Scared, Potter?

Wiltshire, July 1991

The peacocks were screaming again.

Dracaena Malfoy sat very straight on the drawing room sofa, ankles crossed the way her mother had taught her, and listened to them shriek on the lawn below. She was eleven and small for it, with a pointed chin and skin so pale it looked as if it had never met weather. Her hair was Malfoy platinum, so fair it was nearly white, and it fell straight to the middle of her back. Her eyes were gray as rain. Her father stood at the tall window with his back to her, his long white blond hair tied with a black ribbon, one hand resting on the silver head of his cane.

“Come here,” he said.

She went. The glass was cold. The grounds of the Manor ran green and perfect down to the hedge, and past the hedge was the village, and past the village was everything else.

“Tell me what you see.”

“The garden,” she said. “The village. The road.”

“You see a slope.” Lucius did not look at her. “Everything in this world stands on something beneath it. The village stands on the farmers. The farmers stand on the dirt. The Muggles, who have no magic at all, stand on one another and call it fairness. Everything climbs, Dracaena, and somebody always reaches the top.” He turned the silver snake on his cane so its emerald eyes caught the light. “We are not at the top because we were born there. We were born there because we belong there. Do you understand the difference?”

She didn’t, quite. She nodded anyway. You always nodded.

“Harry Potter starts at Hogwarts this year.”

That made her look up. Everyone knew the name. Ten years ago, the Dark Lord, the darkest wizard in a century, the one grown witches and wizards still would not name out loud, had come to a cottage in Godric’s Hollow and killed James and Lily Potter. Then he had turned his wand on their baby son. The curse had failed. The Dark Lord had vanished. And the baby had lived, with nothing to show for it but a scar. It was in three of her history books, which she had read twice each.

“Half the world believes he is a hero,” her father said. “The other half believes he is an accident. And a few of us wonder whether a baby survives the Dark Lord because he is something darker.” His gray eyes finally came to rest on her, the same gray as her own. “I want to know which. You will be his friend.”

“What if I don’t like him?”

Lucius smiled the way he smiled at Ministry dinners.

“Liking,” he said, “is for people who can afford it.”

Diagon Alley, July 31

Madam Malkin’s smelled of chalk and steam. Dracaena stood on a footstool with her arms out while a witch pinned black robes up around her ankles, and she was bored past bearing, so when the bell over the door rang she twisted around so fast a pin caught her.

A boy came in. Skinny, with knobbly knees and round glasses mended across the middle with tape, in a shirt so enormous it might have belonged to a walrus. Black hair that looked like it had lost a fight. And behind the glasses, eyes of such a bright green that they startled her. He stood blinking at the bolts of fabric as if he had never been inside a shop before.

Madam Malkin put him on the stool beside hers. Dracaena gave him a good long look. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands.

“Hello,” she said. “Are you going to Hogwarts too?”

“Er. Yeah. I think so.”

“You think so?” She laughed. “Mother’s at Ollivander’s and Father’s gone for my books, and after that I’m making them take me to look at brooms. First years aren’t allowed their own, which is absolutely ridiculous, so I’m going to sneak one in.”

He made a small noise that might have been agreement.

“Do you fly?”

“Fly?”

“On a broom. Obviously.”

“I’ve never been on a broom.”

She stared at him as if he’d said he had never been in a bath. “Then what do you do all day?”

“Mostly cupboards,” he said, which she decided was a joke, and not a very good one.

“I’ll be in Slytherin,” she went on. “Everyone in my family has been, all the way back. If the Hat puts me in Hufflepuff, I’ll bite my own tongue off. I swear I will.”

A shape blotted out the window. A man stood on the pavement outside, so tall and so wide that he made the street look small, with a wild tangle of black hair, a beard like a hedge, small dark eyes that crinkled when he smiled, and two enormous ice creams in his fists. He held one up and waggled it at the boy.

“Is that man with you?” Dracaena said. “He looks like he lives in a tree.”

“That’s Hagrid.” The boy’s voice had changed. “He works at Hogwarts.”

“Oh, the groundskeeper. Father says Dumbledore keeps him around the way you’d keep a stray dog.” She tilted her head. “Where are your parents?”

“They’re dead.”

“Oh.” She hadn’t expected that, and for a second she didn’t know what to do with her face. “Sorry. Were they both magic? From proper families?”

“They were magic,” he said shortly. “Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters.” She said it kindly, the way you’d explain to someone that fire was hot. “Some of the new students have never heard of any of it until the letter comes. Their parents don’t even know what we are. Father says letting them in is like letting the neighbor’s dog sit down to dinner.”

The boy didn’t say anything at all. He looked at the window, where the giant was still holding up an ice cream and beaming, and his jaw went tight.

“That’s you done, dear,” said Madam Malkin.

Dracaena hopped down and fished out the little silver pocket watch her grandmother had left her, the one with the snake coiled around the face. Ten past twelve. Mother would be cross.

“Oh, I’ve got to go.” She swept her new robes over her arm and was out the door before the bell stopped ringing. “See you at Hogwarts!”

She skipped down the steps into the sunshine, humming. He was strange, but he’d listened, which was more than most people did. She thought they could be friends.

Maybe she should have asked his name.

Inside the shop, the boy stood on his footstool with his fists balled up in his huge sleeves and decided that she was the worst person he had ever met. It was his eleventh birthday. She had not asked about that either.

The Hogwarts Express, September 1

By the time the train cleared London, the whole of it knew. Harry Potter was aboard. Somebody’s cousin had seen the scar. Dracaena heard it from Pansy Parkinson, a sharp faced girl with a black bob and an opinion about everyone, who heard it from a fourth year, and she sat very still for a moment remembering a boy in an enormous shirt with his hair pushed down over his forehead.

Oh.

She stood up and smoothed her skirt. “Crabbe. Goyle. Come on.” The two boys heaved themselves up after her. They were built like wardrobes and about as chatty, and their fathers were friends of her father’s.

She found him three cars down, in a compartment drowning in sweet wrappers, sitting across from a tall, gangly redheaded boy with freckles, a long nose, and chocolate on his chin. She stopped in the doorway and let Crabbe and Goyle fill the space behind her, which was what they were for.

“So it’s true,” she said. “You’re Harry Potter.”

He looked up, and his fringe fell aside, and there it was on his forehead: a thin scar shaped like a bolt of lightning. She watched him recognize her. It was not a happy recognition.

“You’re the girl from the robe shop.”

“Dracaena Malfoy.”

The redhead made a sound like a sneeze turning into a laugh.

“Something funny?”

“Sorry,” he said, not sorry at all. “Only, isn’t that a houseplant? Mum’s got one in the kitchen. It keeps dying.”

Heat crawled up her neck. She looked him over, slowly, the way her father looked at people he intended to make small. The red hair. The freckles. The robes gone shiny at the elbows from somebody else’s wearing.

“Let me guess,” she said. “Weasley. Father says yours is the only family in Britain that’s managed to be pureblood and poor at the same time. It takes a real talent.”

The redhead’s ears went scarlet.

She turned back to Harry Potter, because he was the one who mattered. “There are families at this school worth knowing, and families that will drag you down with them. I know which are which. Stick with me and you won’t have to learn it the hard way.” She held out her hand. Her father had practiced this with her. Firm grip. Hold the eyes.

Harry Potter looked at her hand. Then at the redhead, whose ears were still burning. Then back at her.

“I’ve already got a friend,” he said. “I’ll work out the rest myself.”

She didn’t lower her hand. She didn’t know how. Nobody had ever left it hanging before, and her arm stayed out there in the air between them like it belonged to someone else, until he reached up and pushed it aside with the back of his own.

It wasn’t hard. It didn’t need to be.

“Fine,” Dracaena said. Her voice came out higher than she meant it to. “Fine. You’ll be sorry, Potter. You’ll see.”

She walked out. She sent Crabbe and Goyle ahead to find the trolley with one sharp jerk of her chin, and when the corridor was empty she stopped at the window and pressed her forehead against the glass.

Malfoys did not cry. She had learned that at six, the day she fell off her first toy broom onto the gravel drive. Dobby, the family’s house elf, a creature no taller than her knee, with ears like a bat’s and eyes the size of tennis balls, dressed in nothing but an old pillowcase, had picked her up and pressed a cold cloth to her knee and hummed some tuneless elf song until she stopped sobbing, and she had said thank you, Dobby, the way you would say it to anyone.

Her father heard. That night she lay awake listening to Dobby through the kitchen door, punishing himself the way elves did, and in the morning her father explained, very patiently, that Malfoys did not cry and Malfoys did not thank servants, and that both lessons were for her own good.

She had never thanked Dobby again. She had never cried in front of her father again either.

Her eyes blurred anyway. Fields went by, and sheep, and a river like a strip of tin. She held her right hand in her left as though it had been burned.

“Are you all right?”

A girl with an enormous amount of bushy brown hair and front teeth a little too big for her face stood in the corridor, already in her school robes, looking at her with frank concern.

“I have something in my eye,” Dracaena said.

“Both of them?”

“Go away.”

The girl didn’t go at once. “Only, a boy called Neville’s lost his toad, and if you’ve seen it…”

“I haven’t seen a toad. Go away.”

The girl went. Dracaena dried her face on her sleeve, checked her reflection in the glass until it looked like nothing had happened, and walked back to her own compartment with her chin up.

The Great Hall

At Hogwarts, every first year was sorted into one of four houses, and that house became your family for seven years: brave Gryffindor, loyal Hufflepuff, clever Ravenclaw, ambitious Slytherin. The sorting was done by a patched and frayed old wizard’s hat that could see inside your head. It smelled of old dust and older magic. It slid down over her eyes, the Hall vanished, and a small dry voice spoke inside her head.

Ah. A Malfoy. I know where you want to go before you ask.

Slytherin, she thought. Please.

Mm. Yes, there’s ambition here, plenty of it. Cleverness. A very great wish to be thought well of. The voice paused, and she felt it turning something over, the way her mother turned a jewel to the light. But there’s something else, isn’t there? Tucked away at the back, where your father never looks. Nerve. Real nerve. You’d do very well in Gryffindor, you know.

Panic hit her like cold water. No. Not Gryffindor. Please. Father would… please. Slytherin.

You’d beg me for the smaller room? The Hat sounded faintly sad. Very well. It’s your head. But I’ve seen it, child. Remember that I’ve seen it.

“SLYTHERIN!”

The green table erupted. She walked to it on legs that didn’t feel like hers, sat down beside Crabbe, and smiled when an older boy clapped her on the back. Nobody would ever know. She would make very sure that nobody ever knew.

“Potter, Harry!”

The Hall went silent the way a church goes silent. She watched the Hat slide down over his messy hair and stay there, and stay there, and stay there, so long that people began to whisper. She found she was gripping the edge of the bench.

“GRYFFINDOR!”

The noise from the far table was like a wave breaking. Two red haired twins were chanting something. Harry Potter pulled off the Hat, grinning with relief, and walked to his new house without once looking back.

Dracaena clapped politely, because Malfoys were always polite.

That night, by the light of the green lamps in the Slytherin dungeon, she wrote to her father.

Dear Father. I have met Potter. He is nothing special.

She looked at it for a long time. Then she tore it in half and started again.

Dear Father. Potter is in Gryffindor.

That much, at least, was true.

September 1991

Neville Longbottom, a round faced boy who lost everything he owned at least once a week, got bucked off his broom ten feet up, and he landed on his wrist with a crack that made the whole flying class wince. Madam Hooch marched him off to the hospital wing, warning everyone that anyone who so much as touched a broom while she was gone would be out of Hogwarts before they could say Quidditch.

Something glinted in the grass where he had fallen. A glass ball the size of a plum, full of white smoke.

Dracaena picked it up. “Longbottom’s Remembrall. His gran sent it.” She held it up to the light. “If he’d squeezed it, maybe he’d have remembered which end of the broom goes up.”

The Slytherins laughed. Harry Potter did not.

“Give it here, Malfoy.”

“I don’t think so.” She swung her leg over her broom and kicked off, and the ground fell away the way it always had, since she was six, easy as breathing. She hovered level with the top of an oak. “Come and get it, Potter.”

“Harry, no,” said the bushy haired girl from the train. “Madam Hooch told us not to move. You’ll get us all in trouble!”

He kicked off anyway.

Dracaena had seen a lot of people fly. Her father, her cousins, the Quidditch players her father took her to watch from the Ministry box. She had never seen anyone go up like that, like the broom had been waiting for him all his life. He shot past the oak and turned and came level with her, and he was grinning.

“You said you’d never been on a broom,” she said.

“I hadn’t.”

She didn’t like how that made her feel, so she threw the Remembrall as hard as she could at the castle wall.

He went after it. Straight down, flat against the handle, faster than anyone on a school broom had any right to go. He caught it a foot from the grass, pulled out of the dive, and tumbled off onto the lawn holding it over his head while the Gryffindors screamed.

Then Professor McGonagall came striding across the lawn, tall and stern in emerald robes, her black hair scraped into a tight bun, square spectacles flashing, and her voice cracked across the grounds like a whip. “HARRY POTTER!”

Dracaena landed slowly. Potter was going to be expelled. That was the plan, wasn’t it? That was exactly what should happen to boys who refused your hand on a train.

She felt sick all through lunch.

At dinner she learned that he was not expelled. He was the new Gryffindor Seeker. In Quidditch, the wizarding world’s great game played on broomsticks, the Seeker has one job: catch the Golden Snitch, a winged gold ball the size of a walnut, faster than a swallow and worth more than anything else on the pitch. Potter was the youngest Seeker in a century.

She stabbed her potato so hard the fork went through it.

The Trophy Room

“Wizard’s duel,” she said, standing over the Gryffindor table with her arms folded. “Tonight. Midnight. The trophy room. Wands only.”

“I’m his second,” said Weasley instantly. “Who’s yours?”

“Crabbe.”

Then she went straight to the office of Argus Filch, the caretaker, a stooped and bitter man who hated students almost as much as his cat did, and told him there would be students out of bed in the trophy room at midnight.

And then she lay in her four poster in the dark, and stared at the green hangings, and saw Potter’s face in midair. Grinning. As though nobody had ever let him be good at anything before.

At ten to midnight she got up.

She found all of them in the trophy room. Potter and Weasley, which she expected. Granger, which she didn’t. And Neville Longbottom, wrist mended, who had apparently been locked out of his own common room and followed them because he was afraid to be alone.

“Where’s Crabbe?” said Weasley.

“Crabbe isn’t coming. Filch is. I told him.”

“You what?”

“And then I came to warn you,” Dracaena said, “so it cancels out.”

From the next room, a voice wheezed: “Sniff around, my sweet. They’ll be lurking in a corner.”

They ran. Five of them, through a gallery of suits of armor, Neville tripping over everyone, until they hit a locked door at the end of a corridor and Granger shoved them aside, pointed her wand at the lock, and whispered a spell. The door clicked open. They piled through and slammed it.

It was very quiet. It was very dark. There was a smell like wet dog and old meat.

Dracaena turned around.

The dog filled the corridor from the floor to the ceiling. It had three heads. All three were looking at them. Six eyes rolled in the dark, and yellow fangs dripped onto the flagstones, and a growl started somewhere deep inside it like distant thunder.

Nobody screamed. There wasn’t time. Harry found the door handle behind him and they fell back out into the corridor in a heap, and he slammed it shut, and they ran, and didn’t stop running until they reached the portrait of a fat woman in pink seven floors up.

Dracaena bent over with her hands on her knees.

“What do they think they’re doing,” Weasley gasped, “keeping a thing like that locked up in a school?”

“Didn’t you see what it was standing on?” said Granger.

“I wasn’t looking at its feet, I was a bit busy with its heads!”

“For once,” Dracaena panted, “Weasley is right.”

“It was standing on a trapdoor. It’s guarding something.” Granger drew herself up. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to bed before you get us all killed. Or worse, expelled.”

“Thank you, Granger,” Dracaena said, “for that very calm observation about the monster that nearly ate us.”

“You’re welcome,” said Granger, who did not seem to know what sarcasm was, and climbed through the portrait hole.

Weasley and Longbottom followed. Harry stayed.

“Why’d you come back?”

“I told you.” She straightened up. “To cancel it out.”

She walked away before he could say anything else. Behind her, Weasley’s voice floated out of the portrait hole: “She’s mental, Harry.”

“Yeah,” said Harry. But he watched her go all the way to the stairs.

October 1991

Tiny Professor Flitwick, who had to stand on a pile of books to see over his own desk, read out the first Charms results like a man calling a horse race.

“Miss Granger, full marks! Wonderful! Miss Malfoy, ninety seven! Oh, very close, very close!”

Ninety seven. Dracaena had never in her life come second at anything except flying, and she had only come second at flying once, last month, to a boy who had never been on a broom.

She went to the library that evening to make sure it never happened again, and found Granger already there, at the best table, the one under the tall window, behind a stack of books taller than her own head.

They looked at each other.

Dracaena sat down at the second best table, by the pillar.

It became, without either of them ever saying one word about it, the arrangement. Granger at the window. Malfoy at the pillar. Every evening from seven until Madam Pince threw them out, two first year girls who would not have shared a quill if the castle were on fire, each of them refusing to be the first to leave.

On Halloween a mountain troll got into the castle, and somehow Granger nearly got eaten by it in a girls’ bathroom, and after that, for reasons nobody in Slytherin could explain, she was always with Potter and Weasley.

November 1991

Harry’s first Quidditch match was against Slytherin.

Professor McGonagall had bought him a Nimbus Two Thousand, the fastest broom in the world, which was exactly the kind of thing that happened to Potter. Dracaena sat in the Slytherin stand with a green rosette on her robes and explained loudly to everyone nearby how a first year Seeker would be flattened by a Bludger inside ten minutes.

Twenty minutes in, his broom tried to throw him off.

The crowd thought it was a gust of wind. Dracaena knew better. She had been flying since she was six. She knew every way a broom could go wrong, and none of them looked like that: a hard sideways buck, then another, as if the broom were a horse trying to rid itself of its rider. A broom did not do that by itself.

Somebody was cursing it.

She snatched Pansy’s binoculars and swept the stands. There. In the teachers’ box, Professor Snape stood with his eyes fixed on Potter, his lips moving without a pause. And right beside him sat Professor Quirrell, the twitchy Defense teacher in the purple turban who smelled of garlic, staring just as hard.

Potter was dangling from his broom by one hand, sixty feet up.

“Give those back,” said Pansy.

“In a minute.”

Then there was a commotion in the teachers’ box, a flash of bright blue, and Snape leapt up beating at the hem of his robes, which were somehow on fire. The broom stopped bucking. Potter hauled himself back onto it, dove straight at the ground, clapped a hand over his mouth, landed on all fours, and coughed something gold into his palm.

He had caught the Snitch in his mouth.

The Gryffindor stands went mad. The Slytherin stands groaned. Dracaena lowered the binoculars and realized she had been holding her breath for almost a minute.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” said Pansy.

“I see ghosts every day. Ours is covered in blood.”

That night she lay awake in the green dark of the dungeons and thought somebody at Hogwarts just tried to kill Harry Potter. A grown wizard. A teacher. She thought about writing to her father. Then she thought about what her father would say.

She didn’t write. It was the first secret she ever kept for Harry Potter, and he never knew about it.

December 1991

“Potter’s staying for Christmas!” Dracaena announced to the Entrance Hall, loudly enough for the Gryffindors on the stairs. “Poor thing. I suppose when your own family doesn’t want you, the castle’s the next best thing.”

Harry didn’t even turn his head.

The eagle owl that brought her sweets every morning landed at breakfast with no sweets at all. Just a letter, sealed in black wax.

You will remain at school over the holiday. You were sent to learn what the Potter boy is. In four months you have learned only how to make him despise you, and the whole of Slytherin has watched you do it. Consider that over Christmas. Alone. Your mother sends her love. L. M.

She folded it into a very small square.

When she looked up, Harry Potter was watching her from the Gryffindor table. He had seen her face. She looked away first.

Boxing Day

On Christmas morning there was a dress from her mother and a book from her father, Nature’s Nobility: A Wizarding Genealogy, with the Malfoy page marked by a green ribbon. On the second night she gave up on sleep.

She was three corridors from the dungeons with her wand lit when she walked straight into something that wasn’t there.

“Ow.”

She landed on the flagstones. Above her, Harry Potter’s head hung in midair, attached to nothing.

Two lamp yellow eyes appeared at the end of the corridor. Mrs. Norris. Behind her came the shuffle and wheeze of Filch.

Harry grabbed her arm and threw something silver and weightless over both of them. They stood shoulder to shoulder against the wall, not breathing, while the cat padded close enough to touch and sniffed the air and moved on.

“Where did you get an Invisibility Cloak?” she whispered.

“Christmas present. The note said it was my dad’s.” He was looking at her face in the light of her wand. She knew what it looked like. “Your family didn’t want you home either huh”

It wasn’t cruel. It was just true. She opened her mouth to say something vicious, and nothing came.

“I found something,” he said. “It shows you your family.” He shrugged. “Maybe yours would be nicer in it.”

It stood in a classroom nobody used: a mirror as tall as the ceiling, in a gold frame on two clawed feet. Words were carved across the top. Dracaena held her wand up to them and frowned.

“It’s backward,” she said, and read it to herself, lips moving. “It doesn’t show your face. It shows what your heart wants.”

“No, it shows your family. Look.”

Harry stepped in front of it, and his whole face changed.

“There. That’s my mum.”

Dracaena looked. There was nobody in the glass but Harry in his pajamas, and her own pale face over his shoulder.

“She’s got red hair,” Harry said. “Darker than Ron’s. And her eyes… Malfoy, her eyes are like mine. Exactly like mine. And that’s my dad, with the glasses. His hair’s worse than mine, it sticks up at the back.” He laughed, a strange cracked sound, like he’d forgotten how. “They’re waving. There’s loads of them. That old man’s got my knees, I think.”

She could have said it. There’s nobody there, Potter. You’re talking to a mirror. Her father would have said it. It would have been easy.

She looked at his face instead.

“Your father’s hair is a disgrace,” she said. “Obviously that’s where you get it.”

Harry laughed again, properly this time.

“Your mother,” Dracaena said, and stopped, and tried again, carefully, the way she’d say something in French. “Your mother looks like she’d have liked you. Quite a lot.”

“You can’t see her.”

“I don’t need to see her. I can see you looking at her.” She folded her arms, because it was cold, and because she needed something to do with them. “Of course they’re happy, Potter. They’re looking at you.”

He didn’t say anything for a long moment. He put his hand flat against the glass. Then he stepped back to the wall and nodded at her. “Go on. Your turn.”

She expected her father, approving at last. She expected the Malfoy portraits, or herself as Head Girl with the Quidditch Cup in her arms.

Instead she saw herself in her dressing gown, hair a mess, wand lit. And beside her, close enough that their shoulders almost touched, Harry Potter, grinning at her as if she’d just said the funniest thing in the world.

She looked over her shoulder. The real Harry was across the room by the wall, arms folded, watching her.

She looked back. Mirror Harry was still right beside her. Mirror Dracaena was laughing.

“Your mirror’s broken, Potter,” she said. “There’s nothing in it but you and me.”

“I’m over here.”

“I know where you are.”

She had read the words herself. She decided, very firmly, that they were wrong.

“Did you see them?” he asked. “Your family?”

“No.” Her throat had gone tight. “I told you. It’s broken.”

“Sorry,” Harry said, and he sounded like he meant it. “I thought you’d see your family.”

“So did I.”

At the top of the dungeon stairs she stepped out from under the Cloak and turned around. “If you tell anyone I was out of bed, Potter…”

“I’d have to tell them I was too.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.” A pause. “Happy Christmas, Malfoy.”

“It’s Boxing Day.”

“Happy Boxing Day, then.”

She went down the stairs without answering. She smiled all the way to the bottom.

The next night Harry went back alone and found Albus Dumbledore waiting for him: the headmaster, tall and thin and impossibly old, with a silver beard that reached nearly to his waist, a long crooked nose that looked as though it had been broken more than once, and half moon spectacles over eyes as bright and blue as a summer sky. The old man explained the mirror kindly, and told him it would be moved, and then said something Harry didn’t understand until much later. The happiest person in the world, Dumbledore said, could use the Mirror of Erised like an ordinary mirror. They would see themselves exactly as they were, and nothing else.

Harry lay awake that night thinking about a girl who had called it broken.

May 1992

They found the unicorn in a clearing in the Forbidden Forest, on the worst detention of her life: Potter, a cowardly boarhound named Fang, and a lantern. It lay in the leaves like something spilled, white and wrong, its blood silver in the moonlight. Something hooded was bent over it, drinking.

Harry made a noise like he’d been stabbed and dropped to his knees with both hands over his scar.

Dracaena screamed. Fang bolted. She bolted after him, three steps, four.

Then she stopped. Potter was still on his knees. The hooded thing had lifted its head. It was coming.

She ran back, grabbed his wrist with both hands, and hauled.

“Get up, you idiot! What are you waiting for?”

She dragged him behind an oak, and the hooded thing glided after them across the leaves, and then there were hoofbeats, and a pale centaur burst into the clearing and the figure was gone like smoke.

Afterward, at the edge of the trees, she couldn’t make her hands stop shaking.

“I wasn’t scared,” she said.

“You screamed.”

“That was a battle cry!”

Harry laughed. It was the first time he had ever laughed at something she said instead of at her, and it surprised them both.

“You came back for me.”

“I did not come back. You were in my way.” She wiped her face hard. “You can’t understand, Potter. If I’d left Harry Potter in the Forest to die, I’d have had to explain it to my father. Do you know what he’d…”

She stopped.

“So that’s the only reason?” Harry said.

“That’s the only reason.”

It wasn’t. They both knew it wasn’t.

June 1992

At the end of year feast, the Great Hall was hung in Slytherin green and silver. Slytherin had won the House Cup for the seventh year running, and the whole table was banging its goblets, and Dracaena banged hers too.

Then Dumbledore stood up and began awarding points.

Fifty to Ron Weasley, for the best game of chess Hogwarts had seen in many years. Fifty to Hermione Granger, for cool logic in the face of fire. Sixty to Harry Potter, for pure nerve. Gryffindor drew level with Slytherin to the very point.

And it took a particular kind of courage, Dumbledore said, beaming over his spectacles, to stand up to your enemies, but even more to stand up to your own friends. Ten points to Neville Longbottom.

The Hall exploded. The green banners turned scarlet and gold over their heads.

In the middle of all the furious Slytherins around her, Dracaena realized that she had clapped. Once. By accident. When Longbottom’s name was called.

Pansy was staring at her.

“My hands were cold,” Dracaena said.

On the platform at King’s Cross, in all the noise of trunks and owls and parents, she passed Harry Potter close enough to touch.

“See you in September, Potter,” she said, without looking at him.

“See you, Malfoy.”

July 1992

She couldn’t use the family owl. Her father read everything that left the house.

So she did something she had never done before. She went down to the kitchens, where Dobby was scrubbing a roasting pan nearly as big as he was, and held out an envelope of pale green paper.

“Can you post this? Without Father knowing?”

Dobby’s ears went straight up. Both his hands were bandaged again. Elves did that to themselves, she told herself. It was simply what elves were like. Father said so. Dobby looked at the name on the envelope, and his enormous eyes grew even bigger.

“Dobby will take care of it, Miss,” he whispered. “Dobby will take very good care of it.”

Potter, she had written, in her best green ink. Father says you live with Muggles. I have decided not to hold this against you. The peacocks have been screaming for nine days. Mother says it is the heat. I have finished all my summer reading, which I expect Granger has also done, so I have started next year’s. Do not tell her. Write back. D.

She gave Dobby three more letters that summer. No reply ever came.

By the middle of August, she had decided that Harry Potter was exactly as rude as she had always said he was.

Surrey, July 31, 1992

On his twelfth birthday, Harry went up to his bedroom and found a house elf bouncing on his bed.

It was the size of a small child, with ears like a bat’s and huge bulging eyes, and it was wearing a filthy old pillowcase. It had come, it whispered, to warn Harry Potter that he must not go back to Hogwarts. Terrible things were going to happen there. And when Harry asked why not one of his friends had written to him all summer, the elf twisted its long fingers together, looked very guilty, and drew a thick wad of envelopes out of its pillowcase.

Harry saw Hermione’s neat handwriting. Ron’s scrawl. Hagrid’s enormous lopsided letters.

And on top, a pale green envelope, addressed in elegant slanting green ink to a single word. Potter.

“Dobby thought,” the elf whispered miserably, “that if Harry Potter believed his friends had forgotten him, Harry Potter would not want to go back…”

“Give me those!”

Harry lunged. The elf was faster. It was out the door and down the stairs, and a moment later there was an almighty crash from the kitchen, and Aunt Petunia’s prize pudding was all over the ceiling, and Harry never saw the letters again.

He lay awake that night, and many nights after, behind the bars Uncle Vernon bolted across his window, wondering who in the world wrote in green ink.

August 1992

Flourish and Blotts was packed to the shelves for some author signing, and Harry Potter had somehow ended up on the front page again, dragged into a photograph by a man with very white teeth.

“Enjoying the attention, Potter?” Dracaena said, when he finally escaped. “I’m sure the front page was exactly what you came in for.”

“Leave him alone,” snapped a tiny redheaded girl at his elbow. “He didn’t want any of that!”

“Oh, look, Potter. You’ve got a fan.”

Harry caught her sleeve as she turned away. “Malfoy. Did you…”

“Did I what?”

He thought of the pale green envelope. It couldn’t have been. “Nothing.”

“Then let go of my sleeve, Potter.” Four letters. Four, and not a single word back. She pulled free and didn’t look at him again.

Then her father arrived, and Mr. Weasley arrived, and the two men said things to each other in very quiet voices that made the air go cold. Her father picked up the little redhead’s battered secondhand Transfiguration book, turned it over with two fingers as if it were dirty, and dropped it back into her cauldron.

For a second Dracaena thought she saw something small and black slide out of his sleeve and into the cauldron with it.

Then Mr. Weasley lunged, and books went flying, and an enormous man had to haul them apart, and she forgot all about it.

October 1992

She made Seeker in her second year. She had been on the pitch alone every morning since the first of September, before dawn, until her hands went numb on the handle. She had earned it.

The same week, her father bought the Slytherin team seven Nimbus Two Thousand and Ones.

“Funny,” said Hermione Granger on the pitch, in front of both teams, “how Slytherin found a new Seeker the same week they found seven new brooms.”

It was the one thing Dracaena had done by herself. So she reached for the worst thing she owned, the word her father used at dinner for witches and wizards born to Muggle parents, people like Granger, and she threw it.

“Keep your opinions in your own gutter, Mudblood.”

The Slytherins laughed. The Gryffindors went still, as if she’d pulled a knife. Ron Weasley’s broken wand backfired and he spent the afternoon throwing up slugs, and that should have been the funny part.

It wasn’t. The part she remembered was Harry. He didn’t shout. He just looked at her the way he had looked at her hand on the train, as if she had finally proved something he had suspected all along.

They had never been friends, exactly. But since the mirror and the Forest, he had nodded to her in corridors. Once he had passed her a quill in Potions without being asked. Now there was nothing. Five weeks of nothing. She found that she minded the nothing more than she had ever minded anything.

Professor Snape kept her back after Potions that Friday. He was her Head of House: a thin man in black, with sallow skin, a hooked nose, and greasy black hair that hung to his shoulders like curtains, and dark eyes that gave nothing back at all.

“I hear you have expanded your vocabulary, Miss Malfoy.”

“Everyone says it, sir.”

“Yes,” Snape said “Everyone does. Once.” His black eyes didn’t move from her face. “A word like that is a door. You may walk through it as often as you like. You will find that the people on the other side do not follow.”

He dismissed her before she could ask what he meant.

November 1992

Her first match as Seeker was against Gryffindor, in the middle of the silence.

They hadn’t spoken in five weeks. They didn’t speak now. They hovered at opposite ends of the pitch high above the storm of the game, two small figures in green and scarlet, each pretending the other wasn’t there.

Then a Bludger went for Harry.

Bludgers were iron balls bewitched to knock players off their brooms, and they went for whoever happened to be nearest. This one didn’t. It ignored the Slytherin Beaters, ignored the Gryffindor Chasers, ignored her, and went for Potter, again and again, as if it had his name written on it.

The rain started. Potter dodged and rolled and dove, and the Bludger came after him every time. Someone had tampered with it. She would have bet her broom on it.

She flew close to tell him so. It came out wrong.

“Training for the ballet, Potter?” she called, as he spun away from it for the tenth time.

He looked at her, soaked and furious. Then his eyes went past her shoulder and widened.

The Snitch. Hovering a foot from her left ear.

She never saw it. He dove straight at her, and she jerked aside, sure he had lost his mind, and in that half second the Bludger caught his elbow with a crack she heard over the rain. He reached past her anyway with his good hand, closed it around the Snitch, and fell twelve feet into the mud.

She landed beside him before she knew she was doing it. His arm was bent in a place arms didn’t bend. He was white to the lips and holding the Snitch up in the rain.

“You idiot,” she said. “You complete idiot.”

He looked up at her through his rain spattered glasses, and for one second neither of them remembered they weren’t speaking.

Then Professor Lockhart arrived to help, and with one cheerful flick of his wand removed every single bone from Harry’s arm, and the moment was lost in the screaming.

December 1992

The Dueling Club was Lockhart’s idea, so naturally it was a disaster. Snape paired her with Potter on purpose. She could tell from the curl of his lip.

They faced each other from opposite ends of the long golden stage and bowed, barely. Then she raised her wand in the dueling salute and held it straight up in front of her face, dead center, so that it split her smirk neatly down the middle, and looked at him over the tip.

“Scared, Potter?”

At the other end of the stage, Harry Potter raised his own wand with the look of a boy who had been asked to duel a wasp, and was annoyed about it.

“You wish.”

She hit him with a dancing hex and his legs went wild. He hit her with a tickling charm and she doubled over shrieking. Then Snape bent down and whispered in her ear, and she pointed her wand and shouted the words, and a long black snake burst out of the tip and landed coiled on the stage, hissing at a Hufflepuff boy in the front row.

And Harry Potter hissed back. Not an imitation. The real thing: Parseltongue, the language of snakes, the famous gift of Salazar Slytherin himself.

The Hall went silent. The snake turned away from the Hufflepuff as if it had been told to. Someone had opened the Chamber of Secrets that year: a hidden room the founder Salazar Slytherin was said to have left for his true heir, with a monster inside it meant to purge the school of Muggleborns. Students kept turning up in the corridors frozen solid. By dinner the whole school had decided that Harry Potter could talk to snakes because he was the Heir of Slytherin, and that he was the one leaving them that way. First years ran when he turned a corner. Even the Hufflepuffs, who liked everybody, gave him a space .

She found him that night on a window ledge in an empty corridor, knees pulled up, watching the snow.

“Come to tell me I belong in Slytherin?” he said, without turning around.

“You’d hate it. The dungeons are freezing.” She stopped a few steps away. Then she heard herself say it, and there was no sneer in it at all.

“Scared, Potter?”

He looked at her for a long time.

“…You wish.”

“Good.” She sat down on the step below the ledge. “Everyone’s scared of you now.”

“Not you.”

“I’ve met you. You eat treacle tart like a dog.”

He almost smiled. Then the smile went away, and she knew why, and she made herself say it before she lost her nerve.

“That thing I said to Granger. I won’t say it again.”

“You should tell her that.”

“I’m not telling Granger anything.” She picked at a thread on her sleeve. “But I won’t say it.”

“Why?”

She thought about it honestly, because it seemed like a night for honesty.

“Because you looked at me like I was my father.”

The snow fell past the window. Far below, a suit of armor clanked in its sleep.

“If anyone sees us here,” Harry said eventually.

“Then I was hexing you.”

“And I won.”

“In your dreams, Potter.”

After that, it became a thing they said. In corridors, on the stairs, across the Potions classroom, in front of everyone. Scared, Potter? with her lip curled. You wish, with his eyes rolling. The whole school heard two rivals who couldn’t stand each other.

Only two people knew it meant something else.

Are you all right?

I’m still here.

On the way back to the dungeons that night, she took the long way round, past the classroom nobody used.

The mirror had been gone for a year. She stood in the doorway anyway, looking at the bare patch of wall where it had stood, and tried to remember exactly what she had seen. Two children in dressing gowns. Side by side. One of them laughing.

She told herself she had imagined most of it. She told herself that every time she walked past that door, for years.

May 1993

They found Hermione Granger at the foot of the library stairs, frozen solid, eyes wide open, a small round mirror still in her hand.

At the Slytherin table, Pansy said it before anyone else could. “Well. The Heir did say Mudbloods first.”

A few people laughed. Dracaena put down her toast. The word sat in her mouth like a stone she couldn’t spit out. It was written on the wall on the second floor in letters that dripped. It was what the monster in the walls was hunting. She had said it to Granger’s face in front of two Quidditch teams, and now Granger was lying in the hospital wing with her eyes open, seeing nothing.

She went that night, after curfew, the long way round.

Granger lay in the last bed by the window, stiff as a statue, moonlight on her face. Somebody had brushed her hair. It hadn’t helped much.

Dracaena stood at the foot of the bed with her hands clenched in her robe pockets.

“I said a word to you,” she whispered. “In October. It’s the word they wrote on the wall.” She swallowed. “I’m sorry.”

Granger couldn’t hear it. It didn’t count. Dracaena knew it didn’t count, and she said it anyway, and then she turned and walked out fast, before she could do anything as stupid as cry.

She didn’t see the two boys pressed flat against the wall beside the door, under a Cloak, holding their breath.

“Harry,” Ron Weasley breathed, when her footsteps had gone. “Was Malfoy just… apologizing to Hermione?”

“Shut up, Ron.”

“But she…”

“I know. Shut up.”

Ron shut up. He never told anyone. Not even Hermione. It was the first secret of Dracaena Malfoy’s that Ron Weasley ever kept, and he kept it for five years.

June 1993

Her father came to the school the day after the Chamber was opened and closed for good. He swept past her in the corridor outside Dumbledore’s office with Dobby scurrying behind him, bandaged and bruised, and said “Wait here,” without breaking stride.

She waited by the stone gargoyle. Through the door she heard voices rise and fall. Then the door banged open, and her father came down the stairs with his face red with fury, kicking Dobby ahead of him like a bag of laundry.

Harry came running after them.

“Mr. Malfoy! I’ve got something of yours.”

He was holding out a small black book with a hole burned right through it, wrapped in a filthy sock.

Dracaena knew that book. She had seen it slide out of her father’s sleeve in Flourish and Blotts, into the cauldron of a little girl with red hair who had shouted at her for being mean to Harry. That little girl had been taken into the Chamber of Secrets. That little girl who had almost died. And Granger had laid in the hospital wing for a month with her eyes open, because of a book her father had dropped into a cauldron as easily as dropping a coin into a fountain.

Her father ripped the sock off, flung it aside, and stared at the ruined diary.

“Be careful, Potter,” he said softly. “Your parents stuck their noses into things that didn’t concern them too. And look how that ended.”

Dobby caught the sock.

He held it up in both trembling hands, and his huge eyes went wider than she had ever seen them.

“Master has given Dobby a sock,” he whispered. “Master has given it to Dobby. Dobby is free.”

Her father understood a second too late. His face twisted. He lunged at Harry with his wand already rising, and there was a bang like a door slamming in the sky, and Lucius Malfoy flew backward down the corridor and landed in a heap of black robes and silver hair.

Dobby stood between him and Harry with one tiny finger raised. “Nobody hurts Harry Potter. Not while Dobby is watching.”

Her father picked himself up, slowly. He looked at Dobby. He looked at Harry. Then he looked at his daughter, standing frozen by the gargoyle, who had seen all of it.

“Dracaena,” he said. “Come.”

She went. As she passed Dobby, the elf looked up at her. Not at the floor, the way elves were trained to. At her face. For the first time in her whole life.

She couldn’t say anything. Her father’s hand was on her shoulder.

The Hogwarts Express

He found her at the end of the last carriage, alone by the window, because it was the last day of term and the train was loud and nobody was paying attention to anyone.

“Last summer,” Harry said, “Dobby turned up in my bedroom. He’d been stopping my letters. All of them.” He leaned on the window frame beside her. “There was one in green ink. Just Potter on the front.”

She went very still.

“Four,” she said finally.

“What?”

“There were four.” She stared hard at the fields going past. “I gave them to Dobby myself. I thought…” She stopped. “I thought you’d read them and couldn’t be bothered.”

“I never got them.”

They were quiet for a while, watching England go by.

“What was it like?” she said at last. “Down there.”

He told her. Not all of it. The pipes, and the stone face, and the snake that was longer than this carriage. The phoenix. And the Sorting Hat, which the phoenix had dropped at his feet, and the sword that had fallen out of it, heavy and silver, with rubies in the hilt.

“Out of the Hat?”

“Dumbledore says it only comes to a real Gryffindor.” Harry frowned out at the fields. “The Hat wanted to put me in Slytherin, you know. First night.”

Dracaena turned and stared at him. “It what?”

“I asked it not to.” He shrugged, as if it were nothing. “Dumbledore says that’s what counts. What you choose.”

She looked back out of the window very quickly. For one moment she thought about telling him. A dry old voice in the dark. Nerve. Real nerve. Then the trolley came rattling down the corridor, and the moment went, and she didn’t.

“Write again,” Harry said. “Hedwig can find anyone. I’ll write back this time.”

“I’ll consider it,” said Dracaena.

She considered it for nearly two whole days.

She wrote the note that August, at her desk at the Manor, with the door locked. She bought the socks herself in Diagon Alley with her own pocket money: thick wool, Slytherin green, the best pair in the shop. She sent them by a hired post owl so her father would never see the family bird leave.

These are yours. You don’t have to do anything for them. D.

She never got a reply. She hadn’t expected one.

Over a year later, in the Hogwarts kitchens, Harry would find Dobby wearing one green woolen sock and one of his own, and Dobby would refuse, very firmly and with tears in his eyes, to say where the green one had come from.

Summer 1993

Hedwig found the Manor on the fourth night of the holidays and tapped on Dracaena’s window at two in the morning, extremely pleased with herself.

Malfoy, the letter said, in handwriting that looked as if a spider had fallen in the ink and panicked. I’m not allowed to do magic over the summer or I get expelled. My uncle’s sister is coming to stay for a week. She breeds bulldogs. One of them chased me up a tree once and she let it keep me there till midnight. Pray for me. H.

Dracaena wrote back that same night by the light of her wand.

Potter. Under no circumstances do anything stupid. D.

His answer came nine days later, from somewhere that was clearly not his uncle’s house.

Too late.

She read it and laughed out loud in her bedroom at three in the morning, and had to bury her face in her pillow so her mother wouldn’t hear.

August 1993

The face on the front of the Prophet was screaming silently, over and over, gaunt and wild behind a tangle of black hair. SIRIUS BLACK STILL AT LARGE. He was the first prisoner ever to escape from Azkaban, the wizard prison on a rock in the North Sea.

“Put that away,” her mother said, very quietly. Narcissa Malfoy was tall and pale and lovely, with fair hair and a face that had long ago learned to show nothing at all. It showed something now. She left the breakfast table.

Her father folded the paper. “Your mother’s cousin, Dracaena. We don’t speak of him in this house.” He buttered his toast. “He’ll go for Potter, of course. Everyone knows it.”

She put the paper away. She did not stop thinking about it all the way to King’s Cross.

The night before term, she wrote one more letter. It was three words long.

Be careful, Potter.

September 1993

The hippogriff was gray and proud and enormous, the front half a giant eagle and the back half a horse, with eyes like orange lamps, and Hagrid had told them all very clearly to bow before they went near it. Dracaena didn’t bow. Pansy was watching, and Crabbe and Goyle were watching, and Potter had just bowed and been allowed to fly on the thing, and she was sick of watching Potter be good at things.

“You’re not dangerous at all, are you?” she said to it, loud enough for everyone. “You great ugly brute.”

There was a flash of steel gray talons. Then blood on her robes, and the sound of her own scream, and Hagrid carrying her up to the castle like a sack of flour.

It was a scratch. Madam Pomfrey closed it in a minute and a half.

She wrote to her father that night. It was my fault. I didn’t bow. Please don’t make a fuss.

His reply came by return owl. That is not the point, and you will wear the sling until I say otherwise.

She wore the sling for six weeks. The hippogriff, whose name was Buckbeak, was put on trial.

Harry cornered her outside the Potions classroom on the second day. “It’s barely a scratch, Malfoy.”

“I know.”

“Then tell them!”

“I did.”

He opened his mouth, and shut it again. She watched it land on him: that she had tried, and that it hadn’t mattered, and that she had known it wouldn’t. Then Snape opened the door and she walked past him into class with her chin up and her useless arm in its sling.

November 1993

Hermione Granger sat down across from her in the library, uninvited, and laid a sheet of parchment on the table.

“Forty one,” she said.

“Forty one what, Granger?”

“Times you’ve said it since last December. Scared, Potter? And he always says you wish. Always those exact words, always within a few seconds.” She tapped the parchment. “I wrote down when. It’s after the Heir business started. It’s after he fell off his broom when the Dementors came onto the pitch. It’s the morning after anything bad happens to him.”

Dracaena felt her face go very still. “It’s an insult. Obviously.”

“It’s a question,” Hermione said. “You’re asking if he’s all right.”

The library was very quiet. Somewhere behind the shelves, Madam Pince was shushing someone.

“If you tell Weasley,” Dracaena said at last, “I’ll…”

“I’m not going to tell Ron. He’d explode.” Hermione hesitated. “You told Harry you were sorry. About the word.”

“He told you that?”

“No. You just did.”

Dracaena stared at her. Granger had walked her into it like a first year walking into a door, and the worst part was that she had done it kindly.

“I’m not saying it to you,” Dracaena said.

“I didn’t ask you to.” Hermione stood and gathered up her parchment. Then she paused. “Your Arithmancy is wrong, by the way. Question four. You carried the seven.”

She walked off. Dracaena checked question four.

She had carried the seven.

She thought about Crabbe, whose family went back nine hundred years and who could not spell Wednesday. She thought about Granger, whose parents were Muggle dentists, who had beaten her on nearly every test since the first week of first year.

Father said blood told. She sat with her quill in her hand and wondered, for the very first time, what exactly it was supposed to be telling her.

Then she put the thought away, carefully, the way you put away a letter you are not ready to answer.

She was so furious she didn’t sleep until two, and she found that she was looking forward, very much, to proving Granger wrong about something. Anything. It was the first thing she had looked forward to in weeks.

February 1994

It was Pansy’s idea. Everything stupid was Pansy’s idea.

Potter had fainted on the train when the Dementors came aboard. They were the guards of Azkaban, tall hooded shapes with gray, rotting hands, and they drained every happy thought out of the air around them. The Ministry had posted them around the school to catch Sirius Black. He’d fallen fifty feet off his broom when they swarmed the pitch in November. Everyone knew he went to pieces near them. So for the Gryffindor match against Ravenclaw, four Slytherins put on long black hooded robes and crept to the edge of the pitch, and Dracaena, because she was the lightest, ended up on Goyle’s shoulders with her arms raised and her fingers spread like claws.

“Ooooh,” she moaned, through the hood. “Deeementor. Deeementor.”

High above, Harry Potter looked down and saw them.

He didn’t fall. He pulled out his wand, and shouted something, and a blaze of silver light came pouring out of the tip, enormous and blinding, and it hit them like a wave.

Goyle went over backward. Dracaena went over with him. Crabbe landed on her legs, Flint landed on Crabbe, and by the time she got her head free of the hood, Harry had caught the Snitch and was landing ten feet away, grinning so wide his face looked like it might split.

She was lying in a heap of robes with somebody’s elbow in her ear. Above her, Professor McGonagall was shrieking about points, and the whole Gryffindor end of the stadium was howling with laughter.

Harry walked over and flipped her hood back with one finger.

“Nice costume.”

“My father,” said Dracaena, with all the dignity a person could have with Goyle’s knee in her back, “will hear about this.”

“Tell him I said hi.”

That evening, she passed him on the stairs with her face still pink, and she didn’t look at him.

“Scared, Potter?”

“You wish,” he said, and he was still grinning.

March 1994

They both got detention for the same fight, which was the stupidest thing that had happened all year.

It had been a fake fight. A show for Pansy’s benefit in the corridor outside Charms: a few jinxes, a lot of shouting. Then Harry’s Jelly Legs Jinx bounced off a suit of armor, and the armor fell on Professor Flitwick, and now they were sitting on a hard wooden bench outside Professor McGonagall’s office, waiting to find out how bad it was going to be.

The bench was very short. They sat at opposite ends of it anyway.

“This is your fault,” said Dracaena.

“You started it.”

“I staged it. There’s a difference.”

Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. McGonagall’s door stayed shut. A portrait of a sleeping wizard snored.

“What’s your favorite food?” Harry said, out of nowhere.

She looked at him as if he had lost his mind. “What?”

“We’ve been sitting here half an hour. I’ve run out of insults.”

She considered refusing to answer. “Lemon tart,” she said at last. “The kind with burnt sugar on top. Our cook makes it on my birthday. It’s the only day Father lets anyone have pudding at lunch.” She narrowed her eyes. “You’ll say treacle tart.”

“Treacle tart.”

“So predictable, Potter.”

“What’s wrong with treacle tart?”

“Nothing. That’s what’s wrong with it.”

He laughed. The sleeping portrait snorted and turned over.

It went on from there, somehow. Quidditch, because they both had opinions. The Chudley Cannons, because Ron had opinions and Harry had caught them like a cold. Whether the giant squid had a name. And then, because it was quiet and the corridor was empty and McGonagall’s door stayed shut, something she had never said out loud to anyone.

“I’d be a Healer,” she said. “If it were up to me. If Father weren’t deciding.”

“You?”

“I set Crabbe’s nose when I was nine. He fell out of a tree. He didn’t even cry.” She looked down at her hands. “I liked it. Making something go back the way it was supposed to be.” She glanced at him sideways. “Don’t laugh.”

“I’m not laughing.” He wasn’t. “What does your father want you to be?”

“Married,” said Dracaena. “Well.”

Harry didn’t say anything to that. After a while he said, “I don’t know what I’d be. Something where nobody stares at me.”

“So not a wizard.”

“Probably not, no.”

The door opened. Professor McGonagall looked down at them over her square spectacles, at the two of them sitting at opposite ends of the short bench, and something in her face suggested that she had been listening through the keyhole for quite some time.

“Two weeks,” she said. “Each. Polishing the trophy room. Together.”

Neither of them complained nearly as much as they should have.

May 1994

The Quidditch Cup came down to the last match of the year, Gryffindor against Slytherin, and Gryffindor had to win by more than fifty points. That meant Harry couldn’t catch the Snitch until his team was far enough ahead. That meant, for once in her life, Dracaena only had to get there first.

Harry had a Firebolt now. Someone had sent it to him at Christmas without a note, the fastest broom ever built, and he flew it as if it were part of his own body. She had her old Nimbus and her nerve.

It was the dirtiest match anyone could remember. Flint rammed. The Slytherin Beaters aimed Bludgers at heads. Dracaena flew above all of it and marked Potter the whole game, staying tight on his tail the way the professionals did, so that the moment he saw the Snitch, she would see it too.

Then she saw it first.

A wink of gold, low, near the Gryffindor goalposts. She was already diving.

“MALFOY’S SEEN IT!” Lee Jordan howled from the commentary box.

She didn’t look back. She didn’t need to. She could hear the Firebolt coming behind her like a storm, and she knew it was faster, and she knew she was lighter, and she knew this pitch, every post and stand and banner of it.

So she didn’t fly straight. She cut under the Gryffindor stand, into the forest of wooden supports beneath it, where a broom as fast as a Firebolt couldn’t open up without wrapping itself around a beam. She heard Potter swear. She came out the far side a full length ahead, the Snitch fluttering six feet in front of her outstretched fingers.

“Grab his broom!” Flint was bellowing from somewhere above. “Malfoy! Grab his tail!”

She didn’t. She didn’t need to. She was going to win.

Then Potter did something nobody could do. He came out over the top of the stand, flattened himself along the Firebolt, and dropped on the Snitch like a hawk from straight above. His hand closed on it an inch in front of hers. Her fingers brushed his knuckles.

The Gryffindor end of the stadium poured down onto the pitch in a scarlet flood.

She hovered there, breathing hard, her hand still out in the empty air.

That evening outside the changing rooms she passed him in the crowd. He was soaked in butterbeer and grinning so hard it looked like it hurt.

“You went under the stands,” Harry said. “You actually went under the stands.”

“And you came over the top. Show off.”

“You could’ve grabbed my broom. Flint was screaming at you.”

She looked at him as if he had said something unbelievably stupid.

“I didn’t want to win that way, Potter,” said Dracaena, and walked off to be miserable in private.

June 6, 1994

They were going to execute the hippogriff at sunset. She went down to the edge of Hagrid’s pumpkin patch with Crabbe and Goyle because Slytherins were going, and she laughed when Crabbe imitated Hagrid crying, because Slytherins were laughing.

Hermione Granger walked straight up to her and punched her in the face.

It wasn’t a slap. It was a real punch, closed fist, and Dracaena sat down hard in the grass with her nose stinging and her eyes watering, too shocked to do anything at all.

Crabbe and Goyle looked at her, waiting for orders.

“Leave it,” she said thickly.

They stared.

“I said leave it.”

She got up and walked back to the castle holding her nose, and she didn’t look back, because if she had looked back she would have had to see Hagrid’s face.

That Night

The Slytherin common room lay under the lake. Its tall windows looked out into green water, and on quiet nights you could watch the giant squid drift past like a great pale umbrella.

Dracaena couldn’t sleep. She sat on the window seat in her dressing gown with her knees pulled up and her swollen nose throbbing, and that was how she saw it happen.

First, the cold. The water beyond the glass went dark, darker than night. Frost crept across the inside of the window in thin white feathers. And then the feeling came, the one she knew from the train: as if every warm thing in the world had been switched off. She was six on the gravel drive. She was eleven on the train with her hand out in the air. She was sitting in the grass tonight with her nose bleeding while Hagrid cried.

There were Dementors over the lake. Not one. Hundreds.

She pressed her hand to the frozen glass and couldn’t breathe.

Then the light came.

It poured down through the water from above, silver and enormous, as if the moon had fallen into the lake. The frost on the window melted in a single breath. Every fish in the deep turned to flickering coins. And far up on the shining surface, broken and doubled by the ripples, she saw black shapes scattering in every direction like burnt paper in a wind, and something huge and bright galloping across the water after them.

It had antlers.

She sat on the window seat with her hand on the warm glass until the light faded, and she did not know what she had seen, and she was not afraid anymore.

The Last Day of Term

Sirius Black had escaped again. Professor Lupin had resigned in disgrace. Snape stalked the dungeons in such a black rage that first years ran from the sound of his footsteps.

She found Harry on the bank of the lake, skimming stones.

“The lake went silver last night,” she said, sitting down a careful arm’s length away.

“That was me.”

She looked at him.

“It’s a long story,” he said. “It’s called a Patronus. A guardian you make out of the happiest memory you’ve got. It’s the only thing that drives Dementors off. I can’t tell you most of the rest. But I saw someone cast it, across the water, and I thought it was my dad. I really thought it was him.” He turned a flat stone over in his fingers. “It wasn’t. It was me.”

“Of course it was you,” Dracaena said. “Who else is that stubborn?”

He laughed, a little.

“Sirius Black didn’t do it,” he said, after a while, not looking at her. “Any of it. He’s my godfather.”

She was quiet for a long moment.

“He’s my mother’s cousin,” she said. “Nobody in my house says his name.” She picked up a stone of her own. “I won’t say anything. To anyone.”

“I know.”

She threw. Her stone skipped seven times across the water and sank.

“Show off,” said Harry.

“Always” said Dracaena.

November 1994

That year Hogwarts hosted the Triwizard Tournament: three schools, three champions, three deadly tasks, and an enchanted Goblet of Fire to choose who would compete. The Goblet spat out Harry’s name on Halloween, a fourth champion too young to enter, and the whole school decided he had cheated. Within a week, half of Hogwarts wore badges that said SUPPORT CEDRIC DIGGORY in red, and when you pressed them they flashed POTTER STINKS in poison green.

Pansy made them. Every Slytherin wore one. A Malfoy without one would have been noticed, so every morning Dracaena pinned hers on and felt it there all day like a burn.

She had already been a ferret that term. That had been October, in the Entrance Hall, after Ron Weasley called her Houseplant in front of a crowd and she called his father something worse, and he turned his back, and she drew her wand on it. The new Defense teacher, Mad Eye Moody, a legendary old Dark wizard catcher with a face so scarred it looked patched together, a wooden leg, and a bright blue magical eye that spun in its socket and could see through walls, turned her into a small white ferret before she could get the spell out and bounced her off the flagstones, again and again, with a strange savage pleasure, as if he had some personal grudge against her father.

Ron called her Ferret for the rest of the year. Harry laughed so hard he had to sit down on the stairs.

The next morning there was a Chocolate Frog in her Potions cauldron. No note. She ate it in the dungeon girls’ bathroom and didn’t tell anyone, and the card was Merlin, who had been a Slytherin, and she kept it.

The Kitchens

After the first task, after Harry had flown rings around a Hungarian Horntail and the school had decided, grudgingly, that maybe he hadn’t cheated after all, Hermione dragged Harry and Ron down to the kitchens. You got in by tickling the pear in a painting of a fruit bowl.

A hundred house elves bowed. Then one of them came hurtling across the stone floor and flung himself at Harry’s knees.

“Harry Potter! Harry Potter, sir!”

Dobby worked at Hogwarts now, for wages, which he seemed to find both thrilling and alarming. He was wearing a tea cozy for a hat, and on his feet were two socks that did not match. One was a black school sock that Harry recognized with a jolt. The other was thick green wool, the deep green of the Slytherin common room, and very carefully darned.

Hermione noticed it first. Hermione always noticed first.

“Dobby,” she said slowly, “where did you get that green sock?”

Dobby’s ears flattened. “Dobby cannot say, Miss.”

“It’s Slytherin green.”

“Dobby promised himself he would never say.” His enormous eyes filled with tears. “Dobby will say only that it came the summer Dobby was freed. With a note. The note said Dobby did not have to do anything for it.” He pressed both hands over his heart. “Nobody ever gave Dobby anything before. Not for nothing.”

“Who’d send an elf socks?” said Ron, baffled.

Hermione didn’t answer. She was looking at Harry, and Harry was looking very hard at a tray of eclairs.

On the way back up to Gryffindor Tower, she fell into step beside him.

“Her,” Hermione said quietly. It wasn’t a question.

“Don’t tell Ron.”

“I wasn’t going to.” She walked in silence for a while, frowning. “I’ve spent months trying to get people to care about house elves,” she said at last. “I’ve got a whole society. I’ve got badges. And the first person who ever actually did something for one was Dracaena Malfoy.”

She sounded personally offended. Harry laughed so hard he had to stop on the stairs.

December 1994

She was on the battlements when Cho Chang, a pretty Ravenclaw Seeker a year above them, turned him down. She hadn’t meant to hear it. She’d come up to eat an apple in peace, and then there were voices by the tower door, Cho’s soft and miserable, someone’s already asked me, Harry, I’m so sorry, and quick footsteps going away.

Harry stood alone at the parapet with snow on his shoulders.

Dracaena stepped out of the shadow of the door, her long pale hair loose over a green scarf and the little silver hoops she had worn since third year glinting in her ears, and took a bite of her apple. “Aww. Poor Potter. Lost your chance with Cho Chang?”

“Go away, Malfoy.”

“I really do pity you sometimes.” She leaned on the stone beside him, a careful arm’s length away. “But listen. I’ll go with you. Then you won’t have to stand there alone when the champions open the dance and the whole school watches you fall over your own feet.”

He didn’t answer, and she was nervous, and when she was nervous she talked.

“Mother sent my dress this morning. It’s silver. Proper goblin thread, it moves like water. We could dance, and there’ll be those little pastries from France, and honestly it’ll be fu…”

“Just shut up, Malfoy!” He rounded on her so fast she nearly dropped the apple. “Stop joking around! You’re wearing that.” He jabbed a finger at the badge on her chest, flickering POTTER STINKS in green. “Every single day. Go wear it somewhere else and stay away from me.”

She looked down at the badge. As if she’d forgotten it was there. She never forgot it was there.

“I wasn’t joking,” she said. “I really…”

The tower door banged. He was gone.

“…really wanted to go with you,” she told the empty battlements.

The apple slipped out of her fingers and rolled across the snow and came to rest in the open doorway, one bite out of it. She didn’t go after it.

That night she pulled the green hangings shut around her bed and cried into her pillow so quietly that Pansy, two beds away, never woke.

On the other side of the castle, Harry lay on his back in the dark with the golden egg on his chest. He still hadn’t worked out what it meant. It only screamed when you opened it. He thought about the Forest, and the window ledge in the snow, and the look on her face when he pointed at the badge.

I wasn’t joking, she’d said. He knew. That was the worst part. He had known the second he said it.

She was in the library the next morning, behind a stack of books, not reading any of them. He sat down across from her.

“Do you want to go to the Yule Ball with me?”

She looked up. She looked at him for a long, long time.

“Took you long enough,” she said. Then her face changed, and he watched her start calculating. “You realize this will be in the Daily Prophet.”

“Is that bad?”

“That depends entirely on how I write the letter to my father.”

Father. The champions open the ball in front of the Ministry and two foreign schools. Every camera at Hogwarts will be pointed at Harry Potter. I intend to be standing beside him. You once told me that people remember who stood next to the winner. D.

Her father had spent thirteen years telling the Ministry that he’d been bewitched into serving the Dark Lord. A photograph of his daughter on the arm of the Boy Who Lived was worth more to that story than any amount of gold. His answer was four words long.

Wear the Malfoy sapphires.

Christmas Night

Severus Snape did not enjoy balls. He stood at the edge of the Great Hall among the frosted trees, in black, the way a crow stands at the edge of a wedding.

Potter came in last of the champions, and on his arm, in a gown of silver that had not come from any shop in Britain, walked Lucius Malfoy’s daughter, chin high, as though she had arranged the entire evening personally. Whispers ran down the tables like a fuse. A camera flashed. There was a beetle on the window frame, and Snape thought nothing of it.

Potter could not dance. That was obvious within four bars. Miss Malfoy steered him around the floor like a barge, smiling for the room, her lips barely moving. Snape had spent twenty years reading lips across classrooms.

Left, Potter. Your other left.

And Potter laughed. For one moment, under the enchanted snow, the boy’s face turned up into the candlelight, and it was not James Potter’s face at all. It was only the eyes. Lily’s eyes, laughing at something a Slytherin had said.

Snape knew the phrase they used. He had heard it in corridors for two years and taken it for spite, until one night he passed the hospital wing after Potter fell from the sky, and heard the girl say it at the door, alone, when she thought no one was near.

He had had a friend like that once. A girl in a park in Cokeworth, a Gryffindor before either of them knew the word. A friendship hidden from his housemates and then from hers. He had ended it himself at sixteen, by the lake, with one word, because he had been humiliated and that word was the nearest weapon to hand. He had loved her for the rest of his life. That was his own business. It had not mattered. By then he had already said the word.

What he watched on the dance floor was the part that came before. The part where it could still be saved.

When the music ended, he was waiting by the doors. “Miss Malfoy. Your father reads the Prophet.”

She went white. “I wrote to him first, sir.”

Something moved in Snape’s face that on another man might have been approval. “Then you are cleverer than I was,” he said, and swept away before she could ask what he meant.

Later That Night

“Malfoy?” Ron’s voice cracked off the walls of the stairwell. “You’ve been mates with Malfoy? Since when?”

“Second year,” said Harry.

“Second year!?”

“First, really,” said Hermione, in her party dress with her shoes in her hand. “If you count the dog.”

Ron turned on her slowly. “You knew?”

“Since November last year. I worked it out.”

“I’m surrounded,” Ron told the ceiling, “by liars.” He started up the stairs, stopped, and turned around, and his face was doing something complicated. “Was that why she was in the hospital wing? Second year? When you and me were under the…”

“Yeah” said Harry.

Hermione frowned. “What hospital wing?”

“Nothing” said Ron, and stomped off to bed. At breakfast he informed Harry that she was still a houseplant. But he didn’t say it loud enough for anyone else to hear.

February 24, 1995

For the second task, the champions had to dive into the Black Lake and stay under for an hour to rescue something they would sorely miss. Nobody in the stands understood what that meant until they noticed who was missing from breakfast. Ron Weasley was one of them.

Dracaena stood at the rail of the stands on the shore, with the wind off the lake cutting through her cloak, and watched Potter eat a fistful of something slimy and walk into the freezing water and vanish.

Then there was nothing to watch at all. Just gray water, for an hour.

She counted. She didn’t mean to. The French champion came up early, sobbing, without her hostage. Cedric Diggory came up with Cho Chang. The Durmstrang champion came up with his head turned halfway into a shark’s. The hour ran out.

Potter didn’t come up.

“Maybe he’s drowned” said Pansy brightly. “That’s one way to get out of the third task.”

“Shut up, Pansy.”

Pansy blinked at her. Dracaena didn’t notice. She was gripping the wooden rail so hard a splinter went into her palm.

Then the water broke, and there he was, gasping, dragging Ron Weasley in one arm and a tiny silver haired girl in the other: the French champion’s little sister, whom he had refused to leave on the bottom of the lake when nobody came for her.

Dracaena let out a breath she had been holding for a very long time. Then she realized she was relieved about Weasley too, spluttering and coughing up lake water, and that annoyed her more than anything else that had happened all year.

“You’re shaking” said Pansy.

“It’s February, Pansy. It’s freezing.”

The judges gave Potter second place, for what Dumbledore called moral fiber. Dracaena called it being an idiot. She said so to his face that evening, in a corridor, and he said thanks, and she said it wasn’t a compliment, and they both knew it was.

June 24, 1995

The third task began at dusk. The maze rose black and green against the sky, and the stands were full to bursting, and Lucius Malfoy sat in the Ministry box at the Minister’s right hand, smiling his dinner party smile. Dracaena sat in the Slytherin stand below him and watched the champions disappear into the hedges one by one.

In the maze, Harry and Cedric Diggory reached the Triwizard Cup at the same moment, and decided, out of sheer stubborn fairness, to take it together. Their hands closed on the handles. The world yanked sideways.

In a graveyard, a long way from Hogwarts, under a yew tree, a high cold voice said three words, a second voice said two more and green light flashed, and Cedric Diggory lay on the grass with his eyes open but empty, and Harry was dragged against a marble headstone and bound there. A cauldron boiled. A small weeping man cut away his own hand. Then out of the steam rose something thin and white as a candle, with slits for nostrils and eyes the color of blood.

In the Ministry box, Lucius Malfoy’s hand closed hard on his left forearm. He leaned toward the Minister, murmured an apology, and walked down the steps without once looking at his daughter. Dracaena watched him go. Her father never left anything before the end.

In the teachers’ stand, Severus Snape went gray. Beside him, Igor Karkaroff of Durmstrang clutched his own arm, stood up, and ran, straight off the end of the stand and into the dark, and did not come back.

In the Gryffindor stand, Hermione’s fingers found Ron’s sleeve and held on. “It’s taking too long,” she whispered. “Something’s wrong.” Two seats along, Molly Weasley, who had come to sit with Harry’s family because he hadn’t got one, had her hands knotted so tightly in her lap the knuckles turned white.

In a cave above Hogsmeade, a great black dog lifted its shaggy head and howled at nothing, a long, broken sound that carried all the way down the hill.

In the graveyard, the masked figures came cracking out of the air, one after another, to kneel in a circle in the grass: his Death Eaters, his old followers, summoned by the Mark burning on their arms. The thin white man walked among them, naming them one by one. Harry, tied to the stone with his leg bleeding, heard one of the names, and it was a name he knew.

Then the band was playing, and the crowd was cheering, because Harry Potter had appeared on the grass in front of the stands holding the Cup.

And then someone screamed, because he was holding Cedric too.

Dracaena stood up with everybody else. She saw Amos Diggory push through the crowd. She saw Harry’s face, gray and blank and much older than fourteen, his fist knotted in Cedric’s robes as if he’d never let go. And she looked up at the Ministry box, at the empty seat beside the Minister where her father had been sitting.

She didn’t know how she knew. She knew.

July 1995

The night she came home for the summer, she found her father alone in the drawing room, feeding a black robe into the fire a little at a time. The hem was stiff with dried mud.

“Go to bed, Dracaena.”

She went up the stairs. She stopped halfway and sat down on the step in the dark and watched through the banisters until the last of it had burned.

Summer 1995

That summer, nobody told Harry anything. Ron’s letters said nothing. Hermione’s letters said nothing, very carefully. Two Dementors came to Little Whinging and attacked him and his cousin in an alleyway, and he drove them off with his Patronus, and the Ministry tried to expel him for it.

The only letters that told him anything at all came in green ink.

Potter. Father has dinner guests on Thursdays now. They arrive after dark and leave before dawn, and Mother has stopped letting me downstairs after eight. One of them laughs like a kettle. I am not stupid, whatever you think. Burn this. D.

Potter. Father has been to the Ministry four times this month. He comes home smiling. I do not like it when he smiles. Burn this too.

Potter. I heard about the Dementors. Everyone has. Father thinks it is very funny. I do not. Are you all right? D.

He read them under the blankets with his wand lit, over and over, because they were the only letters all summer that treated him like someone who could handle the truth. Then he burned them one by one in the tin wastepaper bin in his bedroom, the way she’d asked.

She was risking a great deal more than a detention to send them. He knew that. He kept the ashes in the bin for a week before he could make himself throw them away.

October 1995

All summer the Daily Prophet called Harry Potter a liar. A disturbed boy, it said. An attention seeker. A Ministry woman named Dolores Umbridge came to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts. She was squat and pale and toadlike, dressed head to toe in fluffy pink, with a little black bow in her hair and a sweet, girlish voice, and she did not teach anyone to defend themselves against anything.

The code went on, quieter now. In corridors, on the stairs, half under her breath. Scared, Potter? You wish.

Then one Thursday in Potions she saw his right hand.

He was holding his knife oddly, knuckles up, and when he reached for the jar of beetle eyes she saw letters on the back of his hand. Not ink. Raw red lines, cut into the skin and healed and cut again. I must not tell lies.

She went on chopping her daisy roots. Very evenly. Very fine.

At the next Potions lesson there was a small glass jar under his textbook when he sat down. Yellow liquid, thick as honey. Essence of Murtlap, from her mother’s stillroom at the Manor, with the wax seal on the lid scraped carefully clean of any crest.

“Where’d that come from?” said Ron.

Harry turned it over in his fingers. On the far side of the dungeon, Dracaena Malfoy was extremely busy with her cauldron.

Hermione looked across the room at her for a long moment. She didn’t say anything at all.

November 1995

Owen Cauldwell was a second year Hufflepuff, small for twelve, with ears that stuck out and parents who ran a fish and chip shop in Leeds. He was Muggleborn. Every Slytherin boy in the fourth year knew it, because it was the kind of thing you just knew.

Dracaena found his wand in the Slytherin common room on a Tuesday night. Two fourth years had taken it off him after Herbology, and now they were tossing it back and forth over the fire, laughing about what they would do with it.

“Chuck it in,” one of them said. “See if Mudblood wands burn different.”

Dracaena turned a page of her book.

She did not look up. She did not say a word. When the boys got bored and went to bed and left the wand lying on the arm of a chair, she waited a full hour. Then she picked it up, wrapped it in a handkerchief, and went up to the library before breakfast.

Owen Cauldwell always sat at the same table, in the corner by the Herbology shelves, where nobody else wanted to sit. She slipped the wand into his bag while he was hunting for a book about Puffapods, and she was gone before he turned around.

He never found out who did it. Neither did Harry. She never told anyone, and she was not entirely sure why she had done it, except that she had looked at that wand lying on the arm of the chair and thought of a boy in a robe shop who had never been on a broom.

The next week Pansy said, “Funny. Cauldwell’s got his wand back,” and looked at her for a moment too long.

“Has he? How dull,” said Dracaena, and turned another page.

January 1996

It was the first real fight they had ever had that they couldn’t turn into a joke.

It started on the Astronomy Tower stairs after curfew, because that was where they met now. Umbridge had let it be known that she wanted a squad of trustworthy students to help her keep order, and Dracaena’s father had already written to say his daughter would be in it.

“So don’t,” Harry said.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t join. Tell him no.”

She stared at him. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

“I’m asking you not to help Umbridge. It’s not that complicated.”

“It is to me.” She heard her voice rise and couldn’t stop it. “You walk around saying no to everyone. Umbridge, Fudge, the whole Prophet. And it costs you detentions, and it costs you your hand, and I know it costs you, Harry, I know. But you can go back to Gryffindor Tower at night and everyone in it is on your side.” She was shaking. “I go back to a room full of people who write to my father. I go home in the summer to a house where he decides what I eat and who I see and who I’ll marry. You’ve never had anybody to lose except yourself.”

He went very white.

“I had Cedric,” he said quietly.

It landed like a slap. She had nothing to say to it. For a long moment neither of them said anything at all, and the old easy thing, the joke that always saved them, simply wasn’t there.

“That’s not fair,” she said finally.

“No,” said Harry. “Neither was what you said.”

She opened her mouth. Shut it. Made herself sit down on the cold step instead of storming off, which was what every bone in her body wanted to do.

“Tell me about Cedric,” she said.

He looked at her for a long time. Then he sat down two steps below her and told her. The maze, and the Cup, and deciding to take it together, and the graveyard, and the voice. All of it. He had never told anyone all of it. She listened without saying a word.

When he had finished, she told him about the Thursday dinner guests, and the man who laughed like a kettle, and the night her father burned his robes. All of it.

Nobody said Scared, Potter? Nobody said you wish.

She joined the Squad in February, because she had to. He never asked her not to again. But he never once said it wasn’t complicated, either.

February 1996

Umbridge made her own little army out of Slytherins, and called it the Inquisitorial Squad, and gave them silver badges and the power to take points. She joined, the way she had told Harry she would.

“She’s on Umbridge’s squad, Harry,” Ron hissed in the Entrance Hall, watching her stalk past with the silver badge gleaming on her robes.

“So’s Crabbe. Doesn’t mean he chose it.”

“Houseplants don’t choose anything. They just sit there.”

“Actually,” said Hermione, “plants turn toward the light, it’s called phototropism, so in a sense…”

“Not helping, Hermione.”

Dracaena knew about the room on the seventh floor. She had known since November. She had seen Longbottom, and Luna Lovegood, the dreamy Ravenclaw who wore radishes for earrings, and the youngest Weasley drift up the stairs on certain evenings, and walk three times past a blank stretch of wall, and vanish. She had worked out what it was, and who was teaching them, and why. Harry Potter was teaching real defensive magic in secret to anyone brave enough to come, because Umbridge wouldn’t. They called themselves Dumbledore’s Army.

She never told anyone. Not Pansy. Not Umbridge. Not her father, in any of the letters that asked her, with increasing impatience, whether Potter was up to anything.

In February she heard a Hufflepuff fourth year whisper to his friend, in the queue outside Charms, that they were doing Patronuses now, proper ones, with shapes. That night she found the spell in a library book, in a chapter marked Advanced, and read it twice before she let herself remember a lake going silver and a boy on the shore saying the happiest memory you’ve got.

She tried it in an empty classroom on the fourth floor, with the door locked and a chair under the handle. A thin cold mist came out of the end of her wand, and hung in the air for a moment, and went out.

She tried it every night for a week. It never came to anything more than mist. She told herself she was tired.

March 1996

The terrible thing about the silver badge was that it felt good.

She had not expected that. She took ten points from a Gryffindor third year for running in a corridor, and he looked up at her with real fear in his eyes, and something old and warm uncurled in her chest. Something that had been asleep since she was eleven years old and stood at her father’s window looking down the slope. Here is the top. Here is where you belong.

She took five more from a Hufflepuff for nothing at all. For being in the corridor. For being small. For the look on his face.

It was Owen Cauldwell.

He didn’t argue. He just nodded, very quickly, the way she had seen Dobby nod at her father, and hurried away with his bag clutched to his chest.

Dracaena stood by the window with the badge glinting on her robes, and felt sick all the way down to her shoes.

That night she unpinned the badge and stood holding it over the common room fire for a long time. She didn’t throw it in. She couldn’t, not with her father’s letters coming every week. But she never took points from a first or second year again, and when Pansy asked why, she said they were too boring to bother with.

April 1996

In the end it wasn’t her. A Ravenclaw girl named Marietta told Umbridge, and the Squad was sent running through the castle to catch whoever came out of that wall.

Dracaena was on the fourth floor when Harry came around the corner at full sprint, and Pansy was ten feet behind her, and Umbridge’s high little voice was echoing up the stairwell.

She had half a second.

She raised her wand and hit him with a Trip Jinx, and he went down hard on the flagstones and skidded, and she was on him before Pansy could get close, kneeling on his back, her wand at his neck, for anyone to see.

“Got him!” she shouted. “I’ve got Potter!”

Then, under her breath, with her mouth an inch from his ear: “Scared, Potter?”

His face was pressed against the stone. “You wish.”

“I’m sorry,” she breathed. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Then Pansy was there, and Umbridge was there, beaming, and Dracaena hauled him up by the back of his collar and marched him all the way to the headmaster’s office without once letting her hand shake.

Umbridge took him up the spiral stairs herself. “Thank you, Miss Malfoy,” she simpered from the top step. “Ten points to Slytherin. Do wait outside.”

So Dracaena waited outside, beside the stone gargoyle, with Pansy chattering in her ear about how brilliant that had been, how fast, how Potter had gone down like a sack of potatoes. Dracaena smiled in all the right places. Her right hand was in her pocket. It was clenched so tightly that her nails left four small red crescents in her palm, and they were still there the next morning.

At the top of those stairs, Dumbledore stunned half the Ministry in his own office, took the blame for everything, and vanished in a burst of flame. By morning, Umbridge was headmistress.

The Eagle Owl

Her father’s owl found her at breakfast three days later.

She knew from the weight of the envelope that it was a long letter, and she knew from the seal that he had written it himself instead of dictating it. She opened it under the edge of the table.

Dracaena. I am told by a friend at the Ministry that it was you who apprehended Potter in the corridor, and that you did it quickly, without hesitation, and in front of witnesses. I have mentioned it to certain other friends. They were impressed. You have done this family great credit at a difficult time. Your mother and I are proud of you. L. M.

She read it three times.

He had never written that word to her before. Not when she made Seeker in second year. Not when she came top of the year in Potions. Not once, in four and a half years of letters, had her father put the word proud on a page with her name above it.

He had put it there now. For this.

She folded the letter into a very small square, smaller than any of the others, and put it at the very bottom of her trunk, under her winter robes, where she would never have to look at it and could not quite make herself throw it away.

Gryffindor Tower

“She said sorry, didn’t she?” said Ron.

It was past midnight. The rest of the dormitory was asleep. Harry was lying on his back with the curtains open, staring up at the canopy, and he had been for an hour.

“Three times.”

“Then the rest of it was for show. You know it was.” Ron rolled over to face him. “Pansy Parkinson was ten feet behind her. If she’d let you go, she’d have been finished. You’d have done the same.”

“I know.”

“So what’s the problem?”

Harry didn’t answer for a long time.

“She was good at it,” he said at last. “That’s the problem. She didn’t hesitate. Not even for one second. If I didn’t know her, I’d have believed every word.” He turned his head on the pillow. “How do you know, Ron? With somebody like that? How do you ever know which one’s the act?”

Ron thought about it, which was not something he usually did out loud.

“Dunno,” he said finally. “But she said sorry three times with her mouth right next to your ear, where nobody could hear it but you. Seems to me that’s the bit she meant.” He yawned. “The shouting was for Pansy. The sorry was for you.”

Harry lay awake for a long time after Ron started snoring.

She and Harry did not say the code for nine days. On the tenth, in a crowded corridor, he passed her and said it first, in her voice, with her sneer, perfectly too.

“Scared, Malfoy?”

She was so startled that she laughed out loud in the middle of the corridor, and had to pretend it was at a first year who had fallen over.

May 1996

In May, Fred and George Weasley left school.

They had turned an entire corridor on the fifth floor into a swamp that afternoon, and they did their leaving in the Entrance Hall, in front of everybody, which was the only way those Weasley twins had ever done anything. Umbridge had them cornered at the foot of the marble staircase. Half the school had come running at the noise. The Inquisitorial Squad stood in a ring around them with their wands out and their silver badges shining.

“Stop them,” said Umbridge, in her sweetest voice. “Anyone who can.”

Fred raised his wand and called, quite calmly, for his broom. Somewhere far above them, in Umbridge’s office, there was a crash of snapping chains.

Dracaena raised her wand with the rest of the Squad. Crabbe’s Stunner went wide. Pansy’s went wider. Dracaena aimed with great care, the way her father had taught her to aim at targets on the lawn when she was eight, and hit a suit of armor squarely in the helmet from twelve feet away. It went over with a crash that echoed up three floors.

Two brooms came screaming down the staircase. The twins caught them out of the air.

Fred Weasley kicked off, rose ten feet above the crowd, and looked straight down. At the suit of armor lying on its back on the flagstones. Then at her.

“Nice shot, Malfoy,” he said and winked.

Then they were gone, out through the great doors into the sunset, and the whole Hall was cheering, and Umbridge was shrieking, and nobody but Dracaena had heard what he said.

She thought about that wink for a long time.

The Office

On the last afternoon of the O.W.L.s, in the middle of the History of Magic exam, Harry Potter fell out of his chair with his hand clamped over his scar and had to be helped out of the Great Hall.

An hour later, Umbridge sent for the Squad.

They found her in her office, pink and trembling with triumph. Harry was in a chair by the fireplace with soot on his knees. He had been caught with his head in her fire. Around the walls, the Squad held everyone who had been keeping watch for him: Crabbe with an arm around Ron Weasley’s neck, Goyle sitting more or less on Neville, Millicent Bulstrode holding Hermione by both wrists, and a hulking sixth year named Warrington pinning the youngest Weasley against the wall. Pansy had Luna Lovegood, who did not seem especially bothered.

“Miss Malfoy.” Umbridge held out two wands. “Hold these. Potter’s, and the Granger girl’s.”

Dracaena took them. Hermione’s was vine. Harry’s was holly, eleven inches, and still warm from his hand. She had never held it before. She held it the way you’d hold something that might go off.

Umbridge wanted to know who he had been trying to reach through her fire. Harry wouldn’t tell her. She sent for Professor Snape and his truth potion, and Snape drawled that she had already used the last of it, and as he turned to go, Harry shouted something after him about Padfoot, and a place, and something hidden there. Snape didn’t turn around but Dracaena kept every word.

Then Umbridge stood up, raised her wand at Harry, and named the curse she meant to use, in the same sweet voice she used to award points.

The whole room went still. Even Crabbe.

Dracaena’s hand closed on the holly wand so hard it hurt. She had heard that word at her father’s dinner table. She had never once heard it in a school. She was working out, quite coldly, how far it was from where she stood to Umbridge’s wrist, and whether she could reach it before the curse did, and what would happen to her mother afterward if she did, when Hermione Granger burst into tears.

It was a lie. Dracaena had sat across a library from Hermione Granger for five years, and she knew exactly what Granger looked like when she meant something. This wasn’t it. A weapon, Hermione sobbed. Dumbledore’s secret weapon, hidden in the Forest. Harry had only been trying to tell him it was ready. Umbridge’s face went soft and greedy.

“Show me,” she breathed. “Both of you. Now.” She paused in the doorway. “Miss Malfoy, you are in charge. Nobody leaves this room.”

The door closed behind them. Six Slytherins, four prisoners, two wands in Dracaena’s right hand that didn’t belong to her, and her own in her left.

For a long moment nobody moved.

On the wall above Umbridge’s desk hung forty little china plates, each with a kitten on it, mewing and pawing and washing its face. Dracaena looked at them. Then she looked at Ginny Weasley, who was looking straight back at her with a very particular expression. The expression of someone counting.

Dracaena flicked her own wand at the wall without lifting it from her side.

Forty plates came down at once in an avalanche of shrieking china. Every head in the room snapped toward the noise. In that half second Ginny Weasley wrenched an arm free and hit Warrington with a Bat Bogey Hex that filled his whole face with flapping black wings. Neville drove an elbow into Goyle’s stomach. Ron stamped on Crabbe’s foot and twisted loose. And Pansy, swinging around, found Luna’s wand already pressed under her chin.

“Lovegood!” said Dracaena.

She threw. Two wands, end over end, over the wreck of the kittens. Luna caught them both without looking especially surprised.

“Thank you,” said Luna.

“Hit me with something,” Dracaena hissed. “Quickly. Make it look real.”

Luna considered her. “Are you sure? You look like you’ve had a very long year.”

“Lovegood.”

“All right.”

The Jelly Legs Jinx hit her square in the knees. Her legs turned to string, and she went down among the broken plates and lay there wobbling helplessly while the four of them stepped over the groaning Slytherins and ran.

Ron was the last out the door. He paused, just for a second, and looked down at her on the carpet.

“Cheers, Houseplant,” he said, and was gone.

By the time her legs would hold her again, the sky outside had turned red. She got to the window just in time to see them: six small figures rising from the edge of the Forest, riding on nothing at all, climbing south into the evening until the dark swallowed them.

She didn’t know where they were going. She told herself so, firmly, several times. She thought about a word shouted after Snape. Hidden. She thought about her father coming home from the Ministry all last summer, smiling.

She didn’t know. It was very nearly true.

When Pansy finally limped over, holding her head, and said, “Lovegood got you?” Dracaena said, “Lovegood got me,” and Pansy looked at her for a moment too long.

June 1996

Pansy read it out at breakfast.

LUCIUS MALFOY AMONG DEATH EATERS ARRESTED AT MINISTRY.

Harry and five others had broken into the Department of Mysteries in the night. Something about a prophecy, and a fight among the shelves, and Death Eaters waiting in the dark. Her father had led them. Her father had been caught. Azkaban. No date for release.

Dracaena set down her fork. She was thinking of a holly wand turning over and over in the air, above a carpet of broken kittens. Across the Hall, at the Gryffindor table, Harry Potter sat with a bandage around his hand, looking at her.

She opened her mouth, and what came out, from habit, from a whole childhood of saying it, was: “My father will hear about this.”

Pansy stared at her. Dracaena heard it too.

Her father wasn’t going to hear about anything ever again. Her father was in Azkaban, and the boy who had put him there was sitting forty feet away, waiting for her to say something else.

She didn’t. She got up and left.

She went down to the empty dormitory, knelt by her trunk, and dug under her winter robes until her fingers found it: a small, tight square of parchment.

She unfolded it on the floor. Your mother and I are proud of you.

She read it until the words stopped meaning anything. Then she folded it again, smaller, and put it back exactly where it had been.

She found Hermione in the hospital wing that evening, propped up on pillows, gray in the face from a curse that had hit her in the chest. Dracaena stood at the foot of the bed, exactly where she had stood three years ago, and didn’t know what to do with her hands.

“Madam Pomfrey told me someone came to see me,” Hermione said. “In second year. At night, when I was petrified. A Slytherin girl.”

“Pomfrey talks too much.”

“She does, a bit. So does Luna.” Hermione’s voice was hoarse. “She told me who threw her our wands.”

Dracaena said nothing.

“You knew where we were going,” said Hermione.

“I didn’t know.”

“But I’m sure you guessed.”

It was a long time before Dracaena answered. “I guessed.”

Hermione closed her eyes. “Sirius is dead.”

“I heard.”

“Bellatrix Lestrange killed him. Your aunt.”

“I know.”

Hermione looked at her for a long time, the way she had looked at her in the library over a sheet of parchment covered in dates. “Harry’s down at the lake. He won’t talk to us. He shouldn’t be alone.”

“He won’t want me.”

“No,” said Hermione. “Go anyway.”

He was on the bank where they had skimmed stones two years before. He didn’t look up when she sat down. The sun was going down red over the water.

“Your aunt killed him,” Harry said.

“I know.”

“She laughed. When he fell. She laughed.” His voice was very flat. “And your dad was there. He’d have handed me over to Voldemort and gone home for dinner.”

“I know.”

“Stop saying that!”

He snatched up a stone and threw it, hard, without any skill at all. It didn’t skip. It just went into the water and was gone.

“Your whole family,” he said. “Every one of them. Just get away from me, Malfoy. Please. Just go.”

She stood up. She brushed the grass off her robes. Then she said the one thing she had come to say, because it was true and nobody else would say it.

“He was my mother’s cousin. Nobody in my house is going to cry for him.” Her voice cracked and she let it. “So somebody has to.”

She walked back up to the castle with her eyes stinging, and she did not look back to see whether he watched her go.

The Train

Luna Lovegood found Harry on the platform at Hogsmeade station and stood beside him for a while without saying anything, which he was grateful for.

“Dracaena Malfoy gave me your wand,” she said eventually. “In Umbridge’s office. I thought you ought to know. She asked me to jinx her afterward, so nobody would guess. I used a Jelly Legs Jinx. I hope that was all right.”

Harry stared at her.

“I think she knew where we were going,” Luna added thoughtfully. “She had the look. People look different when they know something they wish they didn’t.” Then she drifted off down the platform to find a compartment, and left him standing there.

On the train home, he stood in the corridor outside her compartment for a long time. She walked past him without a word.

This time, neither of them said it first.

King’s Cross

Her mother was waiting at the barrier, alone.

Narcissa Malfoy had never once met the train alone. There had always been a tall figure in black beside her, silver headed cane, one gloved hand raised an inch to say here. Today there was only her mother, very straight and very pale in a dark traveling cloak, and a space beside her where nobody stood.

They didn’t speak on the way home. In the carriage, with the curtains drawn, Narcissa held her daughter’s hand so tightly that it hurt, and looked out at nothing.

“Your father’s friends will be coming to the house this summer,” she said at last, very quietly. “Some of them will be staying. Whatever they say to you, darling, you will be polite. And then you will come and find me.”

That night Dracaena sat at the desk in her bedroom and wrote Father at the top of a clean sheet of parchment.

She sat looking at it until the candle guttered. She could not think of a single other word that was true.

In the morning she folded the page into a very small square and put it in the drawer with the rest.

July 1996

The Dark Lord moved into Malfoy Manor in the second week of the summer, the way weather moves into a valley.

He took her father’s chair at the head of the long table. The peacocks stopped screaming. Her mother stopped eating. Her aunt Bellatrix, out of Azkaban and thin as a whip, with heavy lidded eyes and a mane of wild black hair and a face that had been beautiful before fourteen years in a cell, laughed at things that weren’t funny and watched Dracaena the way a cat watches a bird with a broken wing.

One night after dinner he called her to the head of the table. She went, because there was nothing else to do. He put one long white hand on her shoulder, very lightly, the way you’d touch a chess piece you hadn’t decided how to use yet.

“Your father taught you that the world is a slope,” he said softly. “That there is a top. He neglected to mention that the top is mine.” The fingers tightened, just slightly. “Your father failed me, child. You will not.”

The task he whispered in her ear made her knees go weak. She didn’t let them buckle.

He did not order her. That was the cruelest part. He asked, in that mild, reasonable voice, with her mother sitting very still at the far end of the table. He asked whether she would like the honor her father had failed to earn.

She could say no. She understood that perfectly. And then he would turn his red eyes, slowly, to the far end of the table.

She said yes.

For the rest of her life she would want to tell herself she’d had no choice. It wasn’t quite true. She’d had a choice. It was only that every other choice ended with her mother dead on the drawing room carpet, and she was sixteen, and she picked the one where her mother lived.

“Such an honor,” Bellatrix crooned from across the table. “And when it’s done, sweet girl, we’ll find you a husband from a family that hasn’t disgraced itself. The Notts, perhaps. Some good blood left in the Notts.” She said it the way you’d talk about selling a horse.

They gave her the Dark Mark three nights later, the brand every Death Eater carried on the inside of the left forearm, in the drawing room where her father had once shown her the slope. It felt like a branding iron made of ice. She didn’t scream, because Malfoys didn’t. Her mother stood in the doorway with one hand pressed flat over her mouth and watched the whole thing, and did not come in, because she could not.

Dracaena told herself she was doing it to keep her mother alive. She told herself that every night for a year.

September 1996

She knew he was in the luggage rack the moment the train pulled out. It sagged in a way luggage didn’t. Potter under his Cloak, spying, the idiot.

So she bragged. For Pansy and Blaise Zabini and anyone else listening, she bragged about how she might not even bother finishing school this year, how she had more important things to do, how certain people would be very sorry when they found out. Pansy hung on every word.

When the train slowed into Hogsmeade and the others had gone, she sat alone in the empty compartment with her left hand wrapped around her right forearm through her sleeve, and didn’t move for a long time.

“I know you’re up there, Potter,” she said at last, without looking up. “Get off before they lock the doors.”

She left the compartment door open behind her when she went.

November 1996

Harry was Gryffindor captain now. At the first match against Slytherin, he kicked off into a cold gray sky and looked, out of four years of habit, for a flash of pale hair at the far end of the pitch.

It wasn’t there. A thickset fifth year named Harper hovered where she should have been, on a broom that was too good for him.

“Where’s Malfoy?” Harry shouted across the wind.

“Ill,” Harper shouted back, and grinned.

She wasn’t ill. Harry had seen her that very morning on the Marauder’s Map, a tiny dot labeled with her name, pacing up and down outside a blank wall on the seventh floor. She had quit the team. She was quitting everything.

He caught the Snitch in fourteen minutes. Gryffindor won by a mile, and the whole school cheered.

He didn’t feel anything at all.

Sixth Year

All through sixth year, Harry watched her disappear. He followed her dot on a magical map until it vanished on the seventh floor, for hours, night after night. She grew thin. She skipped meals. She stopped saying the code, and when he said it to her in the corridor she walked past as if she hadn’t heard.

“She’s up to something,” Harry said. “She’s one of them now. I know it.”

“She’s sixteen, Harry,” Hermione snapped. “She’s not a Death Eater, she’s a girl whose father is in prison.”

“Nah, I’m with Harry,” said Ron. “She’s dodgy. Always has been.”

Harry stared at them both. “Since when do you two swap sides?”

“Since now,” said Ron. “Enjoy it, it won’t happen again.”

Then Katie Bell touched a cursed necklace in Hogsmeade and was carried screaming to St. Mungo’s, and Hermione stopped arguing quite so hard.

Dracaena was in the Entrance Hall when they carried Katie Bell in out of the snow, rigid and screaming, her eyes rolled back in her head.

Dracaena had sent that necklace. She had meant it for Dumbledore. She had never once pictured it in anyone else’s hands.

She stood very still by the house hourglasses while Katie’s friend sobbed on the stairs, and she made herself watch, the whole time, all the way until the hospital wing doors closed. She thought she owed Katie Bell that much. It was nowhere near enough.

February 1997

The Room of Hidden Things was a cathedral of junk. Centuries of it. Broken furniture, forgotten books, things students had hidden and never come back for. She spent hours there every night, alone, with the Vanishing Cabinet that was supposed to bring the Death Eaters into the castle.

Once, in the middle of a bad night, with the cabinet sulking in front of her and the Mark aching under her sleeve, she pointed her wand at nothing and said the Patronus spell, just to see.

Nothing came. Not mist. Not anything. It was as if she had gone looking in her own head for one good thing and found the shelves bare.

She did not try again.

One night, hunting for a tool, she came around a towering stack of broken chairs and stopped.

Something tall stood against the wall under a gray dust sheet. As tall as the ceiling of an ordinary classroom. Two clawed gold feet showed beneath the hem.

She stood in front of it for a long time.

She could have lifted the sheet. It would have taken one hand. She wanted to know, more than she had wanted anything in months, what it would show her now, with the Mark under her sleeve and the cabinet waiting behind her and the thing she was supposed to do at the end of the year.

She was afraid it would show her nothing at all.

She left the sheet where it was, and went back to the cabinet, and never came around that stack of chairs again.

March 2, 1997

It was in the whole school by breakfast. Ron Weasley had nearly died on his seventeenth birthday. A bottle of oak matured mead in Professor Slughorn’s office, meant as a gift for someone else, poisoned. Harry had shoved a bezoar down his throat with seconds to spare.

Dracaena sat at the Slytherin table and could not swallow.

She knew that bottle. She had bought it in Hogsmeade herself. She knew exactly who it had been meant for, and she had never once, in all her careful planning, thought about who else might drink it.

Weasley. Who had laughed at her name on the train. Who called her Houseplant and Ferret and worse. Who had a mother and five brothers and a sister and a father who would have stood around a hospital bed this morning, waiting to see if he woke up.

She got up from the table and walked out as fast as she could.

The Bathroom

Harry found her in the girls’ bathroom on the second floor because the map told him where she was and he was done waiting.

She stood at the sinks with both hands braced on the porcelain and the tap running, her hair a wreck, mascara in black streaks down her face. She was gripping her left forearm through her sleeve, hard, as though it burned.

Her eyes met his in the mirror.

“Get out.”

He didn’t. He stood just inside the door and waited, the way you’d wait beside something hurt and cornered. She watched him in the glass and didn’t make him leave.

The tap water ran. In one of the stalls, Moaning Myrtle had gone silent to listen.

He had said it to her in corridors all year as a joke, in her own voice, with her own sneer. He didn’t say it like that now.

“Scared, Malfoy?”

For six years she had answered every question in her life with a lie. She looked at him in the mirror.

“Yes” she said.

She turned around. Her face crumpled, and she didn’t stop it.

Then, with shaking fingers, she unbuttoned her left cuff and rolled the sleeve back. Slowly. One fold at a time. Until he could see it, black against her skin like a burn that had never healed: a skull, with a snake coiling out of its open mouth.

Her eyes were swimming. She held her arm out to him the way she had once held out her hand on a train.

“I didn’t choose this,” she whispered. “Whatever happens, whatever you hear about me after, I want you to know that. I never chose this.”

Harry couldn’t speak.

“You can’t understand, Harry.” It was the first time in a year she had said his name. “You can’t. He’s in my house. He sits in my father’s chair. If I don’t do what he wants, he’ll kill my mother, and then he’ll kill me, and then he’ll find someone else to do it anyways.”

“Do what?”

She shook her head.

“Please let me help.”

“You can’t.”

Myrtle began to wail. Footsteps pounded in the corridor, the door banged open, and Severus Snape stood in the doorway taking it all in at once: the running tap water, the girl at the sinks with her sleeve rolled back and the Mark visible on her arm, and Potter standing between her and the door. Not fighting. Standing there.

Last summer, in a cramped front room at Spinner’s End, Snape had knelt with Narcissa Malfoy’s hand clasped in his while a thread of fire bound their wrists. Watch over my daughter. Keep her from harm. And if she cannot do it…

“Potter,” he said. “Out.”

Potter went. At the door he looked back once, and the girl looked back at him.

Snape had been sixteen once, beside a lake, and he had said one word and walked away. This boy had found her crying in a bathroom with the Dark Mark on her arm, and he had asked if she was scared.

Standing in that flooded bathroom, he found that he wanted very badly for this one to end differently.

June 30, 1997

On the night it happened there was no thunder and no warning. There was only the Room of Hidden Things, very quiet, and the Vanishing Cabinet, and a soft knock from inside it.

Dracaena opened the door.

They came out of the dark one after another, stooping under the cabinet’s lintel: the Carrows, a brother and sister like a pair of lumpy toads; a huge blond man named Rowle; her aunt Bellatrix, laughing under her breath. And last, to her horror, someone she had not invited and had not known was coming. Fenrir Greyback, with dried blood already under his nails.

“Lead on, little niece,” Bellatrix whispered.

She threw a handful of black powder into the corridor, a joke product from the Weasley twins shop in Diagon Alley, and the whole seventh floor went darker than the bottom of the lake. She held up the Hand of Glory her father had bought her years ago, a withered thing that gave light only to the one who held it, and led them through the blind dark like a funeral.

They were waiting at the foot of the Astronomy Tower stairs. Somebody had known. Students she’d watched drift up to the seventh floor all through fifth year: Longbottom, Lovegood, the youngest Weasley. Grown witches and wizards she didn’t know. And one she did: a tall man with long red hair and a fang in one ear. Ron Weasley’s eldest brother, Bill.

Then the spells started, and the corridor was all light.

She had never been in a real fight. Duels in a classroom, hexes in a corridor, nothing like this. The noise of it. Stone exploding off the walls. Curses glancing off the suits of armor in shrieks of sparks. Ginny Weasley was everywhere at once, quick as a Snitch, never where a spell landed. Longbottom fought like someone who had decided not to be afraid anymore. A curse came flashing straight at Lovegood and simply missed her by an inch, as if luck itself had stepped into the way.

Dracaena didn’t cast a single spell. She stood with her back against the wall at the foot of the stairs, her wand in her fist.

That was where she was standing when Greyback went for Bill Weasley.

It wasn’t a spell. Greyback didn’t need spells. He came out of the smoke on all fours and hit Bill Weasley in the chest, and they went down together, and Bill screamed, and the sound went through Dracaena like a blade.

She had opened the cabinet. She had let that thing into the castle.

Someone was shouting her name from above. Her aunt, on the stairs. Up. Now. He’s waiting.

She turned her back on the screaming, and she climbed.

The Top of the Tower

At the top of the Astronomy Tower, under a sky with the Dark Mark burning green in it, Dracaena pointed her wand at the greatest wizard in the world and said the first spell they teach you at the Dueling Club.

“Expelliarmus!”

Dumbledore’s wand spun out of his hand and over the battlements, end over end into the dark.

He didn’t reach for it. He leaned against the wall, gray and tired and impossibly calm, and looked at her the way you’d look at a student who had turned in an essay late.

“Good evening, Miss Malfoy.”

She had practiced this for a whole year. She had practiced the words perfectly. They just would not come.

“I don’t think you are a murderer,” he said gently. “I think you are a frightened girl who deeply loves her mother. Let us help you. We can hide her. We can hide you both.”

Her wand dropped an inch.

Then there were boots on the stairs, and her aunt’s laughter, and Snape in the doorway, and Dumbledore saying Severus in a voice she would hear for the rest of her life, and green light. Snape’s hand closed on the back of her collar. “Run.”

She ran. She did not know that Harry Potter had been standing four feet away under his father’s Cloak, frozen by Dumbledore’s last spell, watching every second of it.

She did not know what one simple disarming spell had made her. Nobody did, except a dead man.

July 1997

They buried Dumbledore beside the lake in a white marble tomb. The merpeople came up to the surface and sang, and a great many people Harry didn’t know made speeches.

The night before, he had sat in the Great Hall and looked across at the Slytherin table. There was a gap at the end of it, where for six years a girl with pale hair had sat with her back very straight, pretending not to look at him. Somebody had already pushed the chairs together to close it.

That summer, at Privet Drive, for the very last time, he watched every owl that crossed the sky.

None of them carried green ink.

Malfoy Manor, July 1997

There was a woman hanging upside down over the dining table.

She turned slowly in the air above the polished wood, as if on an invisible rope, and she was crying. Dracaena knew her. Charity Burbage, she taught Muggle Studies at Hogwarts. Who had written in the Prophet that summer that Muggles and wizards were not so very different, and that the old pureblood families would have died out long ago if they had never married Muggles.

The Dark Lord sat at the head of the table in her father’s chair and explained all this to his guests in a mild, pleasant voice. Her father sat three places down, gray in the face, with his empty hands in his lap. Earlier that evening the Dark Lord had asked for her father’s wand, and her father had given it to him.

“Severus,” the hanging woman sobbed, to the man in black at the Dark Lord’s right hand. “Severus, please. We’re friends…”

Snape didn’t move.

Dracaena stared at her plate. She counted the painted roses around its rim. Twenty two. She counted them again. There was a teacher hanging over the dinner table, and every person in the room was watching the Dark Lord, and nobody at all was looking at the teacher.

Green light. A heavy thud on the table that made the silver jump.

Then the great snake came gliding up over the edge of the table, and Dracaena did not look up from her plate. She kept counting roses. She did not stop counting until she was alone in her bedroom with the door completely locked and then she heaved violently into a basin

Twenty two. Twenty two. Twenty two.

October 1997

Over the summer, the Dark Lord had taken the Ministry of Magic without ever showing his face. Muggleborns were being dragged in to explain where they had stolen their magic from. And Snape was headmaster now. The Carrows taught the lessons that mattered. Muggle Studies had become a class about how Muggles were animals who had stolen magic from their betters and Defense Against the Dark Arts had become just the Dark Arts.

The Carrows were a brother and sister, squat and lumpy faced, with the Dark Mark on their arms and nothing behind their eyes. Amycus Carrow liked to practice the Cruciatus Curse, the curse of pure pain, on students who had earned detention. Better still, he liked to make other students practice it.

“Malfoy.” He crooked a thick finger. “Front. Show ’em how it’s done.”

The boy on the floor was a first year Hufflepuff, caught out of bed. He couldn’t have been more than eleven. He was trying very hard not to cry, and failing miserably.

The class watched. At the back, Neville Longbottom watched hardest of all, with a fresh cut across his cheek from the last time he’d refused.

Dracaena walked to the front and pointed her wand at the boy. Her father had taught her about the slope. Here was the slope, she thought. Here was the very bottom of it, the boy crying on a stone floor, and here was the top, a man with yellow teeth waiting for her to prove which end she belonged to.

She bent down, as if to sneer in the boy’s face.

“Fall down and scream,” she breathed. “Loud.”

Then she straightened up and cast, and a Stinging Jinx hit the boy in the arm, and he screamed like he was being burned alive and rolled on the flagstones clutching himself. He was very good at it. Amycus roared with laughter.

In the corridor afterward, Neville fell into step beside her. “That was a Stinging Jinx.”

“Prove it.”

“There’s a room on the seventh floor. We could use someone who lies that well.”

“I am not joining your little army, Longbottom.”

Neville stopped walking.

“You threw my Remembrall at a wall when I was eleven” he said. “My gran sent me that. You laughed about my broken wrist in front of the whole class. You called me worse than Longbottom for six years.” He said it without any heat, like a list he had kept for a long time and had finally decided to read out. “And in fourth year you let Crabbe and Goyle sit on me in the library while you watched.”

She had forgotten the library. He hadn’t.

“I’m not saying it to get an apology,” Neville said. “I just want you to know I remember. Whatever this is.” He nodded back at the classroom, at the boy who had screamed so convincingly. “It doesn’t make us friends.”

“I didn’t ask to be your friend.”

“Good,” said Neville, and walked away.

But every Sunday after that, a scrap of parchment appeared inside Neville Longbottom’s Herbology textbook with the Carrows’ patrol routes for the coming week written out in elegant slanting handwriting. He never asked. She never signed them.

Late at night, in the dungeons, she listened to a forbidden radio program under her blankets with the volume turned all the way down. The password changed every week. She always worked it out. She listened, every time, for one name. Some nights a voice said it: Harry Potter is still out there. On those nights, she slept.

Christmas 1997

They took Luna Lovegood off the Hogwarts Express on the way home for Christmas, to punish her father for what he printed in his magazine, and they locked her in the cellar of Malfoy Manor with an old wandmaker who had been down there since the summer.

Dracaena found out the way she found out everything in that house now: by listening at doors.

On Christmas night, when the Manor had finally gone quiet, she went down to the dark kitchens, filled a napkin with bread and cold chicken and an entire Christmas pudding, and crept down the cellar steps in her dressing gown with her wand lit low.

Mr. Ollivander lay curled against the wall, thin as a bundle of sticks, his pale silvery eyes catching the wandlight. Luna sat cross legged in the middle of the floor, humming, as if a cellar were as good a place as any to spend Christmas.

“Oh, hello,” Luna said. “Are you the Sunday notes?”

Dracaena froze and nearly dropped the pudding. “The what?”

“Neville gets a note in his Herbology book every Sunday. Nobody knows who writes them. The handwriting is very elegant and slants to the ever so slightly to the right, like someone leaning into a strong wind.” Luna studied her with her huge pale eyes. “You lean like that too.”

Dracaena pushed the napkin through the bars. “Eat. Quickly. And don’t tell anyone I was here.”

“I won’t. Who would I tell?” Luna unwrapped the pudding with enormous interest. “Thank you.”

The words went through Dracaena like a draft under a door. Nobody in this house said them anymore. She had stopped saying them herself at six.

She came down every night until the holidays ended. Mr. Ollivander never said much. Luna talked about Nargles, and her mother, and a dream she’d had about a lighthouse. On the last night, as Dracaena turned to go, Luna said, quite matter of factly:

“You don’t belong up there with them, you know. You belong with the people you bring pudding to.”

Dracaena climbed the cellar stairs without answering. She thought about it the whole way back to school.

March 1998

The Snatchers, bounty hunters paid in gold for every Muggleborn and runaway they dragged in, brought three prisoners to Malfoy Manor. A redhead. A girl with a cloud of bushy hair. And a third whose face was so swollen and stung it barely looked like a face at all.

Her aunt Bellatrix dragged her across the drawing room by the wrist. “Dracaena. Look at him. Is it Potter?”

She looked.

The face was ruined, lumpy and purple. But behind the swelling the eyes were green and they were looking at her. Not begging. Just looking. The way they had looked at her across the Great Hall the morning her father was arrested.

Her father’s hand came down on her shoulder, in exactly the place the Dark Lord’s had once rested. He had no wand anymore. He had nothing anymore.

“If it’s him, Dracaena” Lucius murmured “we’re forgiven. For everything. Do you understand? Everything comes back.”

She understood. She looked at the green eyes.

“I can’t be sure,” she said.

Then Bellatrix saw the sword the Snatchers had brought in, and everything went wrong at once. The boys went down to the cellar. Granger stayed upstairs.

Dracaena stood against the drawing room wall while her aunt knelt over Hermione Granger on the floor and the screaming started and it did not stop.

Every word her father had ever said about blood was in that room. At the window, at the dinner table, in the book with the green ribbon. The slope. The top. The other sort. She had believed some of it once. Now she knew what it sounded like when someone said it out loud and meant it with their whole body.

It sounded like screaming.

If Granger lives, she thought, digging her nails into her palms until they bled, I’ll say it. To her face. I swear I will.

There was a shout from the cellar stairs. Ron Weasley burst into the drawing room with Harry right behind him, both of them filthy, both of them holding wands that weren’t theirs.

“Expelliarmus!”

Ron’s spell hit her aunt square in the chest. Bellatrix’s wand went spinning across the room. Harry’s jinx caught Lucius in the shoulder and threw him backward over a sofa nearby. For one wild second Dracaena thought they might actually do it.

Then Bellatrix had Hermione by the hair, dragged up off the floor, with a silver knife pressed under her jaw.

“Drop them” Bellatrix hissed, “or the Mudblood bleeds.”

A thin red line appeared on Hermione’s throat. Harry and Ron let their wands fall to the carpet.

“Good boys.” Her aunt’s eyes found her. “Dracaena! Pick them up.”

Dracaena walked across the room. She bent and picked up the two wands from the carpet. Her own was already in her other hand. Three wands, and every eye in the room on her.

“Now” said Bellatrix softly. “Call him. Touch your arm, girl. Call the Dark Lord.”

Her left sleeve. The Mark beneath it. Her father, dragging himself up behind the sofa, rasping, “Do it, Dracaena. Do it.”

She put her fingers on her sleeve.

She looked at Hermione Granger, standing very straight with a knife at her throat and blood running down into her collar. She looked at Harry, unarmed, his ruined face turned toward her.

Her fingers didn’t move.

“Dracaena!,” said her father.

Something squeaked overhead.

Every face turned up. The great crystal chandelier was trembling on its chain, and the chain was unscrewing itself, all on its own, and then it came down in a thunder of glass. Bellatrix flung herself aside and let go of Hermione. Ron dove, snatched Bellatrix’s wand off the carpet, and dragged Hermione to safety. And Harry lunged across the wreckage at Dracaena and wrenched all three wands out of her hands, her own hawthorn among them.

Her fingers closed on them out of pure reflex. He tore them loose anyway.

And there in the wreckage of the chandelier, small and ragged and furious, stood an elf she had grown up with. Dobby was wearing a tea cozy for a hat, and on his feet were two socks that did not match. One of them was Slytherin green.

He seized Harry’s hand, and Ron’s and Hermione’s limp wrist. Then his huge eyes found Dracaena against the wall.

“Miss Dracaena is coming too” Dobby said. “Dobby is not leaving Miss Dracaena in this house!”

His bony little hand closed on her wrist.

“TRAITOR!” Bellatrix shrieked, and something silver left her hand, spinning, straight at Dracaena’s heart.

Dobby turned into it.

The world twisted and went black.

The Beach

They landed on sand, under stars, with the sound of the sea everywhere.

Dobby lay on his back. The silver hilt of Bellatrix’s knife stood out of his chest, and the dark stain around it was spreading.

Dracaena was on her knees beside him before she knew she’d moved. Harry was on the other side, pressing his hands uselessly around the wound, saying no, no, Dobby, no.

Dobby’s eyes found her. They were full of stars.

“Miss Dracaena,” he whispered, “said thank you. Once. When Miss was six.” His mouth trembled into something like a smile. “Dobby… remembered.”

Then he looked at Harry, and said Harry’s name the way you’d say the name of the sun, and then he was gone.

Harry closed the elf’s eyes with his own two fingers.

Dracaena knelt in the cold sand with her bloody palms open in her lap. She thought of the kitchen door, and the sounds through it, and her father’s patient voice the next morning. Eleven years. She had never said it again.

“Thank you, Dobby” she whispered.

He couldn’t hear it. It didn’t count. She said it anyway.

Harry dug the grave by hand, at the edge of the garden, where the cliff dropped to the sea. He wouldn’t use magic. After a minute Dracaena knelt down in the dirt beside him and dug too, with her bare hands, until her nails broke and the knuckles bled and the earth was packed under her fingernails.

Ron came out and dug beside them. So did Dean Thomas, who had been rescued from the Manor’s cellar too. Nobody spoke.

They buried Dobby wrapped in Harry’s jacket, in his mismatched socks. Harry carved the stone with a borrowed wand. A free elf.

Luna Lovegood stood at the graveside in a borrowed coat and thanked Dobby out loud for rescuing her from the cellar. Then she looked across the fresh earth at Dracaena and said, “And thank you for the pudding” as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Ron stared at her. Dracaena looked at the dirt under her fingernails and didn’t say anything at all.

Bill

Shell Cottage belonged to Ron’s eldest brother and his French wife and it stood alone on the cliff above the sea with whitewashed walls and shells set into them.

Bill Weasley handed Dracaena a cup of tea in the kitchen that evening. She took it. Then she looked up at his face and could not look away.

The scars ran from his hairline to his jaw. Deep, ragged, silvery pink, the kind no potion would ever close. They pulled one corner of his mouth down, so that even when he was kind, he looked as though he were grieving.

“Greyback” Bill said, watching her see it. “The night of the Tower.”

“I know” she said. “I was there.”

He looked at her for a long, long time. “I know you were.”

That was all. He didn’t shout. He didn’t forgive her either. He just went back to the stove. His wife, Fleur, tall and silver blond and very beautiful, came and took the untouched cup out of Dracaena’s hands without a word and poured it down the sink and Dracaena understood that she was welcome in this house because Harry had asked and for no other reason and that this was fair.

That Night

Hermione was sitting at the kitchen table later with a bandage around her throat, holding a cup of tea she hadn’t touched. Dracaena stood in the doorway with grave dirt still under her fingernails.

“I called you a word when I was twelve” she said. Her voice didn’t shake. She had decided on the way in that it would not shake. “I’ve been sorry since I was twelve. I never once said so to your face. And today I stood against a wall while my aunt…” Her throat closed. She made herself finish. “I’m sorry, Hermione. I’m so so sorry.”

It was the first time she had ever said Granger’s first name out loud.

Hermione looked at her for a long time. Then she set down the cup.

“Took you long enough” she said quietly.

She didn’t move over on the bench.

“I accept it” Hermione said. “The apology. I believe you mean it. But I was on that floor, Dracaena and you were against that wall and I can’t…” She stopped and touched the bandage and started again. “Accepting it and forgiving you aren’t the same thing. I’m not there yet. I don’t know when I will be.”

“I know” said Dracaena. “I wouldn’t be either.”

She stayed standing. It seemed right to stay standing.

“She did it before, you know” said Ron from the back door, mud to the elbows. “Second year. When you were petrified. Harry and me were under that Cloak. She came to the hospital wing in the middle of the night and said sorry to you and you couldn’t hear a word.”

Hermione turned around very slowly. “That’s what you meant. At the Yule Ball. What hospital wing. You kept that for five years?”

Ron shrugged, going pink.

Dracaena looked at him. He had dug beside her in the dark without being asked. She knew she could not sleep one night under his brother’s roof without telling him the rest.

“Weasley. The mead. On your birthday.” She made herself hold his eyes. “That was me. I sent it. It was meant for Dumbledore and I never once thought about who else might drink it. You nearly died because of me.”

The kitchen went silent.

Ron’s face went white, then red, then a color she had no name for. He opened his mouth. Nothing came out. He turned around and walked out into the dark and the door banged so hard behind him that the shells rattled in the walls.

Harry stood up. “Ron…”

“Leave him” Hermione said quietly. “He’s allowed.”

Dracaena found that she agreed. That was the worst part. She agreed completely.

The Cliff

Long after everyone else had gone to bed, she sat on the cold grass beside the grave with her ruined hands in her lap and the sea went on and on below the cliff.

She had grown up in a house full of elves. She had never once asked their names. She knew Dobby’s only because her father shouted it. She thought about the rest of them now: the one who polished the silver, the one who lit the fires before dawn so the house was warm when she woke up, the old one who had died when she was eight and been replaced within the week, like a cracked teacup. She hadn’t cried for that one. She hadn’t even noticed.

Her ancestors lined the staircase at home in beautiful gilt frames, nine hundred years of them and she had been taught to honor every one, by name and by date. Tonight she sat in the dirt on a cliff in Cornwall and grieved for an elf in odd socks and she could not make the two griefs fit inside the same person.

One of them would have to go.

Behind her, the cottage door opened and shut. Footsteps came across the grass and stopped a few feet away. Ron Weasley. He stood there with his hands shoved in his pockets, looking at the stone, not at her.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t sit down. But he didn’t leave either, not until the sky went a bit gray over the water. And when he finally went back inside, he left the door open behind him.

The Wandmaker

Mr. Ollivander mended slowly in an upstairs bedroom. Three days after the grave, Harry went up to ask him about wands and Dracaena, who had been bringing the old man his soup every morning, was still in the room and Harry didn’t ask her to leave.

“A wand that is won,” said Ollivander in his thin, silvery voice, “goes to the one who won it. Taken in a duel, wrenched from a hand, the loyalty passes. That is the oldest rule of wandlore.” His pale eyes moved from Harry to the girl by the window. “But a wand won by force is a soldier who has changed sides. It obeys. It does not always trust. Some small part of it remembers the hand it was taken from and waits to see whether that hand will try to take it back.”

“And if it doesn’t?” said Harry. “If the old owner never tries?”

“If the one who lost it gives it up freely” said Ollivander, “with her own hand, then the wand has nothing left to doubt. It belongs to the new master entirely. Nothing in the world will turn it then.”

Harry was very quiet after that.

That night, sitting on the cliff by Dobby’s grave, he worked it out the way Hermione would have, one step at a time, on his fingers. The Elder Wand: Dumbledore’s wand, the most powerful ever made, buried with him in the white tomb and stolen from it by Voldemort, which Harry had watched through his scar as clearly as if he had been standing at the graveside. It had answered to Dumbledore, until a girl disarmed him on the Astronomy Tower. Then it had answered to her, though she never knew it. And then, in a drawing room full of broken glass, Harry had wrenched her wand out of her hand.

The most dangerous wand in the world believed it belonged to him. It just didn’t trust him yet.

He didn’t tell her. Not then. He wasn’t sure he knew how.

In the morning he gave her the last of the three wands from the drawing room, a stiff, sulky length of chestnut that had belonged to one of the Snatchers.

“Until you get yours back” he said.

It worked for her the way a borrowed coat fits. Well enough but never quite right.

April 1998

They were going to break into Gringotts. Hermione would go in disguised as Bellatrix Lestrange, with one of Bellatrix’s own hairs in the potion and Bellatrix’s own wand in her hand. Dracaena sat across from her at the kitchen table and watched her practice, and winced.

“No. Stop. You’re doing it all wrong.”

“I’m doing exactly what she…”

“You’re polite. You said thank you to Ron for passing the jam earlier.” Dracaena leaned forward. “My aunt has never thanked anyone in her life. Don’t look at people. Look through them. Like they’re furniture you’re thinking of having burned.”

Hermione tried. It was better. It was much better. It was horrible.

“How do you know how to do that?” Hermione asked quietly.

Dracaena looked down at her own hands, at the dirt from Dobby’s grave she still hadn’t been able to scrub out from under her nails.

“I was raised by it” she said.

Across the room, Ron passed Hermione the jam without being asked. He still hadn’t said a single word to Dracaena. Three weeks now. He passed her things if she asked for them and he didn’t look at her when he did it and that was all.

She didn’t ask him for anything if she could help it. It seemed the least she could do.

May 1, 1998

They came into Hogwarts through a painting in a pub in Hogsmeade, down a long tunnel and out into a room full of hammocks and banners and dozens of exhausted students who all stood up at once and shouted Harry’s name.

Neville Longbottom looked past Harry, saw Dracaena, and his face did something complicated.

“Sunday parchment” he said slowly. “It was you.”

“Obviously it was me, Longbottom. Who else in this castle has decent handwriting?”

Then a high cold voice spoke inside every head in the building and said that it wanted Harry Potter by midnight and the war came home.

Midnight

Professor McGonagall raised her wand in the Entrance Hall and suits of armor stepped down off their pedestals. They clanked out through the great doors in ranks, swords drawn, to stand on the battlements. Flitwick and Sprout stood in the courtyard weaving enchantments over the castle until the whole sky above it shimmered like the inside of a soap bubble.

A little after midnight, the bubble broke.

McGonagall looked at Dracaena for exactly one second, said “Third floor. East corridor. With Lovegood and Thomas” and moved on. Nobody argued. Nobody trusted her enough to argue.

She knew that corridor. She had run down it at eleven in her nightclothes, with Filch behind her and a locked door ahead.

They came up the east stairs at a run: four of them, masked, wands already spitting light.

The corridor was narrow. That was the first thing she noticed and the thing that saved them. Four Death Eaters couldn’t spread out in it. Two had to fight from behind the other two and every spell from the back rank had to get past the front. Dracaena dropped to one knee behind a toppled suit of armor and didn’t waste a single curse on the masks. She aimed at the ceiling above them. Stone came down in a roar. The back two flinched apart and Dean’s Stunner went straight through the gap.

A curse came at her. She threw up a Shield Charm, not flat the way they taught it, but angled and the hex skidded off it and hit the wall and brought a whole tapestry down over the second Death Eater’s head. Luna, humming under her breath, hit him with a Full Body Bind while he was still fighting his way out of the cloth.

Two left. One of them was good. He split his spells, one high and one low, faster than she could shield both and the low one caught Dean in the knee and dropped him. Luna went down behind a statue to drag him clear out the way. And then it was just Dracaena and two masked wizards in the long dark corridor and she was backing away from them, step by step, toward a door at the far end that she had seen once in her life.

A door with a scorched old lock that a bushy haired girl had opened with a whisper seven years ago.

“Nowhere to run, little traitor!” shouted the good one.

She kicked the door open behind her and backed into the room.

It was empty now. The dog was long gone. But nobody had ever filled in the trapdoor and it lay in the middle of the floor exactly where it had always been. She had been in this room once in her life, at eleven and spent every second of it looking at the dog’s heads instead of its feet.

She had never forgotten the trapdoor since.

She stepped around it. They came through the door after her, fast, wands raised, their eyes on her and nothing else. She pointed her wand not at them but at the floor between them and said one of the first charms anybody learns at Hogwarts.

“Alohomora!”

The trapdoor fell open under their feet.

They went down into the dark with a pair of dwindling shrieks. Somewhere far below there was a thud, then another and then a slow, wet, rustling sound, like something large and green waking up hungry.

Dracaena stood at the edge of the hole, breathing hard.

Luna appeared in the doorway with Dean’s arm over her shoulder and looked down into the dark with great interest.

“That was very clever,” Luna said. “You must have been thinking about that room for years.”

“Since I was eleven” said Dracaena. “Last time, I was looking at the heads.”

The Room of Hidden Things

“I spent a year in here” Dracaena said, running between towers of junk taller than houses. “Fixing that stupid cabinet. I know every corner. A tiara, you said? Old, silver, blue stone? Next to an ugly bust of a wizard with a wig. This way.”

She was right. On the way up, Harry had told her what they were hunting: Horcruxes, pieces the Dark Lord had torn off his own soul and hidden inside objects, so that he could never truly die until every last one was destroyed. This was the last but one. Ron and Hermione were searching the next aisle over. Harry had his hand on the diadem when the voice came from behind them.

“Traitor.” Vincent Crabbe stood in the aisle with Goyle at his shoulder and a wand pointed at her heart. He had followed her around for seven years like a large silent dog. He was not so silent now. “The Dark Lord’ll give us anything we want for you.”

He cast something he couldn’t control.

The fire came alive. Serpents of flame, burning chimaeras, a dragon with a mouth like a furnace, all of it roaring through the mountains of junk faster than anyone could run. Dracaena scrambled up a tower of broken desks with the heat peeling at her skin and there was nowhere left to climb.

A broom came out of the smoke. Harry, low over the handle, one hand reaching down.

She grabbed it. Their palms were slick and it slipped. He came around again and this time she caught his wrist with both hands the way she had in the Forest when they were eleven and he hauled her up behind him. The burning dragon snapped at the tail of the broom. She wrapped her arms around his back and screamed into his ear over the end of the world.

“Scared, Potter?!”

“You WISH!”

He flew them straight through the door as it collapsed behind them. Ron and Hermione shot out a second later on a second broom, with Goyle slung across it between them. Behind them, deep in the fire, something screamed that was not a person and a dark shape tore up out of the flames like smoke and came apart. The diadem was gone.

Crabbe did not come out.

The Entrance Hall

Fred Weasley died laughing at a joke, in an explosion, with his brothers beside him. After that, Ron fought like someone who had stopped counting.

Dracaena was limping when Fenrir Greyback found her at the foot of the marble staircase: a huge, gray matted brute of a werewolf with filed yellow teeth and nails like claws, who had never needed a full moon to bite. Her left leg was burned to the knee. Her wand arm shook.

“Lucius’s little traitor.” He smiled with too many teeth. “I was promised you, girl.”

Then Ron Weasley was between them.

Greyback hit him like a falling brick wall. Ron got a Shield Charm up just in time and it shattered and he flew backward into a suit of armor. He got up. Greyback came again, fast as a dog and Ron sidestepped and hit him with a Stinging Hex in the eyes, and Greyback batted the next spell aside like a fly and slammed him into the banister. Something in Ron’s arm cracked.

Ron got up.

“Stay down, blood traitor,” Greyback growled. “When I’m done with her, I’ll come back for whatever’s left of you.”

Ron spat blood onto the marble. And for no reason he could have explained, he heard Harry’s voice, fourth year, on the stairs to the Gryffindor tower, the night of the Yule Ball.

She isn’t that bad when you get to know her, Ron. She’s more like a hurt cat with its claws out.

And Harry again, a week before that, red to the ears: I’m going with Malfoy. Don’t make that face.

And a girl at the foot of a hospital bed in the dark, apologizing to someone who couldn’t hear her. And a girl in a kitchen, white as paper, telling him the truth about the mead because she couldn’t stand not to.

And the same girl, every night for three weeks after that, sitting alone by an elf’s grave on a cliff, while he stood in the dark behind her and couldn’t think of one single thing to say.

Ron grinned and it was a horrible grin, all blood. “You know what Hermione told me,” he said, “in first year?”

Greyback hesitated, which was his mistake.

Ron raised his wand in his one good hand. “She said I was saying it wrong. Said it was LeviOsa.” He swished and flicked, exactly the way they had been taught at eleven years old. “Never could get it right.”

“Wingardium LeviosAH!”

The hall went up.

Everything within sixty feet of Ron Weasley left the ground at once. Chunks of shattered staircase. Suits of armor, still swinging their swords. Benches, banisters, a fallen chandelier. The rubies from the smashed Gryffindor hourglass rose glittering around him like a cloud of blood red stars. Three Death Eaters rose kicking into the air, shrieking, their wands spinning out of their hands. And Fenrir Greyback, enormous, snarling, hung helpless six feet off the floor, clawing at nothing.

“Where’s that coming from?” one of the Death Eaters screamed. “He’s a Weasley!”

Ron’s whole arm was shaking. Blood ran down his chin. He looked up at Greyback, dangling over the wreckage of the Entrance Hall.

“Mind your head” he said and let go.

Everything came down at once.

When the dust cleared, Neville Longbottom was standing over the rubble with his wand out, making very sure Greyback stayed down and Ron’s knees were wobbling. Dracaena caught him before he hit the floor.

“Weasley.”

“Houseplant.”

She swallowed. “Ron.”

“Oh, don’t make it weird” Ron groaned. “Still haven’t forgiven you, by the way.” And he passed out on her shoulder.

The Great Hall

There was an hour of truce and the Hall was full of the wounded and the dead.

Dracaena knelt beside a first year Hufflepuff boy with a broken arm, the same boy who had screamed so well for Amycus Carrow, who had sneaked back into the castle through the tunnel when the younger students were sent away, binding it with strips torn from the green lining of her own robe. She didn’t hear anyone come up behind her. Nobody was there.

But something made her look up into the empty air.

“…Harry?”

Under the Cloak, Harry Potter stood two feet from her, on his way to the Forest to die. He couldn’t answer. If he answered, he wouldn’t be able to go. She would not have allowed it

He walked on.