The Observer Effect

      Hermione’s parents considered themselves agnostics, and so she quite sincerely believed that this outlook was the most natural and sensible. So many different faiths could not all be absolutely right, nor entirely wrong. Therefore, until one had decisive proof placed in one’s own hands, one ought to refrain from judgment.       In other words, the faint veneer of a Christian upbringing in no way tainted Hermione’s worldview. Still, she was familiar with the concept—as any halfway well-read person would be.       Fear of God.       Yes, that very concept which had once struck her as paranoid. Live as though the Lord never takes His sleepless eye off you. Or, at the very least, as though at any moment he may glance your way to dispel the tedium of eternal existence. Now, though the thing in question was no deity, she felt in full measure the existential dread that attends fervent religiosity. The Eye could open right beside her at any second, and Hermione might not even know it.       Until another book lifted off the desk, apparently.       And to crown it all, something else crept in—something entirely, it must be said, out of place.       Time and again she replayed that evening—oh, if only she had let herself be distracted less, had looked a little more closely! Perhaps she might have spotted the flaws. But—alas. For now, one phrase, like an inane refrain, circled round and round in her head: ‘tall, dark, and handsome’—a silly stock formula from the sillier sort of novels to which her mother, for some unfathomable reason, had a weakness.       Because that, damn it… ah no—Mordred take it… that was exactly how he looked.       This—a Dark Lord? That one there? A pretty older student who could have stepped off the telly?       Hermione had pictured an international terrorist threat somewhat differently.       She had encountered precisely two people (wizards) in books with such a title: first Grindelwald, then Voldemort. So this would be a third? Because he could not possibly be Voldemort—if only for the reason that Voldemort was much older. Had been, until he died.       Although… Harry had let something slip once; he’d said something odd to Malfoy, something like, ‘he lost a few years of memories,’ then corrected himself to ‘many years.’ Hermione had taken that literally at first, as if it referred only to his memory—retrograde amnesia, or something like it. But what if not?       There really were Time-Turners—they existed in outright defiance of nearly every basic principle of the space-time continuum. And if the Universe could be wound back a few hours, why could one not reverse entropy for a single person? Logic suggested that if one was possible, then the other was too (though logic, upon entering the wizarding world, is best left at the door with your shoes, as you would outside a mosque).       Returning to those vague definitions—what exactly did Harry mean by ‘many years’? How many? What if that many? Fifty years, say?       Hermione realised she was sitting with her hands clenched in her hair. The fact that a nice-looking older boy, some God-knows-which Dark Lord—might at that very moment be watching her did not improve matters. She ought to be doing something entirely different in the library, yet she had not read even a page of the Encyclopaedia of Poisonous and Quasi-Poisonous Fungi. The very Herbology essay in question lay reproachfully beside it. Unfinished—Hermione had not lied. Adventure was taking its toll on her studies.       Row upon row of bindings surrounded her, overhanging like cliffs. Small tables for four with green-glass-shaded lamps looked like islands in a sea of books, a little coastal archipelago at the foot of the mountain of the Unknown and the Unread. In each lamp a charmed flame shimmered—not too dim, not blinding either, just right to spare the eyes undue strain. The polished wood smelt of lemon oil. Thick carpets smothered the sound of steps. Everything here encouraged immersion in the mystery of passing on knowledge, in a silent dialogue with people (often long swallowed by the abyss of time) whose thoughts and ideas had taken shape in constellations of signs on paper—that first, imperfect, yet recognisable flicker of true immortality. Yet Hermione, to her own disappointment and irritation, could not focus.       Again and again she began from the first paragraph, and about halfway through it her focus blurred. The hopping toadstools in the beautifully executed illustration played leapfrog with one another; the rubricated initial glowed vermilion; yet the lines refused to reach her mind. She tried again:       ‘…a magical mushroom of the family Amanitaceae Magica. H.T. grows to a height of nine to ten inches. Cap one and a half to three inches in diameter, conical, fleshy, with a smooth (not striated) margin. Colour ranges through shades of red: from pale raspberry to dark claret. As with other members of the family, young specimens of H.T. are enclosed in a sort of “veil”, which splits as the fungus grows. Its remnants encircle the base of the stem as a characteristic “skirt”, while only a few remain upon the cap…’       No, hopeless.       She tried to silence the intrusive thoughts, to shut them up in little boxes inside her head, but time after time her mental discipline, once impeccable, suffered a critical failure.       A troll. A teacher possessed by the spirit of a potential murderer. Something Harry and Malfoy were hiding—oh, she knew perfectly well they kept secrets from her, and it drove her spare. Not because she was dying to pry—as if! But because it was a) unfair, and b) dangerous. Those two possessed a remarkable knack for getting into scrapes, and a shortage of information would hamper her when it was time to help them out of the next scrape.       And now a Dark Lord wandering Hogwarts as if it were his home. Well, perhaps she exaggerated slightly—one did not wear an Invisibility Cloak at home—but in the round… one had to admit, it fit the general trend. No one at school controlled anything, nor even meant to. Except, perhaps, the Dark Lord himself (the fact he was not nominally an adult rather strengthened his legitimacy by that logic than weakened it—the adults had disgraced themselves beyond redemption already).       Another dreadful thought hammered through. Harry had said it to her, obliquely, in the Slytherin way, but he had certainly meant exactly that.       ‘Here, we have a completely different world.’       Two weeks to the holidays, and when she stepped off the train at King’s Cross, slid into the old brown Vauxhall, and Mum and Dad, glancing back from the front in turn, began cheerily asking how her first term at the new school had gone—what could she tell them? Hermione rehearsed the conversation in her head.       ‘Brilliant, Dad, I’ve finally managed to make friends. Imagine, one of them is a fully fledged Dark Wizard, and the other is an aristocrat bursting with his own importance. And we’re from rival Houses, so we can only meet on the quiet.’       ‘Oh, Mum, honestly! Perfectly safe. Though I was nearly eaten by a troll, and our Defence teacher is possessed by an evil spirit. Yes, I know, hilarious! But I haven’t fallen off my broom once, you needn’t have worried.’       ‘No problems with lessons, Dad, I’m top of the year in most subjects. True, the Potions master humiliates me every other sentence. But my friends say he does it for the very best reasons.’       ‘Mu-um! Stop it, what do you mean by “boys”? No, absolutely no one. Except, perhaps…’       Owing to her September birthday, Hermione was a touch older than her classmates. She had already turned twelve, and as the daughter of two doctors she could not but know the dangers of what was soon to come. A hormonal surge that would turn her body into an ungovernable chaos of spots and hair sprouting in thoroughly unhygienic places, and her brain into a jelly devoid of higher brain function. Following the course of her thoughts now, and the moment when an unexpected emotional surge bled into them, she shuddered—was that it? Had it begun?       Was she already mutating into a silly hen, soon to become Lavender Brown’s duplicate? Painting her toenails and pursing her lips like a chicken’s arse (for some reason it was called a ‘bow,’ though Hermione could not for the life of her see any resemblance between a neat knot and that unnatural arrangement of lips)? Would she throw away all her academic achievements, memory, intellect, and ability to focus, in exchange for fantasies that made older girls monopolise the bathroom for forty minutes just when someone desperately needed to wash her hair?       No, not that!       No boys. Even if they were absurdly attractive Dark Lords. Hopping toadstools—that was what really mattered.       ‘I do hope you’re peeking, you wretch,’ Hermione muttered under her breath at last, and managed to frame the next sentence of her essay: ‘Its resemblance to the fly agaric is a defence mechanism that allows the fruiting body to reach maturity.’

      * * *

      There were not many constants in the wizarding world—thanks to magic, the laws of natural philosophy had to be treated as recommendations rather than inviolable rules—but Draco was more certain of that than of the sun rising each day. His parents would always support him. Always, in everything, and whatever the circumstances.       Unfortunately, even with the family’s extensive resources, financial and otherwise (about which it was not the done thing to speak too plainly), certain things were not so easily arranged. ‘Give me anything,’ Father had written, ‘give me a pretext,’ and Draco understood perfectly what he meant. They had no proof.       The courts did not accept the memories of minors as evidence—an idiotic rule based on the conviction that, if you were young, your memory could be tampered with impunity. As if adult wizards were immune! Idiotic or not, a rule was a rule, and they had nothing but memories. Only Granger had seen Quirrell casting. As for the troll cavorting unchecked—the three of them had seen it, but, once again, no physical trace remained. No one had seen the dragon, though every adult had been at the fire, and half the school had been out searching afterwards. Malfoy had fretted himself sick trying to conjure up a pretext—and the flash of insight came shockingly late, especially given the family’s long-running drama with the Ministry.       But of course! It was a game for two as well! A dark artefact hidden in the school would be cause enough for a Ministry commission, would it not?       And—Draco hated himself for the weakness, but could not help it—he ached to glimpse, even for a moment, even with one eye, that other version of his life once more. The happy version, without the curse. So he did not write back to Father at once, and he convinced himself that he ought first to check, to make sure.       The blow that awaited him in the abandoned classroom next to the Arithmancy office was a nasty one.       ‘Potter, wake up!’ he demanded in a loud whisper, shoving the other boy’s bed curtains aside without ceremony. ‘We need to talk, now.’       The answer was a long hiss—either Potter was swearing in Parseltongue, or he had not found words adequate to his grievance. He flung off the blanket and sat, rubbing his eyes furiously with his knuckles. Nag flopped out of a fold in his pyjama top and onto his lap. Potter scooped the snake up absently.       ‘What time is it?’ he mumbled, groping under the pillow for his glasses. ‘No, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. Let’s go to the common room.’       Half-asleep, scowling and hunched, wrapped in a tartan rug over his flannel pyjamas, he bore little resemblance to the usual imperious brat with the pure-blood swagger (yes, the politically correct tosh about ‘first-generation pure-blood’ remained politically correct tosh whichever way one looked at it, a sop for riff-raff, nothing more). Even the adder wriggling in his fingers, trying to burrow into his sleeve in search of lost warmth, failed to lend the Heir of Slytherin the requisite menace. Snatching a cushion off the nearest sofa en route, Potter shuffled to the hearth (the fires were now kept in around the clock against the frost), plopped onto the rug right in front of it, and beckoned Draco down.       They were alone in the Slytherin common room—not surprising; curfew had come and gone, and at this hour only the prefects on duty were awake, making their rounds somewhere out in the night, and Filch prowled the half-lit corridors, tormented by sleeplessness. The ceiling and wall lights glowed at quarter strength, and the shadows in the corners had thickened to almost tangible density. The glow of coals painted furniture and carpets in bloody stripes, flushed faces and hands, and flashed on the lenses of Potter’s glasses. Malfoy dropped cross-legged beside his opposite number and breathed, ‘The mirror’s gone!’       Potter’s sleepiness vanished in an instant. He jerked his head up, stuffed the dissatisfied adder into his pocket, and asked, ‘You went there? Now, at night? Alone? Have you taken leave of your senses?’ With each word his quiet voice grew a shade colder and a shade sharper.       Draco narrowed his eyes—deserved as the rebuke was, he did not care for it.       ‘Are you saying you didn’t go? Don’t be daft, I saw it caught you too,’ he snapped back. Potter gave a dry little hum and drew what he, for some reason, considered a smile.       ‘The room’s well warded,’ he said. ‘Was, at any rate.’       Which did not answer the question—and that alone told Draco a great deal. Yes, it had got to him as well. But as to the rest…       ‘Nothing of the sort,’ Draco retorted. ‘It’s open, and the mirror’s nowhere to be seen.’ A stupid, unexpected little sob escaped him on the last words.       Potter adjusted his glasses, folded his arms, and pulled a face of disappointed censure.       ‘Malfoy,’ he pronounced, ‘you are an utter idiot. One doesn’t go near that thing alone—it will suck you in, and you’ll stand there till one of us notices you’re gone. That’s first. Second—what on earth at night? Earning detention, are you? Or losing house points? D’you feel sorry for the Gryffs because their coffers are empty, and thought you’d even the score?’ he finished, acid.       ‘It only occurred to me just now,’ Draco began to wriggle. ‘Look, Father needs a pretext to drag an inspection in. Then it hit me—the Dark artefact! Exactly what we want. I thought… I’ll check I remember the way, and, well, you know…’       Potter cottoned on to the evasions at once—he sighed and shook his head. ‘That’s precisely why he locked it, don’t you see?’       Draco swallowed an exclamation—really? The Dark Lord had troubled himself about their spiritual well-being? ‘For Potter’s sake,’ Draco corrected himself, ‘he’s the new right hand, the favourite.’ The favourite, meanwhile, scowled and scratched his famous scar.       ‘As for a pretext… Surely we can find something suitable in you-know-where? Slip it in, and that’s that.’       Draco flung his hands up. ‘Don’t be thick, Potter!’ he pleaded with the other’s logic. ‘There will be adults’ memories of the mirror—someone had to bring it in. There won’t be any of anything we plant—and be grateful they won’t interrogate minors, or we’d be done for.’       Potter hissed again, and this time Draco was almost certain he was swearing. It sounded rather cool, though wholly incomprehensible.       ‘Pity,’ Potter summed up, vexed. ‘A real chance slipped through our fingers. Would memories alone not suffice? Or testimony under Veritaserum?’       ‘Where’s the cause for interrogation?’ Draco said, glum. ‘Again we’d need a pretext—a pretext for a pretext, Mordred blast it… How will you prove the artefact wasn’t a figment of our imagination? May I remind you—they’ll listen to us no more than they would to garden gnomes. We’re children.’ He packed as much sarcasm as he could into the last word. Potter twitched at the corner of the mouth—a sore spot. His talk with his godfather had plainly gone badly—by his brief recounting, Potter had practically dripped venom.       They fell silent. The fire crackled; tongues of flame played over the crimson coals in a chaotic yet mesmerising dance. Nag, having sneaked out of his master’s pocket, curled into a coil on the rug. Draco recalled how he had crept through corridors and down staircases in the sleeping castle, starting and freezing at every snore from the portraits on the walls. It felt as though it hadn’t been hours ago, but days, weeks even. By luck, he’d met no one—Salazar himself must have watched over him! His own escapade suddenly appeared in an entirely different light.       ‘I really was… a complete fool,’ he owned up out loud. ‘I shouldn’t have gone. Especially alone. I can only send the letter in the morning anyway…’ He drooped. He would have to write Father that Draco had contrived to let slip the very pretext so sorely needed.       ‘Let it lie,’ Potter waved a hand. ‘I was out of line. Sorry. It’s not you—it’s that blasted mirror. The heart’s desire,’ he mimicked the Mudblood’s skipping little voice.       Yes, she had skewered them thoroughly. Draco grudgingly admitted to himself that Granger was, in fact, useful. How could it be otherwise? Since the Dark Lord had visited them, and the girl had not only survived, but kept her tongue and all her extremities, her usefulness was acknowledged at the very highest level, and it was not for Malfoy to dispute it. A fresh thought struck him then—so sharp he groaned through his teeth.       ‘What?’ Potter asked, alarmed.       ‘Merlin’s bollocks!’ Draco explained, expressively. ‘We ought to shove Quirrell in there!’       Potter smacked his thigh with a fist and let fly a Flint-style tirade—long, florid, and wholly unprintable.       ‘He’d sink up to his ears for certain—just imagine what his “heart’s desires” must be!’ he continued, wincing and worrying his lip.       ‘One look, and we could take him, easy pickings, with our bare hands,’ Draco agreed. ‘Or Silencio, then seal the door… he’d quietly pop off in a fortnight…’       ‘Bastard!’       ‘Exactly my point…’       ‘Right,’ Potter declared after a long pause brimming with the recognition of missed opportunities. Draco straightened—he knew that tone, and what followed it. ‘Right,’ repeated the emissary of demonic chaos, modestly calling himself Harry Potter, ‘we’ll have to find that Mordred-blighted bit of glass. Let’s think, my friend, how we might manage it.’       Whether it was the glasses reflecting the blood-red firelight, the teeth bared in a feral grin, the broad dented zigzag of his scar peeping out from his tousled fringe, or the overall set of his face—for a second he seemed to Malfoy much older than his eleven and a half.

      * * *

      Monday morning brought a couple of fresh surprises—as if Harry were at risk of being bored even for a moment.       The first was that the chair at the staff table, empty for a month or so, was occupied again.       Had it not been for the height, Harry would never have recognised Hagrid, bald as an egg. Without his magnificent facial hair, the half-giant looked wilder—younger, uglier, and far less good-natured than one had imagined. A proper brigand’s mug—though one must admit the scars had a hand in the new look. Burns from dragon-fire couldn’t be erased without a trace, nor the marks of truly Dark curses, and the gamekeeper’s face resembled a chart of ocean depths in all shades of crimson and claret. His ears looked as if they had been melted, and his lips sat oddly; but both eyes had survived—call that lucky.       Hagrid was eating porridge with gusto, gripping the spoon in his fist like a very small child. Lumps tumbled back into the bowl from his mouth now and again. Harry looked away quickly—even the youngest Weasley, nicknamed the Hamster for his flawless table manners, ate more neatly. The Slytherins continued to throw covert glances at the burn-victim. A quiet hiss of malicious delight ran along the House table—the snakes savoured the work of Salazar’s Heir.       The second surprise was not the sudden arrival, but an equally sudden absence. The Headmaster’s chair—Harry still wanted to call it a ‘throne’—was empty, and the emptiness drew the eye as surely as a Jamaican immigrant in a skinhead pub. The portion of the inevitable breakfast gossip (Harry had grown used to it and learned to treat it as the equivalent of the wireless news) that did not revolve around Hagrid was devoted to Dumbledore.       ‘Gone to strike a deal with goblins for the rebuild,’ Pansy Parkinson announced with authority, prodding her omelette with a fork. ‘Their foremen are a nightmare, and charge triple…’       ‘How d’you know?’ gaped Millicent Bulstrode. Slow, scatterbrained, and none too bright, she was forever trailing at the back—figuratively and quite literally.       Pansy tilted up her already pert nose. ‘I keep my ears open, unlike some. I heard Derrick tell Monkley that Norton told him that Bailey heard Flitwick losing his rag.’       Milly fluttered her eyelids—and, this time, not she alone. Theo scowled; Blaise scratched his head; Llewellyn craned for an explanation. Harry had not fully followed either—but he went on steadily with his breakfast. Parkinson would spill the lot of her own accord; one only had to wait. He skewered a piece of fried sausage, chewed it with care, sighted the next—and, predictably, Pansy burst.       ‘Oh, do none of you know he can’t abide goblins?’ she cried, clattering cutlery against her plate in her excitement.       ‘Flitwick?’ Pike was astonished. ‘He’s half-goblin himself!’       Pansy smirked. ‘Precisely, darling,’ she purred.       ‘That’s actually true,’ Daphne Greengrass put in for her friend, crumbling her customary solitary slice of toast. ‘He once blurted out, I swear to you: “the only good goblin’s a dead goblin!”’       ‘What a drama,’ Draco commented, bored, having silently spooned yolk from a soft-boiled egg till then. ‘Life out of joint with itself. Pansy, do get to the point, I beg you.’       Parkinson puffed up—with her plump cheeks, the sight was comic.       ‘So, Flitwick can’t stand goblins. Yesterday he said, “I’d trust those skinflints to build a gallows, and hang them on it.” Now do you get it?’ she pronounced.       ‘Aaah…’       The talk veered off to the labour market. Why did goblins get every building and repair contract, whilst honest wizards sat idle? Where was the Ministry? It would be one thing if the stubby little buggers undercut the price—but they didn’t, did they… ‘Bribes!’ Slytherin first-years adjudged, and roundly condemned—not the practice itself, of course, but its direction. To favour non-humans to the detriment of wizards—how vile! Tolerance had gone too far—at this rate they’d end up with a centaur, a werewolf, and a giant on the Hogwarts staff!       ‘I mean it,’ Blaise fumed, unfolding his fingers one by one. ‘Goblin? Tick. Ghost? Tick. Even a zombie, Salazar save us—a zombie! Oh, come off it—it’s a classic, isn’t it? Look closely! Daphne, do tell her…’       Harry listened with half an ear. So—the Headmaster had gone to haggle over budgets, and given the goblins’ nit-picking temper and pedantry (and Harry, who had dealt with them twice, considered himself an expert), he would be away all day. That ought to be turned to advantage—but how?       ‘Watch your crockery!’       Post owls were landing on shoulders one after another. Mercury—chaos and destruction on great wings—crashed down beside Draco and sank claws into the tabletop. Malfoy took the parcel from him and untied the twine with a practised flick.       ‘This one’s for me. This—for you, Potter. Ladies, these are yours, with my compliments…’       The morning ritual ran like clockwork. Harry unwrapped a chocolate bar, sank his teeth into it—with sea salt, now that was someone’s idea of fun!—and then the penny dropped.       The hardest thing was the waiting. By the time of Charms he was on tenterhooks—and he had five lessons to endure, with a break for lunch. Naturally, today’s spell—they were beginning Reparo—went as badly for him as every previous one. Out of sheer cussedness, Harry tried skipping the verbal component altogether. No matter how clearly he visualised the desired result, no matter how he twitched his wand till his wrist ached, his efforts yielded nothing. The shattered cup remained shattered.       ‘Psst!’ someone hissed behind him, and a thin finger poked his back. Without turning, Harry sent the owner his signature wandless non-verbal—he had told her a hundred times she mustn’t speak to him in class yet! A thud and a rustle followed, as if someone had booted their table from a sudden stab of pain, but a note nonetheless fluttered over his shoulder, quite clearly guided by a confident wand. With an irritated sigh, Harry unfolded the scrap of parchment on the sly.       ‘TRY IT IN PARSELTONGUE,’ Hermione had written. Unlike Tom (and unlike Harry himself, though he was still a thousand miles from fair copperplate), the girl did not trouble to form a proper joined-up hand; she cheerfully scrawled in block letters, like a Muggle—lessons, and many of them, would be needed there!       But the advice itself was worth a go. It was in any case better than the profanity into which he invariably lapsed from rage and despair. What did that blasted Reparo translate as, from Latin?       ‘Put yourself together, you wreck,’ he told the cup, glumly, prodding it with his wand. He didn’t expect it to work—which made the result all the more surprising.       The porcelain shards slid together, stuck, and fused, and, a heartbeat later, a perfectly intact teacup with a kitschy bunch of forget-me-nots on the side stood on his desk. He pinged the rim with a fingernail—the cup trilled merrily in answer.       Salazar and Tom both could have been proud. They really ought to have been—because Harry did none of the things that leapt to mind at once. He did not recite aloud another of Flint’s masterpieces; he did not cackle like a lunatic; he did not dance a jig with Flitwick; and he did not kiss Hermione on both cheeks. Nor did he smash the cup on the flagstones and yell, ‘At last! Yesss!’       Instead, he cupped it carefully, lifted it to eye level, and turned it a little. There was a stir behind him, a catch of breath—Hermione had seen.       ‘Professor,’ she said, in a queer strangled voice, and Harry broke his own rule and looked round, ‘Potter’s done it, look!’       He had expected anger to be on her face. Tears, perhaps. Resentment. Something of the sort. She had been furious when he first got that wretched feather to rise. But he met eyes shining—that very look which recalled illicit substances taken in unwise quantity, and which made something deep in him clamour for another dose, and another, and another.       She was delighted. Completely, utterly, unreservedly.       More than anything, Hermione Granger adored praise. Close on its heels, in an honoured second place, came wonders. Magic in all the diversity of its might.       ‘Excellent, splendid! Five points to Slytherin. Keep it up, Mr Potter!’ Flitwick’s squeak sounded as if from another reality. It mattered no more than the whisper of snow beyond the windows. Neither of them paid him any attention—there and then, they were the only two in the world.       With a slow, teasing gesture Hermione indicated the shards before her.       ‘Reparo,’ her lips said, moving with exaggerated clarity, and a cup—the pair of his cup from the same service, if not the same cup multiplied by magic—appeared in her hands. She saluted with it like a glass of wine, as one does at the end of a toast.       Her smile shone brighter than a Lumos. It was a challenge. And Harry—at long last, yes—could accept it as an equal.       ‘Professor,’ he said, ‘it seems Miss Granger has managed it as well.’       Double Transfiguration went by in a fog. Harry took notes dutifully on transforming air into living and non-living objects, but his mind wandered far from birds, butterflies, snowflakes, and orchids. He relived his triumph over and over. Even the ghost dogging him failed to sour the lift of his spirits. The melancholy and impatience of waiting for lessons to end dissolved in a pleasant haze of daydreams.       ‘Why’s there a ghost next to Potter again?’ Lavender Brown whispered to her neighbour on the left. It was Weasley—he hunched his shoulders and was already opening his mouth to spew up something vile—but Harry beat him to it.       ‘The souls of the slain,’ he intoned sepulchrally. ‘They follow me everywhere I go. Don’t be afraid—come closer, have a good look. In your place, I too would be taking an interest in my future career.’       Today’s spirit, some very small lad in a monk’s habit, fit the role of ‘slain’ to perfection. Only the Princes in the Tower would have been better. The Gryffs shut up—but kept staring. Harry propped his head on his hand and sent Lavender a sweet smile.       Over lunch, Draco pounced—he had understood nothing of what had happened in Charms, but he felt in his bones something important had occurred. When Harry explained about Parseltongue, Malfoy fell into deep thought.       ‘Funny thing,’ he said at last, when they finished a second cup of tea and stood up. ‘You know, they say spells come easiest in one’s native tongue. Hard to prove, but, for instance, Glisseo is derived from the French glisser, and I did pull that one off first go. If the theory holds, you must have learnt to hiss before you ever learned English. Which is, in a way, logical…’       They spent all of Herbology with Harry secretly pelting Ron with little balls of dragon dung. His Levitation Charms now obeyed without a quiver, and winged lizard muck stank so abominably it brought tears to the eyes. A bit here, a bit there—and Weasley now exuded a fragrance in perfect harmony with his inner world. True, they got carried away at one point, and the hopping toadstools nearly made a break for it from the crate, but Draco spotted the break-out and slammed the lid in time.       Defence came last on Mondays, and it was time to set fun aside. Draco, Vince, and Greg flanked Harry as if they were bodyguards. All four had their wands to hand—and in that formation, stepping in time, they entered the garlic-and-rotten-meat-reeking classroom.       The thick castle walls turned the window openings on the lowest four floors into tunnels—only the tower windows had proper sills. In their way, the embrasures were ideal—broad and deep, perfect for curling up with your feet in, leaning your side into the iron lattice, and enjoying a book, a mug of hot chocolate, or simply hugging your knees and contemplating the rain, a proper Byronic hero—misunderstood, mysterious, suffering, and full of scorn for the world.       It wasn’t raining now. Not even snowing any more. There was, however, a Byronic figure. Harry snapped his fallen jaw back up in haste.       ‘Felt like a change of scene,’ announced a tall, dark, and handsome youth to nobody in particular, casting a scornful eye on the world around him. The imprint of suffering, born from the eternal misunderstanding of those around him, lay upon his pale brow. ‘Stop gawping, for Salazar’s sake, and don’t block the door.’