"We've got a business proposal," said one of the twins, and Draco's first instinct, a Malfoy and a Weasley doing business, was to laugh.
He didn't. He listened.
The twins had cornered him in an empty stretch of corridor between the library and the stairs, the kind of place where deals got made at Hogwarts, and they stood shoulder to shoulder, blocking the way, wearing the identical, slightly alarming grins that Draco had learned to associate with trouble.
"Fred Weasley," said the one on the left.
"George Weasley," said the one on the right.
"Or possibly the other way round," they said together.
Draco looked from one to the other. He knew who they were, of course. Everyone knew who they were. Third-years, inventors, the terror of Filch and the despair of their mother, and the brothers of the Weasley boy Draco had been trading insults with for months.
"What could I possibly want from a pair of Weasleys?" he said.
The twin on the left, Fred or George, produced something from his pocket and held it up. It was a small, wrapped sweet, the colour of something faintly alarming.
"Ton-Tongue Toffee," he said. "Eat one, your tongue swells up like a balloon."
"I know what a tongue does when it swells," Draco said. "What does that have to do with me?"
"Capital," said the other twin. "We've got the ideas. We've got the recipes. We've got precisely zero Galleons to make more than three of them at a time." He shrugged, and for a second the grin slipped, and Draco saw something underneath it: two boys with a scheme and no money, looking for a backer. "You've got a vault."
Draco stared at them.
"You want me," he said, slowly, "to fund a Weasley joke shop."
"Think of it as an investment," said Fred, or George.
"A partnership," said the other.
"We supply the genius. You supply the gold."
Draco should have walked away.
That was the thing. A Malfoy and a Weasley doing business was the kind of joke his father would have told at dinner, right before the part where the Weasleys ended up disgraced and the Malfoys ended up richer. The Weasleys were everything the Malfoys were not: poor, numerous, and shameless about both. Going into business with them was unthinkable.
And yet he didn't walk away, because a small, cold part of him, the part that had been born counting, had already done the arithmetic.
"Show me," he said.
The twins exchanged a look, and then Fred — or George — produced a second toffee and held it out, and the other twin whistled, low and sharp.
A second-year Hufflepuff, a boy Draco vaguely recognised from the library, rounded the corner and stopped.
"Oi, Ellery," said the twin with the toffee, all warmth and innocence. "Fancy a sweet? New recipe. On the house."
The boy, Ellery, looked at the toffee, then at the twins, then at Draco, and something in his face did a slow calculation of its own. But the sweet was free, and the twins were grinning, and free was free.
He took it. He ate it.
Three seconds later, his tongue had swelled to roughly the size and colour of a small aubergine, and he was making sounds like a man trying to hold a conversation while drowning.
The twins watched with the serene pride of craftsmen. Draco watched the boy stagger off toward the hospital wing, and he watched the two or three other students who'd drifted over to see what the noise was, and he saw, in their faces, not disgust but hunger. They wanted one. They wanted to see what it did, or give one to a friend, or watch someone else's tongue swell like a balloon.
That was the market. Right there, in a corridor, for free, the twins had just sold three more of the things without trying.
Draco did the arithmetic again, and this time he liked the answer.
"Ten per cent of profits," he said, "for seed capital and distribution."
"Fifteen," said Fred.
"Ten," said Draco, "and I don't tell my father his son is doing business with the Weasley twins."
There was a pause. Then both twins grinned, the real grin this time, the one that meant the deal was done.
"You're all right, Malfoy," said George, and stuck out his hand.
Draco looked at the hand. A Weasley's hand, offered across an empty corridor.
He took it.
That night, alone in the dormitory, he did not open the Ledger.
He sat with the little leather book, his own ledger, and he wrote the terms of the deal in his cramped hand: Ton-Tongue Toffees. Ten per cent. Capital: to be drawn from the vault, not the Ledger.
That was the part he kept coming back to.
The money would come from his father's vault, from Galleons that were simply money, not Points. It would not cost him a piece of the future. It would not dim the memory. It would sit in the twins' cauldron and turn into toffees and turn into profit, and the profit would come back to him as Galleons, and nothing, at any point in the transaction, would be taken from him.
He stared at the words and understood, for the first time, the difference between buying and building.
Buying was what the Ledger did. You paid, and the thing was yours, but the paying cost you something that never came back. Building was what the twins did. You paid, and the thing grew, and the paying came back to you, with interest, in a form you could keep.
It was the first honest deal he'd made all year.
He told himself it was just arithmetic. A good investment, nothing more. He told himself that, and signed his name to a Weasley venture, and did not once open the Ledger.
And he slept, for the first time in weeks, without dreaming of a second column.