Chapter Four: Twenty Feet Up

Cassiopeia

Potions was on Friday morning and she had been looking forward to it since Wednesday, which was the point at which she had worked out the timetable and discovered that the Slytherin first years took it with Gryffindor.

She did not examine why that was the detail she had noticed. There were a great many things on the timetable. She had noticed that one.

The dungeon was cold and there were things in jars along the walls and Professor Snape came in and shut the door behind him with a bang that made two people jump, and then he took the register, and when he got to the name he paused over it with a kind of connoisseur's cruelty.

"Ah, yes," he said softly. "Harry Potter. Our new celebrity."

Pansy giggled. Cassiopeia did the little hiss of laughter behind her hand that she had been perfecting, and it came out perfectly, and she felt nothing at all except a faint and inconvenient sense of having arrived late to something.

Then Snape began on him.

She had expected to enjoy it. She had sat down at that bench expecting to enjoy it so much that she had arranged herself facing slightly sideways so as to have a clear view, and for the first thirty seconds she did enjoy it, in the uncomplicated way you enjoy watching somebody else get caught out when you have not been.

Where would you look if I told you to find me a bezoar. What is the difference between monkshood and wolfsbane. Where, Potter, would you look.

He said, three times, I don't know, sir. He said it clearly, without whining, standing up, and the third time he said, "I think Hermione knows, though, why don't you try her?"

And that was so entirely the wrong thing to say to Snape, so completely and self-destructively wrong, that Cassiopeia laughed out loud with everybody else and at the same time felt a small cold drop of something that was almost dismay.

He had not been trying to be clever. That was the trouble. He had genuinely meant it. He had stood there being asked three questions he could not answer and his solution had been to point at somebody who could, as though the point of the exercise were for the answer to get out. It was the most Gryffindor thing she had ever witnessed and it was going to get him taken apart.

"Sit down," said Snape. "For your information, Potter, asphodel and wormwood make a sleeping potion so powerful it is known as the Draught of Living Death. A bezoar is a stone taken from the stomach of a goat and it will save you from most poisons. As for monkshood and wolfsbane, they are the same plant, which also goes by the name of aconite. Well? Why aren't you all copying that down?"

There was a scramble for quills.

"And a point will be taken from Gryffindor House for your cheek, Potter."

Cassiopeia copied the notes in her best hand and did not look sideways and knew exactly how he was sitting anyway.

The rest of the lesson was easy. Snape came round the dungeon in his black robes and criticised everybody and stopped at her cauldron and said, "Look at the way Miss Malfoy has stewed those horned slugs," and she said, "Thank you, sir," in a voice of smooth modesty, and did not say what she was thinking, which was that she had stewed them properly because her mother had taught her when she was nine, standing on a stool in the still-room at home, and that it had nothing whatsoever to do with being clever.

Then Longbottom melted Finnigan's cauldron.

It went up with a sound like a wet cough and the potion went across the floor in a spreading green tide, and people got onto their stools, and Longbottom was covered in angry red boils within about four seconds and whimpering. Snape cleared the mess with one flick of his wand and started shouting about whether he had added the porcupine quills before taking the cauldron off the fire.

And Cassiopeia, perched on her stool with the rest of them, watched Potter.

He was not looking at Longbottom or at Snape. He was already reaching for the boy's arm to get him up out of the puddle, and he had done it without any sort of thinking about it, the way you catch a falling glass.

Then Snape rounded on him. "You, Potter, why didn't you tell him not to add the quills? Thought he'd make you look good if he got it wrong, did you? That's another point you've lost for Gryffindor."

It was so unfair that even Pansy went quiet.

Cassiopeia sat on her stool and looked at her nails and said nothing, and inside her head a voice that sounded very much like her mother's said, mildly: he was nowhere near that cauldron and Severus knows it.

She told the voice to be quiet.

At the end she walked past the Gryffindor benches on the way out, because she had to, because it was the only door, and she slowed down, which she did not have to do.

"Bad luck, Potter," she said. "Imagine being told off for something that wasn't your fault. One does wonder what that must be like."

He looked up at her.

She had expected the flat careful face from the shop and the train. She got something else. He looked at her for a moment with an expression that she could only describe as tired, and he said, "Yeah. One does."

And he went back to packing his bag.

She got all the way to the stairs before she worked out that he had agreed with her, and that in agreeing with her he had taken the whole thing away from her, and she stood on the bottom step with her bag over her shoulder and her ears going hot and said, out loud, to Pansy, "He's got no sense of humour at all."

"You weren't being funny," said Pansy.

"I am always being funny."

"You were being odd," said Pansy. "You slowed down."

"I did not slow down."

"You slowed right down. You practically stopped."

Cassiopeia went up the stairs fast enough that Pansy had to trot.

••●━━━ 𖤓 ━━━●••

The flying lesson was the following Thursday and she had been talking about it since Monday.

This was not a tactic. This was simply true. She had been flying since she was six, properly flying, on a succession of good brooms in the long paddock behind the Manor with her mother watching from the terrace with her heart in her mouth and her father watching from the window with a stopwatch, and it was the one thing in the entire world that Cassiopeia Malfoy did not have to pretend about.

On a broom she did not have to be anything. That was the whole of it. There was no family in it, and no name, and no table to sit at, and nobody to be better than. There was just the bit where the ground stopped mattering.

She had said all week that she expected it would be tedious. She had told Crabbe and Goyle a long story about nearly colliding with a Muggle helicopter which was completely invented. She had rolled her eyes at Pansy about having to share the lawn with Gryffindors.

And she had been awake since half past five.

The brooms were laid out on the grass in two rows, and they were terrible. That was an objective assessment and she gave it loudly. Some of them had twigs sticking out at odd angles and one of them was vibrating slightly for no reason anybody could identify.

"Stick out your right hand over your broom," called Madam Hooch, "and say up."

"UP," everybody shouted.

Hers came into her hand immediately, which she had expected, and she did not look round to see whose did not, which was a lie, she looked immediately.

Longbottom's rolled over on the grass. The brown-haired girl, Granger, had hers merely twitch, and her face went tight with annoyance in a way that Cassiopeia found briefly and intensely satisfying.

Potter's came up into his hand on the first word.

She saw it. She was looking directly at him when it happened, having turned ostensibly to say something to Pansy, and she saw his broom come off the grass and smack into his palm and she saw his face when it did it, which was surprise, pure uncomplicated surprise, as though he had been told to do something impossible and had done it by mistake.

Something in her chest did something she had no permission for.

Then Longbottom pushed off before the whistle and went up like a cork, twelve feet, twenty feet, with his face white and his legs trailing, and he slipped sideways off the end and came down on the grass with a crack that everybody heard.

Madam Hooch took him up to the hospital wing with his wrist held out at a bad angle and said that if a single broom rose off the ground while she was gone the person riding it would be out of Hogwarts before they could say Quidditch.

The moment she was out of earshot, Cassiopeia laughed.

She did not entirely decide to. That was the awful part, and she thought about it afterwards more than once. There was a gap of about four seconds in which nobody said anything and the whole class stood around on the grass with the afternoon going on and nothing to do, and the silence was unbearable, and filling silences was a thing she had been doing since she was small, and the quickest way to fill one was to be cruel.

"Did you see his face, the great lump?"

And there was something in the grass where Longbottom had fallen, a glass ball with white smoke in it, and she picked it up, and the smoke in it was red because he had forgotten something, and she held it up and watched it catch the light.

"It's that stupid thing Longbottom's grandmother sent him."

"Give that here, Malfoy," said Potter, quietly.

Everybody stopped talking. She looked at him.

He had gone very still and his chin was down and there was a thing happening in his face that she had not seen before. The careful blankness was entirely gone. He looked, she thought, exactly like somebody who had decided something, and he had decided it over a glass ball belonging to a boy he had known for five days.

She did not want to give it back. That was a complicated sentence and she would be unpicking it for years. She did not want to give it back because she did not want this part to be over, because for the first time since a train corridor he was standing in front of her looking at her properly, all his attention, nothing held in reserve, and the feeling of it was so enormous and so unfamiliar that she had absolutely no idea what to do with it except keep it going.

So she smiled and said, "I think I'll leave it somewhere for Longbottom to find. How about up a tree?"

"Give it here."

She got on her broom.

She was not supposed to. She knew the rules and she knew the threat and she had never in her life cared less about either, and she went up fast, higher than she needed to, and hovered level with the top branches of the oak and called down, "Come and get it, Potter."

And then the part she had not planned at all.

He got on his broom.

The brown-haired girl shouted something about Madam Hooch and he did not even turn his head, and he kicked off the ground, and he went up.

She was expecting wobbling. She was expecting the hunched, white-knuckled, teeth-gritted business that she had watched two dozen children do at various family gatherings, and she had been looking forward to watching it and saying something withering about it afterwards.

He came up like he had been doing it his whole life.

She watched him rise with his hair blown back and his robes flapping and an expression on his face that she recognised instantly, and what she recognised was joy, the undiluted kind, the exact thing she felt in the paddock at home with the hedges going past underneath, and the recognition hit her so hard that for a moment she entirely forgot that she was holding a glass ball twenty feet in the air.

He was good. He was better than good and he did not know it yet and he had never been on a broom before in his life.

"Give it here," he said, pulling up in front of her, "or I'll knock you off that broom."

"Oh, yeah?" she said.

She was grinning. She caught herself doing it and could not stop and had to turn it into a sneer by main force, and it was a poor sneer, one of her worst.

He went at her. He actually came at her through the air like a thrown knife and she had to pull sideways to avoid him and the manoeuvre was clean and tight and she felt the air go past her ear, and when she came out of it she was laughing, properly laughing, up in the air where nobody down on the grass could hear it, and the people below were cheering and it was the single best thirty seconds she had experienced since arriving at the school.

She had never raced anybody her own age. There had never been anybody her own age who could.

"No Crabbe and Goyle up here to save your neck, Malfoy," he said.

And she thought, with a wild, soaring, completely unmanageable clarity: no, there isn't. Nobody up here but us.

She threw the ball.

She threw it high and hard towards the castle because her hands wanted to do something and because the alternative was to stay there in the air with him looking at her like that, and she pulled her broom round and went back down towards the ground, and halfway down she turned her head to see what he was doing.

He had gone after it.

He went down the slope of the air in a long flat dive with his hand out in front of him, fifty feet, faster than she could have taken that line, past the window, and the ball was an inch off the grass when he caught it and he pulled out so late that the crowd screamed, and he rolled off onto the lawn with the glass ball held up in his fist.

Cassiopeia landed badly.

She never landed badly. She came down in a scramble with her broom skidding on the turf and she stood there on the grass with her heart going like a bird in a box and her face hot and her hands shaking, watching Potter get up out of the grass with Longbottom's Remembrall in his hand and the whole Gryffindor half of the class running at him screaming.

Pansy said, "Are you all right? You've gone a funny colour."

"HARRY POTTER!"

Professor McGonagall came across the lawn faster than anybody had ever seen her move, and she took him away, and the lawn went quiet.

"Well," said Pansy, with enormous satisfaction, "he's expelled."

"Yes," said Cassiopeia.

She had been waiting a week to say something like that and she found when the moment came that it tasted of nothing at all.

She went up to the castle with the others and she did not speak, and that evening in the Great Hall she sat down facing the doors so that she would see when he came in, and she ate about four mouthfuls, and when he did come in and sat down at the Gryffindor table with that red-headed boy both of them looked like people who had just been let off a hanging and were not sure how.

Then somebody said, down the table, that the Gryffindors were saying Potter had been made Seeker. First year. Youngest in a century.

Cassiopeia put down her knife.

"Nobody's made Seeker in first year," she said.

"Flint's got him," said a fourth year. "McGonagall went straight to Wood. He's got a broom coming and everything."

She sat perfectly still for a moment.

And then she got up and walked the whole length of the Great Hall to the Gryffindor table with Crabbe and Goyle scrambling up behind her, because there was a thing boiling in her chest that had to come out and she had exactly one shape to pour it into, and the shape was the one her father had given her, and so what came out was:

"Having a last meal, Potter? When are you getting the train back to the Muggles?"

And then, because he said something back and because it was not enough, and because she could not stand to walk away yet:

"I'd take you on any time on my own. Tonight, if you want. Wizard's duel. Wands only, no contact. What's the matter? Never heard of a wizard's duel before, I suppose?"

She heard herself say midnight, and the trophy room, and she went back to her own table with her head high.

She lay awake that night listening to the lake and did not go anywhere near the trophy room, because she had never intended to, because the whole thing had been a trap, and she had told Filch, and it had been easy and clever and precisely what a Malfoy would do.

She lay there and thought about him coming up through the air with his hair blown back and that look on his face.

And she thought, with a horror that came up through her like cold water: he will not look at me like that again. He looked at me like that because I had something of his, and now I have told Filch, and he will find out, and when he looks at me after this he will look at me the way he looked at Snape.

It did not stop her. She had already done it. There was nothing to be done about it.

But she pressed her face into the pillow in the dark in a dungeon under a lake, aged eleven, and said into it, very quietly, in a voice nobody heard:

"You could have just given it to me."

••●━━━ 𖤓 ━━━●••

Harry

Potions was a disaster and the flying lesson was the best hour of his life, and both of them happened in the same week, and afterwards he could not decide which had surprised him more.

In the dungeon Snape asked him three questions he could not answer and then explained that the answers had been easy all along, and Harry, who had been asked a great many unanswerable questions in his life by a great many adults who enjoyed asking them, recognised the format immediately. It was not a test. Tests have the option of passing.

What he did not understand was why.

He had never met the man. He had been in the building six days. Hagrid said later that Snape did not like anyone, which was not true and Harry could tell it was not true, because Snape had stopped at the Malfoy girl's cauldron and said look at the way Miss Malfoy has stewed those horned slugs in a tone of something close to warmth, and Harry had bent over his own cauldron and felt a flare of pure unreasonable resentment.

Then Neville's cauldron melted, and Harry got the boy's arm and pulled him back out of the spreading green, and got a point taken off for it.

And on the way out she slowed down beside him and said something about being blamed for things that were not his fault, and he looked up at her and said, "Yeah. One does."

She had not been expecting that. He saw it register. For half a second she stood there with her mouth slightly open and her whole prepared speech evaporating, and then she walked off very fast with her chin up.

"What was that about?" said Ron.

"No idea," said Harry truthfully.

He thought about it that evening and could not work it out. She had come over to gloat, obviously. That was what she did, she had done it on the train and in the entrance hall and twice in the corridors since. But gloating was supposed to make the gloater feel better, and she had walked away from that one looking like somebody who had dropped something.

••●━━━ 𖤓 ━━━●••

The flying lesson, Ron had been talking about for days, and Harry had been dreading for exactly as long.

The reasoning was simple. Everybody else had done it. Ron had done it on his brothers' brooms. Seamus claimed to have been flying since he was six and Dean knew nothing at all but at least did not care, and Hermione had read a book about it, which Harry suspected was going to be no help to her whatsoever, and somewhere on the other side of the lawn would be Cassiopeia Malfoy, who had been telling anybody who stood still long enough that she had very nearly collided with a Muggle helicopter.

He had no intention of making a fool of himself in front of her. He would not have put it that way. If asked, he would have said he had no intention of making a fool of himself in front of anybody, and the fact that his eyes went across to the Slytherin side of the lawn twice while they were waiting for Madam Hooch was not a fact he examined.

"Stick out your right hand over your broom and say up."

"Up," said Harry.

The broom came into his hand straight away, hard, smacking into his palm, and he stood there holding it with a feeling in his chest like a lift starting to move.

Hardly anybody else's did. Hermione's rolled around on the ground. Neville's did not move at all.

Then Neville went up by accident and came down by accident and broke his wrist, and Madam Hooch took him off, and Malfoy picked the Remembrall out of the grass and held it up to the light with that particular smile.

"Give that here, Malfoy," said Harry, quietly.

He meant it. That was the thing he noticed about himself, standing there on the lawn. He was not frightened. He had been frightened of her since the shop in a low constant way, the way you are wary of a dog you do not know, and the fear had gone completely and what was left was something flat and burning and perfectly calm.

Neville had been crying when they took him away. Neville could not do anything right and knew it and was the only person in the class who had been kind to Harry for no reason at all, and this girl in her beautiful robes with her beautiful hair had picked his grandmother's present up off the grass and was holding it in the air like a prize.

"I think I'll leave it somewhere for Longbottom to find. How about up a tree?"

She got on her broom and went up.

He heard Hermione shouting at him about Madam Hooch and he did not listen, and he got on the broom, and he kicked off.

And the ground went away.

He would think about this for the rest of his life. Not the Remembrall, not the dive, not even the business afterwards with McGonagall. Just the first second. The wind coming up into his face and his hair going back and the grass dropping away underneath, and the discovery, instant and complete, that he could do this. He had never been able to do anything. He had spent eleven years being worse than Dudley at everything that could be measured, and he went up twenty feet off the lawn and found that he was good at something, and the finding was so enormous that for a moment he forgot entirely what he had come up there for.

A yell of laughter went up from the people on the ground.

And Malfoy was hanging there in the air in front of him with her broom tilted and her hair streaming out sideways, and she was looking at him, and her face was doing something he had not seen it do before.

She was grinning.

Not the smirk. Not the little lift at the corner of the mouth that she did when she had decided to be unpleasant. An actual open delighted grin, teeth and everything, and she caught him seeing it and dragged it back into a sneer about half a second too late.

"Give it here," he said, "or I'll knock you off that broom."

"Oh, yeah?"

He went at her.

She moved like water. He got nowhere near. She had the broom round and out of the way before he had finished the thought and he heard her laugh as she went, a real one, high and surprised, carried off sideways on the wind, and he came out of the turn and thought, with a complete absence of logic: she is enjoying this.

He was enjoying it too. That was the part he did not tell Ron afterwards and did not tell anybody for years. For about thirty seconds, twenty feet above the lawn, he had entirely forgotten that he disliked her, and the only thing in his head had been that there was somebody up here with him who could actually fly and that he wanted to see what she would do next.

Then she threw the ball.

He saw it going and the thirty seconds ended and he put the broom into a dive, and the wind screamed and the grass came up and he caught it a foot from the ground and rolled onto the lawn with it in his fist.

And Professor McGonagall came across the grass.

He thought he was finished. He genuinely thought it, walking up through the castle behind her with his legs shaking, and he had begun composing in his head what he would say to the Dursleys, and instead she put him in front of a fifth year called Wood and said, "Potter, this is Oliver Wood. Wood, I have found you a Seeker."

He did not fully take it in until dinner.

"Seeker?" said Ron, for the fifth time. "First years never. You'll be the youngest House player in about a century."

"Don't tell anyone," said Harry. "Wood said."

And then she was there.

He had seen her coming, actually, which afterwards he thought was odd. He had been looking down the hall and had seen her stand up at the Slytherin table and start walking, and he had known before she arrived that she was coming to him and that it was going to be about this afternoon, and some small part of him, underneath all the rest, had thought: good.

"Having a last meal, Potter? When are you getting the train back to the Muggles?"

She did not look right. That was the thing. She was saying all the correct words in the correct order and her face was doing all the correct things, and there was something in her voice that was pitched slightly wrong, too fast, too high, and he could not think what it reminded him of until much later that night, and what it reminded him of was somebody who has been crying and has got themselves under control just before coming into the room.

"You're a lot braver now you're back on the ground with your little friends," he said.

She said something about a wizard's duel. Midnight. Trophy room.

And Harry, who had been at a wizarding school for eleven days and did not know a single duelling spell and had in fact been informed that very morning that he was not allowed out of the tower after hours, said yes.

He said yes because she had asked him in front of everybody. He said yes because she had taken Neville's Remembrall and thrown it at the castle. He said yes, and this was the part he did not realise until much, much later, because she was the only person in the entire school who had been up in the air with him, and because some wordless animal part of him understood that saying no to her was the one thing guaranteed to make her go away.

"Harry," said Ron, when she had gone, "have you lost your mind?"

"Probably," said Harry, and found that he was in an extremely good mood.

••●━━━ 𖤓 ━━━●••

Hermione

Hermione Granger had been at Hogwarts for a fortnight and had already made a list.

The list was private and she would have been mortified if anybody had seen it and it was, in her own estimation, entirely rational. It was a list of the things she needed to be better at, in order, and at the top of it was flying, because flying was the first thing she had encountered in her life that could not be improved by reading about it in advance. She had read about it in advance. She had read Quidditch Through the Ages twice and a quite detailed article on broom handling, and she had gone out onto that lawn with the whole theory of it in her head and her broom had rolled over on the grass like a dead thing.

That had been humiliating in a way she did not have much practice at.

What came afterwards was worse, and more confusing, and she went over it for most of the following week.

Harry Potter had never flown before. He had said so. He had said so at breakfast, with that slightly hunted look he got whenever anybody asked him anything about himself, and then he had gone up off that lawn as though the broom were part of him, and he had caught a glass ball going at forty miles an hour with his hand out and his glasses nearly off his face, and he had been given a place on a House team for it. First year. Against the rules, which she had looked up, and which she had pointed out, twice, to no effect whatsoever.

So that was unfair. She was eleven and she was allowed to think it was unfair, and she did, for about a day.

The thing that actually stayed with her was the other girl.

Hermione had been standing almost directly underneath them. Everybody else had been shouting and jostling and half of them had been scared, and Hermione, who was too angry at everyone for breaking the rules to enjoy any of it, had stood with her arms folded and her head back and had watched the entire exchange from the grass.

And Cassiopeia Malfoy had been laughing.

Not the laugh she did in the corridors, the loud one with the hiss in it that she performed for Parkinson and the others. Hermione had excellent hearing and the lawn was quiet when the other children drew breath, and what came down out of the air when Harry went at her and missed was a completely unguarded, startled, delighted sound, and Hermione had looked up at the pale shape of her against the sky and thought, with great clarity for somebody who was wrong about almost everything concerning other people at that age: she has stopped pretending.

Then the Remembrall went flying, and the dive, and McGonagall, and all the rest.

And at dinner Malfoy had come the entire length of the Great Hall, past three tables, in front of eight hundred people, to say something nasty to Harry about a train.

Hermione had watched her come and had watched her go. She noticed that the girl had not eaten anything. She noticed that she said her piece very fast and that she stood a little too close while saying it, and that when Harry answered her back she went pink.

Hermione filed all of this carefully away in the part of her mind that she used for things she had observed and did not yet understand, which was a large and well-organised part and was going to be considerably fuller by the end of the year.

"She hates him," said Ron, afterwards, in the common room. "Her whole family hates him, it's hereditary."

"Mmm," said Hermione, and went back to her essay, and underlined something.

She did not say what she thought, because she did not have a theory yet, only a note, and she did not advance theories without evidence.

The note said: she looks at him more than he looks at her, and he has not noticed, and neither has she.

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