The Heir Who Wasn't

The morning after Justin Finch-Fletchley was found petrified on the second floor, Harry Potter came down to breakfast and the whole of Slytherin table stood up for him. Not all at once. It started with a fifth-year near the end, a broad-shouldered boy who had never once spoken to him, rising half out of his seat as Harry passed and inclining his head. Then a girl from fourth year. Then a cluster of second-years, then a prefect, until by the time Harry reached his usual place beside Draco Malfoy there was a low scrape of benches running the length of the table like a wave going out, and across the hall a hundred Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs had gone dead quiet to watch it. Harry sat down and reached for the toast. His hand was perfectly steady. He had spent ten years in a cupboard under the stairs learning not to let his hands shake in front of people who wanted him to. "Well," said Draco, very low, "you've made an impression." "I haven't done anything." "Obviously." Draco buttered a crumpet with savage precision. "That's what makes it so impressive." * * * It had been building since the Duelling Club. Harry had stood on the stage in the Great Hall with Lockhart's ridiculous cloak flapping somewhere behind him, and a snake had come out of Draco's wand, and Harry had told it to leave Justin alone. He had said it in English. He would have sworn on anything that he'd said it in English. He had found out otherwise on the walk back to the dungeons, when Pansy Parkinson had grabbed his sleeve and pulled him into an alcove beside a tapestry of a troll eating a goblin and said, breathless and delighted, "Why didn't you tell anyone you were a Parselmouth?" He hadn't known that was a thing you could be. Now the house had decided what he was. He could see it in the careful way the older students passed him the marmalade; in the way Marcus Flint, who had flattened him twice in Quidditch practice, had stopped calling him Potter and started calling him nothing at all, which in Slytherin was a mark of respect. The Heir of Slytherin had come back to finish what was begun fifty years ago, and he was twelve, and he was theirs. Draco hated it. Draco had spent a term and a half trying to work out how to get people to look at him the way they were now looking at Harry, and it had arrived for Harry overnight, without effort, like a letter. "It's not me," Harry said quietly, under the clatter of cutlery. "I know it's not you." Draco did not look up from his crumpet. "You'd have to actually plan something, and you've been reading the same chapter of Hogwarts: A History for a week." Harry glanced at him sharply. Draco went faintly pink around the ears. "I notice things," Draco said. "It's not a crime." * * * He had been reading it for a week because it was the only book in the dungeons that mentioned the Chamber, and it mentioned it only to dismiss it. A legend. Salazar Slytherin, a secret room, a monster that only his true heir could control. The book said no one had ever found it. The book was plainly wrong, because somebody had. What it did not say was what the monster was. What it did not say was why Harry could hear it. Because he could. That was the part he hadn't told anybody, not Draco, not the twins who'd started following him around making hissing noises as a joke, and certainly not Professor Snape, who watched him across the Potions classroom these days with an expression like he was counting something. Harry had heard the voice four times now. Once in Lockhart's office, while he was signing photographs in detention. Once on Halloween in the corridor, just before they found Mrs Norris hanging stiff by her tail. Twice in the dungeons, late at night, in the common room under the lake where the windows looked out into green water and sometimes the giant squid drifted past like a slow grey cloud. Cold, it said. Hungry. So long, so long in the dark. And then, closer, a word that meant blood. Nobody else heard it. Harry had watched Crabbe and Goyle playing Exploding Snap not ten feet away while it whispered through the stone, and neither of them had so much as twitched. It was in the walls. That was the thing. It wasn't a ghost and it wasn't a person. It moved behind the walls, in the dark, close and then far, and it was cold and it was hungry and it was speaking a language that only Harry, of everyone in the castle, could understand. He thought about that over breakfast while the Slytherins watched him with their sharp, admiring faces. He thought about it the way he had learned to think about everything in the house where he'd grown up: carefully, from every side, assuming that nobody was going to help. A snake, then. It had to be a snake, because snakes were the only things he understood. A snake that lived in the walls of a castle and moved without anyone seeing it. A snake that didn't kill, not yet. Mrs Norris, Colin Creevey, Justin, Nearly Headless Nick: all of them frozen, none of them dead. Something about that kept snagging. Nick had been floating beside Justin. Colin had been holding his camera up. Mrs Norris had been near the water from Moaning Myrtle's bathroom, a whole flooded corridor of it, like a dark mirror on the floor. Harry put his toast down. * * * He found Hermione Granger in the library after Charms, at the back table in the Restricted Section's shadow where she sat when she didn't want to be bothered. She went stiff when she saw who it was. They had been partners in Herbology for half of first year, until Ron Weasley had told her loudly in the corridor that she shouldn't trust a snake, and she had started choosing her seat before Harry got to class. "I'm not going to petrify you," he said, sitting down opposite. "If that's what the face is for." "I know you're not." She closed her book. "You're too obvious. Everybody's watching you. If you were the Heir, you'd have kept the Parseltongue quiet." "That's what Draco said. More or less." "Well, Malfoy's not stupid. He's horrible, but he's not stupid." She lowered her voice. "Ron thinks it's you. So does half of Gryffindor. You know they're saying it's Muggle-borns next. Me, specifically. Because of the..." She didn't finish. She didn't need to. Harry had been standing beside Draco on the Quidditch pitch in October when he'd called her the word, and he had watched Ron Weasley throw up slugs for an hour afterwards trying to hex him for it. "I know," said Harry. "That's why I'm here." He told her. Not all of it; he didn't tell her about the voice, because he didn't know yet whether she was someone he could tell. But he told her about the walls, and the water, and the camera, and the ghost. He laid it out the way Snape laid out ingredients: one thing beside another, no wasted motion. "Nobody looked straight at it," he said. "Colin saw it through a lens. Justin saw it through Nick, because Nick was in the way. Mrs Norris saw it in the water. It's something that kills you if you look it in the eye. And they all saw it some other way, so they only froze." Hermione had gone very still. Then she was up and gone, moving fast between the shelves the way she did when something had caught hold of her, and she came back with a book so old its pages were soft as cloth. She turned them almost faster than he could follow. She stopped. The Basilisk, the entry began, in a crabbed medieval hand: a serpent hatched from a hen's egg beneath a toad, grown to a monstrous length, and called by those who feared it the King of Serpents. They read the rest together, heads nearly touching. A gaze that killed. Spiders that ran from it in advance, like rats from a ship. And one thing it could not bear: a cockerel's crow. "Hagrid's roosters," Hermione said faintly. "Somebody's been killing Hagrid's roosters." "Pipes," Harry said. "It's using the pipes. That's how it gets around without being seen." She looked up at him then, and he saw her work out the thing he hadn't said. "How do you know it's in the pipes?" He didn't answer. She didn't make him. * * * He should have gone to McGonagall. He knew that, the way he knew most things that an adult would have told him if he'd had one. He should have gone to McGonagall with the page and the theory and let her do something about it. But he was a Slytherin, and Slytherins knew a few things that Gryffindors didn't, and one of them was that a teacher could be told something and still not believe it. A twelve-year-old Parselmouth with a library book and a theory about plumbing. He could see Snape's face already. So before he did that, he did something else. At dinner that night, when the whole of Slytherin table rose for him again, he didn't sit. He stayed on his feet. The scrape of benches died away. Down the table, a hundred faces watched him, sharp and hungry and waiting. "Granger," Harry said, not loudly. He didn't need to be loud. Every Slytherin in the hall was listening. "Hermione Granger, from Gryffindor. Nobody touches her. Nobody follows her. Nobody so much as looks at her in a corridor." He let it sit. "She's mine." He meant it the way they'd understand. He watched them understand it. A murmur went down the table, half-reverent; the Heir had picked his target and was keeping it for himself. Pansy's eyes went wide. Marcus Flint nodded slowly, as if a debt had been settled. Across the hall, Hermione had gone white. Then, very slowly, as she worked out what he'd actually done, her face changed. He sat down. Draco was staring at him. "You absolute snake," Draco said, with something like awe. "Pass the potatoes." Draco passed the potatoes. Then, after a moment, and very quietly, so nobody else at the table could hear: "My father says it was a girl who died last time. A Muggle-born. In a bathroom." He kept his eyes on his plate. "I didn't tell you that." Harry looked at him for a long second. "Thanks," he said. "Don't make it a thing, Potter." That night Hermione found him on the second floor, in the corridor nobody used any more because Moaning Myrtle's bathroom was still flooding it. She came up the stairs with a small round mirror in her hand, the sort that came out of a handbag, and held it out at an angle to check the corner before she stepped round it. "You're letting them think you're the monster," she said. "Somebody already is the monster," Harry said. "I'm just the one standing in front of you." She looked at him for a long moment. Then she pressed the mirror into his palm and closed his fingers over it. "Don't look anything in the eye," Hermione said. Then she went back towards Gryffindor Tower, and she didn't look over her shoulder once, because for the first time since Halloween she didn't think anybody would be following her.