The Forbidden Forest in early May was a different country from the one Lucian had been walking since October, and he came out of it in the middle of the afternoon with the smell of wet earth and crushed bracken still in his clothes, mud dried in a ragged line halfway up his boots, and a thin red scratch across the back of his left hand where a branch had caught him and not wanted to let go. The trees behind him stood in that particular spring density that was not quite summer yet, the new leaves still pale, the old dark of the pines holding the shadows in as if they were something worth keeping, and the path that ran down out of them toward Hagrid's pumpkin patch was soft and black and printed with the huge, unmistakable shapes of Hagrid's boots, and with Lucian's own, smaller, walking in and out of them all the way from the deep places they had been.
They had been out since morning. It had been a good day, as forest days went. They had followed a unicorn's trail for nearly an hour without ever quite catching the animal itself, which Lucian had not minded, because a trail was a conversation if you knew how to read it, and Hagrid had talked the whole way, the way Hagrid always talked when he was happy, which was to say at length and with his hands, and Lucian had been content to listen and to add a word here and there, and not to think about the castle, or about Lockhart's class, or about the fact that it was Saturday and a Quidditch match was supposed to be happening up the slope without him, which suited him perfectly.
At the edge of the trees Hagrid stopped, and Lucian stopped beside him, and Fang, who had spent the last half hour crashing through the undergrowth with the unfounded confidence of a dog who had never won an argument with a bowtruckle, came panting up and sat down heavily on Lucian's foot.
"Yeh come by later," Hagrid said, looking down at him, one great hand already lifting in a wave he had not quite committed to yet. "If yeh still want ter talk about the centaurs. I'll be in. I know yeh've been askin', an' I still reckon it's better we go together than yeh go pokin' about on yer own. They're not..." He searched for a word, and his beard moved as he chewed it over. "They're not like the ones yeh've told me about, Lucian. Not as... well. Not as friendly, I'll put it that way. Best I make the introductions. Fang'll be glad of the company, if yeh come down after supper."
"I'll come," Lucian said. He scratched Fang between the ears until the boarhound's back leg started up in a helpless rhythm, and then he stepped off his own foot with an apology Fang did not appear to require. "After supper. I want to hear it from you before I hear it from them."
Hagrid's face creased into that broad, pleased look he got whenever Lucian treated a bit of his knowledge as if it were worth walking back down the hill for. "Righ' then. After supper." He hesitated, as if there were something else he might say, and then he only clapped Lucian once, very carefully, on the shoulder, which made Lucian's knees consider their options, and turned away toward the hut with Fang trotting after him, and Lucian was left at the edge of the forest with the afternoon wide open in front of him and the castle standing against the sky at the top of the grounds, its windows catching what was left of the light.
He started up the slope.
He was in no particular hurry. The long dark coat hung open over his shirt, and the chain of the locket lay where it always lay, a narrow familiar weight across his chest, and the scratch on his hand had already closed itself to a thin pink line. He walked the way he always walked when he was coming back from the trees, at his own pace, with his hands in his pockets and his mind still half in the forest, turning over the morning the way he would later turn over the notes for Snape: the trail, the broken branches, the place where the light had come down in a long pale column and Hagrid had gone very quiet, because even Hagrid went quiet for unicorns.
It was only when he had come up past the vegetable patches and the first stretch of lawn, and the Quidditch pitch had swung into view off to his left, that he realized something was wrong.
There was no sound.
He had not been listening for the match, not really. He had known it was on, in the vague way he knew most of the school's Saturday arrangements, which was to say that someone, probably Pansy, had mentioned it at breakfast in a tone that suggested he ought to care, and he had not particularly cared, because he did not play, and did not enjoy watching other people play at speeds he found faintly embarrassing. But there should have been sound. There should have been the roar of the stands, and the sharp carrying shout of a commentator, and the crack of a bat, and all the rest of that ridiculous, wonderful noise that filled the grounds on match days and made the castle feel, for a few hours, as if it had been built for something less complicated.
The pitch was empty.
The stands sat in the afternoon light with nobody in them. A few scarlet flags hung limp along the Gryffindor side, and a couple of abandoned cushions had been left on a bench as if their owners had meant to come back, and the hoops stood at either end of the field, the grass beneath them unmarked by any landing. There was no one on a broom. There was no one on the pitch at all. Lucian stopped walking, and looked at it, and felt the first small, unpleasant shift of attention, the way you feel a change in the wind before you can name it.
He looked up at the castle.
It was not empty. He could see that even from here. Figures moved in the courtyard and along the open walk at the top of the steps, too many of them, and not in the loose, cheerful scatter of a Saturday, and as he started walking again, faster now, he began to hear what the pitch had not given him: a low, overlapping murmur, the sound of a great many people saying the same thing to one another and not quite believing it.
He came up through the courtyard and went in under the entrance arch with mud still on his boots.
The entrance hall was full.
Not the organised fullness of a feast, or the tired fullness at the end of one, but the wrong kind, the kind that collected when something had happened and nobody had yet been told where to stand. First-years were bunched in little pale groups near the stairs, some of them crying, some of them trying very hard not to. A knot of Hufflepuffs stood under the hourglasses with their arms folded, talking in low, fierce voices. Prefects moved through the crowd with the stiff walk of people who had been given a job and not enough information to do it. Lucian saw Oliver Wood on the far side of the hall, still in his Quidditch robes, his hair flattened on one side where a helmet had been, talking at McGonagall with both hands, and McGonagall was listening with her mouth very thin, and then she put a hand up and Wood stopped talking, and she said something Lucian could not hear, and Wood's shoulders went down as if someone had let the air out of him.
Lucian came in a few steps and stopped beside the door, and the murmur moved around him without quite touching him. He caught pieces of it as it went past.
"—two of them, that's what I heard—"
"—in a corridor, near the library, they said, just lying there—"
"—the match was about to start, Wood had us in the air and everything, and then—"
"—like the others. Just like the others. Their eyes were open—"
He felt his jaw tighten. He had been in the forest. He had been following a unicorn's trail and listening to Hagrid talk about the way the bracken came back after a hard winter, and while he had been doing that, it had happened again, up here, in the corridors, in the place he had promised his sister he would come to, and he had not been here.
It was a stupid thought. He knew that. He could not have been standing in every corridor in the castle, and he did not even know, not for certain, what he would have done if he had been. But it sat in him anyway, hard and unwelcome, and he was still standing there with it when Professor McGonagall's voice cut across the hall, sharp enough to lift every head that was not already lifted.
"That will do. All of you. This is not a theatre, and you are not an audience. Prefects, I want every student who does not have a specific reason to be here back to their common rooms at once. Five points from Hufflepuff, Mr Macmillan, for arguing with a prefect, and five points from Gryffindor, Miss Brown, for exactly the same piece of foolishness. You may discuss this calamity in your own houses, quietly, and you will not crowd the corridors while Madam Pomfrey is trying to do her work. Move."
The hall began, reluctantly, to move. Lavender Brown went very pink and went. A Hufflepuff boy Lucian thought must be Macmillan shut his mouth and followed, looking furious. Wood was still standing where McGonagall had left him, staring at the floor. Lucian started across toward the dungeon stairs, because if something had happened he wanted it from his own house first, and he wanted it from someone who would tell him the truth without making a speech about it, and he was halfway to the arch when a voice said his name, not loudly, and he turned.
Pansy Parkinson was standing at the edge of the stair, a little apart from a cluster of Slytherin girls being shepherded downward by Evangeline Travers, and she was not looking like herself. Pansy always looked like herself. It was one of the more reliable facts of the house. She wore her hair as if she had won an argument with it, and stood as if the floor had been arranged for her convenience, and she spoke, even when she was being kind, which was not often, as if she were already slightly disappointed in you. She did not look like that now. Her arms were wrapped around herself, tight, and her face, which was usually so carefully arranged, had the stripped, unguarded look of a person who had not had time to decide how she wanted to be seen. Her eyes, when they met Lucian's, were red at the edges, and she did not try to hide it.
"Pansy," he said.
She came away from the stair and stopped in front of him, and for a moment she only looked at him, at the mud on his boots, at the scratch on his hand, at his face, as if she were trying to remember how to begin.
"You're back," she said. "Of course you are. You would be out there, wouldn't you, with him, on today of all days." It was not quite an accusation. It did not have the energy for that. "You haven't heard."
"I heard enough," Lucian said. He kept his voice level. "There was another attack. Two people, from the sound of it. They're saying it like the others." He watched her face. "Who?"
Pansy's mouth tightened. She looked past him, once, at the hall, at McGonagall moving a knot of first-years toward the Grand Staircase with the implacable efficiency of a woman who would have organised a shipwreck, and then she looked back at him, and when she spoke her voice was smaller than he was used to, and very careful, as if the names themselves might do some further damage if they were said too loudly.
"Vivienne," she said. "They found Vivienne."
The hall did not go quiet. The hall could not have gone quiet; there were too many people in it, and too many of them were still talking. But something in Lucian went quiet, a sudden clean dropping-away of everything he had been turning over on the walk up from the forest, the unicorn, the centaurs, the notes for Snape, the pleasant tiredness in his legs. He stood there with it gone, and looked at Pansy, and she nodded, once, as if he had asked her to confirm it, though he had not said anything at all.
"Malfoy," she added, unnecessarily, and then, because she seemed to feel that the rest of it had to be said or it would hang there between them, "and Granger. Hermione Granger. They found them together, I think, or nearly. Near the library. That's what Travers said. They're in the hospital wing. Both of them. Like the others. Eyes open. Petrified." She said Granger's name the way she might have mentioned a piece of furniture broken in the same accident, a fact that belonged to the report and did not require anything further from her, and then her voice, which had been doing its best to stay even, caught very slightly on the next breath. "Vivienne, though. Lucian. It's Vivienne."
He heard her. He heard all of it. The second name sat in him as information, and he would think about it later, about Granger, who had organised half the second year into teaching themselves Defence, and who had never been afraid to look at him, and who was now lying somewhere upstairs with her eyes open and her body gone to stone. But it was the first name that had done the work. Vivienne Malfoy, who sat in the window of the Slytherin common room with a book and a look that measured everything. Vivienne, who had rebuked her sister on his behalf in September, and who had written to her mother, and who had told Draca, if Pansy's version of that story was even halfway true, to go on bothering him if it made her happy. Vivienne, who was the heir of her house, and four years into this castle, and careful, and who should not have been in a corridor alone with whatever had been walking it.
"Where's Draca?" he said.
Pansy shut her eyes for a second, as if she had been waiting for the question and had still not wanted to hear it.
"The common room," she said. "She went down as soon as they told us. I went with her. I tried to—" She stopped, and opened her eyes, and gave a small, helpless little shrug that did not suit her at all. "She won't talk. She hasn't said a word since we got there. She isn't crying. She isn't doing anything. She's just sitting. I didn't know if I should leave her. Travers made me come up because someone had to tell the rest of the house what was going on, and I thought, if you were back, if you were—" She looked at him, and there was something almost like an appeal in it, quickly covered. "You should go down. She won't talk to me. She might not talk to you either. But you should go."
"I will," Lucian nodded.
He was already moving. Pansy fell into step beside him, and then she seemed to remember that she had been sent to do a job, and she stopped, and he looked back at her from a lower step, and she said, very quietly, "She looks awful, Lucian. I thought you should know that before you went in."
"I know," he said, though he did not, not yet, and he went on down, into the dungeons, with the sound of the entrance hall fading above him and the cold of the stone coming up through the soles of his boots, and the name Vivienne still sitting in the quiet place that had opened in his chest, and the other name, Draca, walking ahead of him down the stairs like a door he would have to open.
The stone wall of the Slytherin common room opened for him the way it always did, without a password, with that low, heavy grind of old rock making up its mind, and the green-lit quiet of the place came out to meet him, and Lucian stepped through and stopped.
He had seen the room in a number of moods. He had seen it loud, and he had seen it cruel, and he had seen it, on Christmas night, ordinary and warm and full of people who did not know what to do with a letter in his hand. He had never seen it like this. The fire was burning, the same low green fire it always burned, and the lake was pressing its slow weight against the high windows the way it always did, and none of that was any help, because the people in the room were standing and sitting as if someone had taken all the sound out of them and left the bodies behind. Warrington and two of the fifth-years were at their usual table, cards in their hands, not playing. Harper was on the arm of a chair, looking at the floor. A cluster of girls had gathered near the far sofa and then seemed not to know what to do once they had got there. Cassian Avery stood by the fire with his arms folded and his mouth shut. Nobody looked at Lucian when he came in, and then everybody did, all at once, a quick, almost unwilling turning toward him, as if they had been waiting for someone who might know what to do, and then a turning away again, because he was twelve, and muddy, and not, after all, going to be that person.
He did not have to ask where she was.
Draca was in the window.
It was the same seat Vivienne used, the one along the glass where the lake came up green and close and made a person look as if they were sitting at the bottom of the world, and Draca was in it with her feet on the stone and her back against the frame and her hands in her lap, and she was not doing anything at all. Her pale hair was still pinned up the way it had been at breakfast. Her robes were neat. Her face, which Lucian had seen in a dozen kinds of fury and scorn and, once or twice, in a kind of unwilling, startled softness she would have hexed him for noticing, was empty. Not calm. Empty. The way a room is empty after everyone has gone out of it and left the furniture standing. She was looking at the lake, or toward the lake, and her eyes were open, and if she had blinked since she sat down, Lucian could not have sworn to it.
Nott was standing a little way off from the window, close enough to have tried, not close enough to be accused of hovering. He saw Lucian, and something like relief moved through his face, and then something like a warning, and he came across the rug and stopped at Lucian's shoulder and spoke without looking at the window, very low.
"She hasn't said anything," Nott said. "Pansy told you?"
"She told me."
"I tried. Avery tried. One of the girls tried to get her to go upstairs and lie down. She just sat down there and that was it." Nott's voice had a frayed edge Lucian had not heard before. "It's Vivienne, Lucian. I keep thinking I've got that wrong, and then I haven't. They took her up to the hospital wing on a stretcher. I didn't see her. Warrington did. He said she looked—" He stopped, and shook his head once, sharply, as if the rest of the sentence were a thing he would not let out of his mouth. "Pomfrey's got her. And Granger. I thought you'd want to know that too."
"I know," Lucian said. "Thank you, Theo."
Nott looked at him for a moment longer, as if there were more he might say, and then he only nodded and went back toward the fire, and the room, which had been watching them without quite admitting it, turned itself away again, and Lucian was left with the window, and the lake, and the girl who would not talk.
He walked over.
He did not hurry, and he did not try to make the walk into anything other than what it was. He came up to the seat and stood there for a second, looking down at her, and she did not look up. The green light from the water moved faintly across her face. Her hands were very still in her lap, the fingers loose, not clenched, which somehow made it worse. Lucian had seen her clenched. He knew what to do with that. This was something else.
He sat down.
There was room enough, just, if he sat at the other end of the seat, with a stretch of cold stone between them, and he took it, and set his boots together, and let the mud flake quietly onto the floor, and he did not speak at once, because he had the sense, sitting there, that a word dropped too quickly would go straight through her and out the other side and be of no use to anyone.
The lake did what the lake always did. It was a long, slow, indifferent movement, a shifting of green and darker green, and once a pale shape drifted past in the deep, too far down to name. Draca watched it, or did not watch it. Her shoulder, nearest to him, was so still he couldn't see her breathing.
"Draca," he said, at last, and kept his voice even, and not particularly gentle, because gentleness from him would have been a costume she had never seen him wear, and he thought it would only startle her, if she was in a place where startling was still possible. "It's Lucian."
Nothing.
He had not expected an answer, not really. Pansy had told him. Nott had told him. Telling yourself you are prepared for silence was not the same as experiencing it. The rest of the room was hushed, for they didn't know what to say. This was a person who had gone somewhere and shut the door.
"I was in the forest," he said, after another minute. "With Hagrid. I didn't know until I got back. I came as soon as Pansy told me." He looked at her, at the pale line of her cheek, at the place where her mouth was set, not tightly, only as if she had forgotten she had one. "She's in the hospital wing. Vivienne. She's not—" He stopped, and chose the next words the way he would have chosen a step on bad ice. "She's not dead, Draca. It's the same as the others. Petrified. Pomfrey will have her."
Her eyelids moved, once. It was the only sign he got that she had heard him, and even that might have been the light. She did not turn her head. She did not open her mouth. The hands in her lap did not stir.
Lucian sat back against the stone and let his breath out slowly through his nose, and looked at the lake because looking at her for too long felt like a kind of staring she had not given him permission for, and he tried to think of what he was supposed to do. He wasn't good at this. He knew it. He had never claimed to be. At home there had been people for this, older people, people who knew how to sit with grief without needing it to do something for them. He had sat by a bed himself, for a long time, in a room he chose not to talk about, and he had learned, there, that talking did not always help, and that silence, if you offered it honestly, was sometimes the only decent thing you had. He had not expected to be using that particular lesson in Scotland, on a girl who ordinarily could not stop walking up to him and starting a fight.
He could have used a fight. He would have known where to put his feet in one.
"I can take you up there," he said. "If you want to see her. I don't know if Pomfrey will let us in. I can try. You shouldn't have to walk it on your own."
Nothing.
"Or you can stay here. That's all right too. I'm not going to drag you anywhere." He turned his head and looked at her properly, and what he saw was not pretty, and he did not look away from it. There was no performance in her face at all. The pride had gone, and the temper, and the bright, sharp, needling thing she used on him the way other people used a wand, and what was left was a girl of twelve who had been told that her sister had been found in a corridor with her eyes open and her body gone to stone, and who had no idea, just at present, how to be a Malfoy about it, or a Slytherin, or anything else. She looked cold. She looked as if someone had reached into her and turned a key, and locked everything, and walked off with it. "Draca. Say something. Even if it's that you want me to go. I'll go, if you say it."
She did not say it. She did not say anything. A faint tremor moved through the fingers of her right hand and then went still again, and that was all.
From the fire, someone dropped a cup, or set one down too hard, and the small sound of it went across the room and died, and nobody spoke. Lucian was aware of them, of Nott standing with his arms folded and his eyes on the floor, of Avery pretending to watch the fire, of the girls near the sofa looking and then not looking, and he did not care what any of them thought of him sitting here. He had baited this girl since September. He had wiped spider silk on her friend's sleeve and laughed at her and called her Malfoy in a tone designed to get a rise, and she had come after him every time, chin up, mouth sharp, wanting, though she would have died before she said so, to be taken seriously. He could not take her seriously now in any of the ways she had wanted. He could only sit, with mud on his boots and a closed scratch on his hand, and keep the space beside her from being empty.
He sat there for a long time.
He did not try again, not with questions. Questions were a kind of knocking, and she had already not come to the door. Once, without thinking about it very much, he took his coat off and folded it, and set it on the stone between them, not quite touching her, in case the cold of the window was part of what was on her, and she did not reach for it, and she did not push it away. The lake went on with its slow green business. A bubble rose and broke against the glass. Lucian found himself thinking, of all things, of the letter in December, and of Draca prancing across the rug after him with her chin high, and of the one word he had given her, and of how she had stood in front of the wall afterward with her mouth open. He would have given a good deal, sitting there, to have that girl back, the one who wanted something from him even if she would not name it. This one did not want anything. That was the part that sat wrongly in him. Draca Malfoy had always wanted something.
"She's going to come back," he said, sometime later, and he did not know if he was saying it for her or for himself. "The others will. Nick. The cat. Creevey. Justin. It isn't death. I know it looks like it. I know it feels like it. It isn't." He heard how little the words were, and he let them stand anyway, because they were true, and truth was all he had that would not have been an insult. "When she does, she's going to be furious that she missed this. You know she is. She'll have a look. That look of hers. And she'll tell you that you sat in her seat."
It was a stupid thing to say. He had meant it as a kind of ordinary light, a thing she might have recognised, and it went into the same silence as everything else, and he shut his mouth and chose not to be clever again.
The afternoon had begun to thin at the windows. The green of the lake deepened a shade, as it did when the sun moved off the water somewhere far above them, and the fire behind them took on a little more of the work of lighting the room. People had started, very quietly, to move again, in the small, shamefaced way of a house that could not stay frozen forever. Someone put a kettle on in the corner. Harper began, tentatively, a game of chess with himself. Nott remained where he was and did not come over.
Lucian looked at Draca once more, and then he did the only other thing he could think of, which was to stay until staying itself had become a fact, a solid, unremarkable fact, like the stone under them and the glass at their backs, so that whenever she came back from wherever she had gone, if she came back, she would not have to remember that she had been alone for it.
He didn't know how long it was. Long enough for the light to change. Long enough for Pansy to return, and stop in the doorway, and see them, and go over to Nott without coming to the window, which Lucian thought was the kindest thing she had done all day.
At some point Draca's hands moved. She folded them together, tightly, the first deliberate motion he had seen from her since he sat down, and she held them that way, white at the knuckles, and she still chose not speak, and still did not look at him, and he understood, with a clarity that was not kind, that this was as much as she was going to give, and that asking for more would only be for his sake, so that he could feel he had done something, and he would not do that to her.
He stood up.
The coat he left where it was, on the stone between them, in case she wanted it later, or wanted to throw it on the floor, which would at least have been something. He stood in front of her for a moment, not blocking the lake, only there, and he said, quietly, and only for her,
"I'm going to come back. You don't have to talk then either. I'm going anyway." He paused, and added, because it seemed important that someone say her sister's name in this window as if it still belonged to a person and not a piece of news, "Vivienne isn't alone up there. I'll see her. When I can. I wanted you to know that."
Draca's mouth moved. For a fraction of a second he thought she was going to speak, and everything in him leaned toward it, and then the movement ended, and her lips closed again, and whatever word had been there, if it had been a word at all, went back down inside her and was locked away with the rest of it, and she looked at the water, and Lucian stood there a moment longer, and then he nodded, once, as if she had answered him, and he turned, and he walked away from the window.
Nott took a step toward him as he passed the fire, and Lucian shook his head, not unkindly, and Nott stopped, and Pansy, who was standing with her arms still around herself, met Lucian's eyes and did not ask, and he was grateful to her for that, and he went to the wall, and the stone opened, and he went out into the corridor and let the door close behind him, and then he stood for a little while in the cold of the dungeon passage with his hand on the wall, and he let himself feel, properly, how little he had been able to do, and how much he hated that, and how the thing walking this castle had now taken a girl he had been watching since September, and had reached, through her, into a girl he had been circling since the train, and had left them both in a silence he did not know how to break.
He was going to have to do something about that. He did not know what, not yet. He knew, as he had known since the autumn, more than he could prove. He knew what Dobby had let slip under the stands, and what his own two great serpents had hinted, in the way of old creatures who did not like to say too much about a sibling, and he knew the sound of the voice in the walls. Knowing was not the same as having a place to put your hands.
He pushed himself off the wall and went up, because staying in the passage would only make him angry in a way that was of no use to Draca, and because he had told Hagrid he would come after supper, and because the idea of sitting in the Great Hall with a plate in front of him and the whole school talking around the same two names seemed, just then, more than he was willing to do.
He did not go to supper.
He walked instead, for a while, through the quieter corridors the prefects had already emptied, and once he passed Professor Sinistra coming down from the tower with her arms full of charts and her face very drawn, she nodded to him and did not stop, and once he turned a corner and found the library corridor roped off, a faded burgundy cord strung between two suits of armour, and a first-year prefect standing beside it who looked as if he would rather have been anywhere else. Lucian did not ask to go through. He stood and looked at the empty flagstones beyond the cord, and at the place, just visible, where the light fell a little differently, as if something very cold had been there and had only just gone, and then he turned away, and went down, and out, and across the darkening grounds, toward the one door in this place that had never yet asked him to be anything other than what he was.
The sky over the forest had gone the colour of iron. The abandoned flags on the Quidditch stands moved a little, in a wind that had come up while he was underground, and the hut at the edge of the trees had its windows lit, a low gold that ought to have been a comfort, and Lucian walked toward it with his hands in his pockets and no coat, because he had left the coat in a window with a girl who would not talk, and he told himself, coming down the last of the slope, that he was only going because of the centaurs, and because he had said he would, and he almost believed it.
He came up to the door and lifted his hand to knock, and inside, before his knuckles touched the wood, he heard voices that were not Hagrid's.
---
Harriet Potter had not, until this year, understood how many ways a day could go wrong before the sun had even finished coming down, and she walked across the darkening grounds with that thought sitting sourly in her mind and Ron's elbow jammed against her ribs, both of them inside the close, dusty-smelling dark of the Invisibility Cloak, which had never been meant for two people trying to move at the same speed and was making a poor job of pretending otherwise.
"Watch my foot," Ron muttered, for the third time. "You're on my foot again."
"You're on my foot," Harriet whispered back. "Move left."
"If I move left, I'll be in the pumpkin patch. I'm not explaining that to Hagrid, a pair of floating pumpkins; he'll think we've been hexed."
"Just walk, Ron."
They walked. The cloak brushed the grass and caught, once, on a thistle, and Harriet reached back without looking and freed it, her fingers doing the work while her mind, which had not been still since the afternoon, went on turning over the same small, useless heap of facts. Hermione was in the hospital wing. Hermione, who had been beside her at breakfast, talking about the match and about a footnote she said McGonagall had got slightly wrong in Thursday's class, which Harriet had believed, because Hermione was generally right about footnotes. Hermione, who had organised the Defence group and made Neville come and told Seamus to stop setting his notes on fire, and who had been, this morning, entirely herself, and who was now lying upstairs with her eyes open and a look on her face that Madam Pomfrey would not let them see for more than a minute, and even that minute had been too long. They had gone up as soon as they could get away from McGonagall. Pomfrey had stood in the doorway of the ward and told them they could look, but not touch, and not make a racket; Hermione had been on the nearest bed, and on the bed after that, under a green blanket that did not belong on a Malfoy, had been Vivienne, pale and still and staring at the ceiling.
Harriet had stood there with her hands in fists and had not cried, because crying would not have moved anything, and because there was a feeling in her, old and flat and familiar, that crying was what you did when you had already accepted a thing, and she had not accepted this. She had looked at Hermione's hand, which was closed, and at the way a curl had fallen across Hermione's forehead, and she had thought, quite clearly, I am going to find it, and she had not known, in that moment, whether she meant the monster or the person walking it or the wretched little book that was no longer in her trunk.
The book. That was the other wrong thing, the one that had come first, before today, and had been sitting in her like a stone ever since. Someone had gone through their dormitory. Someone had opened her trunk and put everything back almost as it had been, almost, and the diary had not been there. She had looked for it until her hands shook, under the bed and in Ron's things, with his permission and a great deal of muttering, and in the common room. She did not know who had taken it, or why, and she had not told McGonagall, because what would she have said? Please, Professor, someone has stolen a blank book that was not mine to begin with and that I have been writing in as if it were a person. It sounded mad even inside her own head. The voice that sometimes sat behind her thoughts had been very quiet about the diary, and then, this afternoon, not quiet at all, a sharp, wordless push of attention that had made her look up in the entrance hall and lose the thread of what Ron was saying, and she had muttered, "I know, I know," under her breath before she had quite realised she was doing it, and Ron had said, "You know what?" and she had said, "Nothing. The stairs. Watch the stairs."
She watched the grounds instead, now, what little of them she could see through the gap at the front of the cloak, the dark lift of the forest, the gold of Hagrid's windows, the faint, useless shapes of the Quidditch hoops against the last of the sky. The match had never happened. Wood had been white in the hall. The whole day had been taken apart and put back in the wrong order, and they were walking down through the wreck of it to ask Hagrid a question Harriet was no longer sure he could answer, because they had to ask someone, and Hagrid, at least, had never looked at her as if she were a puzzle that might be safer unsolved.
"If he's not in," Ron whispered, "I'm not standing out here all night. My mum'll kill me if I catch a cold and then get eaten."
"He's in," Harriet said. "The windows are lit. And Fang's barking."
The sound of fang came rolling across the pumpkin patch, deep and joyful and entirely unsuited to the day, and then they were at the door, and Harriet, after a second's thought, knocked, because walking into Hagrid's hut invisible seemed like a poor way to ask a man for help, and then she pulled the cloak around the two of them tighter as the door opened, and they slipped in under Hagrid's elbow in a quick, awkward rustle, and stood to the left of the fireplace, in the crowded shadow between a hanging ham and a chair that had been mended with string, and Hagrid looked out into the evening with Fang shoving past his knees
He looked down, then to either side, then, very slowly, at Fang, who'd stopped barking and was sniffing with great interest at a point in the air about two feet off the floor. Hagrid's face did a complicated thing that ended in grim, fond resignation, and he shut the door and said, to the room at large, "Yeh'd better come out, then. I know that cloak when I smell it, an' so does Fang."
Harriet pulled the cloak off. Ron came out of it a second later, red to the ears, and Fang, delighted, licked his knee and collapsed on the hearthrug with a groan.
"Thought so," Hagrid said, and went to the kettle, because Hagrid, even tonight, was never a man who could stand by and not offer tea. There was a trunk open at the foot of his enormous bed, with a great knitted jumper in it, a biscuit tin, a book with a broken spine, and he moved around it with the stiff, too-careful walk of someone hoping a job he hated would change its mind if he went slowly enough.
"Hagrid," Harriet said, "what's the trunk for?"
"Never yeh mind the trunk." He set out three mugs the size of buckets. "Yeh've seen her, then? Hermione?"
"Pomfrey let us look," Ron said. "For about a minute. She's got this face like she was in the middle of working something out."
"Course she was." Hagrid's voice roughened. "Little Hermione, always a question, always said please when she asked it. An' the Malfoy girl, the older one. I don' care whose daughter she is, she's a child, an' she shouldn' be lyin' up there like that."
Harriet sat on the edge of a chair that had never been built for anyone her size and made herself say it plainly. "Hagrid, we know you didn't do it. Fifty years ago. We know it wasn't you."
He went very still with the teapot in his hand. "Who told yeh about fifty years ago?"
"Nobody, properly. That's the problem. Everyone says it sideways." She'd been turning it over all afternoon, the way she'd learned to work at a problem that refused to sit still for the first answer. A girl had died. Hagrid had been blamed and expelled, then kept on by Dumbledore, which no one did for a guilty man. If Hagrid hadn't opened the Chamber, then whoever had might be doing it again, or might have left something behind. It was a clean line, as far as it went, and it stopped dead at who, and how, and where her diary had gone. "If it wasn't you, you know what it actually was. What got out. What they blamed on you."
Hagrid put the teapot down. He looked at the fire, then at Fang, then at the trunk, and something in his big bearded face gave way a little, the way a dam gives before it breaks.
"I'm not s'posed ter—" He rubbed the back of his head. "Dumbledore said it'd only make things worse, me talkin'. But yeh're right. It weren't me, an' it weren't him neither, the poor thing they blamed alongside me. He'd never've hurt a soul. What was really doin' it, back then, was—"
Fang's head came up off the rug.
Hagrid stopped. His eyes went to the window, where a lantern was swinging up the path, and then a second light behind it, and his whole body changed, the roughness packed away under something careful and frightened.
"Under the cloak," he said. "Now. Both of yeh. Not a word, whatever happens, yeh hear me? Not one."
"Hagrid, what was doing it—"
"Harriet." It was the first time he'd ever used her name like an order. "Please."
She swung the cloak over them both. Ron pressed in close against her shoulder, and they backed into the corner by the dresser just as someone knocked, three firm, official knocks, nothing like a student's. Ron mouthed a word his mother wouldn't have liked, and Hagrid straightened, very slowly, and stared at the door as if it had personally offended him.
"Just a minute," he called, and his voice had changed. The roughness was still there, but it had been put away, packed down under something more careful. He glanced once at the corner by the dresser, where nothing at all could be seen, and then he went to the door and opened it, and the evening came in, and with it two men. Cornelius Fudge, in a pinstriped cloak and a lime-green bowler hat, stepped over the threshold with the hurried, important air of a person who has been thinking about his entrance all the way down the hill, and just behind him, in a dark travelling cloak, with his half-moon spectacles catching the firelight, came Albus Dumbledore, who looked, Harriet thought, not pleased to be making this particular visit, and very, very tired.
"Hagrid," said Cornelius Fudge, and he took off the bowler, and held it against his chest, and then seemed not to know what to do with it, and put it back on, slightly crooked. "Hagrid, my dear fellow. May I come in? I see I already have. Yes. Thank you." He came in a few more steps, and Fang, who had no love of the hat, gave a low, uncertain woof, and Fudge eyed him and moved a little closer to the table. "I am sorry to call so late. Very sorry. This is not a visit I should have liked to make. But you will understand, I am sure, that the Ministry has a duty in circumstances of this kind, and that I, as Minister, have a particular duty, and that sometimes that duty is not a pleasant one."
Dumbledore came in after him, and he stood for a moment taking in the room, the trunk, Fudge's crooked hat, the fire, and his gaze, passing over the corner by the dresser, never paused, never narrowed, and gave Harriet not even the smallest sign that he'd seen them. She hadn't known, until that second, how much she'd been expecting him to see. He always seemed to see. He missed this. The cloak held, and she was, for the first time all day, fiercely glad of it, because if Dumbledore had told them to go back to the castle she wasn't sure she would have gone, and she didn't want to find out how it would feel to refuse him.
"Good evening, Hagrid," Dumbledore said. His voice was mild, and it filled the hut the way it filled the Great Hall, without needing to be raised.
Hagrid hadn't moved from the door. He looked down at Fudge, and then at Dumbledore, and a flicker of something that might have been hope crossed his face, and then he looked at the open trunk, and back at the two of them, and his great hands, at his sides, had curled slowly into fists and then opened again, as if he had caught them at it.
"Evenin', Minister," he said, very quietly. "Professor. I s'pose yeh'd better come and sit down, then. Kettle's just boiled."
"Tea," Fudge said, with a grateful little laugh that didn't last. "Yes. Tea would be... yes." He took a step toward the nearest chair, realised it was Hagrid's chair, and would have swallowed him, and chose, after a brief, unhappy calculation, to remain standing, turning the brim of the bowler in his hands. His eyes went around the hut, over the hanging hams, the pink umbrella, the fire, the place where Harriet and Ron were standing, and passed over them without a hitch, and Harriet, who'd been holding her breath, let it out as slowly as she could and felt Ron do the same. "You will have heard, of course, about the afternoon's unfortunate... that is to say, the attacks. Two more children. A terrible business. A terrible, terrible business. The Malfoy girl, no less, and Miss Granger. Petrified, both of them, as I understand it, like the others. The school is, as you can imagine, in a state of considerable concern, and the Ministry, naturally, shares that concern, and must be seen to share it, which is not the same thing, I grant you, but is not nothing, Hagrid."
Hagrid closed the door. He set it very carefully into its frame, and then he went to the teapot, and poured, and the sound of the tea going into the mug was very loud in the hut, and Harriet watched his back and thought, with a sudden, cold clarity, that the trunk at the end of the bed wasn't a man packing for a holiday.
"Yeh've come ter take me," Hagrid said, without turning. "Haven' yeh."
Fudge made a small, pained noise, as if someone had stepped on his foot. "I would not put it so bluntly. I would not, if I had my way, be putting it at all. But you must see the position, Hagrid. You must. Fifty years ago, when the Chamber of Secrets was opened the last time, you were, as the records have it, the student held responsible. You were expelled. A child died. And now the Chamber has been opened again, and the attacks have begun again, and I am being asked, in every owl that lands on my desk and every Prophet I am unfortunate enough to open, what the Ministry intends to do about it. I cannot say 'wait and see.' I cannot say 'Dumbledore has the matter in hand,' though I have, I assure you, a great respect for Dumbledore, a very great respect. I must be seen to act. And so I have come, myself, in person, to ask you to accompany me, as a precaution, you understand, a precaution only, until this dreadful business can be... resolved."
Hagrid turned around. He had a mug in each hand, and he set one on the table near Fudge, and kept the other, and his face, in the firelight, was the saddest Harriet had ever seen it, and also, underneath the sadness, a kind of exhausted unsurprise, as if he had been waiting for this particular knock for a long time, and had hoped, without really believing, that it might never come.
"A precaution," he said. "Yeh mean Azkaban."
Fudge looked at the mug, and at his bowler, and at a point on the wall just to the left of Hagrid's head. "It is the usual place, in a matter of this seriousness, for a person to be held. You would be treated... that is to say, the Dementors are not... it would only be until we can be certain. I am sure it will not be for long. I am sure of it."
Harriet felt Ron's hand close hard on her wrist, under the cloak. She didn't need the warning. She'd gone very still herself. Azkaban. The word had a cold in it that she had felt once before, in a different kind of conversation, the sort that happened in the dark when she was younger and a voice she never named had spoken about prisons, and about what a man became when he was left too long in one, and she hadn't understood it then, not fully, and she understood enough of it now to know that Hagrid had no business going there, and that Fudge, turning his hat in his hands in this warm little hut, couldn't bring himself to think too carefully about what he was asking.
"I have just come from the hospital wing," Dumbledore said. He looked at Hagrid when he said it, and his face, in that look, was very kind, and very grave. "Madam Pomfrey has made Miss Malfoy and Miss Granger as comfortable as she can. They are not in pain, Hagrid. I thought you would want to know that."
Hagrid's eyes had gone wet and bright. He nodded, once, and looked down at the mug in his hands, and said, hoarsely, "Thank yeh. I did want ter know that. I did."
"As for the rest," Dumbledore said, and now he turned the mildness on Fudge, and the mildness wasn't, Harriet thought, quite as mild as it had been, "we may speak of precautions in a moment. I would prefer, Cornelius, that we not speak of them as if they were already facts."
Fudge opened his mouth. He never got the chance to use it.
The next knock wasn't like the first. It was a sharp, impatient rap, the knock of a man who never expected to be kept waiting on a gamekeeper's step, and who'd come down the hill with a piece of parchment in his hand and a temper already well alight, and Hagrid, who had just begun to look as if the evening might, with Dumbledore in it, be survivable, closed his eyes for a second, and went, once more, to the door.
Lucius Malfoy didn't wait to be invited in.
He came over the threshold in a sweep of black and pale hair, his walking stick striking once against the boards, his face drawn in a way Harriet had never seen in Diagon Alley, and not on the platform, and not in any of the cool, contemptuous looks he had ever given her family from a distance. He looked, she thought, like a man who had been frightened, and had decided that the only decent thing to do with fear was to turn it into anger and throw it at the nearest person who couldn't throw it back. His eyes found Dumbledore first, and stayed there, and the walking stick came down again, harder.
"Dumbledore," he said, and the word was no greeting at all. "I might have known I would find you here, standing in the way of what little the Ministry is still willing to do. Two children were found today. Two. And one of them, as you are perfectly aware, is my daughter."
The hut seemed to shrink around the name. Hagrid, still at the door, went very still. Fudge made a small, unhappy movement with the bowler. Dumbledore held his ground, and kept his voice down.
"I am aware, Lucius," he said. "I have come from her bedside. I am very sorry for it. Vivienne is a credit to this school, and to your house, and I will not pretend I do not feel this as I ought."
"Sorry," Lucius said. He let out a short, incredulous breath, and took another step into the room, and Harriet, pressed back against Ron in the shadow of the ham, could see the white of his knuckles on the head of the stick. "You're sorry? My heir is lying in your hospital wing with her eyes open and no wand in the world able to wake her, and you're sorry, and you are here, in this hut, while the thing that did it walks your corridors as it has walked them all year, and you have done nothing. Nothing!" He shouted, "I told the governors this would happen. They have listened, at last. I have it here." He drew a folded parchment from inside his cloak and held it up, and the seal on it caught the firelight, a smear of dark wax, official and ugly. "An order, signed by the twelve school governors, for your suspension, effective immediately. You will leave the grounds. You will leave tonight. And perhaps, when the person who ought to have been dealing with this from the beginning is no longer being hampered by your... sentimentality, this castle will stop taking its children."
Fudge had gone a peculiar colour, somewhere between the bowler and the fire. "Lucius, my dear man, I did not... that is to say, I had not been informed that the governors had already... I was coming, of course, I was coming to Hagrid, the precaution, as we discussed—"
"The precaution is the least of it," Lucius said, without looking at him. His eyes had never left Dumbledore's face. "You will accept this, Dumbledore. You will accept it, and you will go, and you will not stand in this doorway and tell me about comfort, when it is my daughter who will not wake."
Dumbledore looked at the parchment, and then at Lucius, and for a long moment he said nothing, and Harriet, watching him, thought she saw, not weakness, and not surprise, but a kind of deep, tired recognition, as if he had known the shape of this particular blow for a long time, and had hoped, as Hagrid had hoped, that it might never fall today.
"I will look at the order, Lucius," he said, at last, very quietly. "I will look at it, and I will consider what the governors have asked, and I will not do either of those things in anger, though I think, perhaps, you have earned the right to yours tonight. Vivienne—"
"Don't," Lucius seethed, and the walking stick struck the floor again, "say her name to me as if you had the keeping of it. You had the keeping of this school. That is finished."
Hagrid, who had been standing at the open door with the night at his back and a look on his face that was moving, slowly, from sadness toward a great, helpless rage, took a step forward, and Fudge said, "Now, now, there is no need, no need at all, for anyone to—" and it was in that moment, with the hut full of too many men and too much voice, the parchment still in Lucius's hand, and Dumbledore standing very straight in the firelight, that someone else knocked on the door.
It wasn't a polite knock. It wasn't a quiet one. It was four sharp, impatient raps, the knock of a person who'd come down the hill to talk about centaurs and hadn't, from the sound of it, expected to have to wait, and Hagrid, caught between the night and the room, turned with his mouth already opening to tell whoever it was to come back later, and then he saw, through the gap of the still-open door, who was standing on his step, and his face, in spite of everything, opened with a kind of wretched, automatic welcome, and he said, "Lucian," and the boy on the step, who had already begun to speak, already begun to come in, already begun to be in the hut before he had looked at it properly, looked at it properly, and stopped dead.
Lucian Bloodthorne stood on the threshold of Hagrid's hut with his hand still lifted from the door and the evening at his back, and he looked at the Minister for Magic, and at Albus Dumbledore, and at Lucius Malfoy with a parchment in his fist, and at Hagrid, who had said his name as if it might still be that kind of night, and the first word out of his mouth was no greeting at all.
"Fuck," he said, very clearly, and then, as if the word had opened a door he had been holding shut all the way down the hill, "Oh, you've got to be fucking kidding me. You've got to be."
He didn't come in at once. He stood there in the doorway in his muddy boots and his dark shirt, the long black hair pushed back from the jagged scar that ran across his face, and he looked at each of them in turn as if he were hoping, given another second, that the room might rearrange itself into something he had actually been invited to. It never did. Fudge had turned, the lime-green bowler slightly askew, his mouth already opening around a question. Lucius had gone still, the parchment halted in the air, his pale eyes narrowing as they found the boy in the door. Dumbledore's face, which had been so tired a moment before, did something small and complicated and then settled, not quite into humour, and not quite into apology, as if he would have liked, very much, to have spared this particular student this particular room.
"No," Lucian said, to no one in particular, and then, with a short, incredulous breath, "I came to talk about centaurs. Centaurs. That's all I wanted. I was going to sit down, and Hagrid was going to tell me about the herd, and I was going to drink that tea that tastes like burnt socks, and instead—" He gestured at the hut with a sharp flick of his hand. "Instead I've walked into a bloody cabinet meeting. In a hut. At night. After the day I've already had." He shut his eyes for a second, and then he opened them, and he looked at Hagrid, and his voice, when it came again, had dropped out of the swearing and into something flatter and more reluctant. "I can come back."
"Yeh can come in," Hagrid said, and there was a plea in it, under the roughness, that Lucian heard too clearly to pretend otherwise. "Please, Lucian. Yeh can come in."
Lucian stood there a moment longer, with the night behind him and a room in front of him that he wanted no part of, and then he made a sound in the throat that wasn't quite a groan and wasn't quite a sigh, and he stepped over the threshold, and he closed the door, and he walked in as if every foot of floor he took were a concession he would remember later.
Fang, who had no politics, heaved himself up from the hearth and came and shoved his head against Lucian's hip, and Lucian put a hand down and found the familiar place between the ears and kept it there.
Fudge was staring at him. It wasn't, Lucian thought, a very useful kind of staring. It was the staring of a man who has walked into a room prepared for one conversation and found another person in it who doesn't belong to the script, and who is trying, under pressure, to work out whether this is a problem or an opportunity or a boy who has simply been rude to the Minister for Magic and ought to be told off.
"Headmaster," Fudge said, at last, and his voice had gone a little high, "who is this?"
Dumbledore looked at Lucian, and there was, in the look, a flicker of something that might have been an apology, and then he said, mildly, and with the particular care he used when a name was going to change the temperature of a room,
"This is Lucian Bloodthorne, Cornelius. A second-year student of Hogwarts, of the house of Slytherin, and a member of the Bloodthorne family. Lucian, this is Cornelius Fudge, the Minister for Magic. I believe you have already met Lord Malfoy."
The name did what the name always did. Lucian watched it happen, with a tired, distant sort of attention, as if he were standing a little to one side of himself and taking notes. Fudge's face, which had been only puzzled, went through several colours in quick succession and landed on a white that went poorly with the hat. The bowler came off so fast it nearly took a lock of Fudge's hair with it. The Minister for Magic of Britain, who had come down the hill to arrest a gamekeeper, made a short, uncertain movement that was trying to decide whether it was a bow or a stagger, and the hat, having been removed, was now being turned in both hands as if it might, if wrung hard enough, produce the correct form of address.
"Bloodthorne," Fudge said, and then, "Bloodthorne. I... I had not... that is to say, I was not informed that a member of the... Your... your Majesty. Your Highness. Minister, I mean I am the Minister, you are, of course, you are—" He stopped, and made a small, helpless gesture with the bowler, and looked at Dumbledore as if the headmaster might be good enough to supply the rest of the sentence. "I had no idea. If I had known a member of the Bloodthorne family was coming, if I had been told, I would of course have... that is, the Ministry would have been honoured, deeply honoured, to... there are protocols, you understand, protocols I would not, for the world, have wished to... my dear boy, please, you must sit down, you must, I insist, I will not have you standing, not when I am... Hagrid, a chair, a chair for his... for Mr Bloodthorne, for..."
He was flailing. There was no other word for it. The titles were coming out of him in the wrong order, Majesty and Highness and Mr, and the hat was describing a small, panicky orbit between his hands, and he had, Lucian noted, with a kind of bleak amusement that never quite reached his mouth, just offered a twelve-year-old boy a seat in a hut whose chairs were built for a man the size of a small shed, while the Minister himself went on standing as if sitting in Lucian's presence might constitute a diplomatic incident.
Lucian chose not to sit. He looked at Fudge for a long moment, and then at Lucius, who hadn't bowed, and who'd kept quiet, and whose face had gone very smooth and very watchful, the face of a man rearranging a board around a piece he hadn't expected to find in this particular square, and then Lucian did something he hadn't done since he arrived at Hogwarts, not in the Great Hall, and not in Dumbledore's office, and not in any of the months of being called his Majesty by people who didn't, not really, know what they were saying.
He let them see the ring.
It had always been there. It sat on the third finger of his right hand, where it had sat since the day it was given to him, and for all these months it had gone unnoticed, not because it was small, and not because it was plain, but because it chose not to be seen, and Lucian, who had no love of the ceremonies that came with it, had been content to let that choice stand. He wasn't content now. He was standing in a hut at the edge of a forest with the Minister of this country stammering over titles, and with Lucius Malfoy holding an order to dismiss the only headmaster worth the name, and with Hagrid's trunk open at the end of the bed, and he was tired, and he was angry, and he was, beneath the tiredness and the anger, still a Bloodthorne, and there were courtesies that weren't optional, even here, even tonight, even when he would have given a good deal not to be the person who had to ask for them.
He never raised his voice. He turned his hand, slightly, in the firelight, and the notice-me-not, which had been a kind of quiet around the metal all year, fell away, and the ring was simply there, as if it had always been in the middle of the room and they had only now thought to look at it.
It wasn't a boy's ring. Even in the low gold of Hagrid's fire that much was obvious. The band was two vines of blackened silver, oxidised and old, twisting around each other the way living thorns twist, each one set with small, sharp barbs, and down the length of both vines ran a thin vein of dark red, so dark it was almost black except where the fire caught it and made it look, for a second, like something that might be moving. The seal was an oval of deep blood-red stone, nearly black at the heart, held in a worn silver bezel that had the softness of long use, and on the face of the stone, cut so fine that the fire had to find it, a rose sat under a crown, and the rose was more than a rose. Dragon wings folded into the outer petals, as if the flower and the creature had grown up together, and a dragon coiled down the stem, its tail looped around its own neck, and in its head a chip of redder stone had been set for an eye, and all of it, rose and wings and coil, was ringed with thorns. Around the rim, in letters small enough to be missed by a man who wasn't looking, ran a line of words in a tongue Fudge wouldn't have known, and wouldn't, Lucian thought, have pronounced correctly if he had tried. 'Per sanguor et spinara.' By blood and thorn.
The stone was warm against Lucian's finger. It always was. It felt like a heartbeat that wasn't quite his own.
He watched their faces as they saw it. Fudge's mouth came open and stayed that way. Lucius's eyes, which had been so smooth, sharpened and then, very slightly, widened, and his gaze went from the ring to Lucian's face and back again, as if he were trying to decide whether he had been a fool for months or whether the boy had only now chosen to become a problem. Hagrid, who had seen the locket and the Thunderbird and a good deal else, looked at the ring as if it were one more wonder that had been walking around in ordinary clothes, and his mouth, under the beard, pressed together in a way that wasn't surprise so much as a kind of grim, loyal understanding. And Dumbledore—
Harriet, from under the cloak, saw it.
She had been watching Dumbledore already, because Dumbledore was the one she couldn't quite work out, and because the ring, which she could see now as clearly as if someone had set it on the table in front of her, had appeared in the room without arriving, and she wanted to know whether he had known. She was good at faces. She had had to be, in a cupboard, and later, in rooms full of people who smiled with only their mouths. She saw the flicker. It was very small. It went through the headmaster's eyes and was gone again in the space between one breath and the next, a bare, unguarded instant of surprise, as if Albus Dumbledore, who had spoken with this boy since September, who had introduced him at the Sorting, who had offered him lemon drops and kept the Minister off the grounds at his asking, had never, in all that time, noticed the ring on his hand at all. No one else saw it. Fudge was looking at the seal. Lucius was looking at the seal. Hagrid was looking at Lucian. Harriet saw it, and filed it away, and felt Ron, beside her, staring as openly as the cloak would allow, his mouth slightly open, his earlier fury at Lucius arrested, for a second, by the simple, impossible fact of the thing on Lucian's finger.
Lucian never looked at the corner by the dresser. He looked at no one but Fudge, and then, once, at Lucius, and when he spoke his voice was quiet, and it didn't sound like a twelve-year-old boy's voice, and it didn't sound like a request.
"You'll kneel, Minister," he said. "You, and Lord Malfoy. That's the courtesy due a member of my family, and it isn't optional, and it isn't a performance I asked to give tonight, but we are going to do it properly, since you've already started in on the titles and I would rather you got at least one of them in the right order. You will kneel, and you will kiss the ring, and then we can go on with whatever this is, and I can find out why Hagrid's trunk is open." He held his hand out, not high, not theatrically, only far enough, the seal turned upward, the thorned band dark against his skin. "That isn't a suggestion."
Fudge made a sound that was trying to be a word and never quite got there. Then he went down. He went down so fast that one knee struck the board with a knock that made Fang huff, and the lime-green bowler dropped out of his hands and rolled a little way toward the fire, and he caught himself on one palm, and then, flushing a deep and patchy red, he leaned forward and pressed his lips, very briefly, to the face of the stone, and the stone was warm, and Harriet, who couldn't have said why she noticed it, thought she saw him startle at that, as if he had expected metal and found something that wasn't quite lifeless. He stayed down a second too long, and then he scrambled up again, still talking, the titles tumbling over each other in his hurry to be useful.
"Of course, of course, your Majesty, I do apologise, I had not... the light, the hut, I did not see... an honour, a very great honour, I have often said, I have said in the Wizengamot itself, that the old families, the truly old families, are the... and if I had known... please, you must sit, you must, I will stand, I insist upon standing, Hagrid, the chair, the good chair, I will not hear of you remaining on your feet after I have—"
"I'm fine standing," Lucian said, and he left the chair alone, and he looked past Fudge as if Fudge were no longer in the middle of a sentence. His eyes had already moved. "Lord Malfoy."
Lucius hadn't knelt.
He stood where he had been standing, the governors' order still in his left hand, the walking stick in his right, and his face had gone very pale and very set, and for a moment, a long enough moment that the fire had time to pop, he only looked at the boy in front of him, at the ring, at the outstretched hand, and Harriet could see the war in him, as plainly as if it had been written on the parchment he was holding. Pride, and calculation, and the old, cold instinct of a man who refused to kneel, who'd never knelt in his own drawing room, or in the Ministry, or in front of Dumbledore, and who was being asked to do it now, in a gamekeeper's hut, in front of the Minister and the headmaster and a half-giant, for a child with mud on his boots.
"I do not," Lucius said, and his voice was very careful, and very thin, "kneel as a matter of habit, Mr Bloodthorne. You will forgive me if I take a moment to consider the request."
Lucian never lowered his hand.
"It wasn't a request," he said. He waited, and the waiting was worse than a raised voice would have been, and then he added, still quietly, and with the particular, unadorned plainness he used when he had stopped being willing to play, "You can take a moment if you want, Lord Malfoy. You can take two. And then you will kneel, and you will kiss the ring, and we will not talk about whether you do that as a matter of habit, because this isn't your drawing room, and I am not one of the people you practice not kneeling on. I am being very polite about it. I can be less polite. I don't think you want me to be less polite, not tonight, and not with that piece of parchment in your hand, and not with your daughter lying upstairs in a state I have already had to sit with your other daughter about" He turned the seal a fraction, so that the dragon's red eye caught the fire. "Kneel."
Something moved in Lucius's face at the mention of Draca, a crack, very fine, in the pale set of it, and then it was gone, or almost gone, and he stood there a second longer, and Harriet thought, with a kind of distant, unwilling respect, that it cost him, and then Lucius Malfoy, who had come into the hut like a man bringing a sentence, set the walking stick against the table, and went down onto one knee, stiffly, as if the joints of it refused the decision, and he leaned forward, and he kissed the ring.
He did it quickly. He did it as if speed might make it less real. His mouth barely touched the stone, and then he was rising again, and the walking stick was back in his hand, and his face, when he had his height again, was the face of a man who would remember this, and who wouldn't, if he could help it, be made to do it twice.
Lucian lowered his hand. The ring remained visible. "All right," he said, and some of the formality went out of him, as if he had done the part he hated and would like, now, to be done with the rest. He glanced at Fudge, who was still hovering in a half-bow, the recovered bowler clutched to his chest, and then at Dumbledore, and then, last, at the open trunk. "Now. Is someone going to tell me why you're all in Hagrid's hut, or am I supposed to guess? Because I've had a long day, and I wasn't joking about the centaurs, and I would really like it if everyone who does not live here could finish their business and go back up the hill."
Nobody, for a moment, seemed eager to be the first to volunteer.
Fudge looked at Dumbledore. Dumbledore, who had watched the kneeling without comment, and whose face had settled back into its tired calm, as if the surprise Harriet had seen in it had never been there at all, looked at the parchment in Lucius's hand. Lucius, whose colour hadn't quite returned, looked at Lucian with a new and more careful attention, modestly polite now in the way a man is polite when he has just been made to do something he'd never forget, and it was Dumbledore, in the end, who spoke, as Lucian had thought he would.
"Lord Malfoy has brought an order from the school governors," Dumbledore said. He left the parchment alone. He only indicated it, a slight movement of one hand, as if the thing itself were already loud enough. "They have asked for my suspension. Lucius has been good enough to deliver the request in person, and to make his reasons clear. Two more students were petrified today. One of them is his daughter. I do not argue with his grief, or with the seriousness of what has happened. I am, as I told him before you arrived, very sorry for it."
Lucian had gone very still. He looked at the parchment, and then at Dumbledore, and the reluctant, irritated weariness he had walked in with was changing, Lucian could feel it changing, into something sharper and a good deal less willing to wait for everyone to leave.
"They're removing you," he said. It wasn't quite a question. "The governors. Because of today. Because of Vivienne." He turned his head and looked at Lucius, and there was no courtesy in the look at all. "You're taking him out of the school. Now. In the middle of this."
"The governors have lost confidence," Lucius said, and the smoothness had come back into his voice, thin and cold, as if he could recover himself by way of official language. "It is their right. It is, tonight, their duty. I would have thought even you, Mr Bloodthorne, might see that a headmaster who cannot keep the children in his care from being struck down in their own corridors has exhausted his claim upon the post. My daughter is not a point in a debate. She is lying in the hospital wing. I will not stand here and be lectured on timing by a boy who has been at this school since September."
"You're not going to like what I see," Lucian said. He looked back at Dumbledore, and the sharpness in him paused, and became, if not softer, then at least more careful, the way he was careful with the teachers he respected, which was all of them except one, and Dumbledore had always been first among those. "Do you want me to step in?"
The hut was very quiet. Fudge, who had been nodding along with Lucius in a small, automatic way, stopped nodding. Hagrid, by the table, had his mug forgotten in his hand. Harriet, under the cloak, felt Ron's fingers tighten on her wrist again, and she kept her eyes on Lucian's face, on the plain, unornamented offer of it, as if stepping in were a thing he could actually do, a lever he could actually pull, and she believed, standing there in the dark of the cloak, that he could, and that he would, if Dumbledore said yes, and she couldn't tell, just then, whether that ought to have frightened her more than it did.
Dumbledore looked at Lucian for a long moment, and the look wasn't the look he gave to boys who had offered to carry a box up a stair. It was older than that, and sadder, and, in some quiet way, almost proud, and when he answered, his voice was the same mild voice he had brought in off the step, and it never leaned on the offer, and it never treated it as a child's idea, and it didn't, Harriet thought, leave Lucian standing there feeling that he had said a foolish thing.
"If it is the will of the governors that I step down," Dumbledore said, "then I will step down. That is what the post requires of me, and I will not make a war inside this school tonight, not when the school has already been wounded enough. I am grateful to you for the asking, Lucian. I am more grateful than I will take the time, just now, to say. I need nothing from you in this. Not an intervention, and not a quarrel with Lord Malfoy on my behalf, and not any weight you should not have to lift at twelve years old, in a hut, at the end of a day like this one. I will go, if I am asked to go, and I will do it as I ought, and you will stay here, and be a student, and that, I think, is the more difficult piece of work." He inclined his head, a very small movement, and the firelight moved in his spectacles. "But thank you."
Lucian stood with that for a second, and Harriet saw his jaw work, once, as if he were biting back a second offer, or an argument, or a word he held back in front of people he didn't trust, and then he nodded, shortly, and looked away, at the trunk, at the fire, at anything that wasn't Dumbledore's kind, exhausted face, and he said, "All right. All right, then." It didn't sound all right.
Fudge, who had been turning the bowler in his hands throughout this, seemed to feel that the conversation had arrived at a place where a Minister might usefully speak, and he cleared his throat, took a step toward Hagrid, and composed his face into the particular mixture of regret and firmness that he had, Harriet suspected, practised in a glass before he came down the hill.
"Yes," Fudge said. "Yes, well. That is... that is very properly put, Albus, very properly, and I am sure the governors will... but we must, I am afraid, be getting on. Hagrid. My dear fellow. I did say, before we were... interrupted, that I would need you to come with me. The Ministry, as I explained, must be seen to act, and given the records, given the unfortunate history, it is best, it is simplest, if you accompany me tonight. A precaution. Only a precaution. I am sure it will all be cleared up in no time, no time at all, and you will be back among your pumpkins before you have even..." He trailed off, because Hagrid was looking at him, and because Lucian had turned his head, very slowly, and was looking at him too.
"Come with you," Lucian said. "Where."
Fudge blinked, as if the question were a trick. "Well, to... that is to say, in a matter of this seriousness, the usual place of holding would be... Azkaban, you understand, only until the investigations, only until we can be perfectly satisfied, a precaution, as I keep saying, I do wish I had another word for it, a precaution is all it is."
Lucian stared at him.
Harriet had seen Lucian Bloodthorne look amused, and she had seen him look bored, and she had seen him, on a Quidditch pitch, look at Lockhart as if Lockhart were a stain that had got on his day. She'd never seen him look like this. The faint, lazy humour that seemed to live in his face as a kind of default had gone out of it altogether, and what was left was older, and colder, and very still, and Fudge, who had been mid-flourish with the hat, found himself, without quite knowing how, no longer flourishing.
"What's going on," Lucian said, and it wasn't, this time, a boy asking to be caught up. "From the beginning, Minister. I want to hear you say it. Why Hagrid. Why tonight. Why Azkaban."
Fudge glanced at Dumbledore, and found no rescue there, and glanced at Lucius, who was watching Lucian now with the attention of a man who would like, very much, to know how far this was going to go, and then he said, a little too quickly, "The Chamber of Secrets was opened fifty years ago, as you may have heard, and at that time a student died, a terrible tragedy, and the student held responsible was, well, was Hagrid, who was expelled, and who has, of course, been a valued... a very valued... gamekeeper ever since, thanks to Albus, and now the Chamber has been opened again, and the attacks have begun again, and the Ministry must, you will see, the Ministry must take account of that history, and must, in the absence of any other..." He searched for a word, and found a bad one. "...candidate, must ask Hagrid to come and be held, until we can be sure. It is not a conviction. I want that understood. It is not a conviction."
"No," Lucian said. "It's just Azkaban. That's much better." He hadn't raised his voice. He didn't need to. The hut was listening to him now the way it had listened to the ring. "Let me see if I have this right, Minister. A girl died fifty years ago. A boy was expelled. The attacks stopped, and everyone was very relieved to have an answer, and nobody, as far as I can tell, ever proved that the answer was the right one. And now, because you've got a Prophet to feed and a school full of frightened parents and a set of governors who have just discovered their spines, you've come down here to take the same man, on the same evidence, which is to say on none, and send him to the Dementors, as a precaution." He said the word the way he might have said a slur. "Hagrid is not the Heir of Slytherin. I want to hear you think about that for a second, before you start up with the records again. The Heir of Slytherin would be, if we are using the word correctly, of Slytherin's line, or at the very least a wizard of that house and that teaching. Hagrid's father was Muggle-born. His mother wasn't even a witch. That is not a complicated piece of genealogy. That is not a theory. That is a fact you could have looked up on the way down the hill, if you had wanted an answer that was true instead of an answer that would photograph well."
Hagrid had made a small sound, at the mention of his mother, a brief, unhappy intake of breath, and left the point alone, and Harriet, who was good at hearing the shape of a thing that had been left unsaid, heard, in the way he had left it, that there was more to Hagrid's mother than "wasn't even a witch," and that Lucian knew it, and that he wasn't going to put it on the table for Fudge to use. She filed that away too, beside Dumbledore's surprise, and the ring, and the offer to step in, and she thought, not for the first time, that Lucian Bloodthorne walked around this school with his pockets full of things never seen before.
Fudge's mouth had opened and closed. "I... the records, the expulsion, the timing, you must see, the timing is very suggestive, very—"
"The timing is convenient!" Lucian raised his voice. "That's what it is. A boy was a convenient answer fifty years ago, and he's a convenient answer tonight, and in between, as far as I can tell, nobody has done the work of finding out what actually opened that Chamber, or what came out of it, or why it stopped. You don't have a case, Minister. You have a frightened office and a newspaper, and you have decided that sending an innocent man to the Dementors is a reasonable price to pay so the Prophet can say you did something." He took a step closer to Fudge, not a large step, only enough that the Minister had to look down at him properly, at the scar, at the eyes, at the ring, which was still visible, and still warm, and still not a boy's ring. "My family takes note of how friends are treated."
The sentence wasn't loud. It didn't need to be loud. Fudge, who had been red, went white again, and the bowler, which had been on its way back toward his head, stopped in mid-air, and his eyes, in the firelight, had the wide, unfocused look of a man who has just been shown the edge of a drop he hadn't known he was standing on.
"I... your Majesty, I would never... I have the greatest respect, the very greatest, for your family, for the Bloodthornes, I have always, in every council, in every... if I have given any impression, any impression at all, that I would treat a friend of yours with... of course Hagrid is... of course the precaution could be... there are other places, there are, the Ministry has facilities, holding rooms, perfectly adequate, perfectly, there is no need, no need at all, for Azkaban, not if you feel, not if it is your view that..." He was flailing again, and the titles had come back, Majesty and all, and he was nodding as he spoke, a rapid, bobbing nod, as if agreement itself might get him out of the drop. "Yes. Yes, I think that is much the better course. Hagrid will come with me to the Ministry. He will be held there. Comfortably. Most comfortably. No Dementors, none, I would not hear of it, I will issue the instruction myself, tonight, at once. A Ministry holding, that is all, until the matter is... until we can... yes."
Lucian looked at him, and the look never warmed, and the still, cold thing in his face stayed put, and Harriet, watching, thought that this hadn't been enough, that Lucian would have liked Hagrid left where he was, in his hut, with his dog and his pumpkins and his terrible tea, and that a cell in the Ministry was only a different shape of the same insult. It was better than Azkaban. It wasn't, in any sense that mattered to the boy standing by the fire, all right.
"Barely," Lucian said, as if Fudge had asked him whether he was satisfied, though Fudge hadn't quite dared. "That's barely good enough, Minister. You will hold him at the Ministry. You will not take him to Azkaban, not tonight, and not later, and not if the Prophet writes a headline you don't like. You will see that he is treated as a man who has not been convicted of anything, because he has not. And you will remember what I said. I am not going to say it twice."
"Yes," Fudge said, very quickly. "Yes, of course. Of course. I have it absolutely. The Ministry. Comfortable. I shall see to it personally."
Hagrid had been standing through all of this with the mug in his hands and a look on his face that had moved from fear to amazement to a kind of helpless, troubled gratitude, and now he set the mug down, very carefully, as if it might break if he weren't gentle with it, and he came around the table, looked down at Lucian, his eyes very bright, shook his great head once, and said, in a voice that was almost steady,
"S'alright, Lucian."
Lucian looked up at him, and the cold in his face faltered, and under it, for a second, there was only a boy who didn't want his friend to go anywhere at all.
"It isn't," Lucian said.
"It is." Hagrid put a hand on Lucian's shoulder, carefully, the way he had on the path that afternoon, as if he had learned, over the months, how much of his strength a shoulder would take. "It is. Yeh did more'n yeh should've had to, an' I'm not goin' ter stand here an' let yeh start a row with the Minister on my account, not after he's already... not after yeh've already got me that much. I'll go. I'll go to the Ministry, an' I'll sit where they tell me ter sit, an' I'll wait, an' I'll be all righ'. I've slept in worse places than a Ministry room. An' Dumbledore's... Dumbledore's got his own troubles tonight, an' I won' add to 'em by makin' a fuss at the door." He squeezed, very gently, and let go. "S'alright. I mean it."
Lucian didn't look as if he believed him. He looked as if he were going to argue, and then he looked at Hagrid's face, and at the open trunk, and at Dumbledore, who'd kept quiet, and who was watching the two of them with an expression Harriet couldn't quite name, and he shut his mouth, and he nodded, once, sharply, as if the nod were a thing he was taking on and wouldn't enjoy, and he said, "I'm walking with you. Down to whatever they've brought. I'm not staying here and watching you go off with him like a piece of luggage."
"I'd be glad of it," Hagrid said, very simply, and turned to close the trunk.
Lucius had kept quiet for some time. He had stood through the dismantling of Fudge's case with his face carefully arranged, and through the concession of the Ministry holding with a stillness that might, in a kinder light, have been discretion, and now, as Fudge began to make small, grateful motions toward the door, and as Dumbledore moved, at last, to speak quietly to Hagrid about the care of Fang and the hut, Lucian turned his head and looked at Lucius, and said, in a voice that never carried to the whole of the room, a voice meant for one man, and for the short space of floor between them,
"A word, Lord Malfoy. Before you go back up to your governors."
Lucius's eyes narrowed. He didn't refuse. He had, Harriet thought, used up his refusals for the evening. He stepped, with Lucian, a little aside, toward the wall by the hanging ham, which was, though neither of them knew it, very close to the cloak, close enough that Harriet could see the pale hair at Lucius's temple, and the small, tight line beside his mouth, and she held her breath, and Ron held his, and Lucian spoke as if they were alone.
"I know," Lucian said, very quietly, "what you put in this school."
Lucius stayed where he was. The walking stick, in his hand, was suddenly very still.
"I am not going to discuss it here," Lucian went on, and he never looked away, never blinked, and refused Lucius the courtesy of a softer tone. "I am not going to discuss it in front of the Minister, and I am not going to discuss it in front of Dumbledore, who has just declined my help, and who is leaving tonight because of a piece of parchment you brought down this hill. I know. That is all you need to hear me say about it, for now. What you need to hear next is this. Your heir is in the hospital wing. Your other daughter is sitting in a window in the dungeons and she will not speak. Dumbledore is being taken out of this castle because you asked for it, and because the governors gave it to you. If anything happens to Draca, while he is gone, if anything reaches her, if she is touched, if she is even frightened in a way that can be traced back to what you have set moving, that will be on you. It will be on you, and it will be on the governors who signed that order, and it will be on every man who thought the way to protect this school was to remove the greatest wizard in it at the moment it needed him most. I will not have a conversation with you about it afterward. I want you to understand that now, while you can still do something about it." He paused, and when he spoke again the quiet had an edge that made Harriet, an arm's length away under the cloth, feel the hair go up on her arms. "Look after your daughter, Lord Malfoy. You have already failed the first one tonight. Do not fail the second."
Lucius's face, in the shadow of the ham, had gone the colour of parchment. He looked, for a moment, as if he might deny it, or laugh it off, or bring the stick down, and then he held back from all of them, because the boy in front of him had made him kneel, and had made the Minister kneel, and had just told him, in a voice that didn't sound like a bluff, that he knew, and Lucius Malfoy, who had come down the hill with a sentence for Dumbledore, found himself, at the end of the evening, holding a sentence of his own, and he inclined his head, a very small, very stiff movement, and he said, barely aloud, "I have heard you."
"Good," Lucian said, and turned away from him, as if Lucius were a matter that had been dealt with and could be put down.
Hagrid had closed the trunk. Fudge was at the door, the bowler finally, mercifully, on his head, making a series of small, conciliatory motions that suggested he would like, very much, to be out of the hut and on the way to a place where boys never looked at him like that. Dumbledore stood with one hand on the back of Hagrid's chair, and he looked, Harriet thought, as if he were already halfway gone from the room, his mind in the castle, in the hospital wing, in the long work of leaving a post he'd never asked to leave. Fang had begun to whine, a low, unhappy sound, and Hagrid went down on one knee, which took some doing, and put his great arms around the boarhound and buried his face, briefly, in the rough fur, and said something into it that Harriet couldn't hear, and then he stood, and he looked around the hut, and his eyes, passing over the fire and the hanging ham and the shadow in which two Gryffindors were standing very still, paused, and he spoke, not to Fudge, and not to Dumbledore, and not, quite, to Lucian, but to the air, to the room, to anyone who might, by some chance, be listening in a place they weren't supposed to be.
"If yeh want ter know," Hagrid said, and his voice was rough again, and very low, "follow the spiders. They'll know. They've always known. Follow the spiders."
Beside Harriet, under the cloak, Ron went rigid. Harriet felt her own breath catch. Lucian, who had been reaching for the door, stopped, and looked at Hagrid, and something like disbelief, and something like a groan, moved through his face, and he shut his eyes, and he said, under his breath, "Oh, you have got to be joking," and then, more clearly, to Hagrid, "The spiders. Of course. The spiders. That's your advice, at the end of a night like this. Follow the spiders."
"That's my advice," Hagrid said, and there was, under the roughness, a stubborn, meaningful weight to it, as if he couldn't say more, and wouldn't say less, and Lucian shook his head, once, and groaned outright, a short, exasperated sound, because he had been in that colony, and he had come home full of silk, and he had written the essay, and he knew exactly what kind of advice it was, and how little anyone who wasn't him ought to take it, and he couldn't, standing there with Fudge already on the step, start a second argument about a forest full of Acromantulas.
"Come on, then," he said, to Hagrid, and to Fudge, and to the night, and he opened the door, and the cool May dark came in, and he went out first, as if he would be the one to see what was waiting on the path, and Hagrid came after him with the trunk under one arm, and Fang, who refused to be left, shoved out between them, and Dumbledore followed, and Lucius last of all, the parchment put away, the walking stick striking once on the step, and the door of the hut was left on the latch, and the fire went on burning, and Harriet and Ron stood in the sudden quiet and looked at each other, in the dimness under the cloak, with Hagrid's last words still sitting in the air like a hand pointing down the hill, toward the trees.
They didn't stay. There was no staying, not after that. Harriet pulled the cloak tight around them both, and they went out through the half-open door, as quietly as two people under one piece of cloth could go, and the night was full of the sound of men on a path, and of Fang's unhappy breathing, and of Fudge talking too quickly about Ministry carriages and comfortable rooms, and they followed, at a distance, because Lucian was walking with Hagrid to see him off, and because Harriet found, to her own surprise, that she wanted to see whether the Minister would keep his word, and whether Lucian would, at the last, let his friend go, and because the spiders, and the forest, and whatever Hagrid had meant, would still be there in a few minutes, and this wouldn't.
The Ministry had brought a carriage. It stood on the track just short of the gates, a dark official shape with the Ministry crest on the door and two Thestrals in the traces, which Harriet could see, and which she hadn't, tonight, the heart to explain to Ron, who was looking at the apparently empty air in front of the carriage with a suspicion she would have found funny on any other evening. A pair of Ministry wizards waited beside it, trying not to stare at the boy who had come down the path with Hagrid, and failing. Fudge went ahead, already issuing instructions in a carrying voice, no Azkaban, no Dementors, a Ministry holding, the Minister's own word on it, and Lucian kept walking beside Hagrid, and then Hagrid stopped, and put out a great hand, and motioned Lucian back.
It wasn't a shove, and it wasn't unkind. It was a plain, firm movement of the arm, back toward the hut, back toward the glow of the windows, and Lucian stopped because the hand was there, and because Hagrid's face, when he looked up at it, had a look that wouldn't, just then, be argued with.
"Yeh'll keep an eye on Fang for me," Hagrid said. "An' the pumpkins. An' the hut. I don' want yeh standin' at the door of that thing like yeh're the one bein' taken, Lucian. Yeh've done enough fer one night. More'n enough. Yeh go on back."
"I was going to see you off," Lucian said. His voice was steady, and not steady at all. "That's all I was doing."
"An' yeh have." Hagrid looked at the castle, once, a long look, up at the lit windows and the dark towers and the hut glowing at the edge of the trees, and then he looked at Lucian again, and his eyes were very bright. "Yeh go back an' see Fang's settled, an' yeh see to yerself, more'n any of it. I'll sit where they tell me. Yeh'll see about the rest." He reached out, and Lucian put his hand into that enormous palm, and Hagrid held it for a second, very carefully, and then he let go, and motioned again, more gently, down the path. "Go on. I mean it."
Lucian stood there with Fang against his leg and the carriage waiting and Fudge already hovering at the step, and he wanted, very badly, to refuse, and then he looked at Hagrid once more, and he nodded, once, sharply, as if the nod were a thing he was taking on and wouldn't enjoy, and he stepped back, off the track and onto the grass. He would go back to the hut, as he had been told. He refused to go while the carriage was still here.
Hagrid climbed up into it. The trunk was handed in after him. Fudge, with a last, nervous duck of the bowler in Lucian's direction, got in as well, and one of the Ministry wizards closed the door, and the Thestrals leaned into the traces, and the carriage moved, and the sound of it went away down the track, toward the gates, and then through them, and then it was gone, and Hagrid was gone with it, taken, if not to Azkaban, then still taken, and Lucian Bloodthorne stood in the dark at the edge of the grounds with Fang sitting against his leg and Dumbledore a little way off, and Lucius already walking back toward the castle without looking at them, and the forest standing black on his left, and he watched the empty track until there was nothing on it to watch, and he stayed where he was, for a long time.