hand to help his sister down next: Draco couldn't see her clearly, just her familiar yellow cloak and the scarlet curls like a river of bright fire down her back.

Draco looked down at him for a moment, then pulled back from the window and stood for a moment, lost in thought. He'd wondered if Weasley would actually show up; had suspected he would, but had not been entirely sure. Now that he was here, Draco found his tiredness falling away and a faint anticipatory nervousness taking its place.

It was so dark when Harry finally opened his eyes the next day that he thought it was still the middle of the night. It was a moment before he realized that the curtains had been drawn firmly closed around his bed. He blinked. How odd, he thought. I never do that. One of the house elves must have come in and closed them.

He sat up slowly, wincing, and fumbled for his glasses. He slid them on, his head pounding. He felt decidedly peculiar. And he was fairly sure that he'd had a most unusual dream...

Harry whipped around so quickly that later he'd be surprised that he hadn't dislocated anything. He knew, somehow, what he'd see before he even turned - and yet it hardly lessened the shock: black hair tumbling down over white shoulders, big gray eyes full of mischief, and a sheet wrapped around an obviously naked body.

Harry tried to say something, but all that came out was a whistling noise like a teakettle on the boil.

Her smile widened. "Speechless, are you?" she said. "I'm not surprised, after last night. I'd be shocked if you were in any shape to talk at all."

That freed his voice. "What - what - what -" he stammered. "What are you doing here? How did you get into my bedroom? Where are your clothes?"

Harry goggled speechlessly. Surely this was a horrible nightmare. Surely he would wake up soon. "But," he began. "But I was dreaming."

"Tsk tsk." She pursed her lips. "Really, now. Do I look like a dream to you? Do these?" And she held out her thin white arms. There were bruises all up and down them: the marks of fingers. "I had no idea you'd be so forceful. I mean, I knew you were something special. The Boy Who Lived -"

"Shut up!" Harry hissed, and covered his face with his hands. "Just shut up - I wouldn't. I couldn't have."

"Oh, but you would and you could." Her voice hardened, although she still sounded amused. "How upsetting that you don't remember. Last night was certainly one of the most unique nights of my life. Things happened to me last night that - well, that have never happened to me before."

Harry made a gurgling sound, low in his throat. "I don't believe this," he whispered. "I don't believe it. I have a girlfriend."

She shrugged, and the sheet slipped down. Harry averted his eyes. "I get the paper," she said. "Everyone knows you're broken up. Except you, apparently."

Rhysenn leaned forward. "You said her name last night," she said softly, and reached out her hand to touch his face; Harry jerked away. "You said Hermione. But you only said it once."

Harry shrank away from her even farther, or tried to. But he found he couldn't move. Something about her, despite his horror and feeling of nausea, still compelled him; her gaze mesmerized him like a cobra's gaze. It wasn't that she was beautiful; she was, but in a strange, removed, adult way that unsettled him more than anything else. And her eyes, those Malfoy eyes, gray as winter seas, they frightened him. And yet he still found he could not pull away from her as she reached her hand out, brushed the backs of her long fingers against his cheek, and he felt it like the pain of biting down on a broken tooth, all his nerve-ending screaming at once -

He would probably have tumbled off the bed had there not been a knock on the bedroom door at precisely that moment. Harry snapped out of his befuddled state instantly, and stared in horror.

"Mister Potter," said a voice at the door, quite loud and sepulchral. One of the Manor's ghost servants, most likely. "Mister Black has sent me to wake you up. It is noon, sir."

The knock sounded again, more powerfully this time. "Mister Potter, I am afraid Mister Black impressed upon me the need to awaken you without delay."

"Aaaaaaargh." With a half-wail of despair, Harry got to his feet, wrapping a sheet around himself, and staggered to the door. He opened it a bare crack to see Anton, the ghost butler, hovering just in front of him, looking severe. "Mister Potter," he said. "Mister Black also instructed me to bring you your clothes for the par--"

"Oh, yes, thank you, I'll take those," Harry stammered, seized the pile of clothes from the ghost, and hurled them to the floor behind him. "Thank you, Anton, now if there's nothing else -"

"Mister Malfoy also required me to pass along a message for him. I believe it was, 'Get downstairs now, you big oversleeping git.'"

"Mister Potter! A moment, please. There is one more thing," said the butler, and held out a half-transparent hand. Shimmering in the middle of the ghost's palm was a familiar circle of scarlet glass, shot through with gold and black. Harry stared at his runic band, his mind racing. It was impossible - he wore it always - he'd been wearing it last night on his belt - he remembered unbuckling the belt and - and leaving his clothes out for the house-elves to take away. "The laundry elves asked me to return this to you, sir."

"Thank you," Harry replied mechanically. "Thank you, Anton," and he reached to take the runic band from the ghost. Then he shut the door, and turned slowly to face the girl sitting in his bed.

Hermione was not in good spirits when she arrived at the library at noon. She had slept badly the night before - very badly. Her room at the Leaky Cauldron had seemed too hot, and she'd been plagued with awful nightmares of a weight pressing down on her, cutting off her breath. She'd awoken at dawn with the sound of Pansy's voice shouting "Mudblood!" at her ringing in her ears and had been unable to get back to sleep. All in all, a bad evening.

She had to wait in a longish line before she reached the bookworms. She passed the time by fretting about the upcoming party. The thought of seeing Harry was like a black wall of dread rising up in front of her; he would mope around the party looking depressed and handsome and she would want to drown him in a bowl of fruit punch. Or, even worse, he would have gotten over her completely and would be in the peak of high spirits. Draco would have set him up with some fabulously sexy veela cousin who would be draped all over his lap, feeding him peeled grapes with a pair of solid gold tongs. And she would still want to drown him in a bowl of fruit punch.

"Grapes," she said in a deathly voice to the bookworm when she reached the head of the line. "Who eats peeled grapes? How lazy is that?"

The bookworm waved its antennae in a worried manner. Hermione sighed. "Never mind," she said. "I'm Hermione Granger. Reference number #97356. You were cross-referencing for me...?"

The worm scurried away and returned with a trolley trundling along behind it, piled with several books. Hermione took them and retreated to her now-familiar corner of the library under the portrait of Rowena Ravenclaw.

Most of the books were ones she had already looked at. Several seemed to be general weaponry guides. She began flipping through them dispiritedly. There were chapters on Living Blades, pages on elf-arrows that never ran out or missed their targets, knives that cut stone, shilellaghs and maces and daggers and ....

Hermione paused, and flipped back several pages to a full-page illustration of a dagger. It had a unicorn bone handle and a sturdy silver blade, and the box of text underneath it was slightly blurred with age:

The Angurvadel Blade. Only one known to exist, on display in the Stonehenge Museum of Wizardry. The exact nature of the dagger is not known, but it produces cuts that never heal. When touched by a witch or wizard who is bound by a Dark Oath, they glow phosphorescent blue.

Hermione stared at the words, her mind whirling. A Dark Oath? But only a true necromancer could bind anyone by a Dark Oath - they were horrible dark magic, deadly and impervious - but she remembered the blade of the knife turning blue as Ron pushed it aside and her stomach churned. Ron! she thought. She bolted to her feet, almost knocking over her chair, and began to cram her books haphazardly back into her bag.

Harry gazed bleakly at his reflection in the mirror. He actually looked better than he felt. Although, he suspected, if he'd looked like he felt he would have been gazing at the reflection of a severed head on a pole.

Instead, he looked all right. Mostly due to the clothes he was wearing, which were expensive and very well cut. They took away from the fact that he was deadly pale, with black shadows under his eyes. He began to see why Draco was so attached to clothes. They made you feel that at least you looked all right, even if you felt like hell.

There's something wrong with me, he thought, looking glumly at himself in the mirror. Rhysenn had never affected Draco the way she affected him. Obviously there was some terrible flaw that he possessed that other people did not. Either that, or he was a sex fiend. Some kind of demented sex fiend that nobody else would ever want to be around. Hermione - she would never want to touch him or be anywhere near him again. Sirius would be horrified. So would Narcissa. They wouldn't let him stay in the house anymore; he'd have to move out and live in the toolshed at the bottom of the garden. Draco would go off and find other friends, friends who weren't depressed all the time, friends who didn't sleep with sex demons.

Then again, maybe not. He realized that Draco would find his current train of thought infinitely amusing. You, a sex fiend? he'd smirk. Potter, you couldn't possibly be an anything fiend. I mean, just look at you. Or, Oh, good, congratulations, you've found something else to beat yourself up about. It's a red-letter day! Let's make the most of it!

Harry looked down at his hands; they had, for the moment, stopped shaking. Yes, he definitely needed to talk to Draco. He had no idea how he'd face the party otherwise. Thank God Hermione had said she wouldn't be there; she was coming to the wedding proper, but not the luncheon today. He couldn't possibly face her. It was nearly killing him just to think about it.

He turned away from his white-faced reflection in the mirror, and caught sight of the bed with its rumpled covers. Nausea rose in his throat. He grabbed for his cloak and hurried out the door.

"Do I look all right?" Ginny asked Ron for the third time as they ascended the steps of Malfoy Manor. She'd forgotten what a forbidding building it was. A pile of steel-gray stone, necklaced with dozens of balconies, crowned with spires and turrets, fronted by a huge double staircase the size of the Burrow itself. And there were gardens around the Manor; there had not been the last time she had been there. They were filled with roses, scarlet roses, which showed up like blood against the snow. The charms that kept them alive in this weather must have been very expensive ones.

Ron, who had already told his sister she looked beautiful twice, sighed a martyred sigh. "I keep telling you that you look pretty," he said. "Is that not what you want to hear? Fine. You look horrible. Just looking at you makes me sick."

Ginny didn't say anything to that; she just speeded up her pace slightly in hopes of catching up with her parents. Both she and Ron had been lagging behind; Ron out of obvious reluctance, Ginny out of nerves. After all, she'd been planning for this day for several weeks now.

She and Ron went through the double doors to the entrance hall just after Fred and George; Ginny looked around, pleased and amazed as always by the beauty of the Manor. It was a cold beauty, but it was still beautiful. The black-and-white parquet floor shone, and the walls were strung with thousands of diamond-like crystal globes, each of which flickered with a single pale flame.

Sirius was there, greeting people; Narcissa, he said, was somewhere inside the main hall, entertaining guests. Ginny barely heard her parents exchanging small talk with Sirius, who looked extremely handsome in a black suit. "I believe Draco is also in the Hall, and we're still waiting for Harry to come down...out a bit too late last night," he was saying, and the Weasleys laughed.

Ginny couldn't stand it another moment; she was too impatient. Refusing the house-elves' offer to take her cloak, she excused herself and went into the Hall; the only person who even seemed to notice that she was leaving was Ron, who muttered that he would catch up with her in a moment.

The room that Malfoys had for years called the Greater Hall was already half-filled with guests: women in casually pretty dresses, men in suits and robes. Ginny recognized Lupin, Pansy Parkinson in a hideous green dress, and a few other faces in the crowd. She cut diagonally across the room, heading for a small door on the west side of the hall, and ducked through it quickly.

She was in a stairwell, one she remembered well. A narrow staircase led upward, and there were bracketed torches on the walls on either side of a square mirror. Ginny glanced into it, seeing her own face very pale between her yellow cloak and her curling red hair. The gold chain around her throat gleamed brightly. She reached a hand up to draw it out from under her dress -

She turned. It was Harry, standing on the lowest step of the staircase. He wore a dark shirt that made his skin look very pale, and black trousers. In the dim light, she could not clearly see his face, but she thought he was frowning.

Ginny almost smiled. "That's very helpful, Harry. But no, I wasn't looking for Draco. I was just - going to fix my hair. The wind ruined it."

"Thanks." Ginny looked at him, oddly touched. He looked somehow distracted and a little lost, as he had looked lost seven years ago standing on the platform at King's Cross Station, and that lostness seemed to cling to him even now and forever would. Women would always fall all over Harry, Ginny thought, he was somehow vulnerable without ever being weak, attractive without seeming to know it. One never asked oneself if he was handsome because his face was so familiar and so arresting in its detail: the smoky-hollowed green eyes, the jet blades of lashes, the sharp fine bones. Even now, when he looked so unhappy, his melancholy seemed to suit him. "Are you all right, Harry?"

"Oh. Yes." He shook himself a little, like a dog shaking off water. "Just tired. I had a late night."

Harry's expression didn't change; only the shadows under his eyes darkened. "I had rather thought he wouldn't come."

"Hell," Harry said flatly. He took his hands and shoved them in his pockets. "Now I really wish I could find Draco."

Harry shook his head. "He seems to be blocked at the moment. Busy probably." He shrugged, and tried to smile; it wasn't very successful. "I guess I'd better head in there and face the music."

She watched him as he went past her and through the door, closing it quietly behind him. Her heart went out to him. It went out to her brother as well, and to Hermione. And then there was Draco. It wasn't sympathy she felt for him, exactly. It was fear. She was afraid for him. She had been for a while now.

Her hand went back to the chain at her throat. She gripped it once, tightly. Then she began to climb the stairs.

He'd never thought of himself as much of a lurker - he liked the spotlight too much - but there was no other word for it; he was lurking. In a disused hallway, no less, lit only by a single torch. He was waiting for Pansy Parkinson.

He was tired. His head hurt. He'd slept poorly the night before, and he suspected his hair looked bad. But time, tide and revenge waited for no man, and he'd stood on an upper balcony until he'd seen Pansy in her green dress walk up the Manor stairs with her parents. Then he'd headed back inside.

He needed, he'd realized immediately, to detach her from her parents. So he'd sent a house-elf along with a message for Pansy that an urgent note was waiting for her in the Green Room. The house-elf had instructions to lead her to this hallway, and then leave her there. Draco wasn't fond of house-elves - they made him nervous - but sometimes their unquestioning obedience had its advantages.

It seemed like an hour, although was probably more like half of one, before he heard the sound of someone walking towards him along the corridor. The someone was walking fast, and was obviously wearing high heels. Draco smiled to himself. It was time. He waited until she was almost upon him, then stepped out of the shadows and swung around to face her.

It was as rewarding as he could have hoped; she shrieked, and almost staggered backward.

"Draco!" Pansy gasped, her hand ostentatiously over her heart. "Scaring me like that! I mean, really." She lowered her hand, glaring. "Now, If you couldn't tell, I was on my way somewhere -"

"To get an urgent message. I know." The urge to twirl his moustache was almost overwhelming; luckily, Draco didn't have a moustache. "Only the message doesn't exist. I made it up. I wanted to get you alone so I could talk to you."

"You what?" Pansy was the picture of outraged respectability. "Do you mind? I was busy at the party and I should get back."

"You didn't look all that busy to me," Draco interrupted. He spoke softly, but there was a menace in his tone that made Pansy look up sharply. He began to circle slowly around her and could feel her resisting the urge to turn around and look at him. "Although I've heard you've been very busy lately."

"I think you know." Draco was looming over her now. Her curls trembled just above the round collar of her ill-fitting green dress. "You know, Pansy, the point of social climbing is to make your way up the social ladder. Not slither down it. Although I've heard you're talented in that area, too."

It took Pansy a moment to react to Draco's appalling remark. Then she jerked, and whirled around. "That's disgusting. You're disgusting. I don't know why you'd say a thing like that, but -"

"Don't you?" His voice was suddenly sharp, and she winced as if he had quite literally cut at her. He could see the fear in her dark eyes. "Well, maybe I can jolt your memory with a little recitation session. You don't mind if I read out loud, do you?" He cleared his throat ostentatiously, and drew a folded parchment from his pocket. "This is a little something I like to call 'Sonnets from the Tragically Deluded.' I think you'll like it." He snapped the parchment open with a flick of the wrist and read out loud:

I'm writing this in Potions class. I'm sitting here looking at you from across the room, but you can't see me. You're looking straight ahead. I can see your hand moving over your parchment as you take notes. Maybe you're writing to me, as I'm writing to you.

I'm not good at this. This letter writing business. Harry would be better. Hell, Malfoy would be better at it. But I'm writing you because I have to. Because it hurts to be this far away from you, especially after -"

"But why? It's catchy. You can dance to it." Draco smiled at her. She didn't seem to notice. "'Don't worry," he continued, reading from the letter's end, "'I will leave this for you in our usual hiding place. I'm sorry about what I said last night - about us coming clean and telling everyone. You were right. And even if you weren't, it doesn't matter. We're so beyond all the arguing we used to do - when I see the way you look at me, I feel -'"

"Stop it!" Pansy shrieked. "Stop it, stop it, stop it!" And Draco knew he had hit pay dirt. Her voice was raw and uncontrolled, her eyes rounded into grotesquely huge ovals. "Give me that - give it to me -"

She wrenched the note out of his grasp and tore it into shreds, which she scattered over the floor with a triumphant air.

Draco laughed. "There's thirty more where that came from. Weasley seems to have been an astonishingly dedicated correspondent."

Draco raised an eyebrow. "Are you more afraid of him than you are of me?" he inquired sweetly. "You shouldn't be."

"Before or after I go to your parents and tell them everything about what you've been up to lately?"

Surprisingly, some of the color came back to her face. "Maybe you should try telling them something they don't know."

It was his turn to stare. "Don't tell me you confessed to them in a fit of tormented guilt."

"It was their idea, Draco," Pansy said flatly, having recovered some of her self-possession. "My father's the one who developed the glamour charms - where did you think I got them, anyway? They're prototypes - brand new."

"And you expect me to believe they'd think it was a good idea to whore out their only daughter to a Weasley?" Draco struggled to put the disgust he was feeling into words. "I don't-" He paused, and fell silent. He could almost hear the cogs buzzing and whirring inside his head as things fell into place. "No. They wouldn't do that. They'd support you disguising yourself as Hermione, to get information, to spy - but sleeping with him, that was your idea. Either you hate him that much, or - but no, I don't think you hate him. You fell in love with him, didn't you? With a Gryffindor. Oh, that must have hurt your pride."

His tone was cruel, but cruelty seemed to be what she was expecting. She spoke softly, "It was the way he looked at me," she whispered. "Nobody's ever looked at me like that."

"And you don't know what that's like, I suppose?" Her tone was suddenly spiked with venom. "Being loved even for something you aren't - it feels real, doesn't it, Draco?"

Her eyes were very bright. And for a moment, he was speechless. He had no idea how much she knew, and how much of what she had said was a wild jab in the dark, but uncontrollably the memory of Hermione putting her arms around him in the wardrobe rose up in his mind, of her voice calling him Harry. And Harry's voice earlier that day, You've done a good thing, Malfoy. And that moment, looking back at Harry, and wondering, What does he see when he looks at me? Not me. Somebody else. Somebody better.

And for just that moment, a arrow-thrust of sympathy for Pansy went through him, and he felt pity for her, and then Harry's voice recollected itself to him, telling him to make her pay. Because, of course, he possessed reserves of cruelty that Harry didn't. Didn't he?

"They don't know who you really are," Pansy said, breaking his reverie. He noted with a disconnected interest that her voice was very peculiar: both husky and squeaky at the same time. "And I'm beginning to think you don't, either. Blaise always said differently - she always said you were a true Slytherin, in your heart. I don't believe that. I think you turned on us the first chance you got. Well, you picked the losing side, Draco Malfoy. I know things you don't - we all do - none of us trust you anymore, we keep you out of our plans. But that doesn't mean we don't have plans -"

She compressed her lips into a thin line. "Fine. Stick your head in the sand. But you'll think about what I said, later - I know you will -"

"Pansy," Draco remarked kindly. "I didn't think about what you said while you were saying it. Now come on." He took hold of her arm, and she didn't pull away - she seemed to have gone beyond panic, into a cold, trapped fury. "We're going back to the party."

Several wrong turns had led Ginny nearly to the wine cellars, and it was only with the assistance of a passing ghost butler that she managed to find her way back towards the front of the house. Finally she found herself in a long wood-paneled hallway that ran the length of the house's façade; just outside the window she could see the stone balcony that looked out over the gardens. Right now it was piled with snow, the diamond-paned windows fastened shut against the cold.

Just down the hall was the doorway she remembered: when she'd been at the Manor before, they'd spent most of their time in this room. She went to the door and pushed it open and stepped through it into the library.

It looked just the same. The same blue and green glass in the windows; the same high shelves full of books. It was quiet in here, so quiet that she could hear the beat of her own heart over the soft ticking of the gold clock on the north wall.

Ginny took a deep breath. Then she reached into the neck of her dress and drew out her Time-Turner on its thin gold chain.

Harry badly wanted a glass of wine, but had forbidden himself to have one. After the events of the previous night, he never wanted to drink again. What he really wanted, in his heart of hearts, was to go back to bed and never get up. Failing that, he wanted Draco to talk to. But Draco seemed to be missing - he was nowhere in the Greater Hall and when Harry reached to try to find his mind, he felt only a faint buzz in the distance like an interrupted radio signal. Draco was obviously still busy.

"Oh, Harry, lovely to see you - don't you look handsome." It was Mrs. Weasley, bending to kiss his cheek, smoothing down his hair, admiring his new clothes. Harry made small talk with her without really looking at her - she looked too much like Ron, it was painful. Ron himself was hanging back against the far wall with the rest of his brothers. Harry could see him in the mirror that hung over the long table covered with plates of food. He could also see himself, Mrs. Weasley tilting her head back to look up at him - he remembered when she had had to bend down to talk to him. He could also see the scarlet gleam of the runic band at his waist. Why had he been stupid enough to take it off?

"Although all black seems a little depressing for a wedding," Mrs. Weasley added. This time Harry looked at her, and wondered suddenly what she knew - although he knew Ron well enough to be certain Ron wouldn't have told his parents anything. He was about to reply when he saw a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye, and in the mirror saw the double doors at the far end of the hall open and Draco come through them. He wasn't alone either; he was holding Pansy Parkinson by the elbow. Maybe he'd promised to escort her for some reason?

"Excuse me," Harry said to Mrs. Weasley. "I have to - uh - I have to - I have to go over there," and he beat a hasty retreat, leaving her looking after him in surprise.

Draco was standing just inside the door with Pansy, his eyes roving over the room. As Harry drew closer to them, he noticed that Draco seemed to be less steering Pansy by the arm than gripping her tightly against her will. She was pulling away, a look of obvious distress on her pale, fox-like little face. As Harry approached, Draco looked up and his face cleared. "Ah, Potter - glad you're here."

"Where have you been?" Harry asked under his breath, aware that a significant portion of the room's occupants were looking at them.

"I went spear-fishing in Alaska. Where do you think I've been? Anyway, Potter - I'm a bit busy here. Hang around for a minute, will you? You'll see what I mean." His eyes went past Harry, scanning the room. "The Weasleys get here yet?"

Pansy made a squeaking noise and redoubled her efforts to pull away. Harry blinked and pointed. "Yeah, they're over there - Malfoy, it's important."

"This is important too." Draco began to walk across the room, pulling Pansy with him. Harry fell into step beside him, feeling that something very strange was going on. "Pansy here forgot to bring a wedding present. She's in big trouble."

Draco shot him a look. "You know, for someone so bright you can be a blinkered idiot much of the time." His eyes suddenly narrowed. "You look different, Potter - did you cut your hair or something?"

Harry made a strangled sound. Pansy glanced over at him. "You do look a bit different," she agreed.

Harry choked, and grabbed at Draco's sleeve. "Dammit - Malfoy, listen to me - I have to talk to you!"

"Harry, not now!" Draco hissed, stopping dead in his tracks. He still, amazingly, had hold of Pansy, who had ceased trying to get away and was staring at Harry with what looked like curiosity.

"Can't you see I need to talk to you?" Harry said desperately, abandoning all pretense.

"What I see is you doing a dead-on impression of an electric squirrel. Stop hopping up and down and just wait a second -"

"Then it can wait. WEASLEY!" Draco shouted unexpectedly, pitching his voice very loudly. Most of the room turned around and stared, and all the Weasleys, who were grouped by the punch bowl, turned as well. Draco's narrow mouth curled into a long smile, "Ron! Oi! Over here!"

Ron, arrested mid-motion with a glass of pumpkin juice halfway to his lips, stared. Draco reached out his free hand and made a beckoning motion. Ron's eyes went to Harry; Harry stared him down, challenging him to come near, to look away. With a nervous glance at his brothers, Ron set his glass down on the table and began to make his way across the room towards Draco and his two companions.

Pansy, a stricken look on her face, began trying to get away again. Draco only held her tighter. Harry could see that his fingers were digging hard into her upper arms; it must have hurt her badly. Under other circumstances he might have been appalled at Draco's ruthlessness; now he was not. He was beginning to have an inkling of what was going on, and his heart started to beat faster against his ribs. What did Draco think he was doing?

The world seemed to narrow down to a single path of motion: Ron, walking towards them. He passed by Pansy's parents, who were close by and observing. Heads turned as he walked. Everyone was staring, with the half-embarrassed, half-fascinated expressions of people watching A Scene take place.

Ron stopped in front of Draco. Harry had not been this close to Ron in almost two weeks. He could see violet shadows under his friend's eyes. They stirred no compassion in him. His rage consumed any compassion he might have felt and left him speechless.

"What's this about, then," Ron said, softly, looking not at Harry but at Draco. "If you wanted my attention, Malfoy..."

"If I wanted your attention, I'd dress up like Hermione and try to shag you in the broom closet," Draco said with a smile like the edge of a knife.

Ron colored slightly, but didn't move. "Say whatever you want, Malfoy," he said. "But don't ruin this wedding. I'm asking you."

"It's not the wedding yet," Draco said, the same wicked brilliant smile never leaving his face. "It's the rehearsal dinner."

At that, Harry looked past his friend and saw that Sirius was coming towards them. Behind him, Lupin stood frozen. Everyone was still staring. He felt himself shrink under their gazes, knew Ron must be curdled with humiliation beside him, but Draco was at his best when everyone was watching. Draco alone among them looked as if he was enjoying himself.

"The rehearsal dinner," Draco went on smoothly, "is meant for family and close friends of the family. You, I think, are neither."

"That's not for you to say," Ron said. "I came for Harry's sake, not yours." His eyes went to Harry, and they were huge and almost black with entreaty, "Harry," he whispered. "Harry, I'm so sorry, I'm so so sorry --"

Harry felt each apologetic word like a knifepoint driven into his skin. "Don't," he whispered. "Don't, I don't want to hear it -"

"Shut up, Potter! Just - shut up!" It was Pansy, speaking for the first time, her squeaky little voice trembling with emotion, and Harry knew - in that moment, he knew. She had started away from Draco, who still held her arm tightly from behind, and her eyes were on Ron's face. Harry had seen that look before. Hermione looking at him, Draco looking at her, Seamus looking at Ginny, the same look on his own face, caught in photographs or mirrors - "Leave him alone," Pansy cried. "Like you've never done anything wrong -"

She broke off, as if she realized she had said too much. Harry could see by the dawning look of horror on Ron's face that he, too, was beginning to understand. But it was Draco who acted. It was Draco who bent his head, and spoke into Pansy's ear. It was low enough that she didn't pull away, loud enough that they could all hear it.

"He never has done anything wrong, Pansy darling," he whispered, and his voice was velvet soft. "But I have."

And he pushed her, suddenly and violently and hard, towards Ron. Who, being Ron, caught her instead of letting her fall. She stumbled and clutched at him, and Draco laughed.

"That's right, Weasley," he said. "Cop a decent grab, would you? See if you feel anything familiar? You should - whatever glamour spells she used, I'd think she'd still feel the same. And you ought to know that body pretty well - so many nights together in the prefects' room. You seem the type for clumsy fumblings to me, but after all that time even you ought to have -"

With a guttural little exclamation of horror, Ron pushed Pansy away, and wrapped his arms around himself; he was shaking. Draco made no move to recapture her and she made no move to run away, just threw her hands up over her face and burst into loud, spasmodic sobbing. Ron stared at her, turning rapidly green.

Harry was conscious that there was movement all around them; Sirius hurrying towards them, the Parkinsons almost running to their crying daughter, the whole room bursting into whispers - but he saw, as if lit by a single spotlight, only the narrow circle that held himself and Ron, Pansy and Draco. Pansy weeping, Ron shocked and silent, and Draco - Draco looked like nothing on earth. He looked like drawings Harry had seen in his childhood of avenging angels. There was something inexorable about him and Harry knew he himself was the one who had set this in motion - he had asked Draco to make her pay, and pay she would. Somewhere in the back of Draco's eyes, he seemed to be asking Harry a question, Is this what you wanted? Is this enough? Is this as you imagined it would be?

And some part of Harry, some cruel undreamed-of part, whispered back to Draco that he should not stop.

The smile left Draco's face. He was still looking at Ron. "Now you know," he said again. "What you threw everything away for - for this, for her. For a girl you can't even stand. For a pack of stupid lies. For a fantasy that wasn't even worth having. I would have given everything to have what you had once, Weasley." Harry looked at Draco in surprise, but he wasn't lying - he meant it. "I would have given everything, and you threw it all away for nothing, and you'll never have it back. Nobody will. It's ruined now. One of the only truly good things I've ever seen in this rotten world, and you ruined it." Draco looked at Ron as if he loathed him; Harry wondered how much of it was acting. "Was it worth it, Weasley? Was she?"

It was worse than any insult he could have thrown at either of them. Ron went an agonized white, and his voice broke as he replied, still looking past Draco at Harry. "What do you think, Malfoy?" he whispered.

Draco was silent. His silence said everything he could have needed to say. Pansy's sobbing crescendoed to a shriek that could have shattered glass. Harry stared at her and stared at Ron and a sick feeling began to spread through his stomach. He raised his eyes and met Draco's gaze over Pansy's head, and he didn't know what he would have done or asked Draco to do after that and he never got a chance to know, because at that moment the double doors to the Hall opened and Lucius Malfoy came walking in.

"What do you mean they aren't working?" Hermione demanded, half-hysterical, of the harried-looking man behind the desk at the Leaky Cauldron. "How can they all not be working? I've tried three times to reach Malfoy Manor, and I can't! There must be something wrong with your fireplaces! Do something! Get a - a chimney sweep!"

"Don't you try to be clever with me!" Hermione shrieked, so forcefully that he quailed before her.

"Look, Miss," he said. "There's nothing wrong with our fireplaces here. There must be something wrong with the remote fireplaces at the Manor. Obviously, they're blocked. Someone in the Manor must be blocking all Floo connections."

"Well, what can I do?" Hermione wailed. "I have to reach Ron or Draco, and they're both there, and it'll take forever to get an owl, they're all booked up taking Christmas presents!"

The clerk looked as if he obviously regarded this as Somebody Else's Problem. "Can't you Apparate wherever you're going?"

"No! I haven't got a license, and besides, there are anti-Apparition charms there."

"I haven't got a broomstick..." Hermione suddenly narrowed her eyes at him. "Have you got a broomstick?"

Hermione crossed her arms and glared at him. "The future of the wizarding world might depend on me getting to Malfoy Manor," she said.

"Well, no," she admitted. "But I'm very worried about a friend of mine. Please let me borrow your broomstick? Please?"

"If you don't," she added, "I'll tell the manager you drill holes in the doors so you can watch people getting undressed in their rooms."

The clock continued to tick and Ginny stared at the tiny hourglass in her hand as the minutes went by.

It had not been easy getting her Time-Turner back. In fact, it had been very difficult; but, in the end, not as difficult as perhaps it should have been. If she had been the sort of person people paid attention to, it would have been impossible. But they ignored her, and so she could slip away.

And slip away she had, at the crucial moment. And it had gone unnoticed by everyone, even Draco, sharp-eyed Draco who saw everything. And she had put the Time-Turner back on its chain and kept it hidden and only Seamus had asked about her new necklace, and he didn't know enough to be suspicious.

She had planned this. She had been planning it for weeks. So why was she so nervous? It wasn't as if she hadn't gone back in time before. You've gone back hundreds of years, she told herself. This is only five. What are you afraid of?

She shut her eyes, and slowly raised the hand with the hourglass in it. She heard the sound of a rushing wind and people shouting - they're looking for me, she thought in terror, although later she would realize that what she had heard was something quite different.

"Greeting, everyone," said Lucius Malfoy. "How kind of you all to come to my homecoming party."

Someone cried out; a champagne glass dropped and shattered on the floor. Otherwise, the room was deathly silent. Harry would have expected himself to be more shocked, but instead he felt merely a weary sense of inevitability. Then again, he had known Lucius was alive. Everyone else must have thought they were looking at the ghost of a man dead for six months.

"Oh, my God," Pansy whispered, distracted from her weeping. Her eyes were huge. "Oh, my God, Draco - your father just walked in."

Harry wanted to lay a hand on Draco's shoulder but didn't dare. It seemed like the sort of thing that would be unwise to do in front of Lucius. Not that Lucius didn't know they were friends. But still. Harry felt as if his thoughts were being strained through several layers of cheesecloth. Perhaps it was the result of too many shocks, one after the other. He watched with a disconnected horror as Lucius made his leisurely way into the room. He was not alone, either; at least ten Death Eaters in their signature black and hooded robes were with him. Two of them had their hoods down; Harry recognized them as the Mayor and the bailiff of Malfoy Park.

The occupants of the room backed away as Lucius and his entourage passed by them. Harry could not blame them. Very few of them would have their wands with them, and Death Eaters were terrifying at the best of times. Sirius was white-faced with shock, and had hold of Lupin's arm; the Weasleys were crowded around him.

There was a raised dais at one end of the hall, surrounded by a gold railing. It was where the band had performed at Harry's birthday party. Now Lucius reached it, mounted the steps, and turned to face the crowded Hall with the Mayor and the bailiff at his side. The rest of his Death Eaters had broken away and spread themselves out against the wall. More Death Eaters were coming in through the open double doors and joining them. The room was surrounded.

Lucius leaned against the railing and smiled. He was impeccably dressed - elegant black suit, black cloak, expensive shoes, hands ringed with silver. His gray eyes roamed over the crowd, appraising them as he might have appraised the quality of a painting. "To quote a Muggle writer," he said, "Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated."

Pansy made a choked little sound in her throat; it could have been a giggle or a sob. Draco stared grimly at his father. His eyes were unreadable.

"I'm sure very few of you are delighted to hear it," Lucius said. "However, it remains the truth. I am alive, and I have returned home. As I imagine that my son knew I would. Didn't you, Draco?"

Harry whirled around and looked at Draco, who had gone a chalky sort of color and was staring disbelievingly at his father. "But you were going to - I thought - the wedding," he choked out, his voice cracking.

Lucius smiled. It was a bright, malevolent smile. "Stupid little boy," he said. "did you never realize that we knew you could see us? Did you truly think you could spy on me without my knowledge? Did you think to set yourself against the Dark Lord and all his powers?"

Draco said nothing at all. For once it seemed he had nothing to say. He slumped back against the table and looked as devastated as Harry had ever seen him look. It was, in fact, Ron who broke the silence. He whirled, not on Lucius, but on Draco, and glared at him accusingly. "You knew?" he said. "You knew your father was alive and you didn't tell anyone?"

Forgetting his promise to himself in the sudden spurt of white-hot rage that possessed him, Harry whirled around, his back to Draco, and faced Ron in a fury. "I knew, too," he spat. "He told me. If you're going to blame Draco, blame me as well."

As if Harry's sudden announcement had freed his voice, Draco spoke. "Dumbledore told me not to tell anyone," he said. Harry turned his head and found that Draco was looking over his head, at Sirius. "I'm sorry."

"Dumbledore is the one who should be sorry," Lucius said. "The senile old fool, making his clever little plans, thinking he could head us off, all the while relying on you and your dreams for his information. And you, believing all our lies."

"It was all lies - all of it?" Draco said, and for a moment Harry thought a flash of what looked almost like hope crossed his friend's face.

Lucius looked at his son. His gray eyes gave nothing away. "Well," he said. "Perhaps not all of it."

"That is enough." It was Sirius, Harry saw, detaching himself from the rest of the crowd and stepping forward. "There is no need for these cat and mouse games, Lucius. You're an escaped mental patient -" He laughed, although there was no humor in it. "They'll bring you back to St. Mungo's before you can even -"

"I rather think not," Lucius interrupted. "It is, in fact, all of you, who are in violation of the law."

"I, not you, am the Master of Malfoy Manor," Lucius said, looking coldly at Sirius. "The laws of the Manor are old, old laws, and the Manor knows its master."

Potter ! The word echoed so forcefully in Harry's head that for a moment he thought Draco had shouted it out loud. Potter - get behind me, quickly.

What ? Harry half-turned, and stared at the other boy, whose chalky color had returned. Why?

The Manor - it's charmed against trespassers, and the master of the Manor has ultimate control over the charms. If my father decides we're all trespassing - he could hurl us out of here without lifting a hand -

I know. Malfoy blood, Harry replied, backing up slightly. You guys need a new security system. Maybe one that isn't, dare I say it, blood-based?

Draco looked grimly, fleetingly amused. Pureblood pride, he said. You wouldn't understand it.

Sirius had folded his arms and was glaring. The rest of the wedding party was massed behind him, staring in confusion. "Say your piece, then, Lucius," he snapped. "What do you want?"

Lucius leaned thoughtfully on the railing. For a moment, Harry was reminded of Draco...the same insolent grace, the same catlike lazy movements that were somehow menacing. Of course, Draco must have learned it somewhere. But when Draco did it, it had a certain ironic charm; with Lucius, it was merely sinister. "I want you all," he said slowly, "who are not my family or my servants, to get the hell out of this house. There will be no rehearsal dinner, because there will be no wedding. There will be no wedding, because I say so. Now get out, all of you."

"I will not leave Draco here alone with you," Sirius protested hotly. "He comes with us."

"You won't need to leave him here alone," replied Lucius in a voice like silk. "He'll have Harry for company."

Harry blinked. Surely he'd heard wrong. He glanced sideways towards Draco. Draco was staring intently at his father. He wore an expression Harry had never seen before - a dazed, horrified look. "Leave Harry out of this, Father," he said, his voice firm. "It's me you want -"

"Please refrain from being presumptuous," said Lucius. "if it was you I wanted, I'd say so. Harry stays here."

Sirius was tugging at his tie, livid with rage. "You honestly think you can keep him here, with you-?" he sputtered at Lucius. "The Ministry -"

"Has no choice in the matter," Lucius said. It was beginning to dawn on Harry that Lucius was serious. "Draco is my son by blood and this is his home; you have no right to take him from me. And Harry..." Lucius' eyes brushed briefly over Harry; they were icy cold. "Harry is my property."

Sirius gave a furious bark of laughter. "You really do belong back in St. Mungo's, Lucius."

"Oh, I assure you I am very much sane," Lucius smiled. "And that I have the law on my side. Harry Potter has been a domiciled resident of this house for six months today. He is underage under wizarding law. Therefore, I am his official guardian."

"That's ridiculous," Arthur Weasley burst out, stepping forward to stand next to Sirius. "Sirius Black is his official guardian; I signed the adoption papers myself."

"Ah, yes, you," Lucius said, grinning now, his eyes on Arthur. "Our false Minister. I'll get to you in a moment." He turned to the pale man at his side who Harry knew as The Bailiff of Malfoy Park. "Mr. Stebbins, if you would be so kind..."

With a curt nod, the Bailiff unrolled a long strip of parchment and began to read aloud:

"Under wizarding law, a domicile is the place where a person has his true, fixed, permanent home and principal establishment, entered into under sciens, and to which, whenever he is absent, he has the intention of returning -"

"Then Harry's place of residence is obviously Hogwarts," Sirius protested. "It's his principal home - isn't it, Remus?" he demanded, whirling on his friend.

But Lupin, looking as dazed as the rest of the crowd, only dropped his eyes. "Actually, Sirius, legally speaking..."

"Ahem," Stebbins interrupted. He was obviously enjoying himself - probably nobody had paid this much attention to him in years. "If I may continue:

'Individual wizards who are enrolled to study at Hogwarts are, as determined under the In Loco Parentis Chattel Expiditor of 1721, not deemed domiciled at Hogwarts, as there is no presumption by the castle itself that such students deem said locale as the permanent or principal establishment, as such students have no expectation of remaining within the grounds ad infinitum. Evidence of intent to be a resident of a particular residence is demonstrated by the absence of ties to a former residence; in the instant matter, such absence of ties is demonstrated, ab initio, by the lack of any correspondence between Mr Potter, or in fact, any resident of Malfoy Manor, with those who are still in residence at Number Four Privet Drive, except, of course, for this letter sent by Mr. Sirius Black, and signed by the same, which provides the Manor as a return address and which states, in part, that - quote - Harry will be living here with me, my fiance and her son, and he has no interest in hearing from you, your wife or your son, so I must ask that any further communications with him be made through me at the address provided above - end quote. Ipsissima verba, Mr Potter is considered legally domiciled at Malfoy Manor.'"

"On the strength of a letter I wrote to the Dursleys? That's ludicrous!" Sirius protested. "There was nothing legal about that letter - I sent it without the Ministry's knowledge -"

"Six months ago," Stebbins interrupted, "Mr. Potter changed his address records at Hogwarts to state that his guardian was Mr Black, and as Hogwarts had accepted letters signed by Mr Black in loco parentis for Mr Potter for over three years prior to such change, ceteris peribus, the records at Hogwarts do indicate that Mr Potter is a resident of Malfoy Park, is that correct ... Mr Lupin?"

"That's correct," Lupin said in a barely audible voice. "To the best of my knowledge."

"There's also Muggle law," Sirius said in a constricted voice. "The Dursleys - they're Harry's blood family -"

"So they are," said Stebbins, whom Harry was growing to loathe. Lucius himself was saying nothing; leaning against the rail, letting the bailiff do the talking. "But we do have other evidence here on the issue of domicilary location. We also are in possession of a letter from Mr Dursley in which he states that he was advised that his guardianship of Mr. Potter had ended on Mr Potter's seventeenth birthday. I believe he ended the letter with - quote - good riddance and never come near me or my family again - end quote. A ruling was issued this morning deeming all magical paraphenalia within the purview of Privet Drive to be Bona Vacantia, and was confiscated by the Ministry Response Division approximately seventeen minutes ago. As further evidence that Mr. Potter is now domiciled at the Manor, Ministry records clearly show that various wards and protections on and around the Dursley home were removed during the month of July of this year."

Mr. Weasley nodded, looking shellshocked. "Well, yes - the Auror Response Team thought, since Harry wouldn't be there any more, and there's a high expense involved in keeping such an extensive ward system in place..."

Lucius gave a delighted laugh. "Do be quiet for a moment, Black," he said. "The best is yet to come, I think. Stebbins..?"

The Bailiff smiled a thin smile. "Very well. 'Ex concessis, the Bar of Malfoy Park has considered the evidence presented, in comportment with the Amicus Curae pleadings filed by Lucius Malfoy, then filing in absentia. In our hearing no complaint thereto, cadit quaestio, we issue this Writ of Praecipe and Replevin. Lucius Malfoy is now deemed by this court, per curium and de lege lata, the guardian of his son by blood, Draco Malfoy, and also has full custody, pursuant to the acts and determinations discussed herein, with regard to Harry Potter, as his period of residence, and thus his domicile, at Malfoy Manor predates the date on which he will turn eighteen. Nemo dat quod non habet, and res gestae. Signed by Lucius Malfoy and six officers of the Ministry, as well as the Bailiff of Malfoy Park, in this, the year nineteen ninety-eight.' And that," he finished, rolling up the parchment, "is all."

"Six officers of the Ministry? Which six officers of the Ministry?" Sirius demanded; Harry had never seen him look so angry, not even on his Wanted posters.

Sirius lunged at him, but Lupin and Mr. Weasley each caught at his arms, and held him back. "Sirius," Harry heard him whisper, "The Ministry will take care of this, don't panic, we can handle this..."

Sirius didn't seem comforted by this and Harry hardly blamed him. "The Ministry is obviously in on this," he hissed back. "How can you not realize that, Arthur -"

"Mr. Malfoy." It was Lupin speaking, his voice firm and collected. "You may be correct. You may be able to keep Harry here for a certain amount of time, although you'd be a fool to think you could make it permanent, and I don't think you're a fool. However, that doesn't change the fact that any harm that comes to him while he's in your custody is your responsibility. If you hurt him...if you harm either boy in any way...it's still murder, and you'll go to Azkaban."

Lucius sighed, and waved a heavily ringed hand in a dismissive gesture. "I have no intention of harming the boys," he said. "What one-track minds you all have."

"The Ministry will be watching you!" Arthur Weasley shouted unexpectedly. "If you so much as touch a hair of Harry's head -"

Lucius snorted. "Tedious little petty bureaucrat," he said, "I've no patience at all. I've taken care of you, anyway. Let the Ministry rage and roar. Everything I've done here is perfectly legal. And now...I'd like you all to leave me alone, please."

Lucius raised his wand. Harry felt Draco catch involuntarily at his sleeve and pull him back hard; he ducked his head; there was a roaring in his ears. Lucius shouted an incantation Harry could barely hear, and something like a powerful wind tore past him, ripping at his clothes and hair. He remembered the Whirlwind Spell he had cast last year that had hurled Lucius out of the Manor - wondered if this was the same thing - how ironic it would be if it was. He held his breath -

And it was over. The wind stilled and was gone. Draco's released his grip on Harry's sleeve, and Harry opened his eyes.

The room was nearly empty. Lucius still stood where he had, untouched by the storm, the smirk on his narrow face making him look far more like his son than Harry had ever seen him. The Death Eaters were still there as well, standing near Lucius. All that remained of those who had been at the party before Lucius had arrived was Draco, Harry himself, and Ron - huddled in a small semicircle together.

Lucius looked at them with an expression of calm interest. Then he snapped his fingers at his Death Eaters, and they began walk towards him.

Draco cleared his throat. "Father," he said, and jerked his chin towards Ron. "I think you forgot a Weasley. I know there's a lot of them; it's hard to keep track, but..."

"Sorry," Draco said. "I didn't realize you'd decided Ron was your property as well. I mean, what's next after this? Pseudo-adopting the rest of my class and renaming the Manor 'Lucius Malfoy's Home for Wayward Young Wizards'?"

Lucius looked coldly at his son. "I think," he said, "that you have not been very wise in either your speech or your judgements recently, Draco. I would hate to lose you."

"And what did I tell you when you were a child? That it's wrong to be careless with your possessions? I believe I did tell you that."

"Probably," Draco said. He looked frightened and tired and it made Harry nervous - he was not used to Draco looking frightened, even when he was. "Father - whatever it is, please get on with it."

Without any change in expression, Lucius stepped down from the platform he had been standing on, took a few steps towards his son, and slapped him hard across the face. It was loud in the stillroom, like the sound of a whip cracking. Draco put his hand to his face; Harry tensed and spoke before he could stop himself, "You're not allowed to hurt him," he protested fiercely - "You said you knew that."

"Surely a father can reprimand his son," Lucius said calmly, not looking at Harry. His gaze was on Draco, who had taken his hand away from his face. A red mark remained there, like a whip weal, across his cheek.

"I expected a worse punishment," Draco said, his voice toneless. "Considering all that I've done."

"That was not your punishment," Lucius said. His voice was chillingly soft. "That was my forgiveness of you." He raised his head, and looked at his Death Eaters. "Take them," he said, gesturing at Harry and Draco. "Lock them up on the North Tower. No - not him as well," he added, and laid a long-fingered hand on Ron's sleeve. "Leave this one here with me."

Harry heard Ron's sharp intake of breath, and even now, even after everything that had happened and everything he had told himself, he felt it like a blow to his stomach - he spun around towards Ron, but the Mayor, behind him, had already seized him and jerked his right arm up behind his back. The pain was immediate and intense, and Harry cried out, and kicked backwards with his feet. His left foot connected satisfyingly with something soft and fleshy, and the Mayor nearly dropped him.

"Stop that," he heard Lucius say sharply, and tapped Harry with his wand. Instantly, Harry's muscles froze as if he'd been encased in ice. He couldn't even turn his head to look at Ron, or at Draco. Behind him the Mayor chuckled, low in his throat. Then he took hold of Harry once again and began to drag him out of the Hall.

Sunset had passed and night had fallen completely over the castle. The shadows lengthened in each room; the girl in her golden cage looked up, bright-eyed, at the rising moon outside the window. Near the cage, the Dark Lord, playing chess with himself, used the green knight to capture the red king.

The small man with the silver hand who sat in the shadows raised his head; his eyes were white in the dimness. "Who is it?" he said.

"I will let them in," said the silver-handed man, who was often called Wormtail by his master, but who did not like that name. He stood and crossed the room, giving the gold cage and the girl inside it a wide berth.

The Dark Lord continued to play his solitary game. Soon he would have to sacrifice his knight. He did not look up as Wormtail opened the brass double doors and stood back to let Lucius Malfoy pass into the room. He seemed to sense, however, that the girl had been correct: his servant was not alone.

At that, the Dark Lord rose to his feet and turned; the girl in the cage raised herself up on her knees and stared. Lucius, calm and composed, was holding the arm of a tall boy with red hair, dressed in disheveled party clothes. The boy's face was very white.

"Lucius," whispered the girl inside the cage, and reached a hand through the bars. "Lucius, look at me."

Lucius ignored her, although the redheaded boy stared at her with wide eyes. Instead, he spoke to the boy, "Greet the Dark Lord," he said.

Lucius did not appear to hear her; he chuckled low in his throat. "I am quite sure he is the one," he said.

The redheaded boy spoke. "I don't understand," he said. "The one what? Why am I here?"

The Dark Lord looked at him, and a faint amused smile touched the edge of his inhuman mouth. "You really do not know? You cannot guess?"

"Well, then." The Dark Lord laid a hand on the boy's shoulder and the boy winced in pain. "Perhaps this is something we should discuss. Come over here with me to the table. Do you...play chess?"

Next chapter: Lucius "deals" with Harry and Draco. Ron spends quality time with the Dark Lord. Ginny finds out that the past is a foreign country. Sirius complains to the Ministry. Hermione reads Ron's diary. How rude.

Chapter Eight: The Master of Malfoy Manor