Chapter Text
Wiltshire, July 1991
The peacocks were screaming again.
Dracaena Malfoy sat very straight on the drawing room sofa, ankles crossed the way her mother had taught her, and listened to them shriek on the lawn below. She was eleven and small for it, with a pointed chin and skin so pale it looked as if it had never met weather. Her hair was Malfoy platinum, so fair it was nearly white, and it fell straight to the middle of her back. Her eyes were gray as rain. Her father stood at the tall window with his back to her, his long white blond hair tied with a black ribbon, one hand resting on the silver head of his cane.
“Come here,” he said.
She went. The glass was cold. The grounds of the Manor ran green and perfect down to the hedge, and past the hedge was the village, and past the village was everything else.
“Tell me what you see.”
“The garden,” she said. “The village. The road.”
“You see a slope.” Lucius did not look at her. “Everything in this world stands on something beneath it. The village stands on the farmers. The farmers stand on the dirt. The Muggles, who have no magic at all, stand on one another and call it fairness. Everything climbs, Dracaena, and somebody always reaches the top.” He turned the silver snake on his cane so its emerald eyes caught the light. “We are not at the top because we were born there. We were born there because we belong there. Do you understand the difference?”
She didn’t, quite. She nodded anyway. You always nodded.
“Harry Potter starts at Hogwarts this year.”
That made her look up. Everyone knew the name. Ten years ago, the Dark Lord, the darkest wizard in a century, the one grown witches and wizards still would not name out loud, had come to a cottage in Godric’s Hollow and killed James and Lily Potter. Then he had turned his wand on their baby son. The curse had failed. The Dark Lord had vanished. And the baby had lived, with nothing to show for it but a scar. It was in three of her history books, which she had read twice each.
“Half the world believes he is a hero,” her father said. “The other half believes he is an accident. And a few of us wonder whether a baby survives the Dark Lord because he is something darker.” His gray eyes finally came to rest on her, the same gray as her own. “I want to know which. You will be his friend.”
“What if I don’t like him?”
Lucius smiled the way he smiled at Ministry dinners.
“Liking,” he said, “is for people who can afford it.”
Diagon Alley, July 31
Madam Malkin’s smelled of chalk and steam. Dracaena stood on a footstool with her arms out while a witch pinned black robes up around her ankles, and she was bored past bearing, so when the bell over the door rang she twisted around so fast a pin caught her.
A boy came in. Skinny, with knobbly knees and round glasses mended across the middle with tape, in a shirt so enormous it might have belonged to a walrus. Black hair that looked like it had lost a fight. And behind the glasses, eyes of such a bright green that they startled her. He stood blinking at the bolts of fabric as if he had never been inside a shop before.
Madam Malkin put him on the stool beside hers. Dracaena gave him a good long look. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands.
“Hello,” she said. “Are you going to Hogwarts too?”
“Er. Yeah. I think so.”
“You think so?” She laughed. “Mother’s at Ollivander’s and Father’s gone for my books, and after that I’m making them take me to look at brooms. First years aren’t allowed their own, which is absolutely ridiculous, so I’m going to sneak one in.”
He made a small noise that might have been agreement.
“Do you fly?”
“Fly?”
“On a broom. Obviously.”
“I’ve never been on a broom.”
She stared at him as if he’d said he had never been in a bath. “Then what do you do all day?”
“Mostly cupboards,” he said, which she decided was a joke, and not a very good one.
“I’ll be in Slytherin,” she went on. “Everyone in my family has been, all the way back. If the Hat puts me in Hufflepuff, I’ll bite my own tongue off. I swear I will.”
A shape blotted out the window. A man stood on the pavement outside, so tall and so wide that he made the street look small, with a wild tangle of black hair, a beard like a hedge, small dark eyes that crinkled when he smiled, and two enormous ice creams in his fists. He held one up and waggled it at the boy.
“Is that man with you?” Dracaena said. “He looks like he lives in a tree.”
“That’s Hagrid.” The boy’s voice had changed. “He works at Hogwarts.”
“Oh, the groundskeeper. Father says Dumbledore keeps him around the way you’d keep a stray dog.” She tilted her head. “Where are your parents?”
“They’re dead.”
“Oh.” She hadn’t expected that, and for a second she didn’t know what to do with her face. “Sorry. Were they both magic? From proper families?”
“They were magic,” he said shortly. “Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters.” She said it kindly, the way you’d explain to someone that fire was hot. “Some of the new students have never heard of any of it until the letter comes. Their parents don’t even know what we are. Father says letting them in is like letting the neighbor’s dog sit down to dinner.”
The boy didn’t say anything at all. He looked at the window, where the giant was still holding up an ice cream and beaming, and his jaw went tight.
“That’s you done, dear,” said Madam Malkin.
Dracaena hopped down and fished out the little silver pocket watch her grandmother had left her, the one with the snake coiled around the face. Ten past twelve. Mother would be cross.
“Oh, I’ve got to go.” She swept her new robes over her arm and was out the door before the bell stopped ringing. “See you at Hogwarts!”
She skipped down the steps into the sunshine, humming. He was strange, but he’d listened, which was more than most people did. She thought they could be friends.
Maybe she should have asked his name.
Inside the shop, the boy stood on his footstool with his fists balled up in his huge sleeves and decided that she was the worst person he had ever met. It was his eleventh birthday. She had not asked about that either.
The Hogwarts Express, September 1
By the time the train cleared London, the whole of it knew. Harry Potter was aboard. Somebody’s cousin had seen the scar. Dracaena heard it from Pansy Parkinson, a sharp faced girl with a black bob and an opinion about everyone, who heard it from a fourth year, and she sat very still for a moment remembering a boy in an enormous shirt with his hair pushed down over his forehead.
Oh.
She stood up and smoothed her skirt. “Crabbe. Goyle. Come on.” The two boys heaved themselves up after her. They were built like wardrobes and about as chatty, and their fathers were friends of her father’s.
She found him three cars down, in a compartment drowning in sweet wrappers, sitting across from a tall, gangly redheaded boy with freckles, a long nose, and chocolate on his chin. She stopped in the doorway and let Crabbe and Goyle fill the space behind her, which was what they were for.
“So it’s true,” she said. “You’re Harry Potter.”
He looked up, and his fringe fell aside, and there it was on his forehead: a thin scar shaped like a bolt of lightning. She watched him recognize her. It was not a happy recognition.
“You’re the girl from the robe shop.”
“Dracaena Malfoy.”
The redhead made a sound like a sneeze turning into a laugh.
“Something funny?”
“Sorry,” he said, not sorry at all. “Only, isn’t that a houseplant? Mum’s got one in the kitchen. It keeps dying.”
Heat crawled up her neck. She looked him over, slowly, the way her father looked at people he intended to make small. The red hair. The freckles. The robes gone shiny at the elbows from somebody else’s wearing.
“Let me guess,” she said. “Weasley. Father says yours is the only family in Britain that’s managed to be pureblood and poor at the same time. It takes a real talent.”
The redhead’s ears went scarlet.
She turned back to Harry Potter, because he was the one who mattered. “There are families at this school worth knowing, and families that will drag you down with them. I know which are which. Stick with me and you won’t have to learn it the hard way.” She held out her hand. Her father had practiced this with her. Firm grip. Hold the eyes.
Harry Potter looked at her hand. Then at the redhead, whose ears were still burning. Then back at her.
“I’ve already got a friend,” he said. “I’ll work out the rest myself.”
She didn’t lower her hand. She didn’t know how. Nobody had ever left it hanging before, and her arm stayed out there in the air between them like it belonged to someone else, until he reached up and pushed it aside with the back of his own.
It wasn’t hard. It didn’t need to be.
“Fine,” Dracaena said. Her voice came out higher than she meant it to. “Fine. You’ll be sorry, Potter. You’ll see.”
She walked out. She sent Crabbe and Goyle ahead to find the trolley with one sharp jerk of her chin, and when the corridor was empty she stopped at the window and pressed her forehead against the glass.
Malfoys did not cry. She had learned that at six, the day she fell off her first toy broom onto the gravel drive. Dobby, the family’s house elf, a creature no taller than her knee, with ears like a bat’s and eyes the size of tennis balls, dressed in nothing but an old pillowcase, had picked her up and pressed a cold cloth to her knee and hummed some tuneless elf song until she stopped sobbing, and she had said thank you, Dobby, the way you would say it to anyone.
Her father heard. That night she lay awake listening to Dobby through the kitchen door, punishing himself the way elves did, and in the morning her father explained, very patiently, that Malfoys did not cry and Malfoys did not thank servants, and that both lessons were for her own good.
She had never thanked Dobby again. She had never cried in front of her father again either.
Her eyes blurred anyway. Fields went by, and sheep, and a river like a strip of tin. She held her right hand in her left as though it had been burned.
“Are you all right?”
A girl with an enormous amount of bushy brown hair and front teeth a little too big for her face stood in the corridor, already in her school robes, looking at her with frank concern.
“I have something in my eye,” Dracaena said.
“Both of them?”
“Go away.”
The girl didn’t go at once. “Only, a boy called Neville’s lost his toad, and if you’ve seen it…”
“I haven’t seen a toad. Go away.”
The girl went. Dracaena dried her face on her sleeve, checked her reflection in the glass until it looked like nothing had happened, and walked back to her own compartment with her chin up.
The Great Hall
At Hogwarts, every first year was sorted into one of four houses, and that house became your family for seven years: brave Gryffindor, loyal Hufflepuff, clever Ravenclaw, ambitious Slytherin. The sorting was done by a patched and frayed old wizard’s hat that could see inside your head. It smelled of old dust and older magic. It slid down over her eyes, the Hall vanished, and a small dry voice spoke inside her head.
Ah. A Malfoy. I know where you want to go before you ask.
Slytherin, she thought. Please.
Mm. Yes, there’s ambition here, plenty of it. Cleverness. A very great wish to be thought well of. The voice paused, and she felt it turning something over, the way her mother turned a jewel to the light. But there’s something else, isn’t there? Tucked away at the back, where your father never looks. Nerve. Real nerve. You’d do very well in Gryffindor, you know.
Panic hit her like cold water. No. Not Gryffindor. Please. Father would… please. Slytherin.
You’d beg me for the smaller room? The Hat sounded faintly sad. Very well. It’s your head. But I’ve seen it, child. Remember that I’ve seen it.
“SLYTHERIN!”
The green table erupted. She walked to it on legs that didn’t feel like hers, sat down beside Crabbe, and smiled when an older boy clapped her on the back. Nobody would ever know. She would make very sure that nobody ever knew.
“Potter, Harry!”
The Hall went silent the way a church goes silent. She watched the Hat slide down over his messy hair and stay there, and stay there, and stay there, so long that people began to whisper. She found she was gripping the edge of the bench.
“GRYFFINDOR!”
The noise from the far table was like a wave breaking. Two red haired twins were chanting something. Harry Potter pulled off the Hat, grinning with relief, and walked to his new house without once looking back.
Dracaena clapped politely, because Malfoys were always polite.
That night, by the light of the green lamps in the Slytherin dungeon, she wrote to her father.
Dear Father. I have met Potter. He is nothing special.
She looked at it for a long time. Then she tore it in half and started again.
Dear Father. Potter is in Gryffindor.
That much, at least, was true.