Malfoy did not win himself any friends by insisting that he wanted to join the Order of the Phoenix. Possibly, this was because the way he put it was that he wasn’t going to spy for them unless they let him join. At that, Moody made a noise like a very annoyed elephant and pointed out that spying for them had been entirely Malfoy’s idea.
“Well, I rescind my generous offer,” Malfoy said, who seemed to have taken a dislike to Moody. Harry thought the feeling was intensely mutual. “I want to join and have a vote. I think I should have a vote, since I’m risking my life and everything. I bet Potter has like, a presidential veto or something, and I don’t even get a vote, it’s—”
“Malfoy,” Harry said, interrupting before Malfoy really got on a roll. “I don’t even belong to the Order.”
“You don’t?” Malfoy said. “Well, you only came of age four bloody months ago. Why are you frittering away your time?”
Harry thought it might be tactful not to mention that he’d thought he had more important things to do than sit in at meetings. Like finding Horcruxes.
“I demand that we both get to join, then,” Malfoy said.
“And Ron and Hermione,” Harry added.
“Well, of course that won’t be a problem, Harry,” said Mr Weasley.
“Oh, good,” said Malfoy.
He hadn’t increased his popularity by asking for parchment and a quill, either. Harry wasn’t really used to having the whole order directing silent judgement his way, so he folded his arms over his chest and decided to get through this in silence. He tried to ignore Malfoy on his left, doing what looked like a deliberate impression of Rita Skeeter, Intrepid Reporter.
When Moody was listing the suspects for new recruits to the Death Eaters, Malfoy started to scribble ostentatiously and at several points said in a bland tone, “How interesting!” and gave Moody pause.
Harry felt like he had to say: “There’s Petrel Parkinson. I heard he joined.”
Malfoy’s cold gaze turned on him, and the rest of the Order looked rather pleased. Harry glared back: what did Malfoy expect him to do? This was war and Malfoy himself was supposed to be a spy now. They had to hand over this kind of information.
“How interesting,” said Moody, echoing Malfoy. Malfoy scowled at him.
Harry plucked the quill from Malfoy’s fingers and wrote: Look, I don’t have anything against Pansy, all right? Her brother chose this, so he’s the enemy.
Malfoy grabbed his quill back and scribbled It’s not that simple.
Harry took it again and said It has to be that simple.
For a moment Malfoy looked as if he was going to argue, but he let his shoulders slump slightly and simply tapped the quill against the parchment. He didn’t glare at Harry again, but he didn’t look at Harry again either, he looked around the table to see who would make the next remark.
“Then of course we come to the question of You-Know-Who’s banshee,” said Hestia Jones.
“Sorry,” said Harry. “Voldemort’s what?”
“His banshee, Harry,” said Hestia, giving him a look that reminded Harry slightly of Professor McGonagall. “You were the one who gave us the information about the orphanage burning. Did you not wonder why the fire didn’t respond to basic water charms?”
“Didn’t really think about it,” Harry said. “I just sort of got on with it.”
Malfoy nudged Harry and Harry looked at the parchment, where freshly gleaming ink spelled out the words: Think about it? But you’re a Gryffindor. This Order will crush you underneath the weight of their unreasonable expectations! Harry snorted, and took this as an olive branch about the whole Petrel Parkinson business.
“Voldemort’s recruited at least one banshee,” Hestia said, folding her hands in front of her. “The fires don’t respond to anything but advanced water charms and we need to figure out a pattern before there are mass casualties. We also need to find a way to combat the banshee. I have been in correspondence with Severus Snape and we have pooled our resources on the subject. There is not much information about banshees. They are creatures indigenous to Ireland, whose scream causes fire, and they cannot be touched unless they choose. They can make fire and then turn themselves into air.”
“So our odds aren’t what could be called good,” drawled Kingsley Shacklebolt.
“They also have a propensity for seduction,” said Hestia briskly, at which point several men around the table went red. “They like to start a fire in a man’s heart,” Hestia went on, looking rather amused. “Quite literally. Of course, there are male banshees as well and those prey on women, but generally the men stay in isolation and care for the hatchling banshees, so I think we can presume if You-Know-Who’s banshee is straying far afield she’s a female. This might indicate that we should use female Order members to patrol places where the banshee fires might occur.”
Malfoy was scribbling furiously and Harry peered over his shoulder: when he saw comments like Smoking hot banshees? he raised his eyebrows and almost laughed out loud. Hestia Jones looked at him coldly.
“Shut up, I’m summarising,” Malfoy muttered.
“Another order of business is a report from France,” said Kingsley Shacklebolt. “Bill and Fleur Weasley have been very successful in recruiting French goblins to stand against the Dark Lord. I suggest that this is partly the result of the more relaxed laws about goblins in France, as compared to our far more oppressive measures here. I think that if someone put this in the right way to Scrimgeour we might all receive the benefit—”
“Scrimgeour won’t listen to me,” Mr Weasley said, “but possibly my son Percy—”
Everyone started talking over each other, mentioning the names of people in the Ministry who Scrimgeour might listen to, and in the middle of the debate Malfoy raised his hand, the members of the Order ignored it, and Malfoy shrugged and said loudly: “What about Sextus Baddock?”
Moody turned one icy human eye and one swivelling, magical, but still ill-disposed-towards-Malfoy eye in Malfoy’s direction. “Sextus Baddock,” he said precisely, “is a consort of known Death Eaters and one of the more prominent lobbiers against muggleborn equality.”
“Yes I know,” said Malfoy. “But I don’t think he’s a Death Eater. I never saw him at the meetings. Anyway, what does it matter? He’s been working with the goblins for fifty years: they’ve increased his money a hundred times over. My—” he swallowed slightly and Harry moved his chair a bit closer to Malfoy’s. “My father,” Malfoy said. “He used to say the goblins respected Baddock. There were rumours he’d taken tea at some prominent goblin houses. He’s said publically that it’s appalling that real magical creatures get treated like dirt while the Mud—the muggleborn are treated like proper wizards.”
“And you suggest we go to a man like that?” demanded a woman Harry didn’t recognise.
“Why not? He hated Dumbledore and the muggleborn like poison, but he’d speak for goblin rights. He’s rich and influential enough for Scrimgeour to listen to him.” Malfoy smiled in a way that was kissing cousins with a sneer. “You don’t have to tell him you’re doing it so you can recruit for the Order, you know.”
“Of all the opportunistic—”
“Now, Moody,” said Shacklebolt. “The boy’s here so we can use his information.” He gave Malfoy a slightly less hostile and more appraising look. “None of us know about the dirty politics which were clearly dinnertable conversation at his house. Let’s consider the question of Sextus Baddock.”
“My people can have a dossier on him by tomorrow,” said another woman Harry didn’t recognise, this one dark blond, spare and apparently in her late thirties, with very calm grey eyes.
Malfoy nudged him again and wrote: That’s Megara Prewett. She used to come to my mother’s dinner parties because she was Mrs Goyle’s colleague. She’s an Unspeakable.
Harry nodded and gave him a smile of thanks.
“And now to the question of the missing tea money,” said Mr Weasley. “I know it’s not terribly important, but Cyril’s becoming really distressed about it. Can we ask Minerva to have a stern word with Mundungus?”
Malfoy started writing furiously again and Harry leaned against him to look over his shoulder. I wish people wouldn’t say things like that, Malfoy wrote. Why are they asking Professor McGonagall in particular? What special disciplinarian skills does she have? I don’t want to picture the new headmistress telling someone that they’ve been a very naughty boy, but—
Harry confiscated Malfoy’s quill for his own good and bit back a horrified laugh. Malfoy tried to snatch it back.
“May I ask what you’re doing now, Mr Malfoy?” asked Kingsley Shacklebolt, who no longer looked approving in the least.
“All I want to do is record your words of wisdom, sir,” Malfoy told him, with a limpid look that had only ever worked on Professor Snape. “But Potter stole my quill.”
“That went well,” Harry said. “I think the first order of the next meeting will be to burn you in effigy.”
“Messing with dolls doesn’t work,” Malfoy told him confidently. “Burn the thing, stick pins in it, pull out the stuffing. It’s all a great big delusion and a snare.”
“You stuck pins in a little doll of someone?” Harry asked, staring. “Who?”
As they went out into the hall Malfoy became extremely occupied with folding up his parchment very small. “I forget.”
“Right,” Harry said.
“I have a very bad memory,” Malfoy claimed. “It’s tragic, in one so young. I expect it’s my riotous lifestyle.”
“Or the inbreeding,” Harry suggested.
Malfoy smirked, as one fairly acknowledging a hit. Considering there were God knows how many little Harry dolls who had met their doom in the Slytherin dungeons, Harry thought it was richly deserved.
“It was—you know, good of you to say all you did in there,” Malfoy said unexpectedly. “I didn’t expect—Well. Thanks.”
He made a face about it, as if thanks tasted bad in his mouth.
“That’s okay,” Harry said, feeling rather startled.
He felt considerably more startled when Malfoy reached out his hand to Harry and waggled it about imperiously, as if he expected Harry to go down into the kitchen and fetch a tea tray or something. “Now,” Malfoy said. “Come on. Tour.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Tour,” said Malfoy. “Of the house. I presume you know your way around it, since it’s yours and everything. I was four when I was last in it. When I was four I was notable for many things,” he added reminiscently. “Among others, my great charm and the unfortunate decision my parents made to grow my hair to my shoulders. However, I was not noted for my keen observational skills, since I was four years old and everything. So I want to see Great-Aunt Wally’s place, please.”
“Well,” Harry said. “All right. If that’s what you want.”
Malfoy glanced upwards at the dusty snake-shaped chandelier. “I like the decor already,” he remarked.
“You’re entitled to your opinion,” Harry said.
They went upstairs to the first floor and into the drawing room, upon which Malfoy had a conniption fit over the fact that the glass-fronted cabinets against the wall were empty.
“I remember these!” he exclaimed. “They had some really good stuff in there! Where’s Great-Aunt Wally’s bottle of dragon’s blood, do you know how much that stuff costs?”
“We threw it out,” Harry said curtly.
He’d never liked it here, and Sirius hadn’t, either. He remembered Sirius with a sudden vivid flash of memory, stalking around these dark, dilapidated rooms like an angry ghost, and then shoved the memory furiously away.
Malfoy stared at him, eyes wide, and it struck Harry that Sirius had had grey eyes, too. “Why?”
“We had to decontaminate the house,” Harry answered. “There were Doxys and murderous ghouls and—”
“Family photos,” Malfoy said, running a hand over the empty mantelpiece. Harry looked at his long fingers in the dust, and became unpleasantly aware of how bare and desolate things must look to Malfoy. “Where did they go? I remember Great-Aunt Wally showed me my great-grandfather’s First Class Order of Merlin every time I came—I mean, I tried to put it in my mouth because it was shiny, but still—where did everything go?”
Harry remembered Sirius throwing out that Order of Merlin. “Sirius said that his grandfather got it because he gave the Ministry a load of gold.”
“Yes!” Malfoy snapped. “To set up a new wing of St Mungo’s. Did Sirius happen to mention that part?”
“No he didn’t,” Harry snapped back. “And don’t talk about him like that, all right?”
Malfoy looked like he was about to talk about Sirius in considerably harsher terms and Harry was just reminding himself that he’d promised not to hit Malfoy, but then he tilted his head and perhaps had some idea of how suddenly wretched Harry was feeling. “All right,” Malfoy said, more quietly. “But still, this is all—this is a bit much.”
Malfoy turned around and walked through the room with an air of being lost in the wilderness. He went and stood beside the casements of the windows where the long moss-green curtains hung, looking out through the dusty panes of glass. He was staring straight ahead, and then the curtains moved. Harry was about to shout out a warning about Doxys, but no hairy winged creature sprang from the material. The curtains just swayed a little towards Malfoy, as if on some impossible wind, and like a cat wanting to be noticed, a velvet fold rubbed against his cheek.
Malfoy jumped, but he didn’t jump away.
“Potter,” he said. “Am I having hallucinations, or do these curtains seem to like me?”
“I thought they only moved because they had Doxys in them,” Harry said blankly, and then remembered the way the curtains had hung after Doxycide had been sprayed all over them, with a distinct reproachful, fainting-maiden air about them.
The curtains kept timidly rubbing up against Malfoy and Malfoy, staring at them and looking more than a little taken aback, lifted his hand to them and stroked them for a minute in return. The curtains spilled lovingly all over his still-dusty fingers.
“I suppose they can tell I’m a pureblood,” Malfoy said after a moment. He sounded almost awed.
“They can tell more than that,” Harry answered, trying to get over the drapery petting Draco Malfoy. “I remember a set of purple robes trying to strangle Ron, and he’s a pureblood. They can tell you’re one of the family.”
“Oh,” said Malfoy.
He regarded the curtains thoughtfully and Harry realised that Malfoy was probably going to get fond of them, as he usually did when something liked him. This foreboding was more or less confirmed when Malfoy ran a hand down the curtains, creating a long stripe of cleaner, paler green, and making the whole curtain give a pleased sort of movement. The curtain on the other side of the window started in a sneaky sort of way to shut itself, creeping inch by inch along the curtain rod in order, presumably, to get in on some of the Malfoy-stroking action.
“Look,” Harry said. “I hate this place.”
“All right,” Malfoy said, frowning at him and pausing in his display of curtain affection, “D’you want to go? We’ve only seen one room—”
“No, that’s not what I meant. The thing is,” Harry took a deep breath. “I always hated this place. Sirius hated it too. He was so unhappy here and when Dumbledore told me that he’d left the whole place to me I didn’t want it, I didn’t want anything from Sirius’ death, and I didn’t know what to do with it. I still don’t. I mean, the Order of the Phoenix use it, I couldn’t give it to Death Eaters and I wouldn’t anyway, but you’re a member of the Order now, so—”
Malfoy seemed to have forgotten the curtains completely so that he could stare at Harry as if Harry was the lunatic bonding with the furnishings.
“Potter,” he said in tones that implied Potter was a synonym for every word meaning ‘insane’ that Malfoy knew, “are you trying to give me your house?”
“Well,” Harry said. “Well, yeah.”
Malfoy made a sound like a tea kettle on the boil. “You can’t just—you can’t just give somebody your house! If you want to give away your house you sell it—well, I’d wait a bit, actually, the property market’s gone down the drain because of the Dark Lord—it’s a house, it’s not a cast-off jumper. And curtains do not get to make decisions about real estate!”
“Okay,” Harry said. “You don’t need to yell. I just thought you might like it.”
Malfoy’d seemed to like the house, Harry certainly didn’t want it and he was supposed to be making Malfoy happy now. He’d thought this might do it. He didn’t know what Malfoy’s problem was.
“I really don’t understand how your brain works half the time,” Malfoy said.
“Right back at you,” Harry muttered. “D’you want to go on, or should I give you and the curtains some privacy?”
Malfoy made a terrible face at him and left the curtains with a final pat. They trailed after him until brought to a halt by having their connection to the curtain rod, whereupon they drooped like puppies chained to kennels when they wanted to go walkies.
Harry showed Malfoy around the first floor, and then once they were sure everyone for the Order was gone they went over the ground floor. Malfoy refrained from making any further remarks about missing priceless heirlooms. Just as they were wandering around the hall, about to go up to the second floor, Malfoy spotted the curtains at the bottom of the stairs.
His sudden affection for curtains led him to make a fatal mistake, which was twitching open said curtains to reveal the portrait of Mrs Black.
“Malfoy, don’t!” Harry yelped too late.
Mrs Black opened her eyes and the yellow skin around her face snapped taut as elastic as she gave her first scream: “Get out of my house! Half-blood scum, traitors-”
“Great-Aunt Wally?” Malfoy asked, staring.
Mrs Black looked somewhat put off by being interrupted mid-diatribe, and she opened her mouth, and then shut it again. Then Harry saw her hands, yellow and clawed into the resemblance of talons if not for the black-edged lace handkerchief caught between them, go up to her mouth and wipe the spittle from the corners. She did it slowly, as if nothing but the mad urge to scream remained to her as instinct.
“Draco?” she asked faintly, her voice hoarse from screaming. “Little Draco?”
Malfoy said: “Yes.”
“Oh,” Mrs Black said, as if he’d hurt her. Then she narrowed her eyes and said: “Why on earth are you wearing those frightful clothes?”
Malfoy paused, looked rueful, and then said: “It’s a long story.”
“I see,” said Mrs Black. “My darling boy, I’m delighted to see you, but you must get away at once. This house has been taken by invaders, despoiled and ruined, vandalised—” She looked as if she was going to start screaming again, but she clenched her fingers around her handkerchief and did not. “You need to run home,” she said. “It’s not safe.”
“I don’t have a home,” Malfoy told her. “I know who comes here. I’m with them now.”
“No you’re not!” Mrs Black snarled, her eyes crazed once more. “No, you’re not, you’re not to be like Sirius, I forbid it, you’re your mother’s only child. He said he didn’t have a home but it wasn’t true: you do have a home, you do have a family. Don’t do this. Do you know what happened—”
Harry remembered something someone had said, once: that Sirius had broken his mother’s heart.
Maybe he had, but so what? Sirius couldn’t have stayed in this house where the family believed in Muggle hunting and would’ve wanted to kill Lupin or Harry’s mum just for being what they were: who thought that their son Regulus was a hero when he joined the Death Eaters. Maybe it had hurt Mrs Black, and that was a shame, but Sirius’d had to go.
“I know what happened,” Malfoy said. “I’m not like Sirius Black. I never wanted to leave. But I don’t have a home any more. Great-Aunt Wally,” he said, and Harry was surprised by the depth of cold hate in Malfoy’s voice. “That upstart half-blood who calls himself the Dark Lord has gone too far.”
“Half-blood!” Mrs Black exclaimed. “Well, he certainly kept that quiet, didn’t he—and no wonder—but while I’d agree his methods are verging on beyond the acceptable, I have to say his policies are—”
“He murdered Narcissa,” Malfoy snarled.
There was a long pause, and then from her shadowy alcove, behind the frame, came a voice colder and more hateful than Malfoy could ever have managed. “He did what?”
“He killed my mother!” Malfoy said. “He made my father do it.”
“Lucius Malfoy never had any guts,” Mrs Black said. “Nice-looking boy and clever enough, but not someone you can count on. I warned Narcissa, but she said that she could rely on herself—”
“He murdered my mother and he murdered Regulus,” Malfoy said. “Don’t you remember that? Don’t you remember Regulus?”
Mrs Black wrung her handkerchief. “It’s hard for me,” she said. “I was painted before he died and once I woke up nobody would speak to me, I was alone, alone, and then enemies closed in on me—he murdered my son? How dare he? How dare he assault my family? A filthy little half-blood—”
“Raised Muggle,” Malfoy interjected.
“Muggle!” Mrs Black spat. “He’s no better than a Mudblood! How dare he? How dare he?”
“Go to the other portraits,” Malfoy said. “Tell them all. Wake the house up. He’s not going to get away with this. We won’t let him.”
Mrs Black threw up her handkerchief and vanished. For the first time, Harry saw Mrs Black’s portrait silent. Malfoy stood looking at it for a moment, and then he started climbing the stairs, making for the second floor.
“Some of the present company are half-bloods who were raised Muggle,” Harry said behind him. “And I don’t think it’s anything to be ashamed of.”
“You’re not a half-blood, your mother was a witch,” Malfoy said absently. “Learn the terminology. And also learn how to talk to portraits, you idiot.”
“What d’you mean by that?”
“I suppose I mean I don’t have a very high opinion of your intelli—” Harry shoved at Malfoy’s back. “Oh, all right,” Malfoy said, sounding quite pleased to have information to divulge. “Portraits aren’t alive, right?”
“Right,” Harry said. “I’d actually gathered that on my own, thanks.”
“Don’t you know what not being alive means?”
“Being, er. Dead?”
“When you stop living,” Malfoy said in a measured voice, “you lose all capacity for change. I mean, we see pictures, and we can see them interacting with the real world. They can see the present, but they’re not personalities. They’re echoes of personalities. And you can’t teach echoes a new song. If I’d said, oh no, aunty, how can you talk like that, the Muddleborn—” he glanced back and he and Harry exchanged a flashing grin—“are our friends, let us join together in peace and love, she’d have started screaming her head off. I know how to talk to portraits. I’ve been doing it since I was little.”
“I understand,” Harry said. “But what do you think? Really?”
Malfoy was silent, taking the steps to the second floor two at a time. Then he said: “Well, I mean, I wouldn’t support a bill for Muggle hunting.”
“That’s very big of you, Malfoy,” Harry said dryly, but he thought about Malfoy’s definition of portraits and considered the fact that the reverse was true, as well, that while people were living, there was always capacity for change. He recalled Malfoy amiably stealing Hermione’s biros.
Malfoy strode across the floor of the second-floor landing with the easy confidence of one who was at home. He immediately went over to the Black tapestry and began to run his fingers along it, murmuring happily to himself and saying things like, “I had no idea they were cousins thirteen times removed!” and “I heard he went a little odd in his old age. Well, I tell a lie, I heard he had house elves carry him around the streets in a litter and caused a sensation among the Muggles.” Harry had to admit, it was slightly more fun to listen to Malfoy’s views on his family tapestry than Sirius’ comment about his dead brother. Malfoy seemed to know a lot of gossip which was centuries old.
“And I heard he ran off with a dancing girl,” Malfoy added triumphantly. “And that she still gave private shows after they were married. Cytherea Black, she was called. Lived to be a hundred and forty-two. Hopefully didn’t give private shows when she was a hundred and forty-two, of course.”
“This place,” Harry said suddenly. “We had to chuck stuff away. It felt like—like invading enemy territory.”
“It’s a house,” said Malfoy. “And it’s not Voldemort’s house, or a Death Eater’s house. It wouldn’t have gone for Sirius Black if he hadn’t gone for it, and it’s not enemy territory. I won’t let it be.”
Harry leaned against the wall and looked at the tapestry with him. It occurred to him that, actually, he wasn’t having too bad a time.
Malfoy abandoned the tapestry at last and went over to the first door he saw. It swung open to reveal a four-poster canopied bed and an enormous wardrobe. The carpet was black, and Harry thought it was worn in places until he saw the patches were actually tiny silver snakes.
“Potter,” Malfoy said urgently. “Can this be my room?”
“If you like,” Harry said, and Malfoy beamed at him.
“Good,” he said, and narrowed his eyes speculatively. “I have plans for it.”
Harry resigned himself to hearing all about these plans when Malfoy glanced over his shoulder, and Harry turned, and they both saw the little figure creeping across the floor.
“Hullo,” Malfoy said. “That’s a house elf. Why isn’t someone using him?”
“Kreacher,” Harry snarled.
“Oh I see you know each other,” Malfoy said. “Oh—so this is—that house elf—”
“Yeah,” Harry said. “That house elf.” He strode over to Kreacher, a wizened shape crouching on the ground like a toad and staring up at him with bulging malevolent eyes, and demanded: “Didn’t I tell you to go to Hogwarts?”
“Master did tell me to go to Hogwarts,” Kreacher said, muttering at the floor: “and consort with filth under the sway of a blood traitor, oh yes, Master said so.” He transferred a menacing gaze to Harry’s knees and went on, “But since the master had left Hogwarts Kreacher could not serve him so Kreacher thought it was best to return to the family home and await further orders.” Back to the floor went Kreacher’s gaze and he proceeded blithely: “Not that this is your family, not that this is your home, you loud-mouthed ill-bred son of a—”
“Yeah, that’s enough,” Harry snapped, resisting the urge to kick Kreacher. “I didn’t tell you to come here, all right?”
“Kreacher profoundly apologises, master,” said Kreacher. “Even though his master is lower than dirt and has impure blood and an unprepossessing face,” he informed the floorboards.
Behind him, Harry heard Malfoy snicker and he whirled on him.
“What d’you think is so funny?”
“Nothing,” Malfoy said, then looked at the floor and said: “Well, maybe the bit about your face.”
“Master Malfoy!” said Kreacher. “I see you have captured one of your enemies, master, my congratulations,” he said in a flat monotone, and then in a much more urgent voice to the floor: “If the brat were to fall down the stairs and break his horrible little neck, Master Malfoy could make his escape. Kreacher would suggest taking a broom that he has concealed in the attic—it used to belong to Master Regulus, bless his sweet heart—and escaping from the roof, there are enemies who may come at any time—”
“I’m sure you’d like to murder me like you helped murder Sirius,” Harry snarled. “Maybe I’ll tell you to break your own neck. You’d have to do it too, wouldn’t you?”
He hadn’t realised quite how he sounded until he saw Malfoy go pale.
“I won’t do it!” he said. “Of course I won’t. I wouldn’t.”
“All right,” Malfoy said. “I know that.” Harry looked up at him, and saw Malfoy looking a bit concerned. “I do know that,” Malfoy said, and Harry felt a bit better. This state of affairs did not continue, because the next words Malfoy spoke were addressed to Kreacher. “I’m quite safe,” he said. “Kreacher, is it? It’s—it’s nice of you to be worried about me.”
“Kreacher would die for the son of Miss Narcissa,” Kreacher told him promptly. “Or kill for him,” he added, giving Harry’s knees another death glare.
He made Harry feel sick to his stomach.
“That’s fine,” Malfoy said. “I don’t require the services of an assassin house elf just yet, but I’ll let you know. I,” he paused. “I got that locket, too. Thanks,” he said in a casual, lordly way, as Malfoy would probably have addressed any house elf.
This wasn’t any house elf, though. This was the disgusting creature who had betrayed Sirius. Narcissa Malfoy had done that too, Harry recalled, and for the first time felt a moment of gladness about her death.
Kreacher, while giving Harry a wide berth, was creeping determinedly towards Malfoy. “How is Miss Narcissa?” he asked in a much softer, humbler voice than Harry had ever heard him use before. “Oh, she was lovely when she was a girl, very gracious, she never even soiled her pretty feet by giving Kreacher a kick. We had the wedding party here, Master Malfoy, for your parents. She was seen as a daughter of the house—a daughter—my mistress always wanted a daughter—”
Harry didn’t care about Kreacher for a moment because Malfoy’s mouth jerked like he wanted to cry, and Harry was sorry about what he’d thought, and wanted to take it back, even though Malfoy couldn’t know about it.
“She’s dead,” Malfoy said in an almost gentle voice, as if he had to touch a wound and even doing it lightly made him want to scream. “The—Voldemort,” he said with sudden decision. “Voldemort had her killed for trying to protect me.”
“Miss Narcissa!” exclaimed Kreacher, and then began to moan. “Oh no, oh no, not Miss Narcissa. No, no, no. Miss Bellatrix would never have allowed it. You’ve been listening to liars, Master Malfoy, yes you have—”
“You know as well as I do,” Malfoy said emptily, “that Aunt Bella wouldn’t have lifted a finger for my mother. Not against Voldemort. She’s as much of a blood traitor as Sirius Black.”
“Stop it!” Harry snarled. “Don’t call him that. And stop talking to Kreacher as if he’s—as if he’s anything but a little monster.”
Malfoy, who had been looking at Kreacher’s slow progress towards him, suddenly whirled to face Harry. His expression was icily furious.
“Why shouldn’t I call him that?” Malfoy demanded. “He was proud of it, wasn’t he? Your Sirius. He was proud of leaving his family. You know, if you have any thoughts about me being like that, Potter, any thoughts of someone you people will graciously accept as long as they reject everything they were. I’d never have turned away from my mother! I’d never have turned away from my father, if he hadn’t betrayed us. They were mine!”
“Sirius was mine,” Harry snarled. “So shut your mouth. Have I asked you to—I never—”
“What about him?” Malfoy asked, pointing a finger at Kreacher. “They were his, too. You heard him. He loved my aunt, he loved the Blacks, he loved them all! He’s lived here his whole life and he was one of the family. He felt like one of the family!”
“He’s a slave,” Harry snapped. “It’s not the same.”
“You were brought up by Muggles,” Malfoy said, his eyes narrowing. “And you don’t understand about portraits, and you don’t understand about house elves, and you don’t understand about anything. House elves are bound to a family, bound to obey them because their magic is too powerful not to be harnessed in service. Wizards and house elves have existed like that for hundreds of years and he was part of the family if he felt like he was!”
“Your dad’s house elf Dobby, he was thrilled to be one of the Malfoys,” Harry sneered.
Malfoy looked like another few feet had been added to his towering rage. “He was an anomaly! Have you ever met another house elf like him? Have you? Or has every single house elf you ever met been inextricably bound up with their owner?”
Harry thought, suddenly, of Winky weeping on the floor for Mr Crouch, and swore.
“I don’t care!” he announced violently. “I don’t care if he did feel like he was part of the family. That doesn’t give him any right to go off and tell your mum stuff that got Sirius killed!”
Malfoy’s eyes glinted coldly, and they stared at each other as if it was hatred between them all over again.
“If I was part of a family,” Malfoy said succinctly, “and someone in it left the others, abandoned them forever and betrayed them, and everyone else in the family died except for an old woman who sat with me going slowly mad over her memories and her broken heart, and then she died too and I was all alone except for the lonely screams of pictures but at least I was home, at least there was no more of the sheer torture of when all these things were happening. And then the person who had betrayed us all came back and brought the memories alive with him, if he started throwing away every last remnant of those I had loved and lost, and he held me for the first time in my life—for the first time!—in real slavery and let me be tortured by seeing all that, then I’d betray him. My God, I’d betray him. I mightn’t even wait to betray him. I might kill him myself.”
“Don’t harm the wizards,” Kreacher sighed, in a desolate crazed mutter to the wind. “Don’t harm the wizards. Never raise a hand to the Blacks—”
“It wasn’t like that!” Harry said. “You wouldn’t betray your friends either, Malfoy. Sirius had different friends: he had a werewolf friend, his best friend had a Muggleborn wife. There was no way not to be—a traitor, if you like. He went with what he believed in. He wasn’t—”
“He didn’t have to throw away everything!” Malfoy snarled, breath hot on Harry’s face. “He didn’t have to spit on his family when they were down. He could have freed Kreacher as soon as he walked in the door, before he had anything to betray. He wanted to hurt the elf, he wanted to hurt the whole place, he’s practically disembowelled it—”
“So d’you think he felt nothing?” Harry shouted back. “You don’t disembowel something if you don’t care about it! He was in a foul mood all the time, he was drinking too much, because he could hardly bear to look around him. Do you think that’s the way someone would behave if they’d put their family behind them forever and never felt a thing?”
“It went wrong for everyone,” Malfoy said, teeth flashing behind a curled lip. “It went to hell for everyone. The Blacks went to the wall. But your Sirius came back after fifteen years, and he resumed hostilities, didn’t he? He didn’t have to torture Kreacher. He didn’t have to be cruel!”
“Like you’ve never been cruel?” Harry shouted. “I don’t care what he did, any more than I care how Kreacher feels! If Sirius did anything wrong then he paid for it, didn’t he? He paid for it with everything he had left, and now I don’t even have him, and I hope that evil little thing is suffering. It deserves to suffer, it deserves to die like Sirius died!”
Malfoy stepped away from Harry, and made a sweeping gesture towards Kreacher. His face shut like an abruptly slammed door.
“All right then,” he said. “Fine. He deserves to die, you say? You’re the judge, jury and executioner. Go on. Tell him to kill himself.”
There was a long pause, and then from the floor Kreacher said: “Master Malfoy must do as he wishes, but he is not really helping Kreacher here.”
“He can’t fight you any more than he could fight Sirius,” Malfoy went on. “Just like the Imperius Curse, isn’t it handy? Go on, then! Punish him.”
“Go to hell,” Harry said, shoved Malfoy against the doorframe of his new bedroom, and turned and ran into the next room he saw.
It turned out to be a bathroom, which was a bit of an anticlimax. Harry thumped the wall, and then he thumped the wall again. Malfoy had never even met Sirius. He didn’t know what he was talking about. And that thing had killed Sirius, or as good as, he’d conspired to murder him. Dumbledore might have preached about how Sirius should have treated Kreacher but that didn’t matter either, Harry’d hardly listened past the roaring in his ears and the desire to be a lot crueler to Kreacher than Sirius had ever been.
Just because Malfoy had decided to identify with a house elf too much, that didn’t have anything to do with Harry. He hated this whole house, just like Sirius had hated it, and he’d go on hating it.
Like Sirius went on hating it, a small voice in his head went on, so he went half mad raging at dead people? Will you hate it like that? Harry had the impression that the small voice was sneering at him in a way that was terribly reminiscent of Malfoy.
A voice that was Malfoy’s, from the recent past, told him that only living people were capable of change.
Harry thought of Sirius and cursed and ran the taps in the sink, took his glasses off with one hand and splashed his face with water cold as stone. It left a bitter taste against his lips.
He went outside and found Malfoy standing exactly where he had been when Harry left. Kreacher was still edging towards him, and had almost reached his side.
“I can’t forgive him,” Harry said bleakly. “I can’t stop hating him. I don’t even want to.” He took a deep breath. “Your rules on giving away house elves the same as the rules for giving away houses?”
Malfoy, whose head had been down studying the slow progression of Kreacher, looked up, looked startled, and even while he was still looking stunned he smiled like the sun coming up. “No,” he said, his voice almost wondering, and Kreacher stumbled against him and he reached down absently and patted Kreacher’s bald head. “No, this present I’ll take.”
Kreacher curled himself like the most nightmarish lapdog in the world around Malfoy’s legs, and to Harry’s amazement, he heard a soft low sound, and realised Kreacher was crying, in a tired, happy sort of way.
He didn’t like hearing Kreacher sound happy. He let it go.
The crooked slant of Malfoy’s mouth made the memory of his first startled smile linger on and on. That was all right.
“Oh, master, master,” Kreacher said, his voice wet. “I will be good. Oh, I will be very good, now.”
“That’s nice,” Malfoy said.
“And if I serve my gracious master faithfully all my days, perhaps when I am dead you will do me the great honour of cutting off my head and placing it on the Wall of Glory?”
Malfoy looked aghast. “If that will make you—happy?” he said doubtfully at last.
“Oh yes, Master Draco,” Kreacher said. “It has been my dream since I was a little elf. I could show you where they put my dear mother’s head when she passed. It is placed high on the wall, for she was a pearl among house elves!”
Harry thought that Malfoy might have stopped identifying with a house elf rather quickly.
“You must have been so proud,” Malfoy said in a distant and horrorstruck tone. “Would you go away now?” he asked, glancing over at Harry. Kreacher clung to the bottom of Malfoy’s jeans for a moment, and Malfoy said in a kinder voice: “I will come back. I promise.”
“Kreacher will ready the house!” Kreacher announced, his face brightening as he lifted it to Malfoy’s. “Oh, there is much work to be done, I will make it perfect, yes perfect, for my master, for my dear master…” He went away and then came back to hug Malfoy’s leg one last time. “Master is a true Black,” he added adoringly.
A pin-scratch frown appeared between Malfoy’s brows, as if he was thinking this over. Harry stood and looked at him standing against the door of his new bedroom, with the whole house turning towards him and opening like a flower.
“Yes,” Malfoy said eventually. “I think I’d better be.”