Chapter Two: The Offered Hand

Cassiopeia

She had spent four days constructing the sentence and she was extremely pleased with it.

The sentence was: you'll soon find out some wizarding families are better than others, and you don't want to go making friends with the wrong sort. I can help you there. She had written it out and crossed bits out and written it again, and she had tried it in the long mirror in her bedroom with various expressions attached, and she had settled on a slight lift of one eyebrow at the end which she felt gave it finish.

What the sentence actually meant, underneath, was: I am sorry about the shop, let us begin again, be friends with me.

She did not know that. She would not have believed it if somebody had told her, and if somebody had told her she would have been so furiously offended that she would have hexed them, except that she did not know any hexes yet, so she would have had to settle for being offended in a loud and expensive way.

Platform Nine and Three Quarters was full of steam and parents and owls. Her father walked her to the carriage door with his hand between her shoulder blades, which was as close as he came to affection in public, and he said the things he had been saying all week: that she was a Malfoy, that the Slytherin common room was in the dungeons and she would find it cold at first and would stop noticing by October, that Severus Snape would take an interest in her and she was to be civil to him and to nobody else without a reason.

Her mother knelt down on the platform in front of a hundred people, which was the single least Malfoy act Cassiopeia had ever witnessed, and straightened her collar and said, "Write on Friday."

"Everybody writes on Sunday."

"Write on Friday," said Narcissa, "and then again on Sunday if you like."

There was one more thing, and her father saved it until her mother had stepped away to speak with somebody from the Ministry, which was how Cassiopeia knew in advance that it would be the part that mattered.

"Potter will be on this train," Lucius said.

She had been watching a boy two carriages down lose control of a toad, and she did not turn her head, because turning her head too quickly was something she had trained out of herself at about the age of seven.

"Will he?"

"He will. He has been living with Muggles. He has been living with them for ten years, which means he will arrive at that school with the manners of a stray and the education of a hedge, and he will nonetheless be treated as though he were the heir to something." Her father adjusted his gloves. He did this when he was annoyed, and he had been doing it on and off since July. "Half the school will fall over itself. Most of the staff will be no better. He will be, within a fortnight, the single most discussed child in Britain."

"And I am to ignore him?"

"You are to be near him," said Lucius.

That got her head round after all.

"People of consequence," her father said, in the patient voice he used for the parts of her education he considered foundational, "are not made by avoiding other people of consequence. You will be civil. You will be useful. You will make yourself the obvious choice of companion before anybody else thinks to try, and you will do it in the first hour, because in the first hour he will know nothing and everything will look alike to him, and after the first hour he will have begun choosing for himself and your work will be ten times harder."

Cassiopeia turned this over.

"And if he says no?"

"Why," said her father, with the slight lift at the corner of his mouth that passed for a joke in their house, "would he say no?"

That was the whole of it. That was the entire philosophy of the Manor in six words, and she had been breathing it since birth, and she did not question it any more than she questioned the fact that water went downhill.

So she stood on the platform with her trunk being loaded by somebody else's hands and she arranged two separate intentions in her head and could not tell them apart.

The first intention was her father's: go to Potter, be first, secure him, report back. The second intention was her own, and it lived underneath the first one like a cellar under a house, and it said: he looked at you properly in that shop, before you ruined it, and nobody has ever looked at you properly, and you would like him to do it again.

She was eleven years old. She genuinely believed those were the same intention. It would take her the better part of five years to discover they were not, and the discovery would cost her a great deal.

The whistle went. Her mother came back and put a hand briefly against her cheek, and Cassiopeia allowed it, and her father said, "Make a good beginning," and she said that she would.

••●━━━ 𖤓 ━━━●••

And then the train, and the compartment, and Pansy Parkinson shrieking at the sight of her and flinging both arms round her neck, and Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle, who were large and slow and comfortable to be around in the way furniture is comfortable, and Blaise Zabini sitting in the corner with his feet up reading a magazine and declining to be excited about anything.

And then, somewhere past the first hour, the news came down the train.

It came the way news did, in the hands of whichever small boy had heard it last, and by the time it reached their compartment it had acquired six different versions. Harry Potter was on the train. Harry Potter was in the fourth carriage. Harry Potter had the scar and you could see it. Harry Potter had been raised by Muggles and had no idea what a Chocolate Frog was, which somebody reported with the deep moral outrage usually reserved for crimes.

Cassiopeia sat very still and did not say the thing she was thinking.

The thing she was thinking was: taped glasses.

"Everybody's going to look," said Pansy. "It's ghastly. Are we going to look?"

"No," said Cassiopeia, standing up, "we're going to introduce ourselves," and she smoothed down the front of her robes, and her heart was going at a speed she considered personally insulting.

The corridor was crammed. She went up it with Crabbe and Goyle filling the space behind her, which was useful, because people moved, and because it meant she arrived at the right compartment having been announced by nothing but the sound of three sets of footsteps, which she thought was rather good.

She slid the door open.

He was sitting by the window.

He had a pile of sweets on the seat beside him that would have fed a small village, and his face was less grey than it had been in the shop and his hair was no better, and the glasses were the same glasses with the same tape, and when he looked up at her she saw him recognise her in the exact order she had expected: the hair first, then the face, then a kind of sinking.

There was a red-headed boy opposite him with dirt on his nose.

She looked at the red-headed boy for one second, and it was a bad second, and the bad second was entirely her father's. It arrived in her mouth fully formed, in his voice, the way a prayer arrives in the mouth of somebody who has stopped believing in it but has been saying it since they were four.

"Is it true?" she said. "They're saying all down the train that Harry Potter's in this compartment. So it's you, is it?"

"Yes," he said.

Yes. The same yes from the shop. Flat, careful, bracing.

"Oh, this is Crabbe and this is Goyle," she said, waving a hand, because her hands wanted something to do. "And my name's Malfoy. Cassiopeia Malfoy."

She watched for the face. Everyone did the face.

The red-headed boy made a small noise. He had tried to turn it into a cough and had not been quick enough, and she turned on him, and it was an enormous relief to turn on him, because he was easy and the other one was not.

"Think my name's funny, do you? No need to ask who you are. My father told me all the Weasleys have red hair, freckles, and more children than they can afford."

She heard it come out of her. She heard exactly how it sounded. There was a part of her standing somewhere behind her own left shoulder, watching, going cold.

And then she turned back to Harry Potter and she delivered the sentence. The one she had built over four days and practised in the mirror and attached the eyebrow to.

"You'll soon find out some wizarding families are much better than others, Potter. You don't want to go making friends with the wrong sort. I can help you there."

And she put out her hand.

She remembered afterwards that her hand was shaking slightly and that she had been very careful to hold it out straight so that it would not show.

He looked at the hand.

He looked at it for what felt like a considerable portion of her life, and then he looked up at her face, and he said, quite politely, in a voice that was not loud at all:

"I think I can tell the wrong sort for myself, thanks."

The compartment went very quiet.

Her hand was still out. That was the thing. Her hand was still out and there was nothing in it and she had to do something with it, and she could not think of a single thing to do with a hand, she had forgotten entirely what hands were for, and the red-headed boy was going red and the pile of sweets was sitting there on the seat and the train was rattling on towards Scotland.

She went pink. She felt it happen and could not stop it, which made it worse, and then she heard herself say, in a voice that had gone slightly high at the edges:

"I'd be careful if I were you, Potter. Unless you're a bit politer you'll go the same way as your parents. They didn't know what was good for them either. You hang around with riff-raff like the Weasleys and that oaf Hagrid and it'll rub off on you."

She had not planned that. None of that had been in the mirror.

Both boys stood up. The red-headed one was the colour of his own hair now. There was a scuffle, which she could not afterwards reconstruct with any accuracy, and it involved Goyle putting his hand into the sweets and a rat being involved somewhere, and Goyle howling, and all three of them going back up the corridor at a speed that was not quite running but was certainly not walking.

She got to an empty compartment and shut the door and sat down.

"What happened to his hand?" said Crabbe.

"Shut up," she said.

"It's bleeding."

"Then go and find someone to look at it. Both of you. Go on."

They went. They were good like that. They did not ask her anything, ever, which was the single most valuable quality a person could have.

She sat alone with her hands in her lap and the countryside going past the window and her face burning, and she went over it, which was a mistake, and she went over it again, which was a worse one.

She had come up that corridor to begin again.

She had opened the door intending, in whatever confused way an eleven year old intends anything, to be liked. And the first thing out of her mouth had been her father's line about the Weasleys, and the second thing had been the sentence, and the sentence had sounded completely different out loud than it had in the mirror. In the mirror it had sounded gracious. Out loud it had sounded like a threat.

And he had said no.

Nobody had ever said no. That was not an exaggeration or a sulk. She tried, sitting there, to think of a single instance in her life in which she had offered somebody something and been refused, and she could not find one, and the absence of one was so total that she felt briefly as though she had been standing on a floor that turned out to be a sheet over a hole.

She tried, for a while, to work out what she would write to her father.

That was an instinct so deep in her that it functioned before thought, the way a hand goes out when you trip. Something had happened, and therefore there would be a version of it, and the version would go into a letter on Friday, and the letter would be read at the long table at the Manor and would produce either the nod or the other thing.

The version assembled itself without much help from her. Potter had been located within the first hour, exactly as instructed. Potter had been offered the acquaintance of the House of Malfoy and had, through ignorance and bad breeding and the influence of a Weasley, declined it. Potter had therefore shown himself to be of no use, and she had concluded the interview with a remark that had left him white in the face.

All of it was true. She checked it twice and could not find a single sentence in it that was a lie.

It was also, she understood with a kind of nauseous clarity that she was far too young to want, not what had happened at all, and she would be sending it anyway, and she would go on sending versions like it for years, and somewhere in the gap between the version and the thing a person could quietly go missing.

He had not even been rude about it. That was what she could not get past. He had said it quite politely. He had looked at her hand, and he had thought about it, which somehow was worse than not thinking about it, and he had decided, and he had said no, thanks.

And the last thing she had said to him was about his dead parents.

She put her face in her hands for approximately two seconds and then took it out again, because the door was glass, and because Malfoys did not.

By the time Pansy found her she had it arranged.

The arrangement was this: Potter had insulted her in front of witnesses, had chosen a blood traitor over her within thirty seconds of meeting her, had revealed himself to be precisely as stupid as her father said he would be, and she, Cassiopeia Lucy Malfoy, would be making his life considerably more difficult for the next seven years.

"You look like you've swallowed a Knut," said Pansy.

"Potter's an idiot," said Cassiopeia.

"Everyone says that. What's he actually like?"

She opened her mouth to say something crushing and found, briefly and horribly, that the thing in her head was: his hands are all scratched up and his glasses are broken and nobody's fixed them, and he has more sweets on that seat than he can possibly eat, and he looked at them like he'd never been allowed any before.

"He's nothing," she said. "He's absolutely nothing. He's a scrawny little nobody with bad eyes who's been told he's important."

"Well," said Pansy. "That's that, then."

"That's that," agreed Cassiopeia, and looked out of the window, and watched the hills, and did not say anything else for a very long time.

••●━━━ 𖤓 ━━━●••

Harry

The compartment door opened and there she was, and Harry's stomach went down a floor.

It was not that he had forgotten her. He had thought about the robe shop more than once in the past week, generally at night, in the specific and useless way you think about a conversation you handled badly. It was that he had assumed, in the easy way you assume things when you know nothing about the world, that the school would be enormous and full of people and that the odds of ever seeing a particular girl again were small.

The odds, it turned out, were not small at all.

She looked different. That was his first thought, and it was wrong, she looked exactly the same, pale and straight-backed and gleaming, but in the shop she had been standing on a footstool in her socks and now she was standing in the doorway of a train compartment with her chin up and two enormous boys behind her, and the arrangement made a point that he understood immediately.

She had brought them with her. That was what the arrangement meant. She had come to have a conversation and she had brought two people the size of outbuildings to stand behind her while she had it.

"Is it true?" she said. "They're saying all down the train that Harry Potter's in this compartment. So it's you, is it?"

"Yes," said Harry.

He did not know what else to say. It was the only true answer and he had not yet got used to it being a true answer. Four days ago a man in a pub had wept on his hand. On Tuesday a woman had tried to get her baby to touch him. He was discovering that his own name was a thing other people had been carrying around for years and that he had arrived very late to the discussion of what it meant.

"Oh, this is Crabbe and this is Goyle," she said, with a careless flip of her hand, which he noticed because it was the only careless thing about her. "And my name's Malfoy. Cassiopeia Malfoy."

Ron made a small noise behind his fist.

Harry saw her head come round. He saw the whole thing, which afterwards he thought was the strangest part, because he saw it slowly. He saw her decide. There was a half second where her face was doing one thing and then it did another, and the other was a sneer so practised that it fitted her like a glove she had been given.

"Think my name's funny, do you? No need to ask who you are. My father told me all the Weasleys have red hair, freckles, and more children than they can afford."

Ron's ears went scarlet.

And Harry, who had spent ten years as the person in the room who did not have the right trainers, felt something go hard and level in his chest, which was new, because at Privet Drive there had never been anything to be level about. You could not be level about Dudley. Dudley was simply larger. But he had been sitting in that compartment for two hours with a boy who had given him half a squashed corned beef sandwich before he knew who Harry was, and there is a particular kind of loyalty that arrives in two hours and never leaves afterwards.

She turned back to him.

"You'll soon find out some wizarding families are much better than others, Potter," she said. "You don't want to go making friends with the wrong sort. I can help you there."

And she put out her hand.

He looked at it.

He looked at it for longer than he meant to, and he thought a surprisingly large number of things in that time, and he would have struggled to put any of them into words at eleven.

He thought: this is the second time she has stood in front of me and told me where everybody belongs.

He thought: she is doing the thing Aunt Petunia does with the neighbours.

He thought, and this was the one that decided it, that if he took that hand he would be agreeing to something, and he did not know what, but he knew the shape of it, and the shape of it was that he would be on the inside with her and Ron would be on the outside, and there would be a line, and she would be the one holding the chalk.

He had been on the outside of a line his entire life. He had learned a great deal about how the people on the inside behaved.

"I think I can tell the wrong sort for myself, thanks," he said.

Her hand stayed out.

That was the thing he remembered. For years afterwards, through everything, that was the image that came back: her hand still out in the air with nothing in it, and her face going pink from the throat up, and the one instant of complete and total bewilderment before she papered over it.

She looked, for that instant, like somebody who had been slapped by a stranger in the street.

He had not expected that. He had expected her to laugh, or to say something withering immediately, and instead there had been a gap, and in the gap there had been a girl who genuinely had not considered the possibility that she would be told no.

Then she said the thing about his parents.

Harry did not get up straight away. Ron did. Harry sat there for a beat with his ears roaring, because she had said it the way you throw something you have grabbed off a table without looking, and because it had hit exactly where she meant it to, and because he had nothing to throw back. He did not know anything about her parents. He did not know anything about anybody's parents, including his own, which was the whole trouble.

Then there was a scuffle and Goyle shoved his hand into Ron's sweets and Scabbers the rat, who had done nothing of note in his entire miserable life, bit him so hard that he howled, and the three of them were gone up the corridor.

"What was that?" said Harry.

"That," said Ron, with feeling, "was a Malfoy. Dad says their whole family went over to You-Know-Who and didn't even have to be forced. Then when he disappeared they came back saying they'd been bewitched into it. Dad says that's rubbish."

"Right," said Harry.

He sat down. He looked at the sweets. Somewhere in the scuffle a Chocolate Frog had got under the seat and he could hear it making a hopeful noise against the panelling.

"She was in the robe shop," he said. "In Diagon Alley. I met her there, I just didn't know who she was."

"What'd she do?"

Harry thought about it.

"She talked at me for about ten minutes," he said slowly, "and then she asked me what my name was, and I didn't tell her."

Ron snorted. "Bet that went down well."

Harry did not answer, because he was remembering her face in the shop when he said he did not know what Quidditch was. The second where she had looked eight years old. And he was putting it next to her face in the doorway just now, the half second between the hand flipping carelessly and the sneer snapping into place, and he was noticing, without having any name for what he was noticing, that both faces had been the same face, and that both times she had got rid of it as fast as she could.

"She looked at my hand like I'd offered her a dead thing," Ron said, which was not what had happened, but Harry let it go.

The trolley had been and gone. Outside, the hills had started to look like somewhere else entirely, and the light was going long and gold, and in a few hours he would be at a castle, and he had made one friend and one enemy on the same train on the same afternoon and he had no way of knowing yet which one would take up more of his life.

"Do you reckon she meant it?" he said. "About helping. Or was it just a thing to say."

Ron looked at him as though he had asked whether water was wet.

"It's Malfoy," he said. "She meant it the way they mean everything. It's not help, is it. It's owning you."

"Mmm," said Harry.

The door opened again about ten minutes later and it was a girl with a great deal of brown hair who wanted to know whether they had seen a toad, and who then stayed for a while and corrected Ron's wand technique and told Harry he was in a number of books, which was the second most alarming thing that had happened to him that day. When she had gone, Ron said something uncharitable about her, and Harry made a noise of agreement and did not entirely mean it, because she had at least been honest about what she wanted, which was more than he could say for the last person to open that door.

At the far end of the journey, when the train had slowed and the sky outside had gone properly dark and a voice had told them to leave their luggage, Harry stood in the corridor in his new robes with the sleeves still slightly too long and was carried toward the doors by the crush.

She was three or four people ahead of him. He knew the back of her head now, which struck him as an odd thing to have learned in a single afternoon.

The two large boys had got separated from her somewhere, and without them she was noticeably smaller. She had her arms folded tight across the front of her robes in the way people do when they are cold, except that the corridor was stiflingly warm, and she was looking out of the black window at nothing with her jaw set hard enough to see from behind.

Then somebody said her name, and she turned, and the whole arrangement came back into her face in under a second. The chin. The mouth. The bored, amused, perfectly finished expression of a person to whom nothing has ever happened.

Harry watched it happen and filed it away without knowing he was filing it, the way you remember a tune you were not listening to.

He thought, as the doors opened and the cold came in off the water and somewhere an enormous and familiar voice began bellowing for first years: she is going to make this difficult.

He was right. He had no idea how right, or for how long, or in what direction.

He was not sure. He did not say he was not sure, because there was no sensible way to say it and because Ron was right about most of it.

But he had seen her hand shaking slightly when she held it out, and he had put it down at the time to anger, and it was not until a great deal later, years later, in a corridor with a great deal of blood in it, that he would revisit the moment and understand that she had been frightened.

••●━━━ 𖤓 ━━━●••

Pansy

Pansy Parkinson had known Cassiopeia Malfoy since they were four years old and had been thrown together at a garden party in Wiltshire, where Cassi had pushed her into a fountain and then cried harder than Pansy had, and they had been best friends ever since.

So she knew the signs.

The sign, in this instance, was that Cassi came back from the fourth carriage and sat in an empty compartment by herself with the door shut, and did not come and tell anybody what had happened.

That was unprecedented. Cassi told people what had happened. Cassi told people what had happened at length, with gestures, sometimes twice. When she had successfully got a stable boy dismissed at the age of nine for the crime of laughing at her riding, the retelling had occupied most of a weekend.

Pansy gave her twenty minutes and then went and slid the door open.

"You look like you've swallowed a Knut," she said.

"Potter's an idiot."

"Everyone says that. What's he actually like?"

And Cassi opened her mouth, and there was a pause.

Pansy watched the pause with great interest. It lasted perhaps a second and a half. In it, her best friend's face did something complicated and then stopped doing it.

"He's nothing," Cassi said. "He's absolutely nothing. He's a scrawny little nobody with bad eyes who's been told he's important."

"Well. That's that, then."

"That's that."

And Cassi turned to the window and did not speak again for an hour, which was the longest Pansy had ever known her to be silent while awake.

Pansy sat opposite her and ate a Pumpkin Pasty and thought, privately, that she had just watched somebody go and ask a boy to be her friend and get told no, and come back and decide to call it a war instead, because a war was the only version of the story in which she had meant to do it.

She did not say this. She was eleven, and she did not have those words either, but she had the shape of it, and girls very often have the shape of it long before they have the words.

What she did say, after a while, was, "He's only a boy, you know."

"I know what he is."

"I mean there'll be about four hundred of them. You'll be sick of them by Easter." Pansy picked at the stitching on her sleeve. "My sister says the boys at that school are mostly damp."

"I don't care what he is."

"No," agreed Pansy. "Obviously."

Cassi turned from the window and gave her a look that had been designed in a mirror and was wasted on somebody who had known her since the fountain, and Pansy returned it blandly, and they understood each other perfectly and neither of them said another word about it for two years.

She said, "There's a sweets trolley."

"I'm not hungry."

"I know," said Pansy, and went and bought her a bag of Liquorice Wands anyway, and put it on the seat beside her, and Cassi ate the entire bag over the next forty miles without once admitting that she had.

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