Кассандра Клэр: Draco Veritas

“Those are our provisions! Leave them alone,” Harry said, kicking Draco’s hand away from the bag. “And what did you say to the carriage driver?”

“We’re going to Paris, Potter, not the Kalahari Desert. You can buy chocolate in Paris.”

“Fine, fine. But what did you say to the driver?”

Draco smiled more sweetly than the chocolate he’d liberated from the duffel bag. “I asked him to make a stop on the way to the coast.”

“A stop? Where?”

Draco bit into the candy bar. “You’ll see.”

It was afternoon by the time the carriage stopped with a jolt, shaking Harry awake. He yawned and turned toward the window.

A familiar scene met his eyes. The green lawns, the great gray staircase sloping up to the double oak front doors, the jumble of turrets and battlements rising high into the thin, clear mountain air. “Hogwarts?” he said incredulously. “Your stop was Hogwarts?”

“Yep,” said Draco, cheerfully. He had been lounging on his bench seat, reading through Lupin’s book of travel notes. Now he carefully tucked it back into the duffel bag and swung himself out of the carriage.

Harry followed him, looking around in amazement. “I don’t get it. Weren’t we just here? Are you nostalgic for school already? I thought that was supposed to take ten years at least.”

Draco, who was in the middle of asking the driver to wait for them, shot him an irritable look. “I have an errand here, okay? Hold on to your trousers, Potter.”

“My trousers aren’t going anywhere, Malfoy. But I feel compelled to point out that it’s summer holidays — no one’s going to be in the school, except maybe Dumbledore, and he won’t take kindly to us breaking in.”

“I asked him at the reception,” said Draco, heading for the stairs. “He gave me permission. Of course, you needn’t come with me if you don’t want to.”

Harry shrugged and followed him. “I suppose it’s too late to get expelled.”

“I love how you always look on the bright side.”

They had reached the top of the stairs; Harry was used to seeing them propped open to the sunset. It was odd to find them closed. He tried a knob, but it didn’t turn. “See? Locked,” he said. “I don’t think an alohomora is going to open this door, either.”

Draco shot him a long, dark look, then reached out and put his hand to the door. It slid open soundlessly. “I told you,” he said. “I have the Headmaster’s permission.”

Surprised past arguing, Harry followed Draco into the flagstone-floored entrance hall. The enormous hourglasses that normally kept track of House points stood empty. Draco passed them without a second glance and headed for the wide marble staircase that led upward. He was silent as he went, and Harry followed him silently, though the sense of being in the huge castle alone was unnerving. He noticed creaks in the floorboards he’d never heard before as they passed the statue of Lachlan the Lanky on the seventh floor, turned a corner, and found themselves in a long corridor that Harry didn’t recall. There was a single door along the west wall, and Draco went to it and threw it open. He stood in the doorway, staring into the room, as if he could go no farther.

Harry joined him in the doorway. The room they looked into was nearly bare, with a wall of unshaded windows. Dust motes danced in the air, gilded by afternoon light. The only item of furniture in it was a magnificent mirror on two clawed gold feet. The light struck the mirror at such an angle that the surface seemed to shimmer like water and the inscription over it was unreadable. Not that it mattered; Harry knew well enough what it said.

“I show you not your face,” he said, “but your heart’s desire.”

Draco said nothing. He was still staring at the mirror. A nervous pulse jumped in his throat.

“Is this what you came for?” Harry demanded. “The Mirror of Erised?”

“To look in it,” Draco said shortly. “Yes.”

Harry shook his head. “The Mirror isn’t a game,” he said. “It’s not necessarily pleasant to look at your heart’s desire, especially if it’s something you can’t ever really have.”

“And do you think my heart’s desire is something I can never really have?”

“I don’t know.” Harry thought of Lucius, and wished he hadn’t. “I don’t know what it is you really want.”

“Neither do I,” said Draco. He was leaning against the frame of the doorway, facing the room, but his gaze was elsewhere. “But I want to find out. In Slytherin’s castle he showed me a mirror of Judgement, that shows you what you’ve been, and what you might be. But I want to know who I am right now. I want to know if this past year has changed me.”

“You seem different to me,” Harry offered.

“Seem isn’t good enough,” said Draco. “Our heart’s desires don’t just tell us what we want, they tell us who we are.” He looked over at Harry then, grey eyes clear but unreachable. “You’ll wait for me here?”

Harry, feeling no need to stand in front of the Mirror himself, nodded once. “If that’s what you want.”

“It’s what I want,” said Draco, and went into the room, shutting the door behind him.

With the door closed, the room was enveloped in an intense quiet. The floor was layered with grey dust that showed no footprints. Draco wondered how long the Mirror had been here, though he suspected the manner of its conveyance from place to place was not the sort that left footprints behind.

It seemed to loom up in the center of the room, like an iceberg looming up out of frozen water. The windows shed light but not warmth; Draco shivered as he moved through a visible rain of dust motes towards the Mirror, kicking up grey puffs of more dust with every step. Dust to dust, he thought as he reached the Mirror. Its smooth reflective front was unsmirched by any grime. Standing at an angle from which the Mirror did not reflect himself, Draco saw that it gave back simply a reflection of the empty room, a clear and perfect likeness down to each crack in the floorboards.

He moved to strand in front of it and dropped his gaze immediately, his heart pounding. He wanted to look, and not to look; for it all to be over, and for him never to have had this thought, which had nagged at him subtly until he mentioned it to Dumbledore. Who am I? What am I, really?

Perhaps he had been wrong, perhaps desire was not the way to know himself as the Oracle instructed, perhaps it would only leave him chasing impossible dreams.

The Mirror is not a game, Harry had said, but then he had withstood looking it it, not once but several times. It was because of Harry that he knew that desire changed with the desirer, that one might outgrow one’s yearnings and put them away, as one put away childish things. For now we see as through a glass, darkly; then we will see face to face. There was nothing to be afraid of here, he told himself; after all, the truth about himself would still be the truth whether he acknowledged it or not. And surely it was better to know the truth than not know it? And lastly, he told himself sternly, he was a Malfoy, and Malfoys were not afraid.

He raised his head and looked into the Mirror, quickly, before he could stop himself. For a moment his vision blurred, then it resolved, and he saw what was reflected in the silvered surface of the Mirror: saw his own pale and startled face, oddly vulnerable, and the white line of the scar under his eye, bright as silver wire. He stared at the reflection for a long time, not moving, until he realized that his face felt weirdly, peculiarly cold; and when he raised his hand to touch the back of it to his cheek, it came away wet, and salt-tasting as the sea.