The Ministry officials slowly stepped forward and gathered round them, wands finally lowered.
Hermione snapped out of her daze. She turned her head to check on the others, and saw Harry and Ron helping one another up, not far away, apparently unhurt.
The shout had jolted Draco back to himself. He closed his eyes for a brief moment, then pulled himself abruptly away from her bright eyes, her soft, cloud-pale cheeks, and lips that had come so very close.
He drew a breath, blinked, and gathered his wits. He rose quickly to his feet, slid an arm round her waist, and helped her up from the ground.
The Dark Mark, still flashing overhead, brought him firmly back to his senses. Worry flooded back into his heart, and panic once more took hold of his mind.
Draco could well foresee that being found in such an awkward position, in a moment like this, would spell trouble for a Malfoy.
Sure enough, Mr Barty Crouch strode forward, his sharp eyes sweeping over the four of them, and demanded, "Who did this? Who conjured the Dark Mark?"
"We did not!"
"We never did anything!"
These were Harry's and Ron's voices, both looking bewildered and furious at once.
Hermione saw Ron glaring angrily at the wizard officials, asking, "Why did you attack us?"
"Do not lie to me, boy!" Barty Crouch said, rather rudely, to Harry and Ron... he was, at that moment, the only wizard present still pointing a wand at them.
Then, his gaze swept over them, coming to rest upon Draco. "Aha! And look who I have found here! A Malfoy! I have caught you at last! It was you, was it not, who conjured the Dark Mark!"
How could he accuse people so wildly, without any grounds at all?
Hermione was utterly astonished. Mr Crouch's wand tip was practically jabbing at Draco's face. Draco turned his head away, haughty, plainly in no mood to offer any explanation.
Seeing this, Mr Weasley hesitated, recalling his own old grievances against Lucius Malfoy. But he stepped forward regardless and said, "He is only a child..."
"Arthur, this is none of your concern..." Mr Crouch, his expression still terrible, advanced on Draco without so much as a glance at Mr Weasley.
How could Mr Crouch behave so unreasonably?
Hermione's eyes widened in disbelief.
"No, it was not him!" Hermione gripped the boy's slightly cool hand tightly, a note of anger in her voice. She tried, as calmly as she could, to explain to Mr Crouch, "He did nothing at all; the only thing he did was shield me from being hit by one of your own spells."
"He was found at the scene of the crime! You do not understand, his father..." Mr Crouch clearly paid her words no mind whatsoever; he did not so much as glance at her, his gaze fixed relentlessly on Draco. "He has a criminal record!"
"Barty," a witch in a long woollen dressing gown whispered, "they are only children, Barty, they could never..."
"Where did the four of you get hold of this mark from?" Mr Weasley asked anxiously. Mr Crouch glared at Draco still, but did not lower his wand.
Draco remained coldly silent. This hostile treatment, this suspicious glare from a Ministry official, brought back memories from his past life at once, of the time his own father had been arrested as a Death Eater.
They would only ever ask the questions they wanted answered, state their own position, and display their arrogance forcefully; they had no real interest in hearing anything from him at all.
Besides, he knew Barty Crouch's temperament well enough. He felt quite certain nothing he said now would make the slightest difference, and that arguing would only invite worse treatment still.
Those arrogant Ministry officials, as ever, refused to hear anyone's explanation, talking only amongst themselves, passing judgement entirely on their own terms.
Then, more memories surfaced.
His father's sleeve, roughly yanked up by the Aurors, their contemptuous looks fixed on the Dark Mark branded upon his arm; and then himself, standing before the Dark Lord, bewildered, receiving that "honour" of the Dark Mark, that agonising "honour" burned into his own arm...
Draco stood frozen where he was, suddenly unable to move at all.
In an instant, he was assailed by these dreadful memories. It felt dreadful; he felt almost as though his insides were being torn apart.
Keeping a cold exterior was the only thing left to him just then. He dared not utter a single word, afraid that if he did, he would either shout, or come apart entirely.
Hermione reacted quite differently from Draco. She cared nothing at all for Ministry protocol, nor for how senior Barty Crouch might be.
She pulled the silent, innocent boy behind her, raised her chin defiantly, and, like some furious cat with its fur standing on end, faced down Mr Crouch's wand head-on.
Draco stared at her in astonishment, this small girl standing before him, wondering where on earth she found such nerve, and what she thought she was doing.
He tried to pull her back, away from Mr Crouch's wand, but she pulled back against him harder still, her eyes burning with fire.
She had, at last, unleashed that tough, unyielding side of her that Harry and Ron had once described to Draco, the very essence of Hermione Granger. She seemed never to have learned how to spell the word "weak" at all.
Draco watched her, watching her glare defiantly back at Mr Crouch's wild, bulging eyes.
She pointed straight ahead, to the very spot where the voice and spell had come from, and said firmly, word by word, "I shall tell you again, it was not him! Someone was speaking loudly behind that tree, and then cast the spell. We all heard it happen."
"Ah, so this person was standing right there, was he?" Mr Crouch did not move, but his gaze grew more menacing still.
At last, he turned it upon Hermione, his face full of suspicion. "And he cast the spell, did he? You seem to know a great deal about how this mark is conjured, Miss..."
Hermione did not move. She stood straight, in front of Draco, her lips pressed firmly together, entirely fearless.
She even gripped her wand tightly, though she had not yet raised its tip.
Harry, Ron, and even Mr Weasley all stood quite stunned by the whole standoff.
"Please, Barty, she is only a child!"
The square-jawed witch in her woollen dressing gown glanced at Hermione, her thick eyebrows raised high, her monocle threatening to slip clean off.
"I know her. She is a classmate of my niece, Muggle-born as it happens! She could not possibly know anything of this, and besides, none of them are old enough to conjure such a thing!"
The Ministry officials all seemed to agree with the witch. They plainly took the children's innocence for granted, and turned their wands instead towards the spot Hermione had pointed out, peering into the dark bushes.
"We are too late." The witch peered through her monocle a moment, then shook her head. "They have already Disapparated."
"I do not think so," said a red-faced wizard with a short brown beard. "Our Stunning Spells passed straight through that thicket just now... we may very well have hit them..."
Draco recognised him as Amos Diggory, Cedric Diggory's father. He looked lively and energetic, with no trace at all of that heartbroken figure he would become, in Draco's past life, at the end of the Triwizard Tournament.
Mr Diggory straightened up, raised his wand, strode across the clearing, and vanished into the darkness. A moment later, his shout rang out. He emerged from behind the bushes dragging along an even more suspicious, and rather more pitiable, suspect... a house-elf.
"That is Winky, the house-elf, the one who was sitting in the corner of the Top Box. She belongs to the Crouch family," the nearby wizards murmured amongst themselves.
Now, Barty Crouch found himself facing an entirely different foe. His gaze, at last, left Hermione and Draco alone.
He stared hard at Winky for some while, his face draining of colour, before going to search the bushes himself, as though hoping to find some other scapegoat.
But he came back empty-handed, having found nothing at all.
"She had a wand in her hand as well..." Mr Diggory said, holding one up for all to see, "and this is the very wand that conjured the Dark Mark." The wizards all crowded round to look at it.
Once Barty Crouch had finally stopped threatening Draco, Hermione at last let her tense body relax. She let out a small breath, turned to look at the boy behind her, and gave him a gentle smile.
The boy's eyes flickered, his face still pale and astonished, staring at her, his lips twitching as though he wanted to say something.
Just as she began to move closer to him, they heard Harry cry out... it was his own missing wand.
Amid the chaos of overlapping voices, the Ministry officials pieced together, from a jumble of scattered details, something like the truth: someone had stolen Harry's wand, used it to conjure the Dark Mark, and then flung it away into the woods; and poor, unlucky Winky had simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and picked it up.
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