Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

He felt the same shock now, as if Lucius had walked up and hit him in the face. The words Lucius had spoken seemed in fact to make no real kind of sense, as if he had spoken them in another language.

"What?" Harry said. He heard his own voice, clear and stiff, as if it were a strangerś. "What did you say?"

"I should think I was quite clear," said Lucius, who seemed almost manic with the pleasure of his own malice. "Draco is dying."

Harry looked quickly to Draco, but the other boy was as unmoving as he had been before Lucius had spoken, a still black silhouette against the silvery parapet wall. His chest rose and fell rapidly but other than that he was motionless.

"Dying of what?" Harry demanded in a half-whisper; he wanted to speak more loudly, but he could not quite seem to get enough air.

"Poison," Lucius said, as if this should be obvious. "What else?"

Tell him, Harry thought, hard, in Dracoś direction. Tell him it isn´t true.

Draco did not reply, but he moved at last, very slightly; he raised his chin and looked at his father. The gesture lifted his face out of shadow. "It was the arrow," he said to Lucius. His voice was calm and factual. "It was the arrow, wasn´t it? There was some kind of poison on the shaft."

"Aren´t you clever," Lucius said dryly; he continued to speak after that but Harry didn´t hear him. The sounds he made were drowned out by the roaring of the blood in Harryś ears; it sounded like thunder. As if to make up for this deafness, his vision leapt into a sudden painful clarity and he could see everything within his field of vision both perfectly and simultaneously. The shape of each irregular flagstone, the line of snowflakes melting along the parapet wall, the knifelike shadow Lucius cast on the ground.

He knew Lucius was not lying. Knew it from Lucius´ dry gleefulness, from the dull knowledge in Dracoś eyes, and even more than that he knew it from his own memories: Draco losing a Quidditch game he should not have lost, Draco stumbling over a practice fencing match, all his grace gone. Draco lounging against walls, leaning on bedposts while he talked, sprawling on the floor in front of fireplaces: Harry had put all this recent laziness down to half-insolent posturing, but it wasn´t that, was it. It was that otherwise he would not have been able to stand up.

"How long," Draco was saying, when Harryś hearing returned, "How long have I got, then?"

"A month," Lucius said. "Two weeks, maybe, before you can´t walk anymore."

A faint hard shudder passed over Draco: Harry saw his hands tighten at his sides and felt the shiver down in his own bones. Whatever had been blocking his throat dislodged itself and he spoke, "You poisoned him?" he whispered. "You — "

"I never said I was the one who poisoned him," Lucius said. "I am merely presenting the facts, and they are these: he has been poisoned. The poison is a rare and subtle one. It is nearly untraceable in the blood. It will not be a painful death. But neither will it be a particularly quick one."

"If he dies of this," Harry said in a flat icy tone, "I´ll kill you myself."

"Be quiet, you spluttering child," snapped Lucius. "You will do no such thing. I will be Memory Charming you both shortly. You will not recollect anything I have told you. When Draco dies, it will be assumed to be a natural illness."

"Then why?" Draco asked. He was still leaning against the wall. The moonlight silvered his eyes and made them opaque. "Why tell us at all? It isn´t like you to be sadistic with no larger purpose. If thereś really no cure…"

"I did not say," Lucius remarked, "that there was no cure."

The air whistled in Harryś lungs as he sucked in a breath. "Thereś a cure? Then what — "

"Harry," Draco said in the same toneless voice. "Stop."

Harry subsided reluctantly. A cool smile ghosted across Luciusńarrow face as he looked from Dracoś white face to Harryś, and back again.

Slowly, he flexed his fingers inside his gloves. He appeared to be doing complicated mental arithmetic — arithmetic that amused him greatly. "I think," he said, "that I´d like to talk to Harry, now. Alone."

"I´ll just step off this tower then, shall I?" Draco said with flat bitterness.

"Won´t matter much if I splatter myself all over the moat anyway. Just hastening the process."

"Your theatrics do not impress me," Lucius said. "I know you better than that. Malfoys do not tolerate suicides."

"No, but they seem to roll the red carpet out for murderers," said Harry in a savage sort of voice he barely recognized as his own. "Don´t they?"

"I do what I must," said Lucius, unfazed, and gestured Harry towards the tower door. "Now, if you will come with me…"

"I most certainly won´t," Harry snarled.

Lucius rolled his eyes. "If you´d rather I called upon my colleagues to drag you, be my guest," he said. "I can´t promise they´ll be too terribly gentle. You are not popular among my acquaintances, Harry Potter."

Harry opened his mouth to protest again, but Draco cut him off before he could speak. "Harry, he said. "Go."

Harry felt his mouth sag open. "But, I — "

Go! Draco said inside his head, so loudly that Harry nearly winced. He tried to reply in kind, but Draco had shut his mind down so completely that it was as if Harry were shouting into an empty and echoing cavern -

there was no response at all.

"Really," Draco said out loud. "I´d rather you went."

Luciusśmile was positively incandescent. He swept an arm towards the tower doorway: "After you, Mister Potter."

And Harry went, his feet dragging, feeling as if some part of himself — the sane, logical part, which expected the world and everything in it to make some sort of sense — had been severed from him and might never be recovered.

At the door of the tower he turned and look past Lucius, back at Draco.

Draco had finally moved away from the wall and was standing in the middle of the tower, in full moonlight, as bright as day. He seemed etched in light, as if all the angles and planes of him had been outlined in silver ink — cheekbones and chin, the lines of his narrow hands, the thin line of his mouth. Only his eyes, meeting Harryś across the space that separated them, looked black.

Later, when Harry, alone, tried to picture his friend, it was this image of Draco that would always come to his mind, even though he tried to replace it with happier ones: the cold white figure, straight and slender, outlined in moonlight against a frozen emptiness of stars.

The Ministry was, as Arthur had reported, in a shambles. Low-level officials scuttled here and there looking terrified, and the once-gracious looking marble entry hall was filled with frantic wizards and witches rushing about, registering complaints, reuniting with relatives scattered by Lucius´ Whirlwind Charm, and exchanging hurried anecdotes. "Oh, I was dropped right down into the middle of some lot of mad Muggles having some sort of game, very boring, no flying at all. Where did you end up?"

Lupin looked wryly at Sirius. "The Memory Charm Squad must be out in full force today," he observed.

Sirius nodded. "Typical Lucius, wanting to cause as much disorganization as possible…look, thereś young Percy Weasley over there."

Any hope they might have had that Percy would provide some assistance was dashed when they got within speaking distance of him, however.

Looking harried to the point of torment, his red hair sticking out in all directions and his normally immaculate robes crumpled, Percy greeted them with a distracted air of panic. "Terrible things are going on," he hissed in a half-whisper, having consented to be dragged into a stairwell for a brief chat. "My office has been transfigured into a broom closet!"