Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

"Or maybe we go to Snape," said Blaise firmly.

Ron stood up. "I'm heading to the infirmary," he said. "I need to tell Harry and Hermione what's going on."

Ginny squeezed his arm as she got to her feet. "Thanks, Ron. For coming with me."

"Of course." He still looked a little dazed.

Blaise, impatient, took hold of Ginny's sleeve and towed her out of the library and down the stairs to the dungeon. She kept a tight hold on Ginny's arm, and Ginny was grateful. She suspected that otherwise, she'd have fallen down the stairs and fetched up at Snape's feet, much to his astonishment.

He was, as always, in the Potions dungeon, standing at a long trestle table covered with jars and vials and philters spilling powders and sticky liquids and bits of dragon scale and newts' eyes and boggart toenails all over its surface. Snape hovered above a boiling cauldron, his greasy hair slicked with steam and sweat. His eyes were rimmed in bloody red. He looked up and scowled. "What the devil do you two want?"

Ginny opened her mouth, but could find no words. Exhaustion and dizziness had rendered her speechless. It was Blaise who plucked the bracelet out of her hand and held it out to the Potions professor.

"Ginny's found the missing part of the antidote, Professor Snape," she said imperiously.

Snape raised first one eyebrow, then another. "I see," he said. "Miss Weasley has had yet another fanciful notion regarding the antidote?

Might I remind you, Miss Weasley, of the wholly useless flower that you sent me last week? I believe you thought that was the antidote, too."

Ginny felt herself flush. "It was a flora fortis," she said. "A willpower plant."

"It was a common sowthistle," said Snape crossly, and gestured towards the windowsill, where a small box contained dirt-and a sparse scattering of yellow flowers. "I planted it. It may eventually make a pleasant window box, but an antidote ingredient, it was not."

Blaise looked as if she were about to say something, but Ginny interrupted her. "This is different," she said. "It has the blood of silver dragons in it."

Snape looked up, his reddened eyes suddenly cold. "That's impossible."

Ginny reached for the gold chain around her throat and held up the Time-Turner that dangled at the end of it. Even in the muddy gloom of the basement, it still caught the light. "Dumbledore gave me…" she began.

But Snape had already snatched the bracelet out of Blaise's grasp and was gripping it in shaking hands. "I saw Potter wearing this," he said. "Do you mean to tell me…?"

Ginny shook her head. "It's not the same bracelet Harry had. That one didn't have the dragon blood in it. It'd been taken out."

Slowly, Snape turned the dark, glassy red circlet over and over in his hands. He ran a long white finger over the runes that etched its surface: the one that looked like a wing and the one that looked like a rayed sun and the one that Ginny had thought looked like a heart.

She heard his breath catch.

"A broken heart spills all its secrets," he said, and pressed with the pad of his thumb against the heart rune.

There was a sound like a snapped bone. The bracelet came apart in two perfect half circles, and from the broken ends of it poured a thin silver liquid. It splashed down into the cauldron on the table in front of Snape.

The bubbling mixture inside the cauldron stopped bubbling, and turned a singing gold color.

Blaise gave a little gasp. "The antidote!" she said.

Blade clanged on blade. "I'll never not need you," said Harry, out of breath, his wrist aching.

"That's not true." Draco was making his way back down the stairs now, forcing Harry to retreat. "You needed me in the war, because I made you a better fighter. You needed me because you needed all the help you could get. But now's your chance to live a normal life, that's what you always wanted, isn't it? You want to tell me how a pureblooded, all-Slytherin, prone-to-assasination-attempts telepathically bonded stepbrother with a history of morally questionable behavior is going to help you do that?"

"It's really amazing," said Harry, "how much rot you can talk even when you're in the middle of doing something else."

"Thank you," said Draco, modestly, and forced Harry back another step.

"You're right," Harry said. "Maybe I don't need you the way I did before."

Draco took a breath, a curt intake as sharp as the sound of breaking frost.

"At least you're honest."

"But I don't see where it matters," said Harry. "Needing people because they can help you out in a war, well, help is a benefit of friendship, I suppose, but it isn't the reason for it. Need isn't the basis of friendship, or love, or-"

"Love," said Draco, almost contemptuously, "you do like to talk about it, don't you?"

Not really, Harry thought. "No," he said, "I just don't spend my life avoiding the topic, unlike some people."

Draco's sword made a sweeping sideways gesture that neatly cut away one of the buttons holding Harry's sweater cuffs closed. It clicked to the marble and rolled away underfoot. Cool air touched Harry's bare wrist.

"That's what girls do," Draco said, "talk on endlessly about love, as if they could pin it like a butterfly to a board. In the end, it doesn't matter, does it? It's not what you say, it's what you do."

"Then you do love," said Harry. "I've seen it over and over in everything you do. It's not that you can't love, it's that you're afraid to admit that you do."

Draco made an exasperated noise. "Potter-" he began, but his hand trembled, and the tip of his sword dropped, slicing a clean cut along Harry's chest.

Ginny felt her heart soar-then drop. She exchanged a long glance of mutual understanding and regret with Snape-a first for the both of them, certainly.

"It's not the antidote," she said to Blaise, as gently as she could, as if the other girl's heartache was the greatest at stake here. "The antidote has to brew for a thousand years."

If she'd expected Blaise to cry, it didn't happen. She just went very red, as if flushed with rage, and swallowed hard once. "Then all this was for nothing?"

"Not nothing," Ginny said. "It can brew for a thousand years…if I take it back into the past and leave it somewhere. Somewhere where it'll still be undisturbed a thousand years in the future."

"But you can't go back in the past again-" Blaise started, alarmed, but Ginny shot her such a furious look that she quailed.

"I just need to find somewhere I can leave the antidote where no one will find it-" Ginny began.

Blaise looked as if she were about to start in on Ginny again, but at that moment Snape exclaimed loudly. The runic band-the two shattered halves of it, anyway-was jerking in his hands. He set the pieces carefully down on the table. No sooner had he taken his hand back then they slid towards each other and joined, like two drops of water flowing into one.

"That's Harry's band," said Ginny, with some certainty, and picked it up.

It thrummed once under her fingers, as if alive, then went quiet.

She slipped it onto her wrist. "I need a vial of the antidote," she said to Snape.

He looked at her out of hooded dark eyes, and she suspected he knew exactly what it was that Blaise would have said if Ginny had allowed her to speak. But all he said was, "Indeed."

With a wave of his wand, he lowered the flame under the cauldron and went to fetch an empty vial. Ginny stared down at the pale gold liquid inside the cauldron. It was a almost exactly the color of the yellow cloak her mother had given her, that she'd worn that day Draco had almost kissed her by the lake. The backs of her eyes stung, and to her surprise, two tears slipped down her cheeks and spilled into the cauldron.