Chapter 2: Recognition
THE DAILY PROPHET, Wednesday 17 March 1999
MALFOY "HEIR" CLAIMS VOLDEMORT CURSE; POTTER SILENT
The mystery witness who astonished the Wizengamot on Monday by claiming to be missing Death Eater's son Draco Malfoy is being housed at the Leaky Cauldron at her own expense, the Prophet can reveal. Sources close to the prosecution describe her as "a talented fraud" and "frankly, a very pretty liar." Harry Potter, who was present in the gallery, declined to comment. Mr Potter's friend Ronald Weasley, approached on Diagon Alley, said: "Mate, I have no idea. Ask Harry." Story continues on page four.
I read it standing at the bar of the Leaky Cauldron at seven in the morning with a cup of tea going cold in my hand, and Hannah Abbott, who runs the place now and who once, in another life, I called a fat-faced Hufflepuff, slides a plate of toast towards me without a word.
"I don't want that," I say.
"Eat it anyway," says Hannah. "You look like a ghost. Neville says you've not been eating."
"How would Neville know?"
"Because Neville delivers our herbs on a Tuesday and he's got eyes in his head." She polishes a glass. "He also says Harry's been in here twice asking which room you're in and lost his nerve both times. He's in the corner now."
I turn round so fast I slop tea down my sleeve.
He is in the corner booth by the fire, with a mug of something and the Prophet open in front of him, upside down, which I realise after a moment is because he has not been reading it. He has been watching me read mine. When our eyes meet he raises his mug a little, like a toast, and gestures with it at the seat opposite.
I go over. I sit down. I am aware of every eye in the pub.
"You said you'd testify," I say. "You didn't say you'd stalk me."
"I wanted to talk first." He pushes something across the table towards me, wrapped in a strip of black cloth. "And give you this."
I know it before I unwrap it. I know it the way you know the sound of your mother's voice in a crowd. Ten inches, hawthorn, unicorn hair. The handle is worn pale where my thumb used to rest.
I don't touch it.
"It won't work for me," I say. "You won it. Ollivander told you. It answers to you now."
"I know what Ollivander said." Harry folds his hands round his mug. "I want to try anyway. I want you to pick it up."
"In front of half of Diagon Alley?"
"Specifically in front of half of Diagon Alley," he says. "Yes."
I look at him. He looks back. In the firelight the scar on his forehead is very pale and his face is not unkind. He is, I realise, offering me a test, and a public one, and if I fail it, every person in this pub will tell every person they know before lunch, and the prosecution will have it by Thursday.
He is betting on me. In public. With his own name.
I reach out and pick up the wand.
Nothing happens. The wood lies in my palm like any stick of wood. I feel the last stupid hope go out of me, and I'm about to put it down when Harry says, very quietly, "Wait. Say something to it."
"Say what?"
"I don't know. Something only you'd say."
I look down at the wand. I think of a cupboard in my bedroom at the Manor, full of letters I never sent. I think of standing in the Astronomy Tower with this wand in my hand, pointed at the most powerful wizard in the world, and not being able to say the words. I think of the drawing room, and the swollen face, and the choice I made in a second that cost me everything I was.
"I'm sorry," I whisper to it. "I'm sorry I wasn't braver."
The wand grows warm.
It starts in the handle, a slow heat like a hearth catching, and spreads up the length of it, and then a single thin ribbon of silver light curls out of the tip and drifts up towards the beams of the Leaky Cauldron and hangs there, glowing, turning slowly in the air like a strand of hair in water.
The whole pub has gone silent.
"Huh," says Harry, very softly. He is looking at the silver light, and then at me, and something in his face has gone open and astonished, like a door blown in. "It's never done that for me."
Ollivander tells us that afternoon, in his newly reopened shop, that it is not allegiance. Allegiance belongs to Harry, and will until someone takes the wand from him. What happened in the pub, he says, peering at me with his pale silvery eyes, is something rarer. Recognition.
"A wand," he says, turning the hawthorn over in his long fingers, "is not a dog, Miss Malfoy, to follow whoever holds the leash. But neither does it forget. This wand chose a frightened, proud boy. It knew him. And now it knows you." He looks up. "I remember every wand I ever sold. I remember this one. I'd stake my reputation on it, for whatever my reputation is worth these days."
"Will you say that in court?" Harry asks.
Ollivander smiles, thinly. "Mr Potter. I spent a year in that girl's family's cellar. I know very well what the Malfoys are." He looks back at me. "But I also know that the son of that house once came down those cellar steps alone, at night, and left a loaf of bread and a blanket for an old man without a word. I always wondered why." He hands the wand back to Harry, not to me. "Yes. I'll say it in court."
When we come out onto Diagon Alley, the light is going. The shops are lighting their lamps. Harry walks beside me with his hands in his pockets and his hood up, and I keep catching the edge of his face in the corner of my eye, and I can't think of a single thing to say.
"You never told anyone," he says. "About the bread."
"It was only bread."
"It's not, though, is it." He stops, under the sign for Flourish and Blotts, and turns to face me. "Can I ask you something? You don't have to answer."
"You've earned a question."
He hesitates, and for a moment he looks less like a war hero and more like what he is, which is a boy of nineteen who has seen too much and doesn't know what to do with his hands.
"Do you want it back?" he asks. "Your old face. If they could find a counter-curse. Would you want to be... him, again?"
Nobody has ever asked me that. Not the Healers, not the solicitor, not even my mother, who cried for a week when she understood, and then put her arms round me and said I was hers either way.
I think about it for a long time. A couple pass us arm in arm, laughing. Somewhere a shop bell rings.
"No," I say. "I've tried to want it. I spent months trying. But the person who looked like that was so frightened, all the time. He spent his whole life trying to be what his father wanted. And I woke up one morning as a stranger, and it was the worst day of my life, and then about three weeks later I realised it was also the first day I'd ever been allowed to just..." I stop. I don't have the words. "I don't want his face back. I don't want his life back. I just want my name. I want to stand up in that court and say who I am and have one person in the world believe me."
Harry looks at me for a long moment under the yellow lamplight.
"One person does," he says.
Hermione Granger is waiting in the corner booth of the Leaky Cauldron when we get back, with Ron beside her eating chips out of a paper cone and pretending not to stare at me.
She stands up when she sees us. She is smaller than I remember, or I am, or both. There is a thin white scar at the side of her throat, half hidden by her collar, and I know exactly whose knife made it and exactly where I was standing when it happened.
"Harry told me," she says. "About the bread. And the wand." Her chin is up. "I want to ask you something, and I want the truth."
"All right."
"In the drawing room. When she was... when I was on the floor." Her voice doesn't shake. Mine would. "Did you ever think about stopping her?"
I could lie. It would be easy; I have had a great deal of practice. I find I can't, not with Harry standing beside me, not after today.
"Every second," I say. "And I didn't. I was a coward, and you paid for it, and I am so sorry, Granger. I don't expect that to be worth anything."
Hermione looks at me for a long time. Then she sits back down and pushes the cone of chips across the table towards me, and Ron says, "Oi," and she says, "Ronald," and he subsides.
"It's worth something," she says. "Sit down. If we're going to win on Thursday, I need to see Thorne's file."
That night I can't sleep. At half past two there is a knock on my door at the Leaky Cauldron, and when I open it, wand-less and furious, in a borrowed nightdress, Harry is standing in the corridor fully dressed, white-faced, with a Ministry memo in his hand.
"Sorry," he says. "I'm sorry. You need to see this."
The memo is from Hermione, in her neat cramped handwriting. It says: Harry. Thorne's office has just filed a new witness for Thursday. A man walked into the Ministry at midnight and handed himself in. Kingsley's seen him. Everyone's seen him.
He says he's Draco Malfoy. And Harry, he looks exactly like him.