Draco had been rich his whole life. It took him two weeks at Hogwarts to learn what rich couldn't buy.
The classroom was empty, which was why he'd chosen it. Third floor, east corridor, a room that hadn't been used in years, judging by the dust on the desks and the smell of old chalk. Draco had bolted the door from the inside, lit a single candle with a tap of his wand, and sat down at the teacher's desk as if he owned it.
Then he opened the Ledger.
It surfaced behind his eyes, patient as ever, the leather-bound columns glowing faintly in the dark. Draco looked at it for a long moment, as a man looks at a tool he's about to test to breaking.
"All right," he said, to the empty room, to the thing behind his eyes. "Let's find out what you actually are."
He started with the easy questions.
Could the Ledger buy skill without practice? Yes. He already knew that. The Shield Charm sat in his head, Rank 3, crisp and ready, and he'd never practised a day for it.
But that night he noticed something he hadn't before. When he cast it, the charm rose up perfect, textbook, silver-bright, and it felt like nothing. There was no instinct under it, no sense of the magic bending to him, the way it bent when he did a spell he'd actually learned. It was like a key turning in a lock that someone else had already oiled. It worked. It wasn't his.
He filed that away, and didn't like the shape of it.
Could it buy knowledge without study? Yes. The Draught of Living Death, the bezoar, a hundred other answers, all sitting in his mind like coins in a vault, waiting to be spent. Snape had noticed it within a week. I have never once had one answer a question like that in their first week, Snape had said, and Draco had felt then, as he felt now, that the knowledge was real but the knowing of it was hollow, a thing handed to him rather than earned.
Could it buy a talent he hadn't been born with? He tested that now, the first real question of the night. Flying. He asked the Ledger, as he'd ask a broker, what it would cost to be naturally good on a broom, like Potter was.
The copperplate answered, after a moment, with a number.
It was not a number Draco liked.
He converted ten Galleons to check the rate, and that was when he found the second rule. The number that came back was wrong. Ten Galleons in. Eight Points out.
Eight.
It had been ten for ten a week ago. He'd watched it. Ten in, ten out, clean as a till. Now it was eight, and Draco understood, with a cold, sliding feeling in his stomach, that the price of power was going up the more of it he held.
Diminishing returns, he thought, and the phrase tasted like his father's voice. The richer you get, the poorer the exchange.
He moved on to the hard questions.
The ones that mattered.
Courage. He asked the Ledger what it would cost to be brave, to walk into a troll's path without thinking, the way a Gryffindor did.
The copperplate didn't answer for a long moment.
Then it did.
NOT FOR SALE.
Draco stared. He asked again, differently, as you'd rephrase a question whose answer you didn't like. Loyalty. Charm. The kind of thing that made people follow you not because they feared you, but because they wanted to.
NOT FOR SALE.
NOT FOR SALE.
He tried others, then, half-wild with the discovery, the way a man who'd found a locked door tries every key in his pocket. Luck. Intuition. The ability to know, without asking, what a person was thinking. The way to make someone love you.
NOT FOR SALE.
NOT FOR SALE.
NOT FOR SALE.
The words sat in the air behind his eyes, calm and final as a bank clerk, and Draco Malfoy, who had never once in his life been told that something could not be bought, felt something cold move down his spine.
He'd assumed the Ledger was a market. He was beginning to understand it was something else. A market, at least, would have named a price. A market would have let him bid. But the Ledger simply refused, as a door refuses to open, and it did not explain itself.
It can buy what I am, Draco thought, slowly. But not what I do. And not what I am to other people.
The distinction had never occurred to him before. He wasn't sure he liked it.
A knock at the door made him jump.
"Draco?" Theodore's voice, low and flat through the wood. "You in there?"
Draco closed the Ledger with a thought, and the glow behind his eyes went out. He sat for a moment in the sudden dark, the candle flame jumping, and then he crossed to the door and unbolted it.
Theodore stood in the corridor, hands in his pockets, face unreadable.
"You've been missing since dinner," he said. "People are starting to notice."
"Let them." Draco leaned against the doorframe, and felt the lie rise up easy as breathing. "I was working. You know. On the thing."
"What thing?"
The question was innocent. That was the trouble with Theodore, Draco was learning: he asked innocent questions and meant them, and it made lying to him feel like cheating.
For one long, terrible second, Draco almost told him. Almost. The truth crowded up into his throat, there's a ledger behind my eyes, Theodore, and it's counting me, and I think I might be the thing it's buying, and he had to swallow it down like a mouthful of something too hot.
"Nothing," he said. "Just practising. Snape said my technique was weak."
Theodore looked at him for a long moment, and Draco had the uncomfortable sense that the boy could see the lie sitting between them like a third person in the corridor.
"Snape doesn't say things," Theodore said at last. "He means them. If he said your technique was weak, it's weak." A pause. "You should probably actually practise, then."
He turned to go, then stopped.
"For what it's worth," he said, without looking back, "I've been watching you. The way you look at people, like you're counting them." Another pause, longer. "I don't know what it is you're doing, Draco, and I don't need to. But whatever it is, you don't have to do it alone."
Draco opened his mouth. Nothing came out.
Theodore walked back toward the common room, his footsteps fading, and left Draco alone in the dark with the door half-open and the taste of the lie still on his tongue, and a second, stranger taste underneath it that he couldn't name.
He spent a little anyway, because the night had shaken him and spending was the only thing that made him feel like himself again.
One Galleon. One Point.
RECHARGE RECEIVED
1 Galleon → 1 Point
The future-memory dimmed on schedule, and this time the thing that went was a face. A goblin's face, sharp and familiar in a way Draco couldn't place, gone grey at the edges and then gone entirely, like a name he'd once known.
He stood very still in the dark classroom, and he did not know why the loss of a goblin's face should bother him.
But it did.
Not for sale, the Ledger had said, and Draco heard the words again in the quiet, and understood, with a certainty he couldn't have explained, that the ledger and the goblins and the account that still drew were all pieces of the same puzzle, and that he was standing in the middle of it, holding a candle, unable to see the shape of the thing.
Not for sale, he thought. And for the first time in his life, Draco Malfoy did not care for the sound of a refusal.
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