Chapter 35 : The Interloper
Hermione found Draco behind a barricade of books in the least inviting corner of the library.
Rain streaked the window beside her, turning the grounds beyond it into a grey blur. She had been there long enough for the light to deteriorate, but had noticed only when the print became difficult to read. Several volumes lay open across the table, their illustrations showing coils, fangs, and, in one particularly unhelpful instance, a creature the author admitted might have been an unusually large eel.
Hermione stopped beside the empty chair. “What are you looking for?”
“A snake with rather more to recommend it than venom.”
Draco kept her finger on the passage she was reading while Hermione examined the books. There was little point concealing the subject now. She had intended to bring the others into the search as soon as she had something more useful than a suspicion.
“Because Harry’s a Parselmouth?” Hermione asked.
Draco looked up. “He hears a voice nobody else can hear. It talks about killing and suddenly there’s something attacking people in the castle.” She glanced down at the page. “We might have been assuming the voice belonged to a person.”
Hermione drew the chair out, but did not sit. “You think he’s hearing the monster.”
“If it’s a snake, he could understand it without realising what it was. He didn’t know he was speaking Parseltongue in the courtyard.”
Hermione frowned, working through it. Her gaze moved to the books again, this time with a different interest. “That would explain why we couldn’t hear what he heard. Or at least why it sounded like words to him.” She looked back at Draco. “That’s very clever.”
The admiration was so unreserved that Draco could scarcely bear it.
She had known Harry was a Parselmouth before any of them. She had arranged for him to discover it, then left him to manage what followed while she searched books in private. Hermione was giving her credit for bringing pieces together when she had been withholding half of them. “It's not.” she said.
“But it makes sense.” Hermione paused, her expression changing. “Actually, Harry’s why I came to find you.”
Draco took her finger off the page. “What’s happened?”
“Ron found him outside. He’d been walking about in the rain.”
“Why?”
“He wouldn’t really say at first. We got him to come in, but —” Hermione glanced towards the library doors. “He keeps asking how we can be sure it isn’t him.”
Draco pushed back her chair. “Where is he?”
The classroom was on the third floor, well away from the rooms being used for lessons. Hermione opened the door quietly, and Draco entered close behind her.
Harry sat at a desk near the windows. His hair lay wet against his forehead, and rain had collected along the lower rims of his glasses. His robes were soaked through at the shoulders. Ron had taken the chair beside him and was talking in a low voice, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.
Harry gave no sign that he had heard the door. He sat with his hands tucked beneath his arms, shivering.
Draco crossed the room. “For goodness’ sake, Potter.”
He looked up as she drew her wand. The drying charm lifted the damp from his clothes in a faint cloud, leaving his hair untidy again. She followed it with a warming charm, directing it towards the cold space around the desk.
Ron rubbed his hands together gratefully. “I told him we should go somewhere with a fire.”
Draco barely heard him, as it just registered to her that Harry’s eyes were bloodshot.
She had seen him hurt, furious, and frightened. She had seen him walk into danger with a composure that infuriated her because she could never decide whether it was courage or stupidity. In her past life, every insult she threw at him seemed merely to arm him for the next exchange. He had friends, victories, an apparently inexhaustible capacity to withstand her. Even when she made him angry, he came back.
It had never occurred to her to wonder what happened when she was no longer there to see.
Now he sat at a school desk, wet and exhausted, looking as though he had spent hours arguing himself into something terrible.
Draco felt the last of her irritation drain away. She could have told someone about the diary. She could have given Severus the diary when she first took it, or gone to Dumbledore when it disappeared. Instead, she had cared only for her father’s interests, while Harry wandered the grounds wondering whether he was attacking his classmates.
“Come on,” she said, catching his arm.
Harry resisted when she pulled him to his feet. “Draco —”
“No. You’ve had quite enough time sitting here thinking yourself into a state. Look at me.”
He stood reluctantly, a little taller than she was, though he seemed to be doing his best not to be. Draco stepped into his line of sight. “You are not Slytherin’s heir.”
“You don’t know that.”
Draco sighed. “I know considerably more about old families than you do.”
“You said there wasn’t a recorded connection. That doesn’t mean —”
“It means we haven’t got a single reason to think you’re related to him except that you can speak to snakes. You’ve decided that settles everything.”
“It isn’t just that.”
Draco's mounting frustration forced her to bite out, “Then tell me.”
Harry’s gaze flicked towards Ron and Hermione. “What if I’m doing it without knowing?”
Ron made a frustrated movement. “We’ve been over this —”
Draco held up a hand without looking at him. “How?”
Harry swallowed. “I don’t know. What if something’s making me? Possessing me, or —” He stopped, then forced himself to continue. “I keep hearing things. Things about killing people. What if it isn’t coming from somewhere else?”
The room seemed very quiet around them.
Draco had been so certain the truth about Parseltongue would help. She had thought of it as a means of identifying the creature, a piece of information they needed. Harry had heard it as an explanation for everything people were saying about him.
“Have you lost any time?” she asked.
He blinked. “What?”
“Have there been hours you can’t remember? Have you gone to bed and woken up somewhere else, or found yourself doing something without knowing how you started?”
Harry shook his head slowly.
Draco affirmed, “Nothing like that?”
“No.”
“Then you haven’t described any reason to think you’re being possessed. You’ve described being frightened.”
“But —”
“You remember the night Mrs Norris was attacked. You were with Ron and Hermione. And when Dean was attacked, you were in the hospital wing. You can account for where you were.”
“What if there’s something I don’t remember?”
Draco tightened her hand on his sleeve. “Then we would look into it. But you can’t keep inventing things that might have happened and treating them as though they did.”
Harry looked away. She moved slightly, obliging him to face her again. “I would wager my entire inheritance that it isn’t you.”
Ron gave a small, helpless snort. “Your dad might disinherit you if you keep hanging round with us. Could be an easy bet.”
“Ron,” Hermione said sharply.
“Sorry,” Ron muttered, but Draco did not take her eyes off Harry. “You’ve spent the last year getting yourself into trouble because you can’t leave anyone else’s trouble alone. You went after a troll. You went through that trapdoor. You offered to help me when I’d given you very little reason to.”
His face had begun to colour. “That doesn’t mean —”
“And when a snake came towards me, you put yourself between us before you’d even thought about what you were doing.” Her voice sharpened with the recollection. “You didn’t stop to work out whether I needed you. You just decided that if somebody was going to get bitten, it ought to be you.”
She could feel Hermione watching them, but she was too angry with herself, and with everyone who had helped put that expression on Harry’s face, to stop. “You are so determined to be decent and brave about everything that it’s occasionally unbearable. Do you honestly imagine I haven’t noticed? That Ron and Hermione haven’t? We know you, Harry. You don’t get to decide all of that counts for less than a language you didn’t even know you were speaking.”
Harry stared at her. The colour had reached his ears. He seemed to be trying to find an answer and failing, which Draco considered an improvement on what he had been saying before. Behind him, Ron had turned an interesting shade of red. He was looking down at his hands with fierce concentration.
Draco finally became aware that she still had hold of Harry’s arm and she released it.
Hermione, with a tact Draco would remember gratefully, drew a chair away from the neighbouring desk. “There’s another explanation for the voice,” she said. “Draco was looking into it when I found her.”
Harry turned towards her, visibly relieved to be given somewhere else to look. “What explanation?”
“That you’re hearing a snake.”
He frowned. “The thing in the Chamber?”
Draco nodded. “If Slytherin left a snake behind, you might be the only person who can understand it.”
Harry sat down slowly. This time, the movement seemed less like retreat than a need to think. “But I didn’t hear hissing.”
“You didn’t hear yourself hissing in the courtyard either,” Hermione reminded him. “To you, it was ordinary speech.”
He looked at Draco. “That’s what you were doing in the library?”
She nodded again.
Something in his expression eased, she could see him examining the possibility with a hope he was afraid to trust. “So it could really have been something else. In the walls, or somewhere nearby.”
“Yes,” Draco said. “It could.”
Ron sat back in his chair. “Well, that makes a lot more sense than you sneaking out of the hospital wing without Pomfrey noticing.”
Hermione gave him a warning look, but Harry’s mouth moved into the beginning of a smile.
Draco took the chair beside the desk. Her legs felt oddly unsteady now that she had stopped standing over him. “We still need to find out what sort,” she said. “There are plenty of snakes capable of killing someone. I haven’t found one that explains what happened to Thomas.”
“Or the Friar,” Hermione added.
Ron’s tentative relief faded as he considered that. “Hang on. How big a snake are we talking about?”
Hermione bit her lip, considering the question, “I don’t know.”
“Because if it’s big enough to go round attacking people, how’s it getting through the castle without anyone seeing it?”
Draco looked at him. “That,” she said, “is a good question, Weasley.”
The four of them fell silent. Outside, rain tapped against the windows. Draco found herself looking towards the wall beside them, at the unbroken stone and the narrow gap where it met the floor. She remembered the spiders hurrying away.
Beside her, Harry had stopped shivering. He was following her gaze now, his expression troubled but intent.
Harry came in from Quidditch practice with his broom over one shoulder and mud drying along the hem of his robes. The wind had left his cheeks red and his hair even less manageable than usual, but he looked better than he had the previous evening. Tired, certainly, though in a way Draco found reassuring. Flying had given him something to do besides think.
She stood from the bench beside the entrance-hall window. “Here.”
Harry looked at the cup she held out, then at her. “Hot chocolate?” He smiled and took it, wrapping both hands around the warm ceramic. “Thanks.”
Draco waited while he drank. She had spent several minutes deciding where to stand so that she could intercept him without appearing to have been waiting, an effort rendered pointless by the fact that he had recognised what she was doing at once. He made no comment, however, and she was grateful.“Was practice dreadful?”
“Flint thinks catching the Snitch isn’t enough if the Chasers haven’t scored properly.” Harry took another drink. “Apparently I’m supposed to give them time.”
“Considerate of him to explain that after spending the last month telling you to catch it as quickly as possible.”
Harry chuckled, “He said I knew what he meant.”
“Naturally.”
Harry’s smile lingered over the rim of the cup. Draco looked towards the stairs before he could notice how closely she was watching him.
Since leaving the classroom, she had been unable to settle. She had meant what she told him - she would have wagered everything she owned on his innocence. Yet knowing how to defend him from an accusation did not absolve her of helping create the circumstances in which it could be made.
When she took the diary, she had imagined preventing something. When she lost it, she had imagined recovering it before anyone needed to know. Each decision had seemed containable when she made it. Now Dean lay in the hospital wing, Harry had spent a day wondering whether he was dangerous, and Draco could no longer pretend that the consequences stopped with her.
She could not make any of that right with a cup of chocolate. There was, however, one thing she could give him. “When you’ve finished, there’s something I want to show you.”
Harry lowered the cup. “What?”
“You’ll see.”
He studied her with mild suspicion, then drank the rest.
The trophy room was brighter in the morning. Sunlight caught the polished cups nearest the windows, throwing narrow reflections across the cabinets. Harry followed Draco inside with his broom in his hand, looking around as though he expected whatever she had brought him to see to announce itself. “Have you won something?”
“Several things, if you count arguments. Unfortunately, the school declines to commemorate them.”
She led him past the cabinet she had crouched before on her last visit. Riddle’s award remained half concealed behind the larger shield, and she kept her eyes away from it.
Harry stopped when she did. “This one.”
He leaned towards the glass, searching the crowded shelf. Draco pointed. “Below the cup. The Quidditch plaque.”
He read down the list of names. She knew the instant he found it because he became completely still.
For a while, neither spoke. “James Potter,” Harry said at last. His voice was quiet enough that she might not have heard it if she had been standing farther away.
Harry moved his broom to his other hand and leaned closer, as though the name might reveal something else if he examined it properly. His glasses had slipped a little down his nose. He pushed them back without looking away. “My dad.”
There was wonder in the way he said it that made Draco’s throat tighten.
She had thought about bringing him here, imagined him being pleased, perhaps asking a few questions she would not be able to answer. She had not understood quite what it would mean to find his father’s name somewhere ordinary - not in an account of his death, not in somebody’s recollection of what had been lost, but on a school award among the names of boys who had played a game together.
“He played,” Harry said.
Draco nodded, “Apparently rather well.”
Harry laughed softly. He looked down the rest of the plaque, then back to the name, unwilling to leave it for long. “I wonder if he used to come and look at it.”
“He’d have been insufferable if he did.”
That earned her a proper grin. “Probably.”
He crouched slightly to read the smaller lettering. Draco stood beside him, allowing him the time. There was no need to explain why she had been searching through old awards, provided he did not ask. For once, she hoped he would remain too absorbed to notice the question.
After another minute, he straightened. “Could we ask Colin to take a photograph?”
“Of the plaque?”
“Yeah.” He looked almost apologetic. “I’d like to have one.”
“Then ask him. I imagine he’ll recover from the excitement eventually.”
Harry smiled again, but when he turned towards the cabinet, the expression was smaller and more private.
Draco pretended to examine a nearby cup. She knew very little about James Potter beyond what she had been taught to sneer at and what she had pieced together from other people’s grudges. Watching Harry now, she wished she had more to offer than a name behind glass.
“Thank you,” he said.
“It’s hardly a great discovery. I happened to notice it.”
“I don’t just mean this.”
Draco looked at him. Harry shifted his grip on his broom. His face had gone pink, though whether from the warmth of the room or the effort of continuing, she could not tell. “I mean —yesterday as well. And…” He glanced towards the plaque, then back at her. “For being my friend.”
She had no answer prepared for that. It was an uncomplicated thing to say. Harry seemed to mean it without qualification, and Draco, who was more used to defending herself against suspicion or anger, found herself quite unprepared to be thanked. “You make it sound like charitable work.”
“Sometimes you make it sound like it is.”
He was smiling, giving her somewhere to retreat. She felt a reluctant answering smile pull at her mouth. “Well. You do require a remarkable amount of supervision.”
Harry nudged her shoulder lightly with his own before turning for the door.
She followed, grateful that he did not ask her to say anything more.
They took the quieter passages towards the dungeons, avoiding the students drifting into the entrance hall after breakfast. Harry had begun telling her about practice again, describing a turn Flint wanted him to make close to the stands.
Draco was explaining why Flint’s advice should not be accepted at face value when Harry stopped. She took another step before noticing. “What?”
He held up his hand.
The corridor was quiet apart from distant footsteps on a staircase. Draco waited, watching the change in his face. His gaze snapped towards the wall. “No.” Draco's stomach tightened. “Harry?”
“It’s here.”
The warmth of the trophy room seemed suddenly far away. “The voice?”
He nodded, listening with such concentration that she caught herself holding her breath. There was nothing - no hiss, no movement, nothing to tell her whether whatever he heard was inches away or at the other end of the passage. “What’s it saying?”
Harry did not answer immediately. His hand closed around his broom and then he moved.
Draco caught up with him at the turning. “Where?”
“This way.”
He was no longer walking. She had to lengthen her stride to stay beside him, drawing her wand as they passed beneath an archway. Harry glanced upwards, then towards the wall again, adjusting his course to something she could neither hear nor follow.
Fear gathered painfully beneath her ribs. They were chasing it. The thing that had left Thomas rigid on the floor and the Friar hanging helplessly above him was somewhere close enough for Harry to hear. They had no idea how to fight it, no certainty about what it was. Draco wanted to seize Harry’s arm and pull him back, find a teacher, insist that they stop running towards something capable of doing that to a person.
But if someone was ahead of them —
Harry broke into a run and she ran with him. His broom knocked against the wall as they rounded another corner. He scarcely seemed to notice. Draco’s shoes slipped on the worn stone, and she caught herself against a doorframe before pushing on. “Harry, wait.”
He slowed just enough for her to draw level. For a moment, he stood listening, his face taut, and then the urgency changed into something worse. “It’s stopped.”
Draco looked down the passage before them. The windows here were narrow and set deep in the walls, admitting little light. Halfway down the passage, a mermaid floated through the coloured panes of a larger window, combing her hair among green fronds of glass seaweed. The artist had given her a silver mirror, its surface bright enough to catch the movement of anyone passing.
Something lay on the flagstones beneath it.
Harry saw it too. “Hello?”
There was no answer.
They approached more slowly. Draco could hear Harry breathing beside her and the faint scrape of his broom as he lowered it without seeming to realise.
A boy lay on his side, one leg drawn slightly forward. His bag had fallen open beside him, spilling a roll of parchment and a book onto the floor. Above him, the mermaid had abandoned her comb. She hovered at the edge of her pane, staring down with one hand pressed to her mouth.
Draco recognised the dark hair before she saw his face. Anthony Goldstein.
Harry knelt. “Anthony?”
He reached towards the boy’s shoulder, then hesitated. Draco crouched beside him, her wand casting a small circle of light over Anthony’s face. His eyes were open, his head turned towards the window as though something in the glass had caught his attention. From where he had fallen, Draco could see the opposite end of the passage reflected in the mermaid’s little mirror.
She glanced at it, then back at Anthony.
His body held the same unnatural rigidity as Dean’s. There was no blood, no sign of a struggle beyond the fallen bag. Only minutes ago, perhaps less, he had been walking through the castle with his books.
Harry’s hand rested on Anthony’s shoulder. Draco looked at him. His face had gone white with shock. “I heard it. We were right here.”
Above them, the mermaid withdrew farther into the painted weeds, taking her mirror with her. Its brief reflection of the corridor vanished.
Draco could think of nothing to say. Anthony lay between them, and the passage beyond him was empty.
They had followed the voice as quickly as they could, but they were still too late.
After Anthony, people stopped pretending their avoidance was accidental.
Students no longer found reasons to cross a corridor before Harry and Draco reached them - they simply moved. Conversations died openly. Once, a first-year caught sight of them on a staircase and turned so quickly that the girl behind her had to catch her bag to keep her from falling.
Harry waited until they were out of earshot before saying, “That’s new.”
Draco could not tell whether he intended it as a joke. She had lost the ability to find anything amusing in the way people looked at them.
Being discovered beside one petrified student could be explained. Being discovered beside a second had apparently settled the matter. Colin’s account, Harry’s time in the hospital wing, the absence of any evidence beyond their presence — all of it had become less persuasive than the simple fact that they were always there.
Millicent took particular exception to that phrase. "They found them,” she snapped at a boy who had been unwise enough to repeat it near her. “Would you rather everyone stepped over you and kept walking?”
She and Blaise persisted for several days, with diminishing patience and no visible success. Eventually, Draco told them to stop. “You can’t threaten the entire school, Millie.”
“I haven’t threatened the entire school.”
“Give it another week.”
Millicent looked ready to argue, but Harry shook his head. “It doesn’t help. They just start saying things about you as well.”
That silenced her more effectively than Draco’s warning.
In the quiet that followed, Draco noticed how tired she looked. There were shadows beneath Millicent’s eyes that did not disappear in better light, and her robes hung differently around her shoulders. She had lost weight - Draco could see it now without having to wonder whether she imagined it.
Millicent caught her looking and immediately asked whether there was something on her face.
Draco shook her head. She was becoming very good at recognising when a question would not be welcome. She wished that knowledge told her what to do instead.
The suspicion spread beyond the Slytherins.
Ron arrived at the library one afternoon in a temper because a conversation in his dormitory had stopped the instant he entered. Hermione admitted, after some prompting, that Lavender and Parvati had taken to whispering together whenever she returned to their room. “They’re frightened,” she said.
“They could try being frightened a bit less loudly,” Ron replied.
Fred and George alone appeared determined to extract entertainment from the situation. “Busy evening?” Fred asked Harry when they met outside the Great Hall. “Only George reckons you’ve been having tea with Slytherin’s monster.”
“Difficult to get a reservation,” George added. “We thought you might put in a word.”
Ginny rounded on them before Harry could answer. “Will you stop?” The force of it startled Neville, who had already looked uncomfortable at the mention of the creature.
“We’re joking,” Fred said.
“It isn’t funny.”
Harry gave her a small, grateful look. Draco watched the twins exchange a glance and, for once, let the subject drop.
Luna approached the matter differently. She found Draco returning a stack of books and asked whether the monster had objected to being left out of the Christmas festivities. “Being shut away for so long must make it difficult to know when things are happening,” she explained.
Draco stared at her. “I haven’t asked.”
“No,” Luna said thoughtfully. “I suppose there hasn’t been a convenient moment.”
Pansy’s reaction was less peculiar, though no less noticeable. She had become nervous whenever the attacks were mentioned, looking towards the speaker as though she expected details she had not heard before. When Theodore made a pleased remark about the atmosphere in the corridors, she gave him a look so vicious that he stopped halfway through his sentence. Daphne, sitting beside her, was scarcely more welcoming.
Draco was not surprised. Pansy had always enjoyed cruelty best when there was no possibility of it reaching back towards her. A frightened first-year could be laughed at. A creature moving unseen through the castle was another matter.
Anthony’s friends had abandoned even the pretence of restraint. “Found anyone else lately?” Michael Corner asked as Harry and Draco passed him near the library. Terry Boot said something under his breath that made Padma Patil look away.
Harry kept walking and Draco followed. She could have answered them. Once, she would have considered their anger an invitation to find whatever remark would hurt most. Now she remembered Anthony’s open eyes and the books scattered beside his bag, and nothing she might say seemed worth the effort.
They were wrong about what she had done. She hadn't attacked Anthony but she still felt responsible, all the same. That distinction brought her very little comfort.
Christmas arrived beneath a fall of snow that softened the grounds and did nothing for Draco’s mood until she woke to find her bed surrounded by parcels. For a few moments, she lay still behind the curtains, listening to the quiet dormitory. Then she sat up and reached for the familiar cream envelope resting on the largest box.
Her mother’s letter was affectionate, precise, and entirely unhelpful in understanding why she remained at school. Narcissa hoped she was warm enough, sleeping properly, and making sensible use of the holidays.
Inside the box lay a butterfly clasp, its wings worked in delicate gold and set with small rubies. It was beautiful in the unmistakable way of things Narcissa chose - expensive without appearing to make an effort.
With all our love, the letter ended. Presumably that included her father.
Below her mother’s signature, Scorpius had added his own message. His handwriting had become noticeably more controlled, the letters sitting neatly on the line instead of wandering above it. Clearly the lessons were having an effect. Draco read his contribution twice before setting the letter carefully aside.
Millicent had given her chocolates. Ron, perhaps after considerable consultation, had reached the same conclusion. Hermione’s parcel contained a handsome quill, balanced far better than the one Draco had been using and accompanied by a note that managed to sound both affectionate and instructional about its care.
Blaise’s gift was a plain ruled notebook. Draco opened it suspiciously. On the first page, in his elegant handwriting, he had written: *A diary, as promised. *She shook her head, but found herself smiling.
Harry’s parcel was last. Beneath the paper lay a new copy of Quidditch Through the Ages, its cover unmarked and its pages still close-set from the binding. She had seen him reading the library’s battered copy often enough to know it was a favourite. He must have bought this one before term, perhaps during the same shopping trip that had begun everything else.
She ran a finger along the spine, then set it beside her mother’s letter.
She had selected her own presents with less anxiety than she had expected. Hermione received a three-volume collection of practical charms by the long-dead spellwright Honoria Vale. For Ron, she had obtained a signed Chudley Cannons poster, an extravagance she hoped he would appreciate without asking too closely how much it had cost.
Millicent’s book concerned jinxes unpleasant enough to interest her without requiring a visit to the Restricted Section. Blaise received a box of fragrances Draco remembered him favouring in her past life. For Harry, she had chosen a broom-care kit and a slim handbook of defensive spells, marking a few suitable places to begin.
Everyone received Honeydukes chocolates. If Lucius intended to cause distress among schoolchildren, Draco felt no obligation to economise while making their Christmas more tolerable.
Severus’s parcel had contained a monograph on the stabilisation of volatile potion bases. She expected no enthusiastic acknowledgement, which was just as well. His reply arrived in the form of a brief note identifying an error in the author’s second chapter.
She took that to mean he had started reading it.
Christmas dinner ought to have been an opportunity to forget the rest of the castle.
The Hall was warm, the trees glittered, and the diminished gathering of students made the decorations seem more extravagant than usual. Snow drifted beyond the windows while the enchanted ceiling offered a clear winter sky. Even Harry relaxed enough to laugh when a cracker deposited a small, indignant owl-shaped hat on Ron’s head at the neighbouring table.
Draco tried to attend to the meal but she was distracted.
The potion was ready. Hermione had told them that morning, speaking quietly enough that they had all leaned towards her. Since then, Draco had been conscious of the evening waiting beyond every ordinary activity - presents, breakfast, a walk across the grounds, dinner. In a few hours, she might know where the diary was.
Or she might learn that Theodore had never seen it.
Harry was similarly distracted. Twice, Millicent had to repeat a question before he answered, and he kept glancing towards Crabbe and Goyle farther along the table. Blaise noticed everything and appeared to notice nothing. When Daphne called him over, indicating an empty place beside her, he smiled and declined. “I’m quite comfortable here.”
Millicent paused with her fork halfway to her plate. “Are you ill?”
“Overwhelmed by the spirit of the occasion.”
Harry looked from him to Daphne, plainly surprised. Draco kept her attention on her potatoes.
Blaise’s presence was not generosity. Later, he would need to draw Harry away from Theodore without making it look deliberate. Remaining with them now gave him every opportunity to judge the timing.
Millicent, who knew none of this, shook her head and resumed describing the first use she had found for her present. “He shouldn’t have said it where I could hear.”
Harry glanced at her, “What did you do?”
“Nothing permanent.”
Harry cast a worried glance at Draco, “That isn’t reassuring.”
“It was supposed to make him think before he spoke again.”
Blaise glanced at Draco. “A demanding ambition for one jinx.”
Millicent laughed. She seemed cheerful, pleased with the book and delighted to have provoked disapproval with it. Yet she had eaten scarcely anything. Her fork moved food from one side of the plate to the other while she talked, and whenever someone offered her more, she answered so quickly that the dish passed on before anyone could insist.
Draco wanted to stay with that concern. It was immediate, visible, someone beside her whom she might actually be able to help.
Then Harry’s knee knocked hers beneath the table. Crabbe and Goyle were getting up.
They followed at a distance, letting the two boys turn into the quieter passage towards the dungeons before drawing their wands. Draco had insisted on discussing this part beforehand. There would be no shouting, no chase, and no attempt by Harry to improvise if the first spell failed.
For once, he obeyed precisely.
Their charms struck within a breath of each other. Crabbe sagged against the wall, while Goyle’s knees folded, and Harry hurried forward to keep his head from hitting the floor. Together, they manoeuvred the sleeping boys into a nearby storeroom, settling them where they would neither be discovered immediately nor wake with anything more serious than discomfort.
Harry bent to pluck several hairs from Crabbe’s head. “Feels a bit wrong, doesn’t it?”
“The hair?”
“All of it.”
Draco plucked a few hairs from Goyle’s head. “You might have raised that objection before we knocked them unconscious, Potter. Come on. Let’s not waste a perfectly good crime.”
He looked at her for a moment, then tucked the hairs carefully into a folded scrap of parchment.
At the bathroom, Hermione opened the door before they could knock a second time. “Did anyone see?”
“No,” Draco said.
Ron stood beside the cauldron with several cups arranged on the edge of a sink. The potion had become thick and unpleasantly dark, clinging to the ladle as Hermione lifted it.
Harry examined the cup she gave him. “We have to drink all of that?”
Draco, meanwhile, handed her cup back to Hermione and drew her wand, enlarging her robes and shoes before turning to Harry. He stood still while she adjusted his uniform too, watching his sleeves lengthen well beyond his hands. “Try not to tread on anything until you’ve changed.”
“Thanks.”
Ron was grinning now. Hermione was not. “Remember, you have an hour. Less by the time you get there. Don’t stay just because he’s in the middle of saying something interesting.”
Draco looked at the potion. An hour ought to be enough.
Hermione divided the final ingredients between them. Crabbe’s hairs disappeared into Harry’s cup, where the potion churned and changed colour. Draco added Goyle’s, watching the surface thicken into something she would have refused to touch under any other circumstances.
Ron leaned closer, then regretted it. “That smells foul.”
“Helpful, Weasley.”
Harry raised his cup slightly towards hers, an absurd suggestion of a toast.
Draco met his eyes. For a moment, she remembered him in the trophy room thanking her for being his friend. Then she drank.
The potion was worse than its smell. She forced it down before she could reconsider, swallowing against a bitterness that seemed to coat her whole mouth. Harry made a strangled noise beside her. Draco set the empty cup on the sink with rather less care than she intended.
Heat spread through her stomach.
She gripped the porcelain as the sensation travelled outwards, unpleasantly fast. Her fingers thickened against the edge of the basin. The floor seemed to shift beneath her, though it was her legs changing, her weight redistributing in ways she could neither anticipate nor control.
Somebody asked whether she was all right. She could not tell who.
Her shoulders broadened, pulling at robes that had seemed ludicrously oversized a moment earlier. Her face felt wrong - jaw heavy, skin tight, features moving beneath her hands when she tried to cover them. A low sound escaped her throat in a voice she did not recognise.
Draco remained bent over the sink, breathing hard.
Across the bathroom, Crabbe stood where Harry had been, one hand pressed to his chest. His glasses sat awkwardly on his altered face. He took them off and blinked. “Oh.”
The voice was so unmistakably Crabbe’s that Ron gave an involuntary laugh.
Hermione stepped closer, examining them both with an expression in which satisfaction and alarm competed. “It worked.”
Draco looked into the spotted mirror. Goyle stared back.
For one disorienting moment, the broad shoulders and deep voice were familiar simply because they belonged to a boy. Then she tried to straighten and nearly misjudged the distance between herself and the sink.
This body was nothing like the one she remembered.
Behind her reflection, Hermione checked her watch. “Your hour starts now.”
Harry folded his glasses and pushed them into his robes. Then he looked towards Draco, his expression strange beneath Crabbe’s features but his hesitation entirely his own. “Ready?”
She flexed Goyle’s heavy fingers once, adjusting her grip on her wand. “Let’s find Nott.”
Theodore Nott was occupying a sofa near the common-room fire, with his feet on a low table and a folded newspaper beside him. He looked up when they entered, glanced at their borrowed faces, and returned his attention to the paper. “Took you long enough.”
Harry made an indistinct noise. Draco sat down before he could attempt anything more ambitious, discovering in the process that Goyle’s knees required considerably more room than her own.
Theodore pushed the newspaper towards them. “Father’s in there.”
Draco looked obediently at the page. Several names had been marked, though none of the passages seemed to contain the announcement Theodore plainly believed the Ministry ought to have made.
“He’s helping organise an inquiry into Weasley’s department,” Theodore continued. “About that ridiculous Muggle Protection Act. Father says there are questions about how it was pushed through.”
Beside Draco, Harry became very still.
“The whole thing ought to be thrown out. Weasley spends half his time worrying about people too stupid to recognise magic when it’s right in front of them.”
Harry’s borrowed face darkened. On Crabbe’s broad features, the expression was neither subtle nor particularly difficult to interpret, and Draco had to nudge him.
“What’s wrong with you?” Theodore asked.
“Stomach,” Harry muttered, pressing a hand to it.
Theodore moved his feet away from him. “Don’t be sick here.”
Draco reached for the newspaper and turned it over, giving Harry a moment to arrange himself into something less openly murderous. She had known he would be the weak point. Potter could face an incoming curse without hesitation, but expecting him to listen pleasantly while someone insulted a friend’s family had apparently been excessive optimism.
“Doesn’t matter much, does it?” she said, pitching Goyle’s voice into a dull, satisfied rumble. “Not with what’s happening.”
Theodore’s attention sharpened. “The attacks?”
Draco nodded. “Yeah. Might get rid of a few more Mudbloods.”
The words came easily enough, which was the worst part. She remembered saying much the same thing in another life, not as a performance but because she had liked the sound of it. The certainty, the contempt, the promise of belonging to the people who would remain safe. She had once mistaken repeating her father’s opinions for possessing her own.
Harry was staring at her. She shifted her elbow into his side, harder this time.
Theodore had noticed none of it. He leaned back, looking pleased. “Exactly. Shame whoever’s doing it hasn’t let a few of us in on it. I could help.”
“Thought you knew,” Harry said abruptly.
Theodore frowned. “Knew what?”
Harry surged forward in his seat, “Who it was.”
“I’ve told you I don’t.”
“But your dad —”
Nott scoffed, looking annoyed and suspicious in equal parts, “Knowing something about it isn’t the same as being told everything, Crabbe.”
Harry lowered his eyes. Draco studied the newspaper as though the distinction required more thought than Goyle could comfortably give it.
After a moment, Theodore resumed talking. He could never bear to leave an audience with the impression that there was information he did not possess. “Father knows about the last time. He won’t say much, though. Says I’d be a fool to go repeating things I couldn’t explain knowing.”
“Last time?” Draco asked.
“About fifty years ago. Before he was here.” Theodore paused, ensuring they were both listening. “A Muggle-born died.”
Harry’s hand closed against his knee. “Did they catch whoever did it?”
“Someone was expelled.” Theodore shrugged. “Probably got sent to Azkaban afterwards. Father didn’t say.”
Draco kept Goyle’s face vacant. She knew there had been a death. She had known that as a child and never troubled to ask who had died. Her father had spoken of the Chamber with the comfortable detachment of someone discussing necessary repairs to an old house. Hogwarts required a cleansing and she was to keep her head down and allow events to take their course.
There had been a name attached to that dead student. A family. People who had waited for letters from the school.
She had not asked.
Theodore was saying that this time it was only a matter of waiting when the entrance opened behind them. Blaise came down the steps, took in the group by the fire, and stopped. “Crabbe. There you are.”
Harry looked up and Blaise gave him an impatient gesture. “I need a hand. Something’s fallen behind the cabinet in the dormitory, and I’m not dragging the thing out myself.”
Harry hesitated. Draco let Goyle’s shoulder knock his. “Go on.”
For a second, she thought he might refuse. Then he rose, still looking faintly resentful, and followed Blaise towards the boys’ staircase.
Theodore watched them go. “Zabini’s got some nerve. Spends all his time with Malfoy, then expects us to do his fetching.”
Draco looked down at her enormous hands. “Malfoy’s worse.”
Theodore turned back towards her, eyes bright and face gleeful.
“She thinks she can order everyone about,” Draco continued. “Looks at you like you’re stupid if you ask anything.”
It was not a difficult complaint to make convincing. She had seen Goyle receive precisely that look often enough.
Theodore gave a short laugh. “She’s got far too pleased with herself. Being pretty doesn’t mean she can do whatever she likes.”
Draco kept her expression resentful rather than interested. “Always hanging around Potter.”
“Exactly. Her father must be delighted.”
There was something in the way he said it.
Draco scratched at Goyle’s wrist, buying herself a moment. “Could do something,” she said.
“What?”
“Take her down a bit.”
Theodore’s mouth curved. “Trust me, I've already dealt with that.”
Draco let a beat pass, then looked at him. “How?”
Nott muttered, “Never mind.”
Draco pressed, “Could help.”
“You’d only get in the way.”
She forced herself to remain slouched. Across the room, an older student closed his book and began gathering his things. Draco waited until he had gone up to the dormitories before speaking again. “What did you do?”
Theodore looked irritatingly satisfied. “Let’s just Mr. Malfoy has rather more sense than she does. He gave me instructions, and I followed them. Things are going as they were supposed to now.”
Draco felt Goyle’s heavy fingers tighten against her palms.
Her father knew. Whatever she had hoped, whatever innocent explanation she had tried to preserve for her mother’s letter, her father knew she had interfered. He had reached into Hogwarts and used Theodore to undo it. “Instructions?”
Theodore’s pleasure cooled. “Honestly, Goyle. Leave it.”
He went back to the newspaper.
Draco looked towards the stairs. Blaise could keep Harry occupied for a while, but not indefinitely. Somewhere beneath the unfamiliar weight of this body, she was still aware of the hour passing. Theodore had admitted enough to confirm her suspicions and nothing that would help her find the diary. He liked Goyle as an audience, not as a confidant.
There would be no clever question that made him forget the difference.
She had enough to take to Severus. Theodore had admitted that her father had given him instructions - she could leave now and let someone else make him explain. But then Severus would want to know about the diary, so would Dumbledore. And Harry would learn how long she had kept everything from him.
Draco slipped her wand from her sleeve and Theodore glanced at the movement. “What are you—”
“Legilimens.”
For an instant, Draco saw the common room through two incompatible perspectives: - the fire beside her, the fire opposite him, her own borrowed face advancing in a way that made no sense. Then the room broke apart.
A corridor crowded with students. His father’s handwriting. The sharp satisfaction of watching Harry Potter turn towards a whisper.
Draco pushed past them. She had never possessed her aunt’s ease with this. Bellatrix had found it endlessly aggravating that Draco could close a door in her mind more effectively than she could force one open in somebody else’s. There was a precision to Legilimency she had never properly mastered, a way of following an association without damaging the path.
She had no patience for precision now.
The memories came in abrupt, nauseating fragments. A letter unfolded beneath a blanket. Lucius Malfoy’s name. The dark rectangle of the diary, unmistakable even before she caught sight of the cover.
Theodore resisted. She felt it in the sudden confusion of images, the force with which the present tried to reassert itself. His fear struck through her concentration, followed by a pain so sharp that she could not tell whether it belonged to him or to her.
She held on.
A hand passed over the diary. A turn of the head. A face.
Draco’s concentration faltered.
She knew that face. Had seen it recently, had looked at it without understanding —
The common room slammed back into place.
Nott had fallen sideways against the arm of the sofa. One hand was pressed to his forehead, and his breathing came in short, disordered bursts. He stared at her with horror breaking through the pain. “Who the hell are you?”
Draco’s wand was still raised and he drew his own. “Who are you?”
She moved as his arm came up. The curse he spat struck the back of her chair with a vicious crack, splitting the wood where her shoulder had been.
Draco stumbled under Goyle’s unfamiliar weight. “Stupefy!”
The red light caught Theodore squarely in the chest. He struck the sofa, slid from it, and lay still on the rug.
For several seconds, Draco heard nothing but her own breathing.
She looked towards the stairs, then the entrance. There were no footsteps. No startled voice demanding to know what had happened.
Her chair bore a dark, splintered wound and Theodore’s wand lay beside his outstretched hand.
Draco repaired the chair with a hurried charm, then knelt awkwardly beside him. Goyle’s knees pressed heavily into the rug. She could feel her pulse in his thick fingers as she positioned her wand.
Obliviation was not something to do while frightened.
She knew that with a clarity that did nothing to help her. She had forced her way into Theodore’s mind, and he had seen enough to understand that Goyle was not Goyle. Leaving him with the memory meant exposing the entire plan before she had even reached Myrtle's bathroom.
She tried to gather the relevant moments - the wand, the intrusion, his question, the fight. Not the diary or whatever Lucius had told him. She needed those memories left intact, however much easier it would have been to strip everything away.
“Obliviate.”
The charm settled over him but there was no satisfying sign that it had worked exactly as she intended. His face slackened, but then again, he had been unconscious already. Draco remained still, then a faint crawling sensation passed along her fingers.
She looked down, and for a moment, she thought they had begun to narrow.
She got to her feet at once. Theodore’s wand went beside his hand. The newspaper she placed on the sofa, open where he had been reading. From the entrance, the scene might pass for someone who had fallen asleep in front of the fire, though the angle of his body made her unwilling to rely on that impression for long.
She crossed the room and stopped at the foot of the steps.
Harry and Blaise would come down expecting to find her there. Draco looked once towards the boys’ staircase, torn between the risk of waiting and the thought of Harry discovering Nott on the floor. She could not remain. If the potion failed here, everything she had done would be laid bare.
She would have to trust Blaise to manage it.
At the entrance, she turned and pointed her wand back towards the rug. “Rennervate.”
Nott stirred, while Draco stumbled through the entrance before his head lifted. She walked until the wall had closed behind her, then broke into a clumsy run.
The face she had seen remained horribly clear.