Draco Veritas

Chapter Nine: The Knight, Death, and the Devil

She would always remember the light in the room that day: gray hospital light. Her father had carried her from Dumbledore's office, although she could walk perfectly well, her mother hurrying behind. Madam Pomfrey had readied a bed for her; Ginny winced as her father set her down on it, not from any physical pain but out of guilt over what the blood and dirt all over her would do to the scrupulously white sheets and pillows.

"I'm so sorry," she said to Madam Pomfrey, but her parents only hushed her and drew the curtains closed around her bed, urging her to rest.

But she could not rest. Her body would not allow it; it did not want to lie still. It was restless, as if it wanted to crawl away from her. Crawl back to Tom, perhaps. She did not know what he had taught her body to do during the long darkness that she did not remember. When she stood, and went to the window, she found herself reaching to draw it up with her left hand. It took a moment of fumbling before she recollected herself: she was right-handed.

The window opened noiselessly onto a clear spring day: the front of the school was bathed in sunlight. The light stung Ginny's eyes, but she kept them open. When she closed them, she saw him again. She had seen his face only briefly; before today, he had been a dream trapped in diary pages, an insubstantial phantom conjured out of her own loneliness and need. She had reached out for him then, but he had slipped away from her like water. But there in the Chamber, it was different. As the life pulsed out of her with every beat of her heart, he seemed to evolve in strength and substance, until at last she could see him whole: the black, tangled hair, the white face, the slightness of him, the tensile strength in the slender hands. The young-old eyes whose color she could no longer recall but had been clear and unshadowed. Eyes that opened onto a mind like a cauldron of snakes.

The sound of raised voices drifted up to her window, recollecting her to the present moment. Ginny looked down listlessly. A carriage had drawn up to the foot of the front steps: it was black, and the design upon the door was of a wand crossed with a sword. There was a word etched in gilt lettering underneath: she couldn't read it. But it was not the carriage that caught her eye, nor the blond man who stood impatiently by it. She knew him. She knew the boy who stood at his side as well, hunched and miserable-looking despite the warm weather. The sunlight was bright on his pale hair. She knew him, and she hated him, but it wasn't him she looked at either: it was the book his father held in his narrow-fingered hand. Black, tattered, shabby....

The carriage door opened. The blond man tucked the book under his arm as he gestured for his son to get in.

"No," Ginny whispered. "You can't take it..."

That book was hers. Somewhere in its poisoned pages were her words, the dreams she had poured into it, the wishes and the nightmares. Who else could be said to have a claim upon it? Tom, but Tom was gone now. Harry perhaps, who had bought its destruction and her own salvation with blood and venomous death. But Harry would not have wanted it, and who else had a right? Not Lucius Malfoy, whom she loathed, nor his equally loathsome son. She saw him jerk hard on his son's arm as he pushed him into the carriage and climbed in after. The boy winced; Ginny was glad.

"Home, Anton," the man said, his clipped tones clearly audible through the still air. "Now."

The carriage pulled away from the stairs. As it did, the sunlight struck it, and the gilt letters along the side flashed out like fire:

MALFOY.

***

The top of the tower was smooth and slightly tilted, as if it had been sheared off at an angle by a pair of giant scissors. It was square, and surrounded by crenellated walls just high enough to lean against while sitting down.