are still all dilated.'
'Well, so?re yours,' said Harry mulishly. 'He just left it on me longer, is all.'
'I know. I guess he really couldn?t believe Hermione hadn?t told you where the cup was.'
'He must not read Teen Witch Weekly. If he did, he?d know she wasn?t speaking to me.'
'He probably let his subscription lapse while he was in the mental institution.' Dracos grin was a white flash in the darkness. 'Can you stand up?'
Harry tried and found that indeed, he could stand up. He still smarted slightly — he hadn?t realized that the Veritas curse would be so painful. It had felt as if two enormous steel grappling hooks had been sunk into his chest and were ripping it open, exposing all his innermost secrets. 'You know,' Harry said slowly, turning to lean against the parapet, 'that look on his face when he realized we really didn?t know…'
'I know.' Dracos smile faded: shock and anxiety had wiped his face clean of its usual guardedness. He looked defenseless, tired, and years younger.
'I?d think it was funny, but I suspect it means he?ll soon be back with something worse.'
'Is that the famous Malfoy optimism?'
Draco did not reply. He was looking up at the sky as if he expected answers to appear there, written magically in the space between the stars.
'What are you thinking?' Harry asked.
'I was pondering the immortal words of Socrates, when he said, 'I drank what??'
Harry laughed. Draco rested his elbow on top of the wall, his chin in his hand. He seemed to be staring out at the winter landscape, black and white as a chessboard now that the last sunlight was gone. The bare branches of the distant trees flung thin shadows along the snow, narrow as knife cuts. In between the trees, the moonlight struck sparks of fire from dangling icicles and nets of frost.
Harry felt an odd cold peace steal over him. Things were bad, it was true.
They would probably only get worse. But he had faced worse in the past, they both had, and they had won out. At least this presented him with a target: something to fight against.
'I told you you were enjoying this,' Draco said, so quietly that Harry had to bend his head to hear him. He was black and white in the moonlight too, a statuary angel with sad blank eyes.
'I?m not,' Harry said, with partial truthfulness. 'Well…maybe just a bit.
Its just that-'
He broke off as the tower door opened again. Harry turned slowly, his feeling of dread returning.
It was, of course, Lucius, once more alone. His heavy cloak was tightly fastened against the cold, and a brilliantly wicked look of inner glee illuminated his narrow features. 'Hello, boys,' he said. 'Did you miss me?'
'Of course,' Draco said flatly. 'This tower just feels empty without a gibbering maniac on it.' He turned slowly to face his father, keeping his back braced against the wall. He looked very tired. 'What have you come for now? Just more taunting?'
Lucius shook his head, and his look of inner glee intensified. 'I have not come with curses or taunting,' he said. 'Only news.'
/Whats his game this time?/ Harry demanded silently of Draco.
Draco shrugged. /I don?t know./
'You might, however,' Lucius added, 'want to sit down.'
'This is ridiculous,' Harry burst out angrily. 'You can?t hurt us, not in any lasting way. The Ministry is watching — and even if you?ve got them in your pocket, which I don?t believe, theres still Dumbledore and the rest, they?d never let you live if you hurt either one of us — '
'I have no intention of hurting either one of you.'
'Then whats the point of coming up here and making empty threats?'
Harry snapped, but Lucius wasn?t looking at him. Instead, he was staring at his son and there was a look in his eyes that Harry found most unsettling — a dedicated predatory sort of appetite that made Harry want more than anything to distract Lucius? gaze onto himself. 'You?re just trying to frighten us, and it won?t work. You just have a little bit of time until they come for us, and you can?t hurt us, you can?t kill us, and you know it. And you can?t touch me — ' Harrys voice came out on a hissing whisper. 'I?d like to see you try it.'
Lucius raised one silvery eyebrow, as if he found Harrys outburst tactless. 'You I would not bother to kill,' he said, still looking at Draco, and his gaze narrowed and narrowed until it seemed as sharp as a needle with which he jabbed at his son. Draco continued to stand very still against the parapet wall, his face in shadow. 'You I would not bother to kill, Harry Potter, and Draco is dying already.'
When Harry had been eight years old, he had been following Dudley to school one day — several paces behind him, as his cousin always insisted.
They were late, as they often were, due to Dudleys habit of eating breakfast twice, and they?d been forced to sneak around the back of the school after the front gates had been closed. Ducking under some low-hanging tree branches, Dudley had held one back for him, and Harry, forgetting momentarily the instincts drilled into him by a lifetime of his cousins abuse, had followed after. Dudley, of course, had immediately released the branch, which had whipped backward and slashed Harry across the face. Even Dudley had been surprised by the amount of blood it had produced, but more than the humiliation or the bleeding, what Harry always remembered was the sudden, vicious shock of it: the blinding pain out of nowhere.
He felt the same shock now, as if Lucius had walked up and hit him in the face. The words Lucius had spoken seemed in fact to make no real kind of sense, as if he had spoken them in another language.
'What?' Harry said. He heard his own voice, clear and stiff, as if it were a strangers. 'What did you say?'
'I should think I was quite clear,' said Lucius, who seemed almost manic with the pleasure of his own malice. 'Draco is dying.'
Harry looked quickly to Draco, but the other boy was as unmoving as he had been before Lucius had spoken, a still black silhouette against the silvery parapet wall. His chest rose and fell rapidly but other than that he was motionless.
'Dying of what?' Harry demanded in a half-whisper; he wanted to speak more loudly, but he could not quite seem to get enough air.
'Poison,' Lucius said, as if this should be obvious. 'What else?'
Tell him, Harry thought, hard, in Dracos direction. Tell him it isn?t true.
Draco did not reply, but he moved at last, very slightly; he raised his chin and looked at his father. The gesture lifted his face out of shadow. 'It was the arrow,' he said to Lucius. His voice was calm and factual. 'It was the arrow, wasn?t it? There was some kind of poison on the shaft.'
'Aren?t you clever,' Lucius said dryly; he continued to speak after that but Harry didn?t hear him. The sounds he made were drowned out by the roaring of the blood in Harrys ears; it sounded like thunder. As if to make up for this deafness, his vision leapt into a sudden painful clarity and he could see everything within his field of vision both perfectly and simultaneously. The shape of each irregular flagstone, the line of snowflakes melting along the parapet wall, the knifelike shadow Lucius cast on the ground.
He knew Lucius was not lying. Knew it from Lucius? dry gleefulness, from the dull knowledge in Dracos eyes, and even more than that he knew it from his own memories: Draco losing a Quidditch game he should not have lost, Draco stumbling over a practice fencing match, all his grace gone. Draco lounging against walls, leaning on bedposts while he talked, sprawling on the floor in front of fireplaces: Harry had put all this recent laziness down to half-insolent posturing, but it wasn?t that, was it. It was that otherwise he would not have been able to stand up.
'How long,' Draco was saying, when Harrys hearing returned, 'How long have I got, then?'
'A month,' Lucius said. 'Two weeks, maybe, before you can?t walk anymore.'
A faint hard shudder passed over Draco: Harry saw his hands tighten at his sides and felt the shiver down in
