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...
By the time Christmas came to Hogwarts, the castle had gone very quiet, and Harriet had never been so glad of it.
It hadn't been a good few weeks. After the Dueling Club, people had started stepping out of her way in the corridors, which might've been funny if it hadn't been so obviously frightened, and Hufflepuffs who'd sat beside her in Herbology for a year and a half suddenly found reasons to sit somewhere else. Then she'd gone looking for Justin to explain, and she'd found him instead, stiff and staring on the floor of a corridor with Nearly Headless Nick hanging grey and smoky above him, and Peeves had started shrieking about attacks before she could even get her breath, and the whole thing had ended with her sitting in Dumbledore's office while a phoenix burst into flames on its perch beside her. Dumbledore had asked her, very kindly, whether there was anything she'd like to tell him. She'd said no. She still wasn't sure that had been the right answer, and she still didn't like thinking about it, so she mostly didn't, and when the holidays came, and the carriages took most of the school away to the station, she'd stood at the window of Gryffindor Tower and watched them go with a feeling very like relief.
Nobody stayed in Gryffindor except the Weasleys, and Hermione, and her. Nobody stayed in Hufflepuff at all. From what Ron had heard, the Slytherins left behind were a mixed handful, and the ones who mattered most to them were Draca Malfoy, Pansy Parkinson, Theodore Nott, Crabbe and Goyle, whose parents apparently found them easier to love at a distance, and Lucian Bloodthorne, who, as far as anyone could tell, had never even considered going home.
The potion was finished on Christmas morning.
Hermione had been brewing it for weeks in the girls' toilet on the first floor, the one that belonged to Moaning Myrtle and that nobody ever went into because of it, and she'd stolen the last ingredients out of Snape's private stores during a Potions lesson while Harriet set off a firework in Goyle's cauldron as a distraction. Harriet hadn't felt bad about that at the time. She felt slightly worse about it now, looking at the thick, sludgy, gently bubbling mess in the cauldron in the end cubicle, which looked like mud and smelled like something that had died in a drain.
"That's it?" Ron said doubtfully, peering over the edge. "We drink that?"
"It's supposed to look like that," Hermione said. She was flushed and anxious and had a smear of something grey on her cheek, and her hair was even bushier than usual from the steam. "It's exactly how the book describes it. And yes, Ron, we drink it, that's rather the point."
"Couldn't the book have described something nicer?"
"Do you want to find out who the Heir is or not?"
Ron muttered something into his scarf that sounded like a complaint about books in general, and Harriet sat down on the closed lid of the toilet in the next cubicle along and pulled a small paper packet out of her pocket. Inside it were two short, stiff, mousy-brown hairs. Ron had an identical packet. They'd got them after lunch, in the end, and it hadn't been difficult at all, which Harriet still found faintly insulting on Crabbe and Goyle's behalf. Hermione had filled two chocolate cakes with a Sleeping Draught and left them floating at the bottom of the staircase to the dungeons, and Crabbe and Goyle had come out of the Great Hall after their third helping of Christmas pudding, spotted the cakes, looked at each other, and eaten them whole. They'd keeled over in about ten seconds. Harriet and Ron had dragged them into a broom cupboard, which had taken a great deal of dragging and some swearing on Ron's part, plucked a few hairs each, taken their shoes because their own wouldn't fit, and left them snoring among the mops.
"Right," Hermione said briskly, laying out three glasses on the cistern. "Hairs in. Ron, you've got Crabbe's, Harriet, you've got Goyle's, I've got Millicent's—"
"Hang on," said Harriet. "I thought I was supposed to be Crabbe. That's what we said in the library."
"That was before," said Ron, with feeling. "That was before I got a proper look at Goyle's shoes in the cupboard. They're massive, Harriet, they're like boats, and Crabbe's are only about half as bad. Goyle's must be a whole size bigger. I'm not walking round the Slytherin common room in boats. I'll trip over and give the whole game away."
"So I'm walking round in the boats."
"You've got smaller feet than me already, you'll swim in either pair anyway, it doesn't make any difference to you." Ron looked at her pleadingly. "Go on. I'll owe you."
"You already owe me," said Harriet, but she swapped packets with him anyway, mostly because she didn't have the energy to argue, and because the truth was that if she was going to be stuck in a body that size, she couldn't imagine it mattered much which one. Hermione rolled her eyes at both of them and held out the glasses.
She ladled the potion out in three thick, glutinous dollops. Then she took the hairs one at a time and dropped them in. The potion hissed like a kettle as each one went down. Ron's went a sludgy, dirty khaki, the colour of a bogie, and Harriet's turned a murky, unpleasant brown, like gravy left out overnight. Hermione's own she held up to the light for a moment, frowning faintly, but it was the same greyish-mud colour, and she didn't say anything.
"Ugh," said Ron, staring into his glass. "Essence of Crabbe."
"Let's not drink them all in the same cubicle," said Hermione. "Once we start changing, we won't fit in here together. We'll go one each."
So they did. Harriet took her glass into the cubicle at the far end, locked the door, and stood there for a moment with the potion steaming gently under her nose. It smelled like Goyle. She wasn't sure how she knew that, having never consciously smelled Goyle, but she knew it was true.
There was something she hadn't let herself think about too much over the last month, and now that it was here she couldn't avoid it. She'd always known, in a vague and theoretical way, that if this was going to work at all she'd have to become a boy for an hour. They'd tried, briefly, to think of some way round it. Hermione had pointed out that there were girls in Slytherin too, and Harriet had spent a whole afternoon trying to work out how to get a hair from Pansy or Millicent without ending up hexed, but Hermione had already claimed Millicent's, which she'd pulled off her own robes after their scuffle at the Dueling Club, and Pansy never went anywhere without Draca at her elbow and was far too sharp to fall for a floating cake. Crabbe and Goyle were the only two people in the castle stupid enough to be tricked and close enough to Draca to be useful, and they were the only two hairs they had. So it was Goyle. That was all. She'd be Goyle for an hour, and then she'd be herself again, and nobody need ever mention it.
She held her nose and drank it.
It went down thick and slow, like cold gravy with lumps in it, and it tasted the way the bottom of a compost heap smells, and she'd barely swallowed the last of it before her stomach clenched like a fist. She grabbed the cubicle wall. Heat was pouring outward through her, down her arms and legs, prickling under her nails, and then her skin seemed to come loose all over at once and start to slide and bubble, as though somebody had set her on a stove and left her there. She watched, horrified, as her own fingers swelled up thick and blunt as sausages. Her wrists widened. Her shoulders shoved outward against her robes with a sound of tearing stitches, her ribs seemed to spread like a barrel's, and something crawled across her scalp as her hair shrank and coarsened and came creeping down toward her eyebrows. Her feet, still jammed into her own shoes, felt as if they were being crushed in a vice.
Then, as abruptly as it had begun, it stopped.
She was lying face down on the stone floor of the cubicle. She hadn't noticed falling. She lay there for a moment, listening to Myrtle humming gloomily to herself in the end cubicle, and then she pushed herself up onto her hands and knees, and kept going up, and up, and her head hit the cubicle door with a thump, and she realised she'd risen nearly two feet higher than she'd expected.
"Oh," she said, and then clapped a huge, thick hand over her mouth, because the voice that had come out of her wasn't hers. It was low and rough and gravelly, a slow, slightly stupid rumble, like gravel going round in a bucket.
She looked down. It was a strange and deeply unsettling experience. Her own body had always been small and narrow and quick, the sort of body that was good for slipping through gaps and dodging Dudley and hanging onto a broomstick in a high wind, and the body she was looking down at now was none of those things. It was enormous. It went on for a long way before it got to the floor. Her arms were as thick as her old legs, her chest was a broad, solid slab under the torn seams of her robes, and there was a definite, comfortable, porridge-fed roundness to the middle of her that she'd never had in her life. She lifted one hand and turned it over. It was the size of a dinner plate. It had a scab on the back of it. She didn't know how Goyle had got the scab, and she didn't want to.
She took off her glasses, because Goyle didn't need glasses, and everything swam into sharp focus, which was the first nice thing that had happened since she'd drunk the potion. Then she tried to tuck a lock of hair behind her ear out of sheer habit, and found there was no lock of hair to tuck, only a short, coarse, bristly fringe that came down nearly to her eyebrows, and she felt her face go hot, and wasn't sure whether Goyle's face was even capable of blushing.
"This is so weird," she said out loud, in Goyle's slow growl, and that was even weirder, so she stopped talking.
There was the matter of clothes. They'd planned for that, at least. Hermione had taken two sets of Slytherin robes from the laundry, boys' robes, the biggest she could find, and folded them on top of the cistern. Harriet pulled her own ruined robes off with a good deal of difficulty, since her new arms didn't bend the way she was used to, and dragged the Slytherin ones on over the top of her vest and jumper, and they fitted, which was somehow the most unsettling thing of all. She kicked off her own shoes, which had gone tight as vices, and crammed her feet into Goyle's boats. Ron had been right. They were massive. She could've rowed across the lake in them.
She unlocked the cubicle door and ducked out, remembering just in time to bend her head, and found Crabbe standing at the sink.
He was staring into the cracked mirror with an expression of horrified fascination, prodding at his own face with a thick finger. He had a pudding-bowl haircut and long, gorilla-ish arms and a jaw like the end of a shovel, and when he saw Harriet in the mirror behind him he jumped so violently he hit his elbow on the tap.
"Harriet?" he said, in Crabbe's low, grunting voice. "Is that you?"
"Yes," said Harriet. Her voice came out in a deep, slow rumble. "Is that you, Ron?"
"Yeah." Ron turned round and looked her up and down, very slowly, with his mouth hanging open, and then looked down at himself, and then back at her. "Blimey. Blimey, Harriet. This is mental. You're massive. You're like a wardrobe. You're like a wardrobe someone's put a face on."
"So are you."
"Yeah, but I'm used to being tall, I'm just wider now, that's different. You're—" He waved one enormous hand vaguely up and down her. "You're Goyle. You're a bloke. You're the biggest bloke in our year, after me. I mean after Crabbe."
"I know, Ron."
"I'm not trying to be funny, I just, I didn't think it'd be this weird. It's really, really weird. You sound like you've swallowed a cement mixer." He squinted at her. "Does it feel weird? Being—you know. Him?"
Harriet thought about it, standing there in Goyle's enormous boots in a body that took up most of the room, with her new hands hanging heavy and strange at her sides, and decided there was only one honest answer.
"It feels like I'm wearing a suit of armour made of porridge," she said, "and I can't take it off, and I want to go home. Can we please not talk about it?"
Ron snorted, and then caught himself, and looked so guilty about it in Crabbe's heavy, slow-witted face that she nearly laughed too. "Sorry. Yeah. Course. Not another word." He paused. "Your fringe is horrible, though."
"Ron."
"Not another word."
He went and banged on Hermione's cubicle door with his fist, which, now that his fist was the size of a small ham, made a noise like a battering ram. "Hermione! Come on, we've got to go, we've only got an hour!"
"I'm—" Hermione's voice came out high and squeaky, nothing like Millicent's. "I don't think I'm going to come after all. You go on without me."
"Hermione, come on, nobody's going to be looking at Bulstrode's face, it doesn't matter what you look like—"
"No, really, I don't think I'll come. You two hurry up, you're wasting time."
Harriet looked at Ron, bewildered. "Hermione? Are you all right?"
"I'm fine, I'm fine, go on, go!"
"Something's wrong," Harriet said, and her deep voice came out lower and more worried than she meant it to. "Hermione, what's happened? Let us in."
"No! Go away! Just go, please, you're wasting the potion—"
There was a squelching from the end cubicle, and Moaning Myrtle drifted out through the door with a look of rapt, gleeful interest on her pale, spotty face, and peered at the two of them through her thick round glasses.
"You'll never guess," she said, with enormous satisfaction. "Oh, it's dreadful. It's the best thing that's happened in here for years."
Ron and Harriet looked at each other. Then Ron rapped on the cubicle door again, more gently this time. "Hermione? Hermione, we're not going to laugh. Whatever it is. Promise."
There was a long silence. Then the bolt slid back, very slowly, and Hermione stepped out.
She was covered in fur. Her face was black and glossy with it, and her ears had gone up through her hair into two tall, pointed triangles, and her eyes had turned a vivid, startled yellow, with long slit pupils, and when she raised one hand to hide her face, Harriet saw that her fingers ended in small, curved, needle-sharp claws. A long, black, furry tail was whipping back and forth behind her in great agitation, knocking against the cubicle wall.
"It wasn't hers," she wailed, through a muzzle full of whiskers. "The hair. It wasn't Millicent's at all, it must've been her cat's, it was on her robes and I didn't look at it properly, and the potion isn't supposed to be used for animal transformations—"
"Oh, Hermione," said Harriet.
Ron's mouth had fallen open. His face, which was Crabbe's face, was doing several things at once, and the main one was very obviously trying very hard not to laugh, and failing, and turning the laugh into a series of strangled coughs. Hermione's yellow eyes narrowed dangerously at him.
"Don't," she said.
"I'm not, I'm not, I promised, I'm not—"
"Everyone's going to laugh at you," Myrtle sang, drifting in a delighted circle overhead. "Everyone, everyone."
"It's all right, Hermione," Harriet said quickly, before Ron could die of the effort of not laughing. She didn't quite know what to do with her new enormous hands, so she put one very carefully on Hermione's furry shoulder and patted it, as gently as she could manage, which still nearly knocked Hermione over. "We'll take you up to the hospital wing. Madam Pomfrey never asks too many questions—"
"No!" Hermione flinched back. "No, you can't, there isn't time. You've got less than an hour now, go, both of you. Go and find out what you can. I'll be fine here. I'll go up to the hospital wing myself when it's dark and there's nobody about." She flapped one clawed hand at them, shooing them toward the door like a pair of stray chickens. "Go on! Go! What are you standing there for? If you don't go now this will all have been for nothing!"
"But—"
"Harriet Potter, if you don't take those enormous feet out of this bathroom in the next ten seconds, I'll scratch you."
Harriet took the enormous feet out of the bathroom.
---
The entrance hall was deserted when they reached it. Their footsteps echoed alarmingly on the flagstones, and Goyle's boots made a sort of heavy, flapping slap with every step that Harriet felt certain must be audible in the Astronomy Tower. She kept trying to hunch, out of habit, the way she did when she wanted to go unnoticed, and kept finding that a body this size didn't hunch so much as fold, like a deckchair, which only made her look odder. Ron kept walking into things. It turned out Crabbe's arms were a good deal longer than his own, and twice he swung one out to steady himself on a doorway and missed by a foot.
"Where is it, anyway?" he whispered. "The Slytherin common room?"
"Somewhere in the dungeons. That's all I know. Under the lake, I think, didn't Lucian say once—"
"I don't care what Lucian said." But Ron looked uneasy. "Come on, then. Down. Look for someone in green and follow them."
They went down the marble stairs into the dungeons, and the air grew colder with every step. The torchlit passages were damp and empty and full of echoes, and they wandered along them for what felt like an age, peering down side corridors and listening for voices, and getting nowhere. Twice they passed the Potions classroom. Once they walked past the same suit of rusting armour three times before Ron noticed. Harriet was beginning to think they'd wasted half the potion in getting lost when footsteps came hurrying round a corner ahead of them, and a tall figure in robes stepped into the torchlight, and it wasn't a Slytherin at all.
"Percy!" said Ron, before he could stop himself, in Crabbe's deep surprised grunt.
Percy Weasley stopped dead and stared at them. His prefect's badge gleamed on his chest. He looked distinctly put out, and also, Harriet thought, faintly guilty, though she couldn't have said why. "What are you doing down here?" he said, and then, seeming to remember who he thought he was talking to, drew himself up to his full and considerable height. "What are you two doing down here, I mean. Shouldn't you be in your common room?"
"Er," said Ron. "We're... looking for it?"
"Looking for it?" Percy frowned. "It's your common room. You've been sleeping in it for a year and a half."
"Yeah," said Ron. "We, er. We forgot."
"You forgot where your own common room is."
"It's Christmas," said Harriet, in Goyle's slow growl, which was the only thing she could think of, and Percy turned to look at her as though a wardrobe had spoken. "We ate a lot of pudding."
Percy looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked at Ron, and back at her, and something in his expression shifted, as though he'd decided, reluctantly, that two Slytherins of their particular reputation forgetting where they lived after a large dinner was entirely within the bounds of possibility, and not worth the effort of arguing about.
"Well, it's not down here," he said stiffly. "And you two oughtn't to be wandering about on your own in the dungeons after dark, not with everything that's been happening. It's not safe. People have been attacked."
"What are you doing down here, then?" said Ron, and Harriet very nearly kicked him.
Percy went slightly pink. "I," he said, swelling importantly, "am a prefect. Nothing's going to attack me." He made a small, fussy gesture at the corridor behind them. "Go on. Off you go. And I'd thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head when you're talking to—"
"Crabbe! Goyle!"
The voice rang down the passage behind them, sharp and clear and imperious, and Harriet's heart, wherever it was in Goyle's enormous chest, gave a great lurch. They turned. Draca Malfoy was walking toward them with her robes swinging and her pale hair pinned up for the holiday, and she looked, for the first time since Harriet had known her, genuinely pleased to see somebody.
"There you are," she drawled, coming up beside them. "Have you two been pigging out in the Great Hall all this time? I've been looking for you, I want to show you something really funny." She glanced past them at Percy, and her lip curled. "And what are you doing down here, Weasley?"
Percy went an alarming shade of maroon. "I'll thank you to remember you're speaking to a prefect, Miss Malfoy, and I won't be addressed in that tone by anybody."
Draca's lip curled, and she motioned for Harriet and Ron to follow her. Harriet very nearly apologised to Percy, caught herself just in time, and hurried after Draca instead, and as they turned the next corner Draca said, with a gleeful little laugh, "That Peter Weasley—"
"Percy," Ron said, before he could stop himself.
Draca waved a hand as if it hardly mattered which. "He's been creeping round the dungeons all week, I've seen him twice. I'd bet anything he fancies he'll catch the Heir all on his own and get his picture in the paper." She gave a short, scornful laugh. Harriet and Ron exchanged excited looks.
She stopped by a stretch of bare, damp stone wall.
She turned and raised her eyebrows at Harriet expectantly, as though waiting for something.
Harriet's mind went completely blank. She stared at the wall. She stared at Draca. Goyle's face, she suspected, was probably very good at looking blank, and for once that was a blessing, because Draca rolled her eyes before she'd had to say anything.
Draca heaved a sigh. "Pureblood," she told the wall, and then, to Harriet, "It hasn't changed since September, Goyle. Write it on your hand."
Something in the stone ground and shifted, and a hidden door swung inward. Draca swept through it, and Harriet and Ron followed her.
---
The Slytherin common room was long and low-ceilinged and dug right into the rock, and greenish lamps swung on chains from the rough stone overhead, so that everything had the faint drowned look of the bottom of a pond. A fire was crackling under an elaborately carved mantelpiece ahead of them, and several Slytherins were silhouetted against it in high-backed chairs. And along one whole wall ran a great curved window, and beyond it was water, dark and green and very deep, and as Harriet watched, something long and pale drifted slowly past the glass and away into the gloom. She'd never seen anything like it. She'd never imagined anything like it. For a second she forgot entirely why they were there.
"Wait here," said Draca to Harriet and Ron, motioning them to a pair of empty chairs set back from the fire. "I'll go and get it. Father's just sent it to me."
Wondering what Draca was going to show them, Harriet and Ron sat down, doing their best to look at home. Ron's chair creaked ominously under him. Harriet's creaked louder. She tried to sit the way she imagined Goyle would sit, which was mostly a matter of slumping, and found that Goyle's body did it all by itself, sinking down into the cushions like a sack of flour, legs sprawled out in front of her and the enormous boots crossed at the ankles, and she sat there in it and looked round the room and tried to take in as much as she could.
There weren't many people. A pair of fifth-years were playing Exploding Snap at a table near the window, flinching every time the cards went off. Over in the far corner, Theodore Nott sat cross-legged on a rug opposite a thin, sharp-faced boy Harriet didn't know, with a game of cards spread between them, and he was frowning at his hand with the deep, focused annoyance of someone who was losing. A sixth-year was asleep in an armchair with a book on her face. And on the sofa nearest the fire, curled up with her feet tucked under her, was Pansy Parkinson, who looked up when Draca went past, and then at Harriet and Ron, and gave them a brief, bored glance before going back to painting her nails a glittering, poisonous green.
Draca came back a minute later with a folded scrap of newsprint, which she flapped open under Ron's nose with the air of somebody presenting a gift.
"Read that," she said. "Go on. It's the best thing that's happened all week."
Harriet watched Ron's eyes travel down the cutting and saw them go round. It was a short piece from the Daily Prophet, tucked away near the back. The Ministry had fined Arthur Weasley fifty Galleons over an enchanted Muggle car, and Lucius Malfoy, writing as a school governor, had demanded that he step down from his post, because a man who broke the very laws he was paid to write had no business writing them. Ron made a noise that was meant to be a laugh and came out more like a cough, and passed it to Harriet with fingers that weren't quite steady.
"Well?" Draca looked from one of them to the other. "Isn't it priceless?"
"Yeah," said Harriet, in Goyle's flattest rumble. "Brilliant."
"Father says he's lucky it was only fifty, even though they could never repay it." Draca took the cutting back and smoothed it fondly. "If Weasley likes Muggles that much he ought to just go and live with them and save everyone the bother. Honestly, you'd think a pureblood family would have a shred of pride. Probably going to have Dumbledore pay for it or something"
Crabbe's face had gone a dark, blotchy purple.
Draca broke off and stared at him. "What's wrong with you?"
"Bad stomach," Ron grunted through his teeth.
"Then take it up to the hospital wing and breathe on the Mudbloods while you're there," said Draca, with a little snort of laughter. She folded the cutting away into her pocket. "It's odd, isn't it, that the Prophet hasn't printed a word about the attacks? Father says Dumbledore's sitting on it. He says if it goes on much longer, the governors will have him out, and good riddance. He's always let any sort of riff-raff in. Look at that Creevey boy and his camera."
She dropped onto the sofa beside Pansy, who had moved from the fire and budged her feet over without looking up from her nails, and stretched out her legs toward the fire.
Harriet's mind was racing. She'd wanted to ask about the Heir since the moment they'd walked in, and now, with Draca talking about the attacks, it was as good an opening as they'd ever get, and she knew she had to say something before the potion ran out. But she had no idea how to ask it without sounding like a Gryffindor. She cast round desperately for something Goyle might plausibly say, and came up with nothing, and in the end she just leaned forward in the creaking chair and said the first thing that came into her head.
"D'you know anything?" she said, in Goyle's slow rumble. "About the Chamber. About who's doing it."
Draca looked at her. For a moment Harriet was sure she'd ruined everything, that Goyle had never in his life asked anyone a question that wasn't about food. But Draca only sighed, and tipped her head back against the sofa, and stared up at the ceiling as though she'd been waiting for someone to ask.
"I've told you," she said. "I don't know. I wish I did. I'd help them." She frowned. "I keep thinking it's him."
"Who?" said Ron.
"Who do you think, Crabbe? Him. Bloodthorne." Draca said the name the way someone might pick at a scab, half reluctantly and half unable to leave it alone. "I mean, it's obvious, isn't it? It's got to be. He turns up out of nowhere, and the whole castle starts bowing to him, the ghosts, everything, and then two months later the Chamber opens, and he's the one standing in front of the wall. And then he gets up in Transfiguration and tells McGonagall his family taught the founders. Taught Slytherin himself. And every time anyone asks him straight out if it's him, he just smiles that stupid smile and won't say." Her mouth tightened. "Who else could it be?"
Harriet kept her face as blank as she could, which with Goyle's face was easy, and said nothing. Beside her, she could feel Ron going very still.
"But," Draca went on, after a moment, and her voice went lower, and more uncertain, "I don't know. I might be wrong. He's so strange. He's so—Muggle. He sits around in jeans. He goes down to see that great oaf of a gamekeeper. He was on Potter's side on the pitch, you saw him, in front of everybody. It doesn't fit. The Heir of Slytherin wouldn't go round sticking up for Potter, would he?" She scowled at the fire. "I've asked Father. I wrote to him twice. He won't tell me anything about it, he just says to keep my head down and let the Heir get on with it. But he did tell me one thing."
"What?" said Ron and Harriet together, and then Ron added hastily, "I mean, what?"
"He told me the Chamber's been opened before," Draca said, with relish. "Fifty years ago. When he was nowhere near Hogwarts, obviously, it was before his time, but he knows all about it. Somebody opened it, and the monster came out, and it went for Mudbloods, just like now. And the person who opened it got caught and expelled." She looked sideways at them, and her grey eyes were glittering in the firelight. "He won't tell me who. He says it'd only look suspicious if I knew too much. But they're probably still in Azkaban, I should think, or they ought to be. And he said—" she leaned forward, and lowered her voice, and there was something in it, Harriet realised with a cold, sick feeling, that sounded almost like excitement, "—he said that last time a Mudblood died. An actual Mudblood. Dead. So it's only a matter of time before one of them gets killed this time, isn't it?" She smiled. "I hope it's Granger."
Something snapped to Ron's face.
Harriet saw it before Draca did. Crabbe's thick, heavy features went from stupid to murderous in about a second and a half, and his enormous hands closed into fists on his knees, and the chair gave a long, warning creak as he started, very slowly, to rise. He wasn't thinking. Harriet knew that look. It was exactly the look he'd had in the corridor on Halloween, the one that meant his brain had switched off entirely and his body was simply going to go and hit something. She shot out one of Goyle's huge hands and grabbed his forearm, hard, and hung on with all the strength in it, which was a great deal of strength, and Ron jolted to a stop halfway out of his seat, quivering like a dog on a lead.
And at exactly that moment, the stone door of the common room slid open, and Lucian Bloodthorne strolled in.
---
For a second Harriet genuinely didn't recognise him. She thought, for one wild instant, that something had come in from the lake.
He was covered from head to foot in web. It wasn't the fine, delicate kind that you found in the corners of classrooms, or even the thicker grey kind that clung to the rafters in the owlery. It was thick and white and ropey, great clinging sheets of it, as though he'd walked straight through a set of curtains made of sticky string and then rolled about in them for good measure. It was plastered over his shoulders and down his back. It hung from his arms in long, swaying streamers. It was matted through his long black hair so thickly that his head looked half wrapped in cotton wool, and a long tattered rope of it trailed from the heel of one boot all the way back out through the door behind him, as though he'd been dragging it across half the castle. His jeans were torn at one knee. There was a scrape along his jaw, just below the scar, and a leaf stuck to his collar, and there was what looked like a very large, very dead, very hairy leg, as long as Harriet's forearm, caught in the webbing on his left shoulder, twitching faintly every time he moved.
He didn't seem to have noticed any of this. He walked in as though he were coming back from a pleasant afternoon at the library, with his hands in his pockets and his expression mild and slightly distracted, and he nodded vaguely at the room in general, the way somebody might nod at their family on coming home for supper.
The entire room had stopped. The fifth-years had stopped mid-game, and their Exploding Snap cards went off unnoticed with a bang in the middle of the table. The sixth-year in the armchair had woken up and was staring with her book halfway down her face. In the far corner, Nott had frozen with a card in his hand.
It was the larger of the two fifth-years, a broad, red-faced boy with a squashed nose, who finally found his voice.
"Merlin's beard, Bloodthorne," he said. "What the bloody hell happened to you?"
Lucian glanced at him, and then down at himself, as though only now noticing his condition. He plucked absently at a strand of web dangling from his sleeve, examined it, and let it go.
"Oh, this?" he said. "Don't worry about it."
"Don't worry about it?" the fifth-year repeated. "You look like you've been eaten."
"Partially," Lucian agreed. "But not by anything that was going to finish the job. It's fine, Warrington. Honestly. Don't worry about it." He gave the boy a small, friendly, absolutely uninformative smile, and the boy, Warrington, opened his mouth, shut it again, and went back to his cards with the look of someone who'd decided this was above his pay grade.
Nott was already getting up. He abandoned his card game without a word, leaving his thin opponent staring after him with his hand still raised, and came across the room in long, quick strides, his face caught somewhere between fascination and horror, and stopped in front of Lucian. He stared at him for a long moment, up and down, from the matted hair to the trailing rope on his boot. Then, very gingerly, between finger and thumb, as though he were handling something that might bite, he reached out and took hold of one of the thicker streamers hanging from Lucian's shoulder and gave it an experimental tug. It came away with a faint, sticky, tearing sound, and stretched, and kept stretching, and he held it up in front of his face and stared at it, his lip curling.
"That," Nott said, "is disgusting. That is the most disgusting thing I've ever seen. Where have you been?"
"Out," said Lucian.
"Out where? Out in a giant's sock drawer?"
"Something like that."
"It's sticky," said Nott, with deep revulsion, shaking his hand. The web didn't come off. He shook it harder. It wrapped itself round his fingers. "Why is it sticky? Why won't it come off? Bloodthorne, why is there a leg on you?"
"Is there?" Lucian looked down at his shoulder, saw the enormous hairy leg, and plucked it off with an expression of mild interest. He turned it over in his fingers. "Huh. So there is. I wondered what that was." He set it down carefully on the arm of the nearest chair, where it lay curled and twitching faintly, and the sixth-year who'd been sitting in that chair got up and quietly left the room.
On the sofa, Pansy Parkinson had put down her nail varnish. She uncurled herself, rose, and came round behind the sofa where Draca was sitting, and leaned her elbows on the back of it, just behind Draca's shoulder, and stared at Lucian with an expression of the purest, most aristocratic disgust Harriet had ever seen on a human face.
"You," Pansy said, slowly and distinctly, "are absolutely disgusting. Do you know that? You're filthy. You're dripping on the rug. You smell like a cellar. And you've brought a leg in here, Lucian, a leg, there's a leg on the chair." She shuddered elaborately. "I'm going to be sick."
Lucian rolled his eyes. It was a long, slow, thorough roll, the sort that started somewhere near the floor and went all the way up to the ceiling and back down again, and he didn't say a word, which somehow made it worse.
Nott looked at Pansy. Then he looked down at the long, sticky streamer of web still wrapped round his fingers. Then a slow, wicked grin spread across his face, and before Pansy could react, he flicked his wrist and flung the whole sticky mass of it straight at her.
It hit her square in the face and stuck there.
Pansy let out a shriek that probably woke the giant squid. She leapt back from the sofa, clawing at her face, and the web came away in long, clinging strings that wrapped themselves round her fingers and her hair and the front of her robes, and the more she pulled at it the more it seemed to spread, and she spun round in a little circle, flapping and spitting and yelping, while Nott stood there with his hands on his hips and laughed until he had to hold onto the back of a chair. Somewhere in the corner, his abandoned card partner was laughing too. Even Warrington snorted into his cards.
It took Pansy nearly a full minute to get it all off, and when she had, and stood there pink-faced and panting with her hair sticking up in several directions, she marched straight round the sofa and swatted Nott across the back of the head, hard, with the flat of her hand.
"Ow," said Nott, still chuckling.
"You're a pig, Theodore," Pansy snapped, and swatted him again for good measure. "You're both pigs. You're disgusting, the pair of you, I hope it gets in your bed."
"Worth it," said Nott.
Through all of this, Draca hadn't moved from the sofa. She'd turned round to watch, and her mouth had pressed itself into a thin, pale line, and her eyes were fixed on Lucian with an expression that Harriet, watching from inside Goyle's enormous head, couldn't quite read. It wasn't the open contempt she used on Ron, or the cold focus she'd turned on Harriet at the Dueling Club. It was something more brittle than that. When Pansy had finally stopped shrieking, Draca drew herself up, lifted her chin, and spoke in a voice of crisp and frosty disapproval.
"Honestly," she said. "Why haven't you cleaned yourself up? You can't just walk in here like that. It's unbecoming. You're supposed to be royalty, aren't you? I'd have thought someone like you would at least have the decency to stop at one of the bathrooms upstairs before coming into the common room looking like a—like a mummy that's been dug up."
Lucian looked at her. He considered her for a long moment, quite seriously, with his head on one side, as though weighing her words with the grave attention they deserved. Then he spoke, and his voice was perfectly flat, perfectly level, and absolutely, devastatingly deadpan.
"I did think about it, Draca," he said. "I really did. I stood outside the prefects' bathroom on the fifth floor for a good two minutes, weighing it up. But then I thought, well, if I shower up there, I'll have to walk all the way back down here afterwards in the same clothes, covered in the same web, and then I'll have to shower again. Whereas if I shower in the dorm, my clean clothes are right there. In the dorm. Next to the shower. So I can just pick them up." He paused, with great gravity. "I know it's a radical idea. I know it's not how things are done in Britain. But I like to think we're a forward-thinking house."
There was a beat of silence. Somebody near the window coughed.
Draca's cheeks went pink. She sniffed, loudly, turned her nose up as high as it would go, and twisted round on the sofa so that her back was to him, folding her hands very precisely in her lap and staring into the fire as if Lucian and his web and his leg and his clean clothes had all ceased to exist.
Harriet realised she'd been holding her breath. Beside her, Ron had sunk back into his chair, the murderous look draining out of Crabbe's face and leaving behind a sort of stunned confusion, and she let go of his arm. Neither of them said anything. Harriet didn't trust herself to. She was trying very hard to look like Goyle, which was to say like someone who wasn't really following, and it was very difficult when inside Goyle's head she was thinking, over and over, that Lucian Bloodthorne had just walked into the Slytherin common room covered in the web of some monstrous spider and called it nothing.
Pansy, now standing well clear of the cobwebs on the far side of the sofa and still picking at a few clinging strands in her hair, seemed to decide that the best way to get her dignity back was to change the subject entirely. She flopped back down onto the cushions beside Draca, at the end furthest from Lucian, and said, in a tone of bright, malicious curiosity, "Anyway. Has anyone heard what Potter's been up to?"
Harriet's stomach dropped through the floor.
It wasn't just her. The question seemed to catch everyone by surprise. Nott looked up sharply. Draca twisted round on the sofa again, her frosty dignity forgotten, and stared at Pansy as though she'd suddenly started speaking Mermish.
"Potter?" Draca said. "Why in the world does it matter what Potter's up to? Why are you even thinking about her? It's Christmas."
"Isn't it obvious?" said Pansy. She examined her green nails. "After the Dueling Club? Everyone's saying it. She talks to snakes, Draca. Slytherin talked to snakes. And Finch-Fletchley was the one she set it on, and look what happened to him a week later." She shrugged elegantly. "Maybe she's the Heir of Slytherin."
Draca stared at her for a moment longer. Then she gave a short, sharp, incredulous snort.
"Don't be ridiculous," she said. "That's absolutely impossible. Potter? She's a half-blood. Her mother was a Mudblood. A half-blood couldn't possibly be Slytherin's heir, Pansy, it's—it's the opposite of everything he stood for. It'd be like saying a Weasley was the heir of Merlin. It's just stupid."
"Oh, is it?" said Nott mildly. He'd sat down on the arm of a chair across from her and was still rubbing the last of the web off his fingers onto his robes. "Funny. Because only a couple of months ago you were dead certain it was Lucian." He jerked his chin at the web-draped figure behind the sofa. "You said it to his face. In front of the whole house. You were practically ready to curtsey."
Draca's face went from pink to red. She opened her mouth, and closed it, and for a moment she looked so caught out and so young and so unsure of herself that Harriet, inside Goyle, felt an unexpected and deeply unwelcome flicker of something that was nearly sympathy.
"Well," Draca said awkwardly. "It seemed obvious at the time. He was standing right there, wasn't he? In front of the wall. And with his family, and the founders, and everything." She hesitated. Her eyes went, very briefly, to Lucian, and away again. When she spoke again her voice was much quieter, and the haughtiness had gone out of it. "I can't be sure now. That's all. I don't know who it is." And she crossed her arms tight over her chest and turned back to glare at the fire.
Lucian chuckled.
It was a low, warm, genuinely amused sound, and it seemed to come from somewhere deep in his chest, and he didn't bother to hide it. He came round from behind the sofa, unhurried, trailing his long rope of web behind him, and as he passed the end where Pansy was sitting, he reached out with great deliberation and wiped one sticky, web-covered hand slowly and thoroughly down the full length of her sleeve, from shoulder to wrist, the way someone might wipe their hands on a tea towel.
Pansy's screech this time was even louder than the first. She shot up off the sofa as though it had bitten her and stood there with her arm held out stiffly in front of her, staring at the long grey smear of web glistening on her sleeve with an expression of complete and total betrayal.
"LUCIAN!"
"Sorry," said Lucian, not sounding sorry at all. "I needed somewhere to put it." Nott was laughing again, helplessly, and even Warrington and the other fifth-year had given up pretending not to listen. Lucian ignored Pansy's furious spluttering entirely and came round to stand in front of the fire, his back to the flames, his web-matted hair steaming faintly in the warmth, and he looked down at Draca, and at the room, with a slow, needling smile.
"You know what I think's funny?" he said. "And I'm saying this purely as an outsider, as an American, as someone who doesn't know the first thing about the way you lot do things over here. It's this. Here's a whole house full of people who've spent a thousand years telling each other that Salazar Slytherin was all about pure blood. Clean lines. Old families. Every one of you can recite your great-great-grandmother's maiden name. And somewhere in this castle there's an Heir of Slytherin running about, and none of you can work out who it is." He spread his web-draped hands. "Now imagine for a second that it turned out to be her. Potter. The half-blood heir of House Potter. A Gryffindor, with a Muggle-born mother. The one girl in the whole school who can actually talk to snakes. Wouldn't that be ironic as hell?" He grinned. "Wouldn't that just be the most wonderfully, perfectly ironic thing that ever happened to this house? That's irony right there. I'd pay good money to see the look on some of your fathers' faces."
There was a stunned, uncomfortable silence. Draca looked as though she'd swallowed a lemon whole. Pansy had stopped scrubbing at her sleeve. Warrington was frowning at his cards as though they'd personally offended him.
And Ron, sitting beside Harriet in Crabbe's body, still trembling slightly with the remains of his fury, said, in Crabbe's slow grunt, the one thing Harriet would've given anything for him not to say.
"So it really wasn't you, then?"
Lucian's eyes moved to him.
It was a slow movement, unhurried, almost lazy. He looked at Crabbe for a long, long moment, and something changed in his face. The needling smile didn't vanish, exactly, but it went still, and his eyes narrowed very slightly, the way Harriet had once seen a cat's eyes narrow when it heard something rustle in a hedge. He looked at Ron as though the question itself were wrong. As though Crabbe, of all people, asking him that, in that voice, at that moment, with that much feeling behind it, made no sense at all, like a chair suddenly bursting into song.
Then his gaze slid sideways, slowly, to Goyle.
Harriet sat very still. She didn't breathe. She kept her face as blank as she'd ever kept anything, as blank as Goyle's face could go, and she stared back at him, and she felt his eyes travel over her, unhurried and thoughtful, taking in Goyle's slumped bulk and his huge, crossed boots and his heavy, stupid face, and then lift, very slowly, up past her eyes, to her forehead.
To the place, just below Goyle's bristly fringe, where Harriet suddenly became horribly aware of a faint, familiar, tingling prickle. The prickle of a thin, lightning-shaped line of skin that had been there her whole life, and that hadn't been there an hour ago, and that was, she understood with a lurch of cold horror, very probably there again now.
Lucian's eyes rested on it for what felt like a very long time.
Then the corner of his mouth curled up into a slow, private, knowing smirk.
He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. Harriet felt the blood drain out of Goyle's enormous face so fast she was dizzy with it.
Ron had seen it too. He'd gone rigid beside her, and he leaned very slightly toward her and breathed, out of the side of Crabbe's mouth, so quietly she barely heard it, "Harriet. Your—your head, your scar—"
But Harriet was staring at him, and at the top of his head, and at the pudding-bowl haircut, which wasn't a dull, mousy brown any more. It was going ginger. It was going ginger from the roots outward, flaming, unmistakably, unmistakably Weasley red, as she watched, and Crabbe's heavy face was starting to look somehow thinner, and longer, and more freckled round the nose.
She pointed at it, wordlessly, with one huge, trembling finger.
Ron put a hand to his head. His eyes went wide.
They were on their feet before either of them had decided to move. Harriet's chair went over backward with a crash. Ron's knocked into the little table beside it and sent a whole pack of Exploding Snap cards flying, and they went off in a ragged volley of bangs as the two of them stampeded across the common room, past the staring fifth-years and the gaping Pansy and Draca half-rising from the sofa with her mouth open, Goyle's enormous boots slapping and flapping on the flagstones, and hurled themselves at the stone door, which slid open just in time, and vanished out into the dark corridor beyond, and the door ground shut again behind them.
There was a long, bewildered silence in the Slytherin common room.
"What," said Pansy at last, "was that?"
"I think," said Nott slowly, staring at the door, "Goyle needs the toilet."
"They've been odd all evening," said Draca, frowning. She'd risen halfway off the sofa and stood there uncertainly, looking from the door to the overturned chair to the scattered, smoking cards. "Crabbe said he had a stomachache. Do you think they ate something?"
Nobody seemed to know. Warrington shrugged and began gathering up his cards. Pansy went back to scrubbing her sleeve with a look of deep suffering. Nott stared at the door a moment longer, then at Lucian, and seemed to be on the point of asking something, and then appeared to think better of it.
Lucian was still standing in front of the fire. He'd watched the whole thing, the scramble and the crash and the bolt for the door, with an expression of calm and enormous enjoyment, the look of a man watching a play whose ending he'd guessed in the first act and was delighted to see come off exactly as he'd hoped. Now he let out a low, rich chuckle, and shook his head slightly, and turned away from the fire. He lifted one web-draped hand over his shoulder in a lazy, careless wave, to nobody in particular and everybody at once, and started toward the stairs that led down to the boys' dormitories, trailing his long, tattered rope of spider silk behind him across the rug.
He'd shower, he thought. A long one. As hot as the castle's plumbing would give him. Then he'd find a clean shirt, and something to eat, and sit on his bed with his feet up for an hour and not think about anything at all. And then, eventually, with great reluctance, he'd get out a fresh roll of parchment and begin writing up the evening's excursion for Professor Snape, which would at least, for the first time since September, be an essay about something other than trolls. He'd written nine reports on that troll colony. Nine. Hagrid loved it. Hagrid kept wanting to go back and see if the little one with the lopsided ear had grown. Lucian had been very fond of the little one with the lopsided ear for about the first four visits, and was now sick to the back teeth of every last troll in it.
Acromantulas, at least, would make a change.
He was still smiling to himself as he turned down the stairs.