Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

Blaise turned to Ginny. "Is that where you'll be?"

"I'm riding separately, with Seamus. You can come with us instead, if you like…"

Blaise backed away hastily, shaking her head. "Er, no, that's all right….I'll just see you there, shall I?"

Ginny sighed.

Seamus was waiting for her by a black carriage with the Malfoy coat of arms etched in silver on the door. Narcissa had lent it to them for the journey, as neither Ron nor Seamus was considered strong enough to travel by Portkey.

Seamus was sketching something on a piece of paper, which he quickly stowed in a pocket as she approached. "Are we leaving?"

Ginny nodded and swung herself up into the carriage; Seamus followed, pulling the door shut behind him. For several long minutes they sat in silence in the dark blue plush interior, the creak and rock as the carriage navigated the snowy road the only sound. Finally, Seamus said, "I'm sorry."

Ginny looked at him. "What for?"

"Frightening Blaise." He watched the countryside lurch by the windows in a monochromatic patchwork of black, white and gray. "I don't think I've ever frightened anyone before."

"Get used to it," Ginny said wearily, and was immediately sorry, for Seamus winced as if she'd punched him. She leaned forward. "I'm sorry, too. Look, just remember that it wasn't you. It was someone else wearing your face. You didn't do anything wrong." How many times have I said this over the past three days? she thought. And it never seems to make any difference.

Seamus looked down at his hands. They were thin, flexible hands, tapering to square fingertips, freckled along the knuckles. "When the coffin was being lowered," he said, "I remembered her running through the house to get away from me. Falling down and getting up again. I remember laughing at her — "

"Seamus," Ginny pressed the backs of her hands against her eyes. "It wasn't you."

"But they're my memories," he said softly. She lowered her hands and looked at him; his eyes were dark in the dimness of the carriage, the color of forget-me-nots. "My dreams. How can I be sure he's left me entirely, Ginny? That there isn't some scrap of him left inside me, changing me, poisoning me?" His voice rose. "How can I be sure?"

"He may never leave you, entirely, Seamus," she said as gently as she could. "But I trust the goodness in you to overcome that. You should, too."

He took a long, shaky breath, then reached for her hand. He slipped her glove off, and wound their fingers together, her small fingers warming his cold ones. "I don't know what I'd do without you, Ginny," he said. "You're the only thing that still makes sense to me."

They drew up to the school just as the sun was setting: the early, light-blue sunset of deep winter. Ginny drew her yellow cloak tightly closed as she went up the front steps, Seamus beside her. The lamps were off in the turret that housed the Headmaster's office; Dumbledore had left the premises precipitously moments after their arrival, saying that he was going to fetch Narcissa to her dying son's bedside. She had appeared hours later, but Dumbledore had yet to return. In her more irrational moments Ginny wondered if he was avoiding her, knowing what she wanted to ask him.

Pleading exhaustion, Seamus kissed her goodbye in the entryway, and headed towards Gryffindor Tower. Ginny wasn't entirely sorry to see him go; being cheerful and optimistic for Seamus was something of a strain.

She found Blaise waiting at the foot of the steps that led to the infirmary.

She looked so woebegone that Ginny's heart skipped a beat. "Is everything all right?" she asked, thinking, Please let it not have happened while I was gone, when I wasn't here to sit with him, to tell him goodbye.

"I feel so rude barging in." Blaise confessed. "I suppose I really hadn't thought about it, but his mum's there, and Harry, and Hermione, and what right have I got to be here? I wasn't anyone to him, really…"

Her voice trailed off. She sat, a disconsolate figure in her neat black outfit, her hair spilling cherry-red out from under her hat. Ginny had always thought of Blaise as tall and imposing; now she realized the other girl was her own height. "Please come see him," Ginny said. "He cared for you, I know he did. He always said you were just like him."

"Well, that's encouraging, since he loves himself more than anything else,"

Blaise said, looking as if she were only half joking.

"It meant a lot to him that you understood him," Ginny said quietly. "God knows, I never have."

Blaise looked up, startled. Her eyes were the same unnerving glass-green as Harry's, but fringed with long copper lashes, where his were black.

Looking into them, Ginny thought, Draco must have felt he were staring into some strange combination of Harry's eyes and her own. "All right,"

Blaise said and, standing, took Ginny's wrist and held it tightly, which Ginny found startling though not unpleasant. They went up the stairs together and through the wide double doors into the infirmary.

A profound hush lay over the room, as if all sounds were muffled in the shadow of Death's wings. Madam Pomfrey moved silently in the low light, stopping occasionally to speak to Narcissa Malfoy, who had insisted upon being helpful in any way she could: bandaging Harry and Ron's wounds as well as Draco's, carrying bowls of antidote and plumping pillows. She sat now in a large armchair pulled up to the window by Draco's bed, her eyes half closed, chin in hand.

Hermione sat at the foot of the bed, a book open in her lap. Her hair was pulled up in a heavy silver clip, her still-damp blue winter cloak hung on a peg behind her. She had a shawl wrapped around her shoulders: Ginny recognized it as the one Draco had given her for Christmas. Hermione glanced up as the door shut behind Ginny and Blaise, and gestured them over with her quill, spilling a bit of ink on her sleeve.

Blaise hung back. Ginny had to half-drag her to the side of the bed. The last splashes of dying sunlight lent a faint color to Draco's white hands, folded across the snowy-white sheets and blankets drawn up to his chest.

He had been bathed and put into his own pajamas; clean, he looked deceptively healthier than when Ginny had seen him in Romania, a stark scarecrow latticed with cuts and filthy with blood and mud, his ragged clothes hanging on his bony frame. His hair was fresh now, curling in silver-white tendrils at his temples, his hands were wrapped in bandages, and his thin chest rose and fell, rose and fell, so slightly that the blankets barely moved.

Blaise's eyes welled up with tears, which spilled down her cheeks, spoiling her eye makeup. "Bother," she said, dropping Ginny's wrist to scrub fiercely at her face. "Sorry," she said, addressing Draco, a soft catch to her voice. "I know how you hate it when I cry."

"It's all right," said Harry. "He won't notice. He doesn't notice anything."

Blaise jumped and turned, startled. Ginny followed her gaze to where Harry huddled in an armchair at the head of the bed, so still that he might have been invisible. Ginny wondered if she would have noticed him if she hadn't already known he'd be there. He'd been there for three days, and looked it: his green eyes smeared with lampblack stains of weariness, his hair hanging in matted tangles. Madam Pomfrey and Narcissa had done what they could to patch him up — he hadn't objected as long as he hadn't been asked to move from the chair — and swathes of clean white bandage showed beneath the ragged tears in his filthy black clothes. His sword, the hilt still stained with blood, leaned against the back of his chair; Ginny didn't know where Terminus Est was, and hadn't dared ask.

"You don't know that, Harry," said Hermione, looking up from her book.