It Came Out of the Wardrobe

Dracina Malfoy did not come back to lessons on Friday, or on Monday, or on Tuesday or Wednesday either.

Harry tried not to notice.

It was surprisingly hard work. He'd come into the Great Hall for breakfast and his eyes would go to the Slytherin table before he could stop them, and find Pansy and Daphne and a gap, and come back. He'd go past the hospital wing on the way to Charms, which wasn't on the way to Charms at all if you were being strict about it, and slow down at the doors, and walk on. On Saturday afternoon he got as far as putting his hand on the handle. He stood there with it in his hand for nearly a minute, listening, and heard her voice from inside, high and carrying, complaining to Madam Pomfrey that the bandage was too tight and the soup was cold and the light was in her eyes, and he thought of her screaming what do you THINK I mean at him with the lamp shaking, and he let go of the handle and went to the library instead.

He didn't know what he'd have said. Sorry was the obvious thing, and he was sorry, he'd been sorry since he'd walked out of the ward with Madam Pomfrey's hand in his back; he was sorry he'd made her cry, and sorry he'd said Hagrid first, and sorry he hadn't asked about her arm. But he wasn't sorry for the rest of it. He'd meant the rest of it. And he had a feeling that if he went in there and said sorry for half, she'd hear it as sorry for all of it, and if he said sorry for none of it she'd start screaming again, and either way he'd come out knowing less than he went in.

'You're doing it again,' said Ron, on Tuesday night, in the common room.

'Doing what?'

'Staring at the fire like it owes you money.' Ron put his Charms book down. 'Is it Malfoy?'

'No.'

'It's Malfoy.' Ron sighed. It wasn't one of his big loud sighs. It was a small one, for Harry. 'Look. Mate. I'm not going to tell you what to think about her. I've given up. But you didn't do anything wrong. You caught her when she fell and then you went and told her she'd been out of order, which she had. That's not a crime. If she wants to lie in there for a week sulking about it, that's her lookout.'

'She's not sulking. Her arm...'

'Madam Pomfrey grew every bone in your arm back in one night.' Ron picked his book up again. 'Her arm's fine. She's waiting for you to go up there. That's what she's doing.'

Harry stared at him.

'How d'you know that?'

'Because I've got five brothers and a sister,' said Ron, 'and I've watched Ginny do it to Mum since she could walk.' He turned a page. 'Don't go, by the way. Not tonight. Let her come out on her own. If you go up there now she'll know she can do it again.'

Harry didn't go. He wasn't sure if it was because Ron was right or because he was a coward. He lay awake for a while that night, wondering which, and couldn't decide.

*

She came back on Thursday, late in the morning, when the Slytherins and Gryffindors were halfway through double Potions.

She didn't come in. She arrived. The dungeon door swung back and there she stood in the gap, framed by the torchlight in the corridor, with her right arm bandaged now only from wrist to elbow and done up in a black silk sling that had certainly not come from Madam Pomfrey, and her hair brushed until it shone and plaited round her head in a crown, and her chin up, and her pale face arranged into an expression of brave suffering nobly borne. She paused there, on the threshold, for a good two seconds longer than she needed to. Then she came down the steps into the room one at a time, slowly, as if every step cost her, and the whole Slytherin side of the dungeon turned round to watch her do it.

She's loving this, Harry thought. She looked like the heroine of one of Aunt Petunia's afternoon films, the ones where somebody was always coming down a staircase in a ballgown after being wronged.

'Dracina!' Pansy Parkinson was half off her stool. 'Oh, your poor arm, is it awful? Does it still hurt?'

'Oh yes. Thankfully I had a knight in shining armour to save me.'

She said it to Pansy. She said it, Harry noticed, at a volume that would have carried to the back of the Great Hall, and on knight her eyes went, for one flick, to the Gryffindor side of the room and back.

Pansy sighed.

It was an odd sigh. It wasn't a swooning sort of sigh. It was a long, weary, put-upon breath out through the nose, with a bit of a droop at the end, and Harry had heard it before, quite recently; he'd been hearing it all week. He glanced at Ron. Ron was looking at Pansy with the expression of a man who has just heard his own voice come out of somebody else's mouth.

Harry had no idea why that should be. He went back to his daisy roots.

'Sit down, sit down, Miss Malfoy,' said Professor Snape, without looking up from the register, in the voice of a man pouring a cup of tea. 'Take your time.'

Harry and Ron looked at each other across the table in disgust. If either of them had strolled in an hour late, there'd have been no take your time about it; there'd have been detentions until Christmas. But Malfoy had always been able to get away with anything in Snape's dungeon. Snape was Head of Slytherin, and he had never once pretended to be fair about it.

They were making a Shrinking Solution. Malfoy looked round the room, at the bench by Pansy where her stool was waiting for her, and walked straight past it. She set her cauldron down, one-handed, with a great deal of awkward clanking, on the end of Harry and Ron's table, so that the three of them were sharing a board, and arranged herself on the stool beside Harry, close enough that her sling brushed his elbow.

'Don't mind me,' she said.

Ron minded. Ron's face said so.

'Professor?' Malfoy's good hand went up. 'Professor, I'm terribly sorry, I don't think I can manage these daisy roots with only one hand. Might somebody...' She let it trail off, and looked up at Snape with her eyes very wide and her lashes going, and then let her gaze slide, very slowly and with great meaning, sideways, until it arrived at Harry.

Snape looked at her for a moment over the top of the register. Something went across his sallow face that might have been distaste. He followed her look to Harry, and the distaste deepened.

'Weasley,' he said, turning a page. 'Miss Malfoy's roots.'

Ron went the colour of a brick. Harry caught his eye and pulled a face at him, a quick, sympathetic, I know, mate, face, and Ron's ears went down a shade. Dracina looked disappointed.

'Your arm's fine,' Ron muttered across the table. 'There's nothing wrong with it.'

Malfoy gave him a small, cool smile.

'You heard the Professor, Weasley. Roots. Chop chop.'

Ron grabbed his knife and dragged her roots across the board and went at them as if they'd insulted his mother, so that they came out in lumps and slivers and one great chunk that hadn't been cut at all.

'Professor,' Malfoy called, in a voice of gentle distress, 'Weasley's massacring my roots, sir.'

Harry put his knife down.

He'd decided on the walk down to the dungeons, before she'd even come in, that whatever happened in this lesson he was going to be the better man about it. He'd thought about it all week, in the library and in bed and outside the hospital wing with his hand on the door. He'd made her cry. Whatever else she'd done, he'd made her cry, and he'd done it on the first day back to a girl with her arm cut open, and the least he could do was not make it worse. So he'd be decent. He'd be patient. He'd be the sort of person who could sit next to Dracina Malfoy for two hours and not rise to a single thing.

He hadn't thought about Ron.

'Here,' he said, and reached across, and took the board from in front of Ron, and slid it over to his own place. 'I'll do them. You do yours.'

'Harry, you don't have to...'

'I know.' He picked up the knife. 'Go on.'

Ron looked at him for a second as though he was about to argue, and then didn't, and went back to his own cauldron with his jaw tight.

Malfoy had gone very still beside him.

Harry didn't look at her. He just started cutting. He did the roots properly, the way the board said, in neat equal rounds the thickness of a Sickle, and swept them into her cauldron, and then went back to his own, and he heard her draw breath and let it go, and after a moment she said, in quite a different voice, 'Thank you.'

He grunted.

'They need to go in before the fig,' she said. 'Not after. Everybody does it after because that's what it says in the book, but the book's wrong; it was wrong last year as well. If you put the roots in first the fig skins go clear instead of grey.'

He looked at the board. Then at her. She had her chin up and was looking at her cauldron, not at him.

'Is that true?'

'Obviously it's true. Do you think I'd say it if it weren't true?' Her nose went up another half an inch. 'Honestly, Potter, I'm not surprised your potions always look like something Crabbe trod in. It's a wonder you haven't poisoned yourself. Roots, then fig.'

He tried it. The fig skins went clear.

It went on like that. She'd say something, and it would come out of her mouth with its nose in the air and a sneer at the end of it and an insult tucked in somewhere, anybody with half a brain, even Longbottom knows that, and he'd want to snap back, and then he'd try it, and it would work. Every single time. She knew things about potions that weren't in the book and weren't on the board, little turns and tricks, like somebody who'd been taught at home by somebody who knew. And every single one of them came wrapped in something nasty, like a sweet in a wasps' nest, so that he could never quite take it without getting stung.

It was the most confusing hour of Harry's life, and that included the hospital wing.

'Weasley,' Malfoy said, about twenty minutes in, without looking up. 'My caterpillars.'

Ron's hand tightened on his knife.

'I've got them,' said Harry, and reached over, and took her caterpillars before Ron could move, and started slicing them.

'And the leech-.'

'Got it.'

'And the-.'

'I've got it, Malfoy.'

He was doing two potions at once now, his own and hers, and it was taking every bit of attention he had. There was the stirring, and the counting, and the heat under two cauldrons to keep an eye on, and the caterpillars, which were slippery, and the leech juice, which had to go in by the drop. He was vaguely aware that Malfoy had started talking. She was telling him something about the summer, about Mother's roses at the Manor and a peacock that had got into the orangery, and something her cousin had said at dinner, and she seemed to want him to answer. He said mm. He nodded. He said yeah at one point that was probably wrong. He was counting drops.

'You're not listening.'

'I'm counting.'

'You haven't heard a single thing I've said. I've been talking to you for ten minutes.'

'I'm doing your potion, Dracina.' He hadn't meant to snap. It came out anyway, low and hot, and once it was out the rest came behind it. 'I'm doing your potion because your arm's so terrible you can't hold a knife, apparently, and I'm doing it so you'll stop ordering Ron about like he's one of your house-elves, and I can't do both potions and hear about the peacock. All right? I'm sorry. But I'm not doing it again. I've had it.'

'Had what?'

'Had it with how you treat my friends.' He put the leech juice down. 'All of it. Ron. Hermione. Hagrid. Neville, even, you laugh at Neville every time he walks into a room. You can't do that and then sit next to me and tell me about your mum's roses like nothing's happened. We can't be friends if you keep slagging off my friends. We just can't. Do you even know how cruel you're being? Do you even notice?'

Her face had gone white, and then pink, and then a dark, mottled red right up into the crown of plaits.

'I'm cruel? I'm cruel? You come into the hospital wing in the middle of the night and you sit down and you...'

'That's not the...'

'...you lecture me about your gamekeeper with my arm in ribbons, and I'm...'

'You called him a savage, Dracina!'

'He is a savage! He set a wild animal on me!'

'He didn't set it on you, you walked up to it and-'

'...and you let him carry me off like a...'

Between them, unnoticed, both cauldrons had begun to boil.

They had been simmering quite nicely until a moment ago. Now the one on Harry's left gave a great wet glop, and the one on Malfoy's right answered it, and then both of them were going at once, rising, heaving, bright acid green, foaming up towards the rims as though they were angry too, and the fumes off them were coming up between Harry and Malfoy in a hot, stinking, sulphurous cloud that neither of them seemed to have noticed, because they were too busy shouting at each other through it.

'...never once asked how I...'

'...every single time...'

The green foam reached the lip of Harry's cauldron and hung there, trembling.

A wand came between them. It came from above and behind, quite slowly, and tapped the rim of Harry's cauldron, once, and then the rim of Malfoy's, once, and both potions sank back down at the same instant into a sulky simmer, as if somebody had sat on them.

'That,' said Professor Snape softly, 'will do.'

The whole dungeon had gone silent. Harry hadn't noticed that either. Every head in the room was turned towards their table, and every face had on it the expression of somebody watching two people walk into the same lamppost.

Snape stood over them, tall and black, with his wand still lowered between the two cauldrons like a barrier. He looked at Malfoy. He looked at Harry. He looked, for a long, strange moment, at the two of them together, the boy with the black hair and the girl with the red face, and something happened behind his eyes that Harry had never seen there before and couldn't put a name to. It wasn't anger. It was as if he'd been shown a picture he'd once owned and lost.

'Ten points from Gryffindor,' he said, 'for the noise. And ten from Slytherin,' and there was a gasp from the Slytherin benches that he ignored, 'for the same.'

Then he bent, a little, so that his voice wouldn't carry beyond the two of them.

'A word of advice,' he said. 'Since neither of you appears to have anyone else to give you one. Friendships in this school have ended over less. Over a single word, said once, in temper, in front of witnesses, that could not afterwards be taken back. However sorry the one who said it might be. However long they might go on being sorry.' He straightened. His face had closed again, like a door. 'Bear it in mind. Or don't, and find out for yourselves. It is all the same to me.'

He swept away up the room.

Harry stared after him. He hadn't understood a word of it. He looked at Malfoy to see if she had, and she was staring after Snape too, with her mouth slightly open and her colour going down, and when she turned back to Harry there was something in her face that hadn't been there a moment before. Something frightened.

'Potter,' she said.

'What?'

She looked at her cauldron. She looked at her bandaged arm in its silk sling. She looked, very briefly, at Ron, who was pretending to be absorbed in his caterpillars and was listening so hard his ears had gone red again.

'I'm sorry,' she said.

She said it quietly. She said it to the potion. She said it in a voice that had nothing whatever in it of the dungeon door or the black silk sling or knight in shining armour; it was the voice from a hospital bed in June, small and stiff and costing her something, and Harry heard it cost her.

'I'm sorry,' she said again, 'for what I said about your... about Hagrid. And for shouting at you. In the wing.' She took a breath. 'And I've dropped it. All of it. The bird and the... and him. I was going to write to Father. I had written to Father, if you must know, I sat up all night, it was four pages. And then I didn't send it. I'm not going to. I've decided.' Her chin came up again, but only a little. 'So you needn't look at me like that any more. That's all.'

Harry didn't know what his face was doing. He found it was smiling.

It was a real smile, a big one, and it came up out of the middle of him without asking, the way the laugh had come up on Buckbeak over the lake. He'd spent a week wondering whether he'd ruined everything. He'd stood outside a door with his hand on the handle. And here she was, sitting next to him in a dungeon, saying sorry and I've decided, and meaning both, he was sure she meant both, and he thought, with a lift in his chest that surprised him with how high it went: maybe I am getting a kinder Dracina this year. Maybe I am.

'Thanks,' he said. 'That's... thanks, Dracina. Really.'

She went pink. She looked at her cauldron and stirred it, very busily, with her good hand, the wrong way.

'Anti-clockwise,' said Harry.

'I know that.'

Two tables away, Pansy Parkinson had gone the colour of the dungeon wall.She looked down at her potion and stirred it, very carefully, and said nothing at all.

A few cauldrons along, Neville was in difficulties.

Neville was always in difficulties in Potions. It was the lesson he was worst at by a mile, and his terror of Snape, who knew it, turned every mistake he made into three more. His Shrinking Solution was meant to be a clear, sharp, poisonous-looking green. It was not green.

'Orange,' said Professor Snape, who had arrived beside him as silently as fog. He dipped the ladle in and lifted it high and let the stuff pour back into the cauldron in a long, slow, carroty stream, so that the whole room could see it. 'Orange, Longbottom. Remarkable. I wonder, is there anything at all inside that head of yours, or is it simply very well sealed? One rat spleen, I said. I said it twice. One. A dash of leech juice, I said, not a flood. Which part of dash was beyond you?'

Neville had gone pink to the roots of his hair and his lip was going. He looked about four seconds away from crying in front of everybody.

'Please, Professor,' said Hermione quickly, 'if I could just show him where it went wrong, I'm sure we could...'

'I don't recall,' said Snape, without turning round, 'inviting a performance, Miss Granger.'

Hermione went as pink as Neville.

'At the end of the lesson, Longbottom,' Snape went on pleasantly, 'we shall give a little of this to your toad and see what becomes of him. That may concentrate your mind.'

He drifted on. Neville looked after him with his mouth open and his whole face sick.

'Hermione,' he whispered. 'Please.'

'Here, Harry.' Seamus Finnigan had leaned across from the next table, reaching for Harry's brass scales. 'Did you see the Prophet this morning? They're saying Sirius Black's been sighted.'

'Where?' said Harry and Ron together.

Beside him, Malfoy's head came up.

She didn't say anything. She didn't move. But Harry, who'd sat next to her for an hour by now, felt her go still at his elbow, the way Hedwig went still on the wardrobe when she'd heard a mouse.

'Not far off,' said Seamus, who seemed to be enjoying himself. 'A Muggle saw him. Some woman, out walking her dog. She didn't know what she was looking at, of course, the Muggles think he's just some bloke who's broken out of a Muggle prison. So she rang that number they've been putting on the telly. And by the time the Ministry got there he'd gone. Not a trace.'

'Not far off...' Ron said slowly, and looked at Harry, hard.

Then he looked past Harry, and found Malfoy watching, with her pale eyes fixed and bright.

'What?' said Ron. 'Want something else peeled, do you?'

But Malfoy wasn't looking at Ron. She was looking at Harry, and her eyes were shining.

Harry would have called it mischief, if he'd had to call it anything. It looked like the glint she got when she was about to say something clever and cutting, and he braced for it. He wasn't to know that it wasn't mischief at all. It was something closer to the look on Lavender Brown's face when Gilderoy Lockhart came into a room, if Lavender Brown had been brought up in a house with a tapestry of Saint George in the east drawing room and an armoury in the cellar. Dracina Malfoy was looking at Harry Potter and seeing, quite clearly, as clearly as she saw her own cauldron, a black-haired boy standing in a dark place over the body of a dead murderer, with a sword in his hand.

She leaned in, over the board.

'Planning to go after him on your own, Potter?' she said softly.

It sounded like a sneer. It was meant to. Underneath it, where only she could hear, it was a hope.

'That's right,' said Harry, carelessly.

He didn't know why he said it. He knew perfectly well he wasn't planning anything of the kind. But there was a girl leaning in at him with her eyes shining and the light from the fire on her hair, and something in him that hadn't been there a year ago sat up and squared its shoulders and wanted, very much, to sound like somebody who might.

Malfoy smiled. It was a slow smile, and thin, and to Harry it looked exactly like the one she wore when she'd caught somebody out. To Malfoy it felt like being handed a present.

'Well, I certainly wouldn't hang about,' she said, very low. 'If it were me. I wouldn't be tucked up in the castle doing my homework like a good little boy. I'd have gone already. I'd be out there.'

'Out where?' said Ron sharply. 'What are you on about, Malfoy?'

Ron knew exactly what she was on about. Or near enough. He'd watched her do it for two years, the poke and the prod and the little twist at the end, and he could see her doing it now, leaning across the board, blowing on something in Harry that Ron would much rather nobody blew on at all.

'You don't know, Potter?' Malfoy breathed. Her eyes had gone somewhere else entirely, somewhere with candles in it, and a great hall, and a man in chains on his knees, and Harry Potter laying a sword at her feet and saying for your honour, my lady. She wanted it so badly it showed. 'Really?'

'Know what?'

'You've already slain a Basilisk, I saw it. A murderer is nothing to you. Especially after what he did.'

Harry's chest puffed. He couldn't stop it. It simply went, an inch, all on its own, and he felt his ears go warm.

Ron sighed.

Two tables away, at exactly the same moment, as though they'd been rehearsing, Pansy Parkinson sighed too: the same long, weary, nasal breath out, the same droop at the end. Ron and Pansy looked up and caught each other doing it, and both looked hastily away, and went on looking away with great determination.

'And if I were you,' Malfoy went on, quite softly, with her chin on her good hand, 'I'd want him to pay. I'd go and find him. Myself.'

To Harry it sounded haughty and strange. To Malfoy it sounded like the most romantic sentence she'd ever said out loud.

'Pay for what?' said Harry, and there was an edge on it now. 'What are you-'

'Your ingredients should all be in by now,' said Professor Snape, from the front, in a voice that cut across the whole dungeon. 'This potion must be left to stand before it is fit to drink. Clear your places while it settles, and then we shall see what Longbottom has made for us...'

Crabbe and Goyle laughed out loud at Neville, who was stirring his cauldron with the desperate speed of a man trying to bail out a boat. Hermione was beside him, murmuring out of the side of her mouth without moving her lips, so that Snape wouldn't see.

Harry and Ron put away the things they hadn't used and went to wash their hands and ladles at the stone sink in the corner, where water ran in a freezing stream from a gargoyle's open mouth.

'What did she mean?' Harry said, under the noise of the water. His hands had gone numb. 'Why would I want Black to pay? He's never done anything to me. Not yet.'

Ron scrubbed his ladle for a while before he answered.

'She's uh... She just wants you to impress her, mate.'

'Why would she want me to impress her?'

'Mate, at this point you know what she's like, right?'

'She's mental. I know that,' said Harry drily.

'Yeah...' said Ron.

He left it there. He turned the gargoyle off with his elbow and dried his hands on his robes and didn't say anything else, and Harry thought it was because there wasn't anything else to say. It wasn't. Ron had a great deal else he could have said. He'd watched Dracina Malfoy throw her broom in front of a Bludger, and sob her heart out in McGonagall's office. He'd heard what she'd just said across that board, and what she'd meant by it, and mental didn't begin to cover it. Mental was the bit you could see.

He'd keep an eye on her. A closer eye than before. Somebody had to.

The lesson was nearly over. Professor Snape went down the room to where Neville was crouched behind his cauldron as if it might go off.

'Gather round, all of you,' said Snape, and his black eyes were gleaming, 'and watch what becomes of Longbottom's toad. If, by some miracle, he has made the potion correctly, the animal will shrink to a tadpole. If, as seems a great deal more likely, he has not... we shall have rather less toad.'

The Gryffindors gathered with their hearts in their mouths. The Slytherins gathered with relish.

Snape picked up Trevor in his left hand. He dipped a little spoon into Neville's potion, which had somehow, since he'd last looked at it, turned a sharp clear green, and tipped a few drops down the toad's throat.

There was a silence, in which Trevor swallowed.

Then there was a small pop, and in Snape's palm, where the toad had been, a fat tadpole lay wriggling.

The Gryffindors cheered. Snape, looking as though he had bitten into something sour, took a little bottle from the pocket of his robes, poured a drop of something onto the tadpole, and there was Trevor again, full-sized, blinking and indignant.

'Five points from Gryffindor,' said Snape, and every smile in the room went out. 'You were told not to help him, Miss Granger. You may all go.'

*

Harry, Ron and Hermione went up the dungeon steps towards the Entrance Hall. Harry was still turning over what Malfoy had said. Ron was boiling about Snape.

'Five points because the potion worked! You should've lied, Hermione! You should've said he did it all on his own!'

Hermione didn't answer.

Ron looked round.

'Where's she gone?'

Harry turned too. They had reached the top of the steps, and the rest of the class was streaming past them into the Hall for lunch.

'She was right behind us,' said Ron, frowning.

Malfoy came up the steps between Crabbe and Goyle. She caught Harry's eye as she passed, and smirked at him, a small, private, sideways smirk that Harry was fairly sure was meant to be friendly and that came out looking like she'd just poisoned his pumpkin juice, and then her good hand went up to touch the crown of plaits on her head, the way girls did without thinking, and stopped.

She touched her hair again. She felt all round it, front and back, faster and faster. Her face changed.

'Where is it?'

'Where's what?' said Goyle.

'My brooch. My clasp, the silver one, the serpent, with the emeralds, it was here.' She was patting at her plaits with her good hand, pulling at them. 'It was in my hair. It was in my hair, I put it in this morning, I put it in in the wing before I came down...'

'You weren't wearing it,' said Goyle, puzzled.

'Of course I was wearing it!'

'You weren't. Not all lesson. I was looking at the back of your head the whole time.'

'Why were you looking at the back of my...' She stopped, because it didn't matter. 'I put it in. I know I put it in. I always put it in. It was Grandmother's, it was Grandmother Black's, it's worth more than your house, Goyle...' Her voice was climbing. 'It's in the dungeon. It's fallen out. It's on the floor in that stinking dungeon and Longbottom's going to tread on it...'

She turned and went back down the steps at a run, with the sling bouncing and her plaits coming loose, shrieking at Crabbe and Goyle to come and look, and they lumbered after her.

'Funny,' said Ron, watching her go. 'Can't happen to a nicer person.'

'There she is,' said Harry.

Hermione was coming up the steps from the dungeons. She was slightly out of breath and slightly pink, and she had her bag clutched against her with one hand, and with the other she seemed to be tucking something away down the front of her robes, quickly, the way you'd hide a sweet from a teacher.

'How did you do that?' said Ron.

'Do what?' said Hermione, arriving beside them.

'One minute you were right behind us, the next minute you were back at the bottom of the stairs.'

'What?' Hermione looked faintly confused for a moment. 'Oh... I had to go back for something. Oh, no...'

A seam on her bag had split. It had been bulging all morning; Harry could see at least a dozen huge, heavy books crammed into it, and the stitching had simply given up. Books slid out across the flagstones. And with them, for half a second, before Hermione dropped to her knees and swept it back in with the side of her hand, something small that skittered on the stone and flashed in the torchlight: silver, and green.

'What was that?' said Harry.

'What was what?'

'That shiny thing.'

'Sweet wrapper,' said Hermione, stuffing books back. 'Honestly. Here, could you hold some of these?'

'Why are you lugging all these about?' Ron asked her, taking an armful.

'You know how many subjects I'm doing,' said Hermione breathlessly.

'But...' Ron was turning the books over, reading the spines. 'You haven't got any of these today. There's only Defence Against the Dark Arts this afternoon.'

'Oh. Yes,' said Hermione vaguely, and took them back off him and packed them all into the split bag regardless. 'I'm starving. I hope it's something nice,' she added, and set off for the Great Hall without them.

Ron sniffed.

'She smells of the hospital wing,' he said. 'Did you notice? That green stuff Pomfrey uses. Dittany.'

'She probably walked past it.'

'The hospital wing's on the first floor. The dungeons are underground.' Ron looked after her. 'D'you ever get the feeling she's not telling us something?'

Harry did. He didn't say so. He was thinking about Malfoy running back down the steps with her plaits coming down, about something small and silver-green skittering on the flagstones, and then he thought, don't be stupid, and went in to lunch.

*

Hermione ate her lunch very fast and very neatly and excused herself halfway through her pudding to go to the library, and came back for the end of it ten minutes later having apparently not gone to the library at all, since she hadn't got a book. She sat down and finished her treacle tart and looked very calm.

Malfoy didn't come to lunch. She'd been seen turning the dungeon upside down for most of it, with Crabbe and Goyle on their hands and knees.

She was waiting outside the Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom when they got there, alone, with her back against the wall and her good arm folded over her sling and her hair taken down out of its crown and brushed out loose over her shoulders, as if she'd decided that if there was nothing to pin it with there was no point pinning it at all. Pansy and Daphne were a little way off, talking to each other in low voices and glancing at her. Malfoy wasn't talking to anybody. Her face had a white, set, scrubbed look, and her eyes were going along the corridor, slowly, from face to face, as people came up, and stopping on each one, and moving on.

They stopped on Hermione.

And stayed.

Harry, who was walking between them, felt the look go past him like a draught from an open door. He glanced at Hermione. Hermione was getting her wand out of her bag and checking the end of it with great attention, as though she'd noticed something wrong with the tip.

'Afternoon, Malfoy,' said Ron, who couldn't help himself. 'Lost something?'

Malfoy didn't even look at him. She was still looking at Hermione. And then, quite slowly, the look slid off Hermione and came round to Harry, and changed. The white set scrubbed thing went out of it as if somebody had drawn a curtain, and what came in its place was warm, and soft, and pleased to see him, so suddenly and completely that Harry blinked.

'Potter,' she said. 'You came.'

'It's a lesson,' said Harry. 'I had to, oddly enough.'

'Well. I'm glad.' She pushed herself off the wall and came and stood beside him, on the side away from Hermione, as close as she'd sat in the dungeon. 'I wanted to say. About the potion. You did those caterpillars beautifully. Much better than I'd have done them.'

'You'd have done them with one hand.'

'I'd have done them badly with one hand.' She smiled up at him. It was a real smile, or it looked like one, and it made her face into something quite different. 'Thank you. For this morning. For doing my roots, and for... the other thing. For telling me. Nobody tells me things.'

Harry didn't know where to put himself. He felt his face go hot. He was aware of Ron, on his other side, beyond Hermione, making a face like a man watching a dog walk on its hind legs, and of Hermione, right next to him, not making any face at all.

'That's all right,' he said.

He meant it. He'd wanted a kinder Dracina this year; he'd wanted it on the train and in the paddock and outside the hospital wing with his hand on the door. And here it was, standing beside him with its hair down, saying thank you and nobody tells me things, and he was so pleased that he didn't stop to wonder why it had turned up now, of all times, in this corridor, five minutes after looking at Hermione like that.

Hermione wondered.

She stood on Harry's other side and looked straight ahead at the classroom door and wondered with her whole mind, coldly and clearly, the way she wondered at a maths question. She turned her head and smiled at Harry, warmly.

'Harry, you've got potion on your collar,' she said, and reached up and brushed it off with her fingers, and straightened the collar while she was there, and let her hand rest on his shoulder for a moment afterwards, as though she'd forgotten it was there.

Malfoy's eyes went to the hand. Then to Hermione's face.

The two girls looked at each other across Harry for perhaps a second, past him, which wasn't hard, since both of them were very nearly his height. Neither of them said anything. Harry, standing between them with his collar straightened and his ears hot, thought it was very nice that they were both being so friendly today, and wondered if it meant they might all be able to get along this year after all.

Ron looked at the ceiling and moved his lips. He might have been praying.

Professor Lupin wasn't there when they went in.

They sat down and got out their books and quills and parchment and talked, the noise going up as the minutes went by, and Malfoy, who was supposed to be on the Slytherin side of the room, sat down at the end of Harry's bench as though it had been saved for her, and Hermione, on Harry's other side, moved her stool two inches closer to his without appearing to notice she'd done it. Harry was squashed. He didn't mind. He was rather enjoying it, in a baffled sort of way.

Professor Lupin came in at last, smiled vaguely round at them, and set his battered old briefcase down on the desk. He was as shabby as ever, the same patched robes, the same frayed cuffs, but he looked a great deal better than he had on the train. There was colour in his face. The grey had gone out from under his skin and the bones didn't stand out so sharply in his cheeks, and he moved differently, too, Harry thought: easily, loosely, like somebody who has had a good run and a good night's sleep and several large dinners, and whose body is pleased with him for once.

'Good afternoon,' he said. 'Books away, please, all of you. We'll be doing something practical today. All you'll need is your wand.'

People exchanged curious looks as they put their books away. They'd never had a practical lesson in Defence Against the Dark Arts, unless you counted the time Lockhart had let a cageful of Cornish pixies loose and then hidden under his desk.

'Right, then,' said Professor Lupin, when they were ready. 'Follow me, please.'

Mystified, and interested, they got up and went after him, out of the classroom and down the empty corridor and round the corner.

The first thing they saw was Peeves.

The poltergeist was hanging upside down in mid-air outside a broom cupboard, stuffing the keyhole with chewing gum, and humming. He had on, as he often did, a battered hat and an orange bow tie. And pinned to the bow tie, glittering in the light from the windows, catching it and throwing it back in little green sparks every time he moved, was a brooch.

It was silver. It was shaped like a serpent, coiled round on itself, and it had two emeralds for eyes.

Harry heard Malfoy make a noise beside him that he'd never heard a human being make. It was a sort of thin, high, strangled squeak, like a kettle just before it starts to whistle.

Peeves didn't look up until Professor Lupin was nearly underneath him. Then he wriggled his curly-toed feet, and saw who was behind Lupin, and his wide wicked face split into a grin.

'Oooh, it's the shabby one!' he sang. 'Shabby Lupin, shabby Lupin, patches on his patches! Shabby Lupin, shabby...'

Rude and impossible as he was to everybody, Peeves generally kept a shred of respect for the teachers. Everyone looked quickly at Professor Lupin to see how he'd take it. He was still smiling.

But Peeves had seen something better than a teacher. His eyes had found Malfoy, and the grin got wider, and he swung himself upright and did a little twirl in the air so that the brooch flashed.

'And look who's here! Ickle Slytherin princess! Lost something, has she? Lost her sparkly?' He stroked the brooch with one grubby finger. 'Peevesy found it! Found it lying on the floor by the dungeon steps, he did, all on its own, just where Peevesy would see it! Finders keepers! Pretty pretty sparkly for Peevesy's bow tie! Doesn't it suit him? Doesn't it bring out his eyes?'

'Give that back,' said Malfoy.

She said it in a voice that shook. Her face had gone from white to scarlet in one go. Behind her, somewhere in the Slytherin part of the crowd, somebody laughed, and was elbowed, and laughed again.

'Give it back, you disgusting-'

'Ooh! Ooh, she wants it back!' Peeves turned a slow somersault, cackling. 'Says please, does she? Says pretty please, Peevesy? Says it on her knees?'

'I'd take that gum out of the keyhole, if I were you, Peeves,' said Professor Lupin pleasantly, as though nothing else had been said at all. 'Mr Filch won't be able to get at his brooms.'

Filch was the caretaker, a sour, unsuccessful wizard who fought an endless war with the students and, with even less success, with Peeves. Peeves took no notice whatever of Professor Lupin, except to blow a long, loud, wet raspberry in his face.

Professor Lupin sighed, very slightly, and drew his wand.

'Here's a handy little charm,' he said over his shoulder to the class. 'Watch carefully.'

He lifted the wand to the height of his shoulder, said, 'Waddiwasi!' and pointed it at Peeves.

The wad of chewing gum came out of the keyhole like a cork out of a bottle, flew straight up, and went with a horrible accuracy into Peeves's left nostril. Peeves spun upright, howling, and shot off down the corridor in a cloud of curses, and as he went, still howling, he tore the brooch off his bow tie and flung it, hard, over his shoulder.

It sailed the length of the corridor, flashing, and landed with a small, clear, final-sounding plop in the fire bucket by the far window.

There was a short silence.

Then the whole class, Slytherins and all, burst out laughing.

They didn't mean to. Most of them didn't, anyway. It was just that Malfoy had made the noise again, the kettle noise, and then she'd gone down the corridor at a dead run with her loose hair flying and her sling bouncing, and knelt down by the bucket, and stuck her good arm into it up to the shoulder, and come up with the brooch dripping, and a long grey string of something, possibly the remains of somebody's sandwich, hanging off it. And she'd stood there in the window light holding it up, white and wet and shaking, with her sleeve soaked to the shoulder, looking at it as if it had died.

Harry didn't laugh. He felt terrible for her. He was nearly sure he'd heard Ron laugh, behind him; he was quite sure he'd heard Crabbe. He sent her a supportive look. Which she saw and appreciated.

He looked round for Hermione, to see if she'd heard Ron.

Hermione wasn't laughing either. She was standing very still at the edge of the crowd with her wand in her hand, watching Malfoy wipe the brooch on her robes, and her face had nothing at all on it. Then she saw Harry looking at her, and her face filled up at once with sympathy, and she said, 'Oh, poor thing,' quite warmly, and looked away down the corridor.

'Brilliant, sir!' Dean Thomas was saying. 'Right up his nose!'

'Thank you, Dean,' said Professor Lupin. He had put his wand away and was watching Malfoy too, with his head a little on one side, the way he had by the carriages on the first night. 'Shall we go on? Miss Malfoy, when you're ready.'

Malfoy came back up the corridor with the brooch clenched in her fist. She didn't look at anybody. She walked straight through the middle of the class, which parted for her, and took her place at the back, and as she passed Hermione she slowed, just for a step, and turned her head.

She didn't say anything. She didn't need to. Harry saw the look, and it was the look she'd given him across the Quidditch pitch a year ago, in the rain, a dozen feet away, the second before she'd said I hate you. Only it wasn't for him. And it wasn't a scream.

It was a promise.

Hermione looked back at her quite calmly, and said, 'I'm so sorry about your brooch, Malfoy. That was awful,' and then turned and walked on beside Harry, and put her arm through his.

They went on, the class looking at shabby Professor Lupin with new respect. He led them down another corridor and stopped outside the staffroom door.

'In you go,' said Professor Lupin, opening it and standing aside.

The staffroom was a long, panelled room full of old armchairs that didn't match. It was empty except for one teacher. Professor Snape was sitting in a low chair by the window, and he looked round as the class came in, and his eyes glittered, and his mouth curled.

As Professor Lupin came in after them and turned to shut the door, Snape said, 'No... leave it open, Lupin. I'd rather not be here for this.'

He got up and stalked past the class with his black robes swirling. At the door he turned on his heel.

'Perhaps nobody has thought to mention it, Lupin,' he said, 'but you have Neville Longbottom in this group. I should think twice before giving him anything to do. Unless, of course, you can arrange for Miss Granger to whisper it into his ear.'

Neville went crimson. Harry glared at Snape. It was one thing to torment Neville in the dungeons; it was quite another to do it in front of another teacher, as though Neville were a dog that had made a mess.

And there was something else. Harry was standing nearest to Professor Lupin, and as Snape said Longbottom, he heard, quite distinctly, a sound come out of Lupin's chest. It was very low. It was barely a sound at all, more a vibration, like the bottom note of an organ that you feel in the floor before you hear it. It went on for about a second, and then stopped, and when Harry looked up Lupin was smiling as mildly as ever, with his eyebrows raised.

'I'd rather hoped Neville would help me with the first part,' he said. 'And I'm quite sure he'll do it very well.'

Neville's face, impossibly, went redder. Snape's lip curled. But he went, and shut the door behind him with a snap.

'Now, then,' said Professor Lupin, and beckoned them down to the end of the room.

There was nothing there but an old wardrobe, the kind the teachers kept their spare robes in. As Professor Lupin went and stood next to it, the wardrobe gave a sudden lurch and banged against the wall.

Several people jumped back.

'Nothing to worry about,' said Professor Lupin calmly. 'It's a boggart.'

Most people clearly felt that this was a very great deal to worry about. Neville looked at Professor Lupin with naked horror, and Seamus watched the wardrobe handle, which had begun to rattle, as if it might come for him.

'Boggarts like dark, shut-in places,' said Professor Lupin. 'Wardrobes. The space under a bed. The cupboard under the sink. I once met one that had made its home in a grandfather clock. This one turned up yesterday afternoon, and I asked the Headmaster whether the staff would mind leaving it where it was so that my third-years could have a go.'

He laid his hand flat on the wardrobe door, as a man might lay a hand on a horse to calm it, and Harry saw his nostrils widen, once, as though he could smell what was inside.

'So. First question. What is a boggart?'

Hermione's hand went up.

So did Malfoy's.

It was the first time Harry had ever seen Malfoy put her hand up in a lesson. She'd always behaved as though answering questions was something servants did. But there it was, her good hand, straight up in the air at the back of the room, and her chin up behind it, and her eyes not on Professor Lupin at all but on Hermione.

Professor Lupin looked from one hand to the other with an expression of polite interest.

'Hermione,' he said.

'It's a shape-shifter,' said Hermione. 'It can turn itself into whatever it thinks will frighten us most.'

'I couldn't have put it better,' said Professor Lupin, and Hermione glowed.

'It doesn't turn itself into anything,' said Malfoy, from the back, quite clearly. 'Not really. It reaches into you. Then it finds your greatest fear and wears it. Like a coat. That's what my mother says. Something that wears your fear like a coat because it hasn't got a shape of its own.'

There was a short pause.

'That's very well put, too,' said Professor Lupin, looking at Malfoy with his head on one side again. 'Your mother sounds like a sensible woman.'

'She is,' said Malfoy, and folded her arm, and didn't look at Hermione, very pointedly.

'So the boggart in there,' Professor Lupin went on, 'hasn't taken a shape yet. It doesn't know what will frighten whoever opens the door. Nobody knows what a boggart looks like when it's on its own, because nobody's ever seen one alone. The moment I let it out, it'll turn into whatever frightens each one of us the most.

'Which means,' he said, ignoring a small whimper from Neville, 'that we've got a great big advantage over it before we even start. Can you see what it is, Harry?'

It was very difficult to answer a question with Hermione beside you going up and down on her toes with her hand in the air. It was even more difficult with Dracina Malfoy at the back of the room with her hand up as well, and her eyes on you, and her lips moving very slightly, as if she were saying the answer to herself and willing it across the room into your head. Harry tried.

'Er... because there's lots of us, it won't know what to be?'

'Exactly,' said Professor Lupin, and Hermione put her hand down, looking a little crestfallen. 'Always best to tackle a boggart in company. It gets muddled. Should it be a headless corpse or a man-eating slug? I once watched one get it wrong in exactly that way: tried to frighten two people at once and turned itself into half a slug. Not frightening in the least.'

'Well done, Potter,' said Malfoy, from the back, in a warm clear voice that carried to every corner of the room.

Several people turned round to stare at her. Pansy dropped her wand.

Harry felt his whole face go hot. He also felt, at the same moment, Hermione's hand come down on his arm and squeeze, quite hard.

'That was really good, Harry,' she said, very close to his ear.

Professor Lupin looked at the three of them. He looked at the girl at the back of the room with her hair down and her soaked sleeve and her face glowing, and at the girl beside Harry with her fingers round his arm and her eyes on the girl at the back, and at the boy between them, with his ears scarlet and his glasses slipping and his face showing a pure, honest, flattered bewilderment that hadn't the faintest idea what was happening to him.

He didn't need any nose at all for that, he thought. Any fool could see it. It was coming off the three of them like heat off a road.

And for a moment, a strange, painful moment, it wasn't Harry standing there. It was another boy with the same black hair standing on end, and the same glasses, in another corridor in this same castle twenty years ago, with two girls who had both decided he was theirs and a third who'd decided he wasn't anybody's, and the same lost look on his face, as though he'd walked into a room and found the furniture rearranged. Remus Lupin had watched that boy get through it, more or less. He'd watched him come out the other side. He'd stood at his wedding.

He put the thought away, quickly, before anything showed in his face, and turned back to the wardrobe.

'The charm that gets rid of a boggart is simple,' he said, 'but it needs a strong mind. What finishes a boggart, you see, is laughter. What you've got to do is make it turn into something you find funny.

'We'll try the charm without wands first. Say it after me, please... Riddikulus!'

'Riddikulus!' said the class.

'Good,' said Professor Lupin. 'Very good. But I'm afraid that's the easy part. The word on its own isn't enough. And this is where you come in, Neville.'

The wardrobe gave another shudder. It wasn't half as bad as Neville's. He came forward as though he were walking to his own execution.

'Right, Neville,' said Professor Lupin. 'First things first. What would you say frightens you most in the whole world?'

Neville's lips moved. Nothing came out.

'Sorry, Neville, didn't quite catch that,' said Professor Lupin cheerfully.

Neville looked round at the rest of them, wildly, as though hoping somebody would leap in and save him. Nobody did. He said, in hardly more than a breath, 'Professor Snape.'

Almost everybody laughed. Neville himself gave a sheepish grin. Professor Lupin didn't laugh. He looked thoughtful.

'Professor Snape... I see. Neville, you live with your grandmother, don't you?'

'Er... yes,' said Neville anxiously. 'But I... I don't want it to turn into her either.'

'No, no, that's not what I meant,' said Professor Lupin, smiling now. 'I was wondering... could you tell us what your grandmother usually wears?'

Neville looked startled, but he answered. 'Well... she's got this hat. She always wears it. It's tall, with a stuffed vulture on the top. And a long dress, green, mostly... and sometimes a scarf, a fox-fur one.'

'And a handbag?'

'A big red one.'

'Good,' said Professor Lupin. 'Now. Can you see all that, Neville? Really see it? The hat and the dress and the bag?'

'Yes,' said Neville, uncertainly. He was clearly waiting for the trick.

'When the boggart comes out of that wardrobe and sees you,' said Professor Lupin, 'it's going to turn into Professor Snape. And you're going to lift your wand, like this, and say Riddikulus, and while you say it you're going to think as hard as you can about your grandmother's clothes. And if it goes right, Boggart Snape is going to find himself in that vulture hat, and that green dress, carrying that great red handbag.'

There was a howl of laughter. The wardrobe rocked furiously.

'If Neville manages it, the boggart's likely to turn on each of us in turn,' said Professor Lupin. 'So I'd like you all to take a minute now and think about the thing that frightens you most. And then think about how you might make it ridiculous...'

The room went quiet.

Harry thought.

What frightened him most in the world? His first thought was Voldemort, Voldemort with his body back and his full strength back, standing in front of him. But before he'd even begun to work out how you'd make Lord Voldemort ridiculous, something else came up out of the bottom of his mind, by itself, unasked.

A grey hand, wet and rotten, sliding back into a black sleeve. A long, slow, rattling breath from a mouth he couldn't see. A cold that went in past the skin and into the heart and filled him up like water filling a well...

He shivered, and looked round quickly, hoping nobody had seen.

Plenty of people had their eyes screwed shut. Ron was muttering to himself, 'Take its legs off.' Harry was fairly sure he knew what that was about; there was only one thing on earth that frightened Ron worse than his mother.

Beside him, Hermione had her eyes open and was staring at the wardrobe with her lips pressed tight together. At the back of the room, Malfoy wasn't looking at the wardrobe at all. She was looking at the back of Harry's head.

'Everyone ready?' said Professor Lupin.

Harry felt his stomach drop. He wasn't ready. How did you make a Dementor funny? But he didn't want to ask for more time, not with everybody else nodding and pushing up their sleeves.

'Right, Neville, we're all going to stand back,' said Professor Lupin. 'Give you a clear run. I'll call the next person up... Back, everybody, give Neville room...'

They all moved back against the walls and left Neville alone by the wardrobe, and Malfoy, somehow, in the shuffle, ended up at Harry's right shoulder. Neville was white and shaking, but he had pushed back his sleeves, and his wand was up.

'On three, Neville,' said Professor Lupin, pointing his own wand at the wardrobe handle. 'One... two... three... now!'

A spurt of sparks flew from his wand and struck the handle. The wardrobe door banged open.

Out of it, hook-nosed and terrible, stepped Professor Snape. His eyes blazed at Neville.

Neville went backwards, his wand up, his mouth working with no sound coming out. Snape came on, slowly, one hand going into his robes as if for his wand...

'R... r... riddikulus!' squeaked Neville.

There was a crack like a whip. Snape staggered. He was wearing a long green dress trimmed with lace, and on his head was a towering hat with a moth-eaten vulture on top of it, and from the crook of one arm swung an enormous crimson handbag.

The room exploded. The boggart stood there swaying in its hat, baffled, and Professor Lupin shouted, 'Parvati! Forward!'

Parvati stepped up with her face set. Snape rounded on her. Crack! In his place stood a mummy, wound in old stained bandages, its blank wrapped face turned on Parvati. It began to shuffle towards her, dragging its feet, its stiff arms coming up...

'Riddikulus!' cried Parvati.

One of its bandages came loose round its feet. It caught its toe in it, pitched forward onto its face, and its head came off and rolled away.

'Seamus!' roared Professor Lupin.

Seamus dashed past Parvati. Crack! Where the mummy had been stood a woman with black hair down to the floor and a green-white face like a skull: a banshee. She opened her mouth wide and a sound came out of it that didn't belong in the world, a long, high, howling shriek that made every hair on Harry's head stand up...

'Riddikulus!' Seamus yelled.

The banshee clutched her throat and made a noise like a creaking gate. Her voice had gone.

Crack! The banshee was a rat, chasing its own tail round and round. Crack! It was a rattlesnake, coiling and writhing. Crack! It was a single bloodshot eyeball, rolling.

'It doesn't know what to do!' shouted Lupin. 'We've got it on the run! Dean!'

Dean ran forward. Crack! The eyeball turned into a hand, cut off at the wrist, that flipped itself over and began to scuttle across the floorboards on its fingertips like a crab.

'Riddikulus!' bellowed Dean.

There was a snap, and the hand was caught in a mousetrap.

'Good! Miss Malfoy!'

Harry felt her go rigid at his shoulder.

She hadn't expected it. He could tell. She'd been watching the others with her chin up and her mouth curled, as if the whole business were rather beneath her, and now Professor Lupin was looking straight at her with his wand ready and his eyebrows raised, and every head in the room had turned, and she couldn't very well say no. Not in front of Slytherin. Not in front of Crabbe and Goyle. She pushed herself off the wall, and pushed her loose hair back with her good hand, and walked out into the middle of the floor with her wand held up and her back as straight as a poker.

Crack!

The hand in the mousetrap was gone. In its place, tall and pale and perfectly dressed, with his silver-topped cane in one gloved hand and his long fair hair falling over the shoulders of his black travelling cloak, stood Lucius Malfoy.

Several of the Slytherins gasped. Pansy put both hands over her mouth.

He didn't loom. He didn't snarl or reach for his wand. He simply stood there, a few feet from his daughter, and looked at her. He looked her slowly up and down, from her loose untidy hair to her bandaged arm to her soaked and stinking sleeve, the way he'd looked at Hagrid's hut, the way he looked at anything that had been put in front of him and found not quite good enough. And then he sighed.

'Dracina,' he said.

That was all, for a moment. Just her name, and the sigh. And Harry, standing by the wall, saw what it did to her.

'Second,' said the boggart, in Lucius Malfoy's cold, quiet, beautiful voice. 'Again. Second in Potions, behind a Mudblood. Second in Charms. Beaten to the Snitch, in front of the whole school, by a boy who learnt to fly on a school broom.' He tilted his head. 'Do you know, I was never second at anything. Your grandfather was never second at anything. There has not been a Malfoy who came second in eleven hundred years, and I had rather hoped that the first one would not be my only child.'

'Father...' Her wand had dipped. Her voice had gone small.

'Look at you.' He didn't raise his voice. He never needed to. 'Look at the state of you. Your hair. Your robes. Fishing in buckets in front of half the school like a scullery maid. Mauled by a farmyard animal because you couldn't follow an instruction a gamekeeper gave you.' The grey eyes went over her again, and found nothing to stop on. 'Do you imagine that is what the name is for? Do you imagine your mother and I gave you that name so that you could drag it through the mud of every corridor in this castle and then come home and cry to us about it?'

'I didn't... I tried, Father, I...'

'You always try.' He said it almost gently, which was worse. 'That is the trouble with you, Dracina. You always try, and it is never enough. You are not enough. I don't know what you are. I only know you are not a Malfoy. Not a real one. You never were.'

Dracina Malfoy began to cry.

It wasn't the crying Harry had seen in the hospital wing, the furious screaming kind with her head thrown back. This was something else. Her face simply crumpled, all at once, like a piece of paper in a fist, and the tears came, and her shoulders came in, and she stood in the middle of the staffroom with her wand pointing at the floor and her bandaged arm held against her and wept, quietly and helplessly, like a small child who has been told off in front of guests and knows that it will be worse later, at home, when they've gone.

Nobody laughed. Even Crabbe didn't laugh. The room had gone perfectly silent.

Harry found that his hands had closed into fists.

He'd seen this. Not this, not Lucius Malfoy in a staffroom; but this. He knew that sigh. He knew that slow look up and down that found nothing to stop on, and that voice that never had to shout, and he knew exactly what it did to you to hear it, year after year, at breakfast, at dinner, in the hall: look at the state of you. You always try. You're not one of us, you never were. He'd grown up under a different roof, with a fatter man and a cupboard and nothing of his own, and it was the same sound. It was exactly the same sound.

He'd thought she had everything. The manor, and the pony, and the ribbons, and the parents who sent sweets. He'd thought, when he thought about it at all, that the reason Dracina Malfoy was so horrible to everybody was that nobody had ever once told her no. And here she was, standing in the middle of the floor, being told something a great deal worse than no, by the voice she'd plainly been hearing in her head every day of her life. Second. Not enough. Not a real one. She didn't sneer at people because she thought she was better than them. She sneered at people because she wanted to be like her father. It imprisoned her in behaviour that was expected of her.

He took half a step forward without meaning to. Lupin, across the room, lifted one hand very slightly, palm out: wait.

And Dracina stopped crying.

Harry saw her face change, between one breath and the next. The crumpled paper smoothed out. Her chin came up. Her eyes, still streaming, went from wet to hard, and the hard went to something hotter, and she lifted her wand, and her hand had stopped shaking.

'No,' she said.

The boggart Lucius raised one eyebrow.

'I am not,' said Dracina Malfoy, through her teeth, 'second. I am thirteen. And I am sick,' her voice was climbing, 'I am sick to death of you, and your sighing, and your look, and your eleven hundred years, and I am going to... RIDDIKULUS!'

There was a crack like a shot.

Lucius Malfoy staggered.

His long black travelling cloak was gone. In its place was an ancient army greatcoat several sizes too big, out at both elbows, with string for buttons and a half-eaten pasty sticking out of one pocket. His beautiful hair had gone lank and grey and stuck up at the back, and he had three days' stubble and a woolly hat with a hole in it, and on his feet were two odd wellingtons, one green and one red, and the red one had no toe. The silver-topped cane had become a bent umbrella with three spokes showing. In his other hand, instead of gloves, he was clutching a large brown bottle, and he was swaying gently from side to side, like a tree in a light wind.

He looked down at himself. He looked up at his daughter. He opened his mouth to say something devastating, and what came out instead was a long, loud, rumbling hiccup.

'Oi,' said Lucius Malfoy blearily, in an accent from somewhere very far from Wiltshire. 'Oi. You. Spare us 20p for a couple fags, love?'

Dracina made a noise.

It started as a sort of snort, and she clapped her good hand over her mouth to stop it, and it came out round the hand anyway, and then she was laughing. Really laughing. Not the drawl, not the polished little Slytherin titter she did at the table with Pansy. She was bent double in the middle of the staffroom with her wand dangling and her loose hair hanging in her face and tears still wet on her cheeks, laughing so hard she couldn't breathe, great helpless whooping shrieks of it, while the tramp who had been her father swayed in front of her in his odd wellingtons and patted his greatcoat for a light.

'20p, muggle money?1111111111111111' she gasped. 'Twenty... oh... oh, Father...'

The boggart hiccupped again, looked round at the class with an expression of deep injury, and tried to take a dignified swig from its bottle, and missed its mouth.

Now the whole room was laughing with her. Harry was laughing. He hadn't known he was going to. He'd been standing there with his fists clenched about four seconds ago, and now he was laughing, partly at the boggart and its odd boots and partly, mostly, at her, at the sound of Dracina Malfoy laughing like that, like a girl, like a person, like somebody who had just put down something very heavy that she'd been carrying for a very long time.

'Brilliant!' Professor Lupin was laughing too. 'Brilliant, Miss 11111111111111111111Malfoy! Stand back, now, you've earned it...'

She stood back. She came back to the wall still hiccupping with laughter and wiping her eyes on the back of her wrist, and stopped beside Harry, and he saw her glance, very quickly, across the room, at Crabbe and Goyle. They were both laughing. They had their mouths open and they were laughing at Lucius Malfoy in a woolly hat. Harry saw it go through her, the moment she remembered who Crabbe and Goyle's fathers were, and who they reported to, and what they'd say; saw the laughter go out of her face and the white come into it.

Then she lifted her chin, and looked away from them, and didn't look back. And she was still, very slightly, smiling.

'Your father,' Harry said, under the noise. He didn't know what else he was going to say. 'Is he really...'

'No. Not always,' said Dracina, without looking at him. 'Don't, just don't, Potter.' And then, so quietly he nearly missed it: 'You've got your fat Muggle. My Father gives me everything I want. Don't project that onto me. That's all.'

He looked at her.

He thought about it for the rest of the lesson. He thought about it, on and off, for a long time afterwards. He'd always known what Dracina Malfoy wanted; everybody did. She wanted to be the best. She wanted to win, and be looked at, and be right. But he'd never once wondered who she wanted to be looked at by, or whose voice it was she could hear when she lost, or what it might be like to have everything a person could want and still be lying awake at night trying to be good enough for the one person in the world who'd never say so. He knew what it was like to want somebody's approval and never get it. He'd sat at a kitchen table in Privet Drive on his thirteenth birthday and felt it, for a second, when Uncle Vernon had nodded at him for lying about being caned, and been ashamed of how much he'd wanted it. But at least he'd always known the Dursleys were wrong. At least he'd had Hogwarts, and Ron, and the Weasleys, and a man in white by a pillar, to tell him so. He heard from Dracina herself and everyone else how much her father and mother spoiled her. And yet Dracina still had these fears.

Dracina had a tapestry of Saint George, and a manor, and a father.

He was beginning to think that he and Dracina had more similarities than he previously thought.

'Brilliant! Ron! You next!'

Ron jumped forward.

Crack!

Several people screamed. A spider six feet high, hairy all over, was coming at Ron with its pincers going click, click, click. For one dreadful moment Harry thought Ron had frozen solid. And then...

'Riddikulus!' Ron roared, and the spider's legs vanished. It rolled over, and over again, legless, bowling across the floor; Lavender Brown shrieked and leapt out of its way, and it came to rest right at Harry's feet. He lifted his wand. He was ready. He was...

'Here!' Professor Lupin had moved. He'd moved faster than Harry had ever seen a grown man move; one moment he was by the wardrobe and the next he was in front of Harry, between Harry and the spider, without seeming to have crossed the space in between. 'Here!'

Crack!

The legless spider had gone. For a second everybody looked wildly round to see where.

Crack!

Snape was back. And this time Neville came at him at a run, with his round face set and red.

'Riddikulus!' he shouted, and for a split second they saw Snape in his lace and his vulture before Neville let out an enormous HA! of laughter, and the boggart burst apart into a thousand tiny threads of smoke, and was gone.

'Excellent!' cried Professor Lupin, as the whole class broke into applause. 'Excellent, Neville! Well done, all of you. Now... let me see... five points to Gryffindor for everybody who took on the boggart... ten for Neville, because he did it twice... and five each to Hermione and Harry.'

'But I didn't do anything,' said Harry.

'You and Hermione got my questions right at the beginning,' said Lupin lightly. 'And ten to Slytherin for Miss Malfoy, five for the boggart and five for her coat. Right, that's it for today, well done, everyone. For homework, please read the chapter on boggarts, and write me a summary of...'

Only Harry saw the smoke.

He was the only one looking at the floor. Everybody else was looking at Neville, who was being thumped on the back by Seamus and Dean and was grinning so hard it must have hurt. But Harry was still standing where he'd been when Lupin stepped in front of him, with his wand out and nothing to point it at, and he saw the tiny threads of grey that the boggart had burst into come drifting back together along the floorboards, very fast, like water running downhill, and slide in a thin grey stream through the gap under the wardrobe door.

'Professor...'

The wardrobe door banged open.

And the thing that came out of it was not for any of them.

It came out bent, because it was too tall for the wardrobe; it had to duck its head under the top, and then it straightened, and went on straightening, up and up, until its ears brushed the ceiling of the staffroom, nine feet if it was an inch. It was a wolf. It was a man. It was neither, it was both at once and something else besides, something Harry had no word for: a vast hunched body covered in coarse grey fur, with a wolf's long jaws and a wolf's yellow eyes and a man's long arms that hung down past its knees and ended in hands, real hands, with fingers, and on the ends of the fingers, claws like carving knives. Its chest was as broad as a door. Its muscles moved under the fur like animals under a blanket. And it was red.

It was red from the jaws down. It was soaked in blood. It was matted, dripping with it, the fur clotted into dark spikes all down its chest and its arms. It was standing in the middle of the staffroom on the worn old carpet with blood running off its claws in long slow strings and pattering on the floor, and it was grinning, with its lips pulled back from teeth as long as Harry's fingers, and there were things caught in its teeth that Harry would not let himself look at.

It smelt of a slaughterhouse.

It turned its great head, slowly, and its yellow eyes went over the class, and past them, and found Professor Lupin, and stopped.

And it knew him. Harry saw it. Whatever it was, it looked at the shabby, tired man in the patched robes the way you'd look at somebody you'd known all your life.

The class screamed.

Everyone. Lavender and Parvati and Seamus and Dean and Crabbe, Crabbe screamed like a little girl and hid behind Goyle, and the whole lot of them, Harry and the two girls with him, went back against the far wall in a crush, knocking over chairs. Harry was screaming too, or something was coming out of him, he wasn't sure. He knew it was a werewolf. He'd seen pictures. It wasn't like the pictures. Nothing in any picture had ever looked like that.

He felt somebody take hold of his left arm with both hands and hang on.

He felt somebody take hold of his right arm with one hand, the good one, and hang on harder.

'Riddikulus,' said Professor Lupin.

He didn't shout it. He said it quite quietly, almost tiredly, with his wand held level and his face perfectly white and perfectly calm, like a man saying a word he'd said many times before in front of a mirror. There was a crack.

The great grey legs vanished. Not entirely. They shrank, in an instant, down to two short, fat, furry stumps about the length of a teacup, so that its whole enormous bulk suddenly found itself standing on nothing, and wobbled, and toppled forward with a look of the most complete astonishment Harry had ever seen on any face, and landed flat on its chin on the carpet with its tiny legs paddling in the air behind it, and said, in a high, piping, squeaky voice like Professor Flitwick's after a helium charm, 'Oh, bother.'

There was a split second of silence.

Then Dean shouted out

'Midget wolf!'

The laughter came, all at once, shaky and enormous, the kind of laugh that comes out of people who have just been very frightened indeed and want to be sure they're still alive. The creature lay on its face with its stubby legs kicking and burst into a cloud of smoke, and this time the smoke didn't come back.

Professor Lupin put his wand away.

His hand, Harry noticed, didn't go into his pocket straight away. It hung at his side for a moment, and the fingers were curled, and stiff, and the nails, Harry would have sworn, looked longer than they had a minute ago. Then the hand went into the pocket and stayed there.

'Well,' said Professor Lupin. His voice was perfectly steady. 'That's a lesson in itself. They're never quite gone until they're gone. Homework, as I was saying. The chapter on boggarts. A summary, for Monday, please. Off you go.'

He turned away to close the wardrobe door and stood with his back to them, quite still, with his hand flat on the wood.

It was only then that Hermione and Malfoy noticed what they were holding.

They both looked down at the same moment. Hermione had Harry's left arm in both her hands, wrapped round it, pulled in against her. Malfoy had Harry's right arm in her good hand, her fingers dug into his sleeve, her face pressed into his shoulder. Both of them had their eyes on the other girl's hands, on Harry's other arm.

And both of them, quite distinctly, growled.

It was a small sound. It came up from somewhere low in both their chests at exactly the same moment, a deep thin rumble, nothing like a word, and it was not, Harry thought, standing between the two of them with an arm held fast on each side and his heart still going like a hammer, all that different from the sound that had come out of the thing on the carpet.

Then Malfoy let go.

She let go all at once, as though his arm had become very hot, and stepped back, and went pink, and then red, and her chin came up so fast he heard her teeth click.

'Don't flatter yourself, Potter,' she said. 'I tripped.'

And she turned on her heel and walked out of the staffroom with her loose hair swinging and her soaked sleeve dripping on the floorboards, and didn't look back, and Harry stood there with his right arm cold where her hand had been, and his left arm still held tight, and absolutely no idea what had just happened.

'She's horrible,' said Hermione, quite softly, and let go of him at last, and patted his arm where she'd been holding it, twice, as if she were putting it back. 'Isn't she?'

'I don't know,' said Harry honestly.

*

Everybody talked at once as they left the staffroom. Harry didn't.

Professor Lupin had stopped him having a go at the boggart. He'd done it on purpose. He'd moved like... Harry didn't know what he'd moved like... and put himself between Harry and the thing on the floor before it could turn into anything at all. Why? Was it because he'd seen Harry go to pieces on the train, and thought he couldn't cope? Did he think Harry would just keel over again in front of everybody?

Nobody else seemed to have noticed. They were all too busy.

'Did you see me with that banshee?' Seamus was shouting.

'And my hand!' said Dean, crabbing his own across the air. 'And Snape in that hat!'

'And my mummy!'

'I wonder why Professor Lupin's frightened of werewolves?' said Lavender thoughtfully.

There was a short, odd silence, as if several people had wondered the same thing and not wanted to be the one to say it.

'Everyone's frightened of werewolves,' said Parvati, a bit too quickly.

'Not like that, though,' said Lavender. 'Did you see his face? It knew him.'

'Best Defence Against the Dark Arts lesson we've ever had, that,' said Ron, very loudly, as they collected their bags from the classroom and set off up the corridor. 'Wasn't it? Ever.'

'He's a very good teacher,' said Hermione approvingly. 'I just wish I'd had a turn with the boggart...'

'What'd it have been for you?' said Ron, with a snort. 'An essay with a nine out of ten on it?'

Hermione hit him with her Charms book. She was laughing. Ron was laughing. Harry laughed too, a beat behind them, because they were his best friends and it was a good joke.

But he was thinking about other things.

He was thinking about a vast and brutal creature dripping in blood, it had looked across a staffroom at a shabby, kindly man and known him. And about the hand that had hung for a moment by the man's side with the fingers curled. And about the sound that had come out of Lupin's chest when Snape said Longbottom, and the sound that had come, just now, out of two girls standing on either side of him, which he was not going to think about, not ever, because those girls were both mental.

And he was thinking about a brooch in a fire bucket, and Malfoy's soaked sleeve, and the way Hermione had said oh, poor thing with nothing at all on her face a moment before. And a skitter of silver and green on the dungeon steps. And the smell of Dittany. And don't be stupid, Hermione was with you all day.

He looked sideways at her. She was walking beside him with her split bag held together in both arms, still laughing at something Ron had said, with her cheeks pink and her hair all over the place, and she caught him looking and smiled at him, a quick warm wholly ordinary Hermione smile, and Harry smiled back, and felt rotten for wondering.

He decided he'd been wrong. Very firmly wrong.

He'd have been surprised to know that on Hermione's other side, still grinning, Ron Weasley was looking at Hermione's split bag too, and thinking about the place on the flagstones where a sweet wrapper had flashed silver and green, and was thinking, with a slow, sinking, deeply unhappy feeling, that he was very much afraid he was going to have to keep an eye on two of them now.