The Mudblood knew things the Ledger had charged Draco a fortune for. That, more than anything, was why he hated her.
The lesson was Transfiguration, and the question was on the distinction between the Animagus transformation and ordinary self-transfiguration, and Draco knew the answer. He always knew the answer. It sat in his head, bought and paid for, waiting to be produced.
But Granger's hand was in the air before the question was fully out of McGonagall's mouth.
"The Animagus transformation is a permanent acquired ability to take a single animal form at will," she said, rapid and precise, "whereas ordinary self-transfiguration is a spell, reversible, and far more limited in scope. The Animagus process is also regulated by the Ministry, and a wizard must register —"
"Yes, thank you, Miss Granger," said McGonagall, and there was, Draco was certain, the faintest warmth in her voice, the warmth she reserved for students who had actually done the reading. "Five points to Gryffindor."
Draco stared at the back of Granger's bushy head and felt something hot and ugly coil in his chest.
He had known that. He had known it since the second week of term, because he had paid for it. The answer had cost him actual Galleons, converted to Points, burned out of his future-memory one coin at a time. And there she was, this Muggle-born girl, this nobody, producing the same answer for free, the way she produced everything, for free, effortlessly, as if knowledge were just something that happened to her, like rain.
He'd seen it before, in Potions, the first week. Snape's question about asphodel and wormwood, the one Draco had answered so smoothly that Snape had held him back after class. Granger's hand had been in the air then too, waving, frantic, and she had known the answer as well as Draco did. The difference was that Draco had paid for it, and she had not, and Snape had ignored her and called on Draco, and Draco had taken the credit as if it were his by right.
But it wasn't. That was the thing that ate at him, now, in Transfiguration, watching her collect five points she'd earned in a library while he sat on a pile of bought answers that would never be his, not really.
Not that she knew it. That she'd earned it. That the answer meant something in her mouth that it could never mean in his, because hers had cost her hours in a library and his had cost him a number in a ledger.
It came out at the end of the lesson.
He hadn't meant to say it. That was the worst part, afterwards. He had meant to say something cutting about Gryffindor, something smooth and Malfoy, the kind of thing that left a mark without leaving a bruise. But Granger had brushed past him in the doorway, her bag stuffed with books, radiating the smug, self-satisfied air of a girl who had just been praised by McGonagall, and the word had risen out of some old, inherited place in him before he could stop it.
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"No one asked you, you filthy little Mudblood."
The corridor went silent.
It was the first time he had ever said it. Not the word, he'd heard the word all his life, at his father's table, in the corridors of the Manor, dropped into conversation like a coin. But he had never said it himself, not like this, not at a person, and the moment it left his mouth he felt the weight of it, heavier than he'd expected, settling over the corridor like a blanket.
He felt the silence differently than he'd expected to. He'd expected a certain kind of quiet, the appraising quiet that follows a good, sharp cut. What he got was a stillness that felt like a room holding its breath. A first-year he'd never seen before looked away, quickly. Crabbe shuffled his feet. And somewhere in the back of Draco's mind, a small voice that remembered being older than eleven, that remembered being someone who might have known better, made itself briefly, inconveniently heard, and he crushed it before it could finish a sentence.
Granger stopped. She turned, slowly.
And she did not crumble.
That was the thing he would remember. She did not cry, did not flinch, did not do any of the things the word was supposed to make a Muggle-born girl do. She looked at him, and her chin came up, and something in her face hardened, like water turning to ice, and she said, in a voice that was perfectly, terrifyingly steady:
"At least I earned what I know, Malfoy. Which is more than you can say."
And she walked away, her back straight, and Draco stood there with the silence pressing in on him, and the word he'd thrown hanging in the air like something he couldn't take back.
Theodore was leaning against the wall at the end of the corridor, where he'd apparently been waiting.
"You only hate the people who remind you of the price," he said, without preamble, and Draco turned on him, and the anger that had been looking for a target found one.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Theodore didn't flinch. That was the trouble with Theodore. "Granger," he said, "earns her answers. You buy yours. Every time she opens her mouth, she reminds you that you've been paying for what she gets free." He pushed off the wall. "That's not her fault. That's just arithmetic."
Draco wanted to argue. He wanted to say that Theodore didn't understand, that the Ledger wasn't like that, that the knowledge was real even if it was bought.
But the words wouldn't come, because Theodore was right, and Draco knew it, and the knowing of it sat in his stomach like a stone.
"Also," Theodore added, over his shoulder, "she's not going to be a problem you can buy your way around. Girls like that don't come with a price."
And he was gone, before Draco could think of an answer.
He went to the empty classroom that night and tried to fix it the only way he knew how.
He would out-study her. He would buy every scrap of knowledge the Ledger would sell him, fill his head until there was no question Granger could answer that he couldn't answer faster, until McGonagall's warm little "five points" went to him, until the Muggle-born girl's smug, self-satisfied face finally fell.
He opened the Ledger and asked for the price.
And the price had gone up again.
He stared at the number, and the copperplate stared back, and Draco understood, with a cold, sliding feeling, that the system was doing exactly what he'd been warned it would do: the more he held, the more it cost to hold more. Buying his way past Granger would mean burning through the future at a rate that made even his earlier recklessness look careful.
Diminishing returns, he thought, and the phrase tasted like his father's voice. The richer you get, the poorer the exchange.
He closed the Ledger without buying anything, and sat in the dark classroom, and hated Granger, and hated the Ledger, and hated, most of all, the small, traitorous part of himself that had noticed, that had genuinely, unwillingly noticed, that she had earned every answer she had.
While he had simply paid for his.