Harry had half-expected that the Malfoys, proud as they were—as they had always been would simply turn on their back the moment they became aware of his presence.
And Narcissa's reaction did nothing to disappoint his expectations.
She drew her gaze back to her son. "Shall we find somewhere else, darling?"
"There's no need, Mother—" Draco's reply caught Harry off guard.
He cast a long look in Harry's direction—taking in both of them, Harry and Ron absorbing the twin glares of hatred that were being aimed at him and offered no reaction at all in return.
He simply took his mother by the arm and steered her to a table a little further from Harry and Ron's.
Tom was quick to bring the pair their lunch.
The Malfoys' table manners needed no context or introduction. Even in a pub crammed inside a tent, their dining etiquette remained flawless.
Harry and Ron exchanged a glance across their own table and held their silence, making no immediate move to push further.
The pleasantries of the meal were well and truly dead.
Harry and Ron sat brooding over their Butterbeers, sipping without enthusiasm, their eyes moving between each other and the mother and son across the room.
Narcissa must have sensed the surveillance from those two Gryffindor boys. Yet she sent no warning glance their way—that would have acknowledged their presence and invited further exchange. She simply did not look at them.
"Eat up, Draco. We still have quite a lot to buy afterward—" Narcissa's voice was focused.
She noticed that Draco had barely touched his food since it arrived. He was sitting completely motionless, staring blankly at the kidney steak on his plate as if looking through it.
Noticing this, Narcissa prompted him again. But rather than simply picking up his fork again, Draco considered for a moment, then simply set down his cutlery with a quiet clink.
He did not reach for the pub's own paper napkins. Instead, he drew a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket and dabbed at the corners of his mouth.
"I'm not very hungry, Mother—" He set the handkerchief down on the tabletop after speaking. By the look of it, he had no intention of picking it back up.
"Very well." Narcissa looked at him for a moment—at his face, which was visibly thinner than it had been at the end of term. A summer of something had left its mark.
"A lighter meal never hurt anyone. And one can never be entirely certain how clean the food in a place like this really is—"
She said it at a lower volume that could be heard. "Let's finish our shopping as quickly as we can, then go home. I'll have the kitchen make something you like—"
For reasons Harry couldn't quite name, his expression darkened at the sight of it.
Draco showed no sign of being particularly moved by his mother's care. He sat staring at the table, heavy with thoughts that weren't being shared with anyone in the room, including his mother.
Only when Narcissa herself set down her cutlery and touched her napkin to her lips did Draco finally come back to life. The stiffness in his posture dropped from him all at once.
"Mother—" he said like having decided something. "I'd like to wander on my own for a bit afterward—"
"On your own?" Narcissa's brow creased with immediate, instinctive concern that sharpened quickly into motherly authority.
Her tone hardened. "That's out of the question, Draco. Have you forgotten what your father told you before he—" She stopped herself. "He wants you home as soon as the shopping is done. It isn't safe to be wandering around outside alone right now."
"Ha! Personally, I think the wizarding world is perfectly safe—as long as there are no Death Eaters causing trouble." Harry had no particular objection to letting the Malfoys know that he'd been listening to every word of this exchange.
The cold laugh he let out was deliberate and loud enough for half the tent to hear. "Don't you agree, Ron?"
"You're absolutely right, Harry." Ron matched him in tone and volume with a rare edge of sharpness that surprised Harry slightly. "Some people do have a real gift for crying wolf."
The sharp provocation finally drew a reaction from the Malfoys.
Narcissa turned and slanted a glance toward Harry and Ron—the look was brief and contained within it a complete opinion of both of them.
It was like a look of a woman observing two ill-bred children who are behaving exactly as ill-bred children would be expected to behave, and who are confirming her assessment of their kind in every detail.
It made both Harry and Ron seethe.
As for Draco—
A shadow of grim coldness crossed his face.
By old habit, Draco would have shoved back his chair with a scrape that announced itself across the room and had his wand out and aimed before the chair had stopped moving.
This time, he didn't. He only looked at them once with a single, flat look and then rose calmly from the table. He helped his mother to her feet with a steady hand at her elbow.
The two of them left a handful of gold Galleons on the table for the meal and whatever tip their calculation determined was appropriate. They ignored Tom's slightly anxious smile. They made no retort to Harry and Ron's taunts. They walked out of the pub at a slow pace.
For an instant, as the tent flap was thrown aside to let them through, a blade of sunlight sliced across the interior and Harry squinted against it. Then the flap dropped back into place, and the Malfoys were gone.
"Since when did Malfoy become so…...restrained?" Ron watched the flap settle and put into words exactly what Harry had been puzzling over.
"Maybe he's worried Professor Watson will have a score to settle with him once term starts—"
Harry said it, then shook his own head at the thought.
Neither Professor Watson nor Professor Dumbledore would ever take out their grievances with students on the basis of their parents' choices.
Whatever Harry thought of the Death Eater families, he was certain of that much about both men. They were not that kind of people.
And the students from Death Eater families—Nott, the Greengrass sisters were in considerably more complicated positions than Draco when it came to what the summer had meant for their families.
Theodore Nott's father had apparently been the first Death Eater seized and imprisoned in Azkaban since Voldemort's return—caught during or after the Battle of Diagon Alley, the evidence against him was apparently insurmountable.
And the Greengrass family: Astoria's father, Daphne's father identified as a Death Eater and wanted by the Ministry was said to be seen fleeing the country.
"It's guilt, plain and simple—" Ron said it without a shred of charity.
"If it were me, I wouldn't have the face to come to Diagon Alley at all. Look at this place." He gestured at the tent walls around them.
"They helped do this. Death Eaters helped destroy this. And his father was right there in the middle of it. This is their work. I wouldn't be able to look at it without wanting to disappear."
What remained of lunch was spent dissecting why Draco Malfoy had become so remarkably humble.
They catalogued sins both specific and general, the Battle of Diagon Alley and the years before it. The names of those who had been lost or hurt. The damage visible from this tent and the damage that extended further than they could see.
And the name "Voldemort" fell from Harry's lips enough times during this increasingly indignant conversation that it sent more than a few customers at nearby tables hurrying out the door.
Tom steeled himself and crossed over to their table, looking pained, and asked them vaguely if they could perhaps keep the volume somewhat reduced—they were, he hinted gently, making other customers uncomfortable.
Realizing they had somewhat overstayed their welcome, Harry and Ron paid—leaving a reasonable tip, since Tom's situation warranted it and stepped back out into the tent city.
"Where to next, Harry?" Ron asked the question, reaching into his memory of the day's list.
They stood at the pub entrance. The beaten-earth lane outside was as busy as ever—busier, if anything, than it had been earlier in the morning, the midday hour brought more people out into what had become a genuinely interesting and active version of Diagon Alley despite everything.
Harry hesitated.
Their new textbooks still needed buying, and Potions ingredients, and probably several other things Mrs. Weasley had listed that he'd already forgotten.
But he couldn't summon the will for any of it right now. The strange turns of their two Malfoy encounters—at Gringotts before the war, and now here kept circling in his mind.
Something had happened to Draco over the summer, he felt increasingly certain of it. Some change that went deeper than guilt or fear. Either that—or Draco was planning something.
He was still turning this over when—
"Oh—there he is—"
Right at the moment Harry was circling the question of Draco's oddities in his mind, the flap of Madam Malkin's Robes for All Occasions swung open across the lane and Draco came bolting out, moving fats.
He was alone and appeared a bit nervous. He looked back at the Madam Malkin's tent once, then again through quick glances over his shoulder.
Satisfied, apparently, that his mother was still inside with the robes or the fittings or whatever had kept her, Draco plunged into the moving crowd and accelerated between people.
"Looks like Malfoy managed to give his mother the slip after all—" Harry watched him go. Ron caught the look on Harry's face and read it.
His voice was wary. "You mean—Malfoy's up to something behind his mother's back?"
To Harry's relief, Ron hadn't missed the point. He caught on immediately.
"I mean we have about thirty seconds before he disappears into the crowd completely."
Ron watched Harry carefully seeing what Harry intended to do about it. "You're going to follow him. But Harry, you can't cast a Disillusionment Charm reliably enough for a crowd like this like Hermione, not unless you've brought—"
Harry was already reaching into his robes. His hand disappeared into a drawstring bag, felt around briefly, found what it was looking for—and in full view of Ron's wide eyes, he drew it out with a slow smile.
His Invisibility Cloak.
"Remember how I slipped out onto the battlefield from St. Mungo's?" Harry said in a low tone of voice. "Hagrid told me afterward: unless I'm at Hogwarts, never leave home without it—"
"But…"
When it came to the moment, Ron seemed to hesitate.
"Whatever Malfoy's doing is none of our business, is it, Harry? I know you're worried he might be—"
"Sorry, Ron—if we both duck under the cloak it won't be safe enough. Someone might notice."
Harry cut him off and pulled the Invisibility Cloak over himself with ease.
"Find Hermione, tell her what's happened. I'll bring you both good news."
With that, he set off—shouldering past a couple of witches and wizards who'd wandered into his path and vanished completely, leaving Ron alone outside the Leaky Cauldron's tent with little to do but roll his eyes.
Finding Malfoy on a street with no side-turnings and no place to genuinely disappear into was no great challenge.
Harry picked him out quickly from under the Cloak. Draco was visible about twenty yards ahead: walking fast and focused paying no attention to anyone around him. His head was slightly down.
Harry followed at a careful distance.
Draco led him almost to the far end of Diagon Alley, away from the concentrated bustle of the main tent-shopping district, toward the outer edge where the alley began to thin and deteriorate.
Near the periphery of the alley's footprint, where it bled into the surrounding wasteland of the wider ruins, the tent-shops were still on both sides of the cleared lane but here the arrangement was cramped and irregular rather than the relative neatness of the central area.
Some patches had five or six small dark-collared tents jostling against each other.
The foot traffic had thinned considerably. Almost no one else was walking this far along the lane—the people who had come today mostly hadn't ventured beyond the main shopping district.
Draco glanced behind him twice and saw no one behind him. He then ducked quickly into a low, dark tent.
The moment the flap dropped shut behind him, Harry snapped back into focus.
He let his gaze climb briefly to the letters above the entrance spelling out two words: Borgin and Burkes—spelled out in dull gold then, while the canvas was still swinging, he pulled the Cloak tight, lowered his head, and slipped inside.
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