Witch Weekly Mandragora
Ron Weasley's approach to disagreement can best be described as a Blast-Ended Skrewt in a china shop: loud, doomed, and oddly endearing to anyone standing at a safe distance.
March 2004
Witch Weekly Mandragora
Ron Weasley's approach to disagreement can best be described as a Blast-Ended Skrewt in a china shop: loud, doomed, and oddly endearing to anyone standing at a safe distance.
March 2004
♫ Listen along
He called her Pansy. He called her Pansy on the back of the thestral, with the wind tearing at her hair and the castle lights swinging up out of the dark to meet them. He called her Pansy on the lawn by the lake, when he lifted her down with one hand and said, "Careful, Pansy, it's a long way down," with a courtesy nobody had ever once accused Ron Weasley of. He called her Pansy three hours later, at the top of the great staircase at Malfoy Manor, outside the door of the room they'd given him. "Night, Pansy." And he smiled, and went in, and shut the door, and left her standing on the landing with her own name going round and round in her head.
She had called him Weasley for seventeen years because he had called her Parkinson for just as long, and he had called her Parkinson because she had once, at the age of eleven, told the entire Slytherin table that everything Ron Weasley owned had been his brothers' first, including his face. It was a system. It had survived their childhood, and a war, and ten years of crossing the road whenever they saw each other coming. It was, if she was honest, one of the more reliable things in her life, and he had walked straight through it as if it wasn't there.
She went to bed. She lay in the dark, and it went round and round.
Because it wasn't only the name. If it had only been the name, she could have filed it under Weasley, Ronald, idiocies of and gone to sleep.
Every time she shut her eyes she was back in the spiders' valley, watching Ron Weasley, who was terrified of spiders — she'd seen him shaking — stand in the middle of a nest of them with his teeth gritted, and then throw himself at one the size of a carthorse because it had been about to drop on her. On her. She had hauled him out of the web by his collar afterwards. Don't say anything. Please. So she hadn't. And she had kept hold of his collar a second longer than there was any call for, and she had spent every minute since not thinking about that second.
It wasn't even the first time she'd hung on to him. In the Atrium, with one fire left burning and the entire Ministry coming at them across the floor, he had said Then breathe in, and grabbed her round the waist, and jumped. They had come out at Grimmauld Place in a heap on the kitchen flagstones with their arms still round each other, and stayed like that until they both noticed at exactly the same moment. Then they had let go so fast that she'd cracked her elbow on the table leg, and she had spent the rest of the evening on the far side of the kitchen, avoiding eye contact.
Her shoulder still remembered the hedge: hours on end jammed against his, with her earring caught in his jumper, and that ridiculous crup crawling across the grass on its belly to lick his hand. She had given him Cassia's poem in that hedge, and she still didn't know why. He had laughed at it twice, which was correct, and then he had read it again and not laughed at all, and folded it up along the old creases and handed it back without a word. And some time after midnight she had fallen asleep on his shoulder. Pansy Parkinson did not fall asleep on people. She had woken with her cheek on Ron Weasley's jumper, and he had never mentioned it, then or since.
It was in the hedge, too, that he'd sworn, if he ever found out who Mandragora was, to write her another letter, with better diagrams. Then a week later, at Mrs Zabini's table, with George's tea in him and both hands clamped over his mouth, he had told a room full of people that he kept a scrapbook. Every column since 2001. Even the ones about him. He thought Mandragora was the funniest person in Britain. He had no idea. He had absolutely no idea, and she'd had to put her glass down, because her hand wasn't steady enough to hold it.
But it was the clearing she kept coming back to. You don't have to see it, Parkinson. You have to sit on it. His hands on her waist, heaving her up onto a horse she couldn't see. Parkinson. Then he'd gone back into the dark, into a forest full of white hounds, and come running out of it again, and ten minutes later, with his arm round her and the lake going by underneath, she was Pansy.
Something had happened to him in between. She would have given a great deal to know what.
Don't say anything. Please. Then breathe in. You don't have to see it, Parkinson. Course I did, Pansy. Careful, Pansy. Night, Pansy. Round and round, every word of it, until her heart was hammering and she could have screamed.
In the end she sat up and did what she had always done with a thing she couldn't bear. She took a quill and a sheet of writing paper from the desk by the window, and she tried to make it funny.
Which red-headed war hero — and Mandragora is aware that this hardly narrows it down — has lately taken to calling a certain disgraced former Slytherin by her first name? Three times in a single evening, dear readers, and once on a thestral. Your correspondent scarcely knows where to
She crossed it out.
Which noted arachnophobe was seen this week flinging himself at an acromantula on behalf of a lady who had not asked him to, and who would like it known that she had the situation entirely
She crossed that out too. The situation had had her, if anything. She had never even seen it coming.
Which member of the Weasley family keeps a scrapbook of
She stopped. Then she crossed it out so hard that the nib went through the paper.
It always worked. For seven years there had been nothing so awful, or so humiliating, or so frightening, that Mandragora couldn't take it by the scruff of the neck and make it sit up and be funny, and once a thing was funny it couldn't touch you. It was the only trick she had. And here she was, sitting up in a guest bed at Malfoy Manor with a quill in her fist, and she couldn't find the joke. She couldn't even find the end of the sentence.
Course I did, Pansy.
She fed the page to the fire, which was where Mandragora's drafts always went in the end, and lay down again. It was nothing. People said strange things when they'd nearly died. People said strange things when they'd just watched their brother talk to the ghost of their other brother in a giant's cave. That was all it was.
She told the ceiling so several times. Mandragora would have had a field day.
She didn't sleep.
Ginny and George left for the Burrow in the morning.
"Mum's got to hear it from one of us," said George. He stood in the entrance hall with his bag over his shoulder, and his face was pale and tired and, for the first time in days, almost peaceful. "About the chair. Fred said she'd know who to give it to. I'd like to see her face when she does."
"She'll have seen the Prophet," said Ginny. "She'll have seen all our faces on page two. She'll be going spare." She hugged Harry hard. "One day. Maybe two. I'll get her calmed down, and I'll get Dad to stop writing letters to the Minister, and I'll come straight back." She held him at arm's length and looked him in the eye. "Keep the Stone in your pocket. Don't take it out. Don't look at it."
"I won't."
"Harry."
"I won't, Gin."
She looked at him a moment longer, and then kissed him. "And make it up with Malfoy," she said. "I'm not coming back to the pair of you sulking in separate wings." Then she turned and hugged Ron too, briskly, the way she always did. Halfway through it she went quite still and frowned.
"Look after him," she said into Ron's shoulder.
"Course," said Ron.
He let go of his sister, turned round, and saw Pansy on the stairs. "Morning, Pansy," he said, through a mouthful of toast, and went back in to his breakfast.
Nobody else noticed. Pansy stood on the stairs with her hand on the banister and counted. That was four. Four wasn't a slip. Four was a habit. Then she went down the rest of the stairs and in to breakfast, and took the chair with the best view of him.
♫ Listen along
Ron ate his breakfast the way he always ate his breakfast, as though somebody might be coming to take it off him.
Pansy had been watching him since she sat down. He had four rashers of bacon and two fried eggs and most of the toast rack, and he argued with Harry about the Chudley Cannons all the way through it, and he still had a hand free to pass Hermione the milk before she'd asked for it.
She had spent two days in a hedge with Ron Weasley. She had watched him eat his cheese and pickle sandwiches, all of her quails' eggs, a packet of Chocolate Frogs, half a pork pie, and a squashed Bath bun he'd found in his coat pocket, of unknown age and provenance. Ron Weasley ate. It was, as far as she had been able to tell, his principal response to every emotion he possessed.
It was all exactly right. That was what she couldn't stop looking at.
She folded her napkin and laid it beside her plate.
"You still owe me half a sandwich, Weasley," said Pansy, into a lull in the conversation. "From the hedge. You gave me the small bit."
Draco, who was halfway through spreading marmalade on a crumpet with immense care, looked up with interest and set his knife down.
Ron looked at her, and the tips of his ears went pink.
"You're right," he said, and grinned at her. "Sorry, Pansy. I'll do you a whole one. Cheese and pickle."
Pansy stared at him.
Ron took the last slice of toast out of the rack for the road, and said he was going out to annoy the peacocks.
They heard his footsteps cross the great hall, and the front door open and close.
"He said I was right," said Pansy.
"Ron Weasley," said Pansy, "has never once in his entire life said that I was right. About anything. I once told him the sky was blue and he argued with me for twenty minutes about the precise shade." She turned to Harry. "And he gave me the bigger bit, Potter. I was there."
"He's had a bad few days," said Harry.
"He doesn't remember it."
"He saw George talk to Fred."
"Ron Weasley has never in his life forgotten the size of a sandwich, Potter."
Harry looked at her. Something in his face had gone guarded. She knew that look. She'd been getting it from people for ten years.
"Pansy," said Hermione carefully. "He faced his worst fear in that spider's nest. For you." She hesitated. "It's just shock."
Pansy looked at Hermione, and then at Harry, and saw that neither of them was going to hear it. She put her cup down in its saucer without a sound.
Across the table, Granger wasn't looking at Weasley's empty chair. She was looking at Theo. He was eating a crumpet, still in the coat he'd worn home from the Forest.
"It's probably shock," said Hermione, as they went down the steps.
"Probably," said Harry.
They both walked faster.
Harry had found time to wonder about the clearing after all: Ron coming out of the trees at a flat run, straight through the circling hounds, and the hounds stepping aside to let him by. But they had stopped attacking anyone by then. They'd been waiting.
They found Ron on the lawn, sitting on the edge of the stone fountain among the peacocks.
The peacocks took a dim view of it. There were half a dozen of them standing in a loose ring round the fountain at a careful distance, their white tails trailing on the grass, watching him. He seemed entirely unaware of them. He was sitting up straight, with his knees together and his hands in his lap, looking out across the lawns towards the woods.
"All right?" said Harry.
"All right." Ron looked round and smiled. "Parkinson set you two on me?"
"Sort of."
"She's been on at me since the Forest." Ron shook his head ruefully. "I don't know what I did."
"You called her Pansy," said Hermione.
"It's her name."
"You've never used it in your life."
Ron looked down at his hands. "She nearly got eaten by a spider," he said. "Seemed a bit rich, after that, to go on calling her Parkinson."
Harry caught Hermione's eye.
"Don't," said Ron.
"We didn't say anything," said Hermione.
"You were going to."
Harry sat down on the edge of the fountain beside him. The nearest peacock took a step back.
"They don't like you much," said Harry.
"They don't like anybody. They're peacocks." Ron grinned. "Malfoy says one of them bit his dad once. Took a chunk right out of his ankle. Best thing I've heard all year."
That sounded right. It sounded exactly like the kind of thing Draco would say. It was exactly how Ron would have told it, too. Harry sat there in the thin autumn sunshine and looked sideways at his best friend: at the long nose and the freckles and the red hair falling in his eyes, at the jumper Mrs Weasley had knitted him three Christmases ago with the moth hole in the left elbow. He had known that face since he was eleven years old. He'd have known it anywhere.
"Ron," he said. "What did we fly to school in? Second year. When the barrier closed."
Ron looked at him. Then he laughed.
"Dad's car," he said. "The Ford Anglia. We crashed it into the Whomping Willow and it went feral in the Forest. Are you testing me, Harry?"
"Yes," said Harry.
The laugh went out of Ron's face.
"The tent," said Harry. He didn't let himself look at Hermione. "The night you walked out. What did you say to me?"
Behind them a peacock started to scream, and thought better of it. Ron's eyes went to Hermione, and then away, down to the grass between his feet, and when he spoke his voice had dropped right down.
"I'm not doing that one, Harry."
"Ron —"
"Not that one. Ask me anything else you like." He said it to the grass. "Not that."
It was the one thing the three of them had left alone for ten years. Harry had just dragged it out into the sunshine by a fountain, in front of Hermione, because Pansy Parkinson didn't like the way Ron said her name.
"Sorry," said Harry. "Sorry. It's just — Pansy —"
"Yeah, I know." Ron looked up, and grinned, and clapped him on the shoulder, and it was nearly the old grin. "Don't worry about it. I'd have done the same."
"Then you won't mind this," said Hermione, and took a horseshoe out of her bag.
It was black with age and worn thin at the heels, and heavier than it looked. She had prised it off a door in the old stables on their way over.
Ron looked at it, and for a second his hands stayed where they were, folded in his lap. Then he laughed, and held out the back of his hand. "Go on, then."
She pressed it flat against his knuckles and held it there. Harry counted. He got to five. A peacock came over to see what was going on, and went away again.
Nothing happened. The horseshoe sat on the back of Ron's hand like any old lump of metal.
"Satisfied?" said Ron.
"Yes," said Hermione. She put the horseshoe back in her bag. "Sorry."
"Don't be." He got up, and the peacocks shuffled back to let him past. At the edge of the lawn he turned round and walked backwards for a few steps, hands in pockets. "Do let Parkinson know, won't you?" he said, in a fair imitation of Narcissa, and Harry laughed in spite of himself.
Hermione already had the pencil out of her hair.
"He hasn't got the look, Harry," she said. "Fawley had it. So did the three Aurors by the door."
Harry knew the look she meant: flat and faraway, as though they were listening to something a very long way off. Whatever else was wrong with Ron, he had been right there with them the whole time.
"Harry, I've been going over the clearing all night," she said. "I can put everybody on a thestral but Theo."
"Everybody knows that," said Pansy, when Harry told her.
She was in the library, sitting at one of the long reading tables with a pile of books in front of her that she clearly hadn't been reading. Theo had draped himself along the window seat behind her with his coat on and a cushion over his face.
"Everybody knows about the car, Potter. It was in the Prophet. It was in the Prophet for about a month. My mother had it framed and hung it over my bed to show me what happened to children who were brought up badly." She stood up. "Ask him something only he knows. Ask him something that was never in the papers."
"I did," said Harry.
"And?"
"He wouldn't answer it." Harry heard how that sounded. "It's the one thing he won't talk about. If he'd rattled it off, I'd have known it wasn't him."
"How very convenient," said Pansy.
Hermione sat down opposite her and dealt out a row of index cards. "Theo," she said. "Which thestral were you on?"
From under the cushion, Theo said, "A black one, darling. With wings."
"Would you take that cushion off your face?"
"No."
"Nobody saw you get on."
"Nobody sees anybody get on a thestral. It's rather their charm."
"You came up from the lake on your own, long after everybody else."
"I took the scenic route."
"I asked Luna," said Hermione. "She said you'd asked her not to say."
Theo lifted the cushion at that, and contemplated the ceiling.
"Did she," he said. "What a brick that girl is." He put the cushion back.
Hermione took the horseshoe out of her bag, went round the table, and laid it on the back of the long, ink-stained hand trailing off the edge of the window seat.
Nothing happened. After a moment the hand turned itself over and lay there, palm up, as if it were waiting for a tip.
"Darling," said the cushion, "if you'd wanted to hold my hand, you had only to ask."
"Oh, for heaven's sake," said Pansy. "It isn't Theo."
"Then what's he hiding?" said Harry.
"I've known Theo since the Sorting."
"I've known Ron since the train."
Under the cushion, Theo had gone quiet.
"I don't like that he agrees with me," said Pansy. "I don't like that he doesn't remember the hedge. I don't like that he calls me Pansy —"
"Hermione put iron on him this morning," said Harry. "Nothing happened. Maybe he just likes you, Parkinson."
It came out harder than Harry had meant. He watched Pansy's face close over, like water after a stone had gone into it.
"Right," she said quietly. "Of course. My mistake."
She sat back down. She picked up the nearest book and opened it and looked at it, and didn't turn the page.
Hermione was looking at Harry. So was Theo, over the top of his spectacles. He had taken the cushion off his face specially, which Harry found a great deal worse.
Harry went out of the library. He was halfway down the corridor before he realised that he was angry, and another ten yards before he realised that he wasn't angry with Pansy.
Harry found Draco in the glasshouse that night.
He hadn't been looking for him necessarily. He'd walked round the dark house for an hour with the Stone in his pocket, feeling the weight of it against his leg at every step, and it had been easier to keep walking than to lie still and think about the library. His feet had brought him eventually to the tall white door at the end of the long corridor, and it had been standing a little open, with a faint warm green light coming out.
Draco was sitting on the edge of the dittany bed at the far end of the room, where the fireplace had been, with his elbows on his knees. Nothing moved among the lemon trees. Above them, through the glass roof, the stars were out.
He looked up when Harry came in, and went back to studying his hands. Harry took that as an invitation. He came and sat down on the low brick edge of the bed, a careful few feet away.
"I asked her," said Draco eventually. "Mother. About my aunt. About Imogen."
Harry waited.
"She knew. Bellatrix told her that night. In the Forest. While they were all standing about waiting for you to come and die." He said it quite flatly. "She said the girl had been idiotically brave. She said it had been tedious, how long it took."
Harry let it sit between them. Anything he could say would only have made it smaller.
"Mother never told me. She said I'd already seen enough of what our family does. I keep thinking about it. The fourth floor. I was on the seventh, in the Room, with Vince and Greg, trying to get to you. If I'd gone down instead of up —"
"You'd have died," said Harry.
"Imogen did," said Draco.
A lemon tree stirred beside them in a breeze that came from nowhere.
"You didn't turn it," said Draco. "The Stone. In the cave."
"No."
"Why not?" said Draco.
Harry thought about the Forest, ten years ago, and the four people who had walked beside him through the trees.
"Because I've done it once," he said. "It doesn't bring anybody back. It only means you have to say goodbye to them twice."
Draco looked at him steadily. Then he nodded.
The last of whatever had been standing between them since the front steps, stiff and prickly, went quietly away, and neither of them missed it.
Harry looked round the glasshouse, at the dark glossy leaves and the pale fruit hanging in the starlight.
"Your mother grows lemons," he said.
"Mother hates lemons," said Draco. "She says they're a fruit for people with no self-control."
The question was on the tip of Harry's tongue. Then he looked at the long bed of dittany at their feet, grey-green and woolly-leaved and carefully tended, and at the torn-up floor, and he thought about a night in the last spring of the war, and about what Hermione had lain on in this room.
He didn't ask. Draco didn't tell him.
They sat there together among the lemon trees until the sky began to go grey over the glass.
Blaise arrived at six on Thursday, by Floo, in a very beautiful camel-coloured overcoat and a very bad mood.
"Mother," he announced to the room at large, shaking soot off his sleeves, "is hosting a dinner. For the new Minister's policy advisers. At the house. Tonight." He sank onto a sofa. "She says it's intelligence-gathering. I say it's seven courses of watching changelings pretend to enjoy lobster. I told her I had a prior engagement with a gang of wanted fugitives, and she said that was the first sensible thing I'd said all year." He looked round. "What have I missed?"
"Oh, not much," said Theo. "Greg's baked us a cottage loaf the size of a Bludger. And Pansy's fallen out with Weasley over half a sandwich."
"Only half?" said Blaise. "Then there's hope for them yet."
"He had four slices of it," said Goyle, from the corner, with quiet pride.
Blaise shrugged off his own coat and looked Theo up and down. "And why are you still wearing yours?"
"Granger thinks I'm a changeling," said Theo. "One likes to make an effort."
The spider came out from under the hearthrug while Blaise was still deciding whether to laugh. It was an ordinary house spider, the kind that turned up in every house in England during autumn: brown, long-legged and about as big as a jam-jar lid. It ran out into the middle of the rug and stopped there, right in front of Ron.
Ron had been sprawled on the sofa nearest the fire with the heel of Goyle's loaf. He saw it, and made a noise Harry had last heard in the Forbidden Forest in second year, and was up on the sofa cushions before anybody else had moved, with the hem of his jumper gathered up in both fists, well clear of his knees.
Goyle got up from his corner, scooped the spider into one large, careful hand and carried it to the window. "My mum had spiders," he said, and put it out on the sill.
Harry gave up trying not to laugh. Across the room, Hermione had her face in her hands; when she came up for air, she shook her head at the pair of them. Harry felt something in his chest unclench that he hadn't known was clenched.
By the window, Pansy wasn't laughing.
Dinner was quiet. Narcissa presided over the long table in the small dining room. Kreacher served, radiant, darting between Draco's chair and hers, and set Ron's place, without comment, with the second-best bone china. Theo was being deliberately and outrageously charming to Luna, teaching her to write her own name in the tree alphabet on a napkin with a borrowed quill, and Luna was delighted. Goyle had made garlic bread to go with the tomato soup, and crumbled Wensleydale into every bowl himself. Ron sat at Harry's right hand, had two helpings of everything, and told Goyle his bread was the best thing he'd eaten all week. Then he asked if he might possibly have the recipe.
Further up the table, Luna held up her napkin to show Theo her name, climbing the edge of it in small, wobbling strokes. "I'm practising," she said. "I've got a ceiling to do."
"Neater, darling," said Theo, and showed her again.
After dinner Pansy asked Narcissa to walk the wards, and Narcissa, who had known her since she was in nappies and did not ask why, came back an hour later and pronounced every one of them sound. They were.
It was late when Harry went up. He was so tired he could barely see. He'd hardly slept since the Forest. Every time he lay down and closed his eyes, he felt the Stone lying in his pocket, small and hard and heavy, and he thought about how easy it would be to take it out and hold it, just once. Three turns in his palm, and his mother's face, and his father's, and Sirius, and Remus, and Tonks, and —
Theo was on the top stair.
He had a candle on the step beside him, and he was cutting something into the banister rail with the silver point of his wand: a long stroke, and short strokes across it, small and neat and close together, over and over. Harry couldn't read a word of it. Theo went on cutting when he saw him, and offered no explanation.
"Mrs Malfoy's going to kill you," said Harry.
"Narcissa," said Theo, "is going to owe me a small fortune. I charge by the letter." He blew the shavings off the rail and moved down a step. "You've still got it, then."
Harry's hand had already gone to his pocket. He took it away again, too late.
"Oh, don't. I'm not going to mug you for it, darling. I've seen you duel." Theo cut another stroke, and another. "I only wondered what George heard."
"Why?"
Theo turned one of his silver rings round on his finger, and then round again.
"I was seven," he said. "Behind the door. I never heard what my mother said." He said it lightly, the way he said everything, with his eyes on the rail. "Idle curiosity. Don't look at me like that, Potter. It doesn't suit you."
"I promised Ginny," said Harry.
"Then you'd better keep your promise." Theo pinched out the candle and got up. "Goodnight, darling," he said, and went off along the corridor, and left Harry standing there with his hand on his pocket.
"Harry."
Ron was a few stairs below him.
He was looking past Harry into the dark, where Theo had gone. "What did he want?"
"Nothing," said Harry. Then after a moment, "the Stone."
Ron watched the dark for another second or two, and left it there.
"You look dead on your feet, Harry."
"I'm fine."
"You're not." Ron came up the last few stairs. He was looking at Harry's pocket. His face was quiet and serious and very kind. "You don't want to be sleeping with that thing under your pillow. Trust me." He held out his left hand. "Give it here. I'll keep it tonight. Nobody'll think to look for it on me. And you'll get some sleep, for once."
Harry looked at the outstretched hand.
He thought about how much he wanted to put the Stone down. He thought about his mother's face. He thought about Theo on the top stair, cutting letters into the banister, wondering what George had heard, and what his mother would say to him.
He thought about Ron, at eleven, at thirteen, at seventeen. Ron in the chess set, sacrificing himself. Ron in the Shrieking Shack, on a broken leg, standing up between Harry and Sirius Black. Ron coming back out of the snow in the Forest of Dean with the Deluminator in his hand. Every doubt he had ever had about Ron, in all the years he'd known him, he had lived to regret. He had doubted him yesterday, by the fountain, and been ashamed of it ever since.
He took the Stone out of his pocket and put it in Ron's palm. Close to, Ron smelt faintly of lavender water. Narcissa kept it in all the bathrooms.
"Thanks, mate," said Harry.
"Any time," said Ron. His fingers closed round it. "Get some sleep, Harry."
Neither of them noticed Pansy Parkinson standing at the far end of the landing, in the shadow of a suit of armour, with her arms folded and her face absolutely white.
Draco was up on the gallery, in the corner where the lamps didn't quite reach, sitting on the floor with his back against the shelves and a book open on his knees. He shut it when he heard Hermione on the stairs, but not fast enough. She had seen the cover. It was small and blue and very battered, and there was a goblin on it holding up a lantern. The last she'd heard, it lived on a top shelf in Holland Park with its spine to the wall. He must have sent Kreacher all the way to London for it.
"Volume three," said Hermione.
"Research," said Draco.
"Into what?"
"Lighthouses." He put it face down on the floor beside him, on top of a treatise on Ogham. "You should be asleep, Granger."
"So should you."
He didn't argue. She sat down on the floor as well, an arm's length away, because the gallery was narrow and that was where the room was. It was draughty up there, so far from the fire.
He'd taken off his tie since dinner and undone his collar, and his hair had given up on whatever he did to it in the mornings and was falling in his eyes. She noticed all of this. Then she noticed herself noticing, and read the spine of the treatise on Ogham three times instead.
"It's the chapter with the sea-serpent," she said. "Where Snigg holds the lighthouse door shut with his back. You've turned the corner of the page down."
Draco turned his head and looked at her.
"The Hogwarts library had a copy," said Hermione. "I read it in second year, in the hospital wing. I was mostly cat at the time, and there wasn't much else to do."
He took off his jacket and held it out across the gap between them, without comment. She put it on. It was far too big for her, and still warm, and it smelt of the same clean, faintly expensive something that she'd come to associate with him. The sleeves came down past her fingertips. She pushed them back to the elbow without thinking, and then remembered, and pulled the left one down again.
"He gets it wrong, you know," said Draco, to the ceiling. "Snigg. In that chapter. The door opens outwards. If he'd only —"
"— wedged it with the oil drum, he could have gone up and helped," said Hermione. "I know. I wrote to the publisher."
Somewhere below them, a clock ticked twice.
"So did I," said Draco.
She laughed out loud. She couldn't help it; he looked so affronted about it. When she had finished, he said to the ceiling, "Do you still go? To Perth."
The last time he had asked her about them, in a library, she had told him it was none of his business. It still wasn't. She found that she didn't mind.
"Every September," she said. "On my birthday. There's a market in Fremantle on the weekends, and they have a stall. Honey, and beeswax candles, and lemonade, and a sign my dad painted himself, with a bee on it that looks like a Snitch." She drew her knees up inside his jacket. "My mother does the money. She gives me my change and tells me to have a lovely day. I buy one jar and a lemonade, and then I sit on the harbour wall for an hour and watch them sell the rest."
Draco had turned his head from the ceiling to look at her.
"I've got nine jars on my kitchen windowsill," said Hermione. "I've never opened one." She pulled the sleeves of his jacket down over her hands. "They're happy. I gave them everything they ever talked about wanting: somewhere warm, and bees, and no worries at all. I was very thorough."
He looked as though he were picturing them: nine jars in a row on a windowsill he had never seen, catching the light, with the lids still on.
"Bring me a jar," he said. "When this is over. Somebody ought to find out whether they're any good at it."
She laughed again. It came out wet, and it surprised her, and it helped.
The arm's length between them had gone. She didn't remember moving, and she didn't think he had. Their hands were an inch apart on the floorboards.
Draco closed it.
His fingers were warm. They had been warm in the Time Room too, over her mouth in the dark, and along her jaw in the lemon garden, and she had filed both under things she was not going to think about and then thought about them for a week. He turned her hand over on the floorboards, palm up, as if there were something written on it he meant to read, and the cuff of his jacket fell back from her wrist.
He didn't let go.
She didn't look down. She knew what was there, on the inside of her left forearm: thin white letters, gone silvery now, that she had stopped seeing a long time ago.
In another library, she had looked at his scar and had to guess who put it there. He'd never had to guess about hers. He had been in the room.
"I'm sorry," said Draco.
It wasn't condolence.
"You told them you couldn't be sure it was us," said Hermione. "I've always wondered if you meant it."
"I was sure." His thumb moved once along the edge of the word, so lightly she barely felt it, and stopped. "I knew you the second they brought you in. And then I stood by the fireplace and watched."
She turned his hand over instead, the way he had turned hers, and pushed his shirt cuff back with one finger: the long white line through the ghost of the Mark. She laid her arm down beside his on the dusty boards, and after a while his fingers closed round her wrist, over the word, and stayed there.
They went back to lighthouses after that, because lighthouses were easier, and then, because she couldn't leave well alone, to what he was going to do when this was over. He said he'd never been much good at after. So she took the pencil out of her hair and wrote him a list on the back of an index card: a real lighthouse, in the Outer Hebrides, to settle the business of the door; Holland Park, with the books turned the right way round; Fremantle, on a Saturday in September. He argued with every item but the last, and made her add a column for likelihood, and at some point she stopped pretending to be cold and he stopped pretending to believe her. When at last she got up to go, she held out his jacket.
He got up to take it, and then didn't, quite. She had the shelves at her back and the jacket between them, and he had to look down to look at her, and he was.
"Granger," he said.
"Draco."
He looked at her mouth. She watched him do it, and felt her pulse jump in her throat, where he could certainly see it. Out in the dark, a peacock screamed, and he looked away, down at the jacket, and took it out of her hands without once touching her fingers.
"Goodnight, Granger," said Draco.
She ought to have said something then, while there was still time to say it. But it had been very late, and very quiet, and they had both been brought up, in their different ways, never to say the important thing first.
♫ Listen along
Long after midnight, Pansy was sitting on the stairs in the dark with an iron poker across her knees.
She had gone looking for it after the business with the spider. Everybody else had laughed. But Pansy had watched him stand on that sofa with his jumper hitched up, the way her grandmother held her skirts out of a puddle, and had known exactly what she needed.
It was the only thing made of iron she'd been able to find in the whole of Malfoy Manor. Everything else was silver. The cutlery was silver, the candlesticks were silver, the doorknobs were silver, the suits of armour were silver, the great fire irons in the entrance hall were silver with little rampant Malfoy serpents curling up the handles. So were the horseshoes on the doors of the old stables. She had gone down there with a lamp and a nail file and scraped the nearest one, and under a hundred years of black it had come up as bright as a sixpence. The Malfoys had shod their horses in silver, and nailed the old shoes up for luck. Granger's horseshoe had never been iron at all. In nine hundred years, it appeared, not one Malfoy had ever owned anything as common as iron. Not upstairs, anyway.
She'd found the poker below stairs, in the cupboard where the elves kept the coal: a plain black thing, heavy, a bit rusty, that nobody had ever thought worth silvering. She'd taken it and sat down with it on the half-landing at the turn of the great staircase, where she could see the door of Ron's room above and the front doors below, and she'd waited.
She had stopped waiting for anybody to believe her the moment she saw him close his hand round the Stone. And she was not, after the library, going to knock on anybody's door and be told he just liked her.
At four minutes past three, his door opened.
He came out in his socks. He came down the stairs past her, so close she could have reached out and touched him, with his eyes fixed straight ahead. She held her breath and let him go by. She had followed a great many people out of a great many parties, and you never stopped one before you'd seen who they were slipping off to meet. He went on down into the great hall, across the marble floor, and opened the front door and went out, and left it standing open behind him on the dark.
Pansy got up and followed him.
Outside, it was colder than it had any right to be on the tenth of October. The lawns had gone silver with frost, and her breath smoked in front of her face. She saw him ahead of her on the long drive, walking steadily down towards the gates in the moonlight. The peacocks had seen him too. They were in the trees along the drive, and as he passed beneath them, one after another, they began to scream.
He didn't hurry. He didn't look back.
He reached the gates and stood looking out through the tall black bars at the dark lane beyond. Then he turned to face west, and went completely still.
Pansy had seen that before. She'd seen it on a lawn on Hampstead Heath, at seven minutes past three, with her hand clamped round Ron Weasley's so hard it hurt, and his hand clamped round hers.
She lifted the poker.
"Weasley," she said.
He turned round. He looked at her standing there on the drive in her dressing gown, with an iron poker in her hand, and his face stayed perfectly pleasant.
"Pansy," he said, gently.
"Ronald Weasley," said Pansy, "has never once called me Pansy."
She took two steps forward and brought the tip of the poker down against the back of his left hand.
It hissed. Like water on a hot pan, exactly the way it had in Mrs Zabini's dining room, and a red weal leapt up across his knuckles in the shape of the iron. He didn't flinch. He looked down at the burn on his hand, and then back up at her, and he looked almost sorry.
"Too late, love," said the thing in Ron's body.
He reached back without looking, and put his burnt left hand flat against the wrought-iron gates of Malfoy Manor, and pushed. The iron hissed under his palm. He kept it there.
They swung open.
The gates of an old house are a kind of threshold, and the wards of an old house are a kind of promise. Hermione explained that afterwards. They keep out what the house hasn't invited in, and only that. They are strong against strangers. They are nothing at all against a guest who opens the door from the inside.
At the time, Pansy knew only that the gates were open, and that on the other side of them, in the dark lane, something was coming.
The hounds came first.
They came pouring through the open gates in a white flood, dozens of them, glowing in the moonlight, and they didn't bay this time and they didn't stop. They parted round Pansy without breaking stride, so close she felt the cold of them through her dressing gown, and streamed away up the long drive towards the dark house. Behind them came people in dark robes and violet robes, with their wands raised. A tall figure at the front, taller than the rest, with a broad dark face she had seen in the Atrium, walking with long unhurried strides.
"POTTER!" Pansy screamed. "POTTER, THEY'RE HERE, THE GATES —"
Something hit her in the chest.
She never saw the spell. She felt it: a great frozen fist that picked her up off the gravel and threw her backwards off the drive, over the lawn, into the dense black wall of the yew hedge that ran along the side of it. The branches closed over her. She felt the needles scratch her face, and the cold.
The last thing she heard was the thing in Ron Weasley's body, standing by the open gates, saying in Ron's voice, quite quietly, to nobody:
"Sorry, Miss Parkinson."
Harry woke to screaming.
Peacocks. The whole of the grounds seemed to be full of peacocks screaming, a terrible high endless shrieking that went on and on, and under it, once, from far down the drive, another voice. A human voice. Pansy's, shouting his name.
He was out of bed and on the landing with his wand in his hand before he was properly awake. The house was full of cold. It was coming up the stairs from the great hall like water filling a well, and frost was spreading across the portraits on the walls, and the pale disapproving Malfoys in their frames were scrambling out of sight. Doors were banging open all along the corridor: Hermione, with her wand already raised. Theo, still somehow in his green velvet coat. Blaise. Luna. Goyle, filling the whole of his doorway. Draco, next to Hermione from the far end of the landing, with his face white and his hair on end.
"Ron," said Harry. "Where's Ron?"
Ron's door was standing open. The room behind it was empty.
"Harry," said Hermione. She had gone grey. "Harry, I think Pansy was right. I think Ron —"
Below them, the front doors of Malfoy Manor crashed back against the walls, and the hounds came in.
♫ Listen along
They came across the black marble floor of the great hall like spilt milk, silent and fast, with their red ears flat to their skulls, and hit the bottom of the great staircase and came up it without slowing down.
The frost came with them. It ran up the stairs ahead of the pack and along the banisters, and Harry felt it get into his fingers until he could barely feel his wand.
"The stairs!" he shouted. "Hold the top of the stairs —"
Theo got there first. He stood at the head of the staircase in his bottle-green coat with his silver-pointed wand, and wrote on the air from one banister to the other: long straight lines, crossed with short strokes, that hung there in silver fire. Along the rail beside him, the little marks Harry had watched him cutting that night caught light one after another, and burned. The first hounds hit them and fell back yelping. There was blood at the corner of one of Theo's eyes again, which he was ignoring with great dignity. "Birch," he was shouting. "Rowan. Alder. Willow — oh, do come on, you horrid things, I've got all night —"
Draco was beside him with the black shield up, and Hermione was in the library doorway with her back to the room behind her. She lifted her wand, and out through the doors and over the rail of the gallery came the books. Hundreds of them. They came down into the great hall in a wheeling, flapping storm, spines first, and went for every violet robe that came in at the front doors. The dusty ones from the top shelf were delighted.
Then a door opened on the far side of the landing, and Narcissa Malfoy came out of it in her silver-grey dressing gown, with her pale hair loose down her back. She took in her great hall in one look. Then she raised her wand without an instant's hesitation, and the great chandelier came down. It fell straight into the thick of the hounds on the stairs in an explosion of crystal and fire, and Narcissa said something in a low, carrying voice that Harry had never heard from her before, in no language he knew, and every candle in the hall went up at once in a column of blue flame as tall as a man.
"Mother," said Draco faintly, from behind his shield, "that was the last chandelier."
She was a Black. Harry had forgotten whose sister she was.
Goyle went down to meet them. Theo flicked a gap in his lines to let him through and closed it behind him, and Goyle went down the great staircase into the crystal and the blue fire, planted himself on the bottom step with his arms spread, and held it. He picked up a hound and threw it into another hound. He picked up a marble bust of some long-dead Malfoy and threw it into three more.
Blaise, whom Harry had only ever seen take his tailoring seriously, took the far end of the landing and held that, with a fast, vicious precision that Harry would never have believed second-hand. Every time a violet robe got past the books and came for Narcissa or Luna, Blaise was somehow already in the way. Luna was at the banister, stunning hounds on the stairs below one after another, with Bolorma on her shoulder; and when a violet-robed witch fought her way halfway up, Bolorma made a noise like a kettle coming to the boil, launched herself off Luna's shoulder straight into the woman's face, and bit her on the nose.
Across the hall, the kitchen door banged open, and Kreacher came out of it at a run with a carving knife in both hands and his tea towel flying, shrieking defiance, straight across the marble and into the path of a curse that would have killed him. Goyle stepped sideways off his step without a word and took it full in the chest instead.
He went down on one knee, and got back up.
For nearly five minutes, they held.
Then a tall figure came in at the front doors and walked up through the middle of all of it. The hounds didn't touch it. Neither did the books. It went past Goyle on the bottom step as though he were part of the banisters, and up the great staircase, unhurried, with the frost spreading out from its feet, and Theo's silver lines went out one after another as it reached them, like candles in a draught.
"Oh, that's simply rude," said Theo.
"Hello, Potter," said Kingsley Shacklebolt's voice.
Harry met it at the top of the stairs. "It's Auror Potter," he said, and hit it with everything he had.
In the Atrium he had pulled his punches, because the body in front of him was Kingsley's. It still was. But it had walked into this house behind a pack of hounds, and Kingsley, wherever he was, would have to forgive him. He threw spells at it so hard and so fast that the air between them burned, and the thing in Kingsley's body gave ground. One step. Two. Harry saw surprise on that broad dark face, and then something that might have been fear, and he pressed harder.
It was stronger than Harry, much stronger; it had Kingsley's great deep well of power to draw on, and something else behind that, something old and patient that came up through it from somewhere far away. But it fought like a man with a sledgehammer, and Harry had been fighting people with sledgehammers since he was eleven.
He had it back against the banister. He had it on one knee.
And then, from the library door behind him, he heard Hermione cry out.
He turned.
She was lying on the landing floor by the door of the library. There was a violet-robed wizard standing over her with his wand lowered, and there was frost spreading across her chest. It was under her clothes, in the skin itself, branching out from a single point below her collarbone. Fine white lines, like the skeleton of a leaf, were creeping outward and downward, towards her heart. She was trying to breathe and couldn't. Her lips were going blue.
Draco was on his knees beside her.
He had both hands pressed flat against her chest, over the frost, as though he could hold it back with his palms. He was saying something to her, low and fast. Harry couldn't hear what.
"It will reach her heart," said Kingsley's voice behind Harry, perfectly calm, "in about a minute."
Harry swung round. The thing in Kingsley's body had got to its feet. It had lost interest in Harry. It was looking past him, at Draco.
"I can stop it, Mr Malfoy," it said. "I can lift it this instant. Nobody else in this house knows the magic it's made of, and you know that. Your friends we can carry off. Not you. The hundredth has to walk to the door of his own free will, the same as the Master." It smiled with Kingsley's mouth. "Walk out of that door with us, and she lives."
Everything in the great hall had gone still. The hounds had stopped. The others had all been pinned in the second that Hermione cried out, while every one of them was looking at her. Theo and Blaise were held against the wall by white hounds with their paws on their chests. Goyle was on his knees with frost to his shoulders. Luna had a wand at her throat. Narcissa was standing frozen in the doorway on the far side of the landing, with three violet robes round her and her face like marble.
And Harry couldn't move. He looked down. The frost had come up over his feet while he wasn't looking, and over his ankles, and his shins, and it held him to the floor as though he'd been nailed there. His wand was still in his hand. There was nobody on that landing he could curse without somebody else paying for it.
"Don't," he said. "Malfoy — don't —"
Draco was looking down at Hermione. Her eyes were open. She was looking back at him. She couldn't speak; her lips moved, and no sound came out, but Harry saw what they said.
Draco. Don't.
Draco took his hands off her chest. He stood up.
His wand was lying on the floor beside her, where he had put it down to use both hands. He didn't pick it up.
"All right," he said.
"No —"
"Lift it," said Draco, to the thing in Kingsley's body. His voice was perfectly steady. "Lift it now, while I can see you do it, and then I'll come."
It lifted its hand. Across the landing, the frost on Hermione's chest stopped spreading. Then it began to fade back, the white lines retreating across her skin, and she dragged in a great, gasping, rattling breath.
Draco watched it go, all the way back to the single point below her collarbone where it had started. There it stopped.
"She lives," said Kingsley's voice. "That was the bargain."
Draco looked at the white point for exactly as long as it took him to read the small print. Then he turned and walked across the landing towards the top of the stairs, and the violet robes closed in round him.
He stopped beside Harry. Just for a moment. Harry was still held fast to the floor by the frost, with his wand hand shaking and his face wet, though he hadn't known he was crying. Draco looked at him, and there was something almost like a smile at the corner of his mouth.
"You still haven't earned it, you know," he said.
He looked past Harry then, across the landing, to where his mother stood very straight among the violet robes. "Don't wait up, Mother."
Narcissa inclined her head, as though he had told her he might be late for dinner.
And then he went down the stairs with them.
Hermione's fingers found the hawthorn wand on the floor beside her, and closed round it.
They took Theo next.
The hounds dragged him away from the wall and the violet robes bound his arms. He didn't fight them. He stood quite straight, in his bottle-green velvet coat with its silver frogging, and looked down his nose at the witch who was tying his wrists.
"Do mind the coat," he said. "It's velvet."
As they turned him towards the stairs he looked across the landing at Luna, who was still standing with a wand at her throat and Bolorma bristling on her shoulder. Then he did something with his bound hands. A small movement, a turn of the fingers, and Harry saw that he'd been holding something, and that it had dropped. It fell to the frosted floor and rolled, and came to rest at Luna's feet.
It was his silver-pointed wand.
"Mind that for me," said Theo. "I'll want it back."
"I know," said Luna.
They took Blaise. Blaise went with a sigh, and said, as they pushed him towards the stairs, "Somebody tell my mother. No — on second thoughts, don't tell my mother. She'll come and fetch me, and then we'll all be sorry."
They took Goyle last. It took six of them, and he went in perfect silence.
Kreacher threw himself at them as they passed with his carving knife, screaming, sobbing, "Young Master! Young Master!" at the backs of the people taking Draco away. One of the violet robes flicked him aside with a careless wave of a wand, and he flew across the hall and struck the wall and lay there, a small crumpled bundle among the broken crystal of the chandelier.
The last to go was the thing in Kingsley's body.
It paused at the bottom of the stairs and looked up at Harry, standing held in the frost on the landing above. From the pocket of its robes it took a small, dull, black stone, and held it up so that Harry could see it. Then it put it back.
"You're welcome to come for it," it said. "Any time before All Hallows. If you can find the door."
Beside it, at the foot of the stairs, stood Ron.
Harry hadn't seen him arrive. He stood quite still in the frosted hall with his burnt left hand hanging at his side, among the white hounds and the violet robes, looking up at Harry. For the first time since the Forest he had the look: flat and far off, listening. Then it cleared. He looked tired. He looked, just for a moment, almost ashamed.
Harry looked back at him. At the long nose, and the freckles, and the red hair, and the jumper with the moth hole in the elbow. At his best friend's face, with somebody else behind it.
"Where is he?" Harry said.
The thing in Ron's body opened its mouth. Frost came out. It crept across his lips, white and thin, and stitched them shut. He shook his head, very slightly. Then he turned and followed the others out into the dark.
The doors closed behind them. The frost on Harry's legs began, very slowly, to melt.
It was still dark over the lawns of Malfoy Manor when Parvati Patil came through the kitchen fireplace with her Healer's bag. Luna had sent a silver hare to fetch her before the frost was off the stairs. Parvati hadn't stopped to dress; she came through in a St Mungo's coat thrown over her nightclothes, took one look at the great hall, and went straight to Hermione.
She worked for two hours. Harry sat on the landing floor beside them the whole time, with his back against the wall, watching her hands.
Halfway through the second hour, Luna settled cross-legged next to him with Theo's wand in her lap.
"He was on a thestral," she said. "In the clearing. I promised I wouldn't tell, but I think he'd rather you knew now than went on wondering."
Harry turned his head.
"He got on the last one, at the back, while everybody was shouting for Ron, and when the Aurors went into the lake he asked her to take him the long way round, out over the far shore, so that nobody would see him crying." Luna turned the wand so that its silver tip caught the light. "He said it was the cave. George, and Fred. He'd been holding it in ever since. Thestrals don't mind that sort of thing. They're used to it."
Harry let his head drop back.
"She'll live," said Parvati at last, and sat back on her heels. Her hands were shaking. "I've got most of it out. Not all of it. It isn't a curse, not a proper one. It's more like —" She stopped. "Like frostbite, only from the inside. And it doesn't want to go." She looked down at Hermione, asleep now under a heap of Narcissa's blankets, with her face grey against the pillow. "She'll be weak for days. She mustn't do magic. She mustn't move."
Harry left her sleeping and went downstairs.
Kreacher was asleep in the kitchens, by the range, with his arm in a splint. Narcissa had carried him down herself and let nobody else touch him. He'd broken the arm and several ribs, and he'd woken once, briefly, when Parvati set the bones, and asked for Young Master, and then gone back to sleep crying.
Narcissa was sitting on the front steps.
She had gone out there as soon as Kreacher was asleep, and she hadn't moved since. She sat on the top step in her dressing gown, with her pale hair loose and her wand across her knees, facing the long drive and the open gates. When Harry went out to her with a blanket, she let him put it round her shoulders without looking at him.
Far down the drive, a lamp was moving along the yew hedge. Harry had sent Luna out with it to look for Pansy while Parvati worked, because he couldn't leave Hermione. She was still calling, and every so often she stopped to ask the hedge, politely, whether it had seen her. The hedge hadn't said.
Ginny and George came through the Floo at six.
Harry heard the fireplace roar in the small dining room, and George's voice, cheerful and tired, saying, "— and you should have seen Mum's face, she just sat there holding the mug, and then she went straight out into the garden and shouted for Teddy —" And then George came out into the great hall with a tin of Mrs Weasley's flapjacks under his arm, and saw it, and stopped.
Ginny came out behind him. She looked at the shattered chandelier and the frost-blackened walls. She looked at the scorch marks and the blood. She looked at Harry, sitting on the landing floor with his back to the wall, and at Hermione lying grey under the blankets beside him. And she started up the stairs very fast.
"What happened?"
Harry told her.
He told her nearly all of it. The Stone. The car, and how easily Ron had answered it. How he'd stood on the landing last night and put the Stone into his best friend's hand, and said thanks.
Ginny's face went white, and then red, and then something beyond either.
In the hall below, George sat down on the bottom stair with the tin on his knees. He held it in both hands, carefully, the way he held a prototype he wasn't sure of.
"I felt it," said Ginny. "When I hugged him goodbye. I felt it, Harry, and I told myself I was tired —"
"I told myself worse," said Harry.
"Two days. I left for two days —"
She turned. Harry saw her eyes go past him along the landing, to where somebody was standing at the top of the back stairs.
Pansy had lain under the yew hedge for an hour, frozen half to death and senseless. The hounds had streamed past within a yard of her without noticing, and the people who had come with her name on their list had never found her. Some time in the night she had come in by the back stairs, and she had sat on them in the dark ever since, because she couldn't think of a single person in the house who would want to see her. There were yew needles in her hair. There was a long red scratch down one side of her face. She hadn't let go of the poker.
Ginny looked at her. And Harry saw the thought arrive in Ginny's face, and saw it take hold.
"You were at the gates," said Ginny.
Pansy's hand tightened on the poker.
"The gates were opened from the inside. And you were there. You were down there at three in the morning, and the gates were open, and every single one of them got taken except you —"
"Gin," said Harry.
"— the only one of them left —"
"Ginny."
She stopped.
Harry got to his feet. He was so stiff with cold and exhaustion that it took him two tries. He stood between them on the frosted landing and looked at his wife.
"She knew before any of us that something was wrong," he said. "And I told her he'd had a bad few days. I told her he'd seen George talk to Fred. I told her maybe Ron just liked her." He could hear his own voice cracking. "She went down there on her own, in the dark, with a poker, because nobody in this house would listen to her. Because I wouldn't."
Ginny was staring at him.
"If you want to blame somebody, Gin," said Harry, "blame me. I gave him the Stone."
Down in the wrecked hall, a last piece of the chandelier came loose and tinkled to the floor.
Ginny's face crumpled, and she came up the last few stairs and put her arms round him and pressed her face into his shoulder, and she didn't cry, not quite. She just held on.
Over her shoulder, Harry saw Pansy's face. She looked as though she had been handed something fragile, and was terrified of dropping it.
When Ginny finally let go, she wiped her face on her sleeve, and then she opened the beaded bag at her hip and took out the slate.
She knelt and laid it on the frosted floor of the landing, and Harry knelt beside her. Pansy came and stood over them, still holding the poker.
There were eight grains of rice on the slate now. The four old ones lay in their row in the largest chamber, exactly as they always had, neat and still. The other four had been put down in a smaller chamber across a passage, close together, and they were lying every which way. One of them was moving along the edge of the chamber, a few steps one way and a few steps back.
Pansy counted them twice. There was no ninth.
"They're awake," said Ginny. "The first four never are."
Pansy watched the small grain going up and down, up and down.
"That's Draco," she said. "He paces when he's furious. He did it all the way through our O.W.L.s."
"And before every probation review," said Harry.
He found her alone in the long gallery an hour later.
It was empty. It had been empty since the doors closed. The sofas and the chaise longue and the window seats where the Slytherins had sat after Grieve came to the gates were just as they had left them, the cushions still dented. Theo's chaise was at the end, with his claret scarf lying across the arm of it where he'd thrown it down. Pansy was sitting on it. She'd picked up the scarf and was holding it in her lap, and she was looking out of the window at the grey morning coming up over the woods.
Harry sat down on the window seat opposite. Outside, the peacocks were picking their way back across the lawn one by one, as though nothing had happened.
"So," said Pansy, to the window. "Just me, then."
Harry waited.
"All of them. Draco, and Theo, and Blaise, and Greg." She turned the scarf over in her hands. "Every single one of us on that list, except the one who went outside in her dressing gown and got herself thrown into a hedge." She laughed once, through her nose. "I'd have been number fifty-eight, I think. Right between a Rowle and a Rookwood."
"Your horseshoe was silver, by the way," she said. "Everything here is. I checked."
Harry shut his eyes.
"Pansy —"
"That was very gallant of you, on the landing," she said. "You needn't keep it up, Potter. Everybody else is thinking it." She didn't look at him. "The Parkinson girl. The one who tried to hand you over in the Great Hall. The one who was down at the gates when they opened, and was the only one of her lot left standing in the morning." She shrugged. "It's a very good story. I'd have written it myself."
Harry looked at her: at the scratch down her face, and the yew needles still caught in her hair, and her hands turning Theo's scarf over and over in her lap.
"You can go," he said. "If you want to. Back to Chelsea, or somewhere safer. Nobody would blame you."
Pansy turned her head at last and looked at him properly.
"Everybody would blame me, Potter," she said.
She looked back out of the window, at the long drive and the open gates.
"Besides," she said. "Somebody's got to be here when you get them back. Theo'll want his scarf. Greg'll want someone to tell him it wasn't his fault, because he'll think it was; he always does. Blaise will need somebody to be rude to, or he'll wilt. And Draco —" Her voice caught, just slightly. "Draco will need somebody who knew him before he was sorry about anything."
Harry let her finish. His voice would have given him away.
"And somebody," said Pansy Parkinson, "has got to tell Ronald Weasley that I was right."