Paper Confines

xxiv. Right Where You Left Me

PAPER CONFINES.
24. / Right Where You Left Me

✶

In the steep dark of the great staircase, Nadya waited. Olive Hornby, who was not a Knight but followed too close in their footsteps for comfort, made little effort to watch after herself as she stepped off a settling stair and into the second floor corridor. Seconds after the blue vignette of her wand-light vanished, the staircase returned at Nadya's feet.

There was nothing in sight when she reached the precipice of the corridor but a pathetic vestige of cordons dangling from one of the walls. Malfoy must have taken his post nearer to the lavatory, then, if it was still his turn on watch. Nadya was surprised Dippet had allowed only a single patrol at the scene of his own ruin—not a professor, not even a prefect—but that was how the ruin had left him as of late. The headmaster's already cobwebbed hair was reduced to a sparse few strings curling from the rim of his hat, ashen-faced and angular and such a recluse that Nadya hadn't been to detention once despite spending the last three weeks following the Knights and their acolytes in places neither of them should have been.

This night, despite how it looked, Nadya could assure was in the plan's best interest.

She followed the soft sphere of Olive's light down the corridor. It was indistinguishable from the rest of the castle; the same same stone walls, the same cold floors. Nadya wasn't sure what she was expecting of it, but there was something sour in thinking this was the last place Banks was known to have been and there was nothing at all to prove it.

She stumbled at the end of the corridor when she heard an angry hush and saw the distant glow of Olive's wand snuffed out. Her head peered from behind the corner just enough to see Malfoy press Olive against the wall, barely visible in the almost-dark.

"Told you to be discreet, Liv." Malfoy's voice had the same congested savour as the old snobs who raised him.

"Lighten up, no one followed me."

"Oh my god," Nadya mumbled inaudibly, rolling her eyes.

"As far as you know, and you don't know much, do you?"

Olive smacked him in the arm, but the distinct croak of her laugh was a slap in her own face. Nadya was reminded of Theodore Wright's hands pulling Esther Abney's hair in the school gymnasium, and how she always giggled, and always forgave him.

"Neither do you if you're letting me in on this little secret," Olive said, "Bet your darling Dolohov wouldn't approve."

"Then it's a good thing you're going to keep your mouth shut."

Olive motioned locking her lips and throwing away the key, and Malfoy's hold on her loosened.

"Is she in there?" she went on.

"She's quiet tonight."

Malfoy knocked on a door that could have only been the girl's lavatory, and Nadya's chest seized up. It was quiet, like he said, but she held her breath.

Olive snickered. "If you wanted to get me alone, you could have come up with something better than a fake g—"

Something spilled through the door like a blue fist that had missed its mark, and retreated so quickly Nadya thought she imagined it.

Olive screamed for barely a second before Malfoy's hand was covering her mouth.

Someone in the lavatory started to cry. There was the quick sound of wind, a whirring that went from one end to the lavatory to the other, and closest behind the corner where Nadya hid, she could hear the sobs like her own breath. They were trebled and sunken, but steeped in something hard that Nadya had never heard from a voice that could not belong to anyone but one.