Chapter Five: The Trophy Room

Cassiopeia

She had challenged him to a duel at four o'clock in the afternoon in front of approximately thirty people, and by six o'clock she had realised she did not know how to duel.

This was the kind of discovery that could have destroyed a lesser girl. Cassiopeia Malfoy sat on the end of her bed in the dungeon with her curtains drawn and conducted a full and honest review of her offensive capabilities, and the review concluded as follows: she could make a match float, she could turn a beetle a different colour if the beetle cooperated, and she had once, at home, set fire to a curtain, and had not been able to repeat it under observation.

Against this she set what she knew of Potter, which was that he could not do anything either, and felt moderately better, and then remembered that this had not stopped him going forty feet into the air after a glass ball and coming back with it in his fist, and felt considerably worse.

She lay back and stared up at the stone.

The trouble, which she would not have admitted even to Pansy, was that she had not planned the challenge. She had not planned any of it. She had gone out onto that lawn on Thursday with every intention of being magnificent and had been magnificent for about four minutes, right up until the moment when a boy who had never been on a broom in his life took off beside her and went up at an angle she had been told was not possible.

She had laughed. That was the part she kept arriving back at, the way your tongue keeps arriving back at a broken tooth. In the middle of it, in the air, with the wind going past and the castle tipping sideways underneath them and Potter coming at her white-faced and furious with absolutely no idea how to turn, she had laughed out loud, and it had not been one of her laughs. It had come out of some older place that she had been shutting the door on since she was seven, and it had got out before she could stop it, and it had happened in front of the entire first year.

So she had thrown the Remembrall. She had thrown it as hard as she could at the castle wall in order to put an end to the whole situation, and instead he had gone after it, down, in a line, and had pulled out of the dive a foot off the grass, and the lawn had made a noise she had never heard a group of people make.

And then Professor McGonagall had come out of the castle at a speed that suggested murder, and had taken him away, and Cassiopeia had stood on the grass in the gathering cold with her hair coming out of its clip and had thought, with real and uncomplicated satisfaction: expelled. He will be on a train tomorrow. That is the end of it.

And she had felt, underneath the satisfaction, a drop of something so cold and so unexpected that she had had to go and sit down on the steps.

Then at dinner the Weasley boy had told half the hall that Potter had been made Seeker.

Seeker. First year. Against a rule that had stood for a century. Cassiopeia had gone the length of the Great Hall to say something about it because standing still had become unbearable, and she had said the first thing available, which was something about him going home on the train, and he had answered her back, and she had gone pink in front of everybody and had had to walk all the way back past three tables with it still on her face.

That was when she had said it. Duel. Midnight. Trophy room.

She had said it because she needed to leave the conversation holding something.

••●━━━ 𖤓 ━━━●••

By ten o'clock that night she had constructed a reason not to go, and the reason was so good that she almost believed it.

The reason was that a Malfoy does not meet a challenge on terms set by a person of no standing, which was not in fact what had happened, since she had set the terms herself, but she had found that if you said a principle in your father's voice it did not matter very much whether it applied.

The second reason, which was better, was that Potter had been at the school for eleven days and would get himself lost, caught, and expelled entirely without her assistance, and that it would be far more elegant to arrange the catching than to be present for it.

So she went and found Filch.

This took some doing. The caretaker was not a man one approached, and she had been at the castle long enough to understand that he hated students as a category and did not make exceptions. She found him on the fourth floor scraping something off a suit of armour and muttering, and she stood in front of him with her hands folded and her chin at the correct angle and said that she thought he ought to know that somebody was planning to be in the trophy room at midnight.

Filch stopped scraping.

The way his face changed was educational. She watched it happen, the suspicion going out of it and something almost hungry coming in, and she understood in that moment a thing about adults that she had previously only suspected, which was that a great many of them were simply waiting for permission.

"Who?" he said.

"I couldn't possibly say."

"You could."

"I could," agreed Cassiopeia, "but then I'd be a sneak, wouldn't I, and I'd rather not be. I can only say… Midnight. Trophy room. There may be more than one of them."

She walked away down the corridor with her heart going hard and her face entirely calm, and she was pleased with herself for the length of about one staircase, and then the pleasure wore off the way a sweet does and left her with the taste of it.

She told herself she had done the correct thing. She told herself all the way down to the dungeons, and through the common room, and into bed, where she lay in the dark in the green underwater light with her eyes wide open and told herself some more.

At half past eleven she got up.

She did not have a reason for this and did not look for one. She put on her robe over her nightclothes and went out through the common room, where two sixth years were playing chess and did not look up, and out of the door into the passage, and she walked up through the sleeping castle in her stockinged feet with her shoes in her hand.

She got as far as the ground floor.

The entrance hall at midnight was enormous and black and full of the sound of the castle settling, and the hourglasses glittered faintly in their frames, and she stood in the shadow of the staircase with her back against the stone and her shoes in her hand and did not go any further.

She told herself she was there to watch.

She was there, she understood dimly, for something else, and the something else had no words attached to it, and if it had she would not have said them. It was closest to this: she had set a trap, and she had set it properly, and she had wanted it to work, and now she was standing at the bottom of a staircase in the dark hoping to hear him get away.

Both of those were true at the same time. She was eleven and nobody had told her that was allowed, and so she stood in the dark and was furious with herself and did not move.

She heard it start at about ten past twelve.

First Filch's voice, very far up, saying something about sniffing. Then Mrs Norris. Then, quite suddenly and much closer than she expected, running. A lot of running, badly done, at least three sets of feet and possibly four, coming down the castle from somewhere above with doors banging behind it, and Filch's voice going up into a kind of shriek, and Peeves joining in overhead with a bellow about students out of bed that echoed down six floors and made her press herself flat against the wall.

She stood with her fists closed.

They went past the gallery on the third floor. She could track them by the noise. They were going the wrong way, which she knew because she had learned the castle plan off by heart in the first week and because she was that sort of person, and she thought: not that way, not that way, there is nothing down there, and she had actually opened her mouth before she understood what she was about to do.

She shut it again with a snap.

Then there was a scream.

It was not a boy's scream. It was all of them at once, high and short and ending abruptly, as though a door had been shut on it, which in fact was exactly what had happened, and it came from the right hand side of the third floor, from the corridor that Dumbledore had stood up in the Great Hall on the first night and told eight hundred children was out of bounds to everybody who did not wish to die a very painful death.

Cassiopeia's whole body went cold from the scalp down.

She did not remember deciding to move. She was halfway up the first flight of the marble staircase with her shoes still in her hand before any part of her brain caught up and pointed out that there was no version of this in which she was not going to be found in a corridor at midnight with absolutely no explanation available, and she stopped with her hand on the banister, breathing hard, and stood there like somebody who has got up in the middle of a dinner party for no reason.

The scream did not come again.

She waited. The castle went on settling. Somewhere above, Filch was still going, a long grumbling tide of noise moving away westward, and then even that stopped.

She went back down to the dungeons. She did it very quietly and she was not caught, and she lay in bed for the rest of the night with her eyes open and her hands pressed flat on the blanket, and she worked on an explanation.

The explanation was: she had wanted him expelled and she had been angry that he might have got away with it.

She lay there and held that explanation in both hands like a bowl of water, and it kept slopping.

••●━━━ 𖤓 ━━━●••

At breakfast he was there.

That was the first thing she checked and she checked it before she had sat down, scanning the Gryffindor table from the door of the Great Hall the way you check a pocket for a key. He was there. He was alive and present and eating toast and he had a grey look about him that said he had not slept, and the Weasley boy beside him was talking with both hands going, and the brown-haired girl on the other side was sitting with her arms folded and her chin up and an expression of enormous disapproval that did not appear to be preventing her from being there.

Cassiopeia sat down at her own table and buttered something and did not eat it.

"You look appalling," said Pansy.

"I slept badly."

"You said last night you were going to the trophy room."

"I said no such thing."

"You said it to Vincent and he told everyone." Pansy poured tea. "Did you go?"

"I had something better to do."

"Mm," said Pansy.

Up the table, Blaise Zabini turned a page of his father's newspaper and said, without lifting his eyes, "Potter was out of bounds last night. Filch has been telling the portraits about it since six o'clock. He didn't catch anybody, which is apparently a great personal tragedy."

Cassiopeia made herself say, "What a shame."

"Isn't it," agreed Blaise. "Since you were the one who told him."

The whole bench did not go quiet, because the whole bench had not heard. Pansy had heard. Pansy's head came round with her teacup in mid air.

"I didn't," said Cassiopeia.

"All right," said Blaise, and turned another page.

"I didn't."

"I heard you," said Blaise peaceably. "Fourth floor, by the armour. I was behind the tapestry doing something I would rather not discuss." He licked a finger and turned a page. "I'm not going to tell anyone. I'm only mentioning it because it was interesting."

"What was interesting about it?"

"You said it and then you stood there for about ten seconds afterwards with a face on you like somebody who has posted a letter they wish they hadn't."

Cassiopeia put down her knife with great care and said that she had no idea what he meant, and Blaise agreed that she had no idea what he meant, and Pansy looked between the two of them with her eyebrows somewhere near her hairline, and the subject was closed.

Three days later the story came back round the school in its finished form, the way stories did, and the finished form said that Potter and the Weasley boy and the Granger girl and Longbottom had got into the forbidden corridor on the third floor and had found a dog in it with three heads.

Cassiopeia heard this in the greenhouse with her hands in a tray of soil.

She said, "A dog with three heads," in a voice of complete contempt, and Pansy agreed that it was an obvious invention, and somebody said that Longbottom had told it himself and that Longbottom could not invent his way out of a bath, and Cassiopeia said nothing more about it at all.

She went on repotting. Her hands were not quite steady and she kept them in the soil where nobody could see them.

She had sent him there. Not to that corridor, she had not known about that corridor, but she had put Filch in his way and Filch had driven him and he had gone through the first unlocked door he could find and on the other side of it there had been a thing with three heads.

If it had been a little faster. If the door had been a little further. If.

She thought about that for the rest of the week, late at night, in the dark, in the place where she did her real thinking and where she never once in seven years told the truth out loud.

And what she decided, in the end, was a small and important and entirely wrong thing. She decided that she was not going to use Filch again.

She did not decide that she would stop. She had no intention whatsoever of stopping. She would go on at him for the whole of that year and the next and the one after that, in corridors and in classrooms and from the Quidditch stands, with everything she had.

But she would do it herself, from now on, where she could see him.

She understood this at the time as a question of style. It was not. It was the first rule she had ever made for her own conduct that her father had not given her, and it had a shape to it that she would not recognise for years, and the shape was: whatever happens to him, I want to be there.

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Harry

They had been waiting in the trophy room for twenty minutes before Harry understood that she was not coming.

It had been a strange twenty minutes. The room was long and narrow and full of glass cases, and the cups and shields and plates inside them caught what light there was and threw it about, so that the whole place glimmered faintly, and the all of them stood in the middle of it in their dressing gowns getting colder.

All of them. That was the first thing that had gone wrong. He had expected to be two, himself and Ron, and instead Hermione Granger had followed them out of the portrait hole arguing in a furious whisper the entire length of the seventh floor corridor, and had then been locked out by the Fat Lady and had had to come with them, and Neville had been asleep in the common room because he had forgotten the password again and had woken up and come too.

“I’m going to bed before either of you come up with another clever idea to get us killed—or worse, expelled.”

Hermione had said, several times, that she would not be the one who got them all killed or, worse, expelled. Ron had told her to go away. She had pointed out, with devastating accuracy, that she had nowhere to go.

So they stood in the dark among the trophies, and Harry, who had been sick with nerves since nine o'clock, discovered somewhere around the fifteen minute mark that he was not nervous any more. He was something else.

He went and looked at a case while he worked out what.

There was a plaque in it with a list of names on it, Special Services to the School, and he read down it in the dark without taking any of it in, and what he was actually doing was running the thing through his head again, the way she had stood in the entrance hall at four o'clock with her chin up and said midnight, trophy room, in front of everybody.

She had meant it. He was almost sure she had meant it. He had looked straight at her when she said it and she had looked straight back, and there had been something in her face that was not the usual thing, and he had thought at the time: she wants to.

And now it was twenty past midnight and the trophy room was empty.

"She's not coming," said Ron.

"No."

"She never was. Harry, she set you up. She's probably tipped off Filch. That's exactly the sort of thing she'd do, Dad says the whole family's like that, they don't fight, they arrange."

Harry did not answer.

He was waiting to find out whether he was angry, and he found, slightly to his own annoyance, that what he was mostly feeling was flat. It was the feeling of having got dressed for something and been stood up. He had spent eight hours that day being frightened and then had got good at it, and he had worked himself up to the point where he could walk into a room and face somebody, and the room was empty, and there was nowhere for any of it to go.

Underneath the flatness there was something smaller and worse that he did not look at directly. He had wanted her to come.

Not to fight her. He had not wanted to fight her at all, and he would have been very happy if the whole thing had been called off by mutual agreement. He had wanted her to turn up, because she had said she would, and because somewhere in the last fortnight she had become the one fixed point in a castle full of people he did not understand, and because a person who turns up when they say they will is a person you can place.

She had not turned up.

Then Mrs Norris came round the doorframe with her lamp-like eyes, and there was no more time for any of it.

••●━━━ 𖤓 ━━━●••

The next four minutes Harry could never afterwards put back together in the right order.

There was running. There was a tapestry and a passage behind it and Neville tripping and grabbing him round the waist and both of them going down. There was Peeves overhead screaming about students out of bed, delighted, incandescent, the sound of it hammering off the ceilings and bringing Filch at a shuffling run. There was a door at the end of a corridor that was locked and would not open, and Hermione shoving him aside with both hands and saying a word and the lock clicking.

And then they were through it with the door shut behind them and Filch going past outside, and Harry stood there with his back against the wood and his lungs burning and discovered that Neville was pulling at his sleeve and saying his name in a voice that had gone very high.

He turned round.

There was a dog in the room.

It filled the space from floor to ceiling. It had three heads, three sets of eyes that had all been asleep and were now not asleep, three noses working, three sets of teeth with strings of drool hanging off them, and it was looking at the four of them with the dawning interest of something that has not been given anything to do in a long while.

Harry got the door open behind him by feel. He did not remember deciding to. They went through it and out and he threw his weight against it and the whole thing shuddered as the dog hit the other side.

They ran.

They ran the whole length of the castle and up through it and through the portrait hole, which Hermione got open by main force and outrage, and they fell into the Gryffindor common room and lay about on the chairs with the fire out and nobody saying anything for a long time.

"What do they think they're doing," said Ron eventually, "keeping a thing like that locked up in a school?"

"You don't use your eyes, do you?!" said Hermione.

She was shaking. Harry noticed that, and noticed that she was being extremely rude in order to cover it, and he found that he did not mind her at all any more, which was a change from two hours previously.

"Didn't you see what it was standing on?"

"The floor," said Ron. "I wasn't looking at its feet, I was busy with its heads. Wait, was it floating? It was totally floating, no?"

"Not the floor. It was standing on a trapdoor. It's obviously guarding something." Hermione stood up and pulled her dressing gown round her and looked at the two of them with an expression of furious virtue. "I hope you're pleased with yourselves. We could all have been killed, or worse, expelled. Now if you don't mind, I'm going to bed."

She went.

Ron stared after her with his mouth open. "She needs to sort out her priorities."

Harry was not listening.

He was sitting in a sagging armchair in a dark common room at one in the morning with his heart still going, and he was thinking about the dog, and about the trapdoor underneath it, and about the grubby little package Hagrid had taken out of a vault at Gringotts in July and put inside his coat.

And underneath that, running along quietly, in the part of his head that he did not supervise, he was thinking: she sent Filch after me.

Ron was right. It had taken Harry about ninety seconds in the trophy room to arrive at the same conclusion, and he had arrived at it without surprise, because it fitted everything he knew about her.

The thing he could not account for was how much he minded.

He turned it over while the fire died. He had been lied to and set up and generally mistreated by experts for ten years, and he had developed a thick and serviceable indifference about it. Uncle Vernon lied to him constantly. Dudley had put him in situations considerably more dangerous than a locked corridor. None of it had ever got in.

This had got in. He lay in bed afterwards and could feel it sitting there, a small sour stone.

He worked out why about a week later, in the middle of a Charms lesson, and when he worked it out he stopped writing and sat looking at the page.

It was because she had said it to his face.

Everything else in his life had been done to him from behind or from above. She had come up to him in a crowded entrance hall, in front of everybody, and had looked straight at him and made an arrangement, and he had agreed to it, and for about eight hours he had been a person who had an arrangement with somebody.

And she had broken it.

Harry Potter had no experience of being let down, because nobody had ever offered him anything to be let down about, and so he had nothing to compare it to and no idea at all what to do with it, and he dealt with it the way an eleven year old deals with everything, which was to decide that he hated her and get on with his day.

He was still, three days later, slightly surprised to see her at breakfast.

He had half thought she might not be able to look at him.

She looked at him. She was sitting at the Slytherin table with her hair done and her chin up and she looked straight down the hall at him with absolutely no shame of any kind, and then she said something to Parkinson and both of them laughed.

"See?" said Ron, with his mouth full. "No conscience. Hereditary."

"Yeah," said Harry.

He went back to his toast, and did not mention that she had been looking at the doorway every time it opened for a week, because he had not consciously noticed it, and would not have known what to make of it if he had.

••●━━━ 𖤓 ━━━●••

Blaise

Blaise Zabini had arrived at Hogwarts with a policy, and the policy was to involve himself in nothing.

He had held to it for eleven days, which he considered respectable, and he was watching it come under strain from an entirely unexpected direction.

The direction was Malfoy.

She was, on the available evidence, the most tiresome person in their year, and Blaise had catalogued her within the first evening: loud, clever, performatively bored, extremely frightened of something, and in possession of a laugh that she used like a tool. He had met a dozen of her at his mother's dinner parties. They were all the same and they all came from houses where somebody had an opinion about you at breakfast.

What interested him, against his will, was that she was bad at it.

Not bad at being awful. She was superb at being awful, had real natural talent for it, could find the exact sentence that would make a given person go quiet in under three seconds. She was bad at the part afterwards. Every single time she said something properly cruel she went through a particular small sequence, and Blaise had watched it four separate times now and had timed it on the fourth: a half second of satisfaction, then a flicker, then an immediate loud remark to somebody else about something unrelated.

The flicker was the interesting bit.

The Filch business had been the most interesting of all, because he had happened to be standing behind a tapestry on the fourth floor for reasons connected to a cupboard and a girl in the year above, and had heard the entire exchange.

She had done it well. Cold, brisk, deniable, nothing Filch could repeat in front of a teacher. Blaise had listened with genuine professional admiration.

And then she had stood there in the empty corridor afterwards for a good ten seconds doing absolutely nothing, with her hand still on the wall, and when she had finally walked off she had walked off fast and in the wrong direction.

He mentioned it at breakfast because he was curious how she would handle it, and she handled it badly, and he let it go.

He went on watching for the rest of the term, in the detached way he watched everything, and by Christmas he had formed a theory which he kept entirely to himself for six years.

The theory was simple and he would have been embarrassed to be caught holding it.

The theory was that Cassiopeia Malfoy had got to Hogwarts with an enormous appetite and nothing to spend it on. She had been raised to be important and had discovered on the first night that in a castle of eight hundred people she was simply one more loud girl with a famous surname. And then she had run directly into the only person in the school who was more important than her and who did not want to be, and who had looked at her exactly twice and had not been impressed either time, and some engine had started up in her that she had absolutely no controls for.

Blaise turned the page of his newspaper and declined to get involved.

He went on declining for a long time. He was still declining in a corridor six years later when she came past him white to the lips with her wand out, going the wrong way again, toward a boy who was about to do something stupid, and even then all he did was step out of her path and say, mildly, to nobody at all:

"Took you long enough."

He never got involved. That was the thing about Blaise Zabini, and he was proud of it, and it cost him less than he thought and more than he admitted.

But he did one thing, that first year, which he never mentioned to anybody.

In the week before Christmas he was in the owlery posting a letter to his mother, and the Malfoy girl was already up there in the freezing cold with an eagle owl on her wrist and a sealed envelope in her other hand that she was not sending. He watched her stand there for about two minutes. Then she put it in her pocket and sent nothing.

"Cold up here," said Blaise.

"Yes."

"If you want somebody to post something and not say who it came from," he said, to the window, "I go up on Tuesdays."

She did not answer and she did not take him up on it, not that year.

She took him up on it in March of their sixth year, and by then neither of them made any remark about it at all.

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