IM ALIVE
...
For a moment Harriet could not make her mouth do anything at all. The words he had spoken sat in the corridor between them like something he had set down on purpose and stepped back from, and every instinct she had told her that if she reached for them she would find they weighed far more than they looked. "You hear it too." As though it were a small thing. As though she had admitted to liking the same Quidditch team. Ron had gone stiff at her shoulder, and she could feel Hermione's fingers knotted in the back of her robes, but neither of them had heard the voice, and she knew it, and the knowledge made her feel suddenly and horribly alone in a corridor with three other people in it.
"What do you mean, I hear it too?" she demanded, and her voice came out sharper than she meant it to, sharp enough to bounce off the stone. "Hear what? What did you hear?"
Lucian did not answer. He had turned back toward the wall, his body squared to the writing as though it were a painting in a gallery he had paid to see, and only his head was angled toward the three of them, enough that the torchlight caught the black scar and the corner of a smile that refused to go anywhere. He looked, Harriet thought furiously, like someone who had just been told the answer to a riddle he had been chewing on for weeks and had decided to keep it to himself out of pure spite. He looked at her the way he had looked at nothing else since she had met him, not the Sorting Hat, not the Great Hall rising for him, not Draca Malfoy, and she did not know whether that made her want to shout at him or take a step back.
She opened her mouth to try again, and the corridor filled with sound.
It came from both ends at once, a rising rumble of feet and voices and laughter, the full-bellied noise of hundreds of students who had eaten too much pudding and were climbing toward their common rooms in no particular hurry. The feast had ended. Harriet heard someone singing a bit of a song the Weasley twins had been tormenting Percy with all week, and then the first of them rounded the corner at the far end, and the singing stopped. The ones behind kept coming and walked straight into the backs of the ones in front, and the noise broke apart into a confused, spreading murmur as the corridor packed itself full from wall to wall. Within a minute there were students on both sides of them as far as Harriet could see, Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws still holding napkins full of sweets, Gryffindor fourth-years standing on tiptoe, first-years squeezed between elbows and craning to see. All of them were looking at the same place. All of them were looking at the wall, and at the stiff shape hanging from the torch bracket, and at the four students standing alone in the middle of the open space as though they had been placed there for display.
Harriet had been stared at for most of her life in the wizarding world, but never like this. Usually people stared at her forehead. Now they stared at her hands, at her shoes, at the puddle, and she understood with a sick, dropping certainty exactly what it looked like.
From the knot of green and silver at the front of the right-hand crowd, a familiar figure pushed forward. Draca Malfoy had her robes thrown back over her shoulders and her pale hair still pinned for the feast, and she stepped out of the crush with the easy confidence of a girl who had never in her life been told to wait her turn. Crabbe and Goyle loomed behind her. Pansy Parkinson stood at her elbow, eyes wide and bright. Draca did not look at Harriet first. She looked at the wall, and her lips moved, and then she read the words out loud in a clear, carrying voice, savouring each one.
"The Chamber of Secrets has been opened. Enemies of the heir, beware."
The murmuring died around her. Draca let the silence sit for a moment, and then her grey eyes slid sideways, past Harriet, past Ron, and settled on Hermione with a cold delight that turned Harriet's stomach.
"You'll be next, Mudblood," Draca said.
Ron lunged. Harriet caught his arm more by luck than by design, and Hermione grabbed his other sleeve, and between the two of them they hauled him back before he could reach her. His face had gone the deep, mottled red that meant he had stopped thinking entirely. "You say that again," he spat, "you say that one more time, Malfoy, and I swear I'll—"
"You'll what, Weasley?" Draca's chin lifted. She turned her head, just slightly, toward the older Slytherins at her back, and Harriet saw her looking for it, the approval, the nod. She got it. A tall sixth-year with heavy eyebrows smirked. Two girls behind him laughed behind their hands. Marcus Flint, broad and grinning, gave her a slow, appreciative clap that only three or four people joined. Draca's shoulders straightened as if she had been handed a prize.
But Harriet, still holding Ron's arm, happened to glance at Lucian in that moment, and what she saw on his face was not amusement. He had turned his head fully now and was looking at Draca, and his expression was the tired, faintly irritated look of someone watching a younger cousin embarrass herself at a family dinner. It was gone almost as soon as she saw it. But it had been there, and Draca, searching the crowd for admiration, had not noticed it at all.
"What's going on here? What's all this? Out of my way!"
The voice cracked over the murmurs like a whip, and the crowd on the left side buckled and split as Argus Filch shoved his way through it. He used his elbows freely, knocking a Hufflepuff second-year into the wall and treading hard on a Ravenclaw's foot, his lamp swinging wildly from one hand. He was muttering already, complaining, the same endless grievance he carried around the castle like a second coat, and then he broke free of the front row and saw the four of them standing in the open. His small, pale eyes narrowed on them with an instant and total suspicion, the look of a man who had caught children somewhere they should not be and was only waiting to find out what they had broken. Then his gaze lifted past them to the wall.
Then it found the torch bracket.
Harriet would remember for a long time what happened to his face. All the meanness went out of it at once, the way air goes out of a bladder, and what was left was so naked and so broken that she had to look away from it and then could not stop herself looking back. His lamp sagged in his hand. His mouth worked.
"Mrs Norris," he whispered. "Mrs Norris."
He took one shuffling step toward the wall and stopped, as if he were afraid that touching her would make it true. The crowd had gone utterly silent. Harriet could hear the torches spitting. For a long moment Filch only stood there, his thin shoulders trembling, and Harriet felt a stab of pity so sharp and so unexpected that it frightened her, because she had spent a year and a half wishing that cat would fall down a staircase, and now that something had happened to it she wished she could take back every one of those thoughts.
Then the grief in his face curdled into something else.
He rounded on her. Before she could move he had a fistful of the front of her robes, and he dragged her toward him so hard that her toes nearly left the floor, and his breath was hot and sour and his eyes were wet and wild and fixed on hers. "You," he hissed. "You. You've murdered my cat. You've killed her. You did this, didn't you? Didn't you?"
"I didn't—"
"I'll kill you!" His voice rose into a shriek that rang down the length of the corridor and back. "I'll kill you! I'll kill you, I'll kill you—"
Hermione was shouting something. Ron had hold of Filch's sleeve and was being completely ignored. Harriet twisted in his grip, her heart slamming, and in the middle of all of it, for one strange and perfectly still instant, she found herself thinking with absolute clarity that the man had no wand, that his grip was strongest at the thumb, that a sharp turn of the wrist toward that thumb would break it. The thought arrived fully formed and calm, in a voice that did not feel like panic and did not quite feel like her own, and it was gone again before she could look at it.
"Argus."
The single word was not loud. It did not need to be. It carried down the corridor with a weight that seemed to press the noise flat, and every head turned at once.
Albus Dumbledore came through the parted crowd with his hands folded in the long sleeves of his robes, and behind him, in a dark half-circle, came the Heads of House: Professor McGonagall white-lipped and tight-jawed, Professor Flitwick hurrying to keep up on his short legs, Professor Sprout with soil still under her fingernails from the greenhouses, and Professor Snape gliding a little apart from the others with his face as unreadable as ever. Bringing up the rear, in robes of shimmering lilac that had clearly been chosen with the feast in mind, came Gilderoy Lockhart, peering eagerly over Sprout's shoulder.
"Argus," Dumbledore said again, more gently, and he raised one hand, palm outward, the way a man might calm a frightened horse. "Calm yourself. Let go of Miss Potter, if you please."
For a terrible second Harriet thought Filch would not do it. Then his fingers loosened, one at a time, and her heels came back down onto the stone. Filch backed away from her slowly, stumbling, and the fury drained out of him as quickly as it had come, until he was only an old man in a shabby coat standing beneath his cat with his hands hanging empty at his sides and his chin trembling.
Dumbledore did not look at him for long. He looked at the wall.
Harriet was watching him, because she did not know where else to look, and so she saw it. It was nothing, really. His expression did not change. His mouth did not tighten, and his eyes did not widen, and he did not frown. But something behind his half-moon spectacles went very still and very old, the way the surface of the lake went still before a storm, and for the length of a breath the twinkle she had always associated with him simply was not there. Then he turned to the crowd and it was back, or something that looked like it.
"Everyone will return to their dormitories immediately," he said, in a tone that left no space for argument. "Prefects, see that your houses go straight to bed. There is nothing more to see here tonight."
The crowd began to move, slowly and then all at once, a great shuffling tide of whispers and backward glances. Percy's voice rose somewhere to the left, ordering Gryffindors to keep together. Draca threw one last look over her shoulder, triumphant and gleaming, before Flint steered her toward the dungeon stairs. Harriet turned with the rest, relieved, her legs strangely weak.
"All but you four," Dumbledore said.
She stopped. So did Ron and Hermione. Behind them, Lucian, who had not moved at all, tucked his hands into his pockets.
When the last of the stragglers had been chivvied around the corner by an anxious Ravenclaw prefect, and the corridor was quiet again except for the dripping and the torches and Filch's ragged breathing, Dumbledore turned back to them. "Now," he said quietly, "perhaps someone would be good enough to tell me what has happened here."
"Ask her," Filch croaked before anyone else could speak, and his trembling finger jabbed toward Harriet. "Ask her. She knows. She did it. She saw what I keep in my office, she knows I'm a—" His voice broke. "Ask her."
"It wasn't me!" Harriet heard her own voice ring off the walls and did not care. "I didn't touch your cat. I've never touched your cat. We came round that corner, the three of us, and he—" she pointed, and her hand was steadier than she expected, "—was already here. Standing right there, smiling at the wall."
The effect was immediate. McGonagall's eyebrows shot up toward her hairline. Flitwick's mouth fell slightly open. Sprout looked from Harriet to Lucian and back again, and even Snape's black eyes flicked sideways with something that might have been interest. Filch spun so fast he nearly fell over.
"Him, was it?" he rasped. "The Slytherin? The royal? Was it you? Was it you, boy?"
Lucian turned around properly for the first time since the crowd had arrived. He faced the teachers fully, and the scar across his face caught the torchlight, and he did not look frightened or guilty or even particularly concerned. He looked at Filch, and then he looked up at the stiff little shape on the bracket, and something passed over his face that Harriet could not read.
"No," he said, plainly and without hurry. "I would never do something like that to an animal, Mr Filch. Not to any animal, and certainly not to yours. If you knew me better you would know that is the one thing I can promise you without any reservation at all."
Filch made a noise in his throat, a wet, scornful scoff. "Course you wouldn't. None of you would. Never seen a student yet who'd own up to anything."
"Argus." Dumbledore's hand rested lightly on the caretaker's shoulder. He had stepped up to the wall while they spoke and was studying Mrs Norris from very close, his long nose almost touching her fur, his fingers hovering just shy of her stiff tail. "She is not dead, Argus. She has been Petrified. Look at her eyes. Whatever has done this has not killed her."
Filch's head jerked up. For a moment hope and disbelief fought across his face so plainly that Harriet's throat tightened.
"Petrified?" said a bright voice. Lockhart had stepped forward out of the knot of teachers, adjusting the lie of his lilac sleeves and placing himself, Harriet noticed, squarely in the torchlight. "Ah. Yes. Petrified. I thought as much. Most unfortunate that I wasn't here when it happened, Headmaster, most unfortunate indeed. I know precisely the counter-curse that would have spared her. A tricky bit of wandwork, mind you, the Ouagadou Reversal, I used it on a whole village of Petrified goatherds in the Balkans once, and they sent me a very touching letter afterward. If I had been on the scene even five minutes sooner—"
He trailed off, because every single one of the other teachers had turned to look at him. McGonagall's expression was that of a woman watching a dog attempt to read. Sprout's eyebrows had risen and stayed risen. Flitwick blinked up at him with polite and total bewilderment, and Snape, beside them, wore a look of such pure and silent contempt that Harriet half expected Lockhart to catch fire. Even Filch was staring. Lockhart smiled at all of them, waited, and when nobody said anything at all, cleared his throat and stepped modestly back into the shadow.
Ron made a small strangled sound that might have been a laugh. Hermione elbowed him.
Dumbledore did not comment. He straightened from the wall and turned his gaze on Lucian, and his voice was mild and interested, the voice of a man asking a student about the weather. "And what, Mr Bloodthorne, were you doing in this corridor alone, when the rest of the school was at the feast?"
Lucian glanced back over his shoulder at the writing on the wall. The smirk returned, slow and private. Then his eyes moved, and found Harriet, and stayed on her a beat longer than they needed to, so that she felt her face grow hot. Only then did he look back at the Headmaster.
"I was getting ready to sneak out, sir," he said. "I thought that with everyone at the feast it would be the best chance I would get all term to go into the Forbidden Forest without anyone noticing me."
Harriet heard McGonagall draw in a sharp breath. Dumbledore's eyebrow lifted a careful half-inch.
"I am aware," the Headmaster said, "that you and Hagrid have been making certain supervised excursions to the edge of the forest. Professor Snape was good enough to inform me of the arrangement. But you will understand that it is called the Forbidden Forest for a reason, and that going in alone is very much against the rules."
"Yes, sir," Lucian said, entirely without shame. "That's why I was going to sneak out."
There was a short, startled pause. Sprout coughed into her hand. McGonagall looked as though she had bitten into a lemon and could not decide whether to spit it out. Something moved at the corner of Dumbledore's mouth and was gone, and he regarded Lucian for a long moment over his spectacles before turning to the other three.
"And you?" he asked them. "You were not at the feast either, I think."
"We didn't do it," Harriet said at once.
"I did not imagine you had," Dumbledore said gently. "But I do need to know what happened, and I would be grateful if you could tell me."
So she told him. She told him about Nearly Headless Nick's deathday party, about the dungeon so cold they could see their breath, the orchestra of musical saws, the rotting fish and the grey cake and the headless hunt crashing through the wall, and about how they had finally slipped away to try and catch the end of the feast before all the pudding was gone. She told him they had taken the way up past this corridor because it was quicker. She told him they had come round the corner and found Lucian and the wall and Mrs Norris, and that was all.
She did not tell him about the voice. She did not tell him about the cold whisper in the stones that had called for blood, or how she had run toward it, or what Lucian had said to her before anyone else arrived. She was not entirely sure why she did not. The words simply did not come, and some careful, quiet part of her mind seemed to close a door on them before they could. She felt rather than saw Ron and Hermione glance at each other behind her, a quick, worried look, and she kept her eyes on Dumbledore and her face as still as she could make it.
Dumbledore looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked at Ron and Hermione, and then at Lucian, and the long, considering silence stretched until Harriet was sure he could see straight through her, through all of them, to the thing she had left out.
It was Snape who broke it. He had drifted a little closer from the shadows, and his voice was silky and slow.
"Perhaps, Headmaster," he said, "these four were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Students wander. A deathday party, a misguided adventure." His lip curled slightly on the last word, and his eyes slid over Lucian without settling. "It may be nothing more than unfortunate timing that has made things look the way they do. I see no evidence that any of them possess the knowledge required to do this."
Harriet stared at him. Of all the people in the corridor, Snape was the very last she would have expected to speak up for her, and she could tell from Ron's face that he was thinking exactly the same thing. She did not for one moment believe Snape was doing it for her sake. She saw his eyes go once more, briefly, to the boy in his own house, and she wondered.
"My cat has been Petrified!" Filch burst out. His voice cracked. "Somebody's got to be punished! Somebody's got to pay for it, Headmaster, I want—"
"We will be able to cure her, Argus," Dumbledore said, with a firmness that stopped him mid-word. "Professor Sprout has managed to raise a fine crop of Mandrakes this year. As soon as they have reached their full size, Madam Pomfrey will brew a draught that will revive Mrs Norris completely. She will be well again before very long, I promise you."
"I'll make it," Lockhart put in eagerly. "I must have done it a hundred times, I could whip up a Mandrake Restorative Draught in my sleep—"
"Excuse me," Snape said icily, "but I believe I am the Potions master at this school."
There was a very awkward pause. Dumbledore let it hang for exactly as long as it deserved, and then he lifted Mrs Norris gently down from the torch bracket and laid her in Filch's trembling arms.
"You may go," he said to the four of them. "Straight to your dormitories, all of you. Mr Bloodthorne, I trust that tonight is not the night you choose to visit the forest."
"No, sir," said Lucian. "I think the castle's interesting enough for one night."
---
The four of them walked away together in silence, because there was only one way out of the corridor and none of them was willing to be the first to break and run. Harriet was aware of Lucian a half-step behind her left shoulder the whole time, his footsteps easy and unhurried, and she was aware of Ron on her right, radiating tension like heat off a stove. At the foot of the marble staircase, where the Gryffindor route went up and the dungeon stairs curved away down into the cold, Lucian slowed, and before she quite knew she was going to do it, Harriet stopped too.
"Go on up," she told Ron and Hermione. "I'll be right behind you."
"Harriet," Hermione said, in a low, urgent voice, with a glance at Lucian that said everything.
"Two minutes."
Ron looked as though he wanted to argue very badly. Hermione caught his sleeve and pulled him up the first few steps, where they stopped on the landing and made no pretence at all of not watching. It was the best she was going to get. Harriet turned around.
Lucian had leaned one shoulder against the banister at the head of the dungeon stairs, his hands still in his pockets, the torchlight from the entrance hall gilding one side of his face and leaving the scarred side in shadow. He did not look surprised that she had stayed. He looked, if anything, as though he had been waiting for it.
"You didn't tell him," he said.
"Neither did you." She folded her arms. "What did you mean back there? You said I hear it too. Hear what? Did you hear the voice or not?"
"I heard something," Lucian said. He said it lightly, but he was watching her face the whole time, carefully, the way she had once seen Hagrid watch a hippogriff decide whether or not to bow. "The more interesting question, I think, is how you heard it, because I've walked these corridors every night for two months now and I've never once seen anyone else stop and listen to the walls. Your friends didn't hear a thing. You know they didn't. I watched them watching you."
"It said it was going to kill someone," Harriet said. Her voice dropped despite herself. "It said it was hungry. It was moving, through the stone. How do you hear a voice moving through stone?"
"That," said Lucian, "depends a great deal on who's talking, and on what language they happen to be talking in." He tipped his head and regarded her with open, curious interest, the way he might have regarded an unusual bird. "Where I grew up there are a lot of things that speak, Harriet. Most people simply never learn to listen. You seem to have learned without anyone teaching you, and that's rare enough that I'd quite like to know why."
"Stop doing that," she said.
"Doing what?"
"Answering a question with a riddle and then looking pleased with yourself." She was surprised by the heat in her own voice. "Someone could have been killed tonight. Filch nearly strangled me. Everyone in that corridor thinks I did it, or you did, and you're acting like it's a game."
For the first time the smile slipped. He looked at her for a long moment, and his voice, when it came, was quieter and had lost some of its polish.
"It's not a game," he said. "I know it's not a game. I think something very old is moving around inside this castle, and I don't think it's moving around by accident, and I don't yet know what it is or who let it out. I have suspicions. I don't share suspicions, because a suspicion said out loud becomes a rumour, and a rumour in a place like this gets somebody hurt." The corner of his mouth lifted again, but more gently this time. "But I'll tell you this much, because you asked straight, and I like that. Whatever that voice is, it wasn't talking to me tonight, and I don't think it was talking to you either. It was hunting. If you hear it again, don't run toward it the way you did. Run the other way, and find me."
"Find you?" Harriet heard how incredulous she sounded and didn't care. "Why on earth would I find you?"
"Because," Lucian said, pushing off from the banister, "I'm the only other person in this school who'll know what you mean."
She stared at him, and found she had no answer. In the silence, unbidden and quite calm, a thought slid into the back of her mind that did not feel like hers at all: 'he is telling the truth, and he is not telling you all of it, and both of those things are worth remembering.' It was so composed, so measured, that for a second she lost the thread of what she had been about to say and simply stood there, frowning at nothing, until she realised Lucian was watching her with his head slightly tilted.
"Are you all right?"
"Fine," she said, too quickly. "I was just thinking."
"Mm," said Lucian, in the tone of someone filing something away. He studied her a moment longer, then stepped back toward the dungeon stairs and sketched her a small, ironic bow, the same sort he had given Lucius Malfoy in Flourish and Blotts, though there was nothing mocking in his eyes when he did it. "Goodnight, Harriet. Try not to get strangled again before breakfast."
He went down into the dark. She stood there until the sound of his footsteps faded completely, and then she climbed the stairs to where Ron and Hermione were waiting, and she found that she did not want to tell them any of it, not yet, and she couldn't have explained why.
---
Lucian had expected the common room to be loud. He had not expected it to be waiting for him.
The stone wall slid shut at his back and the whole long room seemed to turn on its axis toward him at once. Every couch was full. Students who should have been in bed an hour ago were draped over armchairs and perched on the arms of sofas and standing in knots by the great window where the lake pressed green and black against the glass. The fire in the carved hearth had been built high, and the conversation, which had clearly been at a roar a moment earlier, dropped to nothing so fast that he could hear the water moving beyond the window.
He let them look. He had been looked at by worse rooms than this. He had stood at the foot of a dais in the Romanov winter palace at the age of eight while three hundred nobles of six dynasties tried to work out whether the scarred boy beside Drago Bloodvist was a prince or a footnote, and he had learned then that the trick was never to be the first one to speak. He walked to the centre of the room at an easy pace, took the pear he had pocketed at lunch out of his robes, and examined it.
It was Draca who broke, of course. She was on her feet in front of the fire, still pink-cheeked from the corridor, and she looked as though she had been rehearsing this for the last half hour.
"It was you," she said. Her voice was breathless, almost reverent, and somehow still managed to sound accusing. "Wasn't it? It has to be. A Bloodthorne. The Hat practically said so when it sorted you. And then tonight, the Chamber opens, two months after you arrive, and you're the one standing in front of the wall." She took a step closer. "You're the Heir of Slytherin."
The word went round the room like a struck bell. Lucian heard it repeated in a dozen whispers, Heir, the Heir, and watched faces change in the firelight as students who had been thinking it all evening heard it said out loud.
He took a bite of the pear and chewed thoughtfully.
"Is that what you think?" he said at last.
"It's what everyone thinks," Pansy Parkinson put in from the sofa, her eyes enormous. "Father says the Chamber was built to rid the school of the unworthy. And if it's you who opened it, then—" she glanced around the room, at once thrilled and terrified, "—then the Mudbloods had better start packing, hadn't they?"
A burly sixth-year by the window, a boy called Hector Rowle whom Lucian had marked on the first night as the sort who mistook volume for authority, gave a short, approving bark of laughter and raised an imaginary glass. A pair of fifth-year girls on the hearthrug actually rose and dipped him something like a curtsey. Crabbe and Goyle had arranged themselves either side of the fireplace like a pair of badly carved gateposts, gazing at him with the dumb, adoring loyalty of hounds who have just discovered whose hand feeds them. And behind them, he saw, others had shrunk back: a thin third-year half-blood named Wilfred Selwyn edging toward the dormitory stairs, two first-years clutching each other's sleeves, a sixth-year prefect with her lips pressed white. To the ones who had gone pale, it did not matter whether the Heir loved Slytherin. It mattered whether the Heir had a list.
Lucian found that amused him a great deal more than it should have. He also found, somewhere underneath the amusement, a small hard knot of distaste, the same one he always felt when people rearranged themselves around his name before they had troubled to learn anything else about him. He had grown up in a capital that loved his sister and tolerated him, in a palace where the servants had flinched from his mother's moods and from him for being the reason she had them, and he had learned very early to let people believe whatever kept them at the distance he preferred. It had been the most useful lesson of a lonely childhood. He saw no reason to abandon it now.
"I'll tell you what I think," he said, and the room hushed again to hear it. "I think the castle has been here for a thousand years, and it's very old, and it remembers a great deal more than any of you give it credit for. And I think that if someone in this school has opened the Chamber of Secrets, they should be extremely careful, because the people who built that Chamber were taught by people who would not have been impressed with how it's being used." He took another bite of his pear. "Beyond that, I don't think I'm going to say anything at all."
"That's not a no," said Draca slowly.
"No," Lucian agreed pleasantly. "It isn't."
The murmur that rose after that was half excitement and half dread, and he watched it ripple outward through the room with the detached interest of a man watching a stone sink in a pond. Draca's face was an extraordinary thing to behold. She clearly could not decide whether she was delighted to be right, furious that he was refusing her the satisfaction of a confession, or quietly, desperately jealous that it was not her own family the walls had chosen. She settled, after a visible struggle, on folding her arms and lifting her chin.
"Well," she said, "I always knew you couldn't be just some Muggle-loving American."
"You told the whole train I was," said Lucian mildly.
Several people laughed. Draca went scarlet and sat down hard on the sofa beside Pansy.
Theodore Nott had been watching all of it from the armchair nearest the window, a book open and forgotten on his knee. When Lucian finally dropped onto the end of the couch opposite him, Nott leaned forward and said, very quietly, "You're having fun with this."
"A little."
"You do realise that half this room is going to write home tonight and tell their fathers the Bloodthorne is the Heir of Slytherin?" Nott's voice was dry, but his eyes were sharp and a little anxious. "Mine will believe it. Mine will be thrilled. And then he'll want me to find out what you're planning, and I'll have to write back that you spent the evening eating a pear."
"Then tell him the truth," Lucian said. "Tell him I wouldn't confirm it. Let him do the rest himself. Grown men are always better at frightening themselves than anyone else is at frightening them."
On Nott's other side, Blaise Zabini, who had been lounging so thoroughly that he seemed to have no bones at all, opened one eye. "For what it's worth," he drawled, "I don't think you did it."
Lucian turned his head with genuine interest. "No? Why not?"
"Because if you wanted someone Petrified," Zabini said, closing the eye again, "I don't think you'd bother writing on the walls about it. That's the sort of thing people do when they want an audience. You don't strike me as wanting an audience." He settled deeper into the cushions. "You strike me as the sort who'd prefer nobody ever found out what happened at all."
It was, Lucian thought, the most perceptive thing anyone had said to him since he had arrived at Hogwarts, and it had come from the boy who had appeared to be asleep. He let himself smile properly, just for a moment.
"Remind me never to play cards with you, Zabini."
"I'd take your money," Zabini murmured, and appeared to go to sleep in earnest.
Across the room, in the window seat where the lake light lay coldest, Vivienne Malfoy had not moved since he came in. She had a book of Arithmancy tables open in her lap and had turned perhaps two pages in the last twenty minutes, and her pale grey eyes had rested on him the entire time with the same patient, measuring attention he had noticed at the feast. She did not join the whispering. She did not look at her sister. When at last their eyes met across the length of the common room she inclined her head a precise quarter-inch, the acknowledgement one player gives another across a chessboard when a move has been made that she has not yet fully understood, and went back to her tables. Of everyone in the room, Lucian thought, she was the only one who had noticed that he had not actually said anything at all. He found he respected her a little for it. He also made a note to be careful around her.
The common room door slid open again.
Professor Snape stood in the gap, his robes still settling around him, and the temperature of the room seemed to drop by several degrees. The fifth-year girls who had curtsied scrambled for the dormitory stairs. Hector Rowle suddenly became very interested in the fire.
"It is past eleven," Snape said, into the absolute silence. "I was under the impression that the Headmaster had sent this house to bed. Evidently I was mistaken. Ten points from Slytherin for every student I find still in this room in one minute's time." His black eyes swept the room and came to rest, as Lucian had known they would, on the end of the couch. "Mr Bloodthorne. A word."
The room emptied with remarkable speed. Lucian rose without hurry, dropped the core of his pear into the fire, and crossed to the door. Snape did not step outside. He simply lowered his voice until it was barely more than a breath.
"I have no idea what you are playing at," he said, "and I am not foolish enough to imagine you would tell me if I asked. But a cat has been Petrified, and you were found standing beside it, and you have just allowed an entire house to believe you are responsible for it. Whatever your family's arrangements with the Headmaster, I would remind you that suspicion in this castle has a way of becoming dangerous to the people it attaches itself to. Even to the Bloodthornes."
"I appreciate the warning, Professor," Lucian said, and found to his own mild surprise that he meant it. "And thank you for what you said in the corridor. You didn't have to."
Something flickered across Snape's sallow face, too quick to name.
"I said what was accurate," he said. "Nothing more. Your report on the trolls is due on Friday. I will expect it to be legible." He turned in a swirl of black, and then paused, without looking back. "And Mr Bloodthorne. Whatever you were going to do in the forest tonight, do not."
The wall slid shut behind him.
Lucian stood alone in the empty common room for a while after that, listening to the lake move against the glass. Somewhere above him the castle settled into the long hours of the night, every stone of it old and patient and full of things that remembered his family's name. And somewhere inside it, deep down where the pipes ran and the water went, something that was not Lucian's had woken up hungry, and a Gryffindor girl with a scar on her forehead had heard it calling.
He found that he was smiling again. It was the first time in a very long while that Hogwarts had given him something he actually wanted to understand.