The Lewis House 13 страница

McNeirney grunted, and the two of them pivoted away. McNeirney held the door open and Draco sauntered through it, tossing out a final, "I hope you left him a tip, Mulrod, honestly. I don’t know how else he survives."

Ron made a choking sound, and strode quickly toward the door.

"Don’t!" Hermione said desperately, her voice high-pitched.

He stopped in his tracks and looked at her. She met his eyes with a silent, pleading look. He clenched his fists and looked agitatedly at the door, which swung shut behind Draco and McNeirney.

"Son of a – " Ron began, finishing his sentence with a flourish. Hermione glanced around at the patrons of the Snout’s Fair, who were still watching Ron, riveted. There were a few snorts of laughter, the sound of glasses clinking, and a shout of "Here, here!" from the corner. Ron looked toward the cheer and turned a bit red, seeming to realize for the first time that he was in public. He turned and looked at Goldie, who had taken up bartending for the moment. The older man waved at him to sit down.

"Take a moment, young Veesley," Goldie said, smiling so that his gold tooth flashed. "You vill be needink a break, now."

Ron thudded immediately into a chair beside Hermione, and emitted a string of epithets, low under his breath, as Harry resumed his seat.

Hermione didn’t want to hear it. She cupped Ron’s face with one hand and turned his chin until he looked at her. "Forget it," she said. "He won't come back."

Ron’s eyes were dark. But he stopped swearing.

"Do you really think he's bought his way onto the Falcons?" Harry asked, after a moment.

Ron exhaled loudly and shrugged, "Dunno. I just assumed. Mulrod McNeirney's not the Falmouth captain, but he's a pretty influential player. Been on the team for years. A lot of the other players from that team were members of Death Eater families, but he’s too stupid to’ve been involved in much, during the war. I suspect they’re trying to rebuild the team as much as possible, with the players they’ve got left, and you know all they care about is winning – they’re used to offering top salaries and getting top players."

"And they could use some help from the Malfoy trust fund," Harry finished.

"That’s my guess."

Harry looked very grave for a moment, then abruptly pushed back from the table and stood.

"Are you leaving?" Hermione asked worriedly, glancing at the door and hoping that Harry didn’t plan to follow Malfoy and do something rash.

"I’m just going home," Harry said, as if he could read Hermione’s thoughts. "I don’t care where Malfoy went."

Ron snorted. "Yeah, well, wherever he went, we’ll see him soon enough."

"I don’t see why we would," said Hermione, sharply, "unless we seek him out. It’s likely he’ll be gone soon. Remus said that Narcissa Malfoy would only live at her brother’s house until Malfoy Manor is restored. That can’t take much longer, can it?"

"Doesn’t matter. If he’s going to be playing Quidditch, then we’ll see him." Ron stood and clapped a hand on Harry’s shoulder. "You might be up against the Slytherin captain again, after all. Think you can take him?"

A smile flickered across Harry’s face. "I reckon it won’t be a problem," he said grimly.

Ron nodded, as if he approved of this response, then headed back to Goldie and resumed working.

"Staying here?" Harry asked Hermione, picking up their empty tankards.

"I’m staying till the pub closes," Hermione answered automatically, her eyes on Ron. She wanted to talk to him. Alone. Though her agenda for the evening had changed – after Malfoy’s appearance, she was no longer in the mood to risk telling Ron anything about Cortona.

"See you later, then," Harry said, and Hermione wasn’t sure if it was her imagination, or if he sounded relieved to be leaving by himself.

She didn’t ask. "Night, Harry."

He returned their tankards to the bar and exited the pub. Hermione made her own way up to a barstool and settled there, watching Ron spin a bottle furiously in mid-air. He looked tense and unhappy, and he hadn’t even noticed her approach.

Hermione cleared her throat gently and, at the same time, Goldie prodded Ron in the ribs with his wand, causing Ron to fumble and almost drop his spinning bottle.

"You haff a customer," Goldie nudged, winking at Hermione.

"Wha–? Oh." Ron met Hermione’s eyes defiantly. He was still pale behind his freckles, but he grasped the spinning bottle by the neck and came to stand in front of her, setting the liquor down between them with a decided thud.

Hermione said nothing. She pushed a curl behind her ear, held eye contact, and waited for him to begin what had become their usual joke.

"Haven’t seen you here before," Ron finally said, his tone deceptively casual. "New to Stagsden, are you?"

"Mm-hmm." She clasped her hands in her lap and continued to look up at him. This exchange between them was usually a bit giddy, and teasing. Tonight it was something more serious – his words were joking, but his eyes were still fierce from confrontation. Hermione glanced quickly at Goldie to make sure she wasn’t being watched, then turned her face up to Ron completely and let him see all her emotions in one look. Ron matched her with a look of his own, so intense that Hermione felt the back of her neck go hot and cold, together.

He drummed his fingers once, on the bar. "What’ll you have, miss?" he asked lightly.

"Just water, thank you." She felt her breath shortening, under his stare. Deep down, she almost wanted him to fight Malfoy – she loved Ron and she didn’t ever want his pride insulted. But neither did she want him injured, or arrested - she didn’t want him to be less than what he was.

Ron nodded, filled a glass with water, and slid it across the bar. Hermione put her fingers around it and felt his fingertips caress the tops of hers, briefly. She shivered.

"I didn’t fight," Ron said, so quietly that she almost missed it. "Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. But I didn’t do anything. I meant my promise, all right?" He withdrew his hand before she could answer, and disappeared down the bar to serve another patron, leaving Hermione alone with her conflicted thoughts.

~*~

Ginny searched impatiently through the index of yet another book, praying that no one would come home from the Snout’s Fair early. She needed time to work, and she wanted to be alone - there was no point in telling anybody what she was doing. They’d only think she’d gone mad. Tonight, she had waited until Hermione had taken Harry out of the house to go and see Ron, then thrown herself into the books with more fervor than she’d ever had in school.

Now she sat on the floor of her room, at the foot of Hermione’s overstuffed bookcase, surrounded by texts that hadn’t helped her at all. Nowhere could she find the recipe she needed, and the longer it took, the more her stomach hurt. She skimmed down the list of ‘W’ topics with her index finger, and was once again disappointed. She groaned aloud, and rubbed her temples.

"Are you all right?" came a concerned voice, from behind her.

Ginny turned to see Remus in the doorway. She snapped the book shut guiltily. "Fine," she answered, feeling her head pound harder. "Just looking for... something."

"Anything I can help you with?"

"No," she answered quickly. Too quickly, perhaps, given the way that Remus was eyeing her now. He lifted an eyebrow and looked much as Hermione had, when Ginny had told her that she was just getting ready for the school year. He looked as though he didn’t quite believe her. She winced and pressed two fingers to her right temple.

It was so strange that she didn’t quite believe it, but recently, every time Remus came close to her, she felt a strange pull in her stomach. In her blood. She had wondered, at first, what was causing it, but as it had grown stronger over the past few days, it had occurred to Ginny that she was feeling the approach of the full moon. Though why she could feel it, she had no idea. She didn’t even know if she was right. She only knew that she was obsessed.

"All right," he said slowly, looking from Ginny’s eyes, to the mess of books around her on the floor. He opened his mouth as if to say something about them, then shut it and shook his head. "I’m going to bed. You can wake me if you need anything. There’s a very good headache powder in the pantry, behind the herbs."

Ginny made herself smile. "No, I’m fine. Goodnight, Remus."

He nodded, glanced at the books again, and went away down the hall.

The second she heard his door click shut at the end of the corridor, Ginny yanked another heavy volume from Hermione’s bottom shelf. She was getting desperate. There were only a few books left, and then she’d have to raid Remus’s own library. She wasn’t quite sure if she wanted to risk that - he’d let them know that many of the old books in his personal study had been his father’s, and that if Hermione in particular wanted to page through them, he’d prefer to be told so that he could put Bookbinding Spells on them, to keep them from falling apart.

Ginny flipped open The Top Ten Thousand Spells and Recipes: 1997 Edition and started muttering to herself, as she scanned down the ‘W’ section. "Come on. Be in here. Let one of these bloody books be useful, Hermione. Be in here, be in here, be - YES!"

She had yelled quite loudly. Ginny clapped her hand over her mouth and looked at the door, listening for Remus or Sirius. But it seemed they had slept through her cry of success. Softly, as if extreme quiet now would make up for her vocal blunder, she put her finger on the words she wanted, and read to herself in a rush.

Wolfsbane Potion

Possibly the most complex and most often-failed potion on current magical record, Wolfsbane Potion is also one of the most important in that it renders the otherwise dangerous werewolf docile on the night of the full moon. Because of its possibly lethal potency and its extreme fallibility, it is unlawful for the Magical Court Publishers’ to list its recipe. The recipe is available only in professional mediwizard texts, and in The New Book of Highly Complicated and Very Likely Lethal Potions, which is made available only to licensed apothecaries and registered werewolves.

Ginny groaned again, anxiously. She shut the book and slid it back into place on the shelf, feeling her stomach churn. She had to get her hands on that book of Lethal Potions. She was going to have to check in Remus’s things.

She sneaked quietly down the stairs and into the dark library, making her way to the back of the study where Remus kept his oldest volumes. Normally she wouldn’t have dug into someone else’s things without permission, but there was something happening in her body and mind that she couldn’t quite grip. It felt like magic, but it wasn’t the same as magic. It wasn’t wand-magic, anyway – this energy was compulsive, it seemed to dictate actions on its own and Ginny felt she had to follow it. If she didn’t follow it, she felt sick - headachy and nauseated. She wasn’t sure exactly what to make of it, but she was almost positive that she could trace it to the day that Remus had given a strange look to the dead seeds in her hand.

"Lumos." She ran the thin beam of wand-light over the spines of the books, feeling very much as if she were a first year invading the Hogwarts restricted section in the middle of the night. She almost expected Madam Pince to come and grip her by the shoulder, at any second. But she forgot her tension when her light illuminated an oddly-shaped book which was buried, on its side, behind a row of thick, dusty, leather-bound publications. Ginny carefully removed these, then worked the hidden book out of its tight position at the back of the bookcase and directed her wand light at the title.

"Wow," she breathed.

The New Book of Highly Complicated and Very Likely Lethal Potions was very tall, very slender, and bound in a strange, silvery cloth. It reminded her of Remus himself. Ginny quickly replaced the books she’d removed from in front of it, then opened the silver volume in the crook of her arm and flipped it to the appropriate page, checking over her shoulder every few seconds to assure herself that she was in private. And then, convinced that it was quiet, Ginny turned her attention to the recipe she’d been trying to get her hands on all day. Quickly she read the title of the page.

Wolfsbane Potion

To be attempted by mediwizards and licensed apothecaries only.

"Do you want more light?"

Ginny gasped, jumped, and whirled around, holding the book behind her with one hand, and her wand out in front of her with the other. Though her hand trembled with a rush of startled adrenaline, the beam of her wand illuminated a pair of familiar glasses, just outside the doorway.

"Oh... Harry, it’s you," Ginny managed, still gasping, only minimally relieved that it wasn’t Remus. She didn’t want to be caught by anyone, just now. She needed to work, and in private.

"Yeah." Harry stayed just outside the door, but he drew his wand and lit one of the lamps in the library.

Ginny winced in the light, and backed up a step, protective of her secret. "I don’t need the light," she said quickly, "I was just picking out something to read myself to sleep with."

Harry didn’t seem to notice that she was nervous - he looked rather nervous, himself. He hesitated, then stepped into the library. "Couldn’t sleep?" he asked. His voice sounded a little odd.

Ginny shook her head, wishing, for the first time in her life, that Harry would just go away. She hadn’t been able to talk to him since he’d come home from Azkaban, and though she’d wanted him to approach her ever since that night, he’d chosen the wrong time.

He took another step toward her, frowning slightly at her elbow. He pointed to it. "What’s that?"

"What?" Ginny tightened her grip on the book, and stepped back against Remus’s desk.

"Whatever you’re hiding behind your back," Harry answered shrewdly, looking less nervous now, and more curious. He moved left and tried to look around her.

"It’s nothing. Nox." Ginny dropped her wand on the desk and began to untie her dressing gown with her free hand. There was nothing else for it. She didn’t want to be caught with this book - she didn’t want to explain what she was on about - she only wanted to get upstairs and get back to the potion recipe. Her head throbbed, and she squinted her eyes. She tugged her dressing gown open.

Harry watched what her hand was doing, his mouth open slightly, then seemed to remember himself, and looked up at her face.

Ginny knew she was blushing, but she continued on, working her arm out of the dressing gown until it fell by her side. She spun around, yanked her other arm from its sleeve, wrapped the dressing gown quickly around the book of potions, and turned back to Harry, hugging the odd package to her chest.

He stared at her. "That’s... some highly classified bedtime reading." Harry looked as if he was fighting not to laugh.

"Yes. Well. Goodnight." Ginny grabbed up her wand, hefted the book closer to her, and tried to walk around Harry on the right. He stepped to the side and blocked her, peering at the wrapped book as if he’d be able to see through the dressing gown and read the title. Ginny looked down and realized that one silvery corner was sticking up, and she tucked it in immediately.

"’Night," she said breathlessly, and moved to get around him on the left.

Harry laughed, this time, and blocked her a second time. "I’ve been in training," he reminded her, stepping deftly to the right as she tried to dodge around him again.

Ginny stopped and looked straight at him. They were very close - so close that she could feel his chest brush against her bare arms, which were crossed over the book. He was half-grinning at her, looking as if he was enjoying teasing her, and Ginny made a noise of frustrated panic. On the one hand, she had to get upstairs - her stomach ached and she wanted nothing more than to be working on this potion, regardless of whether it was going to be a futile attempt.

On the other hand, it was Harry.

"Please, let me go -" she blurted, "I have to work on this or I’ll just feel sick."

His smile vanished. He stepped back at once, the playfulness gone from his demeanor. Instead he looked worried, and hurt.

"Er - okay," he said awkwardly, sounding self-conscious again, as he had when he’d first entered the library. He broke eye contact with her and moved out of her way, his face red.

Ginny breathed a sigh of relief and went quickly out of the library and toward the stairs. She was halfway up them when a feeling, very like the nausea she had been feeling in her stomach, suddenly touched her heart. He had looked hurt. He’d only been curious about her. And she had always so much wanted him to be curious about her that it suddenly felt stupid, to leave him in the dark. She’d felt, for years, that she was in love with Harry – shouldn’t she try to confide in him, if that was really true?

She turned around swiftly, ready to go back and find him, and drew a sharp breath of surprise to find that he was already there waiting, at the bottom of the stairs.

"Sorry," he mumbled, avoiding her eyes. "Not trying to sneak up –"

"Where are Ron and Hermione?" Ginny interrupted, looking over his shoulder, toward the corridor.

Harry looked at her oddly. "Er - they’re still at the pub."

"When are they coming back?"

"Hermione said she’s staying till it closes."

"Two hours," Ginny mused, searching Harry’s eyes for a long moment. He stood there and watched her, looking both uneasy and intrigued. "Okay, Harry," she finally said, screwing up her courage. "Come with me."

She turned and led the way unhesitatingly into the girls’ bedroom. She waited until Harry had followed her inside, then locked the door with her wand and turned to face him. His eyes were wide and he didn’t seem to know quite what to do with his hands. He shoved them in his pockets.

"Hermione’ll kill you for letting one of us in here," he mumbled, after a moment, looking at his shoes uncertainly.

Ginny ignored this. "Harry Potter," she said warningly, "if you breathe one word of what I’m about to tell you, then I will make you suffer. Promise me you’ll keep it secret."

Harry’s jaw dropped.

"Promise now, or leave." Ginny pointed to the door.

"I promise," Harry said hastily. "I promise. Can I see the book?"

Ginny nodded, satisfied, and handed it over. Harry untangled it from the dressing gown, which he held between two fingers and placed gingerly on the nearest chair, then returned his attention to the cover. His eyebrows shot up.

"Very likely lethal - what d’you need this for?"

Ginny told him. She told him about the dead seeds – about the strange feelings she’d been having – how she felt she’d been walking into walls in the air around Remus, how she could feel the full moon coming on and didn’t know why. She told him how her stomach and head had been aching, and confessed that she only felt better when she was working on compiling the Wolfsbane Potion. She told him of her visits to the village apothecary’s, and of how she’d been wandering through Remus’s garden and the woods, looking for the things they’d always used in Potions class, at school. She threw open her trunk and pulled out a wooden box filled with corked vials, bundles of herbs and bags of powder, all guesses she’d made of what ingredients she’d need to collect for the recipe.

She talked for what felt like an hour, and Harry listened, raptly attentive. "Have you asked Remus about any of this?" he asked, when she finally took a breath.

"No. I’m afraid he’ll tell me not to try it, and I have to try it. I know I’m insane, I know that Snape was the only wizard around here that could do it right. Otherwise why would Remus go so far north to a special apothecary, to get the potion every month?"

"Does he?" Harry looked shocked.

"Yes. And I know the potion will never work if I brew it, but it would make things so much easier on him if he could just stay here and transform - I wish I was good enough at things like this - but it doesn’t matter if it works or not. I can’t stop working on it."

Harry didn’t answer for a moment. He pushed his glasses up on his nose. "Why won’t it work if you brew it?" he asked simply.

Ginny blinked, surprised by the both the question, and the confidence it implied. "I’m... only seventeen. I got average marks in Potions," she answered unsteadily.

"And I got average marks in Charms," Harry said dryly.

Ginny had never heard him refer, even abstractly, to what he had accomplished with Expecto Sacrificum. But he was looking at her now as if to say that if he could defeat Voldemort with a charm, then she could make a successful Wolfsbane Potion. Her throat grew dry and her heart pounded.

He was right.

"I can try to help," Harry offered quickly, looking down at the book in his hand, "not that I was much with Potions, either." He pulled his wand. "Accio!" he said sharply, drawing parchment, quill and ink into one spot on Ginny’s desk, displacing a disgruntled Crookshanks from that surface, where he had been napping. Harry lay the book down, opened it to the page of the Wolfsbane recipe, and charmed the quill to copy down the page. "What next?" he said, when he was done. "How far have you got with everything else?"

"To be honest, I haven’t even read that recipe yet."

Together, they perused the list of necessary items, collecting the ones that Ginny had already acquired and piling them up in one place. Harry ran downstairs at one point and came back, floating an enormous iron cauldron in front of him.

"Hermione’s going to notice that in here," Ginny said dubiously.

"We’ll put everything you’re using in it, stick it in your closet, and make it invisible," Harry replied. "That way you can have it all in one spot when you go to start working. Where are you going to brew it?"

"I don’t know, I haven’t thought that far ahead. Where did you used to brew your illegal things?"

Harry laughed. "The girls’ bathroom. Myrtle’s toilet."

"And to think, I never thought I’d miss Myrtle," Ginny replied, laughing as well. She grew quite serious after a moment, though. "I don’t know, Harry. It takes a full week to prepare Wolfsbane Potion. I’m going to have to tell Remus and get permission, so that I can do it properly, on the fire. He’ll never let me."

"He’ll let you."

"But it’s so advanced –"

"He will, I’m telling you. He’s like that. He’s the one who taught me my Patronus, when I was thirteen."

"I never knew that! He taught you?"

"Yeah. I was in his office one day asking him to do it, actually, and Snape came in with a goblet full of this stuff -" Harry gestured to the cauldron as if it already held simmering Wolfsbane Potion. "At the time, I thought Snape was trying to poison him, to get the Dark Arts position."

Ginny snickered, and handed Harry a packet of Moonstone powder and the vial of wolfsbane. "I wouldn’t have put it past Snape, back then," she agreed, watching Harry settle the ingredients carefully in amongst the other things in the cauldron. "Although, nasty or not... I’m sorry he’s gone," she ventured. "I never imagined I could miss Snape, but I do. It’s odd, thinking of Hogwarts ever starting up again, without him."

Harry straightened up and caught her eyes. "Unreal, isn’t it?" he said quietly.

It was the closest they had ever come to having an honest exchange about the war, and Ginny was smart enough to leave well enough alone. She nodded, then touched her finger to the recipe and frowned. "‘Boiled brain of sheep’ – " she read aloud "– ‘to be entirely intact when added to your cauldron.’ Not only is that disgusting, but I don’t know how to properly boil a brain so that it stays intact. We never did that in class."

"You’d’ve learned it seventh year," Harry said, "and Hermione can do it better than anyone. Just ask her, when the time comes, and she’ll be happy to show you."

"Oh, I’m sure she will."

They grinned knowingly at each other.

"So, what do we still need?" Harry walked over to stand beside her, and peered down at the recipe, dragging a finger down the page. "A half-pint of wolf’s blood, shredded human skin –" Harry and Ginny shuddered together "– and scales from the middle head of a Runespoor. I don’t know where you’re going to get any of that."

"They have the wolf’s blood at the apothecary here," Ginny mused. "I’ll get it the day I need it, so it’s not spoiled. I guess I’ll have to talk to Charlie tomorrow."

"What - send him to Knockturn Alley to pick up the rest? He’s up at Azkaban, so you might want to ask Bill, instead."

"Azkaban?" Ginny asked, suddenly anxious. "What are you talking about?"

"He was up there two days ago, with Moody," Harry explained. "He’s the one that woke me up after I brought back the Dementor. Something about using dragons to guard the island. He says they have the right energy."

Ginny snorted. "Him and his dragons, I swear. We’ll have a dragon taking over the Ministry for Dad any day now." But she grew quickly sober and sighed, thinking of the ingredients that were lost to her. "I can forget it. Bill’s nearly as bad as Percy was, when it comes to me. He’ll never send me any of that stuff."

"What do you mean?"

"He thinks I’m five years old, and if I ask him for shredded skin of a human, he’ll tell me to stick to something less dangerous. I’d’ve been better off asking Percy, honestly. At least he went to school with me for a bit and knew I wasn’t still in nappies."

Дата добавления: 2015-11-04