Lucian didn't go back to the hut at once.
He stood on the grass beside the empty track with Fang heavy against his leg and the last sound of the carriage already gone from the gates, and for a little while that was all he could do, because if he moved, if he turned and walked down toward the windows the way Hagrid had told him to, then the going would be finished, and Hagrid would be really gone, and the night would have to become whatever it was going to become next. Dumbledore was still a little way off, a tall, dark shape in the May dark, not speaking, not coming any closer, as if he understood that some silences weren't improved by lemon drops. Lucius had already started back toward the castle, the walking stick ticking against the path, and he never looked around. Lucian was glad of that, at least. He had no wish, just then, to look at Lord Malfoy either.
Fang made a low, unhappy sound, and Lucian put his hand down and found the place between the ears, and said, quietly, "I know. Come on. He asked us to."
He turned, at last, and started back along the grass toward the hut, with the forest rising on his left, black and near, and the castle's lights a cold scatter up the slope to his right, and he had gone perhaps twenty yards, no more, when a movement at the edge of his sight pulled his head around.
Two figures had come off the path.
They were a little behind him and to the left, where the last of the lawn gave way to the rough ground that ran down toward the trees, and they hadn't been there a moment ago, or if they had been, he'd missed them, which, given the night he had just had, was a thought he had no time to finish. They were visible now. A boy and a girl, second-years, the girl's dark hair coming loose, the boy's hair catching what little light there was and going red with it, and they were moving, not back toward the castle, and not toward the hut, but straight for the tree line, at a quick, purposeful walk that was trying not to be a run, and Lucian stopped dead, and looked at them, and felt the groan he had given in the hut come back up through him like a second, worse one.
Potter and Weasley.
Of course it was Potter and Weasley. Of course Hagrid had been talking to the air. Of course the air had been two Gryffindors under a cloak Lucian hadn't seen, because he had been busy making the Minister kneel and hadn't, apparently, had a spare eye for the space beside a hanging ham. He should have known. Hagrid had looked at that corner of the room when he said it. Follow the spiders. Lucian had thought it was a piece of Hagrid's general, hopeless advice, thrown out at the dark because the dark was all he had left to tell. It hadn't been. It had been a direction, and the two of them were taking it, right now, into a forest Lucian knew too well, toward a colony he had already walked into once and come out of looking like a parcel that had been badly wrapped, and they were going, from the way they were walking, as if they thought a few spiders might have a quiet conversation for them and then show them the way home.
"You've got to be joking," he said, under his breath, and Fang, who had started to follow the two figures with the hopeful, stupid loyalty of a dog who hadn't understood the night at all, gave a short bark, and Lucian put a hand on his collar and held him. "No. Not you. Back to the hut. Go on. Go."
Fang looked at him, wounded, and Lucian pointed, firmly, at the glowing windows, and the boarhound, after a last, unhappy huff, turned and trotted down toward the door, his claws clicking on the packed earth, and Lucian waited until he had seen the great head push the latch and the tail disappear inside, and then he looked back at the trees.
They were almost at the edge already. Harriet's cloak, or whatever they had been under, was a dark fold over her arm now, and Ron was talking, a low, carrying mutter that Lucian couldn't quite catch, and then they went in, between two of the nearer oaks, and the forest took them the way it took anyone who didn't know how to be taken slowly, and Lucian stood on the grass for one more second, with Hagrid's instruction still sitting in him, go back to the hut, see Fang settled, see to yourself, and then he swore, once, quietly, and he went after them.
He chose not to call out. Calling out would only have made them run, and running in that forest, in the dark, toward the thing they were walking toward, was a good way to arrive as food instead of as visitors. He followed the way he followed a trail, at a steady, unhurried pace that was still faster than theirs, because he knew the ground and they didn't, and because he had been this way before, in daylight, with Hagrid talking beside him, and the path, such as it was, was still printed in him. The trees closed over his head. The last of the castle light went out behind the leaves. The air changed, the way it always changed when you left the grounds, becoming older and damper and full of the small, listening quiet of a place that had never been planted by anyone, and Lucian moved through it with his hands free and the locket a familiar weight against his chest, and he thought, not for the first time that night, that he would have given a good deal to be sitting in a window with a girl who wouldn't talk, and not doing this.
Ahead of him, not far, he could hear them. Twigs. A muttered curse that was definitely Weasley. Harriet's voice, low and even, telling him to watch the roots, to keep left, to look, there, a spider, a real one, going the same way they were. They were doing it properly, Lucian had to give them that. They had found a spider and they were following it, just as Hagrid had said, and the spider, which would be one of the smaller scouts, the ones the colony sent out along the edges, was leading them exactly where Lucian had been afraid it would, down off the used paths, into the thicker dark, toward the bowl of land where the trees grew up like the ribs of a wreck and the air went silk-thick and sweet and wrong.
He let them stay ahead. If he came up on them now they would argue, or they would startle, or Weasley would do something loud, and the colony had no use for loud things that weren't its own. Better to be close. Better to be there when the path ran out.
The forest went on. A night bird called once, far off, and never called again. Something large moved in the undergrowth to Lucian's right and then went still, and he murmured a word to it as he passed, a soft, ordinary word in the old tongue, and the something, whatever it was, decided he wasn't worth the trouble, and the leaves settled, and he went on, and ahead of him Harriet said, very quietly, "Ron. Look."
---
They had been walking for what felt, to Ron, like a year, and for what was, Harriet knew, because she had been counting it the way she counted things when she was trying not to be afraid, a little under a quarter of an hour, and the spider they were following, which had begun as a spider she could have put her hand over, was now the size of a terrier, and then the size of a badger, and was moving with a horrible, unhurried confidence through a part of the forest that had begun, some minutes back, to look as if it had been decorated by a mad person with a great deal of dirty grey thread.
"I don't like this," Ron said. He had said it four times already, and each time his voice had been a little thinner. "Harriet. I really don't like this. That thing isn't a normal spider. That thing is a spider that ate a normal spider and then ate the family. We should go back. We should go back and tell someone. McGonagall. Dumbledore. Anyone who isn't us."
"Dumbledore's leaving," Harriet said, without slowing. "And McGonagall's got a castle full of petrified people, and Hagrid told us to follow the spiders, and we're following them. Watch your head."
A curtain of web hung across the way, thick as washing, and Ron made a noise she would, on any other night, have saved to use against him later, and ducked, and came up with silk in his hair, and said, with feeling, "I hate this. I hate this, I hate the forest, I hate whoever thought this was a good idea, and if that thing turns around and looks at us I am going to be sick."
"It isn't looking at us," Harriet said. "It's leading us." She could hear, even as she said it, how little comfort there was in the distinction. The trees here were older, and farther apart, and the ground had begun to slope down into a wide, shallow hollow, and the silk was no longer only hanging. It was everywhere, strung from trunk to trunk in great, sagging sheets, and there were things in it, pale bundles the size of birds, and some the size of cats, and one, farther off, that she didn't look at long enough to name. Her wand was in her hand. She had no memory of taking it out. She had it up, and she said, "Lumos," in a voice that came out cleaner than she felt, and the end of the wand bloomed with a steady white light, and the hollow opened in front of them, and Ron stopped so suddenly she walked into his back.
It wasn't so much a clearing as a bowl, a great dip in the forest floor with trees standing around it like the posts of a ruined tent, and from every trunk, and from the branches high above, the silk came down and down and knitted itself into a dim, enormous, breathing dark, and in that dark, as her light found them, there were spiders.
Not one. Not a dozen. More than she could count in the first look, and then she stopped trying to count, because counting would have required her to keep looking at the legs, and the legs were everywhere, long and jointed and resting on the silk as if the air itself had grown knees. Some were the size of dogs. Some were larger. One, hanging in the nearer shadows, was the size of the car the Weasleys had flown to school, and Ron, who had seen that car from underneath, made a sound that wasn't a word, and grabbed Harriet's sleeve, and wouldn't let go.
"Back," he whispered. "Back, now, quietly, we can still—"
The spider they had followed, which had seemed so large on the path and was, in this company, almost modest, went on down into the bowl without looking around, and from the far end of the hollow, out of a dome of webbing so thick it looked like a second hill, something moved that made all the other movements go still.
Harriet held the light steady. She was proud of that, later, when she had time to be proud of anything. Her hand stayed steady. The light never jumped. It found, in the mouth of that dome, a set of eyes first, many of them, clustered and black and old, and then the rest, rising slowly out of the silk as if the dark itself were standing up, and the thing that came forward was so large that the car-sized spider in the shadows became, in a single, sickening correction, an ordinary animal, and Ron's hand on her sleeve became the only solid thing in the world.
It was a spider the way a mountain is a hill. The body of it, bristled and mottled with age, filled the mouth of the dome. The legs, when they settled, were like the trunks of the trees they were standing among. The eyes regarded them, all of them at once, with a slow, considering attention that was worse than hunger would have been, because hunger, at least, would have been simple, and this was a look that had been looking at the world for a very long time, and had never, in all that time, learned to find children charming.
When it spoke, the voice was thick, and strangely careful, as if speech were a tool it had been given once and had kept, out of loyalty, long after it had any use for tools.
"Who comes into my hollow with such blinding light?"
Ron had stopped breathing. Harriet could feel it in the grip on her sleeve. She swallowed, and she kept the wand up, and she made herself answer, because someone had to, and because she had come here for an answer, and because backing away now, with all those legs around the rim of the bowl, was a wish and not a plan.
"Hagrid sent us," she said. Her voice came out smaller than she wanted, and she put more into the next words, the way she did when a problem needed a clean first line. "Rubeus Hagrid. He told us to follow the spiders. He said you would know. About the Chamber. About what's been attacking the school."
The great spider went still, in a way that wasn't the still of a creature preparing to spring, but the still of a name landing in a deep place. The clustered eyes narrowed, or seemed to. Around the hollow, the other spiders shifted, a long, rustling adjustment, and Ron made another sound, and Harriet put her free hand over his without looking at him, and held on.
"Hagrid," the creature said, and the name, in that mouth, was almost fond. "My Hagrid. My friend. It has been many years since he has sent anyone to me. He doesn't come as he did. The forest has grown less kind, and he has grown... busy." A leg, enormous, pale, moved and settled again, nearer than it had been. "You are his, then. His children, of a kind. Come closer. I won't eat his children, if they have been sent. Come. Tell me what he asks."
Harriet had no wish to come closer. Every part of her that had ever been a small girl in a dark place was telling her to do the opposite. She took a step down into the bowl anyway, and then another, and Ron came with her because she still had his sleeve, or he still had hers, and the silk under their feet was damp and giving, and the light on her wand showed too much, and not enough, and the great spider lowered its head a fraction, as if to see them better, and the smell of it, old and dry and faintly sweet, came down around them like a cloth.
"We're not his children," Ron said, hoarsely, because Ron, even in terror, couldn't leave a wrong fact alone. "We're... we're from the school. Hogwarts. Harriet Potter and Ron Weasley. Hagrid's our friend. He was taken tonight. The Ministry took him. They think he opened the Chamber of Secrets. We know he didn't. He said you'd know the truth. He said to follow the spiders."
"Taken," the spider said. The word sat in the hollow for a moment, heavy, and the smaller ones around the rim stirred again, a restless, whispering movement of legs. "They have taken him again. They took him before. They blamed him for a death that wasn't his, and they drove him from the stone house, and they would have killed me, if they had found me, for I was only a child then, and they called me the monster." The clustered eyes gleamed in Harriet's light. "I am Aragog. I'm not the monster of the Chamber. Hagrid has told this. It has never been enough!" Aragog shouted
Harriet felt, through the fear, the clean click of a piece going into a place she had already made for it. Not a spider. Hagrid had been expelled for a spider, and the spider was here, old and huge and talking, and the girl who had died hadn't died of this. So something else had come out of the Chamber fifty years ago, and something else was coming out of it now, and Hagrid had sent them here to be told, at last, that the first answer had been the wrong one.
"What was it, then?" she said. She kept her voice even, the way she kept it even for a question in class when she already had half the answer and needed the rest. "If it wasn't you. If Hagrid didn't open the Chamber. What killed that girl? What's doing this now?"
Aragog's head moved, a slow, side-to-side consideration, and when he answered, the careful voice had gone darker.
"I never saw it," he said. " I heard it, in the walls of the stone house, in the time before they drove us out. A creature that doesn't walk as I walk, and doesn't hunt as I hunt, and that even my kind won't face. We fled from it, all of us who were there. We fled into the trees, and we haven't gone back, and we won't. Hagrid asked me what it was, and I couldn't tell him, only that it was old, and that it came from below, and that the girl who died had looked upon it." He leaned a little closer, and the eyes, all of them, seemed to find Harriet's face, and to hold it. "I can't tell you more than that, child. I will not send my children into that place to learn it. They wouldn't return."
"Looked upon it," Harriet said, almost to herself, and she was thinking, very quickly, of open eyes, of Colin's camera melted on the inside, of Mrs Norris, of Justin, of Hermione lying on the bed with her stare fixed on nothing, of a corridor roped off and a coldness still sitting in the light. "They all looked. That's why they're... if you see it, and you're a person, or a cat, or even a ghost, you—"
"Harriet," Ron whispered. "Harriet, they're moving."
She looked up. She should have been looking all along. Around the rim of the hollow, while Aragog had been speaking, the other spiders had come closer, not all at once, but by the slow, terrible inches of a circle closing, and the car-sized one had come down off its thread and was standing on the silk not ten feet from Ron's left side, and more were coming, out of the trees, out of the dome, out of places her light hadn't reached, and Aragog, who had said he wouldn't eat Hagrid's children, hadn't, she realised, with a sudden, icy clarity, said anything at all about his own.
"Aragog," she said, and her wand, which had been only a light, was also, now, a wand, and she shifted her feet on the giving silk, and felt Ron move with her, his own wand up, the tip of it trembling. "You said you wouldn't. You said if we were sent—"
"I will not," Aragog said, and there was, in the careful voice, a genuine regret, which was somehow worse than none. "I will not. I have given my word to a friend. But I am old, and I don't command as I did, and my children are hungry, and they haven't had my word, and they don't love Hagrid as I love him, because they never knew him when he was a boy, and they never owed him their lives." A ripple moved through the surrounding legs, a ready, gathering thing. "I am sorry, children of the stone house. I am sorry for Hagrid, that he sent you here. You shouldn't have come."
Ron said a word his mother would have washed his mouth out for, and Harriet was already moving, already pulling him back a step, already trying to find, in the ring of legs, a gap that wasn't a gap, and the nearest spider, the one the size of the car, raised two of its front legs and began to come on, and the silk under their feet shivered, and Harriet thought, quite clearly, of Hermione's face on the bed, and of the diary that was gone, and of the fact that they were going to die in a hole in the forest without ever having been able to tell anyone what they had just learned, and then, from the trees at the upper edge of the hollow, a voice she knew sounded down.
"That's enough!"
Lucian came down into the hollow the way a person comes down a stair they have used before, without hurry, without any of the scrambling that the silk seemed to invite, and the spiders nearest the path drew back from him, not far, but enough, a little involuntary opening in the circle, as if something in him had been recognised before anyone had decided to recognise it. He was still in the dark shirt and the muddy boots, and wore no coat. The jagged scar across his face caught Harriet's wandlight and held it, a black, ink-deep line, and his expression, as he took in the bowl, and Aragog, and the two of them standing on the giving silk with their wands up, was the expression of a boy who had had a very long day and had just found the last, least surprising part of it waiting for him at the bottom of a hole.
"Lucian," Harriet said, and she heard, in her own voice, a relief she hadn't given him permission to produce.
"Bloodthorne," Ron said, at the same time, and there was no relief in his at all, only the particular, strained outrage of a person who has been about to die and would have preferred, if someone had to turn up, that it not be this someone. "What are you doing here?"
"Following you," Lucian said, without looking at him. He had stopped a few yards short of them, on a firmer patch of ground at the edge of the silk, and his eyes were on Aragog, and on the great, pale legs, and on the clustered eyes, which had turned, all of them, toward this new arrival with a different kind of attention, an older, more careful kind. "What does it look like I'm doing? Hagrid told the air to follow the spiders, and the air turned out to be the two of you, which I would have worked out a lot sooner if I hadn't been busy, and then I saw you walk into the trees like you were going to a friend's house for tea, so here I am." He let out a short breath, and added, still watching Aragog, "You can put the light down a little, Potter. You're blinding the ones at the back, and they already don't like you."
Harriet, after a second, lowered the wand a fraction, though she left it lit. The white light softened over the silk. The nearest spiders came no closer. They were watching Lucian now, the way the ones in the trees had watched him when he came down, with that same odd, reluctant recognition, and Ron, who still held Harriet's sleeve, whispered, "How does he— why are they—" and never finished, because Lucian had taken another step, and had spoken, and the language he spoke in wasn't English, and wasn't anything Harriet had heard in a classroom, a low, lilting run of sound that seemed to belong to the forest more than to a boy, and several of the smaller spiders, at the edges, settled their legs, as if a restlessness in them had been met and told to wait.
Then he switched, easily, into the tongue Aragog had used, the careful English of a creature who had learned speech as a gift, and he tipped his head, a little, in a gesture that was almost a bow and was also, somehow, not.
"Aragog," he said. "It's Lucian. You remember. I came with Hagrid, before the winter. I sat in this hollow and listened to you talk about the old tunnels, and about the girl, and I went home full of your children's silk, and I wrote it all down, and I didn't come back with anyone who meant you harm. I'm not here for that now either."
Aragog had gone very still. The clustered eyes, which had been considering Harriet and Ron as problems, had fixed on Lucian as if a piece of the hollow itself had sat up and spoken, and when the old spider answered, the careful voice had a different temperature in it, not warmth, exactly, but the respect of one old thing for something it had already decided wasn't prey.
"I remember," Aragog said. "The boy from the far country. The one who walks as if the trees have already told him their names. Hagrid brought you, and was proud, and you spoke to my children. You have come back." A leg shifted, and settled. "These two say they were sent. They say Hagrid has been taken again. Is that true?"
"It's true," Lucian said. His voice had lost the tired sarcasm he had used on Ron. It was plain now, and a little rough. "The Minister came for him tonight. He asked me to look after Fang, and he told these two, without quite telling them, to come to you, and they came, and your children were about to eat them, which is why I'm standing here instead of sitting in his hut with a dog, which is what I was told to do." He looked, once, at the car-sized spider nearest Ron, and the spider, after a long moment, lowered its front legs. "I'm going to say this once, Aragog, and I want it said so all of them hear it. Hagrid would never forgive you if you let your children kill Harriet Potter and Ron Weasley. Not ever. Not if you were sorry afterward. Not if you said you couldn't command them. He sent them here because he trusts you. Because you're his friend, and you owe him your life, and you know it. If they die in this hollow, on the night he was taken, that friendship is done, and you will have to live with what you did to the one person in that castle who ever stood up for you. I don't think you want that. I don't think they—" he tipped his chin, slightly, at the ring of legs, "—want to find out what I will do if they don't listen to you, either. But that's second. The first thing is Hagrid. He would never forgive you. That's all I came to say."
The hollow was very quiet. Even the silk seemed to have stopped its small, constant settling. Aragog looked at Lucian for a long time, and then at Harriet, and at Ron, who was still holding her sleeve as if it were a rope, and then, slowly, the great head lowered, not in a strike, but in something that was almost a bow of its own, a heavy, reluctant, honourable movement, and when he spoke again the regret in the voice had been joined by something firmer.
"You are right," Aragog said. "I am old, and I had let myself be old about it. Hagrid wouldn't forgive me. I wouldn't forgive myself." He lifted his voice, if a voice like that could be lifted, and it went out into the bowl and up into the trees, and the restless movement among the smaller spiders stilled, as if a current had been cut. "Children. These two are Hagrid's. None of you will touch them. None of you will follow them. You will open a way, and you will keep it open until they have gone back to the stone house, and if I hear that any one of you has put a leg in their path, you will answer to me, and I'm not so old as that." The car-sized spider nearest Ron retreated, a stiff, unwilling series of steps, and a gap appeared in the circle, leading up toward the path Lucian had come down, and Aragog's eyes, all of them, returned to Harriet. "You asked what came from the Chamber. I have told you what I can. It isn't of my kind. It kills by being seen, and it lives below, and my children won't go near it, and you shouldn't either, even if you are Hagrid's, even if you have this one walking with you." A pause, and then, lower, to Lucian, "Take them out. The forest isn't safe for lights and loud hearts. I have given my word. I can't give it again if they come back."
"They won't be coming back," Lucian said. He looked at Harriet and Ron, and the tiredness had come back into his face, and with it a kind of grim, practical authority that didn't, Harriet thought, belong on a second-year, and belonged on him anyway. "Come on. Both of you. We're walking out of here, and we're walking out the way I say, and if either of you runs, or shouts, or decides this would be a good time to argue about who I am and why I'm here, I will be very unhappy, and so will everything that's still watching us. Potter. Light on the path, not in their eyes. Weasley. Let go of her sleeve before you tear it off. Stay behind me. Stay close. Don't step off the way."
"Now hang on," Ron began, because Ron's mouth, even now, wasn't finished, and then he looked at the gap in the spiders, and at Aragog, and at the silk, and he shut his mouth, and he let go of Harriet's sleeve, and he nodded, once, shortly, as if the nod hurt him.
Harriet put the light on the path, as she had been told, and she looked at Lucian, and she wanted, very much, to say something that wasn't only thank you, and not only what are you, and not only I heard you in the hut, I saw the ring, I saw Dumbledore's face, and she said, because it was the one true thing that wouldn't take all night,
"He would have forgiven you for a lot of things, I think. Hagrid. But you were right. Not for this."
Lucian glanced at her, and something in his mouth almost became a smile, and then didn't quite, and he said, "Yeah. I know." Then he turned, and started up toward the gap, and Harriet went after him, and Ron came last, so close behind her she could hear him breathing, and the spiders drew back from the way as they passed, a long, reluctant unfolding of legs, and Aragog watched them go from the mouth of his dome, the clustered eyes dull and old and, Harriet thought, genuinely sad, and then the hollow was behind them, and the silk began to thin, and the trees became only trees again, and Lucian never stopped, never looked back, and kept silent, until the last of the grey curtains was gone from the branches and the ordinary dark of the forest had closed around them, and even then he only said, "Keep walking. We're not out yet," and they kept walking.
They walked for a long time.
The path, if it could be called a path, was the one Lucian chose, and it wasn't always the one Harriet would have chosen, and twice she almost said so, and twice she held her tongue, because the first time he turned left before a fall of old thorn that she hadn't seen, and the second time he put a hand back, without looking, and stopped them, and a moment later something heavy went through the undergrowth ahead, something with a smell like wet dog and old leaves, and when it had gone he dropped his hand and went on, as if stopping for such things were only manners. Ron walked with his wand out and his shoulders up around his ears, and he kept quiet for a long while, which, for Ron, was its own kind of event, and when he did speak it was in a mutter, aimed at Harriet's back, though Lucian, who was three paces in front, could almost certainly hear it.
"I still don't like him," Ron said. "I'm just saying. He turns up. He talks to giant spiders like he's asking them to pass the salt. The other spiders get out of his way. That's not normal, Harriet. That's the opposite of normal. And he was in Hagrid's hut tonight, with Fudge, and with your man Malfoy, and with Dumbledore, and we still don't know what he actually is, except rich, and royal, and very pleased about it."
"He isn't pleased about it," Harriet said, without turning. She was watching Lucian's back, the long dark hair, the way he placed his feet, the absence of a coat on a night that had gone cold. "You were there. You saw him. He didn't want to be in that hut at all. He swore in the door. He looked like he would rather have been anywhere else, and then he made them kneel, and he got Hagrid out of Azkaban, and then he came into this forest after us, when he could have gone back to the hut the way Hagrid told him to, and he talked a spider the size of a house out of letting its children eat us. I don't care if you like him, Ron. I didn't ask you to like him. I'm not going to stand here and say he's the same as Malfoy, or that he's the Heir, or that any of this is him being pleased."
Ron was quiet for a few steps. Then he said, a little less certainly, "I didn't say he was the Heir. Not tonight. I'm only saying I don't like not knowing. And I don't like that he saw us come in here, which means he probably knows we were in the hut, which means—"
"I already knew you were in the hut," Lucian said, still not turning. "I worked it out about thirty seconds after I saw you walk into the trees, so you can stop whispering about it as if I'm a wall. I didn't see you in there. I'll give you that. That's a good cloak. I was busy. If I had seen you I would have told you not to come here, and you would have come anyway, so we can skip that part of the argument too." He ducked under a low branch, and held it, briefly, until they had passed, which Ron looked at as if it were a trick. "And I'm not the Heir of Slytherin. I have said that before. I will probably have to say it again. It's getting boring. If I were, I wouldn't be walking you out of a forest at this time of night, I'd be off doing Heir things, and you two would still be back in that hollow being discussed as a meal. Watch the root on your left, Weasley. It's hooked."
Ron stepped over the root, scowling, and muttered, "I was going to watch it," and Harriet, who had been about to thank Lucian for the branch, found herself, instead, almost smiling, which felt, after the hollow, like a kind of theft, and she let the smile go, and she walked, and she thought about what Aragog had said, and about looked upon it, and about below, and about the way the attacks happened in corridors, in places where a creature might travel without being seen until the last, worst second, and she was still turning that over when the trees began, at last, to thin, and the slope began to rise, and a faint, familiar gold showed through the trunks ahead, which was Hagrid's hut, and the night, which had been only forest, became, again, a night that had a castle in it, and a hospital wing, and a set of problems that hadn't, in their absence, grown any smaller.
They came out of the trees a little way above the pumpkin patch. Fang started barking at once, a deep, joyful, frantic sound, as if he had been sitting at the door the whole time doing sums and had just got the answer, and Lucian put two fingers in his mouth and whistled, once, low, and the barking stopped, and became a whine, and then Fang was coming across the patch at a heavy trot, and Lucian met him and put a hand on his head and said, "All right. All right, we're back. Quiet," and Fang quieted, or as near to it as a boarhound could come, and shoved his head against Lucian's hip, and then, after a suspicious sniff, against Harriet's, and then against Ron's, and Ron, who had been bitten by more than one dog in Cornwall, stood very still and endured it.
They stood for a moment in the open, the three of them, with the hut glowing and the castle's windows still lit, far up the slope, and the forest at their backs, and none of them seemed, just at first, to know what the next sentence was supposed to be. It was late. It was later than late. Harriet could feel the long walk in her legs, and the leftover tremor in her hands, and the weight of what they had been told, and she knew, as surely as she knew the way up to the hospital wing, that she wasn't going to bed with it. Not yet. Not while Hermione was lying upstairs with her eyes open, and not while a piece of the truth was sitting in Harriet's head without a place to put it.
"We're going up," she said. She looked at Ron, and then at Lucian, and she didn't make it a question, though it could have been one. "To the hospital wing. To see Hermione. And Vivienne. I want to see them. After that. After what he said, about looking, I want to look at them again, properly, and I don't care if Pomfrey throws us out. You don't have to come. Either of you. I'm going."
"Of course I'm coming," Ron said, at once, as if she had suggested he might wait in the pumpkin patch. "Don't be stupid."
Lucian rubbed a hand over his face, and looked up at the castle, and for a second Harriet thought he was going to say no, that he had done enough, that Hagrid had told him to see to himself, that a Slytherin walking into the hospital wing at this hour with two Gryffindors would only make a night that was already impossible into a story for the morning. Then he dropped his hand, and he nodded, once, and he said, "I'm coming. I told Draca I would see her sister. I meant it. And I want to see Granger too. After today." He glanced at the hut, and at Fang, and he went to the door and pushed it wider, and said, to the boarhound, "In. Stay. I'll be back." Fang went in, reluctantly, and Lucian pulled the door to, not quite closing it, so that a line of gold remained along the frame, and then he turned back to them, and he looked, in the light from the window, very tired, and very young, and in no way pleased. "All right," he said. "The hospital wing. If we're caught, I'm going to say I found you both wandering in the forest, which has the advantage of being true. Try to look as if you're sorry about it. Weasley, you won't have to try. Come on."
He started up the slope, and they went with him, the three of them in a loose, unlikely line, the Invisibility Cloak folded over Harriet's arm, the Forbidden Forest darkening behind them, and the castle growing larger as they climbed, its windows watching, its doors not yet closed against the last, late, stubborn business of a day that had already taken too much, and wasn't, even now, quite finished with them.
---
The hospital wing, at that hour, was a long, white quiet, broken only by the low spell-lamps along the walls and by the faint, regular sound of Madam Pomfrey moving in her office, a rustle of bottles, the click of a tin, the private industry of a woman who had been given too many still patients and wasn't, on principle, going to sleep while any of them were in her care. The main ward was dimmer than it was in the day. The curtains of the nearest beds had been drawn back, because there was no privacy left in petrification, nothing a curtain could do for a person who couldn't close their eyes, and as Lucian came in through the door, with Harriet and Ron just behind him, the first thing he saw was the row of them, the ones he already knew by name and the two that had been added today, laid out under white sheets with their faces bare and their hands arranged, and their eyes, every pair, open and fixed and horribly clean, as if someone had washed the looking out of them and left the glass.
Madam Pomfrey came out of the office at the sound of the door, a bottle in one hand and a look on her face that was already halfway to a scolding, and then she saw who it was, and the scolding paused, and became, if not permission, then a tired, sharp kind of calculation.
"It's past midnight! None of you are dying, and I've already had the Minister's people, the headmaster, and Professor McGonagall tramping through my ward tonight. I won't have it turned into a gallery for every student who can't sleep." She jabbed a finger at the door. "Mr Bloodthorne, Miss Potter, Mr Weasley. Out. Now."
"I know, Madam Pomfrey." Lucian stayed just inside the door, mud still drying on his boots, and made no move to charm her. "I know what time it is. I promised Draca I'd look in on her sister, and I haven't kept that promise yet." His eyes slid past her to the curtained bed at the end of the ward, where Granger lay still as stone. "And they need to see Hermione. So do I." He met Pomfrey's glare and held it. "Five minutes. Please."
Pomfrey looked at him for a long moment, and then at Harriet, whose face, in the white light, was set and tired and nothing like the face of a girl who had come to gawp, and then at Ron, who had his hands in his pockets and silk still in his hair and an expression that suggested he would stand in the doorway until he was allowed in or until he fell over, and she let out a short, sharp breath through her nose, and pointed, with the bottle, at the two nearest occupied beds on the left.
"Five minutes," she said. "You're not to sit on the beds. You're not to try any foolishness you have read about in a book. Miss Granger and Miss Malfoy are stable, they aren't in pain, and they won't hear you, so you needn't make speeches. Five minutes, and then you will go to your houses, and if I find you in my corridor again tonight I will write to your heads of house, and I don't care whose family you belong to, Mr Bloodthorne, I will do it in a very clear hand. Am I understood?"
"Yes, Madam Pomfrey," Lucian said.
"Yes, Madam," Harriet said, at the same time, and Ron nodded, hard, as if he had been given a job.
"Five points to Gryffindor, Miss Potter, for not arguing with me, and five points to Slytherin, Mr Bloodthorne, for the same unusual piece of sense, and I will take them back twice over if you make me regret this." She turned back toward the office, and then stopped, and looked over her shoulder, and her voice, when it came again, was less sharp, and much more tired. "They do look peaceful. I will say that. If you have come to be frightened, you may be. If you have come to be useful, you may look, and then you may go and be useful in the morning, when the rest of us are trying to be. Five minutes."
She went back into the office, and left the door ajar, which was, Lucian thought, both a kindness and a warning, and the three of them stood for a second in the quiet of the ward, and then Harriet went, without another word, to the nearer of the two beds, and Ron went with her, and Lucian, after a moment, went to the other.
Vivienne Malfoy lay as if she had been arranged. Her hair, which was usually so precisely kept, had been smoothed back from her face by someone who had known how she would have wanted it, and her hands were on the sheet, one over the other, and her eyes, pale and grey and open, were fixed on the ceiling in an expression Lucian recognised, with a small, unhappy start, as the measuring look, the chessboard look, caught and held at the moment of some private calculation she would now never finish, or not until someone found a way to start her again. She didn't look frightened. That was the worst of it, in a way. She looked like herself, interrupted. The green blanket he had imagined earlier was there, folded at the foot, not over her, as if even in petrification a Malfoy wouldn't be left under another house's colours for long. A vase of something white stood on the little table, lilies, or something like lilies, which hadn't been there, he thought, when they brought her in, and which would have come, he guessed, from a parent, or from a sister who hadn't been able to come herself, or from Pomfrey, who didn't, despite her voice, do anything by halves.
He stood at the side of the bed, and he never sat, and he kept quiet, at first, because Pomfrey had said they wouldn't hear, and because he wasn't, anyway, sure what you said to a person who wasn't dead and wasn't present. He thought of Draca in the window. He thought of the coat he had left on the stone. He thought of Vivienne on Christmas, or of the story of Christmas, the letter, the advice to her sister, the small, private kindnesses that she never did in corridors. He put his hands on the back of the visitor's chair, and he leaned there, and after a minute he said, very quietly, not as a speech, only as a thing that ought to be in the air,
"I'm here. I told her I would be. She's... she's not all right, but she's sitting where you sit, and she's waiting, even if she doesn't know that's what she's doing. I didn't know what to tell her. I still don't. But you're not alone up here. I wanted you to have that, even if you can't use it yet."
He stood a little longer. He left her hand alone. He looked at her face, at the open, arrested eyes, and he let himself be angry, quietly, in the way he had been angry in the hut, at the thing that had done this, and at the man who had put something in the school, and at the fact that knowing still wasn't the same as having a place to put your hands. Then he glanced across the ward.
Harriet and Ron were at Hermione's bed. Ron was standing at the foot, awkward, his hands having come out of his pockets and not having found anywhere else to go, and Harriet was at the side, leaning in, not sitting, her dark hair fallen forward, and she was looking at Hermione the way she had looked at the problem in the hollow, with a still, intent attention that wasn't grief only, and wasn't friendship only, and was the particular kind of looking she did when she had decided that a thing could be solved if she could only see it clearly enough. Hermione Granger lay very straight, her bushy hair arranged, not very successfully, on the pillow, a curl out of place on her forehead, her eyes open and brown and empty of the impatient, generous light that usually lived in them, and her right hand, Lucian saw, was closed, not arranged the way Vivienne's had been, but closed, around something.
Harriet had seen it too.
He watched her notice. He watched her go still, and then she looked at Ron, and then, very carefully, as if she were defusing something, she reached out and turned Hermione's hand, a little, not enough to disturb it, enough to see, and there was a glint, a small, hard, familiar glint, and Harriet's breath caught, and she whispered, "Ron. Look. She's holding a mirror."
Ron came around the bed so quickly he nearly caught the chair. "A mirror? Why would she... she doesn't even like looking in them, she said so, she said it was a waste of—"
"And this." Harriet had seen the rest of it now, a folded edge of parchment, brownish, torn, sticking from the closed fingers beneath the little glass. She glanced once at Pomfrey's door, which was still ajar, and then she did the thing Lucian would have done, if he had been standing where she was, which was to ease the paper out with a patience that didn't look like a second-year's patience, slipping it free without opening the hand any further, and then she had it, a torn page, heavily inked, the kind that came out of old library books when someone was in too much of a hurry to copy, and she held it into the light of the nearest lamp, and Ron leaned in over her shoulder, and Lucian, after a second, left Vivienne's bedside and came across the ward, not all the way, only near enough to see that they had found something, and not so near as to crowd them.
He had no need to come closer. Harriet's face, as she read, did the work of telling him, though he wasn't close enough to see the words. It went from intent to sharp, and then to a kind of pale, dawning certainty, and she turned the page, and turned it back, and her mouth moved, once, around a word he couldn't hear.
She could hear it, though, in her own head, as clearly as if someone had said it aloud. The page was from an old library book, torn ragged along one edge, the ink brown and close, a heading and then a block of text she took in all at once, the way she took in a page when there was no time to be tidy about it. Of the Basilisk, king of serpents. Its look was death. The rooster's crow was fatal to it. Spiders fled from it. It was, the book said, a creature that might live for centuries, if it were left in the dark, and might travel, if the place were old enough and deep enough, through pipes, through stone, through any passage wide enough for a great body to go unseen. She stood there with Hermione's little mirror still catching the lamp, and she thought of Aragog saying it kills by being seen, and of Colin's melted camera, and of the pipes in the walls, the ones she had been hearing all year, the voice that went through them as if they were a throat, and she thought of the roosters Hagrid had been losing, one after another, and a small, odd flicker went through her, a feeling, not a thought, that something about the roosters wasn't sitting quite right, as if a piece had been offered that didn't fit the space it had been given, and then she let the flicker go, because the rest of it fitted so cleanly it almost hurt. A basilisk. In the pipes. Looked at in a mirror, you would be petrified, not die, which was why Hermione had a mirror in her hand, and why she was lying here instead of being a name on a tomb. Harriet felt, for a second, a fierce, helpless pride in her, in Granger, who had worked it out in a corridor with a monster coming and had still had time to take a page and a glass, and then the pride went down under the rest, under the knowledge of what was in the walls, and under the fact that Lucian Bloodthorne was standing a few yards away, watching her face, and she wasn't, tonight, going to put this into his hands, not until she had had a minute to think about what it meant that he had come out of that forest unharmed, and that he could talk to spiders, and that he had heard the voice too.
"What?" Ron whispered. "What is it? Harriet—"
"Not here," Harriet said, very quickly, and she folded the page, once, and she glanced at Lucian, and the glance was strange, a bright, almost frightened look, not frightened of him, exactly, but of the thing she was holding, and of the fact that he was standing there to see her hold it, and then she did something he would think about later, for a long time, which was to put the page into her pocket, and to set the little mirror carefully back against Hermione's fingers, and to take Ron's arm, and to say, in a voice that was trying to be ordinary and wasn't, "We have to go. We have to go now. Thank you, Lucian. For the forest. For... all of it. We have to go."
"Potter," Lucian said, but she was already moving, already pulling Ron toward the door, and Ron, who had only half read whatever was on the page, was going with her with his mouth still open, looking back once, confused, at Lucian, and at Hermione, and at the beds, and then they were in the doorway, and Harriet paused, as if some manners had caught up with her, and she looked back at him, really looked, and said, "I'm sorry. It's not... I will explain. I will. Not tonight." And then they were gone, the door swinging to behind them, a quick, odd, almost scrambling exit, as if the ward had become a place they couldn't be in for one more second, and Lucian was left standing in the white quiet with Madam Pomfrey rustling in the office and Vivienne's open eyes on the ceiling and Hermione's hand closed, again, around a little mirror, and a very clear, very irritating sense that the two of them had just run off with an answer.
He stood there until the five minutes were, by any honest count, over. He went back to Vivienne's bed, and he looked at her once more, and he said, "I'll come again," and then he went to the door of the office and told Madam Pomfrey they were going, or that he was, and that the other two had already gone, and Pomfrey came out, and looked at the empty space where Harriet and Ron had been, and at Lucian, and her mouth tightened, and she said, "Five points from Gryffindor, then, for leaving without a word, and I won't have that girl thinking a hospital is a library she can take things out of. Did she take anything, Mr Bloodthorne?"
Lucian thought of the folded page in Harriet's pocket, and of the look on her face, and of the fact that he didn't, himself, know what was on it, only that it had been important enough to send them scuttling into the night, and he wasn't, just at present, in the business of handing Harriet Potter to anyone, even to Pomfrey, even for five points.
"I didn't see her take anything she shouldn't have," he said, which wasn't, if you were listening carefully, quite the same as no, and Pomfrey, who was very tired, and who had five other petrified patients to attend to, looked at him for a second longer, and then waved him out, and told him to go to bed, and to tell Miss Parkinson, if he saw her, that Miss Malfoy was unchanged, which was as much comfort as the ward had to give, and Lucian went, out into the corridor, which was empty, the two Gryffindors already gone, no fold of a cloak, no mutter of Weasley, only the long stone and the late lamps and the feeling, sitting oddly in his chest, that the night had just divided, and that they had gone down one side of it with whatever they had found, and he had been left on the other, with a promise to a girl who wouldn't talk, and a friend in a Ministry room, and a forest that hadn't, at least, eaten anyone, and it would have to be enough, for now, because he was very tired, and because morning, when it came, wouldn't be any simpler, and because standing in a corridor being annoyed at Potter wouldn't wake Vivienne, or bring Hagrid back, or tell him, any sooner, what had been on that page.
He went down to the dungeons, and didn't look in on Draca. The common room, when he passed through it, was almost dark, the fire burned low, a single fifth-year asleep in a chair with a book on his chest, and the window seat was empty, and the coat he had left there was gone, which he took, after a moment, as a kind of sentence, and which he hoped, without much evidence, was a good one. He went up to the dormitory, and he lay down in his clothes, and sleep was a long time coming, and when it came, he dreamed, not of spiders, and not of the ring, but of a track with nothing on it, and of a carriage going away, and of Hagrid's hand, very careful, letting go.
---
The days that followed didn't so much pass as settle, the way dust settles in a room that has been left closed, and the school, which had been in a state of sharp, immediate fear on the Saturday, moved into a duller, heavier one, in which people went to lessons because they were told to, and never lingered in corridors, and wrote home, those who still had the heart for it, letters that their parents wouldn't find comforting, no matter how carefully they were worded. Dumbledore was gone. That fact took a day to become real, and then became, all at once, too real, an absence in the Great Hall, an empty chair, a way the staff had of looking at one another at the high table as if they were waiting for a person who wasn't coming. Professor McGonagall took the morning announcements, and her voice, which had always been able to cut a hall in half, had a new, tight quality, and she refused to answer questions about the headmaster, or about Hagrid, or about when either of them might be back, and she docked five points from Ravenclaw on the Monday for a boy who kept asking, and then, as if to prove she wasn't only in the business of taking, gave ten to Hufflepuff when a third-year helped her move a first-year who had gone into tears at the door of the Charms corridor.
Lucian went to his classes. He stayed out of the forest. In the mornings, before breakfast, he went down to the hut instead, and let Fang out, and filled the great bowl by the fire, and stood for a few minutes in the doorway with his hand on the boarhound's head, looking at the pumpkin patch and at the trees, and not looking at the empty chair. Fang had taken to sleeping on Hagrid's bed, which Lucian hadn't the heart to stop, and the hut smelled the same, woodsmoke and dog and the faint, burnt-sweet ghost of rock cakes, and was, without Hagrid in it, the loneliest room Lucian had ever been in that wasn't a room at home. He spoke to Fang, because someone had to, and because Hagrid had asked him to look after the dog, and he wasn't going to fail at the one task he had actually been given. "He'll be back," he told him, on the Wednesday, and Fang looked at him as if he would have liked a better promise, and Lucian, who never made those, scratched him behind the ears and closed the door, and went up to the castle to do what a student was supposed to do.
Snape, on the Tuesday, looked at him over the pile of essays as if he would have liked to ask why the weekly report hadn't appeared, and then, seeing whatever he saw in Lucian's face, only said, "See me when there is something to see, Mr Bloodthorne," and left it there, which was, in its way, the kindest thing Snape had ever done for him. He went, once, to the hospital wing in the afternoon, and sat with Vivienne for ten minutes, and told her, because he had decided it didn't matter whether she could hear, that Draca had come down to breakfast, and had eaten a little, and had said very little, and that Pansy had sat beside her the whole time and hadn't, for once, said anything stupid.
He saw Ginny Weasley twice, in those days, without thinking much of it, except that the twins had been right, and she looked unwell. Once she was coming out of the Great Hall after lunch, very small inside her robes, and she went past him without seeming to see him at all, her face drawn, her hands empty, her mouth moving a little as if she were finishing a conversation that had already ended, and once, in a corridor on the third floor, he turned a corner and found her standing quite still, looking at a blank stretch of wall, and when she heard him she started, and muttered something that might have been sorry, and went off toward the stairs at a walk that was nearly a run. He watched her go, and he thought, only, that the first-years were taking it hard, and that someone ought to be looking after her, and then the thought went under the rest of the week's thoughts, under Vivienne, and Hagrid, and the page Harriet hadn't shown him, and he didn't, then, know enough to keep it out. He never managed to catch Harriet to speak to. He saw her, in corridors, and in the Great Hall, and once in Transfiguration, where McGonagall, who wasn't in a mood for anyone's second-best work, set them to turning beetles into buttons, and Harriet's came out clean and four-holed and exactly right on the first try, the kind of work that usually belonged to Granger, and McGonagall, who had been moving down the row with her mouth very thin, stopped, and picked the button up, and said, "Five points to Gryffindor, Miss Potter. That is how it is done. I would be grateful if the rest of you would look, and then attempt to follow her, rather than inventing your own, less successful, species of beetle." Ron's wand, which was still taped, produced a beetle with a single, melted hole, and McGonagall, without raising her voice, told him to try again, and left his points alone, which Ron later claimed, in a mutter Harriet didn't encourage, was because the whole school had gone soft. Harriet, Lucian noticed, had a look on her, in that class, of a person who was only half in the room. She did the work. She did it well. And then her gaze went away, toward the window, or toward nothing, as if she were turning a page over in her mind, again and again, and still hadn't decided what to do with what was on it. He thought of asking her. He left it. She had said she would explain, and she hadn't, and he wasn't going to chase her down a corridor for an answer she had already decided not to give him in a ward at midnight. He did see them, once, in the library, on the Thursday afternoon, at a table in the far stacks with a pile of old books open between them, Harriet bent over a page, Ron looking as if he would rather have been almost anywhere else, and when Lucian came down the aisle, not even to speak to them, only because the book he wanted was on that shelf, they both looked up, and Harriet closed the book she was reading with a care that was a little too careful, and Ron went a dull red, and Harriet said, "Lucian," as if his name were a thing she hadn't expected to have to say in a library, and he looked at the stack, and at their faces, and he said, "Don't mind me. I'm only here for a book," and he took it, and he left them to it, and he thought, walking away, that whatever had been on that page in the hospital wing was still with them, and that they were doing something about it, and that they still hadn't, even now, decided he was a person to do it with, and the thought sat in him, not quite as anger, more as a dry, familiar kind of being shut out, which he was used to, and which, coming from Potter, after the forest, after the hut, felt a little worse than usual.
He could have insisted. He could have sat down and asked, straight, what they had found. He held back, because she had said not tonight, and because Weasley would have made a scene, and because a Bloodthorne leaning over two Gryffindors in the library would have been a story by supper, and the school had enough stories. He took his book, and he went, and he never looked back.
Draca came back to herself by inches, which wasn't the same as coming back. She sat in lessons. She held a quill. She told Crabbe to stop breathing so loudly, once, on the Wednesday, in a voice that was almost her own, and then went quiet again, as if the effort had surprised her. She never came to bother Lucian. She never pranced. On the Thursday evening he found her in the window again, not empty the way she had been on the Saturday, only very quiet, with a book open and not being read, and he stood for a moment, not quite at the seat, and she looked at him, and he said, "I sat with her. She's the same. Pomfrey says she's not in pain," and Draca nodded, once, a small, stiff movement, and then, after a silence long enough that he thought that was all, she said, "Thank you," in a voice he hadn't heard from her before, almost ordinary, and almost not, and he nodded back, and left her there, because staying would have asked her for more, and she had already given him a sentence, and he wasn't going to spend it. When he passed her later, in the common room, she looked at him, sometimes, a flat, unreadable look, and once she was wearing, or he thought she was wearing, a coat that was too long in the sleeve, dark wool, folded at the cuffs, and neither of them mentioned it, and that, too, had to be enough.
The week wore on like that, in small, unfinished pieces: a hut without its owner, a window with a girl who had given him one sentence, a library table that had closed at his coming, a first-year who had stared at a wall and run. Lucian did his work, and he looked after Fang, and he waited, without admitting that he was waiting, for the next thing, because he had the unwelcome sense, all through those days, that the castle wasn't done, and that Saturday had been a door, and not a conclusion.
On the Friday, late, when the light outside the high windows had gone that particular, lingering May gold that made the castle look, for an hour, as if nothing in it could be wrong, the wrongness came back all at once, and it came back loud.
Lucian was in the entrance hall, at the foot of the Grand Staircase, because Pansy had sent him, of all things, to see whether the evening post had brought anything for the house, which it hadn't, and because he hadn't, in any case, wanted to sit in the common room with a book he wasn't reading. He heard McGonagall first. Her voice came down the stairs and off the stone and filled the hall the way a dropped tray fills a room, and she wasn't announcing or teaching, she was ordering, and the order was already, from the sound of it, being repeated along the corridors above.
"Back to your dormitories," she was saying, and then, louder, "All of you, at once, I won't say it again. Prefects, take your houses. I want every student in their common room in five minutes, and I want the doors sealed, and I will have twenty points from any house that argues with me. Move. Now."
Students were already coming down, and then, confused, going back up, a sudden, thickening traffic of robes and frightened faces, and Lucian stood aside at the foot of the stair and watched it happen, and felt, in his stomach, the same clean dropping-away he had felt on the Saturday, in this same hall, when Pansy had said Vivienne's name. Prefects shouted. A first-year started to cry and was bundled along by a fifth-year who didn't look much better. Professor Flitwick came through from the Charms corridor with his wand already in his hand, and Professor Sprout behind him, and then Snape, taking the stairs two at a time in a billow of black, and none of them stopped to explain, and Lucian, who could have asked, who was perhaps the one student in the hall who might have been answered, chose not to ask, because he could see, in their faces, that the asking would only slow them, and because he already knew, in the way you know a storm has arrived when the light changes, that it had happened again, and that this time it wasn't going to be another still body in a white bed.
He went up, because the order had been to go, and because standing at the bottom of the stair would only get him in the way, and at the first landing he stopped, because a knot of staff had gathered in the mouth of the corridor that led toward the second-floor landing, and McGonagall was there, and Flitwick, and Snape, and, a little behind them, Gilderoy Lockhart, in robes of a foolish, pale lilac, his smile on and wholly unattached to the rest of his face, and they were talking, in the low, rapid, ugly way of people who have just seen a thing and haven't yet agreed how to name it, and Lucian, who had been told to go to his dormitory, stayed where he was, for now. He stood in the shadow of the stair, where the banister turned, and he listened, and he wasn't the only one.
Across the landing, in the opposite shadow, just where the wall made a little fold beside a suit of armour, two other students hadn't gone to their dormitory either. He would have known them even without the red hair. Harriet was very still, her head tilted, her face, what he could see of it, white and set. Ron was beside her, half behind the armour, and their heads were close together, and they were listening, as he was listening, to the teachers, who hadn't seen them, and who hadn't seen him, and who were, for the moment, too occupied with the thing itself to remember that the castle had ears.
"...her name is Ginevra Weasley," McGonagall was saying, and her voice, which had been all command in the hall, had a crack in it now, a raw place, as if the name had come up against something she wasn't prepared to have broken. "A first-year. Arthur Weasley's youngest. She has been taken. The message is on the wall, the same wall, I won't repeat it in full, you have seen it, I have seen it, I won't give it the courtesy of being said twice. The Heir of Slytherin has taken a student into the Chamber of Secrets. That is what it says. That is what has been done."
Ron made a sound, a small, destroyed sound, and Harriet's hand went out at once and closed on his arm, hard, and Lucian, in his own shadow, felt the landing tilt, very slightly, as if the castle itself had taken a breath and hadn't let it out.
"Taken," Flitwick said, faintly. "Not petrified. Taken."
"Not petrified," McGonagall said. "If she had been petrified we would have her, at least, in a bed, and I would have something to do with my hands. She isn't in the hospital wing. She isn't in her dormitory. She isn't anywhere we have looked in the last twenty minutes, and we have looked, Filius, I assure you we have looked. The Heir has taken her into the Chamber, and if the Chamber is what the stories say it is, then we have very little time, and I will not stand here and be told, again, that we must wait for a man who is no longer in this castle."
Snape's voice, when it came, was very quiet, and very dry, and had, under the dryness, something that might have been anger, or might have been fear, or might, Lucian thought, have been both.
"The Chamber hasn't been found in fifty years," he said. "It won't be found in twenty minutes because we wish it to be. If the girl has been taken into it, then the person who knows the way is the person who took her, and that person isn't standing in this corridor offering us the benefit of his publications."
Lockhart, who had been swelling, slightly, at the edge of the group, as if a mention of publications were a cue, deflated again, and smiled, and the smile was a terrible thing, a white, polite, empty thing, and he said, "Now, now, Severus, I am sure, if I were asked, if the school were to require a man of experience, I have, as you say, published extensively on this sort of... that is to say, on related... I would of course be willing, entirely willing, to—"
"You will do what you are told," McGonagall said, and Lockhart's mouth shut with a small, offended click. "All of you will. Filius, I want the doors of the common rooms charmed as soon as the last student is in. Severus, you will assist me in the search of the lower corridors, in case, in the palest of hopes, she hasn't been taken as far as they claim. And someone will send for the Minister, and for the governors, and for anyone else who has spent this week congratulating themselves on the removal of Albus Dumbledore, and they may come and see what their confidence has bought them." She stopped, and put a hand up, and pressed it, once, to her brow, and when she took it down her face was the face she used in class, the starch back in it, the crack closed, or nearly. "Go. I will not have this discussed in a landing as if it were a timetable change. And if I find any student still out of their house in the next five minutes, I will have their bed moved into my office for the remainder of the year, and they won't enjoy it."
They moved. Snape went first, a black cut down the corridor. Flitwick hurried after, already fumbling with his wand. Lockhart went in the other direction, at a pace that suggested he had just remembered an urgent appointment with a locked door, and McGonagall stood for one more second in the mouth of the landing, looking at the empty air as if Dumbledore might, if she looked hard enough, be in it, and then she went too, her boots sharp on the stone, and the landing was suddenly, horribly quiet, and in that quiet Harriet and Ron came out of the shadow of the armour, and Lucian, across the way, came out of his, and the three of them looked at each other, for a long moment, over the empty stair, and there was no joke in it, and no leftover silk, and no argument about who liked whom, only the name, Ginny, sitting in the air between them like a third, terrible presence, and the knowledge, which had been a theory in a hollow of the forest and a torn page in a hospital ward, that the Chamber was open, and that it had, at last, taken someone all the way down.
Ron was the colour of paper. Harriet still hadn't let go of his arm. Her face, in the dim light of the landing, was very still, and very white, and her eyes, when they met Lucian's, had the same look they had had over Hermione's bed, the look of a person who had already begun, in her head, to do the next thing, and who wouldn't, if he knew her at all, be going to her dormitory to sit behind a charmed door and wait.
"Ginny," Ron said, and the word came apart in his mouth. "They've got Ginny. Harriet. They've got my sister."
"I know," Harriet said. She was still looking at Lucian, and then she looked at Ron, and then down the corridor where McGonagall had gone, toward the wall, he guessed, with the message on it, the wall he hadn't yet seen, the words he didn't need to see, because he had heard them, and because he had, in a way, been waiting to hear them since the night in October when a voice in the pipes had told him to run the other way. "I know they have."
She never said what she was going to do. She didn't have to. Lucian stood on his side of the landing and looked at the two of them, at the cloak, which was a dark fold under Harriet's arm again, as if it had never been put away, and at Ron's face, and at the set of Harriet's mouth, and he thought of Hagrid in a Ministry room, and of Dumbledore gone, and of Aragog in the dark saying it lives below, and of a girl of eleven, a first-year, Arthur Weasley's youngest, who had defended Harriet once in a corridor, and who had, if the twins were to be believed, been tired and strange for months, and who was now, if the writing on the wall was true, in the one place in this castle Lucian had never been, and had only ever suspected, and he felt, standing there, the night divide again, the same way it had divided in the hospital wing, only this time he wasn't sure which side of it he was going to be left on, and he wasn't, any longer, sure he was willing to be left.
"Go," he said, because McGonagall's five minutes were already running, and because a prefect's footsteps were already coming up from below, and because this wasn't, yet, the moment, and because, if it was going to become one, it wouldn't be on a landing with half the staff in the corridors. "Before they find you. We'll... we'll talk. We will. Go."
Harriet looked at him for one more second, as if she were deciding whether that was a promise or a dismissal, and then she nodded, once, and she pulled Ron with her, toward the stairs that led up to Gryffindor, and Ron went, stumbling, his face still that paper colour, and they turned the corner, and they were gone, and Lucian stood alone on the landing with the echo of McGonagall's order still in the stone, and with Ginny Weasley's name still in his mouth, unsaid, and with the castle, around him, closing itself house by house, door by door, as if doors had ever been any use against the thing that lived below, and then he turned, and he went down, toward Slytherin, toward a common room that would want answers he couldn't give, toward a girl in a window who might, tonight, look up, and he didn't, as he went, run, because running would only have told the castle that he, too, had heard, and that he, too, was already, in some private, irrevocable way, not going to stay in his house and wait.