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Chapter Three—What Astoria Greengrass Said

"I'm nervous."

Harry smiled, because Astoria was standing with her back to him and couldn't see his face. She was also fiddling with a golden bead braided into her hair—nervous, as she had said—and so Harry reached up and gently restrained her hand. Then he turned her around. Astoria looked up at him with determination, but also a gently trembling lip.

"You don't need to worry," Harry said. "He's going to love you." He liked that phrase, because of its double meaning, and Astoria's face relaxed a bit, as though it had reassured her.

"But if he asks me some question about the letters," said Astoria, and then didn't finish the sentence even though Harry waited for her to do so. She was spinning one curl around her finger, and again Harry stopped her before she could ruin her hair. She had explained that this was a traditional pure-blood hairstyle, a conglomeration of golden beads and even small bells that would add a soft music to her movements without becoming obtrusive.

"So what?" Harry laughed at her. "I've showed you everything I've written, and the one I received. You wrote them. You have to remember that. And you'll make him the best partner."

"You're certain." Astoria raised an eyebrow at the end of that sentence, as if she had started to doubt him. Harry couldn't stand for that to happen, because doubt was not the way to deal with Draco Malfoy. One had to be sure and go fearlessly ahead, the way that Harry was. He gripped her shoulders and shook her a little.

"Of course. Other people want him, but they haven't taken the initiative to win him, like you have, have they? They just sit around waiting for him to notice them. You're the one who understands that his notice has to be compelled."

For some reason, Astoria frowned and slowly shook her head, causing a ripple of melody that Harry knew Draco would find attractive. "I could wish that it didn't have to be this way," she said. "I did hope, at one time, that he would notice me if I was just patient and pretty and accommodating enough."

"Well, now you know better," Harry said. "He's not going to choose someone passive. He wants an active partner, one who challenges him, one who's willing to take the first step and pursue him."

Astoria still had a shadow in her eyes when she looked up and smiled, but before Harry could ask her why it was there, she said, "And you'll be in the restaurant in case something happens. You told me that."

"Of course I will," Harry said bracingly. "Under a glamour, because I don't want to distract Draco's attention from you—and he would feel the need to come over and argue with me if he saw I was there—but ready to intervene if something happens."

"Good." Astoria walked across the main room of her house to study the mirror set into the wall. Harry had never seen a house with so many luxuries, though he didn't doubt Malfoy Manor was worse as far as that went. Good job I'll never be living there with Draco, then.

Astoria bent close to the mirror, adjusted the gold beads, and gave a twitch of her hips beneath the golden gown that was too subtle for Harry to follow. Then she spun on one heel, making the gown flare about her, and nodded decisively. "I'm ready."

*

Draco strode into the House of the Sun with a high step, barely controlling his energy. He could feel the blood beating in his cheeks and his head, roused by the letter that had arrived barely an hour before the set time of his date with Astoria Greengrass.

Bone-skull,

I'm sure you didn't expect me to be writing so soon after your last letter. I know you, you see, and I know that you're used to being the master of every situation. You would have sat back and reveled, certain you'd intimidated me. You would have thought that one line about opening my mouth with your tongue enough to make me shiver and tremble and collapse on the couch in a fit of maidenly modesty.

Idiot.

I might love you—and really, that's so conditional that one might as well give the emotion a different name—but I'm not in awe of you. I see all your mistakes with a cynical eye. I see the pride that turns into arrogance when you have to deal with other people. I see the way you smile viciously when you win an argument. Those debates that you held with Muggleborns weren't all sincere. You were as glad when you won as when you lost and had to admit you were wrong. I'm starting to wonder how many of the things that you do in public are for the public and not signs of a true change in your character. If that's the case, then you're a better liar than I ever expected.

But you're also entitled to less of my respect.

I want someone who can change, someone who can challenge me to change, someone who can offer me a perspective I've never considered. Of course I've lived through much the same experiences that you have: the parties, the dances, the meaningless conversations. I want something different. Another smooth, insincere liar and actor isn't it. I can have a dozen of those ready to marry me by snapping my fingers.

I'm a conqueror, the same as you are. And if you think you can blithely stick your tongue in my mouth, you ought to know one thing.

I bite.

A sincere friend.

Draco wasn't sure he believed half the things that Greengrass had said in that letter, but half being true would still be enough. And it was possible that he had been mistaken, too, and that she had concealed the personality of a conqueror beneath a little girl's front. Why not? He had never had incentive to pay her much attention before this.

He came to a halt in the middle of the restaurant and turned his head in a leisurely circle that would allow him to scan the whole thing, at once looking for Astoria and admiring the place's beauty. The House of the Sun was an enormous round tower of glass, with an automatic Apparition point between the front door, which opened from Diagon Alley, and the tower, so that one need only take a step to suddenly be several hundred feet above the ground. The sun shone in through every window, though spells muted the dazzle to a reasonable glow. The floor was decorated in large, slightly raised wooden shields of deep red, green, blue, and purple, making the interior a riot of color. Larger shields supported round glass tables, themselves stained so that they bent and colored the sunbeams traveling through them. Draco had always enjoyed coming to this place because it filled him with a sense of fire and height, as though he were a transforming phoenix, its wings fretted with flame.

He saw Astoria almost immediately, and smiled his approval. She was dressed in yellow, and had taken care to get a table in the middle of a golden shield. Draco stepped up to her and took her hand, raising it to his lips. She met his eyes coolly, without flinching, and took her hand back again the moment his lips had brushed it.

"Well, Malfoy," she said. "I wondered if you were going to show up."

"I said," Draco murmured lazily, taking the chair on the other side of the table from her, "one-o'clock. And it is that. I would never be late. It would be vulgar."

"I do not think," Astoria said, her voice hardly loud enough to reach his ears, "that you would be above being vulgar. If it suited you."

Even that mild insinuation was more than Draco had received in months, and it affected him like a drug. He leaned forwards, blood pumping with the challenge of the fight and the hunt.

"I can, in fact, be rather dirty," he said.

Astoria raised an eyebrow but neither looked away nor blushed. Draco had to concentrate to keep from wriggling like a child.

*

Everything is going splendidly.

Harry grinned and held a cup of wine to his mouth, sipping slowly. The last thing he wanted was to be drunk in the same restaurant where Draco and Astoria were talking. Still, to make sure he didn't irritate the staff of the House of the Sun, he had ordered a large meal earlier and eaten most of it, and he had already asked for several smaller things. They seemed happy to let him sit at the table as long as he wanted to.

Harry was trying to listen to the conversation, but he kept being distracted by Draco. Draco wore charcoal-grey robes that Harry had seen him in before. He had his hair as neatly combed as always. He carried his wand at his waist in a specially-made sheath. His eyes were bright, his face looking as if it had been chiseled.

All of that was the same.

And yet, he didn't look the same.

Harry thought his eyes were the main difference. His eyes were keener. He stared at Astoria as if he were estimating a game animal for the kill, and wondering how much of it he would be able to eat. And yet Astoria didn't seem disturbed. The glamour Harry had taught her that concealed her constant blushes helped.

Draco was engaged with someone for the first time Harry could remember. He was alive and countering Astoria's gently witty suggestions for food with an eagerness that Harry hadn't thought he was capable of.

Yes, he's engaged with her. And soon he'll be engaged to her.

Harry swallowed a rather larger gulp of wine than he'd been in the habit of taking in the last hour, and then set down his glass and shook his head. He had no right to feel this little glowing ember of hurt that appeared to have lodged itself in the middle of his chest. He had no right to wish that Astoria had taken longer to fascinate Draco and that he would have to watch more of these meetings.

After all, if these meetings hurt you, then it's best that they be done as soon as possible, right?

Harry glanced into his cup again. He had learned a spell from Hermione that would turn any reflective surface into a scrying mirror—though Hermione, still bitter against Divination after all these years, had told him that the term "scrying mirror" was incorrect. He could only see something that was actually happening, and preferably close at hand, not the future. Harry had reassured her that he would never try to see the future, and she had seemed satisfied.

It was an excellent way to watch Draco and Astoria without turning around, though.

Harry blinked when he glanced into his wine this time. Draco was still leaning forwards, his eyes focused on Astoria's face and his smile slight and appreciative, but something had changed. Harry didn't think he could name it, and he probably would never have noticed it if he hadn't watched Draco for years. Draco was just—not as engaged as before.

That was stupid. Harry knew it was stupid. No line of his face had altered. Perhaps his smile had grown slightly smaller, but that was only to be expected. Draco wouldn't want to show too much emotion even here, in a restaurant where only the rich or the pure-blooded came. Some of the richest customers would think it prudent to increase their wealth by selling secrets to the newspapers if they could.

And Astoria was sometimes looking away from Draco, staring moodily into a corner of the restaurant. Her fingers tapped on the table, which Harry could put down to nervousness. But combined with the stare, it looked like boredom.

I wish I could hear them better, Harry thought. Seated as he was, he caught most of their conversation, but something had obviously passed between them whilst he was distracted with his own irrelevant pain that he'd missed.

Pay more attention, he told himself, and cast a slight charm to sharpen his hearing. This is about Draco, and not you.

*

Draco had learned not to ignore his intuition. It had warned him twice about people who had come to the Manor intent on assassinating his mother, and it had warned him not to press ahead and demand his father's freedom even when the Minister seemed to be in his most generous and forgiving mood.

And at the moment, his intuition was insisting that the person who sat across the table from him was not the person who had written those letters.

But that didn't mean he always had to act on his intuition. And he didn't know very much about Astoria yet. He certainly hadn't known she could make asking for a plate of delicate, rare fruits sound like an invitation to a private room. He had formed a certain picture of his writer in his head, but the picture wasn't exact in all particulars.

More problematic was the fact that Astoria seemed to have lost interest in him, which shouldn't have happened no matter how long their conversation ran. She was staring off into a corner of the House of the Sun, her fingers tapping on the table. That wouldn't do at all. Whether or not Draco ended up being taken as her challenge and conquest, he intended to take her.

"I wondered," Draco said softly, in the sibilant tone that had worked so well at drawing so many women's attention, "what you thought of my efforts to influence the Muggleborns about separate schools for their children and the pure-blood children."

Astoria glanced back at him from the corner of one green eye, and her voice became more coquettish than it had been before. Draco was pleased. At least that showed he was having an effect on her.

"I am interested in your part in the affair," Astoria said. She gave a delicious weight to affair that made Draco shift a little. "But other than that, I must confess, I can find little to touch my interest concerning them. If Mudblood and pure-blood children are educated separately when young, they will still be educated together in Hogwarts. The matter of pure-blood teaching, the truth that they come from the highest and noblest part of the wizarding world, should be instilled by their families. We are both products of that system of education, and we are rather marvelous works, are we not?" Her eyelashes dipped.

Draco smiled back, and assumed she would think the added edge to his smile a matter of predatory interest—

Rather than surprise and anger, as it was.

My writer used the term Muggleborn, as if even in private writing they deserved respect. And she says Mudblood, casually, in public, where anyone might hear.

I do not think they are the same person.

He went on talking to her easily, fluently, about Slytherin House and people they had both known in it, about her sister Daphne, about esoteric magic. She kept up with him easily, even when he ventured into the outer branches of esoteric magic, and ordinarily Draco would have been impressed to have such a conversational partner.

But not now, not when his being reverberated with the shock.

Who is writing to me, then? And how would Astoria know the content of the letters?

A conspiracy was the obvious answer, but there Draco ran up against an obvious wall. Why would a woman who knew him so well, and knew how to bait him and lure him into chasing her, give up her own chance to have Draco just so that she could give Astoria one?

Perhaps she's married.

But then offering a challenge like this to Draco was simple madness. If she knew him at all, she must know that he would soon divine Astoria was not the writer, and also that he wouldn't take marriage as a true obstacle to his will. Marriages could be dissolved. Many of them had been, in the last few years, as pure-bloods married Mudbloods for the greater social standing and then discovered that their loyalty to their traditions was stronger than their loyalty to the good opinion of the world.

Perhaps the woman was stupider than she had seemed. But Draco did not think an inferior mind had produced those words. If it had, then the words would never have exercised the powerful influence over him that they had in the first place.

It made no sense, so Draco had to return to his original conclusion. Astoria hadn't written the letters. Someone else had. And he would have to write a letter back that baited and trapped and lured his writer into exposing herself.

"It's been very interesting, Miss Greengrass," Draco said, at the end of the evening, and extended his hand to help her to her feet. Astoria seemed fully focused on him again as she stood, but Draco reminded himself that was as likely to be a deception as anything else, and smiled into her eyes with a mask firmly in place. "I look forwards to meeting you in other times and other places."

Those were words he had said to dates he never contacted again. Draco smiled peacefully on, and waited to see if she would recognize them.

Astoria's gaze narrowed, but she said, "I think I will set the time and place of the next meeting. I find that the House of the Sun is uncongenial to intimate reflection."

And she nodded at Draco and turned away.

Draco waited politely for her to leave before he went after her. No need to make others think they were together when soon that would no longer be true.

Besides, he could use those moments to reflect on the letter he had to write.

*

"I don't understand," Astoria said in a low, troubled voice, pacing across Harry's pacing room. "But somehow, being with Draco wasn't the way I imagined. He's less captivating when he's close to you. I wasn't as desperate to have his attention once I had it."

Harry sat on a chair and tried to look as if he understood what she was talking about. But since sharing a date with Draco and having Draco smile, even in the half-abstracted way he had smiled at Astoria as she left, was a long-cherished dream of his, he doubted that he would sympathize, no matter how long he concentrated.

"I want someone who notices me for me," said Astoria suddenly, turning around and staring at him. "Not someone who has to be coaxed and persuaded into noticing."

"But I don't think Draco would notice anyone of his own free will," Harry pointed out. "He thinks he's too good for them. So you're in the same situation as any other woman trying to court him would be."

Astoria blinked. "I hadn't realized that. I always believed that he would marry as soon as he found someone who could intrigue him sufficiently. He wouldn't want to let her get away, not after he's searched so long."

"And I've seen him date hundreds of women, of many different kinds," Harry retorted, rising to his feet, "and I think that if it were that simple, he would have found her by now. He never gives people a chance, Astoria. It's his greatest flaw. He's convinced that he's the most interesting person in the room, and he would sit around smugly examining himself in his soul's mirror if you left it up to him. No one is good enough for Draco bloody Malfoy. So you need to hold and catch his attention long enough to make him see the good things about you." He paused, and looked at Astoria looking at him. At least there was wonder and speculation in her eyes now, and he suspected that he'd made her think. "Is using the glamour to conceal your blushes somehow a form of cheating?"

"He would never have looked at me, comments about the letter or not, if I didn't wear it," Astoria murmured.

"So?" Harry spread his hands. "We're just using the tactics that anyone would have to use. You're simply the lucky woman who thought of them first." Astoria smiled at that for some reason, but Harry didn't pause to ask why. It was too important to convince her. "Say that you'll go on at least one more date with Draco."

Harry hated how desperate he sounded on those last words, but if he didn't win Astoria for Draco, who in the world would he win? There was no one else in Draco's immediate circle remotely suited to him, no one who was as genuinely attracted to him as Astoria was.

Astoria nodded slowly. "All right. I can see that. And I do like being close to him. I did feel a fluttering in my blood. I'd—like to be there. I'd just like him to know who I really am."

"You can tell him about the letters as soon as he's safely in love," Harry promised her, smiling. "And he'll hate and despise me, because I'm the one who thought up the plan and tried to trick him."

Astoria nodded. "All right."

Grimoire swooped in then, and from the ruffled look of his feathers, Harry knew that he must have been to Draco. He grinned encouragement to both Astoria and the owl, took the letter, and opened it, expecting some sort of pleasant reminiscences of the dinner Draco and Astoria had shared.

My writer,

You present me more of a challenge than ever. You must think I am truly stupid if you expected me to believe that a clumsy, tiresome little girl like Astoria Greengrass was writing your letters. And yet you know me so well. It is a conundrum.

It makes me but the more determined to capture you. This is our second pass of the contest only, and so I forgive you for thinking me unarmed. Merely do not make that mistake again. Make new and more interesting ones, but few enough to keep my interest in you high.

I want you. When I walked into the restaurant, believing I was going to meet you, my blood roared like a dragon in the mating contest. And when I got over my first anger and disappointment in realizing that Greengrass is not you, and saw the mysteries that still surround your identity, I experienced the strongest attraction yet.

You betray yourself by your manner. You think to conceal yourself from me, but you cannot conceal everything. You know me. You dare to taunt me. You knew me at Hogwarts. You use simple, straightforward words compared to most in my circle. I no longer think you are a pure-blood, and I believe that I have narrowed your Hogwarts attendance down to within the last nine years. It is inconceivable that a child younger than that would be writing in this manner, and someone older would have used other ways to approach me.

Every flourish of your quill is my spy upon you; every carefully considered word, in reality so ill-chosen for anything but showing your blazing spirit, brings me closer to the secret.

You warned me that you bite, that you are a conqueror. I do hope, my writer, that your surrender is as beautiful as your struggle.

My writer,

Behold the signature of your conqueror,

Draco Malfoy.

"Harry?" Astoria asked from somewhere far away. She sounded concerned. "What's the matter? Only you've gone so pale."