'It shouldn't be now, not by my calculations, not until tomorrow night. But I know what this is, Sirius.' Lupin looked up, and Hermione could see the lines of tension at the corners of his eyes and mouth. 'Take me downstairs and lock me up,' he said.
Sirius hesitated.
'We talked about this,' said Lupin, with an edge to his voice. 'The dungeons…'
'But it's too early-'
'Sirius.'
Sirius, arrested in mid-speech, shut his mouth and looked at Lupin with worried, dark eyes. Lupin looked back, frowning, and stood up.
Hermione was reminded rather oddly of her parents when they didn't want to fight in front of her.
Sirius shrugged. 'All right,' he said. 'All right — look, you two, I'll be back in ten minutes. Don't go anywhere.'
'Can't we do the spell first?' asked Harry abruptly. 'I think-'
'When I get back,' said Sirius, an edge to his voice, and Harry fell silent. The moment they were gone, however, he turned to Hermione. She was taken aback by his expression — his eyes had an odd sort of light in them, and his jaw was set stubbornly. 'I think we should do it,' he said.
'What, right here on the desk?' asked Hermione with a wan smile.
'You know Lupin said it wasn't very sturdy.'
'Don't try to distract me,' said Harry, but he almost smiled. 'You know what I mean.'
'Do the spell? Send you through to where Draco is? Harry, that is not a good idea.'
'You can do it, Hermione, I know you can. The complicated part of the spell is done already, all you have to do is say the words and send me through.'
'I can send you through,' she said. 'But it'll take Sirius to bring you back.'
'Sirius will be back in ten minutes!'
'So why can't you wait?'
'Because I can't!' yelled Harry, and Hermione tensed; Harry almost never yelled at anyone. 'It's important,' he said, 'and we're not just talking about anything here, we're talking about whether he lives or dies.'
The cold anchor in Hermione stomach gave a wrenching twist.
'I trust you,' said Harry. 'I trust you even though lately you haven't given me much of a reason to trust you about anything. Why can't you trust me?'
Hermione hesitated, then slowly, and with a consuming sense of reluctance, reached for the parchment that Sirius had left on the desk.
He was back in the fencing-room at Malfoy Mansion, facing his father across the flagstones. They had been practicing already for an hour and he was deadly tired, sweat stinging his eyes, clothes drenched in it. His muscles felt like overextended rubber bands. His father, of course, seemed hardly to have tired at all, but then, Draco thought resentfully, his father wasn't a thirteen-year-old boy using a weapon far too large and heavy for him. I just want this over, Draco thought despairingly, but he knew his father wouldn't stop the practice until he had either disarmed his son or made him bleed.
There was no question of Draco disarming Lucius, of course, his reach wasn't great enough, and anyway every attack maneuver he had ever learned had been taught to him by his father.
But I could still try, he thought…he recalled an extremely fancy move he had learned from his father a year ago and had been practicing in secret, involving a beat, a feint in quarte, a feint in sixte, and a lunge veering off into an attack on the opponent's sword hand. He launched into the sequence and saw Lucius' eyes widen in surprise; felt as brief thrill of victory as the tip of his sword nicked Lucius' hand — before his father, swifter and with greater reach, lunged forward and slammed the flat of his weapon against Draco's wrist. Draco stared in dismay as his numb fingers released his blade.
It clattered to the flagstone as his father, pale and angry-looking, took hold of the front of his son's shirt and shoved him up against the wall. Draco's head hit the stone with enough force to blacken his vision.Lucius drew his arm back and placed the tip of his sword against the boy's throat. 'Try to use my own maneuver against me, will you?' he demanded, his voice sharp in Draco's ear. 'That was stupid, very stupid. A s if I would teach you a move I don't know the countermove to, you should know better. You were just showing off, weren't you, boy, it's your besetting sin. Just remember-' The sharp tip of Lucius' sword nicked his son's throat and Draco felt the blood begin to flow — 'a smug scholar is only a fool, but a smug swordsman is a dead man.'
Draco shut his eyes. 'Yes, Father.'
'Yes, Father, what?'
'Yes, Father, I understand.'
Lucius took the blade away, but the cold expression did not leave his eyes. 'Do you?' he said. 'I really wonder. Sometimes I even wonder if perhaps you want to die.'
'No, Father. I don't want to die.'
Draco opened his eyes and stared down at the black water fifteen feet below him. He was standing at the edge of the old rock quarry behind the Weasleys' house. He had discovered it quite by accident; flying over, he had seen the moonlight glint off the water and had descended to take a look. From the air, it had looked even more like the moat that Mr. Weasley claimed it was. Up close, it more closely resembled a long, cleft pit in the ground, falling away suddenly and sharply before his feet, studded with uneven rocks. The bottom of the quarry was flooded with water, which gave back his own reflection, dim and cloudy, backlit by a full white moon. From this angle, thrown into relief, Draco thought that he looked like his father: tall, cold, remote…
'Going swimming, Malfoy?'
Draco spun around, nearly stumbling; regained his balance, and stared.
Harry stood about ten feet from him, near where Draco had left his Firebolt, under the shade of a cluster of trees. Draco had always thought that people who claimed that they couldn't believe their eyes were overstating,
