𝐀 𝐋𝐈𝐓𝐓𝐋𝐄 𝐏𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐂𝐄

Chapter 19

Chapter 19: "Chapter Nineteen"

Fudge pushed the door open, and immediately, the three boys could see they were in horrible trouble. His face was red with blustery anger, and his hand, which was holding his outstretched wand, was shaking. "So," he said, his voice icy. "I had been expecting something of this sort, but I did not dream of such audacity." He looked between the banquet table and the last flickers of fire in the grate. "Zacharias was telling the truth."

So they knew that, somehow, the Gryffindors had guessed their secret, and had betrayed them.

Fudge crossed the room and seized Theodore by the ear, dragging him upright before backhanding him viciously again. "How dare you," he snarled. "You leave this house in the morning."

Draco stood very still, his own hands shaking with rage. Blaise went pale, and. "Please don't send him away," he begged in a shaky voice. "My aunt sent the hamper. We were only having...a party..."

"So I see," Fudge growled. "With Prince Draco at the head of the table." He turned fiercely on Draco. "This is your doing, I know it," he roared. "Blaise never would have thought of something like this on his own. You decorated the table, I suppose, with this...rubbish!" He stamped his foot at Theodore, who was just getting off the floor. "Go to your attic this instant!" he commanded in a terrible voice, and Theodore went, his face swollen from the two smacks, a trickle of blood running down his chin.

Then it was Draco's turn again. "I will attend to you tomorrow," he hissed. "You shall have neither breakfast, dinner, nor supper."

Draco bit his lip to keep himself from saying something unwise. "I have had neither dinner nor supper today, sir," he replied faintly.

"All the better," Fudge snarled nastily. "You shall have something to remember. Don't just stand there. Put these things away." He began to spell the items back into the hamper, when he spotted the books.

"You," he snapped, whirling to face Blaise, "have brought your beautiful new books into this dirty attic. Take them and go to bed this instant. You will stay in your room all day tomorrow, and I shall write to your father again. What would he say if he knew that, not only were you sympathizing with Death Eaters, but you were fraternizing with them at night, visiting their attics, putting yourself at their mercy!"

Something he saw in Draco's pale, angry face made him turn on him fiercely. "What are you thinking of?" he demanded. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"I was wondering," Draco replied, as he had that one day in the schoolroom.

"What?" barked Fudge coldly.

"I was wondering what my father would say if he knew where I was tonight."

Silence. Fudge's face went white, and then red, and then he stormed forward and backhanded Draco as well, who fell to the floor with a thump. "You impudent worm," he growled. "How dare you speak that way to me?" Ignoring Blaise's gasp of horror, he finished putting things into the hamper, thrust both it and the books into Blaise's arms, and dragged him bodily out of the room, leaving Draco to tend to his injury.

He pushed himself upright with some difficulty and looked around. The dream had quite ended. There was only rubbish left now, and blackened paper in the grate. He crossed the room on shaky legs to Cliodne, stroking her head gently. "There isn't any banquet left, Cliodne," he breathed, as she trilled to him placatingly. "And there isn't any prince. There are only the prisoners at the Bastille." And he sat down on the floor and hid his face.

If he had not hidden his face, he might have seen the dark face peering through the window again, as it had earlier when he had been talking to Blaise. But he didn't see it, sitting with his face buried in his arms and his dirty hair, brown from the filth and mud, sticking out in wild spikes around his head.