'— not my love life, you squinty-eyed pillock. It's my Epicyclical Charms.'
This was so unexpected that Harry rocked back on his heels. 'What?'
Draco pulled down the neck of his sweater just far enough so that Harry could see a double row of gold chains glinting against the light skin.
'These. It's a bloody nuisance, carrying them around like this, never being able to take them off—'
'I could carry one,' Harry offered quietly.
“No,” Draco said, without anger or indecision. “That’s not what I want.”
'Then—' Harry felt an absurd stab of something like jealousy, and fought it down. 'You want to take it to someone else? You want me to come with you?'
'I want you to come with me,' Draco said. He took one of the brooms and held it out to Harry.
'You can't give it to just anyone,' Harry said, taking the broom. 'It's got to be someone you really trust.'
'I know,' Draco said. He had picked up his own broom and was heading for the window at the end of the hall. It was open, curtains blowing gently in the soft spring air. He leaned out.
Harry leaned out next to him. 'Someone who—'
'Loves me?' Draco looked at Harry with sideways amusement. 'Don't be such a girl, Potter. Come on. I'll race you.' He slid with agility onto the window ledge, broom in hand, poised for flight.
Annoyed, Harry crawled onto the ledge beside him. 'I could race you if —
'
'Race me? A splendid idea.'
'— I knew where we were going. Who are we taking these Charms to?'
Draco's look was secretive, amusement glinting under his fair lashes.
'Someone I trust — endlessly,' he said, and dropped from the windowsill, tumbling into the night air on his broomstick with the reckless speed of an angel eager to begin the long fall from heaven.
Following Draco on his broomstick through the tangled woods around Malfoy Manor would have been impossible for a flyer less brilliant than Harry, and was difficult even for him. Draco knew the woods intimately, knew every tree and branch, and he whipped between them like a flickering spark of silver in the dark.
Harry knew his friend wasn’t trying to lose him among the jagged branches, it was just that Draco loved to fly, he always had, and now that he was well enough again to fly as he wanted to, he was determined to do it with style. He spun upside-down several times on his broom as they shot out of the forest and onto the barren tract of land that bordered it to the east. To the west, the Manor glittered, bound with lights like a fairytale castle. To the east, a great blackness spread like a stain across the bare ground. It was only when Draco angled his broom down, and Harry followed, that Harry realized that the darkness was the Bottomless Pit.
“Malfoy —” Harry cried in alarm, seizing his friend’s arm and forcing it back down to his side. “What the hell are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?” Draco’s eyes were slitted against the wind and Harry couldn’t tell his mood at all: happiness, exultation, despair, resignation, boredom? He could have reached to touch Draco’s mind, but it seemed, in the face of their meeting with Dumbledore in two days, like more of a painful reminder than either of them needed. “I’m tossing my Charms into the Bottomless Pit.”
“But —”
“But what? It’s an ideal solution. They’ll fall forever, never hitting bottom, never breaking. No one will ever find them again.”
“I don’t understand,” Harry said. “Why are you doing this now?”
“I don’t want to carry them any more,” said Draco, the glitter of his narrowed eyes just visible through his lashes.
“I told you I would,” Harry said.
The wind had died down. Draco opened his eyes and his clear, searching look was free of sarcasm. 'I would put my life in your hands without a second thought if it were only myself I cared about.'
“I don’t mind the risk,” said Harry. “I don’t mind the responsibility.”
Draco looked away from him, towards the endless blackness of the Pit.
“Harry,” he said. “You’ve never minded risk or responsibility. You’ve never been allowed to mind them. They’ve always been your whole life.
But what kind of friend would I be if now that you might finally be free of all that, I placed yet another burden on you?”
“Friendship isn’t a burden,” said Harry.
“Most friends don’t hold each other’s lives in their hands.”
“We aren’t most people,” said Harry, but he could see from Draco’s expression that the other boy’s mind was made up. “All right,” he said, releasing Draco’s arm. “If that’s what you really want.”
“It’s what I want,” said Draco, and he went lightly to the edge of the Pit, and looked down into it. Harry joined him at the edge and for a moment they looked down together into the yawning emptiness. It was like the sea in a way, Harry thought, the moonlight penetrating only the first layers of its atmosphere, suffusing them with a milky glow. Below that glow was impenetrable darkness. He remembered falling into it himself, his hand slipping out of Hermione’s, and the sensation of spinning away into nothingness.
Beside him, Draco took a deep breath and raised his hand, the Epicyclical Charms dangling from his fingers. They shimmered like tears in the moonlight. One, Harry thought, had been made in fear and bitterness, and the other had been made in fear and love, but either could be used to control Draco, to break him or kill him, and even though when he had held those charms in the palm of his hand, Harry had felt that he held Draco’s life safe and protected, perhaps that was more selfish than it was true.
