Chapter 3: One Question
"State your name for the record."
"Draco Lucius Malfoy," says the boy in the chair.
It is like looking at a ghost. It is worse than that. A ghost would at least be honest about being dead.
He sits where I sat on Monday, in the middle of the stone floor of Courtroom Ten, in a set of black robes that fit him perfectly. His hair is white-blond and slicked back the way I used to wear it before the war. His face is my old face exactly: the pointed chin, the high pale forehead, the mouth that I always thought looked like my father's when it sneered. He has my old voice. He even has my old trick of tilting his head slightly to the left when he listens, and I want to be sick, because I didn't know that anyone but my mother had noticed I did that.
My mother is behind her railing. She has gone the colour of candle wax. She is staring at him with an expression I cannot read, and for one terrible moment I think: what if she believes him? What if she wants to?
Then she turns her head and looks straight at me, for the first time since the trials began, breaking the rule we agreed, and the look on her face is so fierce and so full of love that I have to grip the edge of the bench to keep still.
She knows. She has always known.
"Mr Malfoy," says Thorne, with the air of a man who has been given an early Christmas. "Where have you been for the last eleven months?"
"Hiding," says the boy with my face. "In France. I was afraid of reprisals. When I heard that someone was using my name at my parents' trial, I couldn't stay silent."
"And the young woman who claims to be you?"
The boy turns and looks at me. His eyes are grey too. He has done his homework. "I've never seen her before in my life," he says, and my voice coming out of his mouth makes the hair stand up on my arms.
The benches erupt. Ogden bangs his gavel. Thorne turns to the court with his hands spread, as if to say: there you have it.
And Harry Potter stands up in the witness box.
He's been sitting in it all morning, waiting to be called, with the hawthorn wand wrapped in its black cloth on his knee. He stands slowly. He doesn't raise his voice. He just says, "Chief Warlock, can I ask him a question?"
Ogden peers at him. "You are a witness, Mr Potter, not counsel."
"It's one question," says Harry. "If he's who he says he is, he'll know the answer. It won't take a minute."
Something flickers across Thorne's face. Ogden looks between them, and then at the boy in the chair, and then, for a long moment, at me.
"One question," he says.
Harry turns to the boy in the chair. "At Easter last year," he says, "in the drawing room at Malfoy Manor, Bellatrix Lestrange asked you if I was Harry Potter. What did you say?"
There is a pause. It is only about a second long. But I have spent my whole life in rooms with people who were lying, and I know what that second looks like.
"I told her yes," says the boy with my face. "Of course I did. I was loyal to my family. I identified you, and they summoned the Dark Lord, and you escaped before he arrived."
The courtroom is silent.
Harry looks at him for a long moment. Then he turns and looks up at the Chief Warlock.
"That's not what happened," he says. "Draco Malfoy knelt down in front of me and said he couldn't be sure. I know, because I was there, and because it saved my life." He takes a breath, and his voice goes quieter, and somehow it carries further. "I didn't come forward on Monday because I wanted to be certain. I'm certain now. I've talked to her for three days. I've watched her pick up her old wand in a room full of strangers and make it light up. I've watched her tell me things about that night that nobody else alive could know. The person in that chair is wearing a face. The person on that bench is wearing her own." He looks across the courtroom at me. "Her name's Draconia Malfoy. I'd swear it under Veritaserum. I'll swear it now."
The boy in the chair laughs, high and unconvincing. "This is absurd. Potter has always hated me..."
"How long's the recess, sir?" Harry asks Ogden mildly. "Because Polyjuice lasts an hour. And if he's been taking it from a flask in his pocket since he walked in, he'll be running low."
The boy's hand moves, very slightly, towards the inside of his robe.
It is the smallest movement. It is enough. Two Aurors are on him before he can reach the flask, and it rolls out across the stone floor, silver and dented, and fetches up against the foot of my mother's railing. My mother looks down at it. Then she looks at the boy, and says, in a voice like a cracking frozen lake, "My child gave up wearing that hair years ago. It was dreadful."
They hold him. It takes forty minutes. At the end of it, the white-blond hair darkens and coarsens, and the face slackens and broadens and grows a stubbled jaw, and the boy with my old face turns into a man of about thirty-five whom three people in the room recognise at once as Thorfinn Rowle's cousin Edmund, wanted since the Battle and, according to the file the Aurors produce afterwards, heavily in debt.
He'd only wanted the vaults. He'd never even thought about what I did in the drawing room. It hadn't occurred to him that it mattered.
The Wizengamot confirms me at a quarter past four. Draconia Malfoy, child of Lucius and Narcissa, identity established by testimony of the witness Potter and the wandmaker Ollivander. It is written into the record in the clerk's careful hand. I make him show it to me afterwards. I touch the ink with my fingertip.
My mother's verdict will come on Monday. Her solicitor thinks she'll get house arrest and a fine rather than Azkaban, now that her child has testified to what she did in the Forest: the lie she told the Dark Lord, standing over Harry's body, that saved his life the second time. My father's verdict, I already know. I have known it for a year. I will write to him, I think, when I can bear it.
I go out into the corridor and sit down on the same bench as on Monday, and I put my face in my hands, and I shake. Not crying. Just shaking, like something that has been held very tight for a very long time and has just been let go.
Somebody sits down at the other end of the bench.
"You lied to me," I say, without looking up.
"I did not."
"You said you'd testify. You didn't say you'd do a dramatic cross-examination like something out of a Muggle film."
"Hermione made me watch a lot of those." There's a smile in his voice. "Was it all right?"
I lift my head and look at him. He's sitting with his elbows on his knees and the black-wrapped wand in his hands, and his hair is worse than ever, and his tie is crooked, and he is looking at me with that same expression from the Leaky Cauldron, the astonished one, as though I'm a door that has blown open in front of him.
"It was the bravest thing anybody's ever done for me," I say.
He goes red to the tips of his ears.
"Here," he says, and holds out the wand.
"It's yours. You won it."
"I'm giving it back. Not lending it. Giving." He takes my hand, turns it over, and lays the hawthorn across my palm, and closes my fingers round it with his own. "Ollivander says if I hand it over freely, it changes. Properly. It'll be yours again." His thumb stays on the back of my hand. "I want it to be yours."
The wand warms. Silver light spills out of the tip and curls lazily upwards and wraps once round both our joined hands like a ribbon, and stays there, glowing.
Neither of us looks at it. He is looking at me, and I am looking at him, and the corridor has gone very quiet.
"Why?" I ask. My voice comes out much smaller than I want it to. "Why did you believe me? Everyone else looked at me and saw a liar. Even people who wanted to believe. You looked at me and..." I stop.
Harry is quiet for a moment.
"Because nobody's ever lied to me for my own good before," he says. "Everybody lied to me to keep me in line, or to keep me safe, or to keep me going. You lied to the worst person in the world to give me a chance. And it cost you everything. And you never once told anyone." He swallows. "I've thought about you every day for a year. I didn't know where you were. I thought you were dead. I used to stand outside the Manor gates at night sometimes, just to... I don't know. And then you walked into that courtroom with a face I'd never seen, and you looked up at the gallery, and it was you. It was you, and I knew, and I was so..." His voice cracks. "I was so glad."
I lean forward, slowly, giving him every chance to move away. He doesn't. I kiss him very lightly, just once, on the corner of his mouth, in a stone corridor outside Courtroom Ten with the light of my own wand still wound round our hands.
When I pull back, his eyes are closed.
"Sorry," I say. "That wasn't very Malfoy of me."
Harry opens his eyes. He looks at me for a long, long moment, and then he smiles, the real one, crooked and startled and wide open.
"Draconia," he says, trying the name out for the first time, as if it's something he means to keep. "Do you want to get dinner?"
From the end of the corridor, very drily, comes my mother's voice.
"She would," says Narcissa Malfoy, flanked by two Aurors and looking for the first time in a year like herself. "But first, Mr Potter, you and I are going to have a conversation about your intentions."