“No,” said Ron, weakly. “It’s not that.”
Blaise smiled that smile that always made his knees go wobbly. “Well, you’re a Diviner. Surely you can look into the future and see how your parents take the news.”
“What if I told you that telling them would set off a chain reaction of apocolyptic events, covering all the world with a second darkness and flooding the Earth’s continents with boiling, red-hot magma?”
“I’d say you were shirking.”
“As I thought.” Ron sighed. “I suppose I was rather hoping Ginny would do it for me.”
Blaise chuckled. “She looks as if her mind is on other things at the moment.”
Ron followed the line of her gaze and saw his sister, in that terrifying red dress of hers, her arms wrapped around Draco Malfoy. They weren’t so much dancing as clinging to each other. “Why now?” Ron said plaintively.
“I thought she was over her whole Malfoy fixation —“
He broke off and stared. Just beyond Draco and Ginny, moving among the dancers like a flickering shadow, was a familiar, dark-haired figure. He would have recognized her anywhere, as much from the way she moved as from the black hair that wrapped her like a shawl, or the slim pale face, like a thumbprint in white paint against the shadowy background of the suddenly darkened room…
Rhysenn.
She knew that he saw her — she raised a hand, slim and white-fingered, and beckoned him towards her. She was smiling as she turned and slipped away through the dancers, headed for a low door at the east side of the ballroom.
“What is it, Ron?” Blaise sounded actually alarmed now. “Are you —“
“I’ll be right back.” Ron drew away from his dancing partner and hurried after Rhysenn, leaving Blaise, perplexed, staring after him.
They were in a room full of people, and they were dancing. Distantly Ginny knew that the room was the ballroom at Malfoy Manor, and that it had been beautifully decorated in clean shades of white and black: white and black silk draperies drifted in the air like restless ghosts, and rose petals spilled from the sky at intervals. There was even a glittering ice sculpture that changed shapes as it melted: now a flower, now a swan with outspread wings. She saw all this, and didn’t see it; she was focused entirely on Draco.
They had been laughing together as they came down the stairs into the ballroom, but that had changed once they started dancing. Conversation had fallen away, swallowed up or vanished in the intensity of feeling that touching each other had brought with it — Ginny knew she wasn’t alone in feeling it, either; she’d seen the pulse jump in Draco’s throat when he took hold of her to pull her into the dance, and he’d had that look on his face too, that funny, half-taken aback and half-wry look that meant that his own emotional response had surprised him.
She could feel the roughness of his scarred hand against the bare skin of her back, the feather-light brush of his fingertips against her wrist. Her mouth was dry and her heart felt both impossibly light and impossibly saturated with feeling — and all these things she had never felt with Seamus, not even when he was kissing her, she felt from the light touch of Draco’s hands.
She felt like a raw wound, cut open and terribly vulnerable to injury, and yet at the same time she felt more alive than she ever had. There was a word for this feeling, a word she had almost forgotten how to apply to her own life.
Hope.
I love and I hope. They were passing the long table where the ice sculpture sat; as they moved past it it morphed from the shape of a heart to the shape of a glittering star. “What did you say?” Draco asked, leaning in to hear her, his hair brushing her cheek.
Ginny hadn’t realized she had spoken out loud. Flustered, she said, “I was just noticing the ice sculpture. It’s awfully pretty.”
“Yes. Mother does seem to have gone all out with the decor,” said Draco, as if the topic interested him only mildly. “I suppose that’s because Father never really let her have any say in it before.”
“No, it didn’t seem like her. All that dark wood and — what? Are you laughing at me?” she said, as a smile flitted across his face.
“Every time we dance past your brother and Blaise, he glares at me,” he said. “He seems quite certain I intend to ‘paw all over you’,” as he said.
“And you don’t?”
He laughed. “Sometimes I forget how direct you are. No, Ginny, I don’t plan to put my hands on you — unless you ask me to.”
She shook her head, making the gold butterfly clips rattle. “I don’t think you need to worry about that.”
“You’ve rather mastered the art of being scornful, haven’t you, for a Weasley?” he said, with great amusement. “You know, it took me years to figure out who you were.”
She blinked at him, nonplussed. “What?”
“I was twelve,” Draco said. “I’d just come home for the summer and I went into the library looking for my father. He wasn’t there, but someone else was. A most beautiful girl, taller than I was, with hair like the edge of a candleflame—“
“You knew that was me?” Ginny was astonished. “You remembered?”
“Oh, it took me a good deal of time to realize that it had been you. The real you was eleven back then, all knobbly knees and big eyes and an even bigger crush on Harry Potter. I never would have tied you in to the gorgeous girl in the library who said she was going to be my governess and then vanished between one instant and the next.”
Ginny laughed. “I think I told you you were tiny,” she said.
