Кассандра Клэр - Draco Veritas

She jumped back, wiping hastily at her face. "Have I ruined it?" she demanded, staring at Snape in horror.

He merely looked at her, a peculiar expression on his face. "Not at all," he said, and handed her two vials. One was of red glass, stoppered with a yellowish stone, and the other was of clear glass, sealed with stones the color of wine. He measured the liquid out between them, sealed them, and handed them to Ginny with a brief set of instructions. She blinked and nodded, and then Blaise was tugging her arm again and they were back on the stairs, trudging upward and away from the dungeon with its steaming heat and smell of boiled leaves.

"I hate it down there," Blaise said. "It always reeks of cabbage. Where are we going, anyway?"

"Back to the library," said Ginny. "There's one last thing I want to look up."

Hermione looked up as the door of the infirmary swung open. It was Ron, looking more than a little dazed. He made his way across the room and sank heavily into the chair between her and Harry.

She set her book aside; it wasn't as if she'd been reading it, anyway. "Ron, are you all right?"

He glanced sideways at Harry before answering. "Is he asleep?"

Hermione hesitated, then nodded. "In a manner of speaking." Harry was curled silently in the chair, one smudged, pale cheek resting on his arm.

His eyes were shut but his eyelashes, fluttering fitfully, showed the restless movement underneath. Hermione wanted to reach out and squeeze his hand but restrained herself; she didn't want to do anything to jeopardize the delicate half-dream he was trapped in.

"That's probably good." Ron rubbed the back of his hand across tired eyes, then hunched forward to speak to Hermione under his breath.

"Ginny used Helga's Time-Turner."

"I know. She told me she was going to." Hermione fought to keep the hope out of her voice. "Did she…find anything?"

"She brought the runic band back with her. She's with Snape now, figuring it out."

The book slipped from Hermione's hands; Ron caught it deftly before it hit the floor and set it down at the foot of the bed. "Ron, do you think-is it possible-"

He caught her hand and held it. She wondered if he could feel the pulse banging in her wrist. "Hermione, I don't know. But what I do know is this-remember when I told you that I saw Draco dead and Harry crying over him?"

Hermione nodded.

"I was wrong. That wasn't what I saw at all. Hermione, I can't promise anything, but-"

Harry suddenly gasped, a sharp, stuttering gasp that cut Ron off in midsentence. They both looked over at him in astonishment, just in time to see a bright scarlet flower of blood bloom across his chest.

The fifth passage through time was even colder than she could have imagined. Ginny seemed to fall forever through Arctic space, her skin raked by icicles, her eyes, squeezed shut, burning and stinging against flung particles of glass-sharp ice.

The ground came up like an express train, slamming into her feet, and she swayed, falling forward with her arms curved protectively around the precious vials she carried. She lay still for a moment, weak as a kitten, too sick and dizzy even to open her eyes.

At last she sat up, gingerly, and opened her eyes. She was in the library, though the torches on the walls had burned out. It was nighttime, and the room was full of shadows. She got to her feet slowly, blinking to adjust her vision to the darkness. Her head felt as if someone were slicing at the inside of it with knives.

She heard a sound behind her and whirled. Light showed where the door of the library was swinging open. The tension went out of her shoulders.

"Ben," she said.

He came closer to her and she stifled a sound of surprise. He was still Ben, still tall and with the same broad shoulders, but his hair was white now and his face lined. He said, "I knew it was you."

She smiled a little. "How?"

"After the last time I saw you, I put Time Distortion Wards up around the rooms in the castle. I thought it would alert me if you ever came back."

His voice was different too, rougher, almost an old man's voice. "Did you succeed?"

"Yes," Ginny said, and held the two vials out to him. "These must rest undisturbed for a thousand years," she said. "You must take this one-" and she proffered the vial with the wine-colored stones- "and give it to the heir of Slytherin, whoever has succeeded Gareth, and tell him it must be passed down through the generations of his family. And this one-" she held out the one with the golden stones-"has to be hidden in the walls of Hogwarts, somewhere where I can find it again in a thousand years."

Ben took the vials in gnarled hands, and set the golden one down on top of a library table. "You're sure about all this?"

Ginny nodded. "I'm sure."

"There's a stone Gareth and I used to hide notes behind- let me see if it's still loose." He went over to the wall and began to work one of the stones free.

Ginny followed him. "Ben, can I ask you something?"

He nodded without looking up.

"All those years ago when you and Gareth came to see me at the Burrow," she said. "You gave me a yellow flower. A willpower flower. I was wondering…"

Ben was smiling. He stood up, and set the loose stone- it was about the size of two fists, square and uneven at the edges- on the sill of a window high in the wall. He said, "It was just a flower. It didn't make you strong, Ginny. That was all your own strength, all this time."

"Then why…?"

"Come back and see you at all? Let's just say a certain someone asked me to." He set the vial in the far recess of the hole in the wall, and picked the stone up again. The effort of bending and lifting was making him breathe heavily.

"Dumbledore?"

Ben chuckled, and stood back to admire his handiwork. The stone stuck a few inches out of the wall, so he tapped it with his right hand. The excess stone crumbled away into dust and it seemed to sit flush. "Five up from the floor, ten over from the wall," he said. "Can you remember that for the next thousand years?"

She nodded, and glanced around, steeling herself for the journey back to the present. "So there are students here now?"

He nodded. "I'm the Headmaster. It's good to be surrounded by people all the time. Less lonely."

"So you haven't…" she began, before she realized this was probably personal and none of her business, and shut her mouth.

He just looked at her- not like a little boy, the way he'd been when she first met him, or a boy just a little older than her, but like a kindly uncle.

"For some of us, there is only ever one person," he said, and touched her hair lightly with a gnarled hand. "I think you might be that way yourself."

"Er," said Ginny, who wasn't sure if she was, or if she wasn't.

"He is a lucky young man," said Ben, and took his hand back. "I won't see you again, will I?"

"I doubt it," Ginny said, thinking of the long cold journey between times that awaited her. "I wish I would- I wish you could live another thousand years," she added, impulsively, and smiled at him.

He didn't smile back, just hunched his shoulders inside his robes as if he were cold. She knew he was thinking about Gareth. "But I do not," he said.

The sudden, startling pain made Harry stumble, and he half-fell down the last step to the marble floor of the Manor entryway. When he looked down, he saw the bright blossom of blood that colored his white shirt, spreading like a stain. He touched it, wonderingly, and the blood came off, slicking his fingertips with scarlet.

It was the first time he'd ever felt pain in a dream, and he realized, looking at his own blood, that this vision was more than a dream, and the consequences carried by his actions here were very real. He looked up from his bloody hand at Draco, who stood frozen on the steps, ashen-faced. His voice was thin with horror. "Harry-"