Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

"Lucius," he said. "You have brought me someone. A prisoner?"

Lucius cleared his throat. "I have brought you the boy," he said.

At that, the Dark Lord rose to his feet and turned; the girl in the cage raised herself up on her knees and stared. Lucius, calm and composed, was holding the arm of a tall boy with red hair, dressed in disheveled party clothes. The boy's face was very white.

"Lucius," whispered the girl inside the cage, and reached a hand through the bars. "Lucius, look at me."

Lucius ignored her, although the red-headed boy stared at her with wide eyes. Instead, he spoke to the boy, "Greet the Dark Lord," he said.

The red-headed boy was silent.

The Dark Lord had a small smile on his face. "And you are sure he is the one?"

"Lucius," wailed the girl inside the cage. "You promised."

Lucius did not appear to hear her; he chuckled low in his throat. "I am quite sure he is the one," he said.

The red-headed boy spoke. "I don't understand," he said. "The one what?

Why am I here?"

The Dark Lord looked at him, and a faint amused smile touched the edge of his inhuman mouth. "You really do not know? You cannot guess?"

The boy shook his head. "No."

"Well, then." The Dark Lord laid a hand on the boy's shoulder and the boy winced in pain. "Perhaps this is something we should discuss. Come over here with me to the table. Do you…play chess?"

She would always remember the light in the room that day: gray hospital light. Her father had carried her from Dumbledoreś office, although she could walk perfectly well, her mother hurrying behind. Madam Pomfrey had readied a bed for her; Ginny winced as her father set her down on it, not from any physical pain but out of guilt over what the blood and dirt all over her would do to the scrupulously white sheets and pillows. "I´m so sorry," she said to Madam Pomfrey, but her parents only hushed her and drew the curtains closed around her bed, urging her to rest.

But she could not rest. Her body would not allow it; it did not want to lie still. It was restless, as if it wanted to crawl away from her. Crawl back to Tom, perhaps. She did not know what he had taught her body to do during the long darknessness that she did not remember. When she stood, and went to the window, she found herself reaching to draw it up with her left hand. It took a moment of fumbling before she recollected herself: she was right-handed.

The window opened noiselessly onto a clear spring day: the front of the school was bathed in sunlight. The light stung Ginnyś eyes, but she kept them open. When she closed them, she saw him again. She had seen his face only briefly; before today, he had been a dream trapped in diary pages, an insubstantial phantom conjured out of her own loneliness and need. She had reached out for him then, but he had slipped away from her like water. But there in the Chamber, it was different. As the life pulsed out of her with every beat of her heart, he seemed to evolve in strength and substance, until at last she could see him whole: the black, tangled hair, the white face, the slightness of him, the tensile strength in the slender hands. The young-old eyes whose color she could no longer recall, but they had been clear and unshadowed. Eyes that opened onto a mind like a cauldron of snakes.

The sound of raised voices drifted up to her window, recollecting her to the present moment. Ginny looked down listlessly. A carriage had drawn up to the foot of the front steps: it was black, and the design upon the door was of a wand crossed with a sword. There was a word etched in gilt lettering underneath: she couldn´t read it. But it was not the carriage that caught her eye, nor the blond man who stood impatiently by it. She knew him. She knew the boy who stood at his side as well, hunched and miserable-looking despite the warm weather. The sunlight was bright on his pale hair. She knew him, and she hated him, but it wasn´t him she looked at either: it was the book his father held in his narrow-fingered hand. Black, tattered, shabby….

The carriage door opened. The blond man tucked the book under his arm as he gestured for his son to get in.

"No," Ginny whispered. "You can´t take it…"

That book was hers. Somewhere in its poisoned pages were her words, the dreams she had poured into it, the wishes and the nightmares. Who else could be said to have a claim upon it? Tom, but Tom was gone now. Harry perhaps, who had bought its destruction and her own salvation with blood and venomous death. But Harry would not have wanted it, and who else had a right? Not Lucius Malfoy, whom she loathed, nor his equally loathsome son. She saw him jerk hard on his sonś arm as he pushed him into the carriage and climbed in after. The boy winced; Ginny was glad.

"Home, Anton," the man said, his clipped tones clearly audible through the still air. "Now."

The carriage pulled away from the stairs. As it did, the sunlight struck it, and the gilt letters along the side flashed out like fire: MALFOY.

The top of the tower was smooth and slightly tilted, as if it had been sheared off at an angle by a pair of giant scissors. It was square, and surrounded by crenellated walls just high enough to lean against while sitting down.

Draco climbed atop the crenellated wall and looked around thoughtfully.

He was familiar enough with this tower from his childhood to know what he´d see: sheer walls falling away to the ground, gleaming dark silver in the twilight, the gardens below like dark smudges against snow, the distant road that led down to the lights of Malfoy Park. The sun was sinking far to the west, layering the sky with gradually deepening shades of scarlet: seashell, rose petals, blood. Under other circumstances he would have thought it was beautiful.

"Are you sure you should stand up there?" asked Harry, who was hovering back by the bolted door in the tower wall. "You could fall."

"I won´t fall," Draco said.

Harry muttered something under his breath. Draco turned around and looked down at him. Harry had his arms folded across his chest and was gazing up, his face a white smudge between the dark collar of the cloak he wore and his darker hair. The cold air had whipped bright color into his cheeks.

"I said I won´t fall," Draco said.

"I know," Harry said. "Just come down anyway."

Draco shrugged, and jumped down from the wall, landing lightly on the flagstones. The adamantine cuff around his wrist banged against his side as he leaped. Lucius had cuffed his left wrist and Harryś right before locking the tower door: they had discovered that, almost as effectively as an adamantine cell, this prevented them from doing any magic.

"I´m down now," Draco said, stating the obvious. "Feel better?"

"I´d feel better if you came over here and helped me try to open this door," Harry said.

Draco shook his head. "Don´t bother," he said. "You can´t force it."

Harry stopped tugging at the door and turned to look at him. There was a rebellious set to his chin. "Enchanted, is it?"

"Of course."

"And I don´t suppose you know how to get the locking spell off?"

"Itś not a locking spell exactly. The door is enchanted to open only from the inside. It can´t be opened from the outside. Not ever. And no, I don´t think itś a reversible spell."

"All spells are reversible," Harry said.

"Well, you´re welcome to knock yourself silly trying. I, for one, am going to sit here and try to think of a plan."

Draco sat down, his back against the stone parapet. A faint dizziness washed over him as he sat, and he closed his eyes, willing it to pass. Eyes shut, he sensed rather than saw Harry sit down beside him. He could feel Harryś proximity, as if his friendś physical presence stirred some psychic current between them. It helped somehow, and the dizziness vanished entirely.