Roman Holiday

Chapter Twenty-Two

Lunch.

“What did it say?” Parvati asked for the millionth time, and Hermione rolled her eyes over her ham and cheese sandwich.

“It’s from Cornelius Fudge, Parvati,” she said. “He wants me to run away with him and bear his children.”

At that, Harry choked on a crisp and had to be beaten vigorously on the back by Ron. Parvati looked cross, though, and Hermione relented.

“Seriously,” she said, “the note didn’t really give me a clue. Wish it had.” She popped one of Harry’s crisps into her mouth, brushed crumbs from the front of her robes, and stood up. “See you in class. I need to go to the library for a couple of minutes.”

“Some things, at least,” Ron muttered, “never change.”

Hermione pretended she hadn’t heard him.

**

“The Wizard’s Guide to Dark Prophecies” was in the Restricted Section, back on the shelf devoted to Divination. Obviously Draco’s idea of a little joke, Hermione thought, and lugged it over to the nearest study carroll.

Had she paged through this once? She couldn’t remember - back in her third year, she’d worked very hard to establish a mental block of All Things Divination, and she’d rather like to keep it that way. She flipped through it idly, frowning when it fell open at a folded-down page. Madam Pince wouldn’t like that one bit, she thought, and paused to unfold it.

There was a note in the margin, adding insult to injury. Hermione barely registered the message, the first time she read it - a tiny arrowhead pointing up, next to a single sentence:

Is this what it looks like?

Startled, she looked more closely at the page. And gasped.

A black knife. Identical to the mark on the back of Draco’s neck.

By the time she’d finished reading the passage corresponding to the picture, her hands were shaking. She pulled out a half-sheet of parchment and a quill and scrawled a hasty answer:

Yes. Details at 10.

She didn’t bother to encode it - she only had five minutes to Arithmancy. Tucking the parchment into the book, she replaced it on the shelf and sprinted for class.

Every time she thought her life couldn’t get more complicated, something like this happened.

**

Arithmancy, and then Potions, where Hermione managed to trade one swift, significant glance with Draco before settling down at the same table as a pale, set-faced Neville Longbottom.

Poor Neville. At this point, Potions had ceased to become simply his worst class, and had passed into the realm of nightmare. It was as if, Hermione thought, Snape had scared him into mental rigor mortis.

It wasn’t even as if she could help him much at this point - from what she’d read of the textbook, sixth-year Potions had ceased to be all about the ingredients. They were getting into the subtleties now, potions in which success or failure could be determined by the difference between a clockwise or a counterclockwise stir, a simmer or a low boil, thirty seconds’ resting time between ingredients or thirty-five.

The lessons might be getting more difficult, but they were also, Hermione had noticed, becoming very practical … and not just for the everyday. Today’s Armoring Fluid, for example, granted the drinker temporary immunity from hostile spells. Its effects wore off within minutes - less than five, as a matter of fact - but it maintained its potency for several weeks at room temperature.

Practically a military weapon, Hermione thought, as limited as it is. She shuddered. Nothing went into these textbooks without good reason.

Used primarily by Aurors and debt collectors, Snape had said - as usual, so dryly that Hermione couldn’t detect a joke if there was one - despite its unreliability. “I don’t suppose any of you have spotted the weakness in the formula?” he asked, and Hermione - seeing no other takers - raised her hand.

“Miss Granger. Pardon my surprise.” The Slytherins tittered; Harry shot a dark look at Snape that he either didn’t see or pretended to ignore. “Enlighten us,” he sneered, and Hermione felt color rise in her cheeks.

Asshole.

“It’s the lacewings,” she said. “Their half-life is short anyway, and they’re not a strong enough ingredient to stand against the acid in the dragon’s-blood.”

A long silence followed, broken eventually by Ron saying “Huh?” under his breath and Pansy Parkinson sniggering. Apparently, ‘half-life’ wasn’t a wizarding term, Hermione thought ruefully, nor was dragon’s-blood judged by its pH levels.

Funny how she could still make these mistakes sometimes.

But he’d asked her for a hypothetical answer - it wasn’t in the book. And, dammit, she wasn’t wrong.

Snape inclined his head fractionally. Either he was affirming her answer, or his neck was stiff and he was trying to crack it. Whichever it was, he looked pained.

“How … scientific of you,” he said, grimacing. “Anyone else care to take us back to the fourteenth century, where we belong?”

Asshole, Hermione thought again, and settled back in her chair to count her beetle legs and glare at him from under her eyelashes. Honestly. She loved this place, loved being a witch, but sometimes she had to wonder about people who hadn’t settled on at least some adaptation of electricity.

The class went downhill from there, reaching what was perhaps its low point twenty minutes from the end of the period. “You should all be finished by now,” Snape purred, and waved his desk to the side of the room with a rarely-seen flick of his wand. “Kindly measure out a half-beaker of your potion and form a line along the far wall. Whatever you do, Miss Brown,” - and here he glared at Lavender, who was lifting her beaker to her lips - “don’t drink it yet; under the best of conditions this potion’s effects last only a few minutes, and I don’t imagine most of yours will work at all.”

This last was delivered with such obvious anticipation that Lavender paled.

**

“It could have been worse,” Hermione said comfortingly to Neville as they went up to dinner. Neville only grunted, and continued to bunny-hop.

Snape’s curse-of-choice for testing the Armoring Potions had been Tarantallegra for the Slytherins, Leg-Locker for the Gryffindors.

Admittedly, it had been funny to watch Crabbe and Goyle waltzing with each other. But that didn’t change the fact that Tarantallegra wore off in about ten minutes - well before the end of class - and Leg-Locker did not.

Not only unfair, but calculatedly so.

Oh, to be on holiday again, Hermione thought. She’d trade her still-perfect record at the Ministry of Magic for one well-placed hex.

She glanced sideways at Neville, still hopping, and sighed with inward exasperation. Hadn’t he even thought to reverse the spell himself? “Finite Incantatem,” she said, pulling out her wand, and grabbed his shoulder to steady him as his legs snapped apart. “Come on. I’m starving.”

Dinner was a nightmare of Quidditch-speak; in the absence of Fred and George, Ron had joined the Gryffindor team as a Beater. As far as Hermione could tell, he and Harry would never talk about anything else until they died.

That could be arranged, she thought sourly, draining her pumpkin juice and standing up. “I’m going to study,” she announced, and Ron looked up from the diagram he was drawing on his napkin.

“What?”

“Never mind,” Hermione said, and headed for the stairs.

Keeping secrets from them, she reflected, might not be so difficult after all.

**

Crookshanks, who was napping on the foot of her bed, meowed as she came in and stretched out a lazy paw toward her. Since the defection of Peter Pettigrew from Ron’s pocket to Voldemort’s, Crookshanks had seemingly retired his inner Kneazle, and spent most of his time following the migratory spot of deep sunlight from one end of Hermione’s room to the other. Hermione suspected that he missed his summers at her parents’ house: the sunny patio, the visual delights of the aquarium in her father’s office, and the constant cosseting of her mother, who was a Cat Person from the word ‘go’, and who had gone so far last summer as to purchase, in a pet-specialties shop, an electric water fountain designed for cats.

“What is that?” Hermione had asked, and her mum had promptly pulled it out of the box and set it up - a sweetly flowing little column of water, emptying into a roomy dish and circulating up again.

“It’ll keep the water fresh for him,” she’d explained proudly. “Cats prefer running water to still.”

Whatever, Hermione had thought, and rolled her eyes at the extravagance. As it turned out, Crookshanks did like it - not nearly as water-shy as most cats, he was fascinated by the moving water and liked to bat at it with his paws - but the little fountain had remained at home, despite her mother’s protests, and so far Hermione hadn’t figured out how to enchant Crookshanks’ regular water bowl to achieve the same effect.

Professor McGonagall would probably know how. But Hermione was a little embarrassed to ask.

“Hi, sweetheart,” she said now, setting her bag down next to the door, and obligingly rubbed the tummy he presented to her. “Have a good day?”

He rolled back over and half-closed his eyes contentedly. Hermione eyed the bed, still striped with the warm remains of the afternoon sun, and decided he had the right idea. No homework to speak of, and what there was could wait.

Besides, if she was going to run around half the night with Draco Malfoy, she needed to rest up.

“Just for a few minutes,” she told the purring cat, and kicked off her shoes.

**

“Wake up,” a voice hissed in her ear, and she jolted straight up in bed, looking around panicked for her clock.

“What time is it?”

“Ten-fifteen,” Draco said, and lit the candle on her nightstand with a spark from his wand. He sounded annoyed, or at least abrupt, and not loverly in the least. “Sorry I broke in again. You said you’d meet me, and it’s not like you to be late.”

“Ten-fifteen,” Hermione repeated, and shook her head. “Wow. That’s the last time I go down for a power nap at seven-thirty.” She took a deep breath and blew it out. “Give me a minute,” she said, yawning, “and I’ll be ready to go. I just have to wake up a little.”

“Not necessary,” he said, softening a little, and handed her a stack of notes. “I Replicated the chapter.”

Hermione studied him levelly as she took the parchment from him. He wasn’t taking this well; his face was dead white, except for the hot flush of colour on his cheekbones, and his eyes were glassy with anxiety. Understandable, she thought, and laid her hand over his as she began to read over the passage she’d skimmed earlier in the library.

Finally, she looked up, more worried than she cared to admit.

“The Fils de Couteau,” she said, and unconsciously traced the outline of the drawing on the page with the tip of her fingernail. “Son of the Knife.” Draco winced.

“That’s me,” he said grimly. “Since conception, apparently. I’ve been carrying this, this … thing,” - here his hand flew unconsciously to the back of his neck - “from the womb.”

They both did the mental math and shuddered. The time of his conception would have been nearly two years before Voldemort’s defeat, at the height of his power. At a Dark Revel, most likely. Hermione didn’t want to think about what that little ritual must have looked like.

Poor Narcissa, she thought. No wonder she looks so disgusted all the time.

She turned back to the notes, mostly to distract herself.

“I hate Divination,” she muttered under her breath, her finger stabbing at the page. “’Son of the knife, blood pure as snow’, blah blah. ‘Destroy the imperfect’, blah blah. ‘Purge the world’, blah blah blah. This is right up Trelawney’s alley. Nothing but poetry and tea leaves.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Draco said. “It seems pretty clear to me. Especially the part about the blood.”

“Actually,” Hermione admitted, “the purging bit’s pretty clear, too.” She paused thoughtfully. “You’re supposed to be some sort of a secret weapon, then,” she said. “Against Muggle-borns. I wonder how that works, exactly?” She scanned the page again. “Wouldn’t you have figured it out by now, if you had extraordinary powers?”

Draco swallowed hard. “I don’t think I’m the weapon, exactly,” he said, sounding remarkably unshaken, considering the circumstances. “But there’s about five liters of it sloshing around inside me. If you catch my drift.”

They exchanged uneasy glances. Hermione could almost feel herself Reverting To Type.

“Dumbledore,” she said. “We’ve got to see Dumbledore. Now.”

**