11,368 words, my friends. Anyway, if y'all leave a review, for every review ill pump out an extra chapter till I get to 10 reviews. No extra ones tonight, I think; too much damn university work. But tomorrow I'll pump out a couple.
Make the review about how amazing I am and nothing to do with the fic. The more absurd and funny, the better. Unless y'all are just mean and make fun of me.
...
Transfiguration on a Thursday morning had never been anybody's idea of a gentle start to the day, but in the week after Halloween it had taken on a new and uncomfortable quality, because nobody in the castle seemed able to sit still in a room with anyone else without wondering, quietly and guiltily, whether they were sitting next to the Heir of Slytherin. Harriet felt it the moment she came through the door. McGonagall's classroom was one of the larger ones on the first floor, with tall arched windows that let in a pale grey light off the lake, and this section of second-years was a mixed one, drawn from all four houses at once, so the benches were crowded with faces she only half knew. There were Hufflepuffs she recognised, a cluster of Ravenclaws who sat together near the windows and spoke in low, quick voices, a handful of Gryffindors scattered across the middle rows, and along the back wall a line of green and silver where the Slytherins had arranged themselves with the air of people who'd claimed the high ground on purpose. Draca Malfoy was there, sitting very straight beside Pansy Parkinson, and two seats along from them, with his chair tipped back on two legs and his boots crossed at the ankle beneath the desk, was Lucian.
He'd been sitting like that every time Harriet had seen him in a lesson for the past week, and every time she'd seen him she'd found herself thinking about the staircase, and about the way he'd said find me as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. She hadn't found him. She hadn't heard the voice again either, though she'd lain awake more than one night listening for it. Ron caught her looking and gave her a dark, meaningful glance, the kind he'd been giving her all week whenever Lucian's name came up, and she pretended not to see it and sat down beside Hermione.
Professor McGonagall swept in exactly on the hour, as she always did, and the low muttering in the room died before she'd reached her desk. She was a woman who didn't need to raise her voice to fill a room, and she didn't raise it now. She simply set a wicker cage of plump, sleepy-looking pigeons on the corner of her desk, tapped it once with her wand so that the bars folded away, and turned to face them with her hands clasped in front of her.
"Today," she said, "you'll be turning these birds into water goblets. It's an exercise in reducing complexity, which most of you will find a good deal harder than you expect, because a living thing resists being made simple. The incantation is Vera Verto. You'll tap the bird three times, firmly but without unkindness, and you'll hold the shape of the goblet clearly in your mind while you do it. A clear picture produces a clean result. A muddy picture produces a goblet with feathers on it, and I've no wish to spend the afternoon plucking glassware. Begin."
The pigeons were handed out down the rows, one between two, and for a while the room was filled with the soft murmur of the incantation and the occasional squawk of a bird that didn't care for the idea. Hermione got hers on the first attempt, of course. Her pigeon gave a little shiver, stretched, and resolved itself into a slim, perfectly clear goblet with only the faintest grey sheen on the stem, and McGonagall paused beside their desk long enough to say "Very good, Miss Granger," in the tone she used when she was pleased and didn't want anyone to know. Harriet's took three goes and came out with a beak where the base ought to be, which wasn't perfect but was at least recognisably a goblet. Ron's was another matter entirely.
He'd mended his wand as best he could after the Whomping Willow had snapped it in two on the first day of term when he wondered to close by mistake, wrapping the break in a thick sleeve of Spellotape that was already peeling at the edges, and it hadn't worked properly since. It sparked when he didn't want it to and fizzled when he did, and twice that week it had shot out of his hand altogether. Now he squared up to his pigeon, which regarded him with an expression of deep suspicion, and gave it three hard taps.
"Vera Verto," he said.
There was a noise like a wet sneeze, and the pigeon became a goblet. It was a large, greyish goblet with a pair of stubby wings sticking out of either side, and as Harriet watched, the tail twitched, the goblet shuddered, and it let out an indignant, gurgling squeak. Somebody behind them laughed. Ron stared at it, then at his wand, then back at the goblet, his ears going steadily redder.
"It's this stupid thing," he hissed, giving the wand a vicious shake. A spray of green sparks shot out of the cracked end and set fire to the corner of Seamus Finnigan's parchment two desks along. "It's not me, it's the wand, it's been like this since—"
"Mr Weasley." McGonagall had appeared at his elbow without anybody seeing her cross the room. She put out the smouldering parchment with a flick of her own wand, looked down at the twitching, squeaking goblet, and then at the Spellotape, and her lips thinned into a line. "You'd do well to write to your parents about a replacement before that wand does something we'll both regret. Until then, you'll practise the wand movement without the incantation, if you please, and leave the pigeons out of it."
Ron muttered something that might've been "yes, Professor," and slumped back in his seat. McGonagall moved on. It was then, into the small pause she'd left behind her, that Hermione put up her hand.
Harriet knew what she was going to ask before she asked it. Hermione had been trying to find a book on the Chamber of Secrets all week and hadn't managed it, because every copy of Hogwarts, A History in the library had been checked out, with a two-week waiting list, and she'd been fretting about it at breakfast and in the common room and once, memorably, in her sleep. She'd told Harriet that she was going to ask a teacher if it was the last thing she did, and Harriet had thought she was joking. She clearly hadn't been.
"Professor," she said, "I wondered if you could tell us about the Chamber of Secrets."
The room went very quiet indeed. Even the pigeons seemed to stop rustling. At the back of the classroom Harriet heard Lucian's chair come down onto all four legs with a soft thump, and she didn't need to turn around to know that he'd started paying attention.
Professor McGonagall looked at Hermione for a long moment over the tops of her square spectacles. For a second Harriet thought she'd refuse. Her face had that firm, closed look it got when somebody asked a question she thought was beneath the dignity of her lesson, and her hand had already half lifted to wave it away. But then her eyes moved over the room, over the rows of tense, watchful faces and the second-years who'd been looking sideways at one another all week, and something in her expression shifted, as though she'd decided that rumours told in the dark were more dangerous than history told in the daylight.
"Very well," she said. "Since it appears that nobody in this school is going to think about anything else until they've heard it, I'll tell you. But you'll understand that what I'm telling you is legend, Miss Granger, and not history, and that I've very little patience for legend." She set her wand down on her desk and folded her hands. "You all know, I hope, that Hogwarts was founded over a thousand years ago, the precise date being uncertain, by the four greatest witches and wizards of the age. Godric Gryffindor, Helga Hufflepuff, Rowena Ravenclaw, and Salazar Slytherin. They built this castle together, far from prying Muggle eyes, for it was an age when magic was feared by common people and witches and wizards suffered much persecution. For a few years the founders worked in harmony, seeking out youngsters who showed signs of magic and bringing them here to be educated. But then disagreements sprang up between them. A rift began to grow between Slytherin and the others. Slytherin wished to be more selective about the students admitted to Hogwarts. He believed that magical learning should be kept within all-magic families. He disliked taking students of Muggle parentage, believing them to be untrustworthy." She paused, and her mouth tightened. "After a while there was a serious argument on the subject between Slytherin and Gryffindor, and Slytherin left the school. Reliable historical sources tell us that much. But these honest facts have been obscured by the fanciful legend of the Chamber of Secrets. The story goes that Slytherin had built a hidden chamber in the castle, of which the other founders knew nothing. Slytherin, according to the legend, sealed the Chamber of Secrets so that none would be able to open it until his own true heir arrived at the school. The heir alone would be able to unseal the Chamber, unleash the horror within, and use it to purge the school of all who were unworthy to study magic."
There was a silence when she'd finished, but it wasn't an empty one. Harriet could feel it pressing on the room like a held breath. At the back, somebody in green let out a small, pleased sound, and somebody else, a Hufflepuff girl with a long plait, went visibly pale and looked down at her desk.
"The whole thing is arrant nonsense, of course," McGonagall said briskly, picking her wand back up. "Naturally the school has been searched for evidence of such a chamber, many times, by the most learned witches and wizards. It doesn't exist. It's a tale told to frighten the gullible."
"With respect, Professor, that's not quite right."
It was said quietly, and it was said politely, and it still turned every head in the room. Lucian hadn't put up his hand. He hadn't stood, either. He was sitting forward now with his forearms resting on the desk and his hands loosely laced together, and his expression wasn't the bored, half-amused one Harriet had grown used to seeing on him in lessons. It was serious, almost careful, the face of somebody stepping onto a frozen pond and testing each step.
McGonagall turned slowly to look at him. "Mr Bloodthorne."
"I'm sorry to interrupt you, Professor, and I'm not saying you've told it wrong. That's exactly how the story's told everywhere, and I'd guess that's how it was told to you." His American accent was steady and unhurried, and there was nothing in it of the teasing he used on Draca or the dry mockery he saved for Lockhart. If anything he sounded almost apologetic. "I don't know anything about whether there's a chamber or not. But the part about Slytherin only wanting purebloods isn't true, and I don't think it ought to be taught as if it were, especially not this week, when there are people in this school who'd like very much to believe it."
He didn't look toward the back row when he said it, but he didn't need to. Harriet saw Draca's shoulders go rigid.
"Go on," McGonagall said, after a moment. Her voice was cool, but she'd set her wand back down again.
"Think about it practically," Lucian said. "A thousand years ago there were hardly any of us. Wizarding families were small and spread out and half of them were hiding. If Salazar Slytherin had really wanted to teach only the children of old magical families, he'd have been teaching about six people, and three of them would've been his cousins. He wasn't a stupid man. Whatever else he was, he wasn't stupid. He knew perfectly well that magic turns up in children born to non-magical parents, and he knew those children were going to get hurt or burned or drowned if nobody found them and taught them. He was strict about it, and he was suspicious of Muggles, much more than most people are now. He'd lived through things that would make anybody suspicious. But he wasn't anywhere near as uptight about it as some of the families who claim him today."
"Then what did they argue about?" It was one of the Ravenclaws by the window, a dark-haired girl Harriet thought might be called Padma, and she'd asked it before she could stop herself. "If it wasn't about Muggle-borns, what was the argument?"
Lucian glanced at her and gave her a small nod, as if she'd asked exactly the right question. "Some of the founders wanted to take in ordinary Muggles too. Not Muggle-born witches and wizards, but people with no magic at all. The idea was that Hogwarts wouldn't only be a school for magic. It'd be a school for learning in general, philosophy and mathematics and medicine and the rest of it, and magical and non-magical children would be taught side by side. Gryffindor liked the idea a great deal, from what I understand, and Hufflepuff wasn't against it. Slytherin thought it was madness. He thought that if you brought non-magical people into the heart of the only safe place wizards had, it'd be the end of the secret, and the secret was the only thing keeping anyone alive. That was the fight. It wasn't about whose blood was clean. It was about whether to let people without any magic in through the front door."
He stopped there, as though he'd said as much as he meant to, and the silence that followed was a very different one from before. Harriet could see it working its way across the room. A Hufflepuff boy had his mouth slightly open. Two of the Slytherins at the back were whispering furiously to each other, and Pansy had turned to look at Draca with an expression of complete confusion, as if somebody had just told her the sky was green and she couldn't decide whether to believe it. McGonagall herself was watching Lucian with an odd, unreadable look, her lips pressed together, and Harriet had the strange feeling that she was less offended than she was trying to decide something.
"That's a very interesting theory, Mr Bloodthorne," she said at last. "I'm not aware of any historical source that supports it."
"No, Professor," Lucian said. "I don't suppose you would be."
It was Ron who broke first. He'd been staring at Lucian with naked suspicion ever since he'd started talking, and now it came out of him all at once, sharp and loud. "How'd you know all that, then? If nobody's ever written it down, how come you know?"
"I was about to ask the same thing," said a crisp voice from the Hufflepuff benches.
Harriet turned. The boy who'd spoken was Justin Finch-Fletchley, a tall, neatly combed Hufflepuff with a long nose and a habit of tilting his head back slightly when he talked, so that he always seemed to be addressing a point somewhere above the heads of whoever he was talking to. Harriet had never had much to do with him. She knew he was Muggle-born, because he'd told everyone in their first week that he'd had his name down for Eton before his Hogwarts letter came, and he'd been telling people about Eton fairly regularly ever since, in a voice that suggested he'd done the wizarding world a considerable favour by turning it down. He had his arms folded now and was regarding Lucian with the kind of polite disdain that Harriet had only ever seen on the faces of very rich people in shop windows.
"I mean no offence," Justin went on, in the tone of somebody who meant a little, "but one can't simply contradict a professor on the strength of some story one's heard at home. At Eton, you know, they'd want a citation. Primary sources. One doesn't go about rewriting a thousand years of history on the say-so of a schoolboy from, where was it, America?" He said America the way some people said drains. "I'd have thought a chap would want to be a bit more careful about that sort of thing, if he wanted to be taken seriously in a proper school."
There were one or two titters from the Hufflepuff benches. Lucian turned his head and looked at Justin properly for the first time, and Harriet saw something flicker across his face that was almost delighted, the look of someone who's been handed a present he hadn't expected.
"You were going to go to Eton," he said.
Justin's chin lifted a fraction. "I had my name down, yes."
"That's nice." Lucian said it so pleasantly that for a second Justin didn't seem to realise it wasn't a compliment. "It's a good school. I've been there. My family's been there, actually. We had a hand in setting up the place. Henry the Sixth was a very nervous man, and somebody had to stand behind him and tell him where to put the chapel." He let that sit just long enough for Justin's face to begin, very slowly, to change. "And it's a fine thing to be proud of your school, Finch-Fletchley. But I'd keep the Eton business to yourself around me, if I were you. You've had your name down for a school with a king's portrait in the hall. I've had dinner with the people in the portrait. It doesn't come out as impressive as you think."
Somebody, possibly Seamus, made a noise like a kettle coming to the boil. Justin had gone a deep, mottled pink from his collar to his hairline. His mouth opened and then shut again, and for once in his life he appeared to have nothing to say about anything, and he unfolded his arms and looked very hard at his pigeon.
"Mr Bloodthorne," said McGonagall, in a voice like a ruler on a desk, "that will do."
"Sorry, Professor." Lucian sounded as though he meant it, which made it somehow worse for Justin. "You asked how I know, Weasley," he said, turning back to Ron, "and it's a fair question, so I'll answer it. I know because it's family history. Before the Bloods were ever kings, before they were anything much at all, they were teachers. Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw and Slytherin learned everything they knew from them. Every spell they wrote down, every ward on this castle, every argument they had about who to let in, they had it first in my family's halls, at my family's table. That's how I know what Slytherin thought about Muggles. My ancestors heard him say it."
If the room had been quiet before, it was utterly silent now. Harriet felt the hair rise on her arms. Beside her Hermione had gone completely still, her quill frozen halfway to her parchment, her eyes enormous. Ron was gaping. At the back of the room Draca Malfoy had turned so white that her lips seemed almost blue, and she was staring at Lucian as though he'd just set fire to something she'd been told all her life was hers. McGonagall alone hadn't moved. She stood very straight behind her desk with her wand in her hand, and her face was unreadable, but Harriet, watching closely, saw her knuckles whiten for just a moment around the wand.
"I see," McGonagall said, very quietly. Then, after a pause that seemed to last a long time, she drew herself up and her voice returned to its usual crispness. "Well. Whatever the truth of that, it's a matter for the history books and not for this classroom, and it has no bearing whatsoever on the fact that most of your pigeons are still pigeons. Back to work, all of you. Mr Weasley, wand movement only. Miss Granger, you may try the reverse spell. Mr Bloodthorne." He looked up. "I'd like a word after the lesson, if you'd be so good."
"Of course, Professor."
The lesson limped on for another twenty minutes, but nobody was really thinking about pigeons any more. Harriet turned hers back and forth twice and couldn't have said afterwards what it had looked like. When the bell finally rang and the room broke up in a great scraping of chairs and a flood of whispering, she glanced back from the doorway and saw Lucian standing in front of McGonagall's desk with his hands behind his back, his head bent politely, listening, and McGonagall speaking to him in a low voice that didn't carry, and she didn't look angry at all. She looked, if anything, troubled, and very tired, the way Harriet imagined she'd look if somebody had just handed her a very old letter addressed to someone who'd died long ago.
Then Ron grabbed her sleeve and pulled her into the corridor.
They didn't speak until they'd gone round two corners and down a flight of stairs and come out into a quiet stretch of corridor on the ground floor, where the windows looked out over the frost-bitten lawn and the only other living thing in sight was a suit of armour that creaked faintly when the wind got in. Ron stopped there and turned on the other two as if he'd been holding his breath the whole way.
"Well, that settles it, doesn't it?" he said. "I mean, it's got to. You heard him. His family taught Slytherin. His family taught all of them. If anyone's going to know where a secret chamber is, it's going to be someone whose great-great-great-whatever was round for dinner when they built it."
"We don't know that Slytherin ever told them about the Chamber," Hermione said, though she didn't sound very sure. She'd been unusually silent on the way down, chewing the end of her plait, which she only did when she was really rattled. "And anyway, I thought you were sure it was Malfoy. You said so at breakfast. You said it at dinner last night. You said it three times in your sleep."
"I did not say it in my sleep."
"You did, Ron. Dean told me."
"Well, I did think it was Malfoy," Ron said, ignoring this. "I still think she's in on it somehow. You saw her at the wall. You'll be next, Mudblood, all pleased with herself, like she'd been waiting all term to say it. And her whole family's been in Slytherin for about a hundred generations, her dad's practically a Death Eater, and she's always going on about blood. If anyone wants Muggle-borns gone, it's her." He frowned. "But she's thick, isn't she? Not thick thick, but she couldn't keep something like that quiet. She'd be telling everyone. She'd have it printed on badges. Whereas him." He jerked his head back the way they'd come, as if Lucian might be following them. "He was standing right in front of the wall when we got there. Smiling at it. And he's in Slytherin, and the whole of Slytherin thinks he's the Heir, Fred heard some fifth-years talking about it, and he didn't even say he wasn't, did he? Not to them, anyway. And then he stands up in class and tells everyone his family taught the founders. It's him. It's got to be him."
"I think Ron might be right," Hermione said slowly. She looked unhappy about it. "I don't want him to be, but everything points that way, doesn't it? He knows things about Slytherin nobody else knows. He was there. He was alone. And Harriet, you heard the voice, and he said he heard it too. Nobody else heard it. Not me, not Ron. Just you and him. Doesn't that seem strange to you?"
It did. It seemed very strange, and Harriet had been turning it over for a week without getting any closer to an answer, and she didn't like the way it sounded when Hermione put it out in the open like that, plain and clinical, as though it were a clue in one of the detective novels she read in the holidays. She folded her arms against the draught from the window and looked out at the lawn, where a pair of Ravenclaws were trudging down toward the greenhouses with their scarves wrapped round their faces, and she tried to find words for the thing she'd been feeling, which wasn't certainty so much as a stubborn refusal to be certain.
"It does seem strange," she said at last. "I'm not saying it doesn't. But think about what he actually said back there, Ron. He wasn't saying Muggle-borns shouldn't be here. He was saying the opposite. He stood up in front of the whole class and told everyone the Heir of Slytherin business was built on something that wasn't even true. If he wanted to purge the school of Muggle-borns, why would he tell all the Slytherins that Slytherin never wanted them gone? That's the last thing the Heir would want them to hear."
"Maybe he's being clever," Ron said. "Throwing us off."
"Maybe. But he didn't have to say anything at all. Nobody asked him. And he was horrible to Justin, but he wasn't horrible to him because Justin's Muggle-born, he was horrible to him because Justin was being a prat about Eton." She hesitated, then added, more quietly, "And on the staircase, after Filch, he told me that if I heard it again I should run the other way. He said it was hunting. That's not what you'd say if you were the one doing the hunting, is it?"
Ron stared at her. "Hang on. When did he say that?"
"That night. When you two went up ahead."
"You didn't tell us that."
"I'm telling you now." She felt her face going hot and didn't quite know why. "I'm just saying I don't think we know. That's all."
"Harriet's right that we can't be sure," Hermione said, with a quick glance at Ron that was half apology and half warning. "We can't, not really. We don't have any proof. We've got a feeling and a coincidence and some very strange family history." She frowned. "Which I still don't understand. Ron, what actually is a Bloodthorne? I mean, I know what Percy said in the common room, about them being royalty and ruling from the shadows, but if he's a royal, is he a prince? Is there a king somewhere? Who are his parents? It doesn't make any sense to me. Nobody in America has a king."
Ron, to Harriet's surprise, looked pleased to be asked. He'd been spending more time with Percy than usual that week, mostly because Percy kept cornering him in the common room to lecture him about not getting involved in anything, and somewhere in among the lectures Ron had clearly managed to soak up rather more than he'd let on.
"Percy reckons nobody really knows," he said. "That's the thing about them. They just don't show up. He says he's either a prince, like proper next in line, or he's from one of the branch families, cousins or whatever, the ones that carry the name but aren't the main line. There's loads of them, apparently, or there might be. Percy says even Dad wouldn't know which. But either way it doesn't really matter, because the name's the name, and nobody's allowed to say it if they haven't got it. You heard Percy. You get cursed."
"And they really rule America?" Hermione said. "In secret? That's absurd. America had a revolution precisely so it wouldn't have a king."
"Yeah, well, that's the other thing." Ron lowered his voice, though there was nobody in earshot except the suit of armour. "Percy says the revolution, the Muggle one, wasn't really what Muggles think it was. He says it was a sort of cover. Underneath it was a wizard war, a proper civil war between the Bloods and the Bloodthornes, the old royal lot and the American branch, and the Bloodthornes won, and the Muggle bit was just what everyone else saw happening on top. And then after it was over," and here Ron's face took on the expression of someone telling a ghost story he only half believed, "the place they lived, the Lostlands, it just went. Poof. Gone. Percy says it used to be a real place. Like, on maps. People knew where it was. People went there. And then one day it wasn't anywhere any more, and nobody could remember where it'd been, and that's why it's called the Lostlands. 'Cause it's lost. Percy says nobody knows how they did it."
Hermione opened her mouth, closed it, and opened it again. "That's not possible. You can't just make a whole country disappear."
"Tell that to the Bloodthornes," Ron said darkly.
There was a pause. Harriet found she was thinking about Lucian's face when he'd talked about Slytherin, not bored and not amused but careful, and about a country that had vanished off every map, and about how strange it must be to come from a place that the rest of the world had forgotten.
"So what do we do?" she said at last. "If we can't prove it either way."
"We could ask Crabbe and Goyle," Ron said at once. "Corner them somewhere. They're in his dormitory. They'll have heard him talking. They follow Malfoy round like a pair of trolls with a bad sense of direction, they'll know if she's in on it, and they'll know if he is. They're not exactly going to be hard to crack."
"Don't be silly, Ron," Hermione said. "They'd never tell us anything. They're not that stupid. Well, they are that stupid, but not about this. They'd go straight back to Malfoy and tell her we'd been asking, and then she'd know we suspected her, and so would he." She stopped, and Harriet saw her expression change, saw the frown smooth out into the look she got just before she said something that was going to involve a great deal of reading. "But you're right that they'd know. And if we can't make them tell us," she said slowly, "perhaps we could be them."
Ron looked at Harriet. Harriet looked at Ron.
"I think," Ron said, "she's finally cracked."
"I'll explain in the library," said Hermione, already walking.
The library at that hour of the afternoon was nearly empty, which was the only reason Madam Pince didn't throw them out in the first five minutes, because Ron kept forgetting to whisper. Hermione led them to a table at the very back, behind the last row of shelves before the Restricted Section, where the lamps were dim and the only other occupant was a sixth-year Ravenclaw asleep on a stack of Arithmancy texts with his mouth open, and she sat them down and leaned across the table and explained it to them in a rapid, determined undertone, with her hands spread flat on the wood as if she were holding it down.
"It's called Polyjuice Potion," she said. "I read about it last year. It's in a book called Moste Potente Potions, and it lets you turn into somebody else. Exactly into them. Their face, their voice, everything. You add a bit of the person you want to become, a hair usually, and then you drink it and for an hour you're them. So if we were Crabbe and Goyle, we could walk straight into the Slytherin common room and ask Malfoy anything we liked, and she'd tell us, because she'd think she was talking to her friends. And we could listen to what they all say about him, too. If he's the Heir, they'll know it. If he isn't, they'll know that."
"There's three of us," Harriet pointed out. "And only one Crabbe and one Goyle."
Hermione had clearly already thought about this. "Pansy Parkinson," she said. "She's always with Malfoy. Nobody would think twice about her being in the common room. I'll be her."
Ron made a face as though he'd swallowed a slug, which, given the year he'd had, wasn't entirely a figure of speech. "I've got to be Goyle? For an hour?"
"Or Crabbe."
"That's not better, Hermione."
"It's complicated, though," Hermione went on, ignoring him. "It's the most complicated potion I've ever heard of. Some of the ingredients we'll need to get from Snape's private stores, and some of them have to be gathered at the full moon, and the lacewing flies have to be stewed for twenty-one days." She took a breath. "If everything goes right, it'll take about a month to make."
"A month?" Ron hissed, so loudly that the sleeping Ravenclaw stirred and muttered something about logarithms. "Hermione, if Malfoy's the Heir of Slytherin, or him, or whoever it is, they could have half the Muggle-borns in the school done in by then."
"I know," said Hermione, and for the first time all afternoon she looked frightened. "But it's the best idea we've got. Unless you've got a better one."
Ron hadn't. Neither had Harriet. They sat there in the dim lamplight for a while without saying anything, listening to the Ravenclaw snore, and Harriet looked down at her own hands on the table and found herself hoping, more than she'd have admitted to either of them, that when they finally got into that common room, they'd find out it wasn't him.
...
The morning of the match dawned cold and bright, with a hard frost on the grass and a sky so clear and pale it looked as if it'd been scrubbed, and Draca Malfoy woke before anyone else in the second-year girls' dormitory and lay staring up at the green silk of her bed hangings with her heart already going like a hummingbird's. She'd been awake on and off half the night. She hadn't dreamed about the Snitch, which she'd half expected, or about Potter, which she'd fully expected. She'd dreamed, confusingly, about the Great Hall on the night of the Sorting, about the candles dimming and the ghosts bowing and the whole school rising to its feet while a boy in a borrowed robe walked down the middle of it without looking at anyone, and she'd woken feeling cross and unsettled and unable to say why.
She dressed in her Quidditch robes slowly and carefully, the way her father had taught her to dress for anything that mattered, and she stood in front of the long mirror by the door and looked at herself. The green suited her. It always had. Her hair was scraped back tight from her face, and her new broom stood against the wall beside the mirror, sleek and black and gleaming, a Nimbus Two Thousand and One, the finest racing broom money could buy, and money had bought it, along with six others just like it, so that the whole Slytherin team would fly on the best brooms in the school. She knew what the Gryffindors said about that. She knew what Weasley said, and Granger, and Potter. That she'd bought her way onto the team. That she wasn't really any good.
Well, today she'd show them. Today she'd show the whole school. She'd catch the Snitch out from under Harriet Potter's nose in front of every house, and they'd all see that the famous Girl Who Lived was just a girl on a broom, and not a very special one, and that Draca Malfoy was every bit as good as she was. Better. Father would hear about it by the end of the day. Vivienne would hear about it. Everyone would.
And if, somewhere at the very bottom of her, beneath all the fierce bright certainty, there was a picture of a scarred face in the stands turning to watch her fly, with something in it that wasn't boredom and wasn't mockery, something that might almost have been respect, she didn't look at it closely. She didn't look at it at all. She picked up her broom and went down to breakfast and ate half a slice of toast and told Pansy, three times, that she wasn't nervous.
Lucian wasn't at breakfast. She noticed that, and was annoyed with herself for noticing, and was more annoyed when she walked out onto the pitch an hour later with the rest of the team and the roar of the crowd broke over her like a wave and her eyes went, before she could stop them, straight to the Slytherin stands to look for him.
He was there. He was sitting near the top, a little apart from everyone else, with his collar turned up against the cold and his elbows on his knees, and he wasn't wearing a scarf in house colours or waving a banner or doing anything at all except watching. She couldn't tell if he was watching her. She told herself she didn't care.
Across the pitch the Gryffindors walked out in their scarlet, and there was Potter at the front of them with her broom over her shoulder and her untidy black hair whipping round her face in the wind, and she wasn't looking at the stands at all. She was looking up, at the sky, with the narrow, focused expression of someone who'd already forgotten that there was a crowd. Draca hated her for it. She hated how easy it looked. She hated that Potter didn't seem to want anything except to win, as though winning were simple and clean and not tangled up with a hundred other things you couldn't say out loud.
Madam Hooch blew her whistle. Fourteen brooms rose into the air.
For Harriet, the first ten minutes of the match were almost perfect. The wind was cold and sharp in her face and the pitch spread out beneath her in a great green oval, and the noise of the crowd fell away into a far-off rushing like the sea, and for a little while there was nothing in the world except the sky and the broom and the search for a glint of gold. She didn't think about the Chamber, or Filch, or the voice in the walls, or the way Ron and Hermione kept glancing at each other when Lucian's name came up. She didn't think about Lucian at all. Slytherin were already three goals up, their new brooms carrying them past the Gryffindor Chasers as though they were standing still, and Oliver Wood was bellowing himself hoarse below her, but she couldn't do anything about that, so she climbed higher, circling, scanning, waiting.
Then a Bludger came at her head like a cannonball, and she dropped six feet in a heartbeat and felt it go past so close it ruffled her hair.
"Close one, Harriet!" George Weasley shouted, streaking past with his bat raised, and he walloped the Bludger hard toward Adrian Pucey. Harriet watched it fly off. Halfway to Pucey it stopped dead in the air, changed direction, and came straight back at her.
She dived. It followed.
Up in the Slytherin stands, Lucian had stopped pretending to be bored.
He'd been watching the match the way he watched most things at Hogwarts, with half his attention and the other half somewhere else, thinking about the seventh troll report he still had to finish for Snape because hagrid kept insisting the colony was up to something, and about the look on McGonagall's face after class, when she'd asked him in a low voice where he'd learned what he'd said and he'd told her, as gently as he could, that it was something his sister used to tell him at bedtime. He'd not been especially interested in Quidditch. He'd flown faster, higher and more dangerously than anyone on this pitch before he was ten, on brooms he'd learned to hate, and the sight of fourteen children chasing balls round a field on what he privately considered to be very nice furniture didn't do much for him. Draca flew well. He'd noticed that, with some surprise. She flew tight and clean and angry, and she had good instincts and didn't waste movement, and if she'd been a bit less determined to prove something she'd have been better still. But it was Potter he'd been watching for the last two minutes, and not because of how she flew. It was because of what was chasing her.
He knew how Bludgers were supposed to move. Everyone did. They were charmed to hit the nearest player, to go wherever there was a body, and they did it with a kind of blind, stupid enthusiasm, bouncing from target to target like an angry dog in a yard full of sheep. This one wasn't doing that. This one had been batted away by the Weasley twins four times now, hard enough to send it halfway across the pitch, and every single time it'd stopped, hung for a moment in the air as if it were reorienting itself, and come straight back for Harriet Potter. It went past Pucey. It went past Flint, who was well within range and practically waving at it. It ignored everyone else on the pitch. It was going for her and only her, with a precision and persistence that no Bludger Lucian had ever heard of had any business possessing.
That wasn't a ball with a fault in its charms. That was a ball that had been told what to do.
He was on his feet before he'd entirely decided to be. Several Slytherins turned to stare at him as he started down the steps, and he ignored them, threading his way down through the packed stand with his eyes on the sky, trying to work out how long it'd take him to get down to the pitch and whether there was any way he could stop the thing without half the school seeing him do it. The Weasleys had closed in either side of Potter now and were batting the Bludger away every time it came near, which was keeping her alive but leaving the rest of their team wide open, and Slytherin had scored twice more, and there was a ripple of outrage through the Gryffindor stands as people began to notice what was happening. Lucian took the steps two at a time. At the bottom of the stand, where the wooden supports crossed in a dim lattice beneath the seats and the shadows smelled of damp timber and trodden grass, he stopped dead.
There was something under the stand.
It was crouching behind one of the crossbeams with its enormous ears flattened against its skull and its huge, tennis-ball eyes fixed on the sky above the pitch, and it was hiding very badly indeed. It was a house-elf, Lucian realised, though not one he'd seen in the castle kitchens, wrapped in something filthy that looked as though it had once been a pillowcase, and it was so absorbed in watching the match that it hadn't heard him come down the steps. Its long, thin fingers were twisting together in front of it. Every time the Bludger swerved back toward Harriet it gave a little moan and pressed its knuckles to its mouth, and every time it was knocked away again it whispered something to itself that sounded like oh, Harriet Potter must go home, Harriet Potter must go home.
Lucian looked at it for a long moment. Then he said, without raising his voice or turning his head, "Talion."
There was no crack. There never was with Talion, unless he wanted there to be. The air beside the crossbeam simply folded, the way a curtain folds when someone steps through it, and the High Elf was standing there in his dark coat with his white hair perfectly still in the wind, and before the house-elf had even registered that anything had changed, one of Talion's long hands had closed gently but completely around the back of its pillowcase.
The elf turned its head. It saw Talion. It went absolutely rigid, every inch of its small body seizing up at once, and its eyes, already enormous, grew so wide that Lucian half wondered if they'd fall out.
Then it began to scream.
It wasn't a loud scream, which was the only mercy, because the crowd overhead was making so much noise that nobody could've heard it anyway. It was a thin, high, keening wail, and it came with a frantic, flailing struggle, as the elf twisted and kicked and tried with all its might to vanish and found, to its evident horror, that it couldn't. Talion's grip didn't tighten. It didn't need to. Whatever magic house-elves used to slip from place to place, it seemed it wasn't much use when the hand holding you belonged to something older than your entire race.
"A High One," the elf was gasping, "a High One, a High One, oh, Dobby is caught by a High One, Dobby didn't know, Dobby didn't think there was any High Ones left in all the world—"
"There's one," said Lucian. "His name's Talion. He won't hurt you. Neither will I." He crouched down so that his face was on a level with the elf's, the way he'd crouch for a frightened animal in the Lostlands woods, slow and open-handed, keeping his voice low and even. "You're Dobby, then. Hello, Dobby. I'm Lucian."
Dobby looked at him. Dobby looked at his scar. And Lucian, who'd been looked at with fear by a great many people in his life, had never seen a face go quite so grey quite so quickly.
"Dobby knows who you is," the elf whispered. Its voice had dropped to almost nothing. "Dobby has heard them talking. Dobby has heard about the young lord in the castle. The Bloodthorne." It said the word as though it hurt its mouth. "Oh, Dobby is a bad elf, a wicked elf, Dobby should not be here, Dobby should not be seen, Dobby must iron his hands for this—"
"You're not going to iron anything," Lucian said. "I'm not angry with you. I'd just like to know why you're hiding under the stands talking to yourself about Harriet Potter while a Bludger tries to take her head off." He glanced up through the slats at the sky, where Harriet was corkscrewing wildly with the ball inches behind her, and then back at Dobby. "That's your doing, isn't it? You charmed it."
Dobby's ears drooped until they were almost touching his shoulders. For a moment Lucian thought he'd refuse to answer. Then the whole small body seemed to sag in Talion's grip, and when the elf spoke again, it was in a rush, the words tumbling out of him as though he'd been holding them back for months and had finally run out of strength.
"Dobby only wants Harriet Potter to go home," he said miserably. "Dobby is trying and trying to make her go. Dobby stopped her letters. Dobby tried to close the barrier to the station, yet it did not work, and still she comes, and still she stays, and now the castle is not safe, it is not safe, terrible things is happening and terrible things is going to happen, and Harriet Potter must not be here when they does. If Harriet Potter is hurt, only a little, only enough to send her home—"
"What terrible things?" Talion asked. It was the first time he'd spoken. His voice was perfectly calm and perfectly flat, and Dobby flinched from it as if it'd been a raised hand.
"Dobby cannot say, sir, Dobby cannot, Dobby is not allowed—"
"Who won't allow it?" Lucian said gently. "Who do you belong to, Dobby?"
Dobby's eyes went wide and wet and terrified, and his mouth worked, and he shook his head so hard his ears flapped. But Lucian saw something in his face, the frantic look of someone torn in half by two different kinds of loyalty, and he remembered a sneering, silver-headed cane in Flourish and Blotts and a man who'd examined Harriet's scar like a jeweller examining a stone, and he made a guess.
"Lord Malfoy," he said quietly.
Dobby made a strangled sound. He didn't say yes. He didn't need to. His whole body flinched as though the name were a blow, and his hands flew up to cover his mouth, and then, as though some dam inside him had finally broken, he whispered through his fingers, "Dobby's master has put something in the school. Something wicked. Something old. Dobby heard him say it was time, that the school would be cleansed, that it would all happen again like before. Dobby cannot say what, Dobby must not say, but it is here, young lord, it is here in the castle, and it is terrible, and Harriet Potter must go home." He was crying openly now. "Dobby must punish himself, Dobby has said too much, oh, Dobby is a bad elf, a wicked, wicked elf—"
Above them the crowd let out a huge, ragged gasp, the sound of a whole stadium drawing breath at once, and then a roar that shook the boards over their heads.
Lucian looked at Talion. Talion looked back at him, his expression unchanged, but something in the tilt of his head asked the question, and Lucian answered it with a small nod.
"Let him go," he said. "Dobby, listen to me. Don't punish yourself. You didn't tell me anything I wasn't already starting to guess. And don't send any more Bludgers after Harriet Potter, because if you do, I'll know, and Talion will come and find you, and he won't let go next time." He held the elf's gaze. "Do you understand me?"
Dobby nodded frantically, and Talion opened his hand, and with a crack like a breaking twig the house-elf was gone. Talion straightened his cuff.
"Your Grace," he said quietly, "Lucius Malfoy."
"I know." Lucian was already moving. "Tell Drago. Not everything. Just that something's been brought into the school, and who brought it. And find out what you can about the last time the Chamber was opened. Quietly."
"It will be done." The air folded again, and Talion was gone.
By the time Lucian came out from under the stand into the cold, bright noise of the pitch, it was already over. He could tell from the sound of it. The Gryffindor stands were on their feet, screaming themselves hoarse, and the Slytherin stands had gone sullen and loud in a different way, and people were spilling down onto the grass from every side and converging on two places at once. One knot of green was gathering near the Slytherin end, around a figure sprawled on the frozen turf with a broken black broom beside her. The other, much larger and much louder and almost entirely scarlet, was crowding around a small figure on the ground near the middle of the pitch, and above the heads of the people around her, Lucian could just see a hand raised in the air, and in the hand, a tiny struggling glint of gold.
He went to the Slytherins first. He wasn't entirely sure why. Perhaps it was because they were nearer. Perhaps it was because he'd seen Draca's face that morning, pale and set at the breakfast table, and had known exactly what she'd been telling herself. She was sitting up when he reached her, which was something, with Flint and Pucey hovering over her and Madam Hooch kneeling at her side, and she was clutching her left wrist against her chest and there was a long graze down one cheek and grass in her hair, and her face was a mask of furious, humiliated misery. From what he could gather from the people round her, she'd been neck and neck with Potter in a dive for the Snitch, and when Potter had pulled up at the last second with the gold in her hand, Draca hadn't, and she'd ploughed into the turf at full speed and tumbled end over end for twenty feet.
"Sprained," Madam Hooch was saying briskly, prodding at the wrist. "Not broken. You'll live, Miss Malfoy. Bumps and scrapes, nothing Madam Pomfrey can't mend in five minutes."
Lucian crouched down beside her. Draca's eyes flew to his face and then away again, and her cheeks went a dull, blotchy red under the grass stains.
"You all right?" he asked.
"I'm fine." Her voice was thick. "I'm perfectly fine. I don't need anyone fussing."
"I'm not fussing. I'm asking." He looked at the wrist, then at the graze, then at the broom lying in two pieces on the grass a few feet away, and he found that he wasn't quite as indifferent to the sight as he'd have expected. "You flew well, you know. Better than anybody else on your team. You'd have had it if you hadn't been so busy watching her instead of the Snitch."
Draca stared at him. For a second her mouth opened, and something moved across her face that wasn't anger at all, something raw and startled and very young. Then it was gone, and her chin came up, and she said icily, "I don't need your advice, Bloodthorne."
"No," Lucian agreed, standing up. "You probably don't. Get your wrist seen to." And he turned and walked away toward the other crowd, and so didn't see her watch him go, or the way her face slowly crumpled as she realised where he was going.
The crowd round Harriet was ten deep and almost entirely Gryffindor, and the noise was extraordinary. Fred and George were thumping each other on the back. Oliver Wood was on his knees in the grass with tears streaming down his face, telling anyone who'd listen that he'd never seen anything like it in his life. Ron and Hermione had pushed their way to the front and were kneeling at Harriet's side, and Harriet herself was lying flat on her back on the frozen turf with the Snitch still clutched in her left hand and her right arm lying beside her at an angle that made Lucian's stomach turn. The Bludger, it seemed, had caught her at last. It'd broken her arm just above the elbow at the very moment she'd lunged for the Snitch, and she'd caught it anyway, one-handed, and then hit the ground. She was very pale and her jaw was clenched tight against the pain, but her eyes were open and focused, and she was trying very hard not to cry in front of the whole school.
Lucian started to push his way through. He'd got about halfway when a voice rang out over the noise, bright and confident and horribly familiar.
"Stand back, everyone, stand back, give her room! Let me through, I'm a teacher!"
Gilderoy Lockhart swept through the crowd in robes of jade green, beaming, his wand already drawn. He knelt beside Harriet with a great flourish of his cloak, pushed his sleeves up to the elbow, and peered down at her arm with an expression of tremendous professional interest.
"Oh, dear me," he said. "Oh, dear, oh dear. Nasty break, that. Nasty. Not to worry, Harriet, not to worry. I'll have that fixed for you in a jiffy. A simple charm. I've used it countless times."
"No," Harriet said, through her teeth. She was shaking her head, as much as she could from the ground. "No, I don't want you to. I'll go to the hospital wing, Madam Pomfrey can—"
"Oh, Harriet, let him," Hermione said breathlessly. She'd gone pink, and she was gazing at Lockhart with shining eyes. "He knows what he's doing, he must've done it hundreds of times, it's in his books—"
"Hermione, I don't want—"
"She should really see Madam Pomfrey, Professor," Colin Creevey piped up from somewhere at the back, waving his camera.
"Nonsense, nonsense," Lockhart said heartily, and before Harriet could pull away, before anyone could stop him, he'd twirled his wand in a great showy circle and pointed it straight at her arm.
There was a horrible sensation, Harriet would say afterward, as though something were starting at her shoulder and travelling slowly down toward her fingertips, like the feeling of a balloon being let down, and then nothing. There was a moment of total silence. Then somebody in the crowd screamed. Harriet looked down at her arm and saw that it wasn't broken any more. It wasn't anything any more. It hung from her shoulder like a long, limp, flesh-coloured rubber glove, and when she tried to move her fingers, they flopped back and forth like wet ribbon, and she couldn't feel a single bone in it from her shoulder to her wrist.
"Ah," said Lockhart. "Yes. Well. That can sometimes happen. But the point is, the bones are no longer broken, that's the thing to bear in mind—"
"You removed them."
The voice wasn't loud. It cut through the rising noise of the crowd anyway, and people turned to see where it had come from, and the press of Gryffindors parted in a ragged line to let the speaker through. Lucian stepped into the space beside Harriet and looked down at her arm, and his face had gone very still. Then he looked up at Lockhart.
"You removed her bones," he said again, quite calmly, as if he were checking that he'd understood a particularly unlikely story. "She told you no. She said it twice, in front of everybody, and you went ahead and did it anyway, and you've taken every bone out of her arm. Not set them. Not mended them. Taken them out. Professor, I've watched a hippogriff with a broken wing get better care from a centaur foal with a bucket and a stick."
Lockhart's smile flickered. "Now, Mr Bloodthorne, I hardly think—"
"No," Lucian said, "you hardly do, I've noticed." There was a choked noise from somewhere behind him that might have been Fred Weasley. "There are first-years in this crowd who know you don't cast a healing charm on a broken arm you haven't even looked at properly. There are first-years who know you take a girl with a broken arm to the hospital wing, which is about four hundred yards that way and has a qualified healer in it who'd have had her sorted in ten minutes. You didn't do either. You saw a camera and a crowd and you thought you'd put on a show, and now she's got to spend the night growing an entire arm's worth of bone back because you wanted your picture taken." He tilted his head. "I'd ask whether you learned that technique in the Balkans, with the goatherds, but I'm genuinely afraid of what you'd say."
The silence that followed was enormous. Somebody snorted, and turned it into a cough. Colin Creevey, Lucian noticed, had very slowly lowered his camera. Lockhart had gone a strange, uneven colour, pink in patches and white in between, and his smile was still there, fixed in place like a painting, but his eyes had gone small and hard and his hand had tightened on his wand until the knuckles showed. For just a moment, looking at Lucian, there was something in his face that wasn't charming at all.
"Well," he said, in a voice that was a fraction too high. "Well, I'm sure Madam Pomfrey will be able to, ah, tidy things up a bit. Ron, Hermione, perhaps you'd escort Harriet up to the hospital wing? Splendid. Splendid." And he got up, brushed the grass very carefully off his knees, and walked away through the crowd without looking back.
Lucian watched him go. Then he crouched beside Harriet.
"Can you walk?"
"I think so." Her voice was small and strained. She was staring up at him with a very odd expression, and her face, which had been chalk-white a moment before, had gone suddenly and brilliantly red, all the way up to the scar on her forehead. Lucian assumed it was the shock. "Thanks," she said. "For that. You didn't have to."
"Somebody had to," Lucian said, and held out a hand to help her up with her good arm, entirely failing to notice that Ron was glaring at him and that Hermione was staring at the place where Lockhart had been with the stricken look of someone who'd just watched a statue fall over.
...
Madam Pomfrey was not pleased.
"He should've brought her straight to me!" she said, holding up the limp, rubbery remains of Harriet's arm with an expression of profound outrage. "I can mend bones in a second, but growing them back—" She broke off, pressed her lips together, and went to fetch a large bottle labelled Skele-Gro with the air of a woman who was mentally composing a very long letter to the Headmaster.
The hospital wing was long and white and quiet, with tall windows down one side through which the last of the afternoon sun was slanting in pale gold bars across the floor. Harriet had been put to bed at the far end, with Ron and Hermione hovering at her bedside and most of the Gryffindor team crowded round the foot of it, still muddy and triumphant and smelling of grass and sweat. Draca had been mended in about four minutes, exactly as Madam Hooch had said, her wrist bound and her graze vanished with a dab of something orange, but Madam Pomfrey had insisted she stay and rest for an hour in case she'd hit her head, and so she was sitting propped up against her pillows at the other end of the ward with Pansy on one side of her and a box of Chocolate Frogs on the other, scowling at the ceiling.
Lucian stopped by her bed first. He didn't stay long. He asked how the wrist was, and she told him it was fine in a tone that made it clear she didn't want to discuss it, and he told her the graze had gone and she looked like herself again, which made Pansy giggle and Draca go red, and then he said he was glad she was all right and he'd see her in the common room, and he moved on. It couldn't have taken more than a minute. Draca told herself afterward that she didn't care that it had been so short. She told herself she didn't care that he walked straight down the ward without stopping, past all the empty beds, to where the Gryffindors were gathered at the far end, and that the Gryffindor team parted for him as if they'd been expecting him. She told herself she didn't care that she could hear Potter's voice, low and tired, and then his, and then, quite distinctly, the sound of Potter laughing, and him laughing too.
She ate four Chocolate Frogs in a row without tasting any of them and didn't hear a word Pansy said.
At the other end of the ward, Harriet was looking at the bottle of Skele-Gro with deep misgiving. Madam Pomfrey had poured out a whole beaker of it, and it was smoking gently, and it smelled the way she imagined burned feathers mixed with old socks might smell if they'd been left in a cupboard for a year.
"You're going to have a rough night," Madam Pomfrey said, handing it to her. "Regrowing bones is a nasty business. Drink it all, please, Miss Potter. All of it."
Harriet drank it. It burned all the way down, and she coughed and spluttered and nearly brought it back up again, and her eyes streamed so badly she couldn't see for a moment. When she'd stopped coughing, Lucian was standing at the end of her bed with his hands in his pockets, looking at her with something that wasn't quite a smile.
"That bad?"
"Worse," Harriet croaked. "It tastes like something died in it."
"Something probably did," Lucian said. "Most good medicine's made that way." He glanced at the Gryffindor team, who'd gone quiet and were watching him with a mixture of curiosity and wariness, and then at Ron, who was still glaring, and then back at Harriet. "You caught it with one arm," he said. "With a broken arm. While a Bludger was trying to kill you. I've seen people fly for a living do less than that."
Harriet felt her face going hot again and wished heartily that it would stop doing that. "It wasn't trying to kill me," she said. "It was just a rogue Bludger. Fred said it must've been tampered with."
Lucian was quiet for a moment. Something passed across his face that she couldn't read, a sort of stillness, as though he were weighing whether or not to say something.
"Maybe," he said at last. "Maybe it was." Then the stillness was gone and he was smiling again, the easy, teasing smile she'd first seen on the train. "Either way, don't let Lockhart anywhere near the rest of you. I'd like you to still have a skeleton by Christmas."
That made her laugh, despite herself, and the laugh hurt her ribs, and he laughed too, quietly, and for a moment the whole long white ward felt warmer than it had any right to.
Madam Pomfrey came bustling back and told everyone that Miss Potter needed rest, not a party, and began shooing the Quidditch team out with brisk flaps of her hands. Lucian went with them. He didn't look back at Harriet as he left, and he didn't look back at Draca, though he felt both of them watching him go.
Outside the hospital wing, the corridor was cold and empty and full of the long blue shadows of late afternoon. Lucian walked slowly. He let the Gryffindors draw ahead of him, their voices fading down the stairs, until he was alone with the sound of his own footsteps and the faint, far-off murmur of the castle settling around him.
Something old, the elf had said. Something wicked. Something Lord Malfoy had brought into the school, the man who'd smiled so smoothly at him in Flourish and Blotts and examined Harriet Potter's scar like a man pricing a jewel. It would all happen again like before. Lucian turned the words over the way he'd turn over a strange track in the forest, looking for the shape of the thing that had left it. Before meant there'd been a last time. A last time meant somebody in this castle remembered it, or had tried very hard to forget. And whatever had been brought in, it had something to do with the voice in the walls, and the writing in blood, and a cat hanging stiff and staring from a torch bracket, and a Gryffindor girl who could hear what nobody else could.
He'd come to Hogwarts because his sister had asked him to, and because Talion had decided, and because he'd made a promise. He'd expected to be bored. He'd expected a year of pigeons and goblets and pompous professors and children who didn't know what they were looking at. He hadn't expected any of this.
At the top of the stairs he paused by a tall window and looked out across the darkening grounds toward the forest, black against a sky turning slowly to violet, and he found that he was thinking, not for the first time, that whatever was moving through the old stone bones of this castle, it'd chosen a very bad year to wake up.