Splendour Falls

Splendour Falls

by Ashura

archive: Arcadia (http://arcadia.envy.nu)

Chapter Four: Ceilings

"The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together."

--Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well

Draco's room had not changed noticeably the entire time he had occupied it. The mahogany four-poster with the crimson duvet, the wood-panelled walls, the tapestry of drowning Ophelia. The thick Turkey carpet covering the stone floor, the sconces glowing in the walls, the heavy oak wardrobe with ivy vines carved in the doors--it had been this way, the same things in the same configuration, for as long as he could remember. He had never felt the need to rearrange it, to change things, to add his own personal touches, because he had never actually considered it his own.

Home was Hogwarts. Home was constant noise, falling asleep to Greg Goyle's snoring, fighting Blaise Zabini for the corner shower with the little bench against the wall. It was wandering out to the common room in one's dressing gown in the morning to demand why Pansy Parkinson and Millicent Bulstrode were screaming at each other. It was boggarts in the wardrobes and ghosts peeping in an awkward moments, it was quidditch and study groups and playing childish pranks on Harry Potter.

Home was not Malfoy Manor, and never would be. And now he was gone from Hogwarts forever.

He lay on his back on the bed, sprawled, staring up at the ceiling. He'd never really paid attention to the ceiling before. It was the same wood as the rest of the walls, but lighter, having faded with time and exposure to light. There were whorls in the panels where the wood had once been knotted, and a border along the edge of the room. Red velvet, dusty.

What a depressing, miserable room.

It had been nearly a two weeks since his induction into the ranks of the Death Eaters and so far he hadn't learned a thing. Sometimes he spent hours staring blankly at the mark on his arm, forcing himself to realise and accept that it was actually there. From an aesthetic perspective, he loathed it. From a symbolic perspective he loathed it. And yet there was something about it, this horrible mark that had scarred Severus Snape's skin for so many years, and if he could endure it, so could Draco.

He thought sometimes that he saw a flicker of intelligence in the skull's hollow two-dimensional eyes, that its snake-tongue flickered when he moved his arm.

When he was younger, he'd wanted to be a part of something important. It was a common experience of humanity, perhaps, and not something he usually gave much thought to, but he remembered it. He wanted to be someone important. He'd defined himself by it. He'd been so crushed by Potter's rejection in first year that he'd channelled it all into anger--not that the anger hadn't been genuine. Draco had been furious that anyone, least of all an unlikely hero with wide, lost eyes and too-big clothes, would dare to reject him in favour of that Weasley puppy.

But the anger had come from hurt, and even at the time, he knew it.

He wanted to be part of something important. A House that won the Cup. A winning Quidditch team. Draco had always wanted to be on the winning side. And when it came to it, he'd known, somehow, that that was going to be Potter's side.

It didn't mean he had to like it. But he had things to do.

He met Vince and Gregory in a cigar room. It was Vince's idea; he'd taken up the habit first off because his father thought it manly and sophisticated but it had never quite caught on. The smoke made Draco's throat close up, and he disliked the way it made his clothes thick with the smell, but it got them privacy and aroused no-one's suspicions. After all, they were three young gentlemen of fortune, recently released from school, it came as no surprise in society circles to see them idling about wasting their money on civilised vices.

Draco leaned back in a blue velvet chair, sipping brandy and forcing himself to look relaxed. A woman's high soprano was trilling out arias from the wireless above them.

"This Thursday," Greg was saying, low and conspiratorial, leaning over the table toward Draco. "That's what my dad's saying. There's a whole big to-do for the Ministry people, they want to scare them properly, disconcert them a bit."

"Just disconcert?" Vince asked, absently, stubbing out his cigar.

Greg nodded. "Well, they're not going to kill anybody important, this time, that's what I got from my dad at least. There'll be blood, I'm just not sure whose."

"Well then, gentlemen." Draco leaned forward, waiting for a surge of adrenalin and realising with disappointment that he really only felt profoundly tired. "That's our job to find out."

****

When Harry woke up, to the drizzling hum of rain splattering against his window, Ron's knee was poking him in the side. He was cold, and somewhere in the course of the night seemed to have completely lost all attempts at keeping hold of the blankets. Ron had those too, he was tangled up in them, and both their pillows were piled on top of his head, only a few wisps of messy red hair poking out from beneath them. He squirmed when Harry poked him.

"Eh, go 'way."

"Get up," Harry grumbled, yawning, and poked him again. "I'm hungry."

Ron hissed at him, but yawned and rolled out of bed. His face was blotchy and pink, and he stretched, stiff. "I'll make some tea."

Harry tugged his shorts and t-shirt more or less straight and followed Ron into the kitchen. Sirius, in dog form, was still curled up asleep by the fire, and the only sound from Ginny's room was a muffled rustling. Ron put the kettle on, Harry made toast, and they fished around a bit until they found some bacon. The place had started to smell downright pleasant by the time they noticed Sirius leaning against the counter watching them, and Ginny wandered in rubbing sleep out of her eyes.

"Morning," Harry said, passing them each a cup of tea. It felt homey and cheerful, if he didn't stop to think about things. "Sleep all right?"

"Great," Ginny said, so quickly that he couldn't tell if she meant it or not. Ron pushed past him then with a plate full of breakfast, and they all bumped about rather awkwardly trying to get everyone dished up and served and settled.

"What's the plan for the day, then?" Sirius asked, mopping up syrup with a bit of bacon. That caused a bit more confusion, because nobody really seemed to have any clear idea. There was no school, no work, no fighting, no Important Resistance Business. The only one clear on anything was Ginny, who had lost nearly everything she owned and needed to do a bit of shopping.

"Do you think...?" she began, a bit awkwardly, and stopped.

"Don't worry," Harry promised. "You're covered." She blushed very red but smiled at him gratefully, and the sense of encroaching normalcy edged in a bit further.

"Then we'll stop by the twins' shop," Ron said, "and see if they've heard anything from Mum and Dad yet."

"Of course," Harry agreed. The last of the normal faded abruptly away.

****

Hermione awoke in a boat.

It was not precisely unexpected. She had, after all, gone to sleep in a boat. But it took a few confused seconds of blinking at the ceiling and peering over the edge at the carpeted floor before she was absolutely certain it was all right to get up.

Her room at Caer Cysegr seemed to be furnished with the castoffs of a museum. The bed was a shorter, squatter model of a Viking longship, complete with draconic figurehead, and filled near to the top with fluffy pillows and soft, thick blankets in all variety of mismatched colours. The carpet was rich brown, the walls made of the castle's everpresent stone and covered with hangings, and the chest of drawers looked like something out of the Arabian Nights. A hollowed-out place in one wall served as a wardrobe, though she had yet to unpack her trunks, which sat at the foot of the dragonboat-bed looking lost and out of place. There was a desk, and old dark wooden Victorian thing, and a chair covered in violet Chinese silk, and atop the desk, an antique teapot was whistling.

Specifically, it was whistling I Pass All My Hours, and not completely in-tune.

Hermione sat up, rubbing her eyes.

"Please," said a quiet, plaintive voice from somewhere in the vicinity of her throat, "make it stop?" The glass pendant around her neck had its eyes squinted tight shut, as if it could block out the sound that way.

Hermione climbed out of the bed and padded over to the teapot to investigate. It didn't seem to be sentient, or at least, it didn't have a face that she could see. "Would you mind terribly stopping?" she asked it, but it didn't respond to that either. The obvious thing to do would be to pick up and pour it; she looked around for a cup and found two of them--one with a chip just under the handle, was there nothing new in this place?--on a tray just inside the door.

The teapot stopped whistling once she'd filled her cup, and the pendant gave a contented sigh and fell silent. Hermione fished her dressing gown out of her trunk and shrugged into it. She'd been too tired from travelling to really get a good look at the place the night before, and she wanted to get started as soon as possible.

As soon as possible, actually meaning "right after breakfast."

She left the bedroom still tying her belt around her and tried to remember the way to the kitchen. Ilar had shown her any number of passages, and then Gwylyd had led her down yet more, and she hadn't realised quite how turned-around she'd gotten. Still, it wasn't likely to be worse than her first year at Hogwarts with the secret corridors and moving stairs, so she set off in search of something familiar.

The first door she tried opened onto a narrow stone staircase that spiralled down into the depths of the castle. Interesting, but probably not what she was looking for. The second was less interesting--a storeroom stuffed full of candleholders--and the third was someone's bedroom, all done in green linen with a miniature apple tree growing in the middle of the floor. Hermione shut the door hurriedly and went on down the corridor.

The next door was not the kitchen at all, but she would have had to find her way there soon enough anyway, and as soon as she saw it, she forgot all about being hungry. The walls were high, covered with books for storeys above her head, all around a cavernous room dotted with floating lights. There were chairs, and piles of pillows, and tables for studying, there were floating platforms to take you up to see the books you couldn't reach from the floor. It smelled like knowledge. Hermione felt excitement such as she had only dreamed of well up in her throat.

"It would take centuries to read all this!"

"At the very least," a dry, drawling voice responded, and the cushions a few feet in front of her moved. Someone stood up, someone only a little taller than her and stocky, and she thought it was a chubby girl at first until the person came forward into the light and she could see it was a boy in a kilt. He had messy brown hair and a nose ring, and he grinned at her. "You're Hermione Granger. Nice robe."

Hermione wasn't sure whether to laugh, or thank him, or snap at him. She settled on, "Yes, and thanks, I think," and the boy laughed.

"You're Harry Potter's friend," he continued, bending to gather up the scattered books at his feet. "I remember." He winked, but she thought that if it was supposed to put her at ease, it was not necessarily working. "Gowan MacDougal. Ravenclaw, formerly. Welcome to Caer Cysegr. And I meant it about the robe--but were you really in that much of a hurry to get started?"

"Actually," Hermione said, holding onto her dignity as much as one could in flowered pyjamas and a red fluffy dressing gown, "I was looking for the kitchen."

Gowan shrugged. "Well, this isn't it." He grinned, more warmly, and jerked his head toward the door. "Come on, I'll take you there. It's not like I didn't get lost a few times my first few days too, and sometimes if you get lost around here, you wander for a while. It's a big place, and there aren't many of us."

Hermione followed him back out into the corridor. "Just how many of...us...are there?"

"Well." He cocked his head, counting off on his fingers. "You, me, Ilar, Ardán, Ajitabh, Isadora, and Robert Blaine, when he's here. He's sort of the fellow in charge of the place, though you wouldn't know it the way he and Isadora go on."

"I remember. He's the one who signed my letter," Hermione said absently, trying to memorise her way through the passages. Gowan was stocky, but he still moved rather fast, and every few steps she had to run to catch up. "Do you see the rest of them often?"

"Depends on what's going on." Gowan shrugged, turning a hard right and starting down a long flight of stone stairs. "We've all got our own things, and if somebody gets really caught up in research or something, we might not see them for days at a time. We have meetings sometimes, just to make sure everybody's still here, I think."

Hermione laughed, a bit surprised at how natural it felt. "Here we are," Gowan said, taking her by the shoulders and steering her into the kitchen. "Pull up a chair, Granger. It's your first day, so I'll bring you something to eat. Just don't get used to it."

Hermione mumbled agreement, but the dozing pendant around her neck gave a hoarse cough. "I don't think," it said, "that there's anything around here we'll get used to right away."

****

It was well past midnight when Harry, hidden under his invisibility cloak, got into Hogwarts and made his way to Dumbledore's office. He hadn't planned on going at all, but when he, Ron, and Ginny had made a stop by the twins' joke shop, there'd been a carefully coded message for Harry about gingerbread and jelly slugs that he had eventually deciphered to mean, report.

He had his own password for the Headmaster's office now, prongs, and he whispered it to the gargoyle as he pressed against the wall out of sight of...what? Who would be wandering the corridors of Hogwarts in the middle of the night once school had let out? Only Filch, if anyone, and Harry entertained a brief and amusing daydream about being caught by the groundskeeper now that he was no longer a student and could do as he liked. By the time he finished it the gargoyle had stopped and he stepped into the office.

Dumbledore was not there. Harry did two thorough checks of the place just to make sure, as the Headmaster had given him a scare or two before, but there was nothing.

"What's he bloody want to know, then?" Harry asked Fawkes, who was asleep on his perch with his head tucked under his wing and didn't answer.

The desk was cluttered with things: an inkwell, quills, a crystal candy dish, bits of paper, stacks of books, several brightly-coloured wooden feathers, a blue china egg cup, a brass skeleton key, and a ball of brown twine. Harry picked up the key for a moment, pressing it against his cheek.

"Merlin's eyebrows, Potter, don't you ever sleep?" He hadn't heard the door open, but that was Malfoy's voice, cool and acid, behind him.

"Of course I do," Harry answered, too startled to come up with some clever retort. "Leastways I wake up, so it stands to reason I must have been asleep."

"Right," Malfoy said, dismissively, as if he really could care less about the answer to his own question. Which, considering, was probably the case. "Where's the old man? I've got something to tell him, and not much time to do it in."

Harry shrugged, his fingers closing around the key, as if perhaps he was ashamed for Malfoy to catch him taking things off the Headmaster's desk. "I don't know. I was supposed to come here for something, but I haven't seen him."

There was a moment of struggle across Malfoy's face, and he stiffened, nodding. "Fine. I'll tell you instead, then, Potter, and you see it gets passed along. I can't wait here all night." He stalked forward, leaning so close that Harry could see the discolouration of the pale skin beneath his eyes, the redness in them, the exhaustion lining his face. "The Death Eaters are planning something this Thursday night. There's a Ministry gala. They've got plans to leave some kind of sign."

"Sign?" Harry repeated, his stomach sinking. There were really only two kinds of signs the Death Eaters left, and neither were good.

"Blood," Malfoy explained, as if he were talking to a child. "Something symbolic. I'm told they're not meaning to kill anyone important, which makes me think it'll be nice and messy to get their point across." He sighed, pulling back, turning on his heel to pace the length of the room. "They're getting bolder."

Harry watched him. "Do you know who it is they're going to kill?"

Malfoy glared at him. "Does it bloody sound like I know? I'm giving you all the information I've got, which is frustratingly little, now listen to it!"

"Sorry," Harry grumbled. "Anyway I've been listening."

Malfoy tossed himself bonelessly into Dumbledore's chair, his head falling back. "Good. Because this is going to get a lot worse and a lot harder, before it gets any better. Listen. The gala's going to be at Old St. Bride's. It's right there in Muggle London, so if I had to make a guess, I'd say it were Muggles that we'll be leaving for them to find." His face twisted in a grimace of distaste, and Harry's fingers tightened around the key.

"You?"

Grey eyes slitted at him. "Surely you don't want our position compromised this early in the game?" Malfoy sighed, his shoulders slumping just a little, and for a moment Harry nearly felt sorry for him. "If you really want to know, I don't much care for the idea of killing anybody. Well--almost anybody. But if it's them or me, Potter, I'm just not going to think about it."

For a moment the only sound was Fawkes' soft breathing and the ruffle of his feathers. Malfoy sprawled wearily in Dumbledore's chair, and Harry leant against the desk and traced the outline of the brass key pressed into his palm.

"Yeah," he said finally, quietly. "All right."

"I mean," Malfoy began, and stopped, and stood. "Never mind. Just remember it, Potter. Old St. Bride's, Thursday. Tell Dumbledore. I'll get you the actual plans as soon as somebody tells me what they are." He strode toward the door, his cloak swirling about his legs, and didn't look back at Harry at all.

"Malfoy." He stopped, and the rest of the words fell out of Harry's mouth without another thought. "Thank you. I know you've got your reasons, and my saying it's not going to mean a thing to you, but thank you."

Malfoy gave him a curt nod, paused with his hand on the door. "You're welcome, Potter," he said, his voice soft, and then: "Just--if you can, when you get him, make sure he knows it's from me, too."

Harry was still hunting for words when the office door slammed shut, and he was left there alone.

****

[notes]

I Pass All My Hours: an old English song from the time of Charles II