27: Blood of the Covenant

Pansy

If you had told a twelve-year-old Pansy that her future self would willingly go to an anti-Voldemort secret student militia captained and championed by the Boy-Who-Lived himself, she would have laughed herself sick and then hexed you.

And yet: here she was.

Pansy curbed her apprehension. They’d gotten off the staircases on the seventh floor of the school’s largely disused eastern wing. It couldn’t possibly be much further ahead, and by the time she got to that room she had to be ready to walk in and face the scorn that would no doubt hit right away.

“It’ll be fine,” Daphne said lowly. “Potter promised Harry he’d keep them in line.”

Sometimes Pansy hated how well her friends had learned to read her. Another, larger part liked feeling so seen. Also, she could see Daphne’s nerves and grim determination, so it went both ways.

“Not to mention,” said Blaise, “we’re quite capable of defending ourselves.”

Sure, but they were also all sixteen or seventeen, and had been to a greater or lesser degree been practicing dueling for years. Pansy cast a pointed look over her shoulder at the gaggle of younger Slytherins that trailed behind them, and then an even pointier look at Blaise.

His lips curled. “You expect me to believe our lot can’t trounce theirs?”

“They’ve been training too,” Hermione said, and turned, walking backwards but still shoulder to shoulder with Neville, so she could look at them while she talked. “Quite a lot, really. A much narrower range of spells than we use, of course, but a great deal of practice with aim, efficacy, shielding, and dodging. They’ll be difficult to hit and their return spells will hurt less but rarely fail.”

“They came with us to the Ministry last year,” Daphne added. “Some of the older lot, at least, and held their own well.”

“They didn’t, like, win,” said Veronica from behind them.

“They also didn’t die,” Daphne said.

Hermione slowed, and Pansy’s stomach did a backflip. Some of Potter’s defense club had gone to the Ministry last year, yeah: would any of them remember that she hadn’t?

“Here we are.”

Pansy made a face. She recognized that hideous old tapestry from their trip up here last year. Several trolls wearing incongruously feminine ballet costumes and menacing a hapless wizard with their clubs was a terrible choice in decor, and was sufficiently off-putting as to make Pansy want to be somewhere else.

"Oh look. A blank stretch of wall. How droll," said Blaise.

Daphne elbowed him. "We all know you've been here before.”

Hermione had begun to pace along the wall. “Don't be too hard on him, Daphne, not everyone can have a memory quite as good as mine.”

“Why did we ever teach you sarcasm,” said Blaise to thin air.

“As if I ever needed you to teach me anything,” Hermione said sweetly, and then stepped back, looking enormously pleased. “Here we are.”

A door appeared in the wall, quietly, with none of the grinding stone or shimmering illusions that characterized so many of Hogwarts’ secret passages. One moment, nothing, the next: a door.

Just like their visit up here last year, a shiver went down Pansy's spine. The Room was powerful, old magic, and she didn't care for fucking around with such things.

Hermione pulled it open with a flourishing—and sarcastic—bow. A low wash of noise came out: the sound of a number of people already inside. “Welcome,” she said, “to the Come and Go Room.”

No one moved.

"Oh, all right, I should probably go first,” said Hermione. She stepped around the door and strode through.

Maybe it made her a coward. Who cared. Pansy hung back and let Daphne go in first, head high and features frozen, followed by Blaise, already sliding his usual laid-back manner behind a shield of insouciant boredom. The kids went in next, not nearly as well guarded, but that was all right, they were children. Their very wariness and distrust was itself a shield, a marker of vulnerability that would stay all but the nastiest of the taunts that older students might throw. Pansy was okay with being a coward if that meant she didn’t feel all the weight of reaction that Blaise and Daphne provoked the instant they went in the room: Growing silence. One or two shocked noises. Angry muttering that sprung up from every corner at once, rising—

The rest of the Slytherins filing in behind them almost entirely escaped notice.

Hostility crawled over Pansy’s skin and her fingers itched for her wand even though she could not even rely on her dueling to keep her save, not like Daphne or Blaise.

One voice rose above the rest. A strident challenge: “Granger, what in the bloody—”

“There you are!”

Potter’s voice cut the legs out from under the growing protest. “Sorry—didn’t mean to—my bad,” he said, nearly tripping when a little girl in a Hufflepuff tie accidentally stepped in his way. “I didn’t see you come in—everyone,” he turned, addressing the whole group with an ease Pansy had to admire, “these are the new people I mentioned might be joining us today.”

“Slytherins?” said Cho Chang, but that was bearable, her voice was just dubious rather than hateful. Pansy did not care for the way Cormac McLaggen was looking at Daphne just now.

“Yes.” Potter set his jaw and shoulders. A tiny shift. Probably the pressure on him was even worse than that on Daphne and Blaise. “Slytherins. Who have as much a right to defend themselves as the rest of us.”

“And who, you’ll recall, joined us against the Death Eaters in the Ministry last year,” said Parvati Patil coolly, stepping forward. She nodded to Daphne. “Greengrass. Good to see you here.”

“Good to be here.”

“Not all of them,” said someone Pansy couldn’t see.

“Enough of them,” Potter said firmly. “Look, okay, there’s some Slytherins I’d hesitate to let in here, but that’s because they’re related to known Death Eaters, not because they’re Slytherins.”

“My family has already faced retaliation from the Dark Lord’s supporters for refusing to side with him,” said Daphne. “The Zabinis likewise aren’t involved. No one here has direct ties to a Death Eater—we wouldn’t put you or ourselves in danger like that.”

“Yourselves in danger?” said Susan Bones, with force.

Daphne didn’t bat an eye. “Yes. Ourselves. If he had even a hint of suspicion that one of his people’s children had come to something like this, he’d rip their mind open, or torture their parents until they told.”

“Noseless maniac,” Blaise sniffed.

Muttering ran around the room. Some of the hostility had faded. Pockets of it held out, but the tide had shifted.

“We don’t like him either,” Daphne went on. “And we’re in danger from him—a different kind than Hermione, for example, but still danger, and we want to learn.”

Bones came forward. Eyed Daphne for a second. Her eyes said I don’t like you, but the hand she stuck out between them, and the steady set of her shoulders, said she’d commit to this anyway.

She and Daphne shook.

Several paces behind them, Pansy held in a smile. Staging that little confrontation had been her idea—one Daphne and the Gryffindor Patil had arranged in advance, right down to Patil recruiting Bones to the scheme. Better to get it out of the way early, in Pansy’s mind. Their performance definitely hadn’t settled the whole issue, but acknowledging the DA’s legitimate security concerns and pointing out the Slytherins’ own risks all at once had earned them some trust on credit.

“Come on, Daphne, have you met Leanne—?” Patil was saying, leading Daphne away; Pansy looked in the direction they were heading, saw seventh year Leanne Wengrow, and decided she was just as happy to have been excluded. Wengrow was popular: anyone in that conversation would have to talk to far too many people, and Pansy, who would once have enjoyed the challenge, couldn’t make herself do it.

Blaise nudged her. “Tuppence for your thoughts?”

“I—what?” said Pansy.

“It’s a Muggle idiom. I think.”

“Who did you hear it from?”

“Justin.”

Merlin and Morgana. Justin had been teaching Blaise wrong Muggle expressions since something like second year. And somehow, Blaise had yet to catch on. Pansy stifled a laugh. “Right… Well, I wasn’t thinking of anything in particular, really.”

“No?”

Blaise could be a bit too perceptive, always exactly when Pansy didn’t want him to be. She narrowed her eyes at him. “No.”

“Quite understandable. Thinking is exhausting,” he said with an easy acceptance Pansy didn’t believe for an instant. “In lieu of using our minds, shall we mingle?”

“The kids—”

But Pansy saw right away that was a terrible excuse. The younger Vipers had already been absorbed into a large clot of younger members of the DA; there were, after all, a few people from each House in that age group who had dropped into Harry’s orbit, and without the unusual density of people whose families were intimately involved in the war that characterized the older current students, inter-House tension among the littler kids wasn’t as bad.

Hermione saved her. One arm up, she caught Pansy’s attention from the side of a group of sixth-years, and Pansy gratefully looped an arm through Blaise’s. “All right, let’s mingle with Hermione.”

“Cheater,” said Blaise, but fondly, so Pansy ignored this, towing him over to Hermione’s group in silence. Maybe between Blaise’s easy charisma and Hermione’s bluntly endearing charm Pansy could go unnoticed.

To Pansy’s immense relief, that did indeed seem to be the case. Hermione pulled them into conversation with Anthony Goldstein, Sue Li, and Hannah Abbott, all people Pansy at least considered acquaintances, all more interested in academics than accusations. Already they were deep in a discussion of the changes Selwyn had brought to Hogwarts: new professors, a cultural awareness extracurricular for first- and second-years set to start in March, rumors of allowing students to elect one of their number to act as a voice in the Board of Governors—

“That one’s true,” Pansy contributed, unable to resist any longer—it went against her nature to drift on the outside of a conversation like this. To her relief no one so much as looked askance. Anthony and Hannah set about pestering her with questions: Pansy answered some and coyly ducked others and began to feel, at least a little, more herself.

Hermione had gotten them there early, but not by much. Only ten or so minutes went by before conversations began to die down, voices falling and eyes turning to the figure at the front of the room. No one had called out or given any kind of signal. Potter sort of just stood there and waited and their attention swung, naturally, to him.

“You know,” Pansy said to Blaise under her breath, “I’ve never thought they looked that alike, but now—”

“There’s a resemblance,” Blaise agreed.

Potter launched into a quick summary of the last few meetings. He was confident and concise, funny but never mocking. He demonstrated some spells, did a call-and-response review, cracked jokes, answered questions. The circle of his audience drew in closer in dozens of small unconscious movements that combined into a group shift so slow you could almost think you’d imagined it. At Pansy’s left elbow was Blaise but at her right stood a younger Gryffindor she didn’t recognize and in front of her a tall girl in Hufflepuff yellow shuffled aside to let Pansy see better and all of it felt natural as anything.

“Who’s up for a demonstration?” Potter said loudly.

Hands went up all over the room. Not Pansy’s, obviously, but she saw Veronica and Graham both among the volunteers, and thought it was no coincidence Jules picked both of them, among a cluster of half a dozen people from all Houses, for a demonstration of tactics when dueling multiple opponents.

Pansy couldn’t bring herself to care about the dueling. The Vipers drilled things like that already, had for years, and anyway it wasn’t Pansy’s forté.

Instead she watched Potter. Yes, there was the resemblance to Harry, more obvious the longer she looked. His manners were different, maybe, his smile quicker and eyes warmer, but still—

In a way Potter’s gravity was stronger than Harry’s; where Harry held himself aloof and made you want to earn his attention, Potter gave his attention freely, and made you want to keep it.

Veronica and Graham, she could tell, felt it too. Potter was a good teacher, if less, ah, motivating than Theo, or Celesta in a snit; still, the kids were no less intent on getting things right, no less pleased by a smile or a compliment, than in any Vipers meeting. Both had flushed cheeks and proud squared shoulders when Potter called an end to the demonstration and started breaking the group up into smaller chunks for practicing.

People shuffled and shifted and Pansy found herself elbowed away from Blaise. Her stomach turned over uneasily and she spun. Looked back for him. Saw his tall familiar silhouette on the other side of a clot of Ravenclaws, and tried to push around to get back to him, don’t let me be alone here, but too late. Noise levels dropped as people found their groups and Pansy wanted to be the last one running around without a group even less than she wanted to be without a familiar face: she turned towards the Ravenclaws, set her shoulders, found a gap in their body language and inserted herself so that they naturally moved to leave space. They didn’t have time to do more than shoot one round of questioning looks at each other before Potter called the room to order again.

“Right—start with whoever’s oldest or most experienced of your group in the middle—try to anticipate what your teammates will do, and work with them—”

Okay. Dueling. Pansy could do this. She popped her wand out into her hand.

“Who’s going first?” one of the Ravenclaws in her group said.

“Talia? You’re usually best at dueling—”

“Sure.” A tall girl with brown hair stepped forward. “Everyone ready?”

A boy with a pointy chin began to count down: “Three, two, one—”

Everyone around the edge of the circle began casting at once, as instructed. “Stupefy,” Pansy said, “Impedimenta, furnunculus, peragila,” simple spells she knew well, and could chain together if not cast nonverbally.

At first, nothing hit, not from Pansy or anyone else: Talia knew how to shield and how to dodge. Then a boils hex clipped her elbow, a jinx connected with her knee and her legs went wobbly—she recovered, turning her fall into a roll and managing to cast a counterjinx halfway through—popped back to her feet with a shield already up again.

She’s good. Enough to give Hermione a real fight, though Pansy thought she’d lose to Daphne or Theo. Maybe also to Neville. Even with seven other people casting at her Talia lasted almost a minute and a half. Longer than most of the other groups’ first rounds. It was a simple windknock hex that got her in the end, punching the breath out of her lungs and distracting her long enough for an expelliarmus to fling her wand from her hand.

One of the other Ravenclaws caught it and handed it back. “Nice job.”

Talia nodded, still unable to talk, and took her wand back. She waved at the rest of them as if to say Someone else go and stepped back into the circle.

The next three people were… solid, not as good as Talia, but decent. They’d hold their own at least against most of the Vipers in a fair fight.

All of them would die within seconds to a real Death Eater.

Pansy watched them with their stunners and jelly-legs jinxes, imagined what her mother would say to see them—to see Pansy among them—and felt sick.

No one spoke directly to Pansy for the first several rounds. Only when there were two people left to take a turn in the middle did someone even acknowledge her presence: “Do you want to go first, Leah, or let Parkinson?”

The Ravenclaw in question—Leah—hesitated. “Er… Parkinson, go ahead.”

Pansy had wondered if she could get away with not doing this. Apparently not. “If we’re going in order of experience—I don’t know if I’m any better at this than anyone else here.”

“Don’t worry, we all know what your wandwork’s like.” This, from a short girl with a complicated French braid, came accompanied by a suggestive, mocking smile.

“That depends,” said Pansy, who knew how to trade barbs much better than she did dueling, “on the wand in question.”

A hit. Two others stifled laughs. It might have smoothed things over just enough—tit for tat, let it go—except they still stood in a dueling circle. The tall girl’s face tightened. “Let’s see how you do with yours, then—Stupefy!”

Pansy dodged that spell, and the next one, and the next. Protego—which she knew nonverbally, thank Merlin—then another dodge. A red stunner came so close magic crackled in her hair and she smelled ozone. Protego, she cast again, and then an impedimenta caught her under the ribs. She went over backwards. Fell. Wheezed and then gasped for air with lungs that didn’t want to work. Fuck, that hurt.

Talia stepped forward, into Pansy’s field of view, and held out a hand. A truce, maybe. Pansy would take that. The sucked in a breath, coughed a little, reached up and let Talia pull her to her feet.

“Take that as your warning, snake,” Talia said from three inches away. Her grip on Pansy’s hand tightened painfully. “No one’ll go easy on you here.”

“Tal…” said one of the others.

“What? Are we supposed to just let them come crawling in here and smile like it’s fine?” Talia dropped Pansy’s hand like it had burned her. Like it was dirty.

So much for a truce. Pansy sneered. “Well, you’re not in charge here, are you? I don’t think you let anyone do anything.”

“See this?” Talia gestured sharply around the room. “We’ve spent over a hundred hours here—practicing and training to defend ourselves, our families, from people like you. And now you want to learn from us? Those kids, fine, but you couldn’t pay me to teach you dueling.”

“Don’t worry. I don’t expect you to teach me anything,” Pansy said sweetly.

“Merlin. You’re such a bitch, Parkinson, it’s no wonder even your family couldn’t stand you.”

A stray spell from the practice duel next to them soared over their heads. The other Ravenclaws in the group traded uneasy looks.

“No one kicked me out, actually,” Pansy’s mouth said. Inside her head, she heard only a numb buzzing sound. “I left.”

“Why’d you leave? Mummy and Daddy try to cut your allowance?”

Before they could force me to take the Mark—except—

“I haven’t seen my mother since she went to prison last year.”

“And of course,” said Talia softly, “if your escaped convict Death Eater mother came running home, you’d be a good little citizen and report her, right? Call the Aurors? Do the right thing?”

Pansy twisted her mouth dismissively, but in her chest, her heart tripped along at a frantic pace. She could have called the Aurors. She could still call the Aurors. Tell them—tell them Mother was at home—even if Mother ran before they got back, it’d be enough to put Father under Veritaserum, Pansy was of age and her testimony mattered, they would question him and they would know and then Pansy would lose both of her parents, forever, one way or the other.

It had never occurred to her. Not once.

“Or, you know, you could tell us. Right? Let the tip come from an anonymous source?” Now the other Ravenclaws were frowning, looking at Pansy too, following Talia’s train of unfortunately accurate logic. “But you haven’t,” Talia went on, “and you won’t, because you’re not really a blood traitor, are you? Not all the way. You’ll slum it with the hoi polloi for a while, have your fit of rebellion, but you’re still protecting them. And one of these days you’ll go running right back.”

“You don’t know me.” Pansy tasted bile. “Or my family.”

“Er, guys… can we not?” said one of the other girls.

Talia stepped back into the circle without another word. Cool, composed. Like their exchange never happened.

On the outside Pansy was composed too, she wasn’t that easy to rattle, but as the last girl in their group took her turn, as Pansy blindly threw milquetoast jinxes—

Mother would like her. Pansy couldn’t not think it. Not with that taunt so fresh, the wound so raw. She wanted to retreat. It would be so easy to sneer, stiffen, wrap herself in smug superiority seven layers thick—except now she was one of them, wasn’t she? That would do nothing but prove Talia right. Pansy imagined Mother back in Azkaban and felt sick. Imagined both her parents arrested and in jail because she turned them in and felt sicker. Blood traitor. Betrayer of one’s blood. Disappointing only daughter. No. She couldn’t do that to them. Even after—what they’d almost done to her, she couldn’t—

An explosion of shouting overwhelmed all the other noise in the room. They paused in unison, turned towards the source. The girl in the middle of their circle panted from her efforts to dodge. Pansy ignored her, ignored the other duels near them dying down too, because Morgana’s tits, that was Daphne, yelling right back at a bellowing red-faced Hufflepuff, a Glossop if Pansy remembered right.

“OI!”

Potter reached them before the rest of Daphne and Glossop’s practice group could so much as move. Shoved between the two furious students and bodily knocked both of them back. “What the bloody hell is going on?” he said, loudly enough for the whole room to hear it.

“She used Dark magic!” Glossop shouted right back.

The room caught its collective breath. Pansy shut her eyes for a minute. For fuck’s sake, Daph, what did you do?

“Parvati.” Potter looked at the Gryffindor Patil, who’d been in the same group as Daphne. “What happened?”

“Daphne was in the middle. I think—” Parvati hesitated just the barest second. “Things got a little competitive. Heated.”

“I shouldn’t have cast back,” said Daphne with something more like her usual composure. Even from here, though, Pansy saw the furious red burning on her cheeks. “That wasn’t the exercise.”

“Forget the bloody exercise—that was a Dark curse!”

“What was the spell?” Potter asked. Demanded, really: his tone required an answer.

Once again Parvati replied. “Piercing hex.”

Oh. Well, that could have been a lot worse.

Then again—it wasn’t good. That spell was restricted. Certainly nothing like what the DA usually cast. Pansy saw the muttering start up. The hostile eyes that turned Daphne’s way.

Potter opened his mouth, but—

“They’re dangerous,” someone said, “all of them,” and then another voice, “It’s not safe letting them train with us!” and a third person demanding if that’s the sort of shite you use down there in the dungeons, and then too many voices for Pansy to make out any one word.

“Deflagan!” Potter shouted.

The cloth-wrapped target dummy nearest to him exploded in a shower of straw and thread. Someone shrieked. Magic flayed the fabric away from its figure in vicious shreds that drifted down to the floor.

“Alastor Moody taught me that one,” Potter said into the abruptly descended silence. “The Flaying Curse. It’s a favorite of Rabastan Lestrange. Or so I’m told.” He turned in a slow circle so he could include everyone as he talked. “Anyone want to call the DMLE on me? That’s six months in Azkaban just for using it on a dummy target.”

Pansy’s breath was loud in her own ears.

“No?” Potter said. “Okay. Here’s the thing, you lot—the people you’re going to have to fight, out there, when it’s for real—they won’t be using stunners and disarmers. They’ll try to tear the skin off you in strips and worse. Spells like that are illegal for bloody good reason, but we, all of us, need to learn how to defend against it, and sometimes, when things are desperate enough—how to cast it. I’ve seen Alastor Moody demonstrate all three Unforgivables. I know for a fact he’s cast all three of them on other humans before, and not for practice. Anyone want to tell me he’s a Dark wizard?”

“This isn’t Moody here,” said Libby Borage flatly. “It’s the daughter of a Dark family casting an illegal curse on a fellow student.”

Potter turned to Daphne. “You shouldn’t have cast that without warning, Greengrass—it’s damage that can be healed, but it wasn’t the exercise.”

“I know—I’m sorry.” Daphne dipped her head a little. “I got overwhelmed—reacted poorly. It won’t happen again.”

Well that had to have hurt her to admit.

“Moody would say we should use whatever it takes to survive this,” Potter said, managing to talk directly to Borage but include the whole audience too. “Everyone makes mistakes in training, but as for me, I want to know in advance what the curses look like I might expect to see in a real fight—and however they learned those curses, the Slytherins can help us. Just like we can help them learn everything we’ve been teaching each other up here.” Again he swung back to Daphne. “As long as everyone’s careful, and sticks to the rules, because this is dangerous magic, and we aren’t here to get each other hurt.”

Heads nodded. Slytherin heads, but others too. Talia whatever-her-last-name-was cut a look in Pansy’s direction thick with both resentment and consideration.

“Okay—anyone still waiting to take a turn in the middle?” Potter asked.

A few groups indicated that yes, they needed a few more minutes. Potter promptly got them going back at the exercise, said anyone who wanted to leave could do so, and anyone who wanted more practice could line up along the wall of target dummies to work on nonverbal jinxes. “Yes, everyone, you kids too,” he said, when a younger Gryffindor who seemed new and a little lost asked if she should try.

Pansy ditched her group of Ravenclaws as soon as Potter was done talking. Fuck if she was going to leave early, but neither did she intend to spend any more time with those people than she had to, at least today. She caught up with Hermione in line behind one of the target lanes.

“What’s up with Daphne?” Pansy said, low.

Hermione bit her lip, shuffled forward as someone finished their target practice and went to the back of the line. “I think Glossop and some of the others… decided to give her a test.”

“Fuckers.”

The boy in front of them glanced back with an unpleasant expression on his face. Pansy gave him an even more unpleasant one back, and he turned to face front again.

“They’ve reason to not like you being here,” said Hermione in an even quieter voice.

Grudgingly, Pansy nodded. “But they must have been really pushing, if Daphne snapped.”

And honestly thank Merlin her group hadn’t done the same. Pansy could handle bitchy comments: she would have not done well if they’d gone beyond the bounds of the exercise when it was her turn in the middle of the circle.

Pansy sneaked glances at Daphne, whose group was one of the few still doing the original exercise, as she and Hermione moved forward with their line. Daphne looked focused. Movements precise. Face blank. So precise and so blank, actually, that Pansy at least could tell Daphne had to try, that this was more than her habitual chilly façade. Hopefully she could hold it together. Pansy doubted Potter could smooth things over a second time, if Daphne, or any of them, slipped again.

Then Pansy took a reflexive step forward with the movement of the line and it was her turn to take a shot at the practice dummy, at which point it occurred to her that in her worry over Daphne, she’d forgotten to worry about herself, or more specifically, her difficulty with nonverbal casting.

Pansy readied her wand. Her back prickled with the pressure of people watching—imagined pressure, she hoped. Stupefy.

Nothing. Not surprising. She’d only managed a nonverbal stunner a few times. And never with this kind of attention on her.

Stupefy.

Stupefy. There, a red streak of magic—but it fizzled halfway between Pansy and the target. She heard a snigger, from behind her. Laughing at her? No way to know. Pansy set her jaw. Tried again.

On her fifth try it worked. The stunning spell slapped into the dummy’s burlap-clad torso. The magical discharge, as the spell died with no living thing to affect, was minimal. Anyone watching could see that it had been far from the strongest stunner cast here today, and Pansy, deciding that was enough for her, turned to go to the back of the line again and saw that several people had, in fact, been watching.

Her ears burned. Pansy shook her hair forward to cover them, using the same motion to sheathe her wand so it would look natural instead of like hiding, so no one could see her flush.

Hermione, when Pansy rejoined her at the back of the line, didn’t mention it. Pansy thanked Merlin for her friend’s tact. Well-meaning sympathy would be salt in the wound. Already she felt scraped raw. Exposed. Pansy knew what they were all thinking. Can’t even cast a stunner silently. And at her age—

At the front of the next lane over, a tiny Ravenclaw in fourth year’s robes flicked her wand, eyes squinched up in cute childish concentration, and what looked like a lock-knee jinx shot straight into the target dummy even though the girl’s mouth never moved.

Pansy stopped watching the other lanes.

In her second turn at nonverbal practice, Pansy did even worse; the first casting went off but all the ones after that fizzled out or did nothing at all, until she gave up and stepped aside for the next person. There was only one group still doing the dodge-and-shield exercise, though, so if she got lucky, she could avoid getting up there to fail in front of everyone a third time.

Potter spoke over the din when she was only three people from the front: “All right—let’s call it there for tonight!” and Pansy shut her eyes in relief. Stopped having to work to keep her shoulders from curling in on herself.

“Come on,” Hermione said, already moving. Pansy kept her head down and followed her friend. She didn’t belong here. This wasn’t what Pansy was good at. This wasn’t what she wanted. Fuck all of this, fuck her parents, fuck the Death Eaters and the Order for making this world where she had to care about being able to defend herself from an adult trying to curse her into bits, fuck Potter and his stupid charming smile—

“Daph, what happened?”

Pansy cut off her own train of thought with an irritable twist of her mouth. They’d rejoined Daphne’s group, and unless Pansy missed her guess, Daphne looked brittle enough to snap.

“Caught off guard,” Daphne said in a terse voice that discouraged further questions.

Hermione looked closely at her. Daphne’s eyebrows did something complicated. Hermione nodded, almost imperceptibly. And that was it. Nothing else to say between them. Question asked and answered all without words, all opaque to everyone else. Pansy felt a stab of jealousy and furiously snuffed it out of existence. What was she, thirteen? She’d gotten over this years ago.

“He was being aggressive,” Anthony Goldstein said, low. He was Daphne’s cousin, Pansy remembered, as well as Hermione’s friend, and looked at both of them with a hovering sort of worry. “More than he should’ve, really, although not technically outside the bounds of the exercise—”

“We can dissect it later.” Hermione, all ready to sling questions just a moment ago, stepped forward to dismiss the subject with body language as well as words, one arm hooking through Anthony’s with ease. “Walk me back towards the towers? I want to talk to you about that Arithmancy assignment.”

“Oh, er, sure. Bye Daph. Pansy,” he said, tacking Pansy’s name on at the end after a pause.

We’ve been friendly acquaintances for years and now you aren’t even bloody sure if you should use my first name? “Goodnight,” Pansy said, all cheerful smiles, at least until Hermione had gotten Anthony’s back turned.

“I need to get out of here,” Daphne said, low.

Yes, that had pretty clearly been Hermione’s objective. Pansy would like nothing more than to go along with it. She and Daphne set off for the door in perfect accord.

No one stopped them; a quick check told Pansy that the younger Vipers who’d come today had stayed in a group and that Blaise was with them, so that was all right, they had an older escort back to the dorms and didn’t seem particularly roughed up by the dueling exercise. Blaise would just have to suck it up and manage without older backup for a bit.

The door shut behind them and vanished from sight as smoothly and perfectly as it had appeared, just gone.

Daphne glanced back at it and made a face. “That thing’s uncanny.”

“It’s powerful,” Pansy agreed. “Old magic for sure.”

“Hermione mentioned Neville has experimented with what it can do.”

“We should ask him to explain.”

Daphne nodded, but absently, thoughts clearly elsewhere. That was okay. Pansy didn’t mind walking in the quiet. It was well past curfew, and in this high, isolated part of the castle, moonlight filtered cleanly through the windows to paint the castle’s stones in shades of silver. No portraits broke up the eerie monotony of the corridor stretching out in front of them. Pansy half-shut her eyes and imagined that they might just keep walking forever into the gloom. Vertigo overcame her all at once. She jerked a little. Looked at Daphne. Chilly blue eyes met hers. “You all right?”

“Just… dizzy.” Pansy rubbed her eyes. “I need sleep.”

“Don’t we all,” Daphne muttered.

The corridor might have felt infinite, but it did come to an end, depositing them both at the top of the staircase they would take down to the school’s main classroom wing; from there, they could slip into a passageway and be at their dorm inside five minutes. Pansy both longed for and dreaded stepping back into their common room. On the other side of it lay her dorm room, safe, a sanctuary, but the common room itself had become a gauntlet of late, sneers and snide looks and whispers of Blood traitor that stalked her when her back was turned.

At least this late at night few people were likely to still be up.

“Daphne—hey, wait—”

Daphne went instinctively for her wand, had it out and up and ready to cast before Pansy had even turned all the way around. But it was only Parvati Patil, hurrying after them, eyebrows drawn unhappily tight.

“Parvati,” Daphne said, in the most neutral possible tone of voice. Not in any way an invitation. Patil kept coming towards them anyway, which figured: Gryffindors, Pansy thought unkindly, didn’t often care about anything so trivial as whether they were wanted. They preferred to just barge right in.

Merlin. Pansy registered the tone of her own thoughts and hid a wince. She needed sleep. Or maybe just a heavy dose of cheering draught.

“Can we talk?” Patil said.

Daphne lifted one shoulder, lowered it again. The world’s most noncommital shrug. “I suppose.”

Patil’s eyes cut towards Pansy. “Er… alone?”

And didn’t that just fucking figure. “Go on,” said Pansy acidly. “Don’t let little old me get in your way.”

Daphne touched her lightly on the elbow. Fair: that had been too much. Pansy looked away instead. An apology was beyond her right now.

“I won’t be long,” Daphne said. “Wait here?”

“Yeah… I will.”

Daphne’s expression did something approximating a Sorry about this she wouldn’t have the bad manners to say in front of Patil. That would be passive-aggressive. Bitchy. Pansy might have said it, in her place, but that, Pansy thought moodily, watching Daphne walk away at Patil’s side, had always been the difference between them. Daphne liked to be neutral. Pansy, on the other hand, was prone to causing scenes.

The two taller girls retreated down the corridor, easily far enough to be out of earshot—but then they turned a corner into a side hall. Pansy thought about what Harry would say if he knew she’d let Daphne go off with someone they didn’t know that well in a dark corridor at night, alone. Or what Draco would say, for that matter: Draco worried. In a flash she had her wand back out and casting. “Amplius auri,” she muttered, and “Silencio astreadis,” for silent steps.

The sound of Pansy’s next breath scraped unpleasantly against her eardrums, then again as she exhaled. She concentrated. Fought back the strange ringing almost-silence that you got from using this charm in a space that was too open, too quiet. Daphne’s and Patil’s voices came to her dim and fuzzy. Distorted by a ward, no doubt. She dropped the amplius auri with a twist of her wand and some relief. But sound wards didn’t have to stop her from keeping an eye on things. Pansy crept closer, until she was plastered against the wall at the mouth of the corridor the other two had gone down, and could inch forward to peek around the corner.

A faint heat haze in the air indicated the wards that kept her from hearing their words cleary. Pansy ignored it, focused on their tone, their body language, the things she could perceive. Patil was being rather strident. Her hands gestured sharply. Daphne, in comparison, stood reserved and self-contained, but not with the brittle barely-there restraint from the Room of Requirement. If she’d gone back to being so visibly on edge Pansy might have interfered. As it was, she just watched.

Daphne said something, conciliatory based on the hand she half-lifted, palm up, in appeal. Patil toyed with her long black braid as she replied: a nervous gesture, or an uncertain one. She’d backed down from whatever point she wanted so emphatically to make. Their conversation went on for a few more exchanges of words, and Pansy watched as both Patil and Daphne unwound slightly, even to the point of Patil slapping Daphne playfully on the shoulder towards the end. Hm. Pansy hadn’t known they were so familiar. Then again, Daphne did not appear to have expected the gesture, so maybe that was just yet more of the easy informality so many students traded freely and Pansy had never mastered.

Their body language shifted towards disengaging from the conversation, saying good-bye and goodnight and so on. Pansy pulled back from her observation post. By the time Daphne and Patil came back out of the side hall she’d returned to her spot at the top of the stairs, leaning against the railing as if she had never moved.

“See you,” Patil said, including both of them in the gesture. Pansy raised a hand but didn’t bother saying anything back.

Daphne waited for Patil to have retreated back down the hall towards the rest of the DA presumably doing what Hermione had previously described as a social hour where everyone basked in the shared thrill of broken rules. Then she raised an eyebrow at Pansy. “Did you get past the sound ward?”

“You know I didn’t,” said Pansy, making a face at her. “Saw plenty in your body language, though. You should cast a visual obscuration ward next time.”

“No need to bother.” Daphne started taking the stairs down two at a time.

“Must you?” said Pansy, descending one stair with each step, like a normal person.

Daphne stopped on the landing. Leaned on the railing out over the drop to the next floor down. “I suppose I can wait. Such a pity, having legs that short.”

“I’m average height,” said Pansy, lying. “What did Patil want?”

“To chew me out for slipping up, mostly. And to… ask if I was okay.”

“I didn’t know you knew her that well.”

“I don’t, really. But—” Daphne did that one-shoulder shrug again. This time it spoke of discomfort rather than disinterest. “You know Gryffindors.”

“You seemed okay with it,” Pansy said. “Or else I’d have interfered.”

Daphne once again waited for her on the next landing. “I didn’t mind, at any rate. She’s clever. Tolerable company. And Harry mentioned making connections.”

“It is good to have an in with Potter’s camp.” Pansy didn’t verbalize the rest of her thought, which was that, tactics aside, it looked like Daphne might have made a friend.

Good, she thought. At least that way someone might enjoy these fucking meetings.

“Are you all right?” Daphne said.

The question was unexpected. Pansy fumbled for words. “I… guess, I just—that exercise…” She took a breath, tried again. “I’m not good at nonverbal casting.”

“Ah,” said Daphne, understanding. “Was someone rude about it?”

Pansy thought back to Talia’s accusing eyes. Blood traitor. “No more than they had a right to be, really. When you think about it—we are intruders here.”

“What did they say?” Daphne pressed.

“The gist was that I shouldn’t be there because my parents are the people they’re needing to defend themselves against,” Pansy said, staring fixedly ahead of them down the stairs.

Daphne muttered something under her breath. It did not sound like a compliment. Then: “Would you rather not go back?”

It would be easy. Pansy longed to say yes. Would that make her a coward? Did she care? She didn’t belong there, and she wasn’t wanted, and what more did you ever need to leave?

Then again—you’re not really a blood traitor, Talia had said. Pansy didn’t mind being a coward. But she did mind this stupid situation, one side hating her as a blood traitor, the other hating her for not being blood traitor enough.

“Yes,” she said at last, “but I think I have to go anyway.”

Daphne hesitated, then reached out, took Pansy’s hand. That was enough: neither of them said any more, and neither did they let go until they had made it all the way back to the common room entrance.

Harry

Many pureblood families had specific traits that seemed to run strongly through the generations. Whether it was genetics or family magic or both Harry couldn’t say for sure but it was a noticeable pattern. The Malfoys, for example, tended towards starkly pale skin and silver-blond hair. Harry had seen enough portraits—and enough pictures in history books—to know that the currently living Malfoys were the rule, not the exception.

But Draco had gone beyond his normal levels of pallid into the territory of pasty and ill. Purple circles could be spotted under his eyes if you looked closely in the mornings before he had a chance to slink into the bathroom and apply cosmetic charms. Lately his hair had begun to take on a lank, greyish color, particularly noticeable when Draco slouched down to avoid professors’ recriminations when he failed to hand in his homework, and the classroom lights reflected dully off his head.

Harry asked Hermione about it, while the two of them skipped breakfast in favor of sharing scones and stresses in the Knights’ Room one morning. “Are you and Draco… all right?”

“What? Yes, of course we are.” Hermione narrowed her eyes at him. “Why?”

“He just looks… ill. Stressed.”

“Well, it’s not us,” she said shortly. “Unless he’s said something, I suppose.”

Harry shook his head. If Draco talked to anyone about his relationship joys and sorrows, Harry was not that person.

“Besides,” Hermione added, “you know why he’s stressed.”

Yes. The mystery task. “We still don’t know…”

“What it is? No. He won’t tell.”

Harry watched the now-slightly-too-vicious scratch of Hermione’s quill over parchment, and thought it over.

“I can’t help Theo,” he said after a minute, “but Draco’s problem—maybe I can fix it.”

The quill stopped moving. Hermione glanced up, witchlight gleaming flatly in her eyes as she moved. “Be careful. His occlumency is better than Theo’s, but—”

But not perfect.

“It’s not on your level?” Harry said wryly.

“Or yours. However different our strategies are.”

“Still can’t believe you encrypted your brain.” Hermione had told Harry about it only a week or two before, partly, he suspected, as a distraction from what she assumed was his grief. And a brilliant distraction it was too. Even if Harry had been grieving, the lure of figuring out what she’d done and how would have been irresistible.

Hermione smirked. “Am encrypting, technically. It’s a work in progress. But I got Pansy to try to cast legilimens on me last week, and she couldn’t make heads nor tails of it.”

“Next time, ask Draco, I think he’s better at it.”

“He’s uncomfortable using legilimency on me.” Hermione half-rolled her eyes. “It’s sweet, I suppose. Interpersonal trust and so on…”

“But you’d rather have the practice,” Harry finished. That sounded about right. Maybe… An idea came to him, and he sat up straighter. Maybe there was something he could do for Theo. “Hermione—how developed is your occlumency system? Could another one of us learn it?”

She tipped her head. “I don’t think you could. Not easily, at any rate. Your occlumency, from what you’ve told me, relies on a different sort of self-discipline, and you lack the interest and skill for advanced mathematics to habitualize the thought patterns on the timescale we’re working with.”

“Not me. Theo.”

“You mean… oh. Oh.” Now Hermione sat up straighter too, caught by the prospect of a new challenge. “So that he can—”

“Come back to us. Yes.” And keep the Dark Lord out of his head.

She bit her lip in thought. “He’s better than you are with arithmancy… and, bluntly, he has quite a bit more time to practice than you do… Yes, I suppose it’s possible. Do you want me try?”

“Offer your help. See what he says.” Harry hesitated. “Don’t mention it was my idea. He’s too practical to refuse, but he might appreciate it less.”

“Because he doesn’t want to be more of a problem for you than he already is? Yes, good point. I’ll ask him today.” Hermione looked down at the table and the remains of a scone she had picked apart and only half-eaten. “Now, even. I can finish this essay later—I think he and I have the same free period before lunch today, if I can catch him after Runes… but I’ll have to go back to the Tower first, and collect a few books—I don’t think he’s ever learned much cryptography, certainly not what Muggles have done with it—and I’ll need my notes, of course, so he can start studying the equations—wait.” Hermione sank back into her chair and shoved hair out of her face. “You were asking about Draco—?”

“Go on,” said Harry, grinning. “Far be it from me to interrupt our Hermione on a mission.”

“Wise of you,” Hermione said, in a near-dead-on imitation of the plummy received pronunciation Justin affected when he wanted to, and left Harry still half-smiling to himself in her wake. It felt like his world was shaking apart, some days, but at least Hermione was the same as ever, bossy and clever and driven as a gale-force wind. If any of them could help Theo, Hermione would be the one to figure it out.

Harry, meanwhile, would deal with her boyfriend. His smile faded as his thoughts turned back to Draco. Obviously there was some kind of pressure on the blond, and, considering Theo’s warnings last fall about a student with a task, Harry didn’t have to reach far for a conclusion. Draco had been given a job. And he was failing at it.

Well, or the task had been set to another student and Draco was just this fucked up over some interpersonal problem Hermione hadn’t even noticed. Harry wouldn’t put it past her to have missed something that big. So he supposed he could be wrong. Ultimately it didn’t matter. Harry intended to help fix Draco’s problem, whatever Draco’s problem might be.

He cast Tempus. Just past eight in the morning. Hermione, if she was lucky, would catch Theo before classes started at eight-thirty. If Harry remembered right she and the Gryffindors had Charms first thing today, not a class they shared with the Slytherins this year. Harry himself, like Draco, had a free period, so tracking Draco down shouldn’t be too difficult, especially with the Map.

The complicated part, as the Map promptly showed him, wouldn’t be finding Draco, but getting to him. Harry frowned. What was Draco doing skulking around some isolated upper-level corridor no one ever used? Surely his task couldn’t require—Harry glanced at a labeled room near the name Draco Malfoy—Hogwarts’s old chandlery.

For that matter, Harry hadn’t even known one of those existed in Hogwarts. Fascinating. Was there a point to making candles by hand, magically speaking? Hermione might know, and if she didn’t, she would find out within a few hours of being asked the question. Harry made a mental note to see if there was anything about the chandlery they could use. Later: right now his attention needed to stay on Draco.

At least Draco didn’t appear to be moving. Harry fixed the location in his mind—fourth room on the left, sixth-floor corridor below the bell tower—and shuffled through the rest of the Map, skimming the rest of Hogwarts for anything he needed to worry about.

He spotted Hermione, who’d apparently dragged Theo into a closet of all places for their clandestine conversation about occlumency. Pretty close to the classroom wing, too, which would result in some hilarious rumors if anyone happened to notice, not that he thought Hermione would be so careless as to forget wards.

A year ago he would’ve thought the same of Theo, but careful wasn’t a word one could really apply to Theo these days.

Harry kept looking: Ginny Weasley and Alex Rowle moved along a dungeon corridor side by side; the Hufflepuff quidditch team were just coming inside from an early practice; Professor Vector paced circles in her classroom; Veronica sat in the library with Hortense Wrengle; Melinda Bobbin and Collie Patron stood nearly on top of each other in a closet, presumably for very different reasons than Hermione and Theo. Interesting. He’d have to tell Pansy later, in case Bobbin and Patron going together—or, at least, snogging together—wasn’t common knowledge yet. She would love being the first one to know.

Pansy… Harry went back over the Map one last time. Just to check. She and Daphne and Blaise were still in the dining hall, along with Justin, who at this rate would be late for class if he didn’t leave. Harry stared at their names for a moment. Then, reassured, he stuffed the Map in his bag and stood.

Hogwarts was a drafty old place. Pockets of cold air littered its halls, rising from the ancient chill sunk too deep in its stone foundations for highest summer or strongest magic to root out, and it was not summer now. February reached its frigid fingers through the windowpanes even when the snow was kept out, and Harry, wandering into less-traveled areas the house-elves only spottily kept warm, was glad of his heavy wool school robe and his own knack for wandless warming charms. If he half-closed his eyes it almost felt like walking the halls of the Blacks’ home in Riasmoore.

As if the thought had summoned it, Harry felt a tug, deep inside where his magic lived. The family seat, reaching out for him over the miles, wrapping hungry fingers around his heart. Come home.

Harry opened his eyes. Pressed his hands together and cast the strongest warming charm he could. Power and heat bloomed between his palms, spread up his arms; he inhaled through his cupped hands, and the warm air filled his lungs, chasing out the chill winds of Riasmoore in winter. He was at Hogwarts. A student, still. He had things to do. He could not just go running whenever it called.

No warming charms at all could be detected in the corridor where he’d seen Draco on the Map earlier. Harry tucked his hands into the pockets of his heavy wool school robe. He’d have expected Draco to attempt some charms of his own, if the house-elves didn’t bother casting any up here—Malfoys were not known to tolerate physical discomfort well. But he felt nothing.

Fourth room on the right. Harry noticed no shimmer of wards on its door, either. He stared at the wood for a moment, debating. When Blaise locked a door to sulk on the other side he usually needed a moderately soft touch. A listener. Not platitudes, exactly, but sympathy. When Daphne locked doors she meant stay the fuck out and would come talk to you about it if she was ready, or not at all. Hermione didn’t lock herself in weird rooms to sulk in the first place: she had other, less dramatic ways of coping with a bad day.

Draco was none of them. Draco fell into sulks that lasted days, spiraling around a well of self-pity and paralyzing insecurity. Draco got stuck in his own doubts. You could wait him out, you could pat him on the back and make agreeing noises until he worked through it on his own, but Harry didn’t have time for either of those methods. Harry would just have to provoke him.

An aversion charm nipped at his fingers. Harry shook it off. Shoved the door open. “Really, Malfoy? An aversion charm? That wouldn’t have deterred me when I was twelve, let alone—er.”

“Get the fuck out,” said Draco hoarsely. He had turned away when he saw who it was, but not before Harry caught the gleam of tears on his cheeks.

Harry considered that for about half a second. Draco was worse off than he’d realized, but did that mean Harry needed to change his approach? “No.”

“Harry—”

“Do you want to be miserable? You’re sobbing in some drafty sixth-floor bolt-hole, and you thought that was a better idea than asking for help?”

“Help from you?” Draco whipped around; an ugly smile sat on his face. “I think you’ve helped enough, yeah? Where’s your help gotten Theo? What about Sirius?”

Harry froze over.

Just for a second. Just a half a heartbeat before he caught himself, let out a breath, pressed his lips together until the beginnings of frost on them melted back into meaningless water vapor.

Pride. He’d meant to needle Draco’s pride. He’d known—he hadn’t thought enough about it, but he’d known how Draco got when defensive, he’d known about Draco’s tendency to hit back and harder when he felt attacked. Draco lashing out like that meant it was working. This was Harry’s own plan. It was his own fault he’d underestimated Draco.

Knowing that did absolutely nothing to soften Draco’s blow.

“Okay,” Harry said, fighting for calm, do not escalate this, “I deserve that, but Draco, honestly—”

“Look, Harry, just—just go. Please.”

Harry could not remember ever hearing Draco beg before. He found he didn’t care for it now. “Not until you tell me what’s wrong.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I—just—can’t, okay, it’s—”

“An oath?”

“Wh—no, it—well—”

Draco cut off properly, and looked furious.

Got you. “So what’s stopping you then?”

“I can’t!”

“Can’t or won’t? Grow a spine, Draco, because at this rate you’re going to run yourself into the fucking ground before—”

“My mother,” said Draco, and then stopped again, except this time, instead of drawing tight with fury, his face sank into lines of misery.

Harry tried to muster up some guilt, and couldn’t. “Your mother. Voldemort’s threatening your mother if you can’t do this?”

“I—he—” Draco looked away and sucked in a breath, nostrils flaring. When he met Harry’s gaze again his grey eye glinted dangerously. “An oath, Harry. Give me an oath or I’m never talking to you about this again.”

The flat-out order made Harry bristle, but he supposed Draco deserved to ask. Besides which, Harry had just told Draco to grow a spine. He pulled his wand and made an oath to keep this secret.

Not on penalty of losing his magic, though. Draco wasn’t worth that. Draco seemed to know it, and accepted the terms of the oath as given.

By the time he was done explaining, Harry wanted to scream, or perhaps drop something out the window just to watch it shatter on the ground far below. “He’s told you to kill Dumbledore? Albus fucking Dumbledore, in his own Merlin-damned castle, during the school year? When the Dark Lord and all his hokey-pokey Death Eaters couldn’t manage?”

“I told you. It’s a test.”

“A stupid one!” Harry pressed his fingers to his temples. Of all the idiotic ideas.

“It’s also punishment for my father. And I think—Mother thinks—it’s a chance for me to… prove myself. Apparently he was fond of my grandfather. Abraxas. And… well… we’re known to be friendly, and Mother was born a Black.” Saying this, Draco’s eyes cut towards Harry, then darted away again.

It took Harry a second to put this together. “You think it has something to do with me.”

“Daphne’s family,” said Draco. “Then that shite with Pansy. Who knows what the fuck’s wrong with Theo. Yeah, I think it has something to do with you. I think Sirius’s blood got in the water and the fucking sharks are circling. See why I didn’t want you involved?”

“He’d still be focused on reeling in the littlest Malfoy even if I fucked off to bloody Australia. Don’t put this on me.”

Draco glared at him with a flash of temper gone almost as soon as it appeared.

“I’m going to help,” Harry said. “You can’t—Draco. You look like shite, your marks are slipping, last week I had to head off Flitwick wanting to send you to Madam Pomfrey—”

“What?”

“—and I’m not about to sit by when there’s something I can do!”

“I have a plan—”

“Let me guess, you’re stalling, and if you can’t figure out a way to do it covertly, you’ll just try to off him over the dinner table at the end-of-term feast? Trust the Dark Lord to get you out of Azkaban?”

Draco’s mouth tightened. “Wouldn’t you have done it? If it was Sirius on the line?”

Would he?

Harry hesitated a second too long; Draco saw it. “Oh, you selfish bastard,” said Draco wonderingly.

“I don’t know what I would have done.” Harry reminded himself to stick to the past tense: so far only Neville among the Vipers knew about Sirius. “But I do know I’m going to keep your sorry arse out of prison. Draco.” He gritted his teeth, made himself say it. “Please. Let me help.”

Seconds drew out in which they just looked at each other, green eyes and grey.

“Only since you asked so nicely,” said Draco with his haughtiest sneer.

The tension broke; Harry half-smiled. “Prat.”

“Pot, kettle.” Draco leaned against the rickety, forgotten table that took up most of this room. It creaked alarmingly. “All right, Black, let’s plan a murder.”

“May I suggest we do it somewhere else?” Harry said. “The Knights’ Room has better wards than I could put up in here on short notice.”

“I have somewhere better.”

Harry raised his eyebrows. The Knights’ Room was as close to a stronghold as you could get within Hogwarts by this point, barring some serious magic beyond the reach of most adults, let alone a gang of teenagers, no matter how competent those teenagers managed to be. The only realistic better option would be the Chamber, which was off-limits now, or—

Oh, that was clever. But he had to ask: “What about running into Potter’s defense club?”

“I’ve never seen them use it outside of their scheduled meetings, and we know when those are, thanks to ‘Mione and Neville. There’s another reason, though, not just security. I’ll show you.”

Harry and Draco made their way back to the stairs and then up another flight. Only one more floor lay above them, and up there, eight stories above the ground, the hallway was cramped and the rooms small and bare, none of it designed for much more than storage and, in a pinch, good lines of spellfire towards anyone approaching the castle from the east or northeast. Harry could only thank whoever built the Room of Requirement for sticking to the seventh floor instead, which, while cold and hollow in the manner of semi-abandoned places, had at least been built to prioritize comfort over defensive utility.

“Here,” said Draco, stopping at a blank stretch of wall that looked exactly like all the other blank stretches of wall but was secretly the entrance to the Room of Requirement. Harry stood back and let Draco pace in front of it to open the way: only Draco would know what to ask for from the Room.

But when the door appeared and Draco pulled it open, Harry saw not the luxuriously-appointed study or work space he’d have expected Draco to summon. Instead, wide-eyed, he stepped into a room both cavernous and claustrophobic. Its ceiling and its edges were lost to gloomy shadows that fought resolutely back against Draco’s conjured wandlight; towering heaps of… of stuff closed in around them on all sides, with a few paths between them twisting away out of sight.

“What is this place?” Harry breathed into the stale, musty silence.

“I think it might be the room’s basic configuration.” Draco gestured around. “I found an old vanishing cabinet down on the sixth floor last year. Didn’t think much of it at the time—it was broken—but then last summer I was in Borgin and Burkes, and they had one too, and I recognized the runes on it.”

“There’s a vanishing cabinet in the Dark Arts curio shop that’s a match for one in Hogwarts?”

“Yeah. I made sure Borgin wouldn’t sell it. If I can get the one here working—”

“You can let the Death Eaters in to cause some chaos, and pin the murder on them.”

Draco nodded. “Except it runs on seriously advanced enchantments. I lost a finger in it last fall. Had to regrow the bloody thing. It’s taken me forever and I’m still not even close to getting it working. I was keeping it down on the sixth floor, but then some random Ravenclaws looking for somewhere to shag almost walked in on me. So I brought it up here, asked the room for somewhere to hide it. And here we are.”

The urge to spend a week lost in here exploring all the accumulated lost, hidden, and forgotten objects was almost unbearable. Harry’s skin prickled. The longer they stood the more he grew aware of how much magic lay thick and heavy in here, all around them, layered over the heaps of junk, whispering from charms and enchantments and curses on things left here, emanating from the stone under their feet. But he hadn’t the time. “Okay. So you need help fixing the cabinet. Show it to me.”

Draco started forward like he knew exactly where he was going. No small feat, in this place. Harry stuck close to him and carefully kept track of the route they took. Time slipped and shuddered as they walked; Harry didn’t know how long they walked before Draco came to a halt again. His idle thought about getting lost in here for a week now felt uncomfortably, literally possible.

The cabinet, Harry told himself. Focus on the cabinet. Ancient rooms full of warped magic could be a problem for another day.

“Here it is.”

Even if Draco hadn’t said anything, Harry would have been able to guess, once they stopped, which of the random pieces of furniture and other assorted junk around them was the cabinet. Not because of being the only enchanted object near them: plenty of those almost hummed with power. Not even because of visibility: it was tucked unobtrusively away at the edge of an open area, half hidden behind an upended table and a vaguely menacing wardrobe. No, Harry would have known it in an instant because Draco’s entire being locked on to the cabinet as the sole focus of his attention, in a manner reminiscent of an animal going out at night and coming across a shape in the gloom that might be a predator but might also be a threateningly shaped boulder.

Harry went right up to it. What appeared at first to be elaborate decorative carvings winding around the cabinet’s doors, along the trim at its top and bottom, and in swirls across its sides was in fact the runic basis for a hideously complicated enchantment. Leaning closer, Harry saw the problem: fire or blunt trauma had scarred the outside of the cabinet in several places. One patch of runes had been almost entirely obliterated as if by the violent application of sandpaper. Paler, newer wood in the grooves of some of the tiny runes showed where Draco had been attempting to make repairs.

“Can it be safely touched?” he asked.

“The outside, yeah. While the doors are shut it’s inanimate.” Draco grimaced. “Unfortunately there’s more runes inside.”

“Whoever designed this must have been a sadist.”

“They’d have gotten along swimmingly with Theo,” said Draco acidly.

Harry chose not to pursue that. “This is… Merlin, Draco, this could eat your entire arm off if you’re trying to fix something inside and you carve a rune wrong.”

“I did mention the incident with the fingers.”

“You’ve made impressive progress.”

“But not enough.”

That much was grimly evident: Harry did not try to dispute it. Draco’s repairs were, as far as he could see with his first glance over the project, excellent. They were also at most a fifth of the necessary repairs on the outside.

“What do you need?” he said, straightening. “Time? Help?”

“Another set of hands wouldn’t hurt, but more than anything else… just…” Draco ran a hand through his hair and gripped a fistful of it tightly. He hadn’t looked away from the cabinet. His eyebrows drew together in a scowl that was half resentment, half fear. “I just don’t have the knowledge. This is so far above anything Hogwarts teaches… it’s not in the library, not even in the Restricted Section really, and no one can fucking help me. And don’t tell me you will. We both know you don’t have the time.”

No, Harry didn’t. His fingers drummed against his leg. “Assume I can find someone with the necessary skill and free time to help with the carving.”

“That would help, but again—resources. Knowledge. I don’t even have photographs of the one in Borgin and Burkes.”

Of course not. Burke wouldn’t have allowed that, from what Harry knew of the man. “You can’t just write home for them because… your mother’s post is being watched?”

“I don’t doubt she could work out some way to get a letter in or out… the problems are,” Draco started counting on his fingers, “getting my post out of Hogwarts securely, for one; second, my mother slipping any unwanted company long enough to go find and purchase the materials I’d need; and three, the biggest issue, getting anything back into Hogwarts, whether it’s sympathy oil to strengthen the connection between the cabinets or just a fucking book on the subject of vanishing spells. Oh, and we can’t forget access to books in the first place. Generally this is restricted to anyone in a transfiguration mastery program. Any other year Mother would’ve been able to get her hands on some, but given…”

“What if I could get in and out of the castle for you?” said Harry.

Draco, for the first time since they got to this little clearing in the junk fortress, looked away from the cabinet and at Harry. “How?”

“Black family thing. I have a… a portkey.” Harry’s hand half-rose to where the library portkey hung securely under his robe, and then fell again. He had not taken it off except to wash since he came back to the school. His complacency had nearly cost Sirius’s life once; Harry didn’t intend to make that mistake again. “It can get in and out of Hogwarts’s wards to my house in London. Any materials or messages can be delivered there. I can’t go out and get those things, myself, but I could find someone to do it, or we could ask your mother for help.”

“I don’t want my mother involved in this.”

“Draco. She’s already involved. She’s a fucking hostage, more or less. And who else are we going to trust with this?”

Draco turned away with a jerk. Paced several steps away, hands still tugging at his own hair, and then swiveled back around. “I—no, I can’t—I can’t ask her. She wouldn’t say no, not—and she can’t. It’s not safe.”

“She’s going to be worse off if you fail,” Harry pointed out.

“Oh, Merlin’s balls,” said Draco, hands clapped to his face in exaggerated shock, “thanks so much for reminding me, Harry, goodness, I don’t know if I’d have fucking thought of it myself otherwise. What ever would I do without—”

“Okay,” said Harry loudly. Draco shut up. His glare scalded, but that was all right. Harry much preferred Draco annoyed enough to hit back than staring in frozen-rabbit fear at an overly complicated piece of furniture. “I’m not trying to be an arse, but that’s what it is. You have to do something. With Sirius—gone—there’s no one I have on the outside I can trust who could safely hunt this shite down for you and who has a fraction of your mother’s network to draw on.”

Draco remained mulishly silent.

“You can either,” Harry held up his left hand, “just keep on like this, probably fail, and fuck yourself and your mother over in the process, or,” he held up the other hand, “you can take a risk. This is a war. Risks happen. People get hurt. All any of us can do is make the best of what we’ve got.”

What if it was Sirius’s life? his own mind asked. Even in Harry’s thoughts it was an ugly, taunting question. You couldn’t make yourself gamble with him, could you? You’re just going to pack him off to a nice safe padded room for the duration.

That was different, Harry told himself firmly. Sirius was injured. Magically, physically, and mentally too damaged to so much as defend himself. Let Narcissa Malfoy do her fucking job.

Draco looked at Harry’s empty hands, face wracked with indecision.

Harry stepped closer. “Come on, Malfoy. What’s it going to be?”