and withdrew a pinch of tobacco. 'I?m not going to kill you,' he said. 'I have thought a great deal about what the best way to get my son to cooperate with me might be, and have concluded that killing you at this juncture would be relatively ineffective toward that end.'
'I?m touched.'
'You would not be the first thing he has loved that I have destroyed,'
Lucius said. 'It might teach him a lesson. Of course,' and he shrugged, Dracos own, elegant, shrug, 'that lesson is not todays lesson.'
'You can?t kill me,' Harry said. 'The Ministry would have your head.
Whether Draco cares about me or not, thats not the issue — and anyway, you?re wrong. You taught him not to love anyone, don?t you remember?
He hasn?t forgotten, even if you have. He feels responsibility, loyalty….obligation to me — '
Lucius chuckled. 'Maybe he can?t love,' he said. 'Or he couldn?t. But what of you? You can, and he has become what you are. I see how it has changed him. You feel, and he feels through you. Through you he can know what it is to love and to grieve, to dream and to sacrifice. You can be his expectation of happiness; you can be his broken heart. Think of all that world of feeling he would lose, if he lost you.'
'But,' Harry said, 'it is not my death you are planning.'
'Planning?' Lucius echoed. 'I am not planning his death. It has already begun. And perhaps, now that I have told you what my son would lose if you died, it is time for you to think of what would happen to you should the reverse occur. I appeal,' he added, raising a small gold wand from the desktop, 'to your sense of self- preservation.'
Think of what would happen to you, if he died, Lucius had said. And Harry tried. He stood where he was and he tried to imagine it, but it was like trying to imagine what it would be like to be paralyzed. As surely as his legs and arms moved when he told them to, as surely as his lungs filled with air when he breathed, Draco existed as part of him. Lucius might as well have said, Imagine you never were a wizard, or Imagine you had never heard of magic, or Imagine your parents had never died.
'Why do you hate him so much?' Harry whispered finally. He heard his own voice as if from a great distance; wondered, vaguely, if Draco could hear or experience anything of this through him. He hoped not. 'I understand why you hate me. But Draco, hes your son. He loves you — he loved you, anyway, and he would still if you hadn?t burned all that out of him. What did he ever do to you?'
There was a long silence. The fire crackled harshly in the grate; the afternoon shadows lengthened across the floor. A nervous pain twisted behind Harrys ribs, as if his body comprehended what his mind could not, and was wincing in the anticipation of some terrible physical loss.
'I told Draco this once, a long time ago,' Lucius said. His voice was curiously flat. Harry had not heard him speak like this before. 'When a man pledges himself to the Dark Lord, when he receives the Mark, he must, in exchange for this honor and to prove his loyalty, give to the Dark Lord one thing. One…gift. It must be something of precious personal value. I have seen men give up a great talent for music or art, a treasured memory, a grand passion. Draco asked me once what I gave up, and I said that what I had given was him. That is not strictly true, for each man can give only what is his own to give; even my son, in the end, belongs to himself alone. What I gave was my own capacity to care about him.'
'You gave up….your ability to love?' Harry asked. It felt bizarre, asking such a personal question of Lucius Malfoy. But his curiosity was stronger than his anxiety.
'No,' Lucius said. 'Just my feelings of paternal love. I had no children at the time, of course. Had I never had any, as I planned, I suppose it would have been an empty gift in the end. But then, the Dark Lord has no use for empty gifts. Only a year after I pledged myself in his service, he requested that I have a son. So I had a son.' Luciuseyes went to the window, and for a moment he seemed to gaze into nothingness. 'The Dark Lord is nothing if not thorough. In me, he knew he had a servant who would produce a child he would not mind giving up when necessary -
because, of course, I had given him up a long time ago.'
'Couldn?t…' Harry began falteringly, 'couldn?t it be reversed, somehow, I mean, all spells are reversible — '
'Reversed?' Lucius? voice was suddenly icy again. 'Why would I want it reversed? I am very satisfied with the bargain I made. To gain much, one must sacrifice much, and I have gained vastly. I have gained the world.'
And lost your soul. Harry thought of Draco, up on the tower. He reached out with his mind for him, but felt only a resistant uncommunicative silence. Anxiety gnawed at his stomach again, worse than before. 'What do you want from me?? he asked abruptly. 'You didn?t bring me down here just to tell me stories about the past.'
'No.' Lucius? voice had a razor edge now; Harry suspected that the older man now very much regretted having said anything at all about his gift to Voldemort. 'I brought you down here to offer you a bargain.'
'What kind of bargain?'
'It is simple. You have that cup. I want it.'
'I told you already, I don?t have it and I don?t know where it is.'
'I understand that. But your girlfriend does. And therefore, I am willing to make a trade.'
The world turned dark around the edges. 'A trade?' Harry whispered.
'You mean — you don?t mean trading one of them for the other?'
I?d rather die myself, he thought, and meant it, but did not say it. Lucius did not want or need his death at the moment. Offering it would mean nothing.
Lucius chuckled. 'Amusing as it would be for me to watch you make that choice….no, that isn?t what I mean. I mean, that I will trade you what you want, if you will write a letter to Miss Granger, and ask her to share the location of the cup with me. Tell her why, as well. She?ll understand.'
'You?ll trade me what?' Harry said, his head spinning.
'This,' Lucius said, and from an inner pocket of his robe, he drew an object and set it down on the desk in front of him.
Harry stared. It was a clear glass vial the size, perhaps, of a rolled parchment. The top and bottom of the vial were thickly encrusted with wine-colored jewels. Inside was perhaps two inches of pale greenish liquid.
'More poison?' Harry said, weary bitterness creeping into his voice.
'No,' Lucius replied. “Antidote.”
Hermione lay awake in Ginnys bed, staring up at the ceiling. Restlessness hummed in her blood; she could not sleep. When she shut her eyes she saw Harrys face, pale and worried when he turned away from her back at school. Not having seen him since, she fretted: what if he died, and the last thing she had ever said to him was that she didn?t want to be with him anymore?
Giving up on sleep, she sat up slowly, and rested her chin on her knees.
Thinking about what would happen to her if Harry died had always filled her with shuddering nausea; she remembered Draco telling her that she couldn?t imagine a world without Harry in it. Oh, but I can, she thought grimly. I just don?t want to live in it.
She got up and padded quietly into the bathroom in search of water. After lighting the torch with a whispered Lumos, she stared disconsolately at herself in the mirror over the sink. So this was what love looked like: dark shadows under the eyes, pinched pallor, unhappy mouth. Draco would have laughed at her, wouldn?t he. Gazing at her own face, she spared a flash of ironic pity for Pansy: so this was Pansys idea of a devastating femme fatale, was it? Anyone who had to wear her face to feel pretty and loveable….she paused, the glass of water halfway to her mouth. What on earth HAD put this diabolical scheme into Pansys head? Why Ron? It wasn?t that he had been nursing a secret passion for her all these years, Hermione was quite sure of that. Oh, there was something there, there always was with two people who were so close and who had once been romantically involved, however briefly. There was always that lingering possessiveness, in Ron no doubt complicated by his intermittent jealousy of Harry that had never quite gone away. Still, Pansy must have caught onto something: a look, a phrase, a gesture, something about Ron…
