Chapter 10: Salazar's Legacy

The glass rattled softly in its frame as Tom slid the mirror free and felt the cheapness of it flex under his thumb. Not much to look at—thin, clouded at the edges, the silvering already eaten away in spots—but it would keep his eyes his own. He tilted it, catching the faint glow of a candle stub and the pale oval of his face, and slid it inside his satchel on top of a folded sock to stop it knocking.

The dormitory breathed around him: slow, deep pulls of air from curtains that hid boy-shaped lumps and a wet, warm smell of wool and old stone from the water lapping against the lake windows. Somewhere a bubble rose and blopped. He waited for it to settle. Patience tasted like the boiled sweets in the Matron’s drawer—stolen and hard in the mouth. He rolled his shoulders, unlatched the satchel strap, and eased his feet to the cold floor.

He knew the boards that creaked now. The first week he had learned them by mistake, waking a boy called Travers who shoved in his sleep and swung a fist like a club. Tonight he stepped over those boards without looking, hands already chilled, heart thumping hard and then settling when the door closed behind him with only a breath of air. He had rubbed the hinges with soap in the afternoon and the quiet felt like something he had earned.

The common room fire was no more than embers tucked under their own ash. A few greenish lamps dwindled against the walls where carved serpents curled in the shadows. He stood still until the room was just black shapes, then crossed to the cold grate and jabbed his candle into the cinder bed. It sputtered, then caught, a coin of light no bigger than his palm. He cupped it and the room shrank politely to wherever he was looking.

The castle at night listened. That was the only way to think of it. Tom moved as if he walked inside someone else’s ear, every drip and shift magnified. The tapestries breathed when he passed them, and in one portrait a monk snored until he made a sound that turned into a snuffle; the paint of his chin glistened. Tom slid along the wall when the corridor turned, cut past a window with fat rain drops crawling down it, and stilled when lantern light swam across the distant flagstones like a pond disturbed.

Pringle’s footfall came with it—drag, step, drag, the scuff of an old boot that had a heel down. Tom had heard it enough to know the rhythm. He put his candle behind his back, flattening himself into the thin slice of shadow between a suit of armour and the wall, and the breath he took was as slow as he could make it without hurting. The lantern glow widened, a hot puddle. It stopped. Metal chimed as the armour next to him shifted the tiniest fraction. Tom’s mouth went dry. The drip became a hammer.

“Rats,” Pringle muttered, and the glow moved on. The drag-step faded.

Tom did not move for three whole counts of his heartbeat. When he did, the armour shivered again on its stand and he gave it a look that would have made an older boy shift first.

There weren’t many more corners to turn. He had marked the way to the lavatory by the girl’s bathroom tiles; they were different here, glossy and scored with scratches where cleaning brushes had gone too hard, as if the custodian had been angry with them. The door gave under his hand with a sticky, reluctant sound.

Inside, the air was wet and sour with old cleaning potion, and a sweetness underneath like flowers left too long in a glass. The candle made the stalls look blind. Water trembled in the bottoms of the sinks with every small gust under the windows.

He slipped the satchel off his shoulder and took out the mirror. It shivered in his fingers. A crack already existed up one side, long as a fingernail and thin. He laid the sock over the bottom edge, a folded bit of school grey with a hole in the toe he’d stitched in awkwardly on his first night. He smiled at it, quick and bright, as if at a friend who would keep a secret.

He set the candle down. Its light slid along the white porcelain, along a pattern in the metal where thumbs had polished it over decades, and found the tiny snake carved there. He could see it once he knew to look: coils wound upon coils, four fangs like short scratches. He bent close and said, very softly, a hiss that slid out of him like steam.

“Open.”

It was in the other tongue—the one that had startled him when it came, the first time, and then had felt as simple as breathing. The sink trembled. Metal shivered against stone. The basin gave a little squeal, then, with a noise like heavy cloth pulled over wood, the whole section moved aside and away. Stone slid into stone.

Cold gusted out. It smelt of old rock, damp and deep. Tom tucked his candle into the satchel, left the flap open to keep the light low, and swung his legs over the lip without letting his knees knock anything. For a careful headlong moment he hung on with both hands and then let go.

The slide took him like a fish down a throat. The satchel banged against his hip, the mirror knocked a protest he felt more than heard, and thick wet air licked his cheeks. He tried to keep himself straight, heels forward, so the slither did not turn into a tumble. He had learned that on the orphanage bannister, and here there were bends to it, tilts that pulled his shoulder hard into the side, foul water that slapped his cheeks and made him splutter.

He came out onto a shallow ledge and his knees took it, stinging. His hair was full of grit and there was a cool trickle down the back of his neck that had found its way under his collar. He stood, wiped his face with his sleeve, and held the candle out. The light bit at the dark and showed old bones in a fan, all pointing in the same direction like twigs laid by someone with a purpose. He looked at them and was pleased to find that his stomach did not wobble. They were small, mostly. Rat skulls, a cat perhaps, something with long ribs and no skull at all because that had been carried away.

He followed the bones. The tunnel fell away into a chamber with an arched mouth like a yawning thing. On either side of the entrance stone snakes twined up the pillars, each scale cut with care. Their eyes were empty hollows, and when the candle came near, something in the stone shimmered in answer beneath the dust. Tom put his hand against it and felt the cold. He slid his palm down the carved flank where a belly might have been and stopped at the door itself.

The great circle of it was marked all over with snakes locked into their own knots. He cocked his head, looking, and the pattern gave itself, thread by thread, until he could see where to speak to it.

“Open,” he hissed into the worn cold.

They moved. Snakes woke, stone on stone, scales clicking like fingernails being tapped on a desk, and the door split down its centre and slid back into the wall. Cold air pushed into his face and a smell like a cellar kept shut too long. The noise rolled off the ceiling and came back to him as a whisper of its own making.

He slipped inside.

Columns. They held the place up, not the fat sort in the Entrance Hall but tall, pale ones, ribbed like bones, carved with serpents that climbed without ever getting anywhere. His candle made their eyes seem to blink. The floor was flagged and slippery in patches, with a sheen. There was space enough for a match to be played in here. The far wall was a cliff of a face, beard flowing to the floor in stone, and out of the mouth—

He had seen it in dream and book-scraps and in the snake’s own words when he had first taken them into himself, but to stand there and see the mouth of the statue—old, lined, lips slightly parted—was like being at the end of a story and finding it still going. The beard was cut to look soft as a broomtail. The eyes were deep in their sockets, shadow hiding them so he could not tell how they watched.

He held the mirror low, at his knee, and drew his wand out with his left hand to give himself a better angle with the candle, though he did not light it. His own face smeared on the glass, a pale blot, the crack making it look like someone had tried to cut him in two and failed. He lowered the glass further until it took only the floor and a lick of shadow. He did not mean to let it see the eye. Jaw or lip, he told himself. Nothing higher. He felt the itch to look up press at the top of his skull like a hand.

“Wake,” he said, tongue twisting, the sibilants longer, because that was how it wanted to be said. “Wake. Come.”

Silence.

Then the wet sound of something big unpeeling from itself.

Stone shrieked as a weight dragged across it. The mouth in the statue opened a little more without changing at all, a trick of shadow, but the sound came from within it, from behind it perhaps, from a long black that had its own shape. The air moved over his hands and he felt that it was not the wind, but breath—the sort that slid in and did not slop around like ordinary air. He could smell scale and mould and the sharp tin of old water.

A head came like a ship out of a cave, and everything inside him tried to pull his face up to see it. Tom flinched and hissed at his own muscles the way one might hiss at a cat about to jump on a table. He fixed his eyes on the mirror and slid the glass so it caught the underside of what was coming.

Jaw. It was a jaw like the lip of a bucket, the scales there hard and dull, not golden but green such as a pond gets in heat. A slit through which breath came, opening and closing, and at the corner a thick hook of fang, sheathed in its own piece of mouth. He saw the tongue flick once, dark and wet, and the mirror trembled in his hand.

“Small,” came the word, not in his ear but in his head where the other tongue lived. It was not a word, exactly, but a shape made of taste and a scrape of sound. “Wet. Warm.”

“I am Speaker,” Tom whispered, careful to let the words slide out flat. “I speak. I say come. I say wait.”

The tongue tasted the air again. A sound like slow silk on stone answered, long body pulling itself along. The mirror’s edge dug into his palm and he did not shift to ease it. He let the picture come to him: a hinge of a jaw that could open wider than anything ought to, scales that were not neat but scraped, some old scars across them. It was so close now that the smell of it pushed into his nose.

“Hunger,” it said. The shape of hunger met the part of him that understood the word and pushed at it, big as a hand.

“I will bring food,” he said. He had already formed the picture he wanted. Big. He put a weight to the word. He thought of the sides of meat he had seen being swung from a cart in the back lane of a Muggle butcher’s near the orphanage, fat pale as candle grease, the slab of it. He thought of the kitchens here—he had caught a glimpse through a cracked door, buckets of trimmings, a boy carrying a tray of hearts, all gleaming, and an old man in a cap handing the sacks over to an elf who beamed as if a holiday had arrived. Tuesdays, when the weather was better. He had watched once from the stairs, counting the times the same cart had rattled under the arch. “Big. Warm.”

“Now,” it said, teeth clicking. “Bite now.”

The mirror gave a little pop in the corner, the crack running with a noise like frost. A wet drop from the ceiling chose that moment to fall and splashed on the glass. For an instant everything bent, the jaw becoming an eye, the eye a round bright coin, and Tom’s head snapped up an inch before he caught himself. A shadow fell across his wrist—a bend of something heavy moving, sliding over his sleeve—and his heart lurched. His mouth found the other tongue without thinking.

“Down,” he hissed, the sound tight, the end sharp. “Wait.”

A sound, annoyed, like a cart wheel catching on a stone came out of the dark. The head moved, breath washed over his fingers and dried them in an instant. The drop on the mirror spread and then ran, making his own fingers look as if they were melting.

“Where?” it said. He could feel it sniffing the air, the long tongue tasting the warm points. “Where meat? Where hot?”

“In the pipes,” Tom said. He made his voice steady as a teacher’s, the ones who made you listen without raising the stick. “Under the school. Water runs. Smells run. I will give you a smell. I will mark the run and you will come. Not up, not out. You will taste under. You will bite only when I say.”

It did not like that. He could feel the dislike like a coil drawing tight. The jaw, reflected low, edged nearer, the hook of a fang a finger’s width from his wrist now. He could hear his own heartbeat in his ears, heavy and slow—too slow—and the candle flame pressed hard against the side of its little wax cup.

“Speaker small,” the voice shaped. “Why speak to me? Old-speaker asleep. Dark long. Hunger long.”

“I woke you,” he said. He reached for the picture he had of himself—the one that had got him to this spot tonight. He was neat and clever and quick, and he kept his own secrets in his pockets where no one could pull them out. He had not had anyone to keep him, so he had learned to keep himself, and this was another sort of keeping. He breathed in through his nose and caught the iron taste of old water. “I woke you. I am the Heir.”

The jaw paused. A sound went along the body in the dark, a long uncoiling like rope let loose.

“Cold-name,” the voice said, tasting it. “Old. Under-stone. You taste Old in your word.”

“Salazar,” Tom said in Parseltongue, letting the s sounds lie long. He felt the name pass his teeth and knew it for what it was down here: not a name you put on a parchment, but a scent you rolled in until everything knew where you had been.

That pleased it or stilled it; he could not tell which, only that the pressure he had felt trying to lift his head lessened. The mirror shook again and he swallowed, closing his fingers around the frame tighter. His palm slid and he felt a sting. He had cut himself on a bit of tin in a bin at the orphanage once, and this was that kind of cut—thin and angry. Warm wetness soothed the sting as it ran down to his wrist.

“Food,” he said, a little breathless. He could feel the warm line along his hand now and did not look down because that would mean moving the mirror. “Big. Not rats.” He made a face as he said it, because he did not care for rats as anything but a nuisance, and perhaps the distaste would read as command. “Boar.” He had seen one when a pair of older boys had dared one another to creep close to the Forest’s edge. A black shape that burst through ferns, ugly and glorious. He held the size of it in his mind, the way it would take two big men to lift it. “Deer. Pig. Heart. Warm.”

The hunger hit him again, almost an ache, and he pressed on, pushing the picture of the butcher’s cart to the front of his mind. He saw it wobble through the arch to the courtyard, the horse blowing steam, bags hung like soft stones. He saw himself lifting the flap of a sack with fingers that did not tremble and easing out the slick, weighty thing within. He put the smell of it into the word.

When he looked, very carefully, the jaw had stopped moving. The slit there quivered. The hook of the fang shone only a little where the candle light slid over it.

“Not up,” the voice said again, stubborn as a child. “Not out. Stone. Long-place.”

“Not up,” Tom said. “Not yet.”

That was enough. You did not tell a thing like this that it would never go up. He knew that as sure as he knew which boys would shove you on the stairs and which would shove you only when there were new eyes looking. He slid his right foot back an inch, found the line between two flags and put the toe there as if he had always stood so. His back prickled under his shirt.

The mirror gave another tiny cry and a thread of the crack ran, cousin to the first, up and across his own dull reflection. He swallowed and fixed his eyes on the bit of lower jaw where a scale stuck out, old damage. He could control his hands; he was good at controlling his hands. His legs made their own minds sometimes; he told them not to now.

“You will sleep,” he said. He kept the hiss low, the way a snake might speak to its own tail. “Sleep now. Wake when I say. I bring food. I open the under-way. I give you heat. You do not move when the bright walks. You do not bite what I do not give.”

Silence. The hiss of his own breath seemed very loud. There was a stretch of time between him saying it and it taking, and in that time he thought of the first time he had spoken to the boys at the orphanage to make them stop taking his things. He had told them that if they took his things, their things would go missing too. He hadn’t had a plan then. He had only had a voice as flat and certain as the Matron’s when she called lights out. And they had stopped, because sometimes that was all anyone wanted: the sound of someone who sounded as if they knew how it was going to be.

The head shifted. Scales rasped on stone. The warm smell of it retreated a little, then again a little more. The pressure on the top of his skull lifted as if a palm had been taken off it. In the mirror, the jaw became just jaw again, and then a line, and then nothing but the suggestion of a curve back in shadow.

“Sleep,” it said. The word was simple in its mouth.

“Sleep,” Tom echoed, and it was a relief like the heavy iron bell at St Brigid’s stopping when you hadn’t known it had been ringing in your bones.

He waited. He did not put the mirror down. He waited until he could not hear the stone whisper anymore, until the old wet smell swam back into his nose and became just the place again. His arm stung properly now. He looked, careful, and saw that the glass had eaten a line into his palm, a thin V where the crack had met the edge. Blood had made his grip slick and the sock was spotted a darker grey. He put the mirror flat on the floor and sat back on his heels.

The comedown shook him. It was stupid—he knew it was—but his knees bumped the flagstones once before he made them stop. The cold of it soaked him, and he had a sudden clear thought that his shirt was wet down his back and he was going to get a chill and he did not have anyone to bring him broth. He curled his cut palm into his mouth without thinking and sucked. The blood tasted metallic and thin and that steadied him. He hated the taste and he wanted it, both together.

“All right,” he said quietly to the empty air, in English now. His voice sounded like someone who had just run a race and won without anyone seeing. “All right. Sleep.”

He wrapped the mirror in the sock as far as it would go; he could feel the crack under the wool like a bone under skin. He pulled out another sock from his satchel—the pair had never properly matched since he had mended them poorly—and bound that one around the rest of the glass. He slid it in, and the wrapped thing went with two soft clicks as the edges met a buckle. He wiped his cut hand on the inside of his robe where no one would look, then pulled the robe sleeve down over it to hide the stain.

He stood, tucked his satchel strap across his body, and turned to the way out. Stone waited for him, polite and secret.

On the way back he paused at the foot of the door with the snakes and laid his palm flat against it. “Close,” he whispered in Parseltongue, and the stone snakes stirred and slid back into their sleeping shapes until the seam was a line anyone’s eye would pass over.

The slide was worse going up, because there was no up. He had to take the other way, along the tunnel where the bones lay and then onto a steeper angle where water had made a path for itself. He crouched and went sideways like a crab where the drops made the stone slime-green. The candle guttered and went out once where the air rushed narrow and he licked his thumb and pinched the wick until it smelt of finger-skin and old smoke. He thought of the butcher’s back door and the horse that stamped and blew like a kettle, and of the stack of buckets under the stairs in the kitchen arch. He could tip one over and nobody would notice. He knew where to go on Tuesday morning. He had never spoken to a house-elf before, not properly; he had seen them, small and pleased to be helpful, and it would not do to have them helpful to him just yet. He would need to be where they were not looking. Pipes, he thought. Drains. There were iron grates in the courtyard, grills in corridors, little square doors in the corners of rooms where water came and went. Water liked to run; it would not be hard to make it carry other things with it. He thought of blood moving the way water moved, and his hand flexed of its own accord and stung.

He came up under the sink again as the last of the cold on his back began to feel like something he could never get rid of, like a hand stuck there. He put his ear up towards the hole and listened. The lavatory had feelings at night, like the rest of the castle, and he did not want those feelings to belong to anyone else just now.

The room above made its usual throat noises, and then a thin girl’s laugh bubbled through a pipe, absurd and very soft, as if she had her mouth against the tap and was playing. It made the hairs on his arms sit up. He thought of a face pressed to the mirror here, eyes squeezed shut, mouth open as if to sing. He thought of her cheeks as two pale shells. He set his hand to the carved snake and said, “Close,” under his breath.

The sink came back to itself, grinding. He watched till he could not see the seam. Then, without letting go of the memory of where it was, he took his satchel and his little circle of candle-light and turned for the door.

In the corridor the cold was thinner and smelled of chalk. His wet clothes clung when he moved and a drop ran down from his hair and into his collar and found the place between his shoulder blades where his shirt stuck already. He came to the corner with the armour and stopped when a light slid across the far wall and then along the floor, slow and yellow—Pringle again, lantern held low.

Tom blew his candle out. The darkness came in like a cloth thrown over his head. He backed into the nearest stall and counted without sound, using the beats of his heart as numbers. The lantern bobbed past the door crack, a streak only, and Pringle’s steps went drag, step, drag. Something bumped and Pringle swore under his breath, then the light went smaller and moved away.

Tom came out again and went, quick and without fuss, the way he had come. He put his feet where the dark made friendly shapes out of the shoulders of stair treads; he kept his shoulder from brushing the tapestries where shadow lived under they skin of the cloth. He had thought, once, that the whole school slept at night. It did not. It watched and it waited for someone to go, and if you did not know that, it would make a noise around you just to prove it was there.

By the common room fireplace he crouched and smudged the ash where his candle had gone. He reached into the soot and dabbed the ashes with his cut finger until it looked like any other smudge. He went to the dormitory door and put his shoulder to it rather than his hand so the latch would not wear a mark; he turned it with two fingers at the bottom where the wood was rougher. Inside, the dark had that thick feeling again, damp and heavy with breath. He breathed with it until his own breath fitted and did not feel like a stranger.

He did not undress. He did not like the slick cling of his shirt but he did not want to turn the light on to find a fresh one. He set his satchel down, found the step by memory, slid the trunk out enough to lift its lid, and pushed the satchel beneath a stack of folded pyjamas he never wore because they had been someone else’s first. He tucked the wrapped mirror farther underneath and heard it make the tiny sound a quiet secret makes when you pack it. He dropped the sock with the neat, dark spots in a different corner and shoved a book on top of it—History of Magic, which you could always put on anything and no one would want to touch it.

He shut the trunk very softly. He lay down on the bed and made sure the blankets, which had been warmed by a boy who had not quite his shape, were pulled up over his shoulder and his hair so he could feel the heat of his own breath back. He thought of the mouth of the statue and the way the jaw had come out into his reach. He thought of the hook of the fang being a finger’s breadth from his wrist. His mouth made a sideways shape at the thought, not a smile, exactly, but the promise of one that he would never show anyone else.

He tasted iron again and found that he had put his cut finger into his mouth without thinking. He took it out, rubbed the rest of the blood on the inside of the blanket edge where no one would see, and let his hand hang off the side of the bed like anyone’s.

When sleep came, it came in pieces, like pages falling out of a book with the cover missing. He did not dream anything he would remember. He dreamed of stairs that turned to slides and of a crowd of pale faces watching him go down, none of them moving to help but none of them laughing either. Once, in the thin place between dreaming and waking, he thought he heard someone giggle—not the girl’s wet laugh from the pipes, but the quick noise boys made when they weren’t meant to be awake. He put his face deeper into the pillow, until the feathers in it smelled like the cupboard at the orphanage where they kept sheets.

It was not over. It was not even properly begun. He lay there and felt the shape of the plan like a thing under his bed that only he knew about. The butcher’s cart came on Tuesdays. He would have to find the exact time; he would have to be there before the horse had done blowing steam. He would have to work out how to turn out a drain without a house-elf clicking its tongue and whisking him away from the mess. He could do it. He liked things with edges he could find in the dark.

In the morning he would pinch his finger under the table to remember not to wince when he wrote with it. He would go to class and listen when Professor Dippet droned and the others fidgeted, and he would keep his eyes on his parchment like a very good boy. He would watch the windows for the horse’s plume of breath.

When the last of his thinking thinned to nothing, the dormitory made its old sounds again. Water blopped against the glass in the wall. Someone snored—a little whistle at the end of it. The lake pressed its cold face against the window and did not come in. Somewhere, higher up in the castle where the night was drier, a shard of mirror that had ridden in his satchel came loose of its sock wrapping and dropped onto stone in the bathroom with a ping as bright and small as a bell struck in a different world.

Tom's eyes snapped open in the dark. He held still and counted a slow three. Above him, far above, Pringle's lantern moved across a patch of floor, showed under a door, and went again. He let his breath go.

In the walls the pipes whispered to one another, water running where it always ran, taking with it whatever it always took. Somewhere in the long under, far below his bed, a thing as old as the stones had folded its head into its own loop and slept as he had told it to. He shut his eyes, and the corners of his mouth tugged before he made them lie flat. He thought the word Heir like a pebble rolled around the mouth, small and hard and his.

But as sleep pulled him under again, a different thought surfaced—unbidden, unwelcome. The creature had not obeyed because it respected him. It had obeyed because it was hungry and he had promised meat. The moment he failed to deliver, the moment his control slipped...

His cut hand throbbed beneath the blanket. In the Chamber below, the Basilisk's tongue would be tasting the air even now, learning the shape of the pipes, memorising the scent-paths that led up, up, up to where warm things walked and breathed and did not know what slept beneath their feet.

Tuesday, Tom reminded himself. The butcher's cart comes on Tuesday.

He had four days to prove he was worth obeying. Four days before hunger made the creature's patience run out.

Somewhere above, a girl laughed in her sleep—or perhaps it came from the pipes, that wet giggle he had heard before. Tom did not sleep again for a very long time.

The Tuesday came.

Tom had mapped the route three times in his head: kitchen corridor to the drain grate behind the pantry, drain to the pipe junction where the school's plumbing met the older, forgotten passages. He had watched the butcher's cart arrive at half-seven, had counted the sacks, had noted which house-elf took which bundle to which cold-storage room.

The hardest part was the waiting.

He crouched in the shadow of a flour barrel, his robes tucked tight, and listened to the elves chattering in their high, eager voices. They moved like wind through the kitchen—here, gone, back again—and he had to time his breaths to their rhythm. When one disappeared into the larder with a tray of eggs, he moved.

The sack was heavier than he'd expected. Lamb, he thought, or perhaps a haunch of something larger. The blood had soaked through the burlap in patches, dark and spreading. He dragged it to the grate, worked the iron loose with fingers that shook only slightly, and fed the sack into the darkness below.

He waited.

The sound came up through the pipes like a whisper translated through stone. A wet, heavy shifting. The creak of old muscle uncoiling. And then—

Good, said the voice in his head. Not words, exactly. More like the shape of satisfaction pressed into his skull. Warm. Good.

Tom let out a breath he hadn't known he was holding.

"More," he hissed into the grate. "Tuesday. Every Tuesday. You wait. You sleep. You do not hunt."

Sleep, the voice agreed. Wait. Warm comes.

He replaced the grate and walked back through the kitchen as if he had every right to be there. A house-elf looked up from scrubbing a pot and blinked at him with enormous eyes.

"Mr. Student is being lost?" it asked.

"Just passing through," Tom said. "Lovely morning, isn't it?"

The elf's ears twitched with confusion, but it went back to its scrubbing. Tom climbed the stairs to the Great Hall, and if his hands were still shaking slightly, no one noticed.

The second Tuesday was easier. The third, easier still.

By the fourth week, he had established a rhythm. The sack of meat. The grate. The whispered commands. The creature's voice in his head, drowsy with feeding, patient in a way that felt like a held breath.

He began to learn its moods. When it was hungry, the pressure in his skull grew sharper, more insistent. When it was sated, there was a warmth to the silence, almost affectionate. It called him Speaker and Heir and sometimes, in the deepest registers of that inhuman voice, something that might have been friend.

He did not correct it. He did not tell it that he did not have friends. He simply fed it, and listened, and learned.

The Basilisk had been alone for a very long time. It did not understand calendars or seasons or the slow accumulation of years. It understood before—when the old Speaker had walked these halls and given it purpose—and it understood now—when a new Speaker had come and the hunger was finally being answered. The time between was darkness and sleep and a loneliness so vast that Tom felt it press against his own, smaller isolation like a hand laid over a hand.

The other ones, it said once, and he felt the shape of students moving through the halls above. They walk. They do not see. They do not hear. Only you.

"Only me," Tom agreed.

You will stay?

It was not a question a snake should ask. It was not even a question, really. It was a need dressed up in words, vulnerable in a way that made Tom's chest tight with something he refused to name.

"I will stay," he said. "I am the Heir. This is my place."

Our place, the Basilisk corrected, and there was a warmth in the correction that felt like the closest thing to tenderness a thousand-year-old serpent could manage.

Tom did not argue. Even monsters could be lonely. Even monsters could be made to need you.

It was, he thought, the most dangerous kind of power: not the power to command, but the power to be needed.

The next morning, he found Eileen waiting by the library doors.

She did not look at him when he approached. Her eyes were fixed on the spine of a book she was not reading, the pages held open at a chapter on ingredient substitutions that she had read three times already. Her hair was pulled back too tightly, the way she wore it when she wanted to feel armoured.

"You went back down," she said. It was not a question.

Tom stopped two feet away, exactly the distance one would keep from an acquaintance one had nothing particular to say to. "Good morning to you as well."

"Don't." The word was sharp. She still did not look at him. "I could smell the damp on you in the common room. Stone-damp. That particular kind. The kind that doesn't come from anywhere but down."

He considered lying. The lie was ready—a story about the prefects' bathroom, about curiosity regarding the plumbing. But Eileen had seen the Chamber entrance. She had stood in that bathroom and watched the sink move. A lie would insult them both.

"Yes," he said.

She closed the book. Her fingers were white on the spine. "And?"

"And I am handling it."

"Handling it." She turned to face him then, and her eyes had that look they got during difficult brewing—focused, measuring, already calculating what might go wrong. "Tom, there is a creature down there that could kill everyone in this school with a look. You are not handling it. You are playing with something you cannot control."

"I can control it."

"You think you can control it. That is not the same thing."

He felt the flash of irritation and let it pass. Eileen had earned the right to say this. She had kept his secret for three weeks now, ever since she had followed him to the bathroom and seen too much. She could have gone to Dumbledore. She could have gone to Dippet. She had done neither.

"What would you have me do?" he asked. "Seal it up and walk away? Pretend I never found it?"

"Yes," she said. "Exactly that."

"I can't."

"You mean you won't."

He was quiet for a moment. The library doors opened behind them and a cluster of third-years spilled out, chattering about an essay. Eileen pressed herself closer to the wall to let them pass, and Tom did the same, and for a moment they stood shoulder to shoulder like conspirators.

"You're right," he said quietly. "I won't. But that doesn't mean I'm reckless. I have a plan."

"Tell me."

He hesitated. Not because he didn't trust her—he did, as much as he trusted anyone—but because saying it aloud would make it real, would invite the universe to notice and interfere.

"Tuesday," he said finally. "The butcher's cart. I've worked out a way to get it food without anyone knowing. If it's fed, it will sleep. If it sleeps, it won't hunt. That's the control, Eileen. Not force. Satisfaction."

She was quiet, thinking. Her mouth had that line to it that meant she was finding problems and deciding whether to name them.

"And if Tuesday doesn't work?" she asked.

"Then I'll find another way."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only answer I have."

She looked at him for a long moment. Her eyes were very dark in the dim light of the corridor, and for a second he saw something in them that might have been disappointment—not in him, exactly, but in the situation, in the way the pieces had fallen.

"I'll help you," she said. The words seemed to cost her something. "With the food. With whatever you need. But Tom—" She stopped. Her hand came up as if to touch his arm, then fell back. "If this goes wrong. If anyone gets hurt. I will not cover for you. Do you understand?"

"I understand."

"Do you?" She held his gaze. "I mean it. I will walk into Dippet's office and tell him everything. The Chamber. The creature. Your name written on the entrance in a language I couldn't read. Everything."

He should have been angry. He should have felt threatened, cornered, forced to consider what leverage he might use to ensure her silence. Instead, he felt something else—something uncomfortably close to gratitude.

"I know," he said. "That's why I told you."

She blinked. "What?"

"Because I knew you would hold me to it." He smiled, very slightly. "You're my insurance policy, Eileen. The one person who will stop me if I go too far."

She stared at him. For a moment she looked almost hurt, as if he had taken something she had offered freely and turned it into a transaction. Then her face smoothed out, returned to its usual careful neutrality.

"I suppose that's one way to look at it," she said. Her voice was flat.

"It's the honest way."

"Is it?" She picked up her book again, held it against her chest like a shield. "Sometimes I think you don't know what honest means, Tom. You just know what words make people feel like you're being honest."

She walked away before he could answer. He watched her go—the straight spine, the careful steps, the way she did not look back—and felt something shift in his chest, something he did not have a name for and did not want to examine too closely.

Insurance policy, he had said.

He wondered if that was true. He wondered if it had ever been true, or if he had simply found the words that would make her stay without requiring him to need her.

The library doors opened again. A prefect emerged, gave Tom a sharp look that said shouldn't you be in class, and moved on. Tom waited until the footsteps faded, then turned and walked in the other direction, toward the dungeons, toward the pipes that whispered with old water and older hungers.

Tuesday. The butcher's cart. A creature that could kill with its eyes.

And Eileen Prince, watching, waiting, ready to end him if he failed to be what he had promised he could be.

He found, to his surprise, that he did not mind. Not as much as he should have.

That, more than anything, unsettled him.