Draconia Malfoy has never been told no. Not by her father, not by her friends, not by anyone.
Then, at eleven years old, in a robe shop in Diagon Alley, a boy with messy hair and broken glasses says it.
Seven years. One rivalry. A Yule Ball she will...
It began with a dragon, which Draconia took as a personal insult.
She had not been following Potter. She had been taking the air, at dusk, on the lawn, in the general direction of Hagrid's hut, on four separate evenings.
Hagrid was the school gamekeeper. He was twice the size of a normal man, he lived in a wooden hut at the edge of the grounds, and he was Harry Potter's friend. Potter had been going down there far too often lately. He kept coming back with scorch marks on his sleeves.
On the fourth evening she looked through a gap in the curtains. There was a black thing the size of a kettle on the kitchen table. It sneezed, and set fire to Hagrid's beard.
It was a baby dragon. Potter was in there. So was Granger. They were both laughing.
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Draconia stood in the wet grass with her nose an inch from the glass. She was named for a dragon. There had been one on her nursery ceiling, picked out in silver stars. And it was Harry Potter, who had not known dragons existed until last summer, who got to sit at a table with a real one.
It was just like the broom. In his first week he had been put on the Quidditch team, against the rules, without even asking. Things simply came to him.
She knew what a Malfoy did with a secret like this. Keeping a dragon was against the law. You carried the secret to a teacher, quietly, and you let the teacher do the rest.
But she had tried that already. In September she had challenged Potter to a duel at midnight, and then sent the caretaker to catch him instead of going herself. Potter had got away. Worse, he had worked out what she'd done. The next morning he had leaned over her porridge and said, Next time you want to see me at midnight, Malfoy, you could just ask.
She had thought about that sentence every day since. She knew, because she had counted.
She was not going to ask. But this time she would not send somebody else either.
Finding out the plan was easy. The dragon had bitten Ron Weasley, and he was in the hospital wing with a hand swollen to the size of a melon, telling everyone it was a dog. Weasley did not know how to whisper. By Thursday she had the whole of it. They were sending the dragon away, to friends of Weasley's older brother. Saturday. Midnight. The top of the Astronomy Tower, the tallest tower in the castle.
So she would be there. She would be standing at the top of the stairs when Potter arrived with his illegal dragon. He would see her face, and he would know exactly who had caught him. Nobody was ever going to say that she had been too scared to come.
She got as far as the bottom of the tower.
"Miss Malfoy."
It was Professor McGonagall, the strictest teacher in the school. She was wearing a tartan dressing gown and a hairnet. Neither of them made her any less frightening.
