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Seated on her desk in the Potions Dungeon, hugging one cold knee, Lawrie Marlow raised a thought. "Do you think staff ask other staff to the Yule Ball?"
"I don't think they have to ask anybody," said Susan Bones, setting out ingredients neatly on her own half of the desk. "I think they just go. Besides, who would there be for them to ask?"
"Hundreds of people," said Lawrie argumentatively. "Madam Rosmerta. Mr Dervish. Mr Banges. That girl from behind the counter at Honeydukes, the one who puts lollipops in her hair on special occasions, I bet she'd show up with her dress trimmed with Fizzing Whizzbees to match. The porter at Hogsmeade station. They might even have laid on a special train for wizards to come down from London..."
"Up from London, the best people say," said her sister Nicola, passing by with swift efficiency on her way to her own desk at the front of the room. "What are we talking about, anyhow?"
"The Yule Ball," said Susan. "Do move your bottom, Lawrie, there's nowhere to put my bezoar."
"Lawrie was asking if anyone had invited Professor Snape," said Marie Dobson, appearing unexpectedly from behind them and poking Nicola with a rubber wand. Nicola twitched herself disdainfully away from it. Marie jabbed the wand at Lawrie instead. It made a miserable farting noise and turned into a limp squid leg. "Maybe you've missed your chance, there, eh, Law?"
"No one calls her Law," said Nicola fastidiously.
"My word is Law," said Lawrie consideringly. "No, I don't think I like it."
"See? Lawrie heard someone call her Law," said Marie, loudly and clownishly. "I heard someone call her Law. Susan heard someone. Maybe it's just you who's going deaf, Nicky."
Before Nicola could respond to this, the door flung itself dramatically open and Professor Snape swept in, his starched black robes crackling like freshly trodden-on snow. "Miss Marlow of Hufflepuff, you are either a student or a potion ingredient. Pick one, and remain thereafter either on your desk or on your chair rather than taking one's rightful employment away and giving it to the other. As for you, Miss Dobson, kindly remove yourself to your own desk." He looked at the rubber squid leg in Marie's hand. It wilted further. "I need not ask, I believe, where you got that. I am surprised that any student should have pocket money left at this stage of the term to waste on trivialities."
"Some of us are financially prudent, Professor," chirped Pansy Parkinson from the front of the room. Nicola and Lawrie exchanged glances of identical loathing.
"I am delighted to hear it. A charitable collection will be taken in the common room this evening for the Society for the Relief of the Petrified Poor." Professor Snape's dark gaze swept impassively around the rest of the room; as it passed (like, Lawrie thought confusedly, the opposite of a searchlight) it took in and comprehensively squashed a distressed colloquy between Elizabeth Collins and Hannah Abbott concerning who had forgotten to clean out their shared cauldron after the previous lesson, made Wayne Hopkins emerge from behind the lid of his desk, and caused Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle, who were trying to creep in at the back, to traipse sadly to the front of the classroom instead.
"And, of course, any Hufflepuff student who wishes to contribute will be more than welcome," Professor Snape finished smoothly, and turned to deal with Crabbe and Goyle, who were proffering one extremely grubby scrawled note between them.
"Go along to their common room indeed, I've been under their foul bathroom and that was more than enough," murmured Lawrie indignantly to Susan. "Besides, I bet it'd all be a generous and splendid donation from the Slytherins and not a word about us. And I bet he won't take any points off Crabbe and Goyle for being late, even after what he was saying to us last time about how important this perishing poison-antidotes test was."
"Goyle asked me to the Yule Ball yesterday," said Susan tranquilly.
"What?" Lawrie demanded, managing to keep her voice down to a startled squeak.
Susan lit a fire under her cauldron with one swift flick of her wand and another, unasked, under Lawrie's. Lawrie warmed her hands at it. The dungeon was so cold that she wasn't sure whether the icicles hanging from the great iron chandelier above and the small rills of ice up the bones of the high vaulted ceiling were enchanted or real. Susan's cheeks were pink. "I told him I was going with Justin."
"I didn't know Justin had asked you."
"He didn't." Susan dangled her bezoar over the bubbling potion and dropped it neatly in. "I asked him."
"For reference in future, Crabbe, a truly convincing note should be signed something other than Vincent's Mother what is visiting from Hogsmeade." Professor Snape picked up the offending note between two bony fingertips and dropped it into his own cauldron, where it disappeared with a foul smell and a long dissolving hiss. "I suggest that all of you put the remainder of this lesson to the fullest use. A knowledge of poison antidotes is a sure shield in every witch and wizard's armoury. And so much easier, in most of your cases, than attempting to grow up into the sort of person who need not fear that their disgruntled foes might wish to poison them."
--
Nicola, when Lawrie tried to pass on this exciting nugget of gossip that evening, proved unresponsive even by Nicola's standards. "Don't you think it's a bit Pansy Parkinson to be all that interested?" she said without looking up, and went back to annotating a chapter in her Astronomy textbook.
Lawrie refused to be squashed. She lay on her back on her bed's cushiony yellow counterpane and started idly pushing the tinsel which hung about her bedstead to and fro with her feet. "Don't you want to go with somebody?"
"Not as much as you seem to." Nicola shut the book with a bang. "If it's that important to you, why haven't you asked anybody?"
"Because I was waiting for you to sort it out," said Lawrie, surprised that it needed saying.
"Honestly." Nicola stamped over to the window with so forbidding an expression that Elizabeth and Hannah, who had just come in rosy-cheeked from the snow and discussing fashions in dress robes, shut the door and went away again.
"What's the matter?" Lawrie cajoled.
Nicola stood there, framed by the stone arch of the window and the cold endless sky. "This has been a filthy term," she said in a constrained voice. "No Quidditch because of the Triwizard Tournament, as if something that matters to two people in the school should stop all the rest of us getting any practice."
"One of them's Cedric," said Lawrie, shocked at this disloyalty. "Don't you care if he dies?"
"Of course I care if he dies," said Nicola scornfully. "I just don't see what the point is, that's all. All these people from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang traipsing over here, and all this fuss, over a silly cup."
I expect it's because you're usually the sort of person they make the fuss about, Lawrie thought wisely, but she thought she wouldn't say it, all the same. "I like Quidditch," she said dubiously, "but it's not... I mean, it's not like in our first year, with everyone but us being able to play. I don't really mind that much if I can't play, if no one else can either."
"Well, I do," said Nicola flatly.
Lawrie supposed that it was something to do with Nicola being left out of the team last year; but even if it was, that was last year, and this was this year, and there was no reason why next year they wouldn't both be on the team and yah boo sucks all round. "I'll tell you what gets my supersonic seasonal goat," she said, flopping backwards again until her head hung off the bedstead and she could see an interesting new view of the ceiling, "and that's the way people keep asking me if I know whether Ginty's going with anyone and whether it's Harry Potter. How am I supposed to know? I'm not Ginty's social secretary."
"Ginty's going with one of the boys from Beauxbatons," said Nicola, unexpectedly well-informed. "You know, the smarmy one who's always talking about his chateau in the Ardennes."
"Coo, is she?" Lawrie hugged her pillow to her chest. "Well, I bet Peter hasn't got anyone to go with and neither has Ann."
"You bet wrong, then. Peter asked one of the Patils whilst they were walking home in the dark from the last Hogsmeade weekend." Nicola grinned suddenly. "The last I heard, he was trying frantically to get Clement Selby to tell him which one."
Lawrie giggled, conjuring up from her imagination two indignant Patil twins converging on a dress-robed Peter in the Great Hall. That really was terribly funny - she'd have to corner Padma the next time the Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs had a class together and see whether they knew and were in on the joke - "Well, I bet Ann won't be going with anyone," she said to the comforting silence, and was bemused when the silence manifested nothing in the way of Nicola or a reply.
Lawrie rolled off her bed and looked around the suddenly cold and empty room. Outside the window, she could see something that might be a lantern, except that that window looked out over the Forbidden Forest, and no one was likely to be waving a lantern about there. Unless it was someone from Beauxbatons, she supposed, off to feed the whiskey-guzzling horses. Lawrie was generally kindly disposed to horses, but those outsized rolling eyes and drayhorse feet gave her the shivers.
The light bobbed away. Lawrie leaned her elbows down onto the cold stone and stayed there, turning the light into a patch of moonlight on a unicorn's back, and conjuring herself out into the throat-bitter cold, until Hannah and Elizabeth came back in with reinforcements in the form of Susan, and started exclaiming at the cold and dark and dropping bags and lighting candles. The candlelight glittered and danced in the tinsel. Lawrie blinked and jumped, startled by finding herself indoors and warm after all.
Susan gathered up Nicola's Astronomy notes and dropped them neatly on Nicola's bed, and said, in the tentative voice that people used about these situations even with people they'd been sharing a bathroom with for four years, "I say, Lawrie - is Nicola in the bath?"
"I don't know." Lawrie peered at the closed door of the bathroom, which remained as uninformative as any unlit bathroom could.
"She's not in floods, is she?" said Hannah loudly.
"Whyever would she be?" said Lawrie belligerently.
"I saw her go out through the common room," supplied Elizabeth shyly. "I expect she left her quill behind in class or something."
"Well, I'm having first bath, then," declared Hannah.
No one seemed inclined to dispute this. Susan started folding her robes and hanging them over the back of her chair. Lawrie sidled up to Elizabeth in search of companionship in undeserved affliction. "I say - Liz - are you going to the ball with anyone?"
"Cormac McLaggen," said Elizabeth almost inaudibly.
"Whatever for?" asked Lawrie with disproportionate surprise and displeasure.
"We've been going out since third year," said Elizabeth, looking rather hurt.
Lawrie retired offendedly to bed.
She supposed that Nicola must have come in at some point, since there she was, clambering glumly into her robes the next morning. Lawrie thought about asking her what was wrong, but then she might have to do something about it, and it might be something she didn't feel like. Probably it was just that Nicola was suffering a most un-Nicola-like fit of nerves over their end-of-term exams, Lawrie thought comfortably, and opened the bedroom door out into the comforting smell of sausages for breakfast.
And anyway, she thought, as she patted the icicle-bedecked baluster of the staircase down to the Great Hall, her thoughts catching neatly up with a previous line of contemplation like two rows of knitting, there was always Ann.
--
"What do you mean, do I want to borrow your blue dress robes?" Lawrie demanded of Ann, who had come to hover in a most unwanted, elder-sisterly, Gryffindorly way over Lawrie's shoulder at lunch, her tinsel-tied plait nearly dangling into the soup. "Do you mean you're not going at all?"
"Well, it's a bit of a nonsense, isn't it?" said Ann indulgently. "And they were new at the beginning of this term, it seems a pity for no one to get any use out of them."
"Hasn't Ginty snaffled them?" asked Lawrie tactlessly. Beside her, Nicola inhaled a mouthful of soup, and had to be banged on the back and shoulders by Ernie. Ann, of course, had to fuss over that; and then, coming back to Lawrie, said in that concerned tone of hers which made Nicola go even more scarlet and stiff with dislike, "Actually - it's Ginty who doesn't seem to want to go. So I thought I'd keep her company."
"If Ginty's not going, that's two sets of robes going spare," said Lawrie with satisfaction. "One for me and one for Nick."
"I don't want Ginty's leavings," said Nicola flatly. "You have them, if it means that much to you. I'll wear the robes I've got."
"Those scratchy white lace ones that used to be Karen's?" Lawrie looked incredulous. "All right, I'll have Ginty's robes, and you have Ann's."
Ann beamed as if her offer had been accepted graciously and she had been thanked for it, and made fussy arrangements for the transfer of the robes, and added nannyishly that there would be a Carol Concert that evening on the deck of the Durmstrang ship, as if anyone wanted to go to that.
So there wouldn't be Ann, after all.
--
In the end, despite all Ann's careful plans (to which Lawrie had not, in any case, been listening) it was her brother Peter who showed up outside the Hufflepuff common room a few days later with the borrowed dress robes. He announced his presence by singing along in his very new baritone with the suit of armour outside the door, and had collected quite an audience by the time a rather ruffled Lawrie emerged.
"You are the world's biggest show-off," she said hotly. "I thought you wanted to join the Navy, not the cast of the Pirates of Penzance."
Peter bowed elaborately, hands folded over the bundle of robes clasped against his stomach, to the audience. "Thank you, thank you, we're here all week," he said and attempted to summon up a little round of applause for the suit of armour, which had broken erratically into Ding Dong Merrily On High. The audience drifted away. Peter returned his attention, in a maddeningly elder-brotherly fashion, to Lawrie, along with the robes, which he dumped unceremoniously into her arms.
"And that's the very last time I act as a delivery service," he said. "Honestly, who'd have sisters?"
"I can't imagine," said Lawrie candidly, poking through the robes and making a nonsense of Ann's careful tissue-paper and Folding Charms. "Where's the stole that goes with Ginty's robes?"
"With Ginty, I shouldn't wonder. One sister treating one as a convenient beast of burden, the other one slipping out to the Forbidden Forest at all hours - tez enough to turn a wizard to 'ard drink, so it be."
"You do swank, Binks."
Peter snatched the robes neatly back out of her hands and held them up infuriatingly out of reach. The suit of armour broke into God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. "Ah, now," shouted Peter over the clamour, "Peter delivers robes to undeserving sisters who have to go and live in a Tower in the back-end of beyond. Binks has no truck with any such female foolishness..."
"Binks is a beast, then," said Lawrie pinkly. "Do Binks or Peter know which of the Patil twins they're going to the Ball with?"
"They do," said Peter smugly, dropping the robes precisely on her head. "Parvati it is, and very glad of it I am too. Ravenclaw ladies are far too intellectual for this simple soul. And who has the pleasure of escorting you to the ball, may I ask, so that if it happens I'm feeling kindly-disposed to them I can offer them a swig from my hip-flask?"
"No one does," said Lawrie, clutching at the sliding, tangling sleeves and collars as they fell down over her shoulders. "And you are a beast, B...Peter."
"B'Peter I suppose I can answer to. It has a certain ring to it," said Peter grandly, helping her bundle the robes back into some semblance of order.
Lawrie let him get on with it. "Wait a minute," she said, distracted from her search for the stole, which still had not made its presence known. "How do you know about Nick heading out to the Forbidden Forest? Have you all been going without me?"
Peter regarded her from a height that suddenly seemed rather more than was warranted between fifth year and fourth. "Not all at once," he said enigmatically. "Hasn't Nicola got anyone to go the Ball with either?"
"You ask her," advised Lawrie.
"I've already asked someone. No falling back on dancing with one's sisters for me." He patted her kindly on the head and turned to go.
"I didn't mean it like that!" Lawrie shouted indignantly after his retreating back.
She would have pursued it, and him, further, but the suit of armour began on In The Bleak Midwinter in a voice like an adenoidal kettle, and a party of giggling second-years came down the corridor and looked curiously at her. "Are those your dress robes for the Yule Ball?" one of them said. "Lucky you being a fourth-year. None of us are going. Bunty asked Harry Potter, but he said no. We're going to watch from the stairs, and then out of our window."
"Do you all usually stay over Christmas?" Lawrie asked.
The second-years exchanged second-year looks. "Muriel's mum works for the Ministry," said one who Lawrie thought might be Bunty, "and she said it wasn't worth missing the Triwizard Tournament stuff that was going on. There might not ever be another one. And Kelly's mum and dad are Muggles and they've gone to Antigua."
"Was that the boy you're going with?" asked Kelly, or possibly Muriel, pertly. "My mum says witches who accept presents of dress robes from a young man are fast."
"Not as fast as witches who get him to give them enchanted running shoes," said Lawrie easily, exchanging glances with the portrait over the door to cover up her surprise and discomfiture. "Password. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if you lot had forgotten it."
--
The next morning Lawrie and Susan went over to the greenhouses, as they often did after their morning constitutional. They let themselves in through the flapping plastic-sheeted doors, passing from the crystalline cold outside to the spicily earth-scented world within, and felt pleasantly warm, and also pleasantly virtuous. Ice drew patterns on the outside of the panes, giving a frosted-glass look to the world beneath, like the inside, Lawrie thought, of a Christmas-tree bauble.
She and Susan did the small winter chores that the morning found necessary, and chatted about their families, discovering that whilst Susan's family's home was a bit like the one the Marlows used to live in, her grandmother's house in London was nothing like either that or Trennels. Neither of them were particularly surprised to see a boy in Gryffindor robes and scarf push through the doors, bringing with him a small icy inhalation of cold. "Hello, Neville," said Susan over her shoulder. "I'm glad you're here, you'll be able to tell me whether these Bouncing Bulbs have gone mouldy or not. I don't know whether they're supposed to be this shade of blue. Did you ask Hermione to go to the Ball with you in the end?"
"Neville asked Hermione?" asked the boy in tones of muffled shock, unwrapping his scarf. "She won't tell me or Ron who she's going with."
"Quite right too," said Susan austerely. "Hello, Harry."
Harry Potter stared at them combatively. Lawrie couldn't think why. Perhaps it was something to do with the Hufflepuffs who had thought he shouldn't be a Champion as well as Cedric, but Cedric himself had done his best to stamp that out, and Lawrie and Susan had never been particularly involved in that particular kerfuffle in the first place. "I liked how you fought that dragon," she said encouragingly. "I mean, that's how I'd fight a dragon, as well, if I was going to."
"Um. Yes. Lawrie - it is Lawrie, right? Not that I'd have minded if it was Nicola, I mean, I was just making sure which of you it was..." He shoved his hand into the pocket of his robes, and it looked as if he was crossing his fingers in the pocket. "Will you go to the Yule Ball with me?"
"Yes, if you want," said Lawrie cheerfully. "Only I'm going to eat quite a lot and drink Butterbeer and not do any of the dances that my feet won't do. Is that all right?"
"I suppose so. We have to open the Ball together."
"Like cutting a ribbon?" Lawrie beamed. "I can do that. Do you think anyone would mind if I was the Mayoress of Colebridge?"
Harry looked at her as if regretting not having asked Nicola after all. "No... dancing together, I mean, all the Champions and their partners."
"I know," said Lawrie wisely, seeing herself revolving round the floor in something slinky and almost entirely backless, and meaningfully catching the kohl-rimmed eye of... well, someone or other. "Yes, I can do that. It's just if you have to do hover-crosses and things I can't. It confuses my ankles."
"I don't think we'll be expected to do that," he said hastily. "Susan, will you go with Ron?"
"No, I'm going with Justin Finch-Fletchley," said Susan tranquilly.
"Oh." Harry shuffled unhappily. "Can either of you think of anyone who'd go with him, then?"
"My sister Nicola might," said Lawrie obligingly. "If you like, I could ask her."
--
Lawrie had thought at first that arranging a partner for Nicola was a stroke of genius, and of course Nicola would be pleased; but as the day slipped by, almost lightless by three o'clock, and irritatingly devoid of opportunities for a word with Nicola without all the rest of the Hufflepuffs around, she became convinced instead that Nicola would be offended, and would go off into one of those fiercely withdrawn moods that Lawrie found so hard to deal with, reckoning as she did that she should be allowed time away from the family commotion whenever she felt like it but Nicola should be available, so to speak, on tap. It was with trepidation that she mentioned it. "Do you want to go to the Ball with Ron Weasley?" she asked. "Harry Potter said to ask you."
As it turned out - as these things almost always did turn out, though it was only a transient comfort to Lawrie, who never remembered from moment to moment that it was so - Nicola was neither. "Rowan always said never to accept any invitation that came at third or fourth hand and to cultivate a healthy scepticism about those that came at second," she said dispassionately. "You'll have to tell him I can't."
"What, just because Ron asked Harry to ask me to ask you?"
"No, because I'm going with someone else." Nicola looked down doubtfully at the hem of Ann's dress robes, which the obliging Elizabeth Collins had evidently offered to take up.
"Can't you tell him yourself?"
"Well, I could, but you were the body who busied yourself with it in the first place."
"Oh, all right then, I'll go. They've probably got mince pies over in the Gryffindor common room anyway," Lawrie offered as a lure; but Nicola did not seem interested in mince pies, and was looking at herself in the mirror. Nicola and her own reflection, in general, had little to say to one another, feeling that a quick look to make sure she was neat and decent would do, but this evening she managed an almost Lawrie-like detachment at the sight of herself looking like a peacock angel in borrowed blue which lay in hieratic folds over her feet.
"It suits you," said Lawrie, giving tribute where tribute was due.
"I suppose it's better than the white net and frills, at any rate," said Nicola. She blinked at herself in the mirror again, fiercely; and then she gave a quick little shake, like an owl settling its feathers, and turned away to Elizabeth, holding up the folds about her bare legs. "I suppose you could cut the hem into points or something. Or make it mini..."
"Oh, no, it's a shame to waste it being cut on the bias like this..."
Lawrie turned back in the doorway. "Who are you going with, anyway? Because I bet Ron will ask. And don't tell me they're inviting magical creatures, because I won't believe it. They'd be far too worried some troll would show up and turn out to be Karkaroff's brother-in-law wanting money that's owed him. I think he's horrible, don't you?"
"I don't care about Karkaroff and I certainly don't care about any kind of magical creature. If you really have to know, I'm going with Oliver Reynolds."
"What, the second-year?"
"The second-year who asked me."
"Are you sure you wouldn't sooner have Harry Potter instead?" asked Lawrie, sitting down on the bed, suddenly prey to nerves like small chills brushing cobwebbily over her skin. "I mean, I'll have to dance with him in front of the whole school, and everyone will see if I make a mistake..."
Nicola grinned. "Yes, I know. Far sooner you, as they say, than me."
--
It was snowing on Christmas morning. It snowed all day, out of a papery sky in the morning and out of the starless dark by the time the Ball began, a silent counterpoint to the confusion of presents in the morning and the shrill silent joy of an owl from Rowan passing on a letter from their father on his ship at breakfast, and the luxury of doing very little in the common room all day.
Lawrie's nerves dissipated as she got dressed. Nicola's seemed to be going in the other direction, which Lawrie wisely put down to embarrassment at being taller than Oliver Reynolds by at least a head and not knowing enough to talk to him sensibly about horses.
Lawrie grinned cheekily at Harry Potter as he came to collect her and chivvy her into the line of Champions and their partners; she knew exactly how she would walk if she were a Champion and had defeated dragons and was on her way to defeat any other challenge thrown at her, and she thought on the whole she did it rather better than Harry did.
Harry spent most of the meal arguing with Percy Weasley, who seemed to have come down from London; on a special train, Lawrie thought, vindicated, after all. He abandoned Lawrie after a couple of dances to go off and talk to Ron, who had come with Padma Patil. Peter wasn't one of Lawrie's favourite relatives, but she did think, with a small smug flare of family feeling, that Parvati had got the better deal there. Actually, though she'd never considered it before, Parvati was rather admirable in general; watching her dance, she thought that the Gryffindor girl was quite wasted on the likes of Peter... "Aren't you going to dance?" she enquired hastily of Harry as the Weird Sisters struck up a punky number.
"I don't like this kind of music." Harry looked worriedly at Ron, who was glaring at Viktor Krum.
Lawrie took his face in her hand and turned it firmly round to look at her. "There's other men out there," she said.
"I know there are, that's the problem." Harry looked down at her hand and his chin. "Could you let me go please?"
"Yes. Sorry. But I think you're being silly, you know."
"Silly? How?"
"If you like someone, you should just tell them so," said Lawrie wisely, and believing, entirely, in that moment, that she herself was the sort of person who would both welcome such advice and act on it.
Harry stared morosely at Cho Chang, who was dancing with Cedric Diggory. "I did tell her, and she went with him. Sorry, I know you're a Hufflepuff. It's just... I can't even look at him and think, what a git."
"Tell... her. Oh." Lawrie ate a sausage roll to cover her embarrassment. "Well, I'm going to dance to this, all right?"
She danced to that and the next one, and then found herself on the edge of the dancefloor, critically watching Cho Chang, who was dancing with Roger Davies. She was beautiful, of course, but she hung about with a lot of very silly giggling females, and she didn't seem very interesting for a Ravenclaw; usually, in Lawrie's experience, Ravenclaws had at least one thing for which they cherished an eccentric passion, even if it was Chocolate Frog cards or wyvern-assisted wizardly hang-gliding, but Cho didn't seem to have any endearing fierce strangenesses at all...
Lawrie looked round and saw Ginny Weasley staring in the same direction. Endearing, fierce, strange, she found herself thinking, as she looked at that unpretty snubby face. Ginny blinked and manufactured a smile. "Are you the Chaser twin or the twin who wasn't on the team last year?" she asked. "Sorry - I can't always tell Fred or George apart, either, and I've had lots more practice with them."
"I'm the Chaser twin, but Nicola's better, really," said Lawrie cheerfully. "I say, I want some Butterbeer, do you?"
"I suppose it would be better than hanging about here," said Ginny, going docilely with her. The candlelight bounced glossily off her hair. "What was my brother Percy going on about at the feast?"
"I don't know, I wasn't listening," admitted Lawrie. "What is it he usually talks about? He's talking to that other Man from the Ministry now, look."
Ginny screwed up her face into an expression that Lawrie planned to try out herself the very next time Rowan was unnecessarily superior, even if she had to charm herself into red hair and freckles to get the spirit of it. An animated jug with a wreath of ivy about its spout poured them each a glass of Butterbeer and wished them a Merry Christmas.
"I don't know why he has to be like this," said Ginny into her glass. "It's horrible. It's disloyal. Mum just says not to worry about it, but I do, and nobody tells me anything because I'm the youngest..."
"Oh, I know about that one."
"I didn't know whether you liked sweet things or savoury things, Nicola, so I got you a plate of everything," announced Oliver Reynolds suddenly, appearing at Lawrie's elbow. Lawrie had expected him to look silly in dress robes, like a child dressed up; instead, he looked neat and unobtrusive and not ridiculous at all. "Oh - it's Lawrie, isn't it? Sorry. M-may I have this dance?"
Ginny took the plate off his hands with a wry grin. "I'll take care of that. I know a way of enchanting olives that I want to try out on Ludo Bagman," she said. Lawrie smiled back at her as she went off to dance, feeling in a vague warm way that Ginevra Weasley might be someone she wanted to know.
Several dances later, Nicola was still nowhere to be seen. Lawrie supposed she really ought to go and look for her. Ginny was a year younger than she was, after all, and she was worrying about her brothers, and it wouldn't do for Lawrie to look like a baby by comparison. She looked around for Harry. He had brought her to the party, and he hadn't pulled his weight in the way of drinks brought and attention paid. The least he could do was go outside to look for missing sisters, and save Lawrie's delicate constitution from the cold. But he had disappeared as well.
She found Nicola outside on the terrace, looking out over a landscape of small frozen fountains and rosebushes swaddled in charms against the cold. The moon was rising. There were hoofprints in the snow. The snow was falling, and filling them in, the new snow separated from the old by a membrane of frost.
"Come inside, McGonagall's handing out hot chocolate," said Lawrie, slipping her hand inside her twin's cold elbow. "It's been fun, hasn't it?"
"Some of it," said Nicola, making a face.
"There is no rule against walking outside to clear one's head. There is a rule against standing about in one place like the dumb beasts of the field, attempting to catch pneumonia and make work for Madam Pomfrey," said an unmistakeable voice from behind them. "Five points from Hufflepuff..." Professor Snape paused, took in the expression on Nicola's face, and with absolutely no softening whatever in either voice or features (he had tied his hair back, which didn't, in Lawrie's estimation make his face look any more pleasant) added, "between you."
He shooed them inwards. The jet trimming on his robes made them look as if his sleeves were rimed with a darker version of frost. "What a pity it is," he observed in his most sarcastic tones as they went, "that no potion has yet been discovered that bestows the sense to come in out of the cold."
"There's the Wit-Sharpening Potion," said Lawrie bumptiously, feeling in a cold-elated way that the rules of the world had been slackened for a while and she could get away with being pert.
It seemed she could. Professor Snape made something that she might almost have called a slight bow to her as he waved them back into the Great Hall. "But not, alas, a potion to make one aware of the need to use it," he said, managing not only to curl his lip but to flare both nostrils. Lawrie wished her nose did that. Come the New Year, she was going to make a resolution to practice until it did.
Snape strolled off along the terrace; they could hear him snarling 'Another ten points from Ravenclaw, Mr Stebbins, and I wonder whether you intend to tell Miss Perks of the ten points you previously lost your House in the same rosebush with Miss Fawcett?' as they headed gratefully into the warmth and the friendly din of the party. The band were playing a slow dance. Peter was dancing with one of the girls from Beauxbatons, and doing so rather well. Oliver Reynolds was leaning against the stage talking to one of the seventh-years about horses.
"I do think Gin is a drip to miss this," said Lawrie enthusiastically. "She's not going all Unity Loganish again, do you think? Shall we go and sit in that corner and drink hot chocolate and eat mince pies? Oh - no - sorry, I can see Marie Dobson's horrible froggly feet sticking out from under the curtain. Maybe she's crying. I don't know why she came at all. Well, we can find somewhere else, I suppose. I say - Nick - "
"I shall be perfectly all right," said Nicola at her most Rowan-like quelling. "I'm going to find Miranda."
Lawrie felt slightly hurt.
But then, she thought as she drifted off in search of Susan, and then saw Susan revolving with unexpectedly adult expertise with Justin, it wasn't as if she planned on telling Nicola about the pleasant, ice-in-sunshine possibilities of making friends with Ginny Weasley and having a friend who was a dab hand with slightly malicious Charms, let alone about the submerged-iceberg depths of imagining that had stirred when she watched Parvati dancing with her plait swaying against her back.
And besides, whatever it was, most likely Nicola would tell her in the morning.