I lied; new chapter early. But if u give review, you get another chapter.
...
The Skele-Gro worked exactly the way Madam Pomfrey had promised it would, which was to say slowly and horribly, and by midnight Harriet had given up any hope of sleep. It felt as though somebody had filled her arm with splinters and was now pushing each one, very patiently, into its proper place. She lay on her back in the dark at the far end of the hospital wing with the curtains half drawn round her bed and stared up at the ceiling, where the moonlight from the tall windows lay in long pale stripes, and tried to think about anything that wasn't the grinding, creaking ache below her shoulder. She thought about the Snitch, cold and fluttering in her fist. She thought about Wood crying on the grass. She thought, more than she meant to, about a voice cutting through the noise of the crowd and saying you removed her bones in a tone so flat and so contemptuous that Lockhart had actually flinched, and about the warm, mortifying heat that had climbed up her face while he said it, and then she made herself stop thinking about that and went back to staring at the ceiling.
Draca had been sent back to the dungeons hours ago, after Madam Pomfrey had finally agreed she hadn't hit her head, and the ward was empty except for Harriet and the soft ticking of a clock somewhere near the door. So when the doors banged open, she nearly jumped out of her skin.
Footsteps came hurrying down the ward, several sets of them, quick and low, and voices whispering urgently, and Harriet lay very still and pretended to be asleep, watching through her lashes and the gap in the curtains. Dumbledore came first. He was wearing a long woolly dressing gown and a nightcap, which on any other night might have been funny, and he was carrying one end of something that looked like a statue. Professor McGonagall had the other end. Her tartan dressing gown was belted tight and her hair, for once, was down in a long grey plait over one shoulder, and her face in the moonlight was as white as the sheets. Madam Pomfrey hurried behind them, wringing her hands, and they laid their burden down on the bed nearest the door, and Harriet saw, with a lurch of her stomach that had nothing to do with the Skele-Gro, that it wasn't a statue at all.
It was Colin Creevey. He lay on his back on the white bed with his eyes wide open and his hands raised stiffly in front of him, clutching his camera, frozen in the act of lifting it to his face, and he wasn't moving, and he wasn't breathing, or at least not in any way Harriet could see. A bunch of grapes had spilled from his pocket onto the blanket. She thought, absurdly, that he must have been bringing them up for her.
"Oh, the poor boy," Madam Pomfrey breathed, bending over him. "What on earth's happened to him?"
"The same thing that happened to Argus's cat, I'm afraid," said Dumbledore, and his voice was very quiet. "Minerva found him at the foot of the stairs, not ten minutes ago."
"He'd grapes in his pocket," McGonagall said, and her voice wasn't steady. "I think the silly child was creeping up here after hours to bring Potter something to eat."
Harriet's stomach turned over completely. She lay very still and kept her eyes almost shut and tried not to make a sound.
"Is he—" Madam Pomfrey began, and couldn't finish.
"Petrified, Poppy. Not dead." Dumbledore bent over Colin and gently pried the camera out of the boy's rigid fingers, and opened the back of it. There was a hiss and a curl of smoke and a smell of burning plastic, and McGonagall drew in a sharp breath.
"It's ruined," Madam Pomfrey whispered. "The whole inside of it's gone to slag."
"Albus, what does it mean?" McGonagall asked, and Harriet had never heard her sound like that before, not sharp or stern or impatient but frightened, almost pleading, as though she already knew the answer and wanted very badly to be told she was wrong.
Dumbledore was quiet for a long moment. He stood by Colin's bed with the ruined camera in his hands, and in the moonlight his face looked very old, older than Harriet had ever seen it, the lines round his eyes cut deep as carving. When he finally spoke, it was in a low voice, but in the silence of the ward every word carried.
"It means, Minerva, that we can no longer pretend it's a trick," he said. "The Chamber of Secrets has been opened again."
Madam Pomfrey pressed a hand over her mouth. McGonagall only stared at him, and for a moment she seemed to sway.
"Then who could possibly—"
"I'm less troubled tonight by who," Dumbledore said, his eyes still on Colin's frozen face, "than by how. Who can be guessed at. How is the thing that frightens me."
Harriet lay awake long after they'd left, listening to the clock and the creak of her own bones knitting, and looking across the dark ward at the small stiff shape in the bed by the door, still holding up its hands to take a picture of something it would never see.
---
"You'd think," said Theodore Nott, "that a man who'd fought a werewolf with nothing but a teaspoon would have the sense to hold a dueling club somewhere with better lighting."
It was eight o'clock on a Thursday evening, nearly a week after Colin had been found, and the three of them were climbing the stairs from the dungeons toward the Great Hall along with what seemed like half the castle. Lucian walked in the middle, because that was where Nott and Zabini had started putting him lately without either of them ever seeming to decide to do it, and he walked with his hands in his pockets and his collar turned up and an expression of deep, sardonic enthusiasm that he'd been wearing since breakfast, when the notice had gone up on the board.
"He didn't fight it with a teaspoon," said Zabini lazily. "It was a spoon. A soup spoon. Chapter six. Pansy read it out loud in the common room."
"Oh, well, that's all right, then."
Lucian didn't say anything. He was watching the corridor. It had changed over the last week, and he wasn't sure the other two had noticed how much. People still walked in groups, but the groups were tighter now, and quieter, and nobody lingered at corners. Twice that week he'd seen Professor Sprout escorting a crowd of Hufflepuff first-years to Herbology herself, which she'd never done before, and Professor Flitwick had started standing in the doorway of the Charms corridor between lessons with his wand drawn and held loosely at his side, smiling at the students as they passed in a way that didn't reach his eyes. McGonagall had stopped smiling altogether. Even Snape, who never looked anything except irritated, had acquired a new quality to his irritation, a watchful, wire-taut stillness, and when Lucian had handed in his troll report that morning Snape had taken it without comment, glanced at it once, and then looked up and studied Lucian's face for a long, unreadable moment, as though he were checking something off a list. The castle felt like a house the night before a funeral. Everyone was being very polite and very careful and nobody was saying what they were thinking.
"It's got worse," he said. "Have you noticed? The staff. Look at them. Flitwick's standing guard over his own corridor like it's a gate."
Nott glanced at him sideways. "It's Creevey. Nobody thought it'd go past the cat. Then it did." He hesitated, and lowered his voice, though nobody close by seemed to be listening. "And then there's the other thing. What you said in Transfiguration. You know that's all anyone's been talking about, don't you? Not just us. The whole school. My father wrote to me about it. Four pages. He wants to know if it's true your family taught the founders, and if it is, why nobody's ever heard about it, and if it isn't, why you'd say it. He underlined isn't three times."
"Mine wrote too," said Zabini. "My mother did. She wants me to find out if you're for sale." He paused. "Not like that. Politically. Though with Mother, you can never be completely sure."
Lucian laughed despite himself.
Lucian laughed despite himself. "Tell your father it's true," he said to Nott. "And tell him I wouldn't worry about it. It was a long time ago, and it's family history, and I only said it because I was tired of listening to people quote Slytherin about things Slytherin never said. It doesn't change anything. It's not as if anyone's going to give me the castle for it." He smiled faintly, as though at a private joke."Tell your mother I'm not for sale, Zabini, but I'm flattered she asked. And I'd rather not become husband number eight, if it's all the same to her."
"I'll pass it on."
"What I'd actually worry about," Lucian went on, and here his voice changed, so abruptly that both of them looked at him, "is the fact that the school's finally running a dueling club, which it ought to have been doing for years, and they've given it to Lockhart."
They'd come out at the top of the stairs into the entrance hall, and the crowd was thicker here, all four houses jostling toward the open doors of the Great Hall, and Lucian stopped walking. He didn't do it dramatically. He simply stopped, and turned, and Nott nearly walked into him.
"Do you know who teaches you Charms?" he said.
Nott blinked. "Flitwick."
"Do you know who Flitwick is? Not the little man who makes pineapples dance on your desk. Who he actually is." He didn't wait for an answer. "He was a dueling champion. A real one, not a Witch Weekly one. He won the European circuit when he was young, more than once, and people who know about these things still talk about some of those duels. I've heard them. He's one of the best duelists alive in this country, and probably in a good few others, and he's standing in the doorway of his own corridor every day with his wand out, because there's something in this castle that's turning children to stone, and nobody's thought to ask him to teach the children how to defend themselves. They've asked Gilderoy Lockhart instead." His jaw tightened. "A man who doesn't know which end of a pixie bites. A man who took every bone out of a girl's arm because there was a camera nearby. If you'd set out to find the worst person in this castle to put in charge of teaching thirteen-year-olds to fight, you couldn't have done better. It's not funny. People are getting hurt. Somebody's going to get hurt worse, and the one person who could actually do some good is going to be stood at the side of the room watching Lockhart wave his wand about."
There was a short silence. Nott and Zabini looked at each other. In two months of sharing a dormitory with him, neither of them had ever seen Lucian angry. They'd seen him bored and amused and sarcastic and occasionally, briefly, kind, and once, in the common room on the first night, something cold and frightening that had made the whole house go quiet. But they'd never seen this, the plain hot irritation of someone who cared about something and couldn't stand to watch it done badly, and it seemed to unsettle them more than the cold had.
"You really mean that," Nott said slowly.
Lucian let out a breath through his nose, and some of the heat went out of him. "I really mean it."
"Are you a dueler, then?" Nott asked. "Is that why? Do you do it, back home?"
Lucian considered the question for a moment. Then he took one hand out of his pocket and waggled it from side to side in the air, palm down, the way someone might when asked if a meal had been any good.
"You could say I'm a dueler," he said.
Zabini's eyebrows climbed a quarter of an inch, which for Zabini was the equivalent of shouting.
"Well, then, are you going to do something about it?" Nott asked. He sounded half curious and half alarmed, as though he wasn't sure which answer he'd prefer. "About Lockhart, I mean. You already skip his classes to go off with Hagrid. And you tore him to bits on the pitch in front of the whole school, everyone's still talking about it. I'd have thought you'd—I don't know. I'd have thought you'd have done something by now. You could. Couldn't you? Nobody would stop you."
Lucian stood very still. Then he tipped his head back and looked up at the high, shadowy ceiling of the entrance hall, and let out a long, slow, agonised groan, the groan of somebody who's been offered a fourth piece of cake after promising himself he'd only have three. He scrubbed a hand down his face. He opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again. For a moment it really did look as though he was going to say yes, and both of the other boys could see it, the temptation flickering behind his eyes like a candle in a draught.
"No," he said finally, grudgingly, as if every word had to be dragged out of him with pliers. "No. I'm not going to do anything. He's a teacher, the Headmaster hired him, and I've already embarrassed him once in public, and I promised myself before I came here that I wouldn't start throwing my weight about just because I could. It's a very bad habit, and it's a very hard one to break once you've started." He scowled. "I don't have to like it."
"You really don't," Zabini agreed, and they started walking again.
They'd nearly reached the doors of the Great Hall when Zabini spoke again, in the lazy, unbothered drawl he used for questions he actually cared about the answers to.
"Speaking of throwing your weight about. Isn't it strange nobody's come to see you yet? From the Ministry, I mean. I'd have thought the Minister would've been up here the first week. Or somebody from the Wizengamot. Half of them would sell their grandmothers for a cup of tea with a Bloodthorne, and the other half would sell the first half's grandmothers. Mother says Fudge has been jumpy as a cat since September, and she'd know, she's had him to dinner. But nobody's come."
"That's because I asked them not to," said Lucian.
Nott stared at him. "You asked the Minister for Magic not to visit you?"
"No, I asked Dumbledore not to let him. Third day, I think it was. I went up to his office and asked him if he'd keep the Minister and anyone else important off the grounds if they came asking for me, or tell them I was busy, or ill, or had gone back to America for a funeral, whatever he thought sounded best. He was very good about it. He offered me a lemon drop." Lucian shrugged. "I can't be bothered with them. Honestly, I can't. If it's important, if there's something that actually needs saying, they'll do it properly some day, through the proper people, the way it's supposed to be done. And until then I'd like to just be here. I'd like to enjoy Hogwarts while I've got it." He glanced toward the open doors, where the light of the Great Hall was spilling out in a long golden wedge across the flagstones, and the noise of hundreds of voices rolled out to meet them. "It's getting harder, I'll admit. But it's also getting a lot more fun, with the Chamber business going on."
"Yeah," said Nott, "about that." He hesitated in the doorway, glanced round to make sure nobody was close enough to hear, and then said, rather carefully, "What's actually going on with you and it? Because half the house still thinks it's you. You never said it wasn't. And you were there with the cat, and you know all that stuff about Slytherin, and you've been smirking every time anyone mentions the Heir for two weeks."
"Oh, it's not me," said Lucian cheerfully. "Don't worry about that. I'd have thought that was obvious."
"It's really not," said Zabini.
"That's what's so funny." Lucian's grin widened. "The entire school's decided that because my family taught the founders, I must be Slytherin's heir. As if the two things have anything to do with each other. Think about it for half a second. Slytherin was a student. My family were the teachers. He was one house and we were another, a completely different house, a completely different line, and a completely different kind of magic. Being his teacher's descendant doesn't make me his descendant, any more than being descended from Flitwick would make you descended from every student who ever took Charms. Nobody's thinking. They hear the word Bloodthorne and the word Slytherin in the same sentence and they just stop. Everybody in this castle's so busy being frightened that nobody's bothered to use their head, and if anyone actually did, for one minute, the answer'd be right in front of them. It's absurd. It's completely absurd. But it's obvious."
Nott and Zabini exchanged a look.
"So who is it, then?" Nott said.
Lucian looked at them both for a long moment. Then he sighed, the deep, weary, put-upon sigh of a tutor whose two favourite pupils have just got the simplest sum in the book wrong, and shook his head slowly, and for a second he looked genuinely, comically disappointed in them.
"Figure it out yourselves," he said, and walked into the Great Hall.
---
The long house tables had vanished, and in their place a narrow golden stage ran down the length of one wall, lit by thousands of candles floating overhead, and it seemed as though every student in the school had crammed in around it. Harriet's arm still twinged when she moved it too quickly, a dull ache deep in the newly grown bone, but Madam Pomfrey had let her go after one night with strict instructions not to fall off anything, and she'd come down with Ron and Hermione because nobody had wanted to miss it. She'd caught sight of Lucian almost as soon as she'd come in, standing a little apart at the very back of the crowd with Nott and Zabini, leaning against the wall with his arms folded and an expression of patient, long-suffering endurance, as though he'd been dragged to a play he'd already seen and hadn't liked the first time. She'd looked away quickly before he could catch her looking.
Then Lockhart swept onto the stage in robes of deep plum, waving to the crowd as though they'd all come to see him in particular, and behind him, in his usual black and with the expression of a man attending his own execution, came Snape.
Lockhart's speech went on for some time. Harriet caught perhaps half of it. The Headmaster had kindly given his blessing, the times being what they were, for a little club to prepare them all to defend themselves, as he himself had done on more occasions than modesty allowed him to count, the details being available in his books, at very reasonable prices. He'd be assisted this evening by Professor Snape, who'd confessed to knowing a thing or two about dueling himself and had been good enough to volunteer for a short demonstration. He did hope nobody would be too upset if their Potions master came off a little worse for wear. That got a laugh from a few of the Hufflepuffs, and nothing at all from the Slytherins, and Ron leaned close to Harriet and muttered that if there was any justice in the world they'd knock each other out cold and save everyone the trouble.
The two of them bowed, Lockhart with a great looping flourish of his hand, Snape with a short, savage jerk of the head, and then they turned their backs, paced away from each other down the stage, and turned again with their wands raised. Lockhart began a cheerful count, explaining as he went that naturally neither of them was trying to do the other any real harm, and he'd got as far as two when Snape lost patience.
"Expelliarmus!"
The flash of scarlet light was so bright it left a stripe across Harriet's vision. Lockhart left his feet entirely. He sailed backward off the end of the stage with his arms windmilling, hit the wall with a thump that made the nearest candles shiver, and slid down it into a heap of plum velvet, and his wand went cartwheeling away over the heads of the crowd. The Slytherins roared. Somewhere at the very back of the hall, Harriet heard one sharp, delighted bark of laughter that she was almost sure was Lucian's.
Lockhart clambered back up onto the stage with his hat over one ear and his golden hair standing straight up like a dandelion clock. Lavender Brown, who'd caught his wand, handed it back to him with a look of deep concern, and he thanked her with a wobbly smile and told the hall that that had been a Disarming Charm, as they could all see, since he no longer had his wand, ha ha, and that it had been a splendid idea of Professor Snape's to show it to them, though he'd seen it coming a mile off, naturally, and could have blocked it with his eyes shut if he'd thought it would be more instructive. Snape's face suggested that the next spell wouldn't be a Disarming Charm. Lockhart seemed to notice this at last, and announced rather quickly that that was quite enough demonstrating for one evening, and that they'd now pair everyone up.
They moved through the crowd, matching up partners. Lockhart put Neville with Justin Finch-Fletchley, who'd been notably quiet since Transfiguration and had a habit now of glancing toward the back of the room whenever Lucian was in it. Snape reached the Gryffindors first.
"Time to split up the dream team, I think," he sneered. "Weasley, you can partner Finnigan. Potter—"
Harriet moved automatically toward Hermione.
"I don't think so," said Snape, smiling coldly. "Miss Malfoy, come over here. Let's see what you make of the famous Potter. And you, Miss Granger, you can partner Miss Bulstrode."
Draca strutted over, smirking. Behind her, Millicent Bulstrode, a large, square Slytherin girl with a heavy jaw, lumbered toward Hermione, and Harriet saw Hermione give her a weak smile that wasn't returned.
Draca stopped in front of her and looked her up and down. There wasn't any of the gleeful, taunting malice Harriet was used to in her face tonight. There was something colder and more focused, something that hadn't been there before the Quidditch match. Draca had flown well. Everybody had said so, even some of the Gryffindors, and she'd still lost, she'd lost in front of the whole school and ended up face down in the mud with a sprained wrist and grass in her hair while Harriet held the Snitch up for the crowd, and Harriet could see that she hadn't forgotten a second of it. Her grey eyes were hard as pebbles. For just an instant, as she raised her wand, they flicked past Harriet's shoulder toward the back of the hall, toward the wall where a scarred boy was leaning with his arms folded, and then snapped back again, harder than before.
"Scared, Potter?" she said softly.
"You wish," said Harriet.
Lockhart called for them to face their partners and bow. Harriet and Draca managed about an inch each, neither of them taking her eyes off the other. Then he began to count, reminding everyone in a high, anxious voice that they were only to disarm, and Draca didn't wait for him to finish.
Her spell hit Harriet in the chest like a flung stone, and Harriet stumbled back a step with her ribs stinging and a hot rush of anger climbing up her throat. She didn't think. She flicked her wand up and threw the first jinx that came into her head, the Tickling Charm Flitwick had shown them last spring, and it caught Draca square in the stomach, and Draca folded over in a fit of helpless, furious giggles that she was clearly trying with all her might to stop. She went down on one knee. When she came up again her face was scarlet with fury, and she jabbed her wand at Harriet's legs, and the next moment Harriet's feet were jerking and kicking under her in a mad, uncontrollable jig.
All round them the hall had dissolved into chaos. Lockhart was flapping his hands and squeaking that he'd said disarm, only disarm, until Snape strode into the middle of it and ended every spell in the room with a single sharp word, and Harriet's legs went still, and Draca stopped laughing, and they both stood there panting and glaring at each other through a haze of greenish smoke. Around them, people were picking themselves up off the floor. Neville and Justin were both flat on their backs. Ron was propping up Seamus, who'd gone grey in the face, and apologising over and over for whatever his wand had done this time. And a few yards away Millicent Bulstrode had abandoned magic altogether and simply got Hermione in a headlock, and Harriet had to throw herself at Millicent and haul on her arm before she'd let go, which took a great deal of hauling, because Millicent was very nearly twice her size.
Lockhart hurried about among the wreckage, helping people up and telling a Ravenclaw boy with a bloody nose to pinch it, and announced that perhaps, on reflection, he ought to teach them how to block spells before they went any further. He'd need a volunteer pair. He suggested Neville and Justin. Snape, gliding up behind him, observed silkily that this would be unwise, since Longbottom could reduce a classroom to rubble with a cleaning charm and they'd be sending what was left of Finch-Fletchley to the hospital wing in an envelope, and suggested Malfoy and Potter instead. Lockhart thought this was a marvellous idea.
The crowd drew back to make a ring. Snape bent and murmured something in Draca's ear, and a thin smile spread across her face. Harriet looked up at Lockhart and asked him, a little desperately, if he could show her the blocking thing again, and Draca, too quietly for anyone else to hear, asked if she was frightened. Harriet told her to dream on. Lockhart clapped her on the shoulder and told her to do just what he'd done, and Harriet asked if he meant she should lose her wand, but he'd already started counting.
Draca whipped her wand up and shouted, "Serpensortia!"
There was a crack like a snapped branch, and something long and black poured out of the end of her wand and hit the floor between them with a heavy slap. It was a snake, five or six feet of it, glossy as wet ink, and it reared up off the floorboards with its hood half spread and its tongue flickering, and the whole front row of the crowd screamed and stampeded backward.
Snape didn't hurry. He told Harriet, in a lazy drawl that made it perfectly clear he was enjoying himself, to keep very still while he dealt with it, and he'd only just begun to raise his wand when Lockhart leapt in front of him.
"No, no, allow me, Severus!"
He slashed his wand at the snake with a bang like a firework. The snake didn't vanish. It shot straight up into the air, turned over twice, and came down again on the boards with a smack that made people wince, and when it rose this time it was hissing with pure fury. It looked round for something to blame. It found Justin Finch-Fletchley, standing frozen at the edge of the ring, and it slid toward him in a fast black ripple and drew itself up, fangs bared, ready to strike.
Harriet wasn't sure what made her do it. She wasn't even aware of deciding to do it. All she knew was that her legs were carrying her forward as though she was on castors, and that she shouted stupidly at the snake, and that it was the most natural thing in the world, as easy as breathing.
"Stop it. Leave him be. He hasn't done anything to you, and he isn't worth biting anyway. Get down."
The snake hesitated. Then, slowly, as though it had heard something it hadn't expected and wasn't sure what to make of it, it lowered itself to the floor, coil by coil, until it lay there in a loose, harmless loop with its small black eyes fixed on her, quiet as a length of rope. Harriet felt the fear go out of her all at once. It wasn't going to bite anybody now. She didn't know how she knew, but she knew it as surely as she knew her own name. It was the same certainty she'd felt the day at the zoo, years ago, when a boa constrictor had winked at her through the glass, and the same calm, quiet knowing she'd carried around inside her for as long as she could remember, the knowledge that this was a thing she could do, and that it was nothing to be afraid of, because once upon a time, when she was very small and lonely and lying awake in a cupboard under the stairs, a patient voice in her head had told her what it was called and that it was nothing to be ashamed of.
She looked up at Justin with a relieved half-smile, expecting him to look grateful, or at least shaken. He didn't. He looked terrified. He'd gone the colour of candle wax, and he was backing away from her as if she were the snake, and his voice when it came was high and cracking and nothing at all like the voice he'd used to talk about Eton.
"What the devil are you playing at? Keep it away from me! Keep away from me!" And he turned and shoved his way through the crowd and ran out of the hall.
Snape flicked his wand and the snake vanished in a curl of black smoke. Then he looked at Harriet, and it wasn't his usual look of weary dislike. It was sharp and searching and wary, the look of someone who'd just seen something he'd have bet good money was impossible, and for a moment even he seemed to have nothing to say.
The whole hall was staring at her. Hundreds of faces, and every one of them was looking at her as though she'd just grown a second head, and the silence was so thick she could hear the candles burning. Somebody whispered something, and somebody else whispered back, and the whisper spread outward through the crowd like a ripple, and she caught a word in it, one word, over and over again, and the word was Heir.
Her eyes went, without her meaning them to, to the back of the room.
Lucian had come off the wall. He was standing upright now, his arms unfolded, with Nott and Zabini staring at him from either side, and he was looking straight at her across the whole length of the Great Hall, over the heads of every frightened, whispering student in it, and he was grinning. It wasn't the lazy, teasing smile she'd seen on the train, or the polite one he used on teachers, or even the smirk from the corridor where Mrs Norris had hung. It was wide and fierce and delighted, the grin of somebody who has been staring at a puzzle for weeks and has just watched the last piece fall into place on its own, and there was something so wild in it, so openly, joyfully intent, that for a second he looked almost mad.
He held her gaze. Then, slowly and deliberately, so that she couldn't possibly mistake it, his lips shaped three words.
You hear it too.
Then he turned, pushed himself away from the wall, and walked out of the Great Hall without looking back, leaving Nott and Zabini gaping after him.
"Come on," said Ron's voice in her ear. "Move. Come on."
---
Ron didn't let go of her sleeve until they were through the portrait hole and halfway across the Gryffindor common room, and even then he only let go so he could steer her into the corner by the window, where a pair of high-backed armchairs stood angled away from the fire and nobody ever sat because of the draught. Hermione followed close behind with her arms wrapped round herself. The common room was half empty. The people who were there had gone quiet when Harriet came in, and were now very obviously not looking at her, in a way that was much worse than staring.
"You're a Parselmouth," Ron said. His voice was low and urgent and a little shaky. "Why didn't you tell us? Why didn't you ever say?"
"I'm a what?" said Harriet, though she knew perfectly well what he meant. She sat down heavily in one of the armchairs. Her newly grown arm was aching again, a deep, dull throb in the bone.
"A Parselmouth. You can talk to snakes."
"I know," said Harriet. She rubbed her arm. "I just didn't think it was a big deal. I didn't think about it. Lots of people must be able to do it." She looked up at him, and some of the frustration and confusion of the last half hour came out in her voice. "I don't understand why everyone's acting like I did something awful. I stopped it, Ron. That snake was about to go for Justin and I told it to back off and it did. That's all. I stopped it from biting him."
"That's what you were saying?" Ron looked at her strangely. "Because that's not what it sounded like, Harriet. It didn't sound like English at all. It sounded like hissing. Like you were the snake. You could've been telling it to go for him, for all anyone knew. No wonder Justin legged it."
Harriet opened her mouth to argue, and then shut it again, because she realised she'd honestly had no idea, standing there in the hall, that the words coming out of her weren't English, and the thought was unsettling in a way she didn't want to examine. Except that it wasn't entirely true that she'd had no idea. She'd always known, somewhere. She'd known since she was little. She'd been six, or perhaps seven, lying awake in the dark of the cupboard under the stairs, when she'd first told the voice about the garden snake that had hissed at her through the fence at the end of Privet Drive, and how she'd understood it, and how it had understood her back. The voice hadn't laughed at her, or told her she was making things up, the way the Dursleys always did. It had gone very quiet for a moment, and then it had told her, gently and with what she'd later come to recognise as a kind of careful interest, that what she had was a gift, an old and rare one, and that she should never be ashamed of it, but that she should also, perhaps, be careful who she showed it to. She'd forgotten that last part until about twenty minutes ago.
She didn't say any of that. She'd never said any of it to anybody, and she wasn't going to start now.
"Did you know?" Hermione asked quietly. She'd sat down on the arm of the other chair and was looking at Harriet with an expression that was half worry and half something closer to fear, and it hurt more than Ron's shaking voice. "That you could do it? Before tonight?"
Harriet hesitated. Then she nodded. "Since I was little," she said. "I've known since I was little. I just didn't know it had a name, or that it mattered. I thought it was like being good at drawing or something."
"Well, it does matter," said Ron. He'd sat down on the edge of the hearthrug and was leaning toward her with his elbows on his knees, and he looked properly worried now rather than angry. "It matters loads, mate. Nobody can do that. Hardly anybody, anyway, and the ones who can, well, you don't hear good things about them. Slytherin could. That was his whole thing, why d'you think their house has a snake on it? And now everybody's seen you do it, the week after Colin, and they're all going to reckon you're his great-great-however-many-greats granddaughter, come back to finish what he started."
"He lived a thousand years ago," Hermione said unhappily. "Nobody could prove you weren't, Harriet. That's the trouble."
Harriet shook her head slowly, and for a moment couldn't say anything at all. She thought about her mum and dad, the little she knew of them, a Muggle-born witch and a pureblood wizard from an old family that had always been in Gryffindor, and she tried to imagine a thread running back from them through a thousand years to a man who'd hated the idea of non-magical people setting foot in the castle, and the thread just wouldn't come. "It's not possible," she said. "At least, I don't think it is. I don't see how it could be."
Hermione didn't answer for a moment. She was chewing the end of her plait again. When she finally spoke, it was quietly, and she wasn't looking at Harriet, but at the dark window and the snow beginning to fall beyond it.
"This isn't good," she said. "This really isn't good, Harriet. Everyone saw. Everyone. By breakfast tomorrow the whole school's going to know, and they already thought someone in the castle was the Heir, and now they've got someone to point at." She bit her lip, and then turned back and looked at Harriet directly, and her eyes were sharp. "What did Lucian say to you? At the end. He said something. I saw him. He was looking straight at you and he said something, and then he just walked off."
Harriet's face went hot. She thought of the grin, wild and fierce and delighted, and the three words shaped so carefully across the length of the hall, meant for her and nobody else, and something in her chest tightened in a way she didn't understand and didn't want to look at too closely.
"It was nothing," she said. She stood up, a little too quickly, so that her arm gave a sharp throb of protest. "He didn't say anything. It was nothing. I'm going to bed."
"Harriet—"
"Night, Hermione. Night, Ron."
She didn't look back as she climbed the spiral staircase to the girls' dormitory, but she could feel them both watching her go, and she knew without having to turn round that they were looking at each other, and that neither of them believed her.