Chapter 1: The Witness Who Gives Her Name
The first thing they take is my name.
"The witness will state her name for the record," says the clerk, and I say, "Draconia Malfoy," and there is a sound from the benches like wind going through a field of dry grass. Fifty witches and wizards in plum-coloured robes, every one of them leaning to whisper to the one beside them. The clerk's quill hesitates over the parchment. He looks up at the Chief Warlock.
"Record it as the witness's claimed name," says Tiberius Ogden, without looking at me. "We will come to the question of its truth."
So that is how it goes into the official record of the Malfoy trials, March 1999, Courtroom Ten, Department of Mysteries level: The witness, who gives her name as Draconia Malfoy.
I sit in the chair in the middle of the stone floor. It is the same chair they use for defendants. The chains on its arms clink when I move, but they leave them slack, because I am a witness and not a prisoner, at least on paper. The room is dark and deep, like the inside of a well. Torches burn in brackets along the walls. My mother sits behind a low railing to my left with two Aurors beside her, in a grey dress that hangs off her now, her hair scraped back, her hands folded in her lap so tightly the knuckles are white.
She does not look at me. We agreed she wouldn't. It makes them think she is lying when she looks at me.
"Miss," says the prosecutor. His name is Cuthbert Thorne and he has a voice like a well-oiled door, smooth and endlessly opening onto nothing. "For the benefit of the court. You claim to be the son of Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy."
"I claim to be their child."
"Their son, Draco Lucius Malfoy, born the fifth of June, 1980, last seen on the night of the Battle of Hogwarts and listed since by this Ministry as missing, presumed dead."
"Yes."
"You are a woman, Miss."
"I'm aware."
A few laughs. Ogden frowns at the benches and they stop.
Thorne walks a slow circle round my chair. He has a file under his arm, and I know what is in it, because I have seen it, because my mother's solicitor got a copy and we sat up three nights reading it by candlelight in a room above the Leaky Cauldron. It is my life, told by people who were not in it. It is a list of all the reasons I cannot be who I am.
"You do not resemble Draco Malfoy," says Thorne, "in any particular. Your hair is dark. He was famously fair. You are, if you'll forgive me, several inches shorter. Your face bears no likeness to the photographs held by this Ministry, nor to his father's. The Healers at Saint Mungo's have examined you and found no trace of Polyjuice, no trace of Transfiguration, and no trace of any curse they can name."
"Because it's not one they can name," I say. "I told them that."
"Ah yes. Your curse." He turns to face the benches, spreading his hands. "The witness asks us to believe that in April of last year, the Dark Lord himself cast an unknown spell upon his loyal follower's son, which transformed the boy wholesale into a young woman whom no one recognises. A spell so subtle it leaves no trace. A spell, conveniently, that cannot be proven or disproven." He turns back to me. "And why would the Dark Lord do such a thing?"
I have rehearsed this. I have said it to the mirror above the Leaky Cauldron so many times that the mirror has started saying it back.
"Because I lied to him."
"About what?"
"About whether a boy with a swollen face was Harry Potter."
The noise this time is louder. Someone up in the highest benches says "Oh, come on," and is shushed.
"Go on," says Ogden. He has put his quill down.
"It was Easter," I say. My voice is steady. I am proud of that. "Snatchers brought three prisoners to the Manor. One of them had been hit with a Stinging Jinx. His face was so swollen you could hardly see his eyes. My aunt, Bellatrix Lestrange, wanted me to say whether it was Potter, so they could call the Dark Lord. I knew it was him. I knew it from the way he stood. I'd been watching the way he stood for years. I said I couldn't be sure." I take a breath. "Afterwards, when they'd escaped, the Dark Lord came. He knew I'd lied. He could always tell. He said that if I wanted to make myself a stranger to my own side, he would help me. Then he cast it."
The room is very quiet.
"I woke up the next morning like this," I say. "My own mother didn't know me until I told her something only I could know. The Manor's wards still let me in. That's all the proof there is. Blood magic doesn't lie."
"Blood magic," says Thorne gently, "can be bought, Miss. In Knockturn Alley, for the right price, one can buy a vial of anyone's blood. And the Manor's wards, as this court well knows, were keyed by Narcissa Malfoy herself." He looks at my mother. "A woman who has every reason to produce an heir. Draco Malfoy's vaults at Gringotts are frozen pending proof of death. Should he be found alive, they pass to him. Should he be found alive and also, conveniently, sympathetic to his mother's case, his testimony could keep her out of Azkaban." He lets that settle. "I put it to you that you are not Draco Malfoy. That you are an actress, hired by a desperate mother, to tell a story that cannot be checked."
"Then check it," I say. "There was a witness."
Thorne raises an eyebrow. "A witness?"
"The boy with the swollen face." I make myself look up at the benches, at the gallery above them where the public sits. I know he is there. I saw him come in. He sits right at the back, in the shadow, with a hood up, as if anyone in Britain wouldn't know him by the way he holds his shoulders. "He knows what I said. He was looking straight at me when I said it."
Every head in the courtroom turns.
Harry Potter does not stand up. He does not do anything at all. He sits in the dark at the top of the gallery, and after a long moment he pushes his hood back, and the torchlight catches his glasses, and his face is unreadable. He looks thinner than in the photographs in the Prophet. He looks like someone who has not slept properly in a year.
"Mr Potter," says Ogden. "This court did not summon you today."
"No, sir."
"Do you have anything to say?"
Harry looks at me. It is the first time in eleven months anybody has looked at me the way he is looking now: not at the dark hair or the wrong face, but straight into my eyes, as if he is reading something written there.
"Not yet," he says.
They adjourn until Thursday. My mother is taken back down to the holding cells. I am taken nowhere, because I am free, which is a strange word for having nowhere to go.
I sit on a bench in the corridor outside Courtroom Ten with my hands between my knees and wait for my heart to stop slamming. People walk past me and stare. A witch from the Prophet tries to take my photograph and an Auror shoos her off. The torchlight flickers on the black stone walls. Somewhere down the corridor, behind the door that leads further into the Department of Mysteries, something is ticking, slow and heavy, like a clock that is also breathing.
Then someone sits down at the other end of the bench.
I don't look at him. I can't. I stare at the floor between my feet and listen to him breathe, and he doesn't say anything for so long I think he might just be resting his legs.
"Tell me what you said," Harry Potter says finally. "Exactly. The words."
My throat closes. I make it open.
"Bellatrix said, Is it him? Is it Potter? And my father was shouting at me to look closer. And I came and knelt down in front of you and looked at your face, and your eyes were barely open, but you looked back at me. And I said, I can't... I can't be sure." I am staring so hard at the floor that the stones swim. "That's what I said. And then I stood up and walked back to the fireplace, and I didn't look at you again, because I thought if I did my mother would see it on my face."
Harry is silent.
"And then Granger lied about the sword," I say, faster now, because I can't stop. "And they took her into the drawing room, and they took the rest of you to the cellar, and I stood by the fire and listened to her screaming and did nothing. I did nothing. I just stood there. I want you to know that I know that."
When I finally look up, he is watching me. His eyes are very green in the torchlight, and very tired, and there is something in them I have not seen in a single face since Easter last year.
It takes me a moment to recognise it. Belief.
"Your eyes are the same," Harry says quietly. "Everything else is different. But I'd know them anywhere. I spent years glaring at them."
I can't speak.
He stands up, and looks down at me, and pushes a hand through his terrible hair.
"Thursday," he says. "I'll be there. I'll testify." He hesitates. "And Malfoy? I've still got your wand."