A new page has been added to the archive.
Mind the fine print.
The castle is listening.
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Daphne had carried the wrong book all the way from the east gallery.
She discovered it on the stairs to lunch.
History of Magic, upside down again, with a corner bent where her fingers had pressed too hard.
Harry Potter was still beside her.
She turned the book over before he could notice a second time.
“You needn’t escort me into the Hall,” she said.
“I thought you were escorting me.”
“Then we are both safe from gratitude.”
He gave the book a glance, but said nothing about it.
At the doors, a cluster of students came between them.
Daphne let it.
Harry went toward the far end of the Slytherin table with his wrapped thumb held away from his robes.
She could see him if she looked for him.
She tried not to.
Millicent Bulstrode had saved a place beside her with a satchel.
She had also taken the best of the roast potatoes.
That was the sort of welcome Daphne understood.
“I thought you were going to History,” Millicent said as Daphne set down her books.
“I did.
Binns was there in spirit.”
Millicent made a noise into her cup.
“He usually is.”
Across the table Cassian Selwyn sat with a roll untouched on his plate.
Pansy Parkinson was telling him about a second-year who had mistaken a prefect’s warning for an invitation to argue.
Cassian heard Daphne put down the book.
He let Pansy finish her sentence before looking up.
“Greengrass.
Potter find lunch by himself?”
“The Hall is large,” Daphne said.
“He may need a map.”
“You were walking slowly enough to draw one.”
There was a smile on his face, but not the one he had worn in the gallery.
That one had been for Harry.
This was for the people close enough to listen.
Daphne pulled back the bench.
Millicent moved the satchel without being asked.
A younger boy at the end of the table looked up from his pudding.
Cassian saw him looking and took his time buttering the roll.
“We spoke,” Daphne said.
“Everyone saw that.”
“Then you’ve had your answer.”
Pansy laughed.
Daphne had hoped she might.
A joke would make the walk small enough to survive lunch.
Cassian did not help her.
“My father asked me to give Potter his regards,” he said.
“Potter looked as if he’d swallowed a pin.
You stayed with him after I left.”
“He has an injured hand.
Perhaps pins are difficult to remove one-handed.”
The younger boy laughed into his pudding.
Pansy did not.
Millicent slid the salt toward Daphne, though Daphne had not asked for it.
“I didn’t ask for a joke,” Cassian said.
“That makes two of us.”
She reached for the potatoes and found only three left in the dish.
Millicent’s plate was full.
Usually she would have stolen one back.
Today the small action seemed harder than it ought to.
Cassian leaned his forearms on the table.
“Did he say anything about my father after I went?”
He could not have heard.
Daphne had watched him turn the corner.
She had also watched Millicent leave the armor and take the other stairs.
The gallery had not been empty; it had been public in the way a room was public when no one wanted to admit listening.
Cassian had a question, not an account.
“Ask Potter,” she said.
“I have.
He’d rather be clever.”
“I know the feeling.”
This time the younger boy kept his head down.
Cassian’s ears colored a little.
Daphne had managed to annoy him without making the question go away.
“I’m asking you.”
She put her fork down.
She had promised Harry that neither of them would use the other’s name as a shield.
That was easy to say in a corridor, with rain against the windows and his attention on her.
It was less easy here, with half a dozen people waiting to see whether she could still keep a place among them.
“The rest of that conversation was private,” she said.
“In a gallery full of people?”
“No one invited you to it.”
“I wasn’t asking to come,” Pansy said, and reached for the bread basket.
Daphne had meant to aim at Cassian.
Pansy had caught the edge of it, and now the table had a reason to be cross with her that required no knowledge of family vows or Harry’s scar.
It was a stupid mistake.
She felt her face warm.
Millicent said, “I was behind the armor.
I couldn’t hear them.”
“You heard enough to move when Selwyn came,” Daphne said.
“I heard him.
Not you.”
That answer cost Millicent a glance from Cassian.
She looked at her plate.
She had offered Daphne the limit of what she knew, not an alibi for the whole walk.
Daphne wished she had thanked her instead of snapping.
Cassian tore the roll in half.
“I don’t need your family history, Greengrass.
I need to know whether Potter said my father’s name.”
“I won’t report a private conversation to you.”
“That wasn’t a complicated request.”
“Then you can bear a simple refusal.”
For a moment neither spoke.
A spoon rang against a goblet somewhere down the table.
Daphne saw Harry stand to let another student past, then sit again without looking their way.
If he had known what Cassian was asking, he might have made a dry remark and made everything worse.
He knew none of it.
She was glad.
Cassian pushed his untouched half-roll to Pansy’s plate.
“All right.”
It was the answer she had wanted.
His hand stayed on the edge of the bread plate, as though he had not finished.
“Millicent,” he said, “Pansy promised to show me her Charms notes before afternoon lessons.
Daphne can give her that place, can’t she?”
There was room on the bench only if someone moved.
Daphne was already sitting in the place Millicent had held for her.
Pansy had been opposite.
She looked at Daphne’s half-full plate.
“I can show you from here,” Pansy said.
“The ink bled on one page.
Bring it over.”
Pansy knew what he was doing.
Her hesitation lasted long enough for Daphne to hope she would stay put.
Then Pansy collected her things and came around the table.
Cassian slid Daphne’s books off the bench and set them beside her plate.
The place was still under her.
He had made her keep it in front of everyone or surrender it.
It was petty.
It worked.
Millicent did not ask Pansy to stay where she was.
She could have.
Daphne had just made a remark at Pansy’s expense; there was no reason for Millicent to spend another afternoon defending a friend who kept making it difficult.
“I’ll return your book later,” Daphne told her.
“You haven’t borrowed one.”
Daphne looked down at the upside-down History of Magic volume.
It was Millicent’s.
She had taken it from the gallery without noticing.
Even now she was doing things that looked worse when someone else named them.
“I have.
I meant to give it back.”
Millicent held out her hand.
Daphne gave it over.
The bent corner made Millicent pause.
“Sorry,” Daphne said.
“It’s a book.”
Millicent set it in her bag instead of beside Daphne’s.
That small change hurt more than Cassian’s performance.
Daphne rose with most of her lunch uneaten.
The younger boy shifted on his bench to give her a way out.
No one stopped her.
No one asked her to stay.
At the next gap down the table she could have sat among students who did not know what had happened.
She could already hear how they would ask why she had left the other end.
She took her plate to the far side instead.
An older girl she knew only by surname moved her own bag off the bench.
“Potatoes are gone,” she said.
“I noticed.”
“There’s bread.”
Daphne sat.
The older girl returned to her conversation with a friend about the Transfiguration homework.
She did not offer protection.
Daphne took a slice of bread and found that her hands had stopped shaking enough to spread butter on it.
Across the Hall, Cassian was bent over Pansy’s notes.
He did not look triumphant.
That would have required him to admit he had wanted a victory over a chair.
Millicent stared at the page of her book without turning it.
Daphne could not tell whether she was angry with Cassian, with Daphne, or only with the damaged corner.
Harry passed the end of the table on his way out.
He noticed Daphne beside strangers; she saw his gaze catch and move on.
He did not come over.
He did not have a reason he could explain if he did.
She was relieved, then angry with herself for being relieved.
The older girl asked for the butter.
Daphne passed it.
A little of it had got on her cuff.
She rubbed at the stain while she listened to the Transfiguration argument.
One of the girls had turned a practice match into a needle with a blunt point and thought it ought to count.
The other said Professor McGonagall would count it as progress, which was much worse than a mark.
Daphne knew the answer to neither problem.
For a minute she was allowed to be a student at lunch, hungry and annoyed by butter.
***
In the dormitory Millicent had already laid the History book open under two heavier volumes.
The bent corner was pressed flat.
Daphne stopped by the end of the bed.
“Does it help?” she asked.
“It might.”
“I could lend you my copy.”
“That one has your notes in the margins.
I don’t want to learn the goblin rebellions from your complaints about Binns.”
Daphne had no argument.
Millicent’s refusal was ordinary enough that she wanted to hold on to it.
Her own desk had a half-finished letter to her aunt beneath a paperweight.
She had written about lessons, the weather, and the way her sister had complained about the latest broth at home.
It was a small joke meant for someone who would understand it.
She turned the page face down before Millicent could read it.
Millicent was looking at the book, not the letter.
“He’ll ask someone else,” Millicent said.
“I know.”
“Pansy only moved because you snapped at her.”
“I know that too.”
Millicent ran a finger along the repaired corner.
“I didn’t hear you in the gallery.
He may decide I did.”
“I can tell him you didn’t.”
“You already did.
He looked at me as if I was lying for you.”
Daphne sat on the edge of her bed.
She had expected the loss of Cassian’s place.
She had not expected to make Millicent pay part of it.
The easy answer would be to go back, give him something harmless from the walk, let him decide it was all he wanted.
But Harry’s careful words about his mother’s sacrifice were not hers to turn into a harmless scrap.
Nor was the question he had asked about Daphne’s sister.
“I won’t ask you to say anything more,” she said.
“Good.
I might say something foolish.”
“You usually do.”
Millicent gave her a look over the books.
Daphne had meant to make her laugh.
It had not worked.
She let the failed joke lie where it fell.
“I’m sorry about Pansy,” she said.
“And the book.”
“Tell her yourself about Pansy.”
“She won’t want to hear it.”
“Then she’ll tell you so.”
Millicent closed the book carefully.
She did not offer Daphne a place at the table after lessons, and Daphne did not ask.
That was different from the way the morning had begun.
Daphne turned her aunt’s letter back over.
The line about her sister was still there.
She did not strike it out; it belonged in a letter home.
She folded the page so the words were inside, then left it on her desk until she could decide what else, if anything, to say about the afternoon.
Cassian might ask his father.
Someone at lunch might invent a better answer than the one Daphne had refused to give.
She could not stop either with silence.
She could decide whose words left her own mouth.
It had cost her a bench and a friend’s easy trust, which was more than she had thought a quiet corridor would cost.
When the bell called them to the next lesson, she took her own books and went without waiting for Millicent to clear a path.
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