Imogen Rose Grieve
1981 – 1998
Those who stand for others do not fall alone.
St Aldhelm's, Ashcombe
Imogen Rose Grieve
1981 – 1998
Those who stand for others do not fall alone.
St Aldhelm's, Ashcombe
♫ Listen along
The path up Glastonbury Tor went round and round the hill like the thread of a screw.
Harry had read about it, in one of the books Hermione left lying round Malfoy Manor: the old terraces cut into the slopes, seven of them, spiralling up to the summit in a long winding maze. Pilgrims had walked them for a thousand years, the book said, round and round and round, getting no nearer the top for what felt like hours, and then suddenly there. The book didn't know who had cut them, or what they were for.
Harry knew now. They were for this. They were for the dead walking down, and anyone fool enough to walk up.
On a dry afternoon the slopes between the terraces were steep enough to need your hands, and tonight every blade of grass on them was glazed with frost. The only way up was round, and round was slow, and every turn of the path was time they didn't have.
He ran.
The first terrace was steep and wet and slick with frost, and the grass crunched and slid under his boots. Above him the sky was still burning, orange and red where the dragons had set the clouds alight, and every so often a white shape came plunging down out of it: a hound, or a rider, or a burning thing that had been one or the other. The cold was coming down the hill towards him in waves, from the tower at the top, where the white light was pouring out of the broken door. It got into his lungs. It got into his fingers. It made the whole world ring like a struck glass.
Draco was beside him.
He was running flat out, with his hawthorn wand in his hand and his breath smoking, and he was keeping up. It shouldn't have surprised Harry; they had spent five years running down smugglers across the rooftops of Knockturn Alley together. But Draco had also been in a cell under this hill for weeks, living on Margery Crisp's stew, and Harry had expected him to need looking after.
He didn't need looking after. On the second terrace a rider came at them out of the dark, silent and faceless on a pale horse, with a long white spear levelled at Harry's back. Harry never saw it. He only heard Draco say something short and savage, and felt the cold of the spear go past his ear, and turned to see the rider coming apart in a spray of frost and the horse bolting away down the slope.
"That's one," said Draco, breathing hard.
"One what?"
"Snigg," said Draco, "saved you eleven times in volume three. I'm keeping count." He was already running again. "Try to keep up, Potter. I'm not carrying you."
"Last time, I carried you," said Harry, and overtook him.
They ran.
At the foot of the hill, Hermione took her hand off the glass.
It ran the whole length of the shore, and there was no getting through it. But it stopped where the shore did, at the bottom of the lane, and that was where the lanterns were coming down off the hill in a screaming, stumbling stampede, with the second Hunt at their heels.
"Hounds on the east face, coming down fast," said Lee Jordan, back in her ear, very calmly for Lee. "Lots of them. Professor, that's your side. Neville, they're heading for the Muggles —"
Hermione was already running. She reached the bottom of the lane with her arm in her beaded bag up to the shoulder, and pulled, and for the third time that night the gates of Malfoy Manor came out into the world and grew, and came down across the lane between the hill and the lanterns with a clang they must have heard in Wells.
"Iron threshold!" she shouted, to anyone who could hear, which, thanks to George, was most of Britain. "They won't cross it! Everyone else, line up either side!"
"Hold it," said Kingsley's voice in all their ears at once, deep and slow and entirely his own again. "Just hold it. He only needs a few minutes."
They held it. Greg took the left-hand gate in both hands and set his feet, and when the first wave of hounds hit the ironwork and broke on it, shrieking, he didn't move an inch. Ron was on the right with a fresh crate of George's nails at his feet, throwing them in handfuls the way he'd thrown the Quaffle out from the hoops at the Burrow every summer of his childhood, and wherever they landed the white hounds went out like candles. At the far end of the line Theo knelt on the ice, and cut one long stroke of Ogham beside his knee with his wand, swearing gently, and a ridge of ice heaved up out of the flood and ran away along the foot of the hill, all round, like a wall. When a rider came over the top of it, Pansy tried the Bat-Bogey Hex on it, discovered that it had no nose, and hit it with the poker instead. Further along, Neville had the Sword of Gryffindor in both hands, and McGonagall had taken her arm out of its sling.
For a long, loud, freezing while, the line held. Then the hounds found the place where Theo's wall ran thin, out at the far end where the ice gave way to the slope, and came over it in a white flood, pouring down between the gates and the lanterns, and there was nobody there to stop them but Luna Lovegood.
Luna put her arm into her bag up to the shoulder. It was one of a pair Hermione had given her and Ginny a few Christmases ago, beaded like her own and a great deal bigger on the inside, and Luna kept a great many things in hers, some of them alive. She took out Bolorma.
She had grown since the Manor. She was the size of a cat now, bristling and brown and faintly smoking, and she had been making her small-kettle noise all evening. Now it rose to a whistle, and then to a shriek.
"There you are," Luna told her. "You're big enough now."
She let go. Bolorma went into the middle of the pack like a struck match. It turned out that whatever Bolorma was, she ran very hot. Where she breathed on the white hounds they hissed like snow thrown on a stove and went out, a dozen at a time, until the end of the line was clear and Bolorma was sitting in the slush on her own, steaming gently and looking extremely pleased with herself.
"The wind told me you'd be useful tonight," Luna said to her fondly.
Behind them, Percy had got his Confundus back up, and four hundred Muggles who had been promised a Samhain to remember stopped screaming, decided that this was it, and began to applaud.
The next thing to come out of the door was not a Hunt.
Hermione felt it the way she had felt the others, up through the ice and into her boots, but this time it came with a sound: a thin, high, tearing noise from the top of the Tor, like a sheet being ripped in half very slowly. The white light in the tower flickered. And something poured out of it that was not white at all.
They came down the hill low and fast and wrong. They were not running and not quite flying; they came the way smoke comes under a door, a ragged black flock of them with too many joints, and they went over the heads of the dead on the path without touching them, straight for the living below. The hounds had bayed. These made no sound at all until they were close, and then the sound was a whisper, dozens of whispers at once, all of them saying please.
"Sluagh," said Hermione's voice in every ear on the Levels, high and fast. "The Host. They're in the book. Iron, fire, and keep your mouths shut, because they get in through your —"
"Through our what?" said Pansy.
The first of them went over the top of the Manor gates as though the gates were not there. A threshold only binds what walks across it, and the Host did not walk.
It came down on the ice between Ron and Pansy in a tangle of black, and unfolded, and the two of them had barely time to see what it was before Ron put a fistful of nails into it at arm's length. It came apart with a sound like a wet umbrella and a last, reproachful please.
"Keep your mouth shut, she said," said Ron. "You heard her."
"I was asking a question, Weasley!"
"Well, that's a mouth, isn't it!"
Then there were a dozen of them, and then there was no counting. They came over the gates and round the end of Theo's wall and down out of the burning sky, and the iron line that had held two Hunts was suddenly a line of people standing in the open with their backs to a fence. Greg kept hold of his gate and hexed them out of the air one-handed. Neville's sword went through a knot of them in a single stroke. Theo cut a letter into the ice that made the nearest of them fold up like deckchairs, and said something to his mother under his breath. And in the middle of it, back to back, Ron threw nails and Pansy swung the poker, still arguing.
One of them got into her hair. She felt it go in, light and quick and whispering, and then it was pulling, and the whisper was in her ear, very close, saying please, saying let me in, and she opened her mouth to scream at it and Ron's hand was there first. He got it by whatever it had instead of a neck and tore it out of her hair with a fistful of George's nails closed round it, and it went to smoke between his fingers.
"Mouth," said Ron, breathing hard. "Shut. I told you."
"— and for anybody who's just tuned in," said Lee Jordan's voice, with great calm, in both their ears and in every kitchen in Britain, "that's Ron Weasley and Pansy Parkinson at the foot of the hill, and no, I don't know either."
They both stopped dead.
"Half the country's listening," said Ron.
Pansy looked at him across the ice, with her hair half down where the Host had got into it and something black smoking on the end of her poker, and her chin came up.
"Then half the country," she said, "can hear this. Weasley. Duck."
He ducked. The poker went over his head and took the one behind him clean out of the air.
Bolorma looked up from her puddle at the Host, shrieked, and went up through the middle of them like a rocket. After that it was mostly tidying up.
Then Robards came in over the top of Lee again, dry and carrying and a long way off.
"Jordan. Robards. Level Nine."
"Go ahead, sir," said Lee, who had now said sir on air twice in one night.
"I have had things coming through that curtain all night, Jordan, and not one of them has signed the visitors' book." Behind his voice, something hit a ceiling. Robards drew breath. "Somebody take care of that hound. Somebody tell me why the Department of Mysteries keeps a door it can't shut. And will somebody tell Potter that if he isn't off that hill by breakfast, he's on paperwork till Easter!"
"We'll draw a veil over that," said Lee.
The dead were coming down the path.
Harry saw them on the third terrace. He'd known they'd be there, and it made no difference at all. They were coming round the curve of the hill above him in a long, slow, silent line, one after another, walking down the spiral path towards the water. They were pale and quiet, and a little blurred at the edges, like figures seen through rain. Close to, they looked like people who had been a very long way away and were only now, slowly, coming home.
He didn't slow down. He couldn't let himself. He went on up the path towards them, and they came on down it towards him, and there was nowhere on the narrow terrace to go but past.
The first one was a stranger, an old man in a flat cap, with a walking stick. The second was a young witch in Healer's robes. The third was a boy of fifteen or sixteen, with a camera round his neck.
Colin Creevey looked at Harry as they passed each other on the path. His face broke into a wide, delighted, astonished grin, exactly the way it always had. He lifted his camera, as if out of pure habit.
And then he stopped walking.
Harry didn't look back. If he stopped now, he would never start again. But he felt it, the way you feel somebody come into a room behind you: Colin standing still on the path, and then turning round, and following him back up the hill.
The old man in the flat cap turned too. And the young Healer.
"Potter," said Draco, very quietly, beside him. "Potter. Look."
Harry looked. All along the path above them, as he climbed, the dead were stopping. One by one. As he reached each of them, they stopped, and looked at him, and turned. They turned round on the narrow terrace and began to walk back up the hill, the way they'd come, behind him.
He saw a big, square, shaggy man he'd once seen in a photograph, laughing on the steps of the Ministry. He saw a small, grey-haired witch with a round, cheerful face in a Hufflepuff scarf. He saw a tall man with Dean Thomas's hands. He saw Lavender Brown, who gave him a little wave, as though they had just run into each other in Hogsmeade. He saw a young man with a Healer's badge, and a thin, tired, gentle-looking face. The young man studied Harry as if trying to decide something, and then nodded, and turned round.
Gareth Pritchard, Harry thought. Owen's boy. He didn't know how he knew.
He saw a young woman with bright pink hair. And beside her a tall, shabby, tired man with grey in his hair and a small surprised smile, as if somebody he loved had just walked into the room.
Harry's eyes were streaming. He had no idea when that had started. He kept climbing. He had to. Remus and Tonks stopped on the path as he passed them, and he felt Tonks's hand on his shoulder, very light and very cold, just for a second. Then they turned, and walked up the hill behind him.
He didn't see Fred. He'd known he wouldn't. Fred had said no.
"Potter," said Draco hoarsely. "Your — up there. On the next turn."
Harry looked up.
Ginny Potter hadn't moved from the glass.
Everybody else had gone along the shore to hold the lane. She stood where Harry had left her, with her broom lying on the ice where she'd dropped it, and a pair of Omnioculars that somebody had pushed into her hands on the way past. Through them she had followed the two small running figures round the spiral of the Tor for three terraces, and every time the path took them round the far side of the hill, she stopped breathing until they came back.
"Potter's on the third terrace," said Lee in her ear. "Malfoy's with him. Ginny, two coming along the shore at you, low —"
She dropped them both with a Blasting Curse apiece, and never took her eyes off the hill.
Overhead, Gwenog had got the Harpies back in the air, the ones who could still bend their fingers, and they went over in a long ragged chevron, cackling, and down in the lane the Muggles screamed back at them, delighted. Somebody down there had started a chant. It sounded, Ginny thought, very much like WITCHES! WITCHES! WITCHES!, and she found, to her own surprise, that she was laughing.
Then she found the fourth terrace, and saw who was standing on the path in front of her husband, and stopped laughing.
"Lee," she said quietly. "It's his mum and dad."
♫ Listen along
They were standing on the path, the two of them, halfway round the curve of the fourth terrace, and they were waiting.
A young man with untidy black hair and round spectacles, and a face that was so very nearly Harry's own that it was like looking at a photograph of himself taken by someone who'd never quite met him. And beside him, holding his hand, a young woman with long dark red hair and bright green eyes.
Harry didn't decide to stop. He was running, and then he wasn't.
He stood on the frozen path of the fourth terrace of Glastonbury Tor, with the Hunt burning in the sky above him and the dead of the war standing silently on the path behind him, and he looked at his mother and his father.
They were twenty-one. They'd been twenty-one the last time, too, in the Forest. He was twenty-eight now. He was older than they had ever been.
His mother came forward. She came right up to him on the narrow path and put her hand on his face, and it was cold, so very cold, and it didn't matter at all.
"Look at you," said Lily Potter softly. "Oh, Harry. Look at you."
Harry couldn't speak. He didn't try.
His father was looking past him. Harry saw his eyes go over Harry's shoulder, to where Draco was standing a few feet down the path, pale and silent, with his wand forgotten in his hand. Something went across James Potter's face that Harry had never seen on it in any photograph: pure, frank, disbelieving astonishment.
"That's Malfoy's boy," said James. "Isn't it? Lucius Malfoy's son?"
"He's my partner," said Harry. His voice cracked. "He's — yeah. He's my partner."
James looked at Draco. Draco looked back. Harry knew Draco Malfoy had sat across a dinner table from Voldemort's own snake, and he had seen him face down McGonagall at her most furious, and the whole Auror Office in the Atrium, and a vampire smuggler with a knife in each hand. He had never once seen him look the way he looked now, standing on a frozen hillside at midnight in front of James Potter.
"Mr Malfoy," said James.
"Sir," said Draco faintly.
"You came up here with him."
"Yes, sir."
James Potter's mouth twitched at one corner, in a way that Harry knew, suddenly and absolutely, from the inside of his own face.
"Don't let him do anything stupid," said James.
"I've been trying for five years, sir," said Draco. "It's not going especially well."
"Oi," said Harry.
James laughed. It was the first time Harry had heard him laugh anywhere but in a Pensieve. It was a big, warm, delighted, slightly ridiculous laugh, and it went on a little too long, and Harry realised with a strange lurch that he knew exactly what it sounded like, because it sounded like his own.
Then James turned back to Harry. The laugh went out of his face, and something much quieter came into it.
"Go on, then," he said gently. "We'll walk up with you."
They did.
His mother walked on his left with her hand tucked through his arm, as if they did this every Sunday, and his father walked on his right, and the terraces went by under their feet. Lily asked him, once, whether he was eating properly. He said he was. "He isn't," said Draco, from behind them, and Lily laughed, and it was the laugh from the Mirror, the one he had never been able to hear. On the sixth terrace Harry looked back down the long pale line behind him for Sirius, face by face, all the way to the bottom, and didn't find him. His father saw him looking, and only smiled.
Behind the line, a retired dinner lady called Janet Pocock from Shepton Mallet, who had walked up Glastonbury Tor on Hallowe'en night every year for twenty-two years, held up her lantern and watched it all with her mouth open.
She saw a woman in a green cloak on a broomstick go past at the height of a double-decker bus, cackling. She saw a young man in a green velvet coat kneel down and draw a wall out of the ice with a pen. She saw a lad with no eyebrows let off what she assumed were more fireworks, and a girl in a white coat at the bottom of the lane running from one person on the ground to the next with a bag, the way they did at the end of the Festival. She saw a very large man holding a pair of iron gates shut against a pack of white dogs the size of ponies, and two women in nice coats standing back to back doing something with sticks that made the dogs vanish like a conjuror's doves. She saw a lady in an enormous hat and a fur coat sitting on a shooting stick with a cup of tea, who never once got up, and every so often lifted her little finger off the cup, and somebody on a horse fell off it trussed up like a Christmas turkey. And she saw, far up the hill, a long line of pale people in old-fashioned clothes walking slowly up the spiral path behind a lad in glasses, as quiet as if they were going home from church.
"Ooh, look," said Janet Pocock to her husband. Her eyes had filled with tears, and she didn't know why. "That's lovely, that is. That's the best one they've ever done."
"Council must've had lottery money," said her husband, who had come as a badger.
On his hummock at the foot of the hill, Percy Weasley saw an Obliviator start towards them, and put out a hand to stop him. "Leave those two," he said. "Nobody's going to believe them either."
And from the vestry window, into every wireless in Britain and every ear on the Levels, Lee Jordan said, very quietly: "That's Harry Potter going up the Tor with his mum and dad. I'm not going to say anything for a bit, if that's all right."
The tower was bigger than it looked from below.
Harry had seen it from a churchyard and from the frozen Levels, and he had stood in it once already, a fortnight ago, with the wind going through it, and every time it had seemed small: a single roofless stone tower on the top of a hill, like a finger raised for silence. Tonight it was huge. It stood at the very summit of the Tor, square and grey and ancient, and instead of a door it had two tall arched openings, one on either side, facing each other, so that you could walk straight in one side and out the other, through the hollow heart of the tower, from the east to the west.
The east arch was ordinary. Grey stone, and wet grass, and the burning sky beyond.
The west arch was a door into somewhere else.
White light was pouring through it, cold and blinding. Beyond the light, Harry could see — or thought he could see; it was hard to look at — a great hall under a hill. A hall of dark stone pillars going down and down into a green-lit dark, far bigger than the hill it was under, bigger than anything had any right to be. There were hounds lying at the foot of the pillars, white and red-eared, hundreds upon hundreds of them. There were riders standing between the pillars, faceless and silent. And at the far end of the hall, very far away, something was sitting on a high seat of stone. Something very tall and very old, that did not stir, with a crown on its head that might have been silver or might have been frost. It was watching the door.
It was watching Harry.
On the threshold of the west arch, set side by side on the worn stone sill like offerings on an altar, lay a long pale wand of knobbled elder and a small black stone with a crack across it.
And in front of them, with his back to Harry, stood Edmund Grieve.
He turned round when he heard them come.
He looked very old. That was the first thing Harry saw. Older than he'd looked at the Manor gates, older than he'd looked in his office a lifetime ago in September, handing out cups of tea. His beard was white with frost. His hands were white with frost to the elbows. He was leaning on his stick as though it was the only thing holding him up. He looked at Harry, and at Draco, and past them, at the long silent procession of the dead who had followed Harry up the hill and were standing now all round the summit of the Tor, on the frozen grass, in the burning dark.
His face changed.
"They're going back," said Edmund Grieve.
"They never wanted to stay," said Harry.
"No. No, that's not — they're confused, Harry. They've been in the dark for so long. They don't know what's good for them." Grieve turned towards the door, towards the blinding light. "You have to come through. That's all. You're the Master, it's your door, you only have to walk through it and it will open properly, the way it should, and they'll understand, they'll all understand —"
"They understand now," said Harry.
The frost went out from Grieve across the summit, quick and white, and closed over Harry's boots, the way it had on the landing at the Manor. Then it stopped. Grieve looked down at it as though it had done it on its own. "No," he said. "Not like that. It has to be you." The frost let go.
Harry held out his hand.
No incantation. No spell. He simply held out his open hand, palm up, towards the threshold of the west arch, the way you'd hold out your hand for something that belonged to you.
On the stone sill, the Elder Wand moved.
It rolled once. Then it rose into the air, turning slowly end over end, and came across the summit of the Tor through the white light, straight past Edmund Grieve's frosted face, and dropped into Harry's palm as if it had never been anywhere else.
It was warm. It had been cold in the tomb, and cold in Grieve's pocket, and cold on the threshold. In Harry's hand it was warm as a living thing.
Grieve stared at it.
"Nor to you," he said. "Minerva said that, on the shore. I thought it wouldn't matter —"
And from the far end of the great hall under the hill, from the high seat of frost and stone, a voice spoke.
Harry had heard it once already that night, in his ear, on the ice. It was no louder here. It didn't need to be. It came through the door like cold through a crack, and every one of the dead standing on the summit of the Tor went still.
Master.
Harry looked through the arch. The thing on the high seat was leaning forward now. He still couldn't see its face. He didn't think it had one, exactly. But he could feel it looking at him, the whole vast weight of its attention, as you feel the sun on your skin with your eyes closed.
Master, said the King under the Hill. You have two of the three. You carry the third. You have come to my door of your own will, as the old bargain asks. Step through it, and it opens as it was always meant to. My Hunt rides out into the world again, as it did before your people came. Tonight it takes the lanterns on my hill. After tonight it rides every night, at every door that is not barred with iron, for a thousand years. And all your dead go home to you. Every one. That is the bargain. That was always the bargain.
"I've had an offer like that before," said Harry. "I was eleven. I said no then, too."
Harry looked at Grieve.
"That wasn't —" Grieve's voice had gone thin. "That wasn't the bargain. The Hunt. You never said. You said the door, and the dead, and a hundred for a hundred, you never said anything about —"
It was always the bargain, said the King under the Hill, quite gently. It was written. You simply did not read to the end.
Harry watched it land. He watched it go into the old man's face, slowly, all the way down: every letter, every ledger, every careful red-ink tick. Ten years of reading a Healer's report every night. Ten years of writing to every bereaved family in Britain on the anniversary of their dead. Ten years of keeping accounts, and he had never once read to the end.
"Oh," said Edmund Grieve, very quietly. "Oh, Immy."
And through the blinding white light of the door, someone walked.
♫ Listen along
She came out of the hall under the hill very quickly, the way a girl of seventeen would come running down a corridor. She was round-faced and freckled, with wind in her brown hair, though there was no wind, and a yellow-and-black scarf wound three times round her neck. She came through the light and stopped on the threshold of the west arch, right on the stone sill, beside the small black stone. She looked at her father.
"Dad," said Imogen Grieve.
The old man stood frozen. Harry saw him try to speak and fail.
"You got my message," said Imogen. "Didn't you? On the coin. I didn't know if it would work. Neville always said I was rubbish at Protean Charms."
"Immy," said Edmund Grieve.
"I didn't want this, Dad." She was looking at him the way you'd look at somebody you love who has done something very foolish for a very good reason. "I told you. Don't bring me back. I'm fine. I've been fine for ten years. It's you I've been worried about." Her voice wobbled. "Reading that report every night. Writing all those letters. You never stopped. You never let yourself stop for one single day."
"I couldn't," whispered her father. "I couldn't. You were in the cold. You were on your own —"
"I'm not on my own. I've never been on my own. There's loads of us." She glanced back over her shoulder, at the dead standing silent round the summit of the Tor, and her face softened. "It's you who's been on your own, Dad. For ten years. In that office, with all the photographs."
Grieve made a sound.
Imogen looked past him then, at Harry, and at Draco. Her eyes stopped on Draco for a moment, and softened.
"You told him," she said to Draco. "In the hill. What I did, in the corridor. What it meant." She smiled a little, crookedly. "I heard you. Thank you."
Draco only nodded. It seemed to be all he could manage.
And through the door behind Imogen, the white light was getting brighter. The dark hall beyond it was getting bigger. At the far end of it the thing on the high seat was standing up, very slowly, very tall. The hounds at the foot of the pillars were getting to their feet, hundreds and hundreds of them, red ears pricking. The crack in the world was widening.
"It won't close," said Harry. He could feel it. The Wand was warm in his hand, and it was telling him, with the certainty of a dream. "It's broken. Two of the keys were put in the lock, and it broke. It won't close from this side. Not even for me."
Draco moved.
He stepped out of the arch towards the light, horribly sure and horribly fast: number one hundred, reserved for All Hallows, like a table.
"It's the sea-serpent chapter, Potter," he said, without looking back. "Somebody has to put his back to it from the other side."
Harry hit him before he could take a second step. He caught Draco round the middle and they went down together on the frozen grass a yard short of the sill, hard, and Draco twisted and swore and fought him for it in earnest, all elbows and knees. For a moment Harry was the one nearer the light, and then Draco had both arms locked round his legs.
"You know what's waiting for you at the bottom of the hill, Potter." Draco's voice was savage. "Don't be stupid."
"Then let go."
"You let go."
In their ears, very small and very close, there were two voices, Ginny's and Hermione's: two soft gasps, both at once. Then nothing at all.
Neither of them let go. His own mother and father were standing at his back.
"Neither of you," said Imogen. She was looking at her father. "It needs somebody on the other side. To hold it. Somebody who walks through on their own, because they want to. That's the only exchange the hill has ever honoured." She held out her hand across the threshold. "Come and sit with me for a bit, Dad. Please. I've missed you so much."
Edmund Grieve looked at his daughter's outstretched hand.
He looked at it as though it were the only thing left in the world. Then he turned round, slowly, leaning on his stick, and looked at the summit of the Tor. At the dead standing silent in the frost, and the burning sky, and the two young men tangled together on the frozen grass in front of the arch, each with a fistful of the other.
"Mr Malfoy," said Edmund Grieve.
"Sir."
"I was wrong." The old man's voice was quite steady. "She wasn't a debt. She was never a debt. You told me so. Neither are you. I'm sorry I didn't listen." He looked at Harry. "I'm sorry, Harry. For all of it. I owe a great many people a great deal." He smiled, very tiredly. "I suppose I'll start here."
He turned back to the door.
He put down his walking stick. He laid it very carefully on the wet grass of the summit, and straightened up, and for a moment, just a moment, he looked much younger. Then he stepped forward onto the threshold, and took his daughter's hand.
"Hello, Immy," said Edmund Grieve.
"Hello, Dad," said Imogen, and took him through.
The door began to close at once.
Harry felt it. The crack in the world stopped widening, shuddered, and began to draw back together, a hair's breadth at a time. It was like watching a wound heal in fast motion. The blinding white light in the west arch narrowed. The hall under the hill grew smaller and further away. Far off down the long green dark, the King under the Hill gave a long, slow, furious cry that shook the Tor to its roots. Harry felt it come up through the stone into the soles of his feet. It sounded like a thousand years of being cheated.
The dead were moving.
They were walking past him now, through the east arch of the tower, across its hollow heart and out through the west, into the narrowing light. One by one. They didn't hurry. Colin with his camera. The old man in the flat cap. The young Healer. Gareth Pritchard, who looked back once at the Levels below, where his father was standing somewhere on the ice, and then walked on. Philippa Thistlewood, small and bent, on the arm of a young man in Auror's robes. Remus and Tonks, hand in hand. Tonks winked at him as she went past.
His mother and father came last.
They stopped in the arch beside him. The light was very narrow now, no wider than a doorway, and getting narrower.
"Go home, Harry," said Lily. She put her cold hand on his face again. "Someone's waiting for you."
"I know," said Harry.
And his father, standing beside her, looked past Harry once more at Draco, and grinned exactly the way Harry did when he was about to do something he shouldn't.
"Lucius Malfoy's son," said James Potter, shaking his head. "Padfoot is going to laugh himself sick."
Then they turned and walked into the light, and they didn't look back.
Only one thing was still lying on the stone sill of the west arch: the small black stone with the crack across it. The Elder Wand was still in Harry's hand, warm as a living thing.
He looked down at it.
He could keep it. He knew that. He had known it for ten years, since the morning after the Battle, when he'd stood on the shore of the Black Lake in the grey dawn and thought about it. He could keep it and nobody in the world would ever be able to take it from him. He could keep the Stone, and the Cloak, and he would be what the King under the Hill had called him: Master.
He let go of Draco and got up and went to the sill, and Draco came up off the grass after him and had a fistful of the back of his robes before he got there.
"Potter. Don't."
"I'm not going through," said Harry.
He picked up the Stone. He had given it away once already that autumn, into the wrong hand, and said thanks. Draco didn't let go of his robes, and Harry didn't ask him to.
Then he threw both of them, the Wand and the Stone, one after the other, as hard as he could, through the narrowing gap of light in the west arch of the tower, after his mother and his father and Imogen Grieve and her father and all the rest of them. Into the hall under the hill. Back where they'd come from.
He saw them go. The Wand turned over and over through the white light like a falling star. The Stone went after it, small and dark. And he thought he saw something at the very edge of the light, something tall and grey and patient that might have been a man in a travelling cloak, reach out one long hand and catch them both.
"Keep them," Harry said to it, quietly. "They're yours."
The light closed.
It went out all at once, the way a door closes when the wind catches it. There was a sound like a great bell struck once, very deep, that went through the hill and the water and the whole of the drowned country for miles. Then silence.
The west arch of St Michael's Tower was an ordinary stone arch, with ordinary wet grass beyond it and an ordinary night sky, going grey in the east with the first of the dawn. Harry stared at it. He had started up the hill at midnight, and he would have said he had been in the tower for ten minutes at the most. Down at the gates, they told him later, they had held the line for the best part of six hours.
Harry put his hand in his pocket and felt the Cloak there. His father's cloak. Soft and light and a little worn at the edges. On the ice it had felt heavy. It didn't now.
He left it where it was.
♫ Listen along
Draco sat down on the wet grass of the summit, very suddenly, as though his legs had simply stopped working.
Harry sat down beside him. Below them, all round the foot of the hill, the floodwater was going down. You could see it happening: the ice cracking and melting and draining away, the tops of the hedges rising up out of it, the green of the drowned fields coming back. On the Levels, tiny figures were moving about: the Order, the Harpies, and a long straggle of Muggles with lanterns, wandering home in a thoroughly Confunded state, singing. The glass was gone from the shore. At the foot of the path, a small figure with red hair was standing exactly where he had left her, watching the top of the hill and waiting for him to come down.
In his ear, very faintly, Harry heard Lee Jordan clear his throat. "Well," said Lee, to the whole of Britain. "I think that's full time." And then, for the second time that night, he ran out of words. This time he didn't seem to mind.
The sky was going pink in the east. There were no hounds in it.
"Eleven," said Draco eventually.
Harry looked at him.
"I only managed four," said Draco. He was looking out at the dawn. "I'll be honest, I'd assumed I'd do better."
"I only saw one."
"Yes, well," said Draco. "That's rather the point of Snigg." He smoothed down his sleeve. "Your father's very like you."
"Yeah," said Harry. "I've been told."
"He laughs the same. It's extremely unsettling." Draco pulled his knees up and wrapped his arms round them. "Volume three was better, you know. The real one. The lighthouse was much less frightening than this."
Harry started to laugh. He couldn't help it. He laughed until he was lying on his back on the wet grass of the summit of Glastonbury Tor, with the sun coming up and the tears running down into his ears, and after a moment Draco lay back beside him and laughed too, a little helplessly, at the pink sky, and neither of them could have said exactly why.
Hermione was still at the gates when they came down.
There was nothing left to hold them against. The second Hunt had broken on the ironwork hours ago, and Greg had finally let go of the left-hand gate and sat down in the slush, and Ron was asleep on his feet against the right-hand post. But Hermione's hands had stopped shaking when they were on the iron, and she wasn't ready to find out whether they would start again.
Blaise, who had opened a book at midnight on how long Potter would be up there, was paying out to Luna. Everyone else had said ten minutes. Luna had said, "Oh, about six hours, I should think."
Ginny was waiting at the bottom of the path. She watched Harry all the way down the last terrace, and then looked past him, up the hill, to where Draco was picking his way down behind, and he saw her count to two. Then she ran. She hit him so hard he went back a step, and he caught her, and she kissed him with both hands in his hair, there at the foot of the Tor, with the frost melting on both of them. When she let go at last she kept hold of his hand, and they went along the shore to the lane, and he made for the gap between the gates with his head down, hoping to get through them before anybody could make a fuss. He very nearly managed it.
"Took your time," said Ron, from the right-hand post, without opening his eyes.
He saw a blur of hair. Then he had an armful of Hermione, who had let go of the gates at last, and who was hugging him hard enough to give Hagrid a run for his money. She had her face pressed into his shoulder, and for once she let the hug do the talking. She had been doing this at the end of things since they were twelve, and Harry had long since given up pretending to mind.
Over her shoulder he saw Ginny grin at him, and behind Ginny he saw Draco come through the gates, slowly, as if he wasn't sure of his welcome.
Hermione let go of Harry, turned round, and hugged Draco in exactly the same way.
Draco went rigid. He stood with both arms held out from his sides, as though somebody had handed him something extremely valuable and hadn't told him where to put it down.
"Granger," he said, into her hair. "You're on me."
"I know," said Hermione, and didn't let go.
Harry looked at Ginny. Ginny looked at Harry. "Come on," she said. "Your other wife's busy." Then he took her hand, and they went on down the lane together and left the two of them to it.
When Hermione did let go, at last, Draco looked at her: at her face first, and then at her hands.
"It's been four weeks," said Hermione. "Since the Atrium. You said to ask you in a month."
"It hasn't been a month."
"It's been four weeks and a day."
"Then it hasn't been a month, Granger." He turned to stand beside her on the threshold, close enough that his sleeve brushed hers, and they stood there while the sun came up over the Levels. "Ask me when you've given those back."
They found Imogen Grieve's body three days later, in a small dry chamber deep in the heart of the hill, lying on a bed of moss with her scarf round her neck, and her father beside her. He was lying on his back with his hands folded on his chest and his eyes closed, as though he had lain down beside her for a little while and gone to sleep.
They were buried together at St Aldhelm's in the second week of November, in the same grave. There were a great many people at the funeral. Neville read something. Ginny read something. Minerva McGonagall stood at the graveside with her arm back in its tartan sling, and didn't read anything, and didn't need to.
When it was over, Neville stayed behind. He stood by the grave a long time. Then he took something out of his pocket and laid it on the fresh earth: a single fake Galleon, slightly tarnished, with a number on its rim.
It had been found in Imogen's hand.
The headstone had a new line cut into it by Christmas. Nobody was ever quite sure who had paid for the mason. Harry had his suspicions, and one of them was Hermione, and one of them was Draco, and he never asked either of them.
IMOGEN ROSE GRIEVE. 1981–1998. Those who stand for others do not fall alone.
EDMUND GRIEVE. He went to her.
The rest happened mostly in the newspapers.
The Restitution Act was repealed on the fourth of November by a vote of fifty-one to none. Aldric Fawley, who had no memory of ever having voted for the thing, made a forty-minute speech against it anyway, and Percy minuted every word. The Register of Outstanding Obligations was abolished the same afternoon. The Manor stayed with the Malfoys, and the flat in Holland Park with Draco. Mrs Mulciber got her son back, and took him home, and fed him until he complained.
The arch in the Death Chamber was its old size again by the morning after Samhain, and the new stones were gone; nobody could say where, and nobody in the Department of Mysteries asked. The governors of Hogwarts did ask what had become of the Elder Wand. McGonagall wrote back that it had been returned to its original owner, and that they were welcome to take the matter up with him.
The changelings were all restored within the week. Hermione set up the gates of Malfoy Manor in the sealed corridor under Level Nine, with Draco on the gate, because Kingsley had said he would come back for every one of the sleepers and he had meant it, and when the last of them had gone through she folded the gates up small again and, with some ceremony, put them straight back in her bag. Percy matched every pair against the Remembrance Society's roll, from the copy Theo had made in the chapel, and ticked each name off in green ink as it went through. Seamus took the Ministerial order off the corridor door himself, and had it framed.
The ones who hadn't woken were brought out of the hill the same week, from further in, and taken home. Philippa Thistlewood was buried beside her son. Ron went.
The Remembrance Society was dissolved. Its members were tried before the Wizengamot, one by one, over the winter. Kingsley Shacklebolt, with a gold hoop back in his left ear, addressed the Wizengamot personally before the first trial. He said that no one in this country would answer for their grief while he was Minister, any more than they would answer for their parents. Owen Pritchard and Jonah Crisp were given suspended sentences and a great deal of community service, most of which Kingsley arranged for them to spend at the Office of Remembrance. Margery Crisp was not charged with anything. Greg gave her a job at the bakery.
The Office of Remembrance got a new head.
"No," said Hermione, when Kingsley offered it to her in his office on the third of November.
"I haven't told you the terms yet."
"I'll read them, and then I'll say no. I'm not going to sit in that room with all those photographs and hand out cups of tea."
"I wasn't going to ask you to." Kingsley folded his big hands on his desk. "I was going to ask you to do whatever you thought it ought to be."
Hermione looked at him across the desk, and he looked back, and waited.
She read the terms. Then she took it. The first thing she did, on her first morning, was to take down every single photograph from every single wall of Edmund Grieve's office, very carefully, and pack them in boxes and send each one back to the family it had come from, with a letter. The last one she took down was Imogen's, and Imogen was back in it, laughing on her windswept grass. Hermione gave that one to Neville. The second thing she did was to go down to the Atrium with a stonemason and a list she had spent the whole of the previous night compiling. It had every name on it that the fountain had left out: everyone the war had killed who had never chosen a side, and every child who'd had one chosen for them.
Vincent Crabbe was about halfway down. She checked the spelling twice.
It took the mason three weeks.
♫ Listen along
She brought the gates back to the Manor on a crisp bright afternoon at the end of November.
Draco was waiting for her at the end of the drive. He'd been told she was coming. He was standing in the lane in his grey coat with his collar turned up, where the gates ought to have been, looking at the two bare stone posts as though they had let him down.
"You've been a month," he said.
"I've been busy. I've been taking down photographs." Hermione put her hand in her beaded bag, up to the elbow, and pulled. Out came the gates of Malfoy Manor, very small, and then with a word very large, and settled back on their old stone posts with a clank that set the peacocks off in the trees. The wrought-iron face in the ironwork twisted, looked round, recognised Draco, and settled. "There. As promised."
"Mother will be relieved. She's been having to open the drive with a Charm." Draco looked at the gates, and then at her. "They're a bit bent."
"They've been in a hill."
"That's no excuse."
Hermione laughed. He watched her do it, unsmiling. There was a small, strange expression on his face that was new to her, and she stopped laughing, and waited.
They were standing in the gateway. Exactly in it: on the threshold, between the two stone posts, with the lane on one side and the long drive on the other.
"Hermione," said Draco.
"Draco."
"I never thanked you. For Courtroom Ten." He said it quite plainly, and he didn't look away. "You stood up in front of the whole Wizengamot and told them I hadn't said Potter's name, in this house, when you had every reason in the world to let them lock me up. I'd spent seven years making your life miserable. You didn't owe me a word."
Hermione looked past him, once, up the long drive to the house. Then she looked back at him.
"It's taken you ten years," she said.
"I'm very slow," said Draco. "It's well documented."
"Well, it's been over a month," said Hermione, "and I've given them back." She looked up at him. "So. Was it worth it?"
He drew breath to answer, and the wind got there first. It turned his collar back, and there, pinned to the inside of his lapel where nobody would ever see it unless they were standing exactly where she was standing, was a small round badge. It said S.P.A.W.N. in her own handwriting. She had made thirty of them in bed at the Manor, with Parvati glaring at her, and she had been almost sure he had thrown his away.
She didn't need him to answer. She kissed him.
She hadn't planned it. She had thought about it more often than she would ever admit: in the Time Room, with a pendulum digging into her hip; in the lemon garden, in the small hours; on the library gallery, the night he had said goodnight instead. She simply went up on her toes on the threshold of Malfoy Manor, put one hand flat on his lapel, over the badge, and kissed him.
It was over almost before it had begun: a small, quick, closed-mouthed kiss, the kind you could pretend afterwards had been an accident. Draco stood through the whole of it in what she could only describe as complete stupefaction. She dropped back onto her heels with her face on fire.
"Sorry," she said. "I didn't mean —"
"Don't you dare," said Draco. His voice had gone rough. "Don't you dare apologise for that."
He looked at her mouth, and this time he didn't say goodnight. He took her face in both hands, very carefully, as though she might break, and kissed her.
It was nothing like the first. It was slow, and deep, and devastatingly thorough, the way he did anything he meant to get right. When she opened her mouth under his, he took his time about that too, and somewhere in the middle of it Hermione's knees forgot what they were for. She bit his lower lip. He made a sound, low in his throat, that she fully intended to think about later, at length, and stopped being careful.
He walked her backwards until her back met the gate, the iron cold through her coat, and she didn't care. She had both fists in his lapels. She pulled him in by them and kept pulling, until there wasn't an inch of air left between them anywhere and his hips were flush against hers, and she could feel exactly how much he had been holding back. His hand slid under her coat to the small of her back and spread there, warm and possessive, holding her against him. Her own hand found its way inside his coat, over his heart. In the Time Room it had gone quick and steady against her back. It was not steady now.
His other hand went up into her hair and closed there, not quite gently, and tipped her head back, and he looked at her. His eyes had gone almost black, the grey no more than a thin ring at the edge.
His mouth found the corner of her jaw, exactly where his thumb had rested in the lemon garden, and then the place just below it, where her pulse gave her away, and stayed there. Then he used his teeth. Hermione made a noise she would have denied under Veritaserum, and forgot Gamp's Law, all five of its Principal Exceptions and, briefly, her own middle name.
Her hair crackled round her head. Draco laughed against her throat. "Tired, Granger?"
"Shut up," said Hermione, and dragged his mouth back to hers by the lapels. He pressed her into the ironwork hard enough to rattle it on its hinges. Somewhere above her left ear, the stern iron face in the gate took one look at the pair of them and shut its eyes.
When at last they came apart, Draco rested his forehead against hers. He was breathing as though he had run the length of the drive. He had her face in his hands again, and his thumbs moved slowly along her cheekbones, learning them. One of them strayed to her lower lip. "Yes," he said, against her mouth.
In the trees along the drive, the peacocks went on screaming. Neither of them heard.
♫ Listen along
The party at Grimmauld Place was in the first week of December, and everybody came.
It was Ginny's idea. She said that if they didn't have a party, Molly would have one at the Burrow, and there'd be relatives in the airing cupboard and nowhere to sit. Harry had long ago learned not to argue with anything Ginny said with that particular expression.
So everybody came. They filled the kitchen and the hall and the drawing room and spilled up the stairs, with the yellow walls warm in the firelight and snow falling outside the windows. The Weasleys came, all of them. The Harpies came, and brought Gwenog Jones, who got into an argument with McGonagall about Transfiguration that went on for three hours and ended with both of them agreeing that everyone else was an idiot. Four separate Harpies asked Harry, over the course of the evening, whether it was true about the Hungarian Horntail tattooed across his chest. Harry had never had a tattoo in his life. When he looked round for an explanation, Ginny was suddenly very interested in the mince pies. He told the fourth one it was a Welsh Green.
Charlie came without a dragon, to Narcissa's visible relief. Percy came, with Audrey, and announced to the whole kitchen that he had, the previous Tuesday, taken a day's leave. The Ministry had very nearly collapsed. He was hoping to do it again in February.
Later, George took him out into the hall for a while, and when they came back Percy had his spectacles in his hand and was laughing.
Teddy Lupin came with his grandmother, and spent most of the evening telling anybody who would listen that he had his own chair at the Burrow now, and his own mug, and that George had painted his name on the back of the chair in gold, just underneath the other one.
Parvati announced over the pudding that she was leaving the spell-damage ward after Christmas and transferring to maternity. She'd had quite enough of curses for one year, she said, and would like, for a change, to be there at the beginning of things. She also owned up, over the mince pies, to what she had seen in her tea leaves at that first meeting in September, before she tipped them into the slop bowl: a gate, and a kiss in it. She had assumed at the time that the leaves were drunk.
"In my experience," said McGonagall, "they usually are."
Kreacher had been cooking for a week. He had produced, from somewhere in the depths of the house, the full Black family dinner service, and he served dinner on it to everybody, even Ron. But he served Draco first. He served Draco on a separate, smaller, even older plate with the Black crest in silver leaf, which had apparently belonged to Phineas Nigellus himself, and nobody in the kitchen felt able to object. Molly Weasley took one look at what was on it, told him he was far too thin, and added three roast potatoes without asking.
"Four, I think," said Narcissa, without looking up.
Molly added a fourth.
"This," said Draco, holding the plate up to the light, "is the finest thing that has ever happened to me."
"You said that about the teacup," said Harry.
"I've been having a very good year, Potter."
There was also a seed cake. Kreacher had been perfecting it since October, without a recipe, and he set it down in front of Ron for inspection.
"Just how Reginald liked it," said Ron, with his mouth full.
Ron found Hermione by the dresser a little later, and stood beside her for a while with his hands in his pockets, watching Draco and Neville by the fire, deep in a disagreement about dittany that had been going on since dinner. Neville said something that made Draco laugh out loud.
"Malfoy, though," he said at last.
"Yes," said Hermione.
"If he ever —"
"I know, Ron."
"I'd write to Mandragora," said Ron darkly. "I'd write the longest letter of my life. With diagrams."
"Labelled, I hope," said Hermione, and leaned her head on his shoulder.
Ron went back to the seed cake. A minute later somebody put a glass in her hand.
It was cloudy, with a sprig of mint floating on the top. Draco was standing beside her, looking very hard at the dresser.
Hermione tasted it. It was lemonade: real lemonade, sharp and cold and not quite sweet enough, made by somebody who had plainly read a great deal about lemonade before attempting it. It was her favourite drink in the world. It had been since she was six, when her mother, who was a dentist then and disapproved of sugar on principle, made it anyway on Saturday mornings in a glass jug with a chipped lip. She'd had it with Sunday lunch all through Hogwarts, and at every Ministry reception since she had quietly gone looking for whatever had lemon in it.
"Where did you get the lemons?" she said.
"The Manor," said Draco, to the dresser. "Mother's lemons."
Next to him, Harry said, "You said your mother hated lemons."
Draco went on studying the dresser, with the same tremendous concentration he had once given to a lemon tree.
Hermione finished the glass.
"It's very nice lemonade," she said.
Ron and Pansy were insufferable.
Everybody said so. George said so, at length, in a speech. Blaise said so, repeatedly, with a glass in his hand. Ginny said so to Harry in the pantry, in a heartfelt whisper, and added that if they hadn't sorted themselves out by New Year she was going to lock them in it. They weren't, as far as anyone could tell, doing anything at all. They had simply taken up a position on opposite sides of the kitchen table and been arguing across it without pause since seven o'clock, about the Chudley Cannons, and the correct way to boil a quail's egg, and whether a bird call that had got half of Dumbledore's Army out of the Ministry of Magic could be considered a success when nobody in the Atrium had seen the film it came from.
"It's a classic," said Ron. "Dean's seen it."
"Dean's being kind. It was a goose in pain, Weasley."
"It worked, didn't it?"
"It worked because everybody in the Atrium assumed a goose had got loose from somewhere and was being murdered," said Pansy.
"Sounded like an Augurey with its foot caught in a door," said Seamus. "Absolutely hideous, so it was."
On the wall by the dresser, where the lists were still Spellotaped, the tick beside Ron's name in column four had been going on and off all evening like a fairy light.
At about nine o'clock, George came in from the hall with the latest Witch Weekly in his hand, and a look on his face that Harry had not seen since roughly 1996.
"Ronnie," said George. "You'll want to see this. Mandragora's written about the battle."
Ron snatched the magazine out of his hand. He opened it at the back pages, and began to read, and as he read his ears went slowly red.
"A certain red-haired strategist," he read aloud, "who, rumour has it, planned the entire operation in a hairnet, who once got through fourteen cheese and pickle sandwiches and a Bath bun of unknown age and provenance in a single hedge, and who has in the past been described in this column as a public health concern, should now, in fairness, be described instead as —" He stopped.
"As what?" said George hopefully.
Ron was reading the line again, to himself. Then he read it a third time. And then, very slowly, he looked up from the magazine and across the kitchen table, at Pansy Parkinson.
She was sitting quite still, with a quail's egg halfway to her mouth, and she had gone pink.
"Nobody," said Ron, "knew about the Bath bun."
Pansy put the quail's egg down.
"I never told anyone," said Ron. He was staring at her. "There were two people in that hedge. Me, and —" His mouth fell open. "It's you."
"I'm well connected," said Pansy.
"It's you. You're Mandragora. You wrote the column about my — you called me a — I wrote you four letters —"
"They were very good letters," said Pansy. "I've kept all of them."
Ron stared at her across the table in total, stunned, helpless outrage. Then his face changed, by degrees, as he began to remember exactly what he had put in those four letters.
"I've got a scrapbook," said Ron Weasley, "of you."
Ginny inhaled her ginger tea. And Pansy Parkinson, who had been a Death Eater's daughter and the most hated girl in wizarding Britain and the most feared columnist in its history, put both hands over her face, and laughed until she cried. For the rest of the evening she and Ron took great care not to be in the same room, and finished the argument about the Chudley Cannons through Audrey.
Theo Nott arrived late, in a new coat.
It was dark green velvet, and it was even more magnificent than the old one, and Luna had made it. She came in beside him with snow in her hair and a necklace of what appeared to be dried Christmas pudding, and told everybody that she had been teaching herself to sew with the help of a very patient family of Puffskeins.
"Darlings," Theo told the kitchen at large, "it's the most beautiful thing I have ever owned. I'm going to be buried in it. Nobody is to argue."
Kreacher, on his way past with a teapot, stopped, looked the coat up and down, and bowed to it.
Later, in the drawing room, Harry heard Luna say to him, very quietly, by the fire:
"I've finished her."
Theo went still.
"On my ceiling," said Luna. "At home. She's sitting at a piano, not keeping time. And there are peonies round her, lots of them, and nobody's shouting about them at all. And her name's written underneath in the tree alphabet, the way she taught you." She looked up at him. "You should come and see. Whenever you like. She's next to my mother."
Theo, for once, had no answer ready. He took Luna's hand, and held it, and looked at the fire. After a while, Harry saw him put his other hand briefly over his eyes.
He didn't hear what Theo said after that. He didn't think it was meant for him.
Greg had brought a cake the size of a small table, and let Hector Mulciber carry one end of it in from the street. It was decorated, in green and silver and red and gold icing, with a sculpture of the Fountain of Remembrance. Greg put it down on the kitchen table, said, "Lemon drizzle," and went to sit on his bench in the corner, and Kreacher brought him a cup of tea without being asked, and he sat there all evening, very quietly, watching everyone eat it, enormously content.
Dean spent most of the evening on the bottom stair with a sketchbook on his knee. At last he came into the kitchen and slid a napkin across the table to Harry. It was the one he'd been drawing on at that same table in September, with Percy and his boxes, and Luna in her crown, and Ron mid-croissant, and Kreacher scowling at the toast. The far end of it wasn't blank any more. Theo was there in his velvet waistcoat, three buttons undone, with one hand raised, mid-sentence. Blaise had a glass. Pansy had a poker. Greg had a cake. And at the head of them all stood Draco, pointing at a chalkboard.
"Took me a while," said Dean.
Blaise announced, at eleven, that his mother's engagement to Aldric Fawley was back on. The wedding was set for Twelfth Night. He had reopened the book.
"What've you got?" said Ron.
"Never," said Blaise, with deep gloom. "I've put absolutely everything I own on never. He's a hundred and six, and I genuinely believe he's going to outlive the lot of us out of pure spite."
"Ginny bet on never," said Harry, "once."
"And how's that going?" said Blaise.
Ginny, across the room, raised her glass to him and smiled.
Ginny caught Ron and Hermione on the landing a little before midnight, with Harry a step behind her.
She stopped them at the top of the stairs, by the door of the bedroom with the four Muggle girls in bikinis that Sirius had stuck to the wall at sixteen. She had the particular look on her face that Harry had been seeing on it since she was eleven, and hadn't noticed until he was sixteen.
"I'm not going to be playing much Quidditch next season," said Ginny, with a hand on her stomach.
Hermione's hand went to her mouth. Ron looked at his sister, and then at Harry, and then at his sister again.
"Gwenog'll kill you," he said.
"Gwenog," said Ginny, "has already asked if she can be godmother. I told her the job was taken." She looked at Harry.
Harry found that his voice wasn't working as well as it should. He'd had a godfather once, for a little while; and a godfather himself, for a bit longer. He knew exactly what he was asking. "We want it to be you," he said. "Both of you. If you'll have it."
Hermione said yes before he'd finished, and burst into tears, and said it again into Ginny's hair. Ron didn't say anything at all for a moment. Then he said, rather loudly, that in that case Ginny had better be keeping off brooms, and stopped, and Harry watched him remember who had said it first.
Ron sat down on the top stair, quite suddenly. After a while, Harry sat down next to him.
"Yeah," said Ron eventually, to his knees. "Yeah. All right."
Harry gave Draco the book at midnight.
He'd been carrying it in his pocket all evening. Draco had lent it to him a fortnight ago, grudgingly, handing it across the table at the Leaky Cauldron as though he were parting with a kidney. Harry had read it in one sitting, in bed, with Ginny asleep beside him. He had laughed out loud four times, and had to put it down twice at the part with the sea-serpent.
He found Draco on the back step, in the snow, where Hermione had once sat turning her badge over and over in the dark. He sat down beside him and held it out.
It was small and slim and very old, with a cracked spine and a cover that had once been bright blue. On the front, in faded gold letters, it said Harry Potter and the Vampire Pirates of the Outer Hebrides. Volume III. There was a picture of a small boy on a winged horse, waving a sword at a lighthouse, and in the corner a goblin holding up a lantern, rubbed almost bare by a small thumb.
Draco took it. He turned it over in his hands, carefully, the way you handle something you've had since you were eight.
"You read it."
"Twice."
"And?"
"Snigg's the best character," said Harry.
Draco almost smiled. Then he opened the cover. And on the first page, the flyleaf, in Harry's untidy handwriting, in ordinary blue ink, it said:
To Draco —
The real ones were worse.
Glad you finally came along.
— H.
Draco read it twice.
Then he closed the book, very gently, and put it inside his coat, against his chest. Then he looked out at the snow falling into Grimmauld Place's small, dark, overgrown garden.
"You've vandalised it," he said, after a while.
"What?"
"I lent you a first edition, Potter. A first edition. And you've written in it." Draco turned and looked at him, profoundly betrayed. "In biro."
"I've added value," said Harry. "Auction that, and you could put your great-grandchildren through school on it."
"I'm old money, Potter," said Draco. "We don't auction things to pay school fees. We inherit them, and then we complain about them."
"You're complaining now."
"Exactly," said Draco.
He didn't take his hand off his coat.
They came down to the Atrium together on the twelfth of December, from the Minister's office, with Draco's probation signed off in triplicate by a Minister who was wearing, although his office was perfectly warm, a navy-blue hand-knitted scarf.
It was crowded, the way it always was in the mornings: a green roar of fireplaces and a stream of witches and wizards hurrying to the lifts, memos circling overhead, the gilded ceiling with a new patch in it the size of a cartwheel that nobody had quite managed to match to the rest. Harry walked through it as he'd walked through it every morning for years, and Draco walked beside him.
They came to the Fountain of Remembrance.
It had been standing on its new plinth since the end of November. The water still ran down the tall black slab in an unbroken sheet, day and night, so that the names always looked wet. But there were more of them now. A great many more. They ran down both sides of the stone and round the back and onto a second slab, new and dark and shining, set beside the first.
Every morning that Harry passed it, he found a name. He did it now, out of habit. His eyes went down the stone the way they always did, to the place a third of the way down on the left where Fred Weasley gleamed wet in the Atrium lights.
And beside him, Draco stopped walking.
Harry turned. Draco was standing at the edge of the basin with his hands in the pockets of his coat, looking straight at the fountain. His eyes were moving slowly down the new slab, name by name, the way you'd look for something you'd been told was there and still didn't quite believe.
They stopped, about halfway down.
Vincent Crabbe.
In five years, Harry had never once seen Draco so much as glance at the fountain.
He looked at it now, for a long time.
After a while, he turned away, and they walked on together through the crowd towards the lifts.
"So," said Harry. "Robards is going to need something else to read with his digestive."
"I was thinking of changing careers, actually," said Draco.
Harry looked over at him. "Oh?"
"Publishing." Draco straightened his cuffs. "I've already got a title for my first novel. Draco Malfoy and the Deathly Hallows." He considered it. "Has a nice ring to it, don't you think?"
"You weren't even there for the Deathly Hallows."
"I was master of the Elder Wand for the best part of a year, Potter. I was extremely there."
"You didn't know."
"Which is what makes it literary."
Harry considered this.
"And who am I," he said, "in this book?"
"Comic relief," said Draco. "You get Portkeyed to Bruges in chapter one."
Harry laughed. He laughed properly, the way he had on the summit of the Tor, standing in the middle of the Atrium of the Ministry of Magic with a hundred people streaming round them on every side. And before he'd quite decided to, he held out his hand.
Draco looked down at it.
He looked at it the way he'd looked at it in a lift in September: as though it were a Blast-Ended Skrewt that had offered to carry his shopping.
Then he took it.
"Don't get sentimental," said Draco Malfoy. "You're still only in the acknowledgements."
Harry looked down at their two hands. He thought of a train, a long time ago, and a pale, pointed boy holding out his hand in a compartment doorway, and of what Harry had done with it. And then, for no reason he could have explained, he thought of the same boy a few months later, creeping down to Hagrid's hut in the dark after the three of them, on the night of the dragon.
"Hang on," said Harry slowly. "First year. Hagrid's hut. Norberta. You followed us down there because you wanted to be in it, didn't you? You wanted to come on the adventure."
Draco's face went perfectly smooth and still, like a lake freezing over. The tips of his ears went pink.
Harry felt a slow, enormous grin spread across his face. He had just been handed a present, and he intended to keep it for the rest of his life.
"Oh, Malfoy," he said. "I really didn't know you felt that way."
fin.