Chapter 152 - Snow in the Scottish Highlands

This year's snow came early.

The upper-year students had just returned from Hogsmeade, thick scarves wrapped around their necks.

The Slytherin dungeons were perpetually cold and damp, but being underground meant no wind, so for the moment, it wasn't quite as bad as it could have been.

WHOOSH—

Passing through the entrance hall, Praeris's cloak billowed out behind her. She quickened her pace, eager to get into the warm Great Hall.

"Rare of you to come eat with us today." Pansy Parkinson was the first to notice her.

Praeris walked up behind Pansy, stuffed both hands into the pockets of Pansy's coat, and grumbled into her back, "The wind is terrible today—"

Then she leaned her full weight against her.

Pansy twisted around. The two of them tangled together, each pressing their hands against whatever warm patch they could find on the other.

They hissed from the cold and kept pestering each other anyway.

"Draco's here!" Pansy said suddenly.

The moment Praeris turned her head, Pansy drove her hand straight down the back of Praeris's collar. Praeris jolted like she'd been shocked.

"Pansy!"

Pansy cackled, thoroughly pleased with herself. "I wasn't lying. Draco really is here."

This was hardly new territory for Draco, he'd long since made peace with not understanding girls. He strolled over with both hands in his pockets and peeled Praeris away from Pansy's arms.

"Why aren't you wearing a scarf?" Praeris asked. "Didn't you just come back from Hogsmeade?"

"Mm, of course not." Draco sat down, pulled out the chair beside him, and gestured for her to take it. "No one's made it a rule that I have to go, have they?"

Praeris frowned. "That doesn't sound like you..."

PFFT—

Zabini was sitting across from them, wearing the expression of someone who had bought a front-row seat to the drama. "Draco," he said. "You're back from detention?"

Praeris looked at Draco. "Detention? When did you get detention?"

"Today," Draco said, unbothered. "It's nothing."

Praeris held his gaze.

A moment passed. She looked at Zabini.

Then she looked toward the Gryffindor table.

"I told you," she said, her voice even. "If you couldn't finish your Transfiguration homework, you should have come to me."

Everyone nearby looked at her. Their expressions were somewhere between astonished and entirely unsurprised.

In truth, it hadn't been difficult.

First: the person who assigned the detention wasn't Argus Filch. Draco showed no signs of physical labor, and he hadn't been cursing the old Squib under his breath.

Second: Draco wasn't wearing a scarf, which meant the detention was inside the castle. That ruled out Professor Sprout.

That left the courses Draco had chosen and the other three Heads of House.

Of those, Professor Snape could be eliminated. Professor Snape never punished Draco, and Praeris had been to his office just that afternoon.

What remained were Professor McGonagall, Professor Flitwick, Professor Slughorn, and the Alchemy professor. The range had narrowed considerably.

Apart from Alchemy, Draco shared every other class with Praeris, and he had always been the one with genuine interest in Alchemy.

As it happened, Praeris knew Draco had once failed to turn in a Transfiguration assignment. And over at the Gryffindor table, Harry and the others seemed to be talking about Draco, glancing over here with some frequency.

The logic looked complicated laid out like that. Explained plainly, it was nothing at all.

She had only needed to test the waters to confirm her guess.

She had guessed right. Draco had once again failed to finish his Transfiguration homework, and had earned himself Professor McGonagall's displeasure.

Draco expected her to say something else, to admonish him, the way she had in the past.

But she didn't. She said nothing more. She put her head down and ate, her gaze unfocused somewhere above the table, as if she were turning something over in her mind.

It made Draco uneasy for the rest of the meal. He kept glancing at her.

What Praeris was thinking about was, in fact, Draco. She was working through the question of what Voldemort had demanded of him.

Harry had said outright that Draco must be a Death Eater. Draco himself had once said he'd been entrusted with a mission.

With a similar course load to everyone else, the others had all turned in their work. Draco had not.

Praeris had assumed at first that he simply hadn't adjusted. But he hadn't come to her about it, either...

The next day, the news of Katie Bell's cursing spread through the entire school.

Bell had been transferred from the Hospital Wing to St. Mungo's early that morning. Baren's memory of it was sharp.

"We couldn't do much for Bell." He blinked as he recalled it. "It was Professor Snape who contained the curse from spreading further."

According to Baren, Bell had apparently received a box containing some kind of Dark magical object. She'd wanted to bring it into Hogwarts, but her friend Leanne had argued against it. In the struggle between them, the box had torn open, exposing what was inside.

Bell had been wearing gloves.

But Bell's glove had a hole in it.

That was enough to put her in contact with the object, not enough to kill her outright, but more than enough to do damage.

Baren's account pulled together the diagnoses from Madam Pomfrey and Professor Snape, along with Leanne's own description of events.

From the summer until now, Praeris had spent a long time turning over the same question: what mission had Voldemort given Draco?

Draco's strange behavior over the summer. The half-swallowed boasting on the train. The deliberately trimmed course load. The unfinished homework. And then what Harry Potter had said, and now Katie Bell's ordeal.

The mysterious curse had crept from the hole in Bell's glove into her fingers. Dumbledore's curse had also begun at his hand, and spread from there through his whole body.

Praeris nodded to Baren. "Thank you."

"Just this once!" he said quietly. "Madam Pomfrey always keeps patients' secrets — otherwise people would panic. She worries that if students think their problems might get out, they'll stop coming to the Hospital Wing altogether."

"And yet you told me?"

Baren shrugged. "Leanne has already told half the Gryffindor common room."

The matter was public knowledge at this point. It was only a question of how much each person knew.

From the Hospital Wing to the Slytherin common room, Praeris had never noticed how long that walk was before.

She arrived back at the common room.

Draco wasn't there. Only Theodore Nott sat in the corner, alone.

"Draco's not back yet?" Praeris asked.

"Prince, are you talking to me?" Theodore said, without looking up. "Since when did you put Draco in my care?"

Praeris silently cursed herself.

Theodore was close with Draco, yes, but he wasn't Draco's shadow. He didn't track where Draco went.

Still, it at least confirmed that Draco wasn't in the common room, and wasn't in the dormitory either.

Praeris crossed to the far side of the hall and sat down alone to wait.

Theodore's eyes shifted toward her. The corner of his mouth lifted, just slightly.

Oh, Draco.

Brother, you're in for it.

So when Draco walked back into the Slytherin common room, what he found were two people sitting at opposite ends of the hall.

Praeris, watching him with a quiet, unreadable look. Theodore, wearing an expression of sincere sympathy.

Draco felt a chill that had nothing to do with the cold.

"We need to talk."

Praeris walked over, took his sleeve, and pulled him after her.

She led him out of the dungeons, through the entrance hall, and past the castle doors, all the way out into the snow.

"That's enough!" Draco dug his heels in. "Where exactly are you taking me?"

Praeris stopped.

They stood in the middle of the snowfield. White in every direction. Not a soul in sight.

Out here, anyone who tried to approach them would be seen long before they arrived.

Praeris tilted her chin up. The wind threw the loose strands of hair at her temples across her face.

"Draco," she said. "Do you remember this place?"

"I don't follow, Praeris." He kept his voice easy, deliberate. "This is the lawn outside the castle. There's just no grass at the moment."

Which told her absolutely nothing and he knew it.

Praeris nodded. "I can't expect others to have my memory, I suppose. Over two years ago, you came to me here and asked if I needed a dance partner."

Two years ago?

To Draco, it felt far more distant than that.

He had almost come to believe that they had been together for a very long time, so long that he had nearly forgotten how it had started.

But he hadn't actually forgotten.

He still remembered the anger. Watching Praeris praise the physiques of the Durmstrang boys, that hot, irritating displeasure that had no business being there. Back then, he was just an ordinary classmate to her, nothing more. But it had felt like someone snatching his ball from him mid-Quidditch match.

So he had done something about it. He had gathered himself up and asked her to be his dance partner. Somehow, it had worked.

That summer, he had started working out at home, for reasons he didn't examine too closely.

"This is good, Draco." Narcissa had been quietly pleased. "A boy should take care of his body."

She had always thought her son was too thin and not well enough.

Lucius had seen it differently. "Know when to stop, Draco. We don't need to end up looking like certain types. All brute muscle and no refinement."

Thinking of his father now, sitting in Azkaban, Draco felt something catch in his throat.

He pulled his attention back to the present.

"Mm," he said, flat. "That's right."

Praeris spread her arms out wide, showing him the empty space around them. "There's nothing here. Is there anything you want to tell me?"

"What could I possibly have to tell you?" The words came out almost before he thought them. "What is there about me that you don't already know?"

He said it the way someone might reach into their chest and offer up their heart for inspection.

Praeris went still. Her arms lowered slowly. She stepped closer.

"Last year, that was true," she said softly. "This year, I'm not sure it still is."

Draco looked at her. He seemed not to understand what she was saying. He also seemed to understand her exactly.

"I'm worried," Praeris said. "Won't you talk to me? About your father. About what the Dark Lord has asked of you. About Katie Bell."

"Praeris!" His voice cracked upward, sudden and sharp. "Do you have any idea what you're saying?"

"I do now," she said.

Draco realized, in an instant, what he had just given away. He turned his head aside, unwilling to let her see his face.

They knew each other too well. That was the thing about conversations like this one, to anyone else, it would have sounded like nothing. To them, every word was precise.

"Have you thought about it?" Praeris's gaze was steady on him. "You nearly killed her."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Draco said. The set of his jaw was stubborn.

"You're not that kind of person." Her voice had gone rough. "I've known you for as long as I've been at Hogwarts. You are not that kind of person."

A beat of silence.

"Did he demand this of you?" she asked. "Were you afraid? When you did it — were you afraid?"

The air in Draco's lungs went thin. He was standing in the snow, in freezing wind, and he felt feverishly hot.

He had known what happened to Katie Bell. He had known everything, her ordeal, the transfer to St. Mungo's. He had followed every development from a careful distance.

He had hidden all of it from Praeris deliberately. He hadn't wanted her to know what he was doing.

What he had said to her was: I can't tell you what I'm about to do.

What he had meant was: Don't try to find out.

That had been the understanding between them. She could control her thoughts, he had trusted that, too. And for a long time, Praeris had played along. Deaf. Oblivious. Willfully unknowing.

That understanding had just shattered.

This had only been his first move. And Praeris had already found him out.

"You don't understand what kind of person I am!" Draco shook her hand off his arm. "You're not standing where I'm standing. You don't have any idea how this feels!"

The wind off the Scottish Highlands had been fierce for days. It had turned Praeris's nose pink.

One second Draco was still angry.

The next, he noticed.

Without a word, he reached over and pulled her scarf up, covering the lower half of her face.

Then he realized what he'd done, and looked away, jaw tight.

Praeris felt the ache of it settle somewhere deep in her chest.

The seeds she had planted were bearing fruit now, and the fruit was bitter. She had told herself it was casual, this kind of feeling, the kind you set down if it stopped working, the kind you walked away from cleanly if you had to. That had been the theory.

The theory was wrong.

She was startled to realize she had never once stopped to think about it: Winnie had never had a relationship that truly lasted. And Lady Plew actively despised men.

Neither of them would have ever felt what Praeris was feeling right now.

And yet she had taken their experience as her own. She had absorbed it entirely, believed it completely, built something on top of it without ever questioning the foundation.

Fate is a strange thing. It doesn't only punish a person through the ugliness in their own heart. It also torments them through everything good in it, through trust, and generosity, and hope, and the longing to be loved.

➤ Next: Beyond Question