He got up, and, taking the blanket with him, went to the window and sat down on the ledge. He wrapped the blanket around himself and looked out at the cold winter night beyond the misted glass.
The word outside was white and wreathed in silver ice. It looked fragile, as if it would ring like a glass bell if struck. The hollow black sky seemed painted with a thousand diamonds, although there was no moon at all.
The night was breathlessly quiet.
Draco looked down at his hands. There was a faint bluish tinge to the nails that might have been cold or shadow; he curled his fingers in against his palms. Images from the dream he had been having moved behind the skin of his eyelids: the castle again, rising from its black nest of pine trees, the diamond-like windows, the echoing empty rooms. The tower, and in the tower the shelf on which sat the mirror, the dagger, and the scabbard.
Tonight, a table had been pulled up to the window and at it had sat his father, absorbed in a solitary game of chess. The chessboard was gold and ivory, and the pieces were carved out of whole rubies and emeralds: one team scarlet as blood, the other green as poison.
By the window stood Voldemort, looking out over the landscape, the trees spilling their autumnal colors down into an empty valley. “Lucius,” he said. “Surely the time is nearly at hand?”
“Yes, my Lord,” said Lucius, moving the bishop. “In two weeks if I am not mistaken.”
“That is good news. Time hangs heavily, here. I grow increasingly bored.”
The Dark Lord turned away from the window and looked down at Draco's father. “I find I prefer these more old fashioned chess sets that capture rather than destroying,” he said thoughtfully. “It is quite novel.”
“I thought you liked killing,” Lucius said, and moved a red pawn.
“Sometimes capturing is a better tactic,” said the Dark Lord. “Why destroy what you can use, or make an example of?” He smiled. It was as unpleasant a sight as always. “How is the boy?”
“As well as can be expected,” said Lucius, and moved the knight. “It is as I told you, my Lord. It is now a matter of waiting.”
Draco was pulled out of his memories and back into the present by a tapping sound against the glass. He realized he was shivering violently enough that his hands were knocking against the window. He pulled the blanket tighter and murmured a Warming Spell, which helped slightly — if only he could sleep, he thought, but he was wide awake. He let his head fall back against the wall, and his eyes trailed to the clock by his bed, whose numbers flared and faded in different colors every minute. Right now the violet numerals told him that it was five in the morning.
In two hours they would get up to have breakfast and go to the museum.
As a prefect, he would have to be there early, waiting with the professors.
Harry, Hermione and Ron were meant to meet him in the entry hall before breakfast even started. He had not expected to be so nervous about what they planned for tomorrow, certainly not so nervous that it would keep him awake. Yet he was dreading it in several ways. Certainly it was hardly the most dangerous thing he had ever done, but it wasn't from fear for his own personal safety that his anxiety sprang.
He wondered idly if Harry was awake yet, the thought lighting a flicker of curiosity in his brain. Without stopping to analyze what he was doing, he sent a tendril of thought out, searching the dark space outside himself for the familiar color and shape of Harry's thoughts. He felt nothing at first, which almost alarmed him. He let himself reach out farther, as if he were stepping from a bridge out into deep water, the darkness rising formless around him.
Then there was a burst of light. He paused, his eyes shut tight, and reached forward again. The light refracted, splitting into various colors, which pinwheeled around him like a shower of falling stars. He seemed to look through a doorway into another world: he felt heat, saw shimmering air and blue sky.
Alarmed, Draco tried to draw away, but it was as if someone had reached out and clasped his hand; he felt himself pulled forward, and then the empty space above him hollowed itself out into a pale blue sky, and the formless air beneath him became a strip of golden sand. He knew it was not real: everything around him had the soft, melting look of a dream, even the house that rose in the distance, gabled and shuttered in blue and white, looked like a dream house: faint and half-remembered. That's it, he thought, I'm in a dream, Harry's dream, and then he took a step forward and something appeared in the sand in front of him. He almost yelled out loud.
It was a boy, perhaps eight years old, perhaps seven, kneeling in the sand, a plastic bucket at his feet. Very thin, with a shock of untidy dark hair, draped in oversized clothes from which his thin wrists and ankles protruded like bundles of twigs. Harry. A child-Harry, Harry just a few years before Draco had met him. And not just Harry, but Harry the way he saw himself.
The dream-Harry raised his head, and looked up at Draco. He looked as Draco would have imagined Harry to look at that age, but the scar on his forehead burned there like a livid brand of fire. There was a lost look in his green eyes, as if he neither knew where he was, nor how he had gotten there.
“You have to help me,” said Harry, his child's voice wavering like a voice heard under water.
Draco opened his mouth, then checked himself. Could his voice be heard in a dream, a dream that wasn't even his own? “Help you?” he asked, and to his relief, his voice was audible, if odd-sounding. “Help you with what?”
“My mother built me a castle,” said the boy who was Harry, looking around at the sand. “To protect me. But I've knocked it down, and now I can't find the pieces. Can you help me build it back up?”
Draco dropped down to his knees in the sand. It was neither warm nor grainy like real sand, but almost cloudy in its texture, as soft as dust. A dream of sand from the imagination of someone who had never been to the seaside. “I'll do whatever I can,” he said, and reached for the plastic bucket with the shovel in it; but before he could take hold of it, the dream-Harry had moved it away. Draco stared at him. He seemed even younger up close, younger and afraid; the burning mark on his forehead was almost too bright to look at. “Don't you want my help?”
Dream-Harry dropped his plastic shovel; it rattled against the side of the bucket. He shook his head. “I waited and waited for you to get here,” he said. “But now I think you might be too late.”
“Too late?” Draco asked, and then he heard something — a loud clanging noise, like the tolling of a bell — it was a bell — some sort of alarm? An alarm clock? Was Harry waking up — and before he could even complete the thought, the sand vanished from under his feet, the blue sky spun away, and he tumbled back into himself, into his own shivery-cold body huddled in a milky spill of starlight on the window ledge in his room.
He clutched at the blanket, his heart pounding. The faint dizziness of dreaming clung to him like cobwebs. He felt strangely guilty — surely it was a violation of some sort to go walking into someone else's subconscious,
