Vol. 0: What Came Before - Ch. 1

I. From the Private Diary of Lucius Malfoy

Malfoy Manor, Wiltshire — the 5th of June, 1988

Dracina is eight years old today; and since I cannot sleep, and since it has been my habit for some years to set down in this book whatever I should be unwilling to say aloud and equally unwilling to forget, I shall attempt some account of her. A man who writes of his child at midnight runs a considerable risk of writing nonsense; but I judge that risk the smaller of two, the other being that I should write nothing, and find in ten years’ time that I could no longer recall what she was at eight.

I could not be prouder of her. I have written that sentence three times this evening, and twice struck it out in favour of some more measured form of words (such as a father might employ who did not wish to be thought foolish even by himself); but each of the measured forms, read back, was untrue, and the plain sentence is all that is left standing.

At dinner today, when Dobby brought in the cake, he set it down a little crooked, so that one of the sugared peacocks which Narcissa had ordered for the top slid down the side and came to rest upon its back in the icing, with its feet in the air. He began at once upon that performance with which every member of this household is acquainted, and had got so far as to seize a candlestick for the purpose, when Dracina said to him, before her mother or I could speak, “Stop that. It’s a peacock, Dobby. Nobody has died. Thank you for the cake.” Then she turned to me, with an air of the most perfect composure, and asked whether that had been correct. I told her that it had; and I believe I told her the truth, though I arrived at the belief slowly, for I could not recollect having said anything of the kind to an elf in the whole course of my life. Her governess is a Rosier, and thinks elves a species of furniture; her mother is kind to them in a general way, and would no more thank one for a cake than she would thank the table for holding it up.

She must have had it from somewhere, and I am driven to suppose she had it from me: from some remark of mine, made upon an occasion I have entirely forgotten, about the courtesy a great House owes to those who serve it, which I intended as an ornament and she received as a rule. It is a disconcerting thing, to find that one’s maxims have been believed. It is more disconcerting to find that one’s manner has been believed along with them. A fortnight since, the Parkinsons dined here, and Dracina said something to their girl about her nose so cold, so exactly made, and so entirely unanswerable, that the child was taken home in tears. I reproved her, and she bore it well. I did not tell her that I heard my own voice in every syllable; still less that I understood perfectly the pleasure she had taken in the composition. She has had both from me, the courtesy and the cruelty, and I cannot flatter myself that I chose which she should take.

Nor, I think, did I choose for myself what I took from my own father. He was a man of strong opinions and few reasons; or, to speak more fairly of him, he possessed his reasons so completely that it never occurred to him they might require to be stated. From him I learned which tone is proper to a Minister and which to a shopkeeper, how an enemy is to be received at one’s own table, and how a Weasley is to be looked at across a room; and I learned these things as a boy learns the shape of his own hands, so early and so thoroughly that I could not afterwards have told you I had learned them at all. By the time I came of age I wore my station as I wore my name, and with as little reflection.

It is commonly said that a daughter softens her father. I grant that I am fonder, which requires no explanation, and gentler, which is less to my credit than it sounds, since a child of five cannot be governed by the methods which suffice for the Wizengamot. But the change of real consequence is that I have grown more serious about my station, and of this the proverb says nothing at all. A child does not permit a man to wear his station without reflection. She asks why of every form he has never examined, and she asks it with the dreadful patience of a person who has nowhere else to be.

At Easter she rode out with me to the western edge of the estate, and upon our return she asked, with no appearance of malice and a very great appearance of interest, why the Malfoys, who were the oldest family in Wiltshire, should have tenants whose roofs let in the rain. I answered that the matter was the steward’s concern. She considered this for the length of the avenue, and then asked whose steward he was. I rode out again the next morning, alone, and found that she was right, and more right than she knew; for the western cottages had been neglected through three winters, and the repairs charged to the estate regardless. When I told her afterwards the old rule of our House, which my father gave to me and his father to him, that a Malfoy answers for whatever is done in his name, she said, “Then you have to answer for the roof.” I have answered for it. It cost me forty Galleons and a steward, and I count the price a low one. I found, in short, that I could not answer her as my father had answered me; and a father who will not lie to his daughter must either confess that he does not know, or go and find out.

I went down into the old muniment room one afternoon in the winter of 1985, intending to spend an hour there, and I spent the better part of the season. There were wills and letters, and the accounts of old patronage: apprentices paid for, widows pensioned, wands bought for children whose fathers could not afford them. Above all there were the household books of my great-great-grandmother Héloïse, who kept this estate through two bad harvests and a goblin rising. One of them lies open before me now, in a hand so small that I read it with a magnifying charm. At the head of every year’s accounts she has written the same line, non nobis solum nati sumus. She wrote that a great house is a granary, filled in the good years in order that it may be emptied in the bad; and in another place, more shortly, and I think more wisely, that before one gives oneself away one had better have something worth the giving. I copied these out for Dracina, and she has them pinned above her bed.

It was in this book that I read her account of the goblin rising, in which she stood at the gates of this house in her nightgown with her wand in her hand and kept them shut three days together, and fed every tenant on the estate out of her own stores while she did it. When I had read it I tried to call to mind a single man of the Dark Lord’s company who would have done the same, and I could not. I believed then, and I believe still, that the cause of the old families was a just cause: that our world is better governed by those who have governed it for centuries than by the newcomers who pour into it every September knowing nothing of its history and caring less; and that our blood, which has carried our gifts down a thousand years, is thinned by every marriage made outside it. I believe also that the cause was served by vulgar men and disgraced by vulgar means, and that I did not keep myself as clear of either as I ought. I have made such arrangements with the Ministry as have kept my family safe. I seldom propose to examine those arrangements, which is itself, I suppose, a fact worth recording. What I meant by the thought about Héloïse I have never been able quite to make out.

Narcissa will not read this, and would be displeased by most of it. I may say with entire truth that I love her more now than on the day we married; and I set this down first because what follows might otherwise sound ungracious — namely that we have disagreed over Dracina more often, and more warmly, than over anything else in our lives together. She has lost both her sisters, each in her own manner; and I believe the loss has made her hold the more tightly to what remains.

She thinks I make the child too grave. She would have her dance, and sit for her portrait, and be admired, and she says, with justice, that a girl taught nothing but duty will grow up without those graces which make duty tolerable to others. I say that a girl taught nothing but grace will grow up the property of whoever flatters her first. We have compromised, as people do who love one another and the same child: Dracina has a dancing master on Tuesdays, and on Thursdays she sits with me for an hour over the estate books. She likes the Thursdays better. Narcissa says that this is my fault, and it is, and I am proud of it.

Dracina will be handsome, rich, and of rank; three things which together have ruined more women than poverty ever did, since each of them invites flattery, and the three together invite it from every quarter at once. I would have her difficult to deceive and difficult to frighten; perfectly civil to an enemy while yielding him nothing; able to command herself before she is permitted to command anyone else. When she meets with a fact which will not fit, I would have her set it upon the mantelpiece and look at it until she understands why it is there, since the facts which will not fit are the only ones that can teach her anything she does not already know. I mean, in a word, to give her so much substance that no one will ever be able to make her merely ornamental. She will be equal to it. She will receive this House from me when I am done with it, and hand it on larger than she received it; and there will not be a family in Britain that does not know her name, nor one that does not wish it had made a better match for its sons.

She is asleep now, with Héloïse’s maxims above her head and the sugared peacock, rescued from the icing, upon the table beside her bed. Narcissa tells me that I am a fool about her. Narcissa is entirely correct, and I am going to bed.

— L. M.

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Vol. 0: What Came Before - Ch. 2

II. The Hogwarts Express

1 September 1991

The floor of the compartment was strewn with the wrappers of Chocolate Frogs and the wreckage of a box of Every Flavor Beans, and Ron was in the middle of explaining which of the Chudley Cannons’ Chasers was worst when the door slid open.

Three students stood in the corridor, and Harry recognized the one in the middle at once. It was the pale girl from Madam Malkin’s robe shop. Her fair hair was neat, her robes already sat on her as though they had been made for her, which they probably had, and she was looking at Harry with a great deal more interest than she had shown in Diagon Alley.

“Is it true?” she said. “They’re saying all down the train that Harry Potter is in this compartment. So it was you.”

“Yes,” said Harry. He was looking at the two boys with her. Both of them were thickset and looked extremely mean. They stood half a step behind the girl, as though they had been doing so for years.

“This is Crabbe, and this is Goyle,” she said. “And I am Malfoy. Dracina Malfoy.”

Ron gave a small cough which sounded suspiciously like a laugh. Dracina’s eyes moved to him.

“You find that amusing?” she asked. Then she looked at his hair. “Weasley, I suppose. My father says your family is very old. He also says it has spent several generations forgetting what that ought to mean.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Ron, going red.

“Exactly what I said.” She turned back to Harry. “You have been brought up with Muggles, haven’t you? You’ll find there are families here who know how our world works, and families who have made rather a mess of their place in it. I can help you tell the difference.”

She held out her hand.

Harry looked at it. It occurred to him, distantly, that she must have walked the whole length of the train to find him, and that she had said all of this to him as though she had been rehearsing it, and as though it mattered to her a good deal how it came out. Then he looked at Ron. Ron’s ears were scarlet now.

“I think I can tell who I want to be friends with for myself, thanks,” said Harry.

A pink tinge appeared in Dracina’s pale cheeks. For a second she looked as though Harry had slapped her.

“Very well,” she said. Her voice had gone colder. “You will probably discover that choosing people because they are friendly to you on a train is a poor way to judge them.”

“And choosing them by their surname is better?” said Harry.

“Usually it tells you rather more than nothing.”

“Get out,” said Ron.

Crabbe shifted forward, cracking his knuckles. Dracina stopped him with a look, and he stopped at once, like a dog brought to heel.

“We are going,” she said. At the door she turned back to Harry, and for a moment the coldness slipped. “I did mean to be useful, Potter.”

“You insulted my friend.”

“Your friend insulted me first.”

“He laughed at your name.”

“Precisely, Potter. Precisely.” Dracina drew herself up to her full height, which was not very great. “Good-bye, Boy-Who-Lived.”

She left with Crabbe and Goyle behind her, and slid the door shut with a precision that was somehow worse than a slam. Harry heard her voice in the corridor a moment later, sharp and clear — “No, Goyle, we are not going back for the Pumpkin Pasties” — and then it faded away down the train.

“You’ve met her before?” said Ron.

“In Diagon Alley,” said Harry. He found that he was still looking at the door. “She was in the robe shop.”

“I’ve heard of her family,” said Ron darkly. “They were on You-Know-Who’s side, and then the minute he was gone they all turned up saying they’d been bewitched. Dad reckons her father never needed any bewitching.” He turned to Harry, rather anxiously. “You didn’t want to shake her hand, did you?”

“No,” said Harry, and he was quite sure that he meant it. All the same, it was some time before he stopped thinking about the way her face had looked when he said it.

✦ ✦ ✦

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III. The Forbidden Forest

Spring 1992

“Righ’,” said Hagrid, glaring at the trees as though they were personally responsible for the last ten minutes. “We’re changin’ groups. Neville, you stay with me an’ Hermione. Harry — you take Fang an’ Malfoy, an’ follow this trail. Stay on the path, an’ send up sparks if yeh see anythin’.”

Malfoy looked as though she would have liked to object. Harry found he was rather pleased when she didn’t. She simply looked at Fang, who was drooling on her shoes, and then at Harry, and then set off down the path without waiting for either of them.

They walked for nearly half an hour, deeper and deeper into the forest, until the path became almost impossible to follow because the trees were so thick. Harry thought the blood seemed to be getting thicker. There were splashes on the roots of a tree, as though the poor creature had been thrashing around in pain close by. Harry could see a clearing ahead, through the tangled branches of an ancient oak.

“Look — “ he murmured, holding out his arm to stop Malfoy.

Something bright white was gleaming on the ground. They inched closer.

It was the unicorn all right, and it was dead. Harry had never seen anything so beautiful and sad. Its long, slender legs were stuck out at odd angles where it had fallen and its mane was spread pearly-white on the dark leaves.

Harry had taken one step toward it when a slithering sound made him freeze where he stood. A bush on the edge of the clearing quivered.... Then, out of the shadows, a hooded figure came crawling across the ground like some stalking beast. Harry, Malfoy, and Fang stood transfixed. The cloaked figure reached the unicorn, lowered its head over the wound in the animal’s side, and began to drink its blood.

Malfoy screamed. It was a high, terrible scream, and it was still going on as she turned and ran, and Fang went with her, crashing away through the undergrowth.

The hooded figure lifted its head. Silver blood dripped from somewhere inside the hood. It rose, and came toward Harry, unhurried, and Harry found that he could not move at all.

Then his scar burst into pain. It was worse than anything he had ever felt, as though a white-hot blade had been laid against his forehead, and he staggered backward, half-blind, his hands over his face.

“Potter!“

The shout came from behind him. Red sparks burst high above the trees, scattering light across the clearing.

Malfoy was back at the edge of the clearing. Her face was dead white, her eyes enormous, and the wand in her hand was shaking so badly that Harry thought it was a wonder the sparks had gone up at all.

“Move!“ she shouted at him. “Potter, move —”

Harry could not. The pain had driven him down onto one knee. The hooded figure was nearly on him. Through the blur of tears he saw Malfoy take two steps toward him, then a third, her shaking wand raised, her mouth open as though she meant to shout a spell and could not think of one —

There was a thunder of hooves. Something leapt clean over Harry’s head and came down between him and the hooded figure, rearing. When Harry could see again, the figure had gone.

A centaur stood over him, with white-blond hair and a palomino body, and his eyes were a startling pale blue.

“Are you all right?” said the centaur, drawing Harry to his feet.

“Yes — thank you — what was that?”

The centaur did not answer. He looked at Harry for a long moment, his gaze resting on the livid scar, and then said, “You are the Potter boy. You had better go back to Hagrid. The forest is not safe tonight, least of all for you. My name is Firenze. Can you ride?”

Over Firenze’s shoulder Harry saw Malfoy still standing at the edge of the clearing, her wand raised, shaking.

Firenze followed his gaze. “Your sparks were well sent,” he told her gravely. “Hagrid will have seen them. Go back along the path the way you came, and do not leave it.”

Malfoy looked at Harry. For a moment he thought she would argue.

“Go,” said Firenze, and she went.

✦ ✦ ✦

Firenze said a great many strange things on the way back through the trees, about unicorn blood and cursed half-lives and who in all the world would be desperate enough to drink it, and by the time Hermione came running down the path toward them with Hagrid puffing in her wake, Harry felt as though something cold had lodged permanently beneath his ribs. He hardly heard Hagrid’s exclamations. He slid off Firenze’s back, and the centaur wished him luck in a low voice and was gone into the dark.

Malfoy was waiting a little farther up the path with Fang, who had evidently recovered his nerve, and was now leaning heavily against her legs. She looked as pale as the dead unicorn.

Harry stared at her.

“You came back,” he said.

She drew herself up at once. “I was not going to explain to the staff how I had managed to lose Harry Potter in the Forbidden Forest.”

“You came back, though.”

“Of course I came back.” Her chin went up a further inch. “One doesn’t run off and leave people. Not even you. Some of us were brought up to know what’s owed, Potter, even if your Muggles didn’t think to mention it.”

Harry almost laughed. His hands were still shaking too badly, and it came out as a sort of hiccup.

“Right,” he said.

“Quite.”

He was still looking at her. He did not quite know why. Malfoy seemed to become aware of being looked at. She glanced at him, and then looked away very quickly and bent to haul Fang off her shoes.

“This dog,” she said to nobody in particular, “is a disgrace to his profession.”

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Vol. 0: What Came Before - Ch. 3

IV. A Letter Home

Hogwarts, the night of the Dueling Club, December 1992

Dearest Father,

Professor Lockhart has started a Dueling Club. I won’t waste your time on Professor Lockhart, except to say that Professor Snape disarmed him in front of the entire school within about four seconds, and that it was the most satisfying thing I have seen since I came here. Afterwards they paired us off, and Professor Snape put me with Potter, and suggested a spell to me under his breath, so I cast Serpensortia and made a snake. It was a good snake. I should like you to know that it came out properly the first time.

What I am really writing about is what happened next.

The snake went toward Justin Finch-Fletchley, who is a Hufflepuff and a Muggle-born, and Potter walked up to it and spoke to it. In Parseltongue, Father. I heard it myself, and so did everyone else in the Great Hall. The snake stopped and looked at him, and then Professor Snape vanished it.

Now the whole school is saying that Potter is the Heir of Slytherin and has been Petrifying people. I do not believe that for a moment. He is far too obvious, and too stupid in the particular way that Gryffindors are stupid, and if he were the Heir he would have told everybody by now. That is not what interests me.

You always told me that when I came across a fact that would not fit, I must not throw it away, but put it on the mantelpiece and look at it until I knew why it was there. I have been looking at this one all evening, and I cannot make it sit anywhere.

Everybody knows Parseltongue is Slytherin’s gift. It is in all the histories. It came down in his line, and it is supposed to be one of the surest signs of his blood there is, which is why everyone has gone mad today. So I want to know where Potter got it.

I have thought of several answers, and I will set them down in order, as you taught me.

First, perhaps the histories are wrong, and Parseltongue is not really Slytherin’s at all, or not only his. But if that were so, I think we should have heard of other Parselmouths by now, and I never have, except for very old ones.

Second, perhaps the Potters have a Slytherin somewhere in them that nobody knows about. Could a gift like that hide for a long time, and skip people, and come out again? You said once that I have Grandfather Black’s temper and that he had it from his grandmother, so things do skip. But if Slytherin’s line ran in the Potters, surely someone would have noticed in a thousand years.

Third — and this is the one that I keep coming back to — everybody says that Potter’s mother was Muggle-born. So whatever he has, he has only half of it from a wizarding family. Is a gift like Parseltongue strong enough to come down through a Mudblood child and still come out whole? I thought Muggle blood was supposed to thin things. If it does, then Potter ought to be the last person in the school to have it, and instead he has it more than anybody.

Or perhaps it is only an exception. You have told me there will always be exceptions, and that an exception is not the same thing as a refutation, and I do understand that. But Granger is an exception because she is clever, and lots of people are clever. This seems a different sort of thing to me, because it is not just a talent, it is a particular gift that belongs to a particular family. I may be wrong about that. Please tell me if I am.

I have not said any of this to anyone here. Crabbe and Goyle would not follow it, and Pansy would tell the whole House I was taking Potter’s side, which I am not. I simply want to know how it works.

I am quite sure you will know the answer, or know where to find it. You always do.

Your loving daughter,

Dracina

P.S. Mrs. Goyle has written to me again to ask whether Gregory is eating properly. He is eating far too properly. I have told her so in politer words, and I have made him promise to write home on Sunday, which he will not do unless I stand over him, so I shall stand over him.

P.P.S. Please give my love to Mother, and tell her that I shall be perfectly good about staying at school for Christmas, though I still do not see why the Ministry must choose my holidays to be tiresome.

✦ ✦ ✦

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V. Polyjuice

Christmas Day, 1992

“Pureblood,” said Malfoy to the stretch of bare, damp wall, and a stone door slid open in it.

Harry and Ron followed her through, doing their best to walk the way Crabbe and Goyle walked, which seemed to involve a great deal of swinging of the arms. The Slytherin common room was long and low, with rough stone walls and round greenish lamps hanging from chains in the ceiling. A fire crackled under a carved mantelpiece, and a few Slytherins who had stayed for the holidays were silhouetted against it in high-backed chairs.

“Sit down,” said Malfoy, waving them toward a pair of empty chairs set a little back from the fire. “I’ve got something really funny to show you. Father’s just sent it.”

She disappeared through a door at the far end. Harry and Ron sat, trying to look as though they did this every evening of their lives.

Malfoy came back a minute later carrying a newspaper cutting and a fat packet of letters. She dropped into the chair opposite them, tucked her feet up underneath her, and handed the cutting to Ron.

“This’ll make you laugh,” she said.

Harry saw Ron’s eyes widen. He read the cutting, gave a very forced laugh, and passed it across. It was from the Daily Prophet:

MINISTRY OFFICIAL FINED OVER FLYING CAR

Arthur Weasley, head of the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office, has been fined fifty Galleons for enchanting a Muggle motorcar.

Mr. Lucius Malfoy, a governor of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where the car ended its journey earlier this year, has called for Mr. Weasley’s resignation. “A man who cannot keep his own enchantments within the law,” Mr. Malfoy told this newspaper, “has no business writing laws for the rest of us.”

Mrs. Weasley declined to comment, beyond threatening our reporter with the family ghoul.

“Well?” said Malfoy. “Isn’t it priceless?”

“Ha, ha,” said Harry bleakly.

“Father says it’s the first sensible thing the Prophet‘s printed all year.” She smoothed the cutting on her knee. “And he’s not wrong, you know. Weasley’s son really did fly that car into the school. If anybody else’s father had been mixed up in it, he’d have been sacked by now.”

Ron’s face — or rather Crabbe’s — had gone a dull, blotchy purple.

“What’s the matter with you, Crabbe?” said Malfoy.

“Stomachache,” Ron grunted.

“I’m not surprised. You had four helpings of trifle; I counted. There are peppermint toads in my trunk if it gets any worse.” She turned to Harry, and Harry’s heart missed a beat. “And Goyle, your mother’s written to me again.”

“Er,” said Harry. “Has she?”

“She wants to know whether you’re eating properly and why you never write. I told her you were eating far too properly.” Malfoy fixed him with a stern look. “You promised me you’d write to her on Sunday, and you didn’t. Write tonight. Two whole sides of parchment, not three lines and a blot, and you can tell her about Christmas dinner, since you obviously paid more attention to that than to anything else this term. I am not covering for you again, Goyle. I mean it.”

“Right,” said Harry weakly.

“And Crabbe, I fixed your Herbology essay. You’d spelled ‘Mandrake’ three different ways, and one of them was rude.” She tossed a roll of parchment into Ron’s lap. “Copy it out before Sprout sees it.”

Ron stared down at the parchment as though it might bite him.

Harry didn’t know where to look. He had always supposed that Crabbe and Goyle followed Malfoy about the way Fang followed Hagrid, hopefully, in case of scraps. It had never once occurred to him that she might spend her evenings correcting their spelling and answering letters from their mothers. It occurred to him now, uncomfortably, that she was talking to them the way Mrs. Weasley talked to Fred and George, only with longer words.

Malfoy had drawn the top letter out of the packet and unfolded it. It ran to several closely written sheets. She began to read it. Harry, not wanting to waste too much time, tried to say something, but she shushed him. She read it, and then read it through again, frowning slightly, and Harry, who had nothing to do but sit inside Goyle and wait, found himself watching her.

Malfoy looked different when she wasn’t sneering at him. With nobody there to be clever at, her face was simply thoughtful; there was a smudge of ink on the side of one finger that she kept rubbing at without noticing. She looked, Harry thought, quite a lot like anybody else, and then, a moment later, not very much like anybody else at all, and he could not have said which thought was the stranger. It was very odd to be able to look at her for as long as he liked without her looking back.

“Father’s answered,” she said abruptly. “About Potter.”

Harry went cold all over.

“I wrote to him after the Dueling Club. About the Parseltongue.” She glanced up at them both and sighed. “Oh, never mind, you wouldn’t have — no, actually, you should hear this. It’ll do you good. Listen, and try to understand.”

She found her place, and began to read aloud in a careful, faintly drawling voice that Harry realized, with a jolt, must be an imitation of her father’s.

“You have asked me a better question than you know, my dear, and you have asked it badly, which is to say that you have asked four questions as though they were one. Nearly everybody who speaks of blood does the same. It is the commonest fault in the whole subject, and I do not wish you to share it.

“The first question is one of upbringing. A child raised in our world knows its laws, its dangers, its history and its manners; she has a library at her elbow, and tutors, and a dozen families who have known hers for three hundred years. A child raised among Muggles has none of these things, and arrives at Hogwarts at eleven years old as a foreigner.

“The second is one of family resemblance. Children take after their parents, in temper, in constitution, in aptitude; anyone who has bred owls or horses knows it. Individuals vary enormously within it, and one meets cleverness and dullness in every sort of family.

“The third is one of lineage, and it is the one your question really concerns. Certain gifts run in certain lines, and in almost no others. Parseltongue is the most famous of them, but there are many. Such gifts may lie hidden for a generation or for five, and then appear again; they go where marriages carry them, and are lost where marriages fail to carry them. That is why a marriage, Dracina, is never only the business of the two people standing at the altar.“

She turned the page.

“The fourth question is one of numbers, which the stupid often forget, though I trust you have not: A single tall woman does not prove that men are not, on the whole, taller than women, and a single short man does not prove it either. Exceptions are what one ought to expect, in any large number of people.“

“There,” said Malfoy, looking up. “I told you he’d say that bit.” She seemed to feel that this required explanation. “That’s what I’d got muddled. I’d been thinking about it as if it was one thing. It’s four things, and three of them are perfectly simple, and the fourth one’s just —” She waved a hand. “Look. Millicent Bulstrode’s taller than you, Goyle. Does that mean girls are taller than boys?”

Harry, who could not imagine what Goyle would say to this, said “No.”

“Well, then.” Malfoy settled back, satisfied. “Granger’s Millicent.”

Harry felt a strong desire to argue, and made the alarming discovery, as he hunted for the argument, that he could not immediately find one. He had always thought of all the stuff about blood as just a thing nasty people said because they wanted to be nasty. It had not occurred to him that anybody had actually thought about it, or that the thinking might be difficult to answer. It was a deeply annoying feeling, and as he sat inside it, Goyle’s big hands clenched on his knees, while Malfoy read on.

“As for Potter, I confess I do not know, and I would rather tell you so than pretend. There are several possibilities, and you have found most of them yourself. Records are imperfect, and the Potters married more widely than most; there may be an ancestry in him that nobody has written down. A gift may run quietly through a minor line for centuries. There are oddities in magic that answer to no rule at all. And it is not impossible that the claim that only Slytherin’s descendants have ever spoken with serpents has been repeated with more confidence than evidence. That his mother was what she was does not trouble me as much as it troubles you; a good wine may be carried in a cracked jug and still arrive. You were right to keep the fact. Keep it still. A single strange case is a thing to watch, my dear, and not a thing to build upon.“

She lowered the letter.

“It’s good, isn’t it?” she said. “Father’s always good.” She frowned down at it, though not unhappily. “Potter’s still odd, though. Father doesn’t know, and he says so, which is fair. I’m going to keep watching it.”

“Watching Potter?” said Ron, before he could stop himself.

Malfoy looked mildly surprised that Crabbe had asked anything at all.

“Watching the fact, Crabbe,” she said. “Do try to keep up.” But a faint pink had come into her face, and she busied herself folding the letter into exact quarters.

Harry thought it was time to say something. He forced Goyle’s thick voice into something like casualness. “You must have some idea who the Heir is, though.”

“I wanted to know,” said Malfoy.

Ron’s borrowed face went perfectly blank with shock. Harry gripped the arms of his chair.

“At the beginning,” Malfoy went on, gazing into the fire. “I thought, if somebody really were Slytherin’s heir, they might know things. Old things, that nobody’s known since. I thought there might be something of Slytherin’s left to recover.” Her mouth twisted. “This isn’t it.”

“Why not?” said Harry hoarsely.

“Because it hides.” She said the word with real contempt. “It creeps about in the dark, and Petrifies first years and cats, and writes on walls, and never once puts its name to anything. If you think the Mudbloods oughtn’t to be at Hogwarts, well, you can think that — lots of people do, and it’s a perfectly proper question — but you say so to the governors, in public, the way Father does. You don’t skulk about outside girls’ toilets frightening children. Peeves could do that.” She tugged at the end of her hair. “And the last time the Chamber was opened, fifty years ago, a girl died. Father let that slip in the summer and then wouldn’t say one more word about it. A girl, at school. Whoever did it was expelled, and he’s probably still in Azkaban. A Malfoy wouldn’t do it like that. A Malfoy answers for what’s done in his name. This person hasn’t even got a name.”

Neither of them said anything. Malfoy didn’t seem to expect them to.

“Father says I’m to keep my head down and stay clear of it,” she went on, more briskly, “which I’m doing. He’s got enough on his mind. The Ministry raided the Manor last week.”

Harry tried to force Goyle’s dull face into a look of concern.

“They didn’t find much,” said Malfoy. “Father keeps anything that matters in our own secret chamber, under the drawing-room floor —”

“Ho!” said Ron.

Malfoy looked at him. So did Harry, and his stomach turned over. Crabbe’s hair was turning red at the roots, and his nose was slowly lengthening. Their hour was up.

They both jumped to their feet.

“Medicine for my stomach,” Ron grunted, and without another word they sprinted the length of the Slytherin common room, hurled themselves at the stone wall, and pelted up the passage, praying that Malfoy hadn’t seen. Harry’s feet were slithering about inside Goyle’s enormous shoes, and he had to hoist his robes up as he shrank. They crashed up the steps into the dark entrance hall, kicked off the shoes outside the broom cupboard where Crabbe and Goyle were still thumping, and ran in their socks up the marble staircase.

“Well, it wasn’t a complete waste of time,” Ron panted, as they reached the top of the stairs. “We still don’t know who’s doing it, but I’m going to write to Dad tomorrow and tell him to look under the Malfoys’ drawing room.”

“It’s not her, though, is it,” said Harry. It came out sounding less like a question than he had meant it to.

“Doesn’t make her any less of a Malfoy,” said Ron darkly. “You heard her about Dad. And Mudbloods. ‘A perfectly proper question.’” He did a savage imitation of her voice. “And all that rubbish about tall women.”

“Yeah,” said Harry.

He did not say that he had been trying, all the way up the stairs, to work out what was actually wrong with the rubbish about tall women, and had not managed it yet. He did not say that he kept seeing her with her feet tucked under her and ink on her finger, fixing Crabbe’s spelling, telling Goyle to write to his mother. He did not say that she had been sitting there thinking about him, carefully, and that he did not know whether that made him want to laugh or to hit something.

✦ ✦ ✦

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VI. The Sock

The night of the Chamber, May 1993

“This meeting is over. We’re going, Dobby!”

Lucius Malfoy wrenched open the door and swept out of Dumbledore’s office, with Dobby scurrying after him. Harry stood for a moment, thinking hard. Then it came to him —

“Professor Dumbledore,” Harry said hurriedly. “Can I give Tom Riddle’s diary back to Mr. Malfoy, please?”

“Certainly, Harry,” said Dumbledore calmly. “But hurry. The feast, remember. …”

Harry grabbed the diary and dashed out of the office. He could hear footsteps receding down the stairs below. Quickly, wondering if this plan could possibly work, Harry took off one of his shoes, pulled off his slimy, filthy sock, and stuffed the diary into it. Then he ran down the dark corridor.

He caught up with them at the top of the stairs. Mr. Malfoy had stopped on the landing and was speaking to Dracina in a low, rapid voice; Dobby crouched a step below them, scrubbing at a shoe. All three of them looked round as Harry skidded to a halt.

“Mr. Malfoy,” he gasped, “I’ve got something for you —”

He thrust the bundle into Lucius Malfoy’s hand.

Mr. Malfoy tore away the filthy, slimy sock, flung it aside, and looked from the ruined black book to Harry with an expression of icy loathing. But Dracina was staring at the diary.

“What is that?” she said.

“Ask your father,” said Harry. “He put it in Ginny Weasley’s cauldron at Flourish and Blotts. I saw him pick up her Transfiguration book. That’s how she got it. It was Voldemort’s — it’s what opened the Chamber — and he slipped it in with her things.”

“That’s a lie,” said Dracina at once. “Father, tell him —”

Mr. Malfoy said nothing.

On the step below, Dobby had gone rigid. His enormous eyes went from the diary to his master and back again. Then he clapped both bandaged hands over his mouth and nodded, very fast, again and again, while tears spilled down his face; and then, with a sort of dreadful quiet resolve, he began to knock his head against the banisters.

Dracina looked at Dobby. Then she looked at her father, and Harry saw her see his face.

“Father,” she said, and her voice had changed. “Is it true?”

“It is not something that anyone can prove,” said Mr. Malfoy.

“I didn’t ask whether anyone could prove it.”

There was a long silence. When Mr. Malfoy spoke again, his voice was perfectly controlled.

“It was an old thing from the old days. A Dark curiosity, of no great consequence, which it would have been imprudent to keep in the house with the Ministry calling. In the Weasley household it would have caused a certain embarrassment, and no more than they have earned. I did not know —”

He stopped.

“Did you know what it would do?” said Dracina.

“No,” said Lucius Malfoy.

Harry, to his own surprise, believed him.

Dracina looked down at the black book with the hole burned through its pages.

“It was the Dark Lord’s,” she said slowly. “You knew it was the Dark Lord’s. And you put it in an eleven-year-old girl’s things, and you didn’t even know what it did?”

“Dracina, this is neither the time nor the place —”

“You always told me,” said Dracina, “that a Malfoy answers for whatever is done in his name.”

Her father did not answer her. For a moment Harry thought he looked, of all things, tired. Then the look was gone, and he turned with a swirl of his cloak toward the stairs.

“Come, Dobby. I said, come.”

But Dobby didn’t move. He was holding up Harry’s disgusting sock in both bandaged hands and gazing at it as though it had been woven out of starlight.

“Master has given Dobby a sock,” he whispered. “Master threw it, and Dobby caught it, and Dobby — Dobby is free.”

Lucius Malfoy stood quite motionless, staring at the elf. Before he could speak, Dracina had rounded on Harry.

“You — you —” Her face was white, and two spots of color burned high on her cheeks. “Do you have the faintest idea what you’ve just done? He has served my family since before I was born. You don’t get to reach into somebody else’s House and pull bits of it out because you feel like it! You don’t know the first thing about how a household’s kept, or what’s owed in one, or — and tonight, Potter, tonight of all nights, when you’ve already —” She stopped, because her voice had cracked, and she would not let it go on cracking in front of him.

“He was hurting him,” said Harry.

“That is our business —”

“You have cost my House,” said Mr. Malfoy, very softly, cutting across them both, “a servant who has served it for decades, boy.” And his hand went into his robes.

“You shall not harm Harry Potter!” squeaked Dobby, leaping between them, the sock clutched to his chest.

“Father.”

It was only one word, and Dracina did not raise her voice to say it. But Mr. Malfoy’s hand stopped. For a long moment nobody moved. Then, slowly, he drew his hand out of his robes again, and it was empty.

“Not here,” said Dracina, rather unsteadily. “Not a student. Not in Dumbledore’s own corridor, with the governors already —” She swallowed. “It would be beneath you.”

Mr. Malfoy looked at his daughter for a long time. Then he inclined his head, very slightly, as though she had made a point at dinner.

Dracina had turned toward the elf, perhaps to say something sharp to him as well. Dobby flinched, from long habit, and bowed so low that his ears brushed the stone. But when he straightened up again he could not help it: his whole face was blazing with joy. It was in his eyes, in his trembling ears, in the way his long fingers kept stroking the sock. He looked like someone who had been given the moon.

Dracina stared at him. Whatever she had meant to say seemed to go out of her head.

“You’re happy,” she said.

Dobby twisted the sock between his bandaged fingers.

“Dobby is sorry, young Mistress,” he whispered. “Dobby is very sorry. But Dobby is free.”

Dracina opened her mouth and shut it again.

Then she straightened her back.

“I’ll tell the other servants where you’ve gone,” she said. “At home. So that they don’t worry.” She glanced at Harry, and her mouth thinned. “So that they don’t imagine Potter’s murdered you. I’ll tell them you’re pleased about it. Apparently.”

Dobby burst into tears.

“Dracina.” Mr. Malfoy’s voice was ice. “You will walk me to the doors.”

He swept off down the stairs without another glance at any of them. Dracina followed him. At the turn of the staircase she looked back once at Harry. It was not a forgiving look.

“Harry Potter freed Dobby!” squealed the elf, gazing up at him, the moonlight from the nearest window shining in his round eyes. “Harry Potter set Dobby free!”

“Least I could do,” said Harry, and found, to his surprise, that he was grinning. “Just promise you’ll never try and save my life again, all right?”

✦ ✦ ✦

VII. The Lake

June 1993

The rest of the term passed in a haze of sunshine. Lockhart was gone, Hagrid was back, and Lucius Malfoy had been sacked as a school governor. Dracina Malfoy was quieter than Harry had ever known her. She spent a great deal of time in the library writing long letters, several of which, Ron reported with interest, ended up in the fire.

It was nearly a week before she spoke to him. Harry was sprawled on the grass by the lake with Ron and Hermione one evening after supper when a shadow fell across the three of them.

“Potter. A word.”

“He’s busy,” said Ron.

“It’ll take a minute, Weasley.”

Harry very nearly told her to get lost. He had the words ready. Then, for no reason he could have explained to anyone, he thought of a green-lit room down in the dungeons, and a girl with her feet tucked under her and ink on one finger, telling Goyle to write home to his mother.

“It’s all right,” he said to Ron, and got up.

They walked a few yards along the bank and stopped at the water’s edge. Malfoy folded her arms.

“Nobody will tell me what happened down there,” she said. “Not properly. Professor Snape won’t, and Father —” She stopped. “Everyone says it was You-Know-Who. Nobody says how.”

So Harry told her. He told her about the diary, and about Tom Riddle, who had been sixteen for fifty years, and who had framed Hagrid and fooled the whole school; about the letters of his name that had shuffled themselves in the air into something else. Malfoy listened without interrupting once, which Harry would not have believed possible.

“So he really was Slytherin’s heir,” she said, when he paused. “The real one.”

“Yeah. Through his mother. That’s where he got the Parseltongue.” Harry hesitated, and then, without quite deciding to, went on. “Dumbledore reckons that’s where I got it, too. From him. When he tried to kill me, when I was a baby, he — some of his powers went into me. Dumbledore thinks. So it isn’t from my family at all. It’s from Voldemort.”

He stopped. He had not even told Ron and Hermione that part in so many words. And now he had just stood on the bank of the lake and told it to Malfoy, of all the people in the world, as though it were something she had a right to know.

Why did I just tell her that?

He didn’t know. He had a vague feeling that it was because she had written to her father about it, and her father had got it wrong, and he had wanted her to have it right. That was a ridiculous reason. He didn’t look at her.

Malfoy did not say anything for a moment. When she did, she sounded thoughtful, and rather as though she were putting something away carefully on a shelf.

“So there’s no Slytherin in the Potters at all.”

“Not unless Dumbledore’s wrong.”

“He isn’t, usually. Father says that’s the most annoying thing about him.” She frowned at the water. “Then it’s not a mystery about you. It’s a mystery about him. You’ve just got his — well.” She seemed to search for a word, and settled on one with distaste. “His leftovers.”

“Thanks,” said Harry.

“You know what I mean.” She was quiet for a little. “And Riddle — the mother was Slytherin’s. What about the father?”

Harry looked at her. “His father was a Muggle.”

Malfoy’s head turned sharply.

“He told you that.”

“He was proud of the Slytherin bit. He wasn’t proud of his dad. Called him a filthy Muggle. Changed his whole name so he wouldn’t have to carry it about.” Harry watched her face. “He was a half-blood, Malfoy. Same as me.”

For a long moment Malfoy gazed out over the lake, where the giant squid was idly waving a tentacle in the evening sun. Harry braced himself for something — he wasn’t sure what. A sneer, or an argument, or her storming off.

“That’s odd,” she said at last.

“Odd?”

“Well, it is. It came down through the mother’s line and straight past a Muggle father, and it came out in him whole.” She said it slowly, as though she were looking at it from several sides. “It’s one case, though. Father said there’d be cases. It doesn’t mean — “ She broke off, and her voice became brisk. “It’s just a fact I had wrong. I thought it was a puzzle about you, and it was a puzzle about him. That’s all. It still goes on the mantelpiece.”

“The what?”

“Never mind.” She seemed to regret having said it. She unfolded her arms and folded them again the other way. “Thank you, Potter. For telling me. Properly.”

Harry nodded.

She turned to go, and then turned back.

“Macmillan’s been telling everybody,” she said abruptly, “that you said it wasn’t me. In Herbology. Before anybody knew anything.”

Harry said nothing.

“Why?”

Harry thought of the Slytherin common room, and it struck him all at once, with a peculiar lurch, that he was never going to be able to tell her any of what he had heard from her.

“I just knew,” he said.

“That isn’t an answer.”

“It’s the one you’re getting.”

Malfoy’s eyes narrowed. It was plainly not an answer she liked, and Harry had the distinct impression that it bothered her a great deal more than an insult would have done. She looked at him for a long moment, searchingly, as though he were a letter in a hand she could almost read.

“You,” she said, “are the most infuriating person in this entire school.”

“Yeah,” said Harry. “Probably.”

She made a small exasperated noise, and turned, and walked away up the slope toward the castle with her back very straight.

Vol. 1: The Prisoner of Azkaban - Ch. 1

NOBILITY OBLIGES

BOOK III · PRISONER OF AZKABAN

Or, the Boy Who Lived and the Girl Who Loved Him

✦ ✦ ✦

There are boys who, turned out of the family home at thirteen with nothing but a trunk, a caged owl and a bad conscience, would have passed the rest of the summer holidays in a decline. Harry Potter passed them at a small round table outside Florean Fortescue’s Ice-Cream Parlour, and had seldom been happier in his life.

The turning-out, it must be admitted, had been very largely his own work. His Aunt Marge had come to Privet Drive for a week, bringing with her a bulldog, a quantity of luggage and a settled conviction that Harry’s dead parents had been a pair of unemployed drunkards; and on the last evening of the week, somewhere between the brandy and the cheese, she had said so once too often. Harry had not meant to do anything. He had merely sat there, gripping the edge of the table, while his aunt began to swell. She had swelled steadily and with a kind of terrible dignity, like a pink balloon being filled from a pump, until her buttons gave way with a series of reports like pistol-shots and she rose, still protesting, from her chair and towards the ceiling. Uncle Vernon had seized her by the ankle. Ripper the bulldog had seized Uncle Vernon by the leg. Harry had gone upstairs, fetched his trunk, and left rather in a hurry.

What he had intended to do next he could not afterwards have said, because he had not intended anything. He had sat down on his trunk at the corner of Magnolia Crescent in the dark, with his heart going like a drum, and had become aware of something watching him from the gap between two garages: something very large and very black, with eyes that caught the light of the street-lamp. He had stepped back, fallen over the trunk, and flung up his wand arm; and at that moment there had arrived, with a bang like a gunshot and a blaze of headlamps, a violently purple triple-decker bus, which stopped with its front wheels a few inches from his hand.

The Knight Bus, as it proved to be, existed for the relief of stranded witches and wizards, and it conveyed Harry to London in the manner of a horse that has been told the stable is on fire. It leapt pavements. It flattened itself between lorries. It once caused an entire row of telephone boxes to jump smartly out of its road. Its conductor, a pimply young man named Stan Shunpike, beguiled the journey by reading aloud from the Daily Prophet about a mass murderer named Sirius Black, who had escaped from the wizard prison of Azkaban, a thing which, Stan said with relish, nobody had ever done before. Black had killed thirteen people with a single curse. He was believed to be at large in the Muggle world. Harry looked at the photograph on the front page, which showed a gaunt man with matted hair and eyes like holes burned in paper, and then at his own reflection in the bus window, and wondered what the penalty was for blowing up an aunt.

He found out at the Leaky Cauldron, where the Minister for Magic himself was waiting for him, and the answer was: nothing whatever. Cornelius Fudge, a portly little man in a pinstriped cloak, sat him down in a private parlour, plied him with tea and crumpets, and told him that his aunt had been punctured, her memory modified, and the whole regrettable business put right. Harry, who had been fully prepared to hear his wand snapped in two, felt like a man who sets his shoulder against a locked door and finds it opened from the inside by a smiling butler. Mr Fudge asked only that he stay in Diagon Alley until term began, and keep out of Muggle London; and he looked so relieved when Harry agreed, and so uneasy when Harry asked why, that Harry, after turning the matter over for a few days, laid it aside as insoluble and went back to enjoying himself.

There was a great deal to enjoy. Harry woke each morning in Room Eleven of the Leaky Cauldron with nobody shouting up the stairs at him, ate breakfast when he chose, and spent the day exactly as he pleased. He soon settled into a routine of great regularity and contentment. In the mornings he walked the length of the Alley, looking at everything. In the afternoons he did his homework outside Fortescue’s, where Mr Fortescue, who knew a surprising amount about medieval witch-burnings and was delighted to be asked, supplied historical assistance and a free sundae every half-hour. And at least once a day, sometimes twice, he went to stand in front of the window of Quality Quidditch Supplies.

There was a broom in that window. It stood on a velvet-draped stand under a placard which announced, in the lettering usually reserved for coronations, that it was the FIREBOLT, that its handle was of ash polished to a diamond hardness, that each twig of its tail had been hand-selected and honed to aerodynamic perfection, that it could reach a hundred and fifty miles an hour from a standing start in ten seconds, and that its braking charm was unbreakable. The price was not given. It was, said the placard, available on request, which Harry understood to mean that anybody who had to ask could not afford it. The Irish International side had ordered seven.

Harry did not need a new broom. His Nimbus Two Thousand had carried him through two seasons and was in perfectly good order. Nevertheless, he often stood before the Firebolt as a pilgrim stands before a relic, desiring its heavenly glory, without the least expectation that it would ever pass into his keeping, and glad that he could at least gaze upon it.

The only flaw in the summer was Sirius Black. Black was everywhere. His face stared from the front of the Prophet every morning and from the posters the Ministry had begun pasting up along the Alley. Witches at neighbouring tables discussed him over their ice-cream, and announced that they would not let the children out alone until he was safely back in Azkaban. Tom, the landlord of the Leaky Cauldron, said the whole Ministry was out looking for him and that it was a disgrace he had got out at all. Harry, who had seen a black dog in the dark of Magnolia Crescent and had since read in a library book that a black dog was an omen of death, did not mention it to anybody, and was careful to sit with his back to a wall.

✦ ✦ ✦

It was two days before the end of the holidays that Harry, sitting at what Mr Fortescue now called his table and giving his Potions essay a last suspicious read-through, felt a shadow fall across the parchment.

“Asphodel,” said a cool voice above him, “has an e in it, Potter. Before the l. Professor Snape will ring it in red before he has read anything else, and then he will not read anything else.”

Harry looked up.

Dracina Malfoy was standing beside his table with a parcel from Flourish and Blotts under one arm, looking down at his essay with the expression of a person who has found a beetle in the soup and is not in the least surprised. She looked, at first glance, exactly as she had looked in June: the same pale face, the same grey eyes, the same air of having been sent down by the management to see what all the noise was about. Then she turned her head to frown at his second paragraph, and the afternoon light fell across her face, and Harry saw that something had happened to it over the summer. It had sharpened. Some roundness had gone out of it, and in its place there had arrived, apparently without consulting anybody, a pair of cheekbones. Her fair hair, which she wore loose, was longer than he remembered, and it slid forward over one shoulder as she bent to look.

Malfoy had somehow acquired cheekbones. Harry looked at them, and then quickly back at the essay, and was annoyed to find that the information had been received, stamped and filed somewhere in his head, and could not now be got out again.

“Do you go round correcting everybody’s homework,” said Harry, “or is it only mine?”

“Only where the need is greatest.” She surveyed the table, on which three weeks of residence had deposited a stratum of books, ink bottles, quills, sweet wrappers and empty sundae glasses. “What are you doing here, Potter? You look as though somebody planted you.”

Before Harry could think of an answer, Mr Fortescue bustled out of the parlour with a fresh sundae, which he set down at Harry’s elbow with a flourish.

“There we are, Harry. Strawberry and peanut butter, same as always.” He beamed upon Malfoy. “And will your friend be wanting anything?”

Malfoy looked as though she had been described in public as somebody’s aunt.

“No, thank you,” she said.

“Best customer I’ve had all summer, Mr Potter,” Mr Fortescue confided to her. “Every day since he took his room at the Leaky Cauldron. I shall miss him when term starts, and that’s the truth.”

He went back inside. Malfoy turned to Harry, and a slow and deeply satisfied smile spread across her face, like the smile of a cat which has been handed, unasked, the canary, the cage and a signed receipt.

“You are living at the Leaky Cauldron,” she said. “On your own.”

“So what if I am?”

“Have your relations mislaid you, Potter?”

“We had a disagreement,” said Harry shortly.

“A disagreement.” Malfoy seemed to find the word one of the best she had heard in years. “Mother and I have disagreements. Chiefly about hats. Neither of us has ever settled one by moving into a public house.”

“It was a bit more than hats.”

“What did you do, set fire to the curtains?”

Harry thought of his Aunt Marge bobbing helplessly against the dining-room ceiling with her feet in the air.

“Something like that,” he said.

Malfoy laughed. It was a short, surprised laugh, as though it had got out of her before she could stop it, and Harry, who had been braced for something much nastier, found that he did not know what to do with his face.

“What sort of laugh was that?” said Harry.

Her chin went up. “Something went down the wrong way. There is a great deal of dust in this street.”

“Dracina.”

A tall witch had come up the street behind her. She was fair, with a long, composed, very handsome face, and several parcels from Twilfitt and Tatting’s floated obediently at her shoulder, like well-trained spaniels. She carried herself as though Diagon Alley had been laid out that morning for her particular convenience and she was prepared, on the whole, to approve of it. Harry knew at once who she must be. He would have known it from the way she walked; and as she came up beside her daughter he saw it in their faces, side by side, so plainly that it gave him a jolt. The new sharpness in Malfoy’s face was her mother’s. So was the line of the jaw, and the set of the head, and the way of standing as though a book were balanced on it. It was like seeing the same drawing twice, once finished and once in pencil.

“Mother,” said Malfoy, “this is Potter.” She paused. “Harry Potter.”

Mrs Malfoy’s eyes went to Harry’s forehead. Everybody’s did, and most people looked away again quickly, either embarrassed or excited. Mrs Malfoy’s eyes stayed there for a long, considering moment before they came back down to his face.

“Mr Potter,” she said. She did not offer him her hand. “I believe you are acquainted with my husband.”

Harry, who had last seen Mr Malfoy being unwillingly parted from his house-elf by means of one of Harry’s old socks, thought it best to say only, “Yes.”

“So I understand,” said Mrs Malfoy.

There followed one of those silences in which a sensitive man becomes acutely conscious of the existence of his hands. It was broken by a harassed-looking wizard in Ministry robes, who was working his way up the street with an armful of rolled parchment and a pot of paste. He slapped a sheet onto the wall beside Fortescue’s door, smoothed it flat with his wand, and moved on to the next shop without a glance at any of them.

It was Sirius Black. The gaunt, shadowed face that had stared out of every newspaper all summer stared down at the three of them now, mouthing soundlessly from the wall; above it, in large black letters, were the words HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WIZARD?

Harry had spent eleven years reading his Aunt Petunia’s face for warnings of bad weather, and he was a connoisseur of mothers’ faces that did not move. Mrs Malfoy’s face did not move at all. One gloved hand drew the other glove a little tighter at the wrist, smoothing it, as though there had been a crease in it.

“Tom says the whole Ministry’s looking for him,” said Harry, chiefly for something to say.

“I should hope that it is,” said Mrs Malfoy.

“He’s Mother’s cousin,” said Malfoy to Harry, in the tone of somebody pointing out that the sky was on top.

Harry stared at her. “He’s —”

“Dracina.”

“Well, he is, Mother. It was in all the papers the first time. Everybody knows.”

Mrs Malfoy was silent for a moment. When she spoke it was to Harry, in a voice so cool and level that he would have preferred her to shout.

“Sirius Black is the elder son of my father’s sister,” she said. “That is the nearest of the connections, Mr Potter, and my family ceased to acknowledge it a long time ago. He was a disgrace to his mother’s house before he had left school. When he was sixteen he ran away from home altogether, and he did not come back.”

“Great-Aunt Walburga burned him off the family tapestry,” Malfoy put in. “Mother says you can still see the scorch mark.”

“Thank you, Dracina.” Mrs Malfoy looked once more at the face on the wall, and then away from it, as one looks away from a thing that has already been looked at for quite long enough. “A boy who will desert his own family, Mr Potter, will desert anyone. Nobody who knew him was in the least surprised by what he did afterwards.” Her eyes went, for the smallest part of a second, to Harry’s forehead again; and then she had turned, and the parcels had turned with her. “Come along, Dracina.”

She walked away up the street. Malfoy hesitated for half a second.

“Do try not to get murdered before term starts, Potter,” she said. “The papers would be unbearable.”

She looked down at the essay.

“And it’s -el.”

✦ ✦ ✦

Harry woke on the last day of the holidays, dressed, paid his respects to the Firebolt, and was weighing the claims of the Leaky Cauldron’s steak-and-kidney pie against those of the sandwich shop by Gringotts when his name was bellowed across the width of the Alley in a voice he would have known anywhere.

“Harry! HARRY!”

They were sitting outside Fortescue’s, both of them: Ron, so thickly freckled after a summer under far too much sun that he looked like a map of an archipelago, and Hermione, very brown, both waving at him as though he were a ship coming into harbour after a long voyage and they had been on the quay since dawn.

“We’ve been everywhere,” said Ron, as Harry sat down. “The Leaky Cauldron, Flourish and Blotts, Madam Malkin’s, that place that sells the cauldrons. Tom said you’d gone out to look at a broom. Dad said you’d be here.”

“Your dad knows?”

“Course he knows. The whole of Dad’s floor knows.” Ron’s grin widened until it threatened his ears. “Fred and George want to know if you can do it on purpose. They’ve got a list.”

“Harry,” said Hermione, in the voice of a woman about to open a serious subject at a dinner party, “is it true about your aunt?”

“It was an accident.”

“It is not funny, Ron. You could have been expelled. You could have had your wand snapped, Harry. There’s a decree —”

“I know there’s a decree,” said Harry. “I thought I was going to Azkaban. And then Fudge gave me crumpets.”

“Crumpets,” said Ron reverently.

“And told me to stay in Diagon Alley. That’s all. Does your dad know why?”

Ron shrugged. “Nobody does. Dad says half the Ministry wanted to make an example of you and the other half wanted to give you a medal, and Fudge just went off and had tea with you instead.” He leaned back in his chair and stretched out his legs, and his face took on the look of a man who has been waiting all morning to be asked something. Harry obliged him.

“How was summer?”

“Brilliant,” said Ron. “We went to Egypt. Bill took us down into the tombs. Proper ones, with curses on. There was one where some Muggles broke in about a hundred years ago and came out with extra heads, Harry. Extra heads. Mum wouldn’t let us go in that one, but Fred and George tried to shut Percy in a pyramid.” He dug in his pocket and brought out a wand, gleaming and new. “And look. Fourteen inches, willow, unicorn hair. Dad got it out of the prize money.”

“What prize money?”

“The Prophet’s Galleon Draw. Didn’t you see? We were in the paper, all of us, in front of a pyramid. Seven hundred Galleons. Most of it went on the trip, but there was enough for the wand.” He dug in his other pocket, more gently. “Scabbers came too. Look at him.”

Scabbers was asleep in Ron’s palm. He was thinner than Harry remembered, and there were bald patches in his fur, and his whiskers had a dispirited droop, like an elderly gentleman who has been taken abroad against his will and wishes the fact to be generally known.

“He hated the heat,” said Ron. “He’s not been right since. I’m going to get him something at that animal place.”

“And I’m getting an owl,” said Hermione. “Mum and Dad gave me the money for an early birthday present. I’ll have ever so many more letters to write this year, I’m taking more subjects than anyone else.”

“How many more?” said Harry.

Hermione inspected the bottom of her sundae glass with sudden and close attention.

“A few,” she said. “Shall we go?”

✦ ✦ ✦

The Magical Menagerie was cramped and noisy and smelled of everything that lived in it, which was a great deal. Cages climbed the walls to the ceiling: there were purple toads, a giant tortoise with a jewel-encrusted shell, a basket of custard-coloured fur balls that hummed, and on the counter a cage of sleek black rats which were skipping, with every appearance of enthusiasm, using their own tails.

Ron set Scabbers down beside the black rats. Next to them he looked like a slipper that had been left out in the rain.

“It’s my rat,” he told the witch behind the counter. “He’s gone a bit funny since we got back from Egypt.”

The witch pulled a pair of heavy black spectacles out of her pocket, put them on, and bent over Scabbers until her nose was nearly touching his.

“Hm,” she said. “How old is he?”

“Dunno. Quite old. He used to be my brother’s.”

“And what can he do?”

“Do?” said Ron. He looked down at Scabbers, who had begun to snore. “He sleeps, mostly.”

The witch straightened up. “An ordinary garden rat,” she said, “lives about three years, young man. If there’s no magic in him at all, then he’s done very well indeed. Remarkably well. He’s getting on, and he’s had a trying journey, and that’s the long and short of it.” She took a small red bottle from under the counter. “Rat Tonic. Three drops in his water. And if he doesn’t pick up, you could always —” her eyes went to the skipping rats.

“I don’t want a new rat,” said Ron, offended on Scabbers’ behalf. “Ordinary garden rat,” he muttered to Harry. “Remarkably well. Who does she think she —”

He never finished. Something large and ginger came sailing off the top of the highest cage, landed squarely on his head, and launched itself, spitting madly, at Scabbers.

“NO, CROOKSHANKS, NO!” cried the witch.

Scabbers shot out of Ron’s hands like a cork out of a bottle, landed splay-legged on the floor, and made for the door. Ron went after Scabbers, still wearing a quantity of the cat’s fur. Harry went after Ron. The pursuit went the length of three shopfronts and ended under a wastepaper bin outside Quality Quidditch Supplies, where Ron recovered his rat, stuffed him back into his pocket, and stood breathing hard and rubbing his scalp.

“What,” he said, “was that?”

“A cat, I think,” said Harry. “Mostly.”

“Where’s Hermione?”

“Buying her owl, probably.”

They went back up the street to wait for her. When she came out of the Menagerie a few minutes later she was not carrying an owl. She was carrying, clasped to her chest with the tenderness of a mother and the grip of a wrestler, the ginger cat.

Ron’s jaw dropped. “You bought it?”

“His name is Crookshanks,” said Hermione, glowing, “and he’s lovely.”

This was a matter on which reasonable people might differ. Crookshanks was a cat of considerable size and very little beauty. His fur was thick and ginger and stood out round him like a hearthrug; his legs bowed outward, as though he had spent his youth astride a barrel; and his face had the flattened, aggrieved look of a face that had once been sat on, and remembered by whom. He looked over Hermione’s shoulder at Ron’s top pocket with a pair of round yellow eyes and an expression of settled purpose.

“He tried to eat Scabbers!”

“He’s a cat, Ron. It’s what cats do. He’ll be in the girls’ dormitory and Scabbers will be in yours, and they need never see each other at all. And he’d been in that shop for ages. The witch said nobody would have him.”

“I can’t think why,” said Ron.

“You forgot this,” said Hermione, and put the little red bottle of Rat Tonic into his hand.

Crookshanks rode back to the Leaky Cauldron in her arms with his face turned backward over her shoulder, and his yellow eyes did not leave Ron’s pocket once.

✦ ✦ ✦

They had been back at the Leaky Cauldron for a quarter of an hour, and Crookshanks had been introduced to the bar, the bar to Crookshanks, and Tom’s elderly tabby had retired under the stairs to reconsider its position, when the door from the Alley swung open and the rest of the Weasleys came in out of the evening in a body, laden with parcels.

“Harry!” Mr Weasley seized his hand and pumped it. He was a thin, balding, mild-looking man whose face lit up like a lamp at anything mechanical. “Good to see you. Good to see you. Now, the Knight Bus — Stan Shunpike was the conductor, wasn’t he? How do they keep the thing on the road? Is it the tyres, or is there some sort of Cushioning Charm on the whole chassis, because I’ve always wondered —”

“Arthur,” said Mrs Weasley. “Let the boy breathe.”

She hugged Harry instead, which made breathing no easier, and then held him off at arm’s length and examined him.

“Have you been eating properly?”

“Yes,” said Harry. “Ice-cream, mostly.”

Mrs Weasley looked at him as though he had confessed to living on gin.

Behind her, Ginny had gone the colour of a pillar-box. “H-hello, Harry,” she said, to his shoes.

Percy came next. He held out his hand as solemnly as though they were meeting for the first time at a diplomatic reception, and Harry, a little taken aback, shook it.

“Harry,” said Percy. “How very pleasant to see you. I trust you’ve had an agreeable summer?”

“Er — fine, thanks.” Harry’s eye, as it was meant to, fell on the front of Percy’s robes, where a shiny silver badge had been pinned with great precision over the heart. “Is that —”

“Head Boy,” said Percy, with modesty.

“Harry!” Fred elbowed Percy smartly out of the way and seized Harry’s hand. “Harry, old man. Simply delightful to see you. Have you met our brother Percy? He’s Head Boy.”

“Did he mention it?” said George, seizing the other hand. “He may have mentioned it. Once or twice. In Egypt, mainly. To the Sphinx.”

“That will do,” said Percy.

“Head Boy, Harry,” said Fred, lowering his voice reverently.

“Head Boy,” said George.

“Mother,” said Percy, “they’re doing it again.”

“Boys,” said Mrs Weasley. But she said it with no great conviction, and when Percy took off his cloak at dinner it was found that the badge had been charmed, at some point in the course of the evening, to read HEAD BIG-HEAD in letters that flashed, and Mrs Weasley had to put down her spoon and look out of the window for some time before she could trust herself to speak.

Dinner was three tables pushed together in the little parlour, and seven courses, and noise. Fred and George related the story of the pyramid. Ginny asked Hermione about the cat. Ron told Harry about the curse-breaker who had opened a tomb in front of them and been chased round it by a mummified cat, and Percy told nobody in particular about the importance of cauldron-bottom thickness standards, on which he expected to work after he left school. Towards the end of the pudding Fred leaned across the table to his father.

“Dad,” he said, “why’s the Ministry sending cars for us tomorrow?”

“Hm?” said Mr Weasley. “Oh. Well. It’s a courtesy. Since I work there.”

“Since when do they lay on cars because you work there?” said George. “They didn’t lay on cars when you blew up the Ministry lavatories.”

“That was a perfectly sound experiment in —” Mr Weasley stopped. “Eat your pudding.”

He helped himself to custard. His eyes went to Harry, and away again, so quickly that Harry, who happened to be looking at him, was the only person at the table who saw it.

✦ ✦ ✦

It was close on midnight when Ron, half into his pyjamas, discovered that he had left Scabbers’ tonic in the bar, and Harry, who was not sleepy, offered to fetch it. The passage downstairs was dark. He was nearly at the end of it when he heard voices behind the door of the private parlour, raised in that particular tone in which married people disagree after the children have gone to bed, and he stopped.

“— and I say he has a right to know,” Mr Weasley was saying. “He’s not a baby, Molly. Fudge talks about him as if he were made of glass.”

“And what good will it do him? He’s happy. He’s had a lovely summer. You want to put him on that train with that on his mind?”

“I want to put him on that train careful. You know what he and Ron are like. Wandering off in the dark, the Forest, the Chamber — it’s a miracle they’re both still here. When I think of him sitting on a kerb at midnight with his trunk —” There was a pause, filled with feeling. “If that bus hadn’t come along, the Ministry would have found him in a ditch. I’d put money on it.”

“Arthur, nobody even knows for certain that Black —”

Something struck the table, hard. Harry thought it was a fist.

“We know. Fudge went to Azkaban himself the night Black got out, and the guards told him what Black’s been saying in his sleep for weeks. The same thing, every night. He’s at Hogwarts. Over and over. That’s who he means, Molly, you know it is. He was You-Know-Who’s man to the bone, and the night that boy put an end to You-Know-Who, Black lost everything he had. Twelve years in a cell to think about it. He wants Harry dead, and Fudge won’t say so in the Prophet because he doesn’t want a panic.”

There was a long silence. Harry stood perfectly motionless in the dark, with the knob of the newel post biting into his palm.

“Dumbledore will keep him safe,” said Mrs Weasley at last, in a smaller voice. “He always has. He knows all this, I suppose?”

“He knows. The Ministry has asked for the Azkaban guards to be posted round the school grounds, and he’s agreed to it. Not willingly. He’s no friend to them.”

“Why ever not, if they’re there to catch Black?”

“Because they’re what they are,” said Mr Weasley heavily. “I can’t say I care for them myself. But there it is.”

Chairs scraped. Harry went back up the passage as fast as he could without making a sound, and was round the corner and out of sight before the parlour door opened and two sets of footsteps went up the stairs.

The little red bottle was standing on a table in the empty bar. He waited until he heard a bedroom door close overhead, then fetched it and went up.

Ron was asleep, one arm hanging over the edge of the bed. Harry set the tonic on the bedside table beside Scabbers, who lay curled on the pillow with his sides going in and out very fast, and got into his own bed, and lay on his back with his hands under his head. Somewhere below a loose shutter banged in the wind. He heard it every time.

✦ ✦ ✦

The morning was a hurricane in a teacup. Mrs Weasley stood at the foot of the stairs calling up the names of her children in rotation, like a station announcer. Percy could not find his badge, and found it in the end pinned to the seat of Fred’s pyjamas. Crookshanks got into the bar again. Ron, coming down with his trunk, met Harry on the landing and gave him a long look.

“You all right? You look like you didn’t sleep.”

“I’m fine,” said Harry.

The Ministry cars were waiting outside on the Muggle street when they came out: two old-fashioned dark-green cars, each with a driver in an emerald velvet suit, both large, both silent. The cars were a great deal roomier inside than they looked, and the drive to King’s Cross took less time than Harry would have thought possible in London traffic. When they got out, the two drivers fetched trolleys, loaded the luggage, and then fell in on either side of Harry, one at each elbow, and walked with him all the way across the station.

“What’s that about?” Ron muttered, looking from one large velvet back to the other. “Why’ve you got bodyguards?”

Harry did not answer. The drivers saw him to the barrier between platforms nine and ten, waited while he leaned against it and slid through onto Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, and then stood back, looking at nothing in particular, in the manner of men who have been told to look at one thing very hard.

The scarlet engine was already breathing steam over the crowd. Harry and Ron found an empty compartment near the back of the train, heaved their trunks and Hermione’s up into the rack, and Harry was climbing down to the platform again to say goodbye when Mr Weasley took him by the elbow and drew him behind a pillar.

“Harry,” he said, “there’s something I’ve got to tell you before you go, and I’m afraid you won’t like it —”

“It’s all right, Mr Weasley,” said Harry. “I know. About Black.”

Mr Weasley blinked at him.

“I went down for Ron’s rat tonic last night,” said Harry, “and you were — I didn’t mean to listen. Sorry.”

“Ah,” said Mr Weasley. He took off his glasses, looked at them, and put them back on again. “Well. Not the way I’d have chosen. But there it is.”

“It’s fine. Honestly. You didn’t break any promise to Fudge, and I know what’s going on.” Harry tried to make his face look like a face that knew what was going on and did not mind. “I’m not scared. He can’t be worse than Voldemort.”

Mr Weasley winced at the name, but let it pass.

“I know you’re not easily frightened, Harry. I never thought you were. But I want you to do something for me.” He glanced along the platform, where Mrs Weasley was herding Ginny up the steps of the nearest carriage. “I want your word.”

“To stay in the castle?”

“Not that,” said Mr Weasley. “Or not only that.” He bent closer. “Harry, I want you to promise me you won’t go looking for Black.”

Harry stared at him.

A whistle blew. All along the train, guards were slamming the doors.

“Promise me,” said Mr Weasley, very fast now, “that whatever you hear —”

“Why would I go looking for him? He wants to kill me.”

“Whatever you hear, Harry. Whatever anybody tells you —”

“Arthur!” cried Mrs Weasley from the carriage steps. “Arthur, it’s going!”

The train had begun to move. Harry ran; Ron flung the compartment door open from inside and Harry tumbled through it, and they hung out of the window together, waving, while Mr and Mrs Weasley dwindled on the platform behind a rolling wall of steam. Mr Weasley had his hand raised. He kept it raised until the train took the curve and the platform was gone.

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Vol. 1: The Prisoner of Azkaban - Ch. 2

When Harry and Ron drew their heads in from the window, they found that the compartment had acquired, during their absence on the platform, a passenger.

He was sitting in the seat by the window with his head against the glass, fast asleep. He was not a student. He wore a set of wizard’s robes so extensively darned that they seemed to be held together less by thread than by habit, and although his face was young, his light brown hair was flecked with grey, and he had the worn, rather pleasant look of a man who has been ill a great deal and has stopped mentioning it. The battered case in the rack above his head bore, in peeling letters, the legend PROFESSOR R. J. LUPIN.

“Who d’you reckon he is?” whispered Ron.

“Professor R. J. Lupin,” whispered Hermione, who had come in behind them with Crookshanks in a wicker basket.

“How d’you know that?”

“It’s on his case.” Hermione stowed the basket under the seat, from which there at once came a low, continuous, ill-natured hum, like a kettle that has taken against the world. “He must be teaching Defence Against the Dark Arts. It’s the only post that’s free.”

Ron looked at the sleeping figure with the frank curiosity of a boy who has had a Defence teacher possessed by Voldemort and another who could not tell a pixie from a paperweight, and who has learned to expect anything.

“Well, I hope he’s up to it,” he said. “He looks like one good hex’d finish him off.”

Harry waited until the train had cleared the last of the London suburbs. Then he drew Ron and Hermione down to the far end of the compartment, as far from Professor Lupin as the furniture allowed, and told them in a low voice what he had heard from the passage of the Leaky Cauldron.

Ron’s face, as the story went on, passed through several stages, of which the last was a kind of greenish horror. Hermione put both hands over her mouth.

“Sirius Black escaped to come after you?” she said through them. “Oh, Harry — you’ll have to be really, really careful. Don’t go looking for trouble —”

“I don’t go looking for trouble,” said Harry, nettled. “Trouble usually finds me.”

“How thick would Harry have to be,” said Ron shakily, “to go looking for a nutter who wants to kill him?”

“That’s what I said.” Harry frowned at the window. “That’s what your dad wanted me to promise. Not to go looking for him. He kept saying, whatever you hear. Like he thought I’d hear something that’d make me want to.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know.”

Nobody had an answer to this. Ron fished in his pocket for something to do with his hands, and found Scabbers, who was asleep, and put him back. Harry was searching his own pockets for something to say when he remembered that he had another piece of information, and that it was the kind Ron would enjoy.

“Black’s Malfoy’s cousin,” he said. “Well — her mother’s. I met them both at Fortescue’s the day before yesterday.”

Ron sat up as if he had been stung. “Course he is,” he said, with deep satisfaction. “Course he is. Dad says there wasn’t a Black born in the last hundred years who wasn’t completely barking. Malfoy’s mum’s one of them. There you go.”

“That’s hardly Malfoy’s fault,” said Hermione.

“Didn’t say it was. I said it figures. What did she say?”

“Her mum did most of the talking. Black ran away from home when he was sixteen. They burned him off some family tapestry.” Harry considered. “Malfoy said to try not to get murdered before term started, because the papers would be unbearable.”

“There you go,” said Ron again, and stretched out his legs with the air of a man who has been proved right on every point and is prepared to be generous about it. “She’d be sorry she missed it, that’s all. She’d have wanted a front-row seat.”

Harry thought of the short surprised laugh outside Fortescue’s, and of the cheekbones, which had no bearing on anything, and said nothing.

From somewhere in the depths of Harry’s trunk there came a thin, piercing whistle.

“It’s that Sneakoscope,” said Ron, reddening, as Harry dug it out. It was a small glass spinning top, which Ron had bought in Egypt and sent for Harry’s birthday, and it was spinning now on Harry’s palm and glowing a vivid, accusing red. “I told you it was cheap rubbish. It went off at dinner the other night when Fred and George put beetles in Bill’s soup —”

“Maybe someone’s doing something untrustworthy,” said Hermione.

They all looked at the sleeping professor, who slept on, unaware of this imputation. Harry wrapped the Sneakoscope in a pair of Uncle Vernon’s old socks, which deadened the whistle, and stuffed it back into the trunk.

The afternoon wore on. The fields went by, and the woods, and the long brown hills; the lunch trolley came and went, and the three of them bought a large stack of Cauldron Cakes and ate them with the steady dedication of people who know there will be a feast at the end of the day and see no reason to arrive at it hungry. Ron, who had gone through the Hogwarts prospectus in the summer with an eye to the third-year privileges, became eloquent on the subject of Hogsmeade, the all-wizarding village a short walk from the school, which third-years were permitted to visit on certain weekends: there was Honeydukes, the sweetshop, and Zonko’s Joke Shop, and the Shrieking Shack, which was supposed to be the most haunted building in Britain.

“And the butterbeer at the Three Broomsticks,” said Ron. “It’s meant to be brilliant —”

“It’s historically very interesting,” said Hermione. “It was the centre of the 1612 goblin rebellion.”

“Hermione, nobody is going to Hogsmeade for the goblin rebellion.”

Harry had been quiet through most of this.

“I can’t go,” he said. “The Dursleys didn’t sign my form. Uncle Vernon was going to, if I behaved while Marge was there.”

There was a short silence, in which it was plain that Ron and Hermione were both reviewing the story of Marge and reaching the same conclusion.

“You could ask McGonagall,” said Ron at last. “Or we’ll ask Fred and George. They know every secret passage out of the castle —”

“Ron!” said Hermione. “Harry shouldn’t be sneaking out of school with Black on the loose —”

“Yeah, well,” said Ron. “That’s what McGonagall’ll say, too.”

Hermione, to change the subject, began to tell them about her timetable, which she had already drawn up in several colours. Harry gathered that it included Arithmancy, Ancient Runes, Muggle Studies, Divination and Care of Magical Creatures, in addition to everything they were all taking already.

“You can’t do all that,” said Ron. “There aren’t enough hours.”

“There are if you organise them properly,” said Hermione, a little pink. “I’ve arranged it with Professor McGonagall.”

“Arranged what? You can’t arrange hours. Hours just happen.”

Hermione bent down to adjust the latch of Crookshanks’ basket, which did not require it. At once the basket rocked, and a large ginger paw shot out through the wicker and swiped at Ron’s knee, in the general neighbourhood of his pocket.

“Oi!”

Scabbers woke in a frenzy. Ron clapped a hand over him. Crookshanks, withdrawing the paw, gave a low and meaningful growl, and Hermione told Ron he was being absurd, and Ron told Hermione that her cat was a homicidal maniac, and the argument kept them both warm for some time, while the sky outside the window turned the colour of wet slate, and then the colour of ink, and the rain began.

✦ ✦ ✦

The lamps had come on along the corridor, and the rain was streaming down the glass in sheets, when the train began to slow.

“We can’t be there yet,” said Ron, leaning to look out of the window, which showed nothing but black. Hermione looked at her watch.

“We’re not. We shouldn’t be there for a while yet.”

The train went on slowing. The pistons sighed and fell silent, and in the quiet the storm made itself heard, flinging rain at the windows by the handful. Then the carriage gave a lurch that slid every trunk an inch along the racks, the Hogwarts Express stood still in the middle of nowhere, and the lamps went out all down the train at once, as though a single hand had pinched them.

For a moment nobody said anything. Then everybody did.

“Was that the brakes?”

“Get off, that’s my hand —”

“Crookshanks? Where’s Crookshanks —”

Ron rubbed a porthole in the misted glass with his sleeve and put his face to it.

“There’s lights outside,” he reported. “Lanterns or something, going along the train.” A pause. “They’re getting on.”

The compartment door rattled open, and somebody came through it at speed and fell over Harry’s feet.

“Sorry — I can’t see a thing — is anybody —”

“Neville,” said Harry, groping for and finding a handful of robe. “Up you get.”

“Harry? Oh, thank goodness. Do you know why we’ve stopped? Nobody knows why we’ve stopped.” Neville lowered himself gratefully onto the seat, and onto Crookshanks, who expressed his views, and Neville rose again with a yelp. The door opened a second time and admitted Ginny, who said she had been looking for Ron, and trod on Hermione, and apologised to Harry; and the dark compartment became so full of limbs and apologies that the next voice to speak seemed to come from very far off.

“Everybody keep still, please.”

The sleeping passenger was awake. There was a small sound like paper catching, and light bloomed in the compartment: Professor Lupin was holding a clutch of cold, wavering flames in the cup of his hand, as composedly as a man striking a match to read a railway timetable. The light threw his tired face into relief, and Harry saw that the tiredness had gone out of his eyes altogether.

“Stay where you are,” he said, and rose, and stepped towards the door.

It slid open before he reached it.

There was a figure in the doorway, and it filled it. It was cloaked in black from head to foot, so tall that the crown of its hood brushed the lintel, and its face was completely hidden beneath its hood. Harry’s eyes slid away from the shadowed hood as from the edge of a drop, and lit instead upon a hand. It came out of the folds of the cloak at the height of his chest: long, grey, wet-looking, crusted, the hand of something that had lain a long while under water and been forgotten there. Then it drew back into the cloak, without haste, as though it had felt itself looked at and did not care for it. Out of it came a breath, slow and long and rattling, a breath that seemed to be drawing on something in the compartment besides the air.

The cold came in with it. It came in through Harry’s skin and kept on coming, past skin and muscle and ribs, until it closed round his heart like a fist. The flames in Lupin’s hand shrank to a point and went out; the compartment tilted; his own breath stopped halfway down; there was a noise in his ears like a weir in flood, and he was going under it —

A woman was screaming.

She was a long way off, and she was terrified, and between the screams she was begging, begging somebody for something, over and over, and the begging was worse than the screams; and white fog came pouring up through everything and carried the sound away —

“Harry! Harry, can you hear me?”

Somebody was patting his face, not gently.

“What —”

He was on the floor. The lamps were lit again, and the train was moving; he could feel the beat of the rails through his back. Ron and Hermione were kneeling on either side of him, and above them Neville and Ginny looked down with faces like two candles. His glasses were crooked. His face was wet. He felt as though he were about to be sick and had forgotten how.

Ron and Hermione hauled him up onto the seat.

“You all right?” said Ron.

“Yeah.” Harry looked at the door. It was shut, and there was nothing beyond the glass but the lit corridor. “Where’s it gone? Who was screaming?”

Ron looked at Hermione. Hermione looked at Harry.

“Nobody was screaming, Harry,” she said.

Harry looked round the compartment. Nobody contradicted her.

There was a sharp crack. Professor Lupin was breaking a very large bar of chocolate into pieces with the decision of a man who had done it many times before.

“Have this,” he said, and gave Harry the largest piece. “All of it, please.”

Harry held it. “What was that?”

“A Dementor.” Lupin was going round the others with the chocolate. “One of the guards of Azkaban. They have been permitted to search the train.” He folded the empty wrapper and put it in his pocket. “Eat, all of you. I give you my word it is harmless. In a long and varied life I have never yet found chocolate at the bottom of anything sinister. Excuse me; I must have a word with the driver.”

He went out into the corridor, and the door closed behind him.

“What happened?” said Harry. He wiped his face on his sleeve. “What did I do?”

“You went stiff,” said Ron, who did not look much better than Harry felt. “Stiff all over, and then you sort of slid off the seat and started — jerking.”

“And Professor Lupin stepped right over you,” said Hermione, “and went up to it with his wand out, and said, ‘There is nobody here you want. Leave us.’ It didn’t go. So he said something else, I couldn’t hear what, and something silver came out of his wand, like a mist, and it turned and went.”

“It was so cold,” said Neville. “My feet went numb. My actual feet.”

“I felt like nothing was ever going to be any good again,” said Ron, and looked surprised at himself for having said it.

In the corner, Ginny made a small noise and hid her face against her knees. Hermione moved over and put an arm round her.

“Did anyone else,” said Harry, “— you know. Fall over?”

“No,” said Ron. “Ginny was shaking like anything, though.”

Harry looked at Ginny, who was twelve, and at Neville, who was frightened of most things, and both of whom had stayed in their seats. He looked down at the chocolate in his hand.

The door slid back and Professor Lupin returned. He paused on the threshold, considered them all, and said: “Ah. I see the chocolate remains under suspicion.”

Harry bit into it. Warmth went through him at once, from his stomach out to the ends of his fingers, as though he had stepped in off a winter street into a lit kitchen.

“Less than an hour to Hogwarts,” said Lupin, sitting down. His eyes rested on Harry. “Better?”

“Fine,” said Harry, and looked at the window.

✦ ✦ ✦

Hogsmeade station was a tiny platform in the howling dark, on which the rain fell like a punishment. The first-years were herded off towards the lake by the bobbing lantern and the enormous outline of Hagrid, whose “Firs’-years this way!” came down the platform like a foghorn; the rest of the school trudged the other way, towards a muddy track where a hundred stagecoaches stood waiting, each, so far as Harry could see, drawn by nothing at all. He climbed into one with Ron and Hermione, and the door shut, and the coach set off by itself with a jolt.

They passed between a pair of high iron gates flanked by stone pillars topped with winged boars, and Harry saw, out of the window, two more of the hooded figures standing sentry on either side of the gate. A wave of cold sickness threatened to engulf him. He leaned back into the lumpy seat and closed his eyes until they were through.

When he opened them again the gates were behind them, and the coach was grinding up the long drive towards the lights of the castle. Ron and Hermione were both watching him.

“I’m all right,” said Harry.

Nobody answered that. The coach rocked over a rut.

“Why was it only me?” he said.

“Dunno, mate,” said Ron.

“Neville didn’t pass out. Ginny didn’t. Ginny’s twelve.” Harry looked out at the dark lawns going by. “Everyone’s going to know. Neville’s already told half the train.”

“Maybe it’s because —” Hermione began, and stopped, and bit her lip.

“Because what?”

“Nothing. I don’t know. I’ll look it up.”

“Brilliant,” said Harry. “Look it up. There’ll be a chapter on it. Wizards Who Fall Over.”

Hermione opened her mouth, looked at him, and shut it again; and the coach rolled on up the drive in silence.

The coach stopped at the foot of the flight of stone steps that led up to the great oak front doors. Harry got out, and was halfway up the steps, in the thick of the crowd and the rain, when a voice behind him rang out above the general noise.

“Potter!”

He knew it before he turned. Dracina Malfoy was coming up the steps with Pansy Parkinson at her elbow and Crabbe and Goyle looming in the rear, and she was wearing the bright, keen expression of a hunter who has been told at the edge of the covert that the fox is lame.

“Is it true, Potter? Longbottom’s been telling half the platform. He says you fainted.” She came up level with him, delighted. “Swooned clean away on the floor of a railway carriage, like a lady in a novel, and somebody had to bring you round with —”

She had reached the step below his, and the light from the open doors fell full on him, and she looked at him properly for the first time.

Harry knew what she was seeing, because he could feel it. He was soaked to the skin and the colour of putty. The hand with which he was holding his collar shut against the rain would not keep entirely still.

Malfoy’s eyes went over him, from his dripping hair to the hand at his collar and back, and the delight in her face dimmed, and she turned half away from him, presenting a shoulder.

“Before Longbottom,” she said. “You went down before Longbottom, Potter. And the youngest Weasley sat up in her seat the whole time, I’m told, and she’s twelve.” She looked at him with something that was very nearly indignation. “The Boy Who Lived. Flat on the floor of a railway carriage while the second-years ate their chocolate. You might at least try to do better than that next time. It’s embarrassing for all of us.”

Crabbe and Goyle burst out laughing.

Harry had been feeling every bit as small and wet and shaken as she made him sound, right up until embarrassing for all of us.

“Says the girl who screamed and ran in the Forest,” he said.

Pansy’s mouth fell open. The laughter stopped. Malfoy’s cheeks went pink, and then she drew herself up even straighter.

“I came back.”

“Yeah,” said Harry. “You did.”

Malfoy opened her mouth, found that she had been agreed with, and appeared to find it a great deal worse than being contradicted. She turned on her heel and went up the steps into the hall without another word, the Slytherins hurrying after her.

“All of who?” Harry heard Pansy say, as they went in under the great doors. “Dracina? Who’s us?”

Malfoy did not answer her.

Ron stood on the step with the rain running off his nose, staring after them.

“Ignore her,” he said. His ears had gone red. “She’s just —”

“She’s right, though,” said Harry.

“She’s not right,” said Ron. “She’s Malfoy. Come on. I’m soaked.”

✦ ✦ ✦

In the Entrance Hall a voice cut through the din like a ruler brought down on a desk.

“Potter! Granger! A word with you both.”

Professor McGonagall, Head of Gryffindor House, was a tall witch of severe aspect who gave the impression of having been starched at birth and kept so ever since. She led them up the marble staircase at a pace which discouraged conversation, while Ron, cast adrift, went on into the Great Hall alone with the face of a man who watches his comrades led to the scaffold and wonders whether it would be good manners to ask to come too.

In her office she bade them sit. “Professor Lupin owled ahead from the train,” she said. “He tells me you were taken ill, Potter.”

Harry had got as far as opening his mouth when the door opened instead, and Madam Pomfrey, the school matron, came in with the air of a woman who has been fetched from her supper and means to have value for it.

“I’m all right,” said Harry, with the horrible sensation that his ears were going red. “Really. I don’t need —”

“I shall be the judge of that.” Madam Pomfrey took him by the chin and turned his face to the lamp. “Well. You again. I might have known.”

“A Dementor, Poppy,” said Professor McGonagall.

Madam Pomfrey compressed her lips until they very nearly vanished.

“Dementors,” she said, with the intonation another woman might have given to rats in the pantry. “Round a school. Round a school full of children. And then everyone will be astonished when the children start dropping.” She laid the back of her hand against Harry’s forehead. “Clammy. Of course he is. Those creatures take it hardest out of the ones who’ve already —”

“I’m fine.”

“Naturally you are,” said Madam Pomfrey, counting his pulse against her watch.

It took some time to bring her to accept that the patient had already been dosed with chocolate by the new Defence teacher, a revelation which caused her to remark that at least somebody on the staff knew his business; and it took longer still to persuade her that he would not spend his first night of term in the hospital wing. She went at last, unconvinced. Professor McGonagall then sent Harry out into the corridor while she spoke to Miss Granger about her timetable, and when Hermione came out a few minutes later she was smiling to herself with a quiet, secretive contentment which she declined, on enquiry, to explain.

✦ ✦ ✦

They had missed the Sorting. The Great Hall was a glimmer of candlelight and gold plate under an enchanted ceiling that faithfully reproduced the storm outside, and the first-years were already sitting among their new Houses, wet and blissful, when Harry and Hermione slid onto the Gryffindor bench beside Ron.

Professor Dumbledore rose. He was immensely old and immensely tall, silver of hair and beard, with half-moon spectacles riding a long and frequently broken nose; and when he stood, the Hall fell silent with the particular silence of a crowd that would follow him into a burning building and ask, on the way in, whether there was anything it could carry.

“Good evening,” said Dumbledore, “and welcome. I must say one serious thing before the feast deprives you of your judgement, and I would rather say it while you can still attend.

“The Hogwarts Express was searched tonight by Dementors of Azkaban, acting on the instructions of the Ministry of Magic. Some of you have met them. They will remain with us for the present, posted at every entrance to our grounds, and while they remain, no student is to leave the school without permission.” He let this settle. “I should add that a Dementor is not deceived by disguises, by tricks, or by Invisibility Cloaks” — Harry and Ron were careful not to look at one another — “and that it is not in their nature to listen to explanations. Give them no cause to come near you. I ask the prefects, and our new Head Boy and Head Girl, to see that nobody does.”

Percy, a few seats along, expanded visibly.

“And now to happier matters. Two new members join our staff this year. Professor Lupin has very kindly consented to teach Defence Against the Dark Arts.”

The applause was thin and short. Most of the school, eyeing the patched robes, seemed to be reserving judgement; only those who had shared his compartment clapped hard, Harry loudest among them. Clapping, he happened to glance along the staff table and saw Professor Snape, the Potions master, looking at Professor Lupin. Harry had seen Snape look at people with dislike, and at Harry himself with something a good deal stronger. This was stronger again; and at the corners of the thin mouth there was a tightness that looked, of all things, like fear.

“Our second appointment,” Dumbledore went on, as the applause died. “Professor Kettleburn has at last retired from the teaching of Care of Magical Creatures, after a long and distinguished career and a number of injuries which he has particularly asked me not to describe at dinner. His successor will be Rubeus Hagrid, who will continue as Keeper of Keys and Grounds besides.”

The Gryffindor table went up like a firework. Harry, Ron and Hermione stared at one another for half a second and then joined in, hammering the table till the goblets jumped. Up at the staff table Hagrid had turned the colour of a ripe plum and was examining his own enormous hands with deep attention, while his grin disappeared into his beard.

“The book!” Ron bellowed, pounding. “That explains the book!”

Across the Hall, at the Slytherin table, a fair head was bent towards Pansy Parkinson’s dark one; Harry saw Malfoy say something short, and Pansy laugh. Malfoy did not laugh. She was looking up at the staff table, where Hagrid was dabbing his eyes with a corner of the tablecloth, with the measuring look of somebody pricing a horse.

The feast was everything a feast ought to be after such a journey, and by the end of it the Dementors seemed a long way off. When the students began to stream towards the doors, Harry, Ron and Hermione went the other way, up to the staff table.

“Dumbledore come down ter the cabin himself,” said Hagrid thickly, his black eyes swimming. “Sat in my chair an’ asked if I’d like it. Like it!” He blew his nose on a napkin the size of a pillowcase. “Yeh wait, you three. First lesson. Yeh jus’ wait an’ see what I’ve got for yeh.”

Professor McGonagall was making shooing motions at them from the end of the table. They went: up the marble staircase, through the portrait of the Fat Lady, across the warm red common room and up the spiral stair to the dormitory, where Harry got into his four-poster and was asleep before Ron had got halfway through telling Neville about the mummies.

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Vol. 1: The Prisoner of Azkaban - Ch. 3

“Nine o’clock,” said Ron, reading upside down across the breakfast table, “Divination. And underneath it, nine o’clock, Muggle Studies. And underneath that —” he craned further, until his elbow was in the marmalade “— nine o’clock, Arithmancy. Hermione. You’ve put down three lessons at the same time.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Hermione, drawing the timetable towards her and folding it in half.

“I’m not being silly. It says so. In your writing. In green.”

“I’ve sorted it out with Professor McGonagall.”

“Sorted it out how? Are you going to sit in all three at once? Are you going to cut yourself into bits?”

“Ron,” said Hermione, “what is it to you if my timetable’s a bit full?” And she put the timetable into her bag, and the bag onto her shoulder, and a piece of toast into her mouth, and that was the end of it.

Harry was not listening very closely. He had his back to the Slytherin table, but he had been aware since he sat down of a certain amount of noise from it, and of the words fainted and swooned and carriage surfacing out of it at intervals, like porpoises. Most of it was Pansy Parkinson. Malfoy, so far as he could tell from a cautious glance over his shoulder, was eating her breakfast and reading a letter.

“Ignore them,” said Hermione.

“I am ignoring them,” said Harry.

It grew harder. Pansy Parkinson had risen half out of her seat to give the Slytherin table a proper performance: she let her eyes roll up into her head, clutched at her throat with both hands, gave a long quavering moan, and toppled sideways onto Millicent Bulstrode’s shoulder. There was a round of applause.

“No, no, Pansy,” said Malfoy’s voice, carrying clearly down the Hall. She had not looked up from her letter. “You’ve left out the best part. He’d have gone green first. A sort of pale, damp, lettuce green. Then he’d have flopped over.”

The laughter was louder this time. Harry put down his toast.

“Right,” said Ron, half rising. “I’ll —”

Hermione pulled him back down by the sleeve.

Fred and George, at the far end of the table, had heard it too. They exchanged a look, picked up their plates, and came along the bench, and sat down on either side of Harry with the deliberation of a pair of bookends that have been given something to hold upright.

“Parkinson,” said George, studying the Slytherin table with professional interest. “Not bad. A bit heavy on the moan.”

“Malfoy’s got the better eye for detail,” said Fred. “Lettuce. That’s nasty, that is. You have to admire it.”

“I don’t,” said Harry.

“No, well, you wouldn’t.” Fred helped himself to a sausage off Harry’s plate. Then he lowered his voice, and for once there was no joke anywhere in it. “Ginny told us about the train. She’s not right yet either, you know. Went up to bed still shaking.”

Harry looked down the table to where Ginny sat among the second-years, pushing her porridge round the bowl and not eating it.

“She didn’t faint, though,” he said.

“It’s not a competition, Harry.”

“Tell Malfoy that.”

The twins looked at each other over his head.

“Dad had to go out to Azkaban once,” said George. “Ministry business, years back. He came home and sat in the kitchen with his coat still on. Mum made him cocoa and he never touched it. Didn’t say a word. Just sat there for an hour, looking at the table.”

“And this is Dad,” said Fred, “who laughed when a self-mowing lawnmower bit him on the leg.”

Harry didn’t reply, but some of the heat went out of his face.

“So never mind Parkinson,” said George, getting up, and the joke came back into his voice like a lamp being turned up. “Gryffindor versus Slytherin, first match of the season. Let’s see Malfoy do her lettuce bit after that. All on you, Harry, old man.”

Fred clapped him on the shoulder, took a second sausage for the road, and they went.

Harry picked up his toast again. The thought of the match was, he found, an unexpectedly cheering one, and he finished the toast and another slice besides.

Breakfast broke up soon afterwards. Hermione drained her pumpkin juice, swung her bag onto her shoulder, and said she would see them there; Ron spread his timetable flat among the plates, ran his finger along it, and announced that Divination was at the top of the North Tower and that he had never been up the North Tower in his life. Neither had Harry. They went out with the crowd and up the marble staircase, and through a door that Ron said looked hopeful, and after ten minutes found themselves in a long corridor neither of them had ever seen, with a window at the end of it and no visible means of going higher.

“It’s got to be up,” said Ron reasonably, glaring at the ceiling as if it were being deliberately obstructive.

It was up. They found a narrow spiral staircase behind a tapestry and climbed it until they were dizzy, and came out on a landing where a painting of a fat grey pony hung on the wall, and a small, belligerent knight in armour too big for him came clanking into the frame, challenged them both to single combat, and, on being declined, insisted on leading them the rest of the way himself, from picture to picture, bellowing encouragement. He left them at last at the foot of a silver ladder that rose to a round trapdoor in the ceiling. Most of the class was already there. So was Hermione, sitting on her bag with a book open on her knee and not in the least out of breath, though they had left her at breakfast and had not passed her on the stairs.

The room at the top looked less like a classroom than the back parlour of a fortune-teller who had come into money and spent all of it on chintz. Little round tables crowded the floor, each ringed with sagging armchairs and squashed poufs. The curtains were drawn. Every lamp wore a red silk scarf, so that the whole room swam in a dim crimson glow, and a fire under the crowded mantelpiece gave off a perfume so heavy and so sweet that the air seemed thick enough to spread on bread.

Professor Trelawney came out of the gloom by degrees, like something surfacing in a pond. She was very thin, and her spectacles magnified her eyes to an enormous size, so that she regarded the class through them with the earnest attention of a large insect. A spangled shawl hung about her shoulders, and chains and strings of beads hung about her neck, and every time she moved her bangles clashed together like a distant tea-trolley.

“Welcome,” she said, in a voice like mist off a river. “How pleasant to meet you, at last, in the flesh.”

She explained that Divination was the most demanding of the magical arts, that books could take them only a very little way, and that she did not expect many of them to possess the Inner Eye. She informed Neville, with deep and tender sympathy, that his grandmother was unwell, which made Neville turn pale. She warned Parvati Patil to beware a red-haired man, which made Parvati edge her chair away from Ron. She mentioned, in the tone of one remarking on the weather, that the class would suffer a bad bout of flu in the second week of February, and that around Easter one of their number would leave them for ever. Then she asked them to pair off for their first assignment. They each received a teacup, and were directed to drink until only the dregs remained.

“You will swill the dregs around the cup three times with the left hand,” she directed, “then turn the cup upside-down on its saucer; wait for the last of the tea to drain away, then give your cup to your partner to read. You will interpret the patterns using pages five and six of Unfogging the Future. I shall move among you, helping and instructing.”

Harry and Ron tried to drink their tea quickly, the speed almost taking the skin off their tongues, then they swirled the dregs round three times with their left hands, upended the cups on their saucers, and swapped.

“Right,” said Ron, opening Unfogging the Future and peering into Harry’s cup as a man peers into a drain. “What can you see in mine?”

“Wet brown stuff,” said Harry.

“Open your minds, my dears,” breathed Professor Trelawney, drifting past in a cloud of scent. “Let your eyes see past the mundane.”

Ron tried. He turned the cup, and squinted, and consulted the book.

“There’s a sort of bent cross,” he said. “That’s ‘trials and suffering’. Sorry, mate. But that blob there might be the sun, and that’s ‘great happiness’. So you’re going to suffer horribly and enjoy it.”

“You want your Inner Eye looking at,” said Harry, and they had to bend low over the table to keep from laughing.

“And there’s an animal here.” Ron rotated the cup. “If that’s its head, it’s a hippo. No — a sheep. A very fat sheep —”

Harry snorted. Professor Trelawney turned upon them with a jingle and a swish.

“Allow me, my dear,” she said reprovingly, and plucked the cup out of Ron’s hand. The room went quiet to watch.

“The falcon,” she said, turning it slowly. “You have a mortal enemy, my dear.”

“Well, that’s hardly a secret,” said Hermione, not quite under her breath. Professor Trelawney’s magnified eyes swung towards her. “It isn’t,” said Hermione. “Everybody knows about Harry and You-Know-Who.”

Harry and Ron gazed at her with respect. They had never before heard Hermione answer a teacher back. Professor Trelawney declined to reply. She turned the cup again.

“The club. An attack. Dear me. This is not a happy cup. The skull — danger in your path, my dear —”

She gave the cup a final turn, and gasped, and let out a thin, high shriek. Professor Trelawney sank into an armchair with one ringed hand pressed to her heart and her eyes shut.

“My poor boy. My poor boy. No — no — it is kinder not to say — do not ask me —”

“What is it, Professor?” said Dean Thomas, and in a moment the whole class was out of its seats and crowding round to look.

Professor Trelawney opened her enormous eyes.

“My dear,” she said, “you have the Grim.”

“The what?” said Harry.

Dean shrugged at him. But most of the others had clapped their hands over their mouths.

“The Grim, my dear boy! The great spectral hound that haunts the churchyards! It is an omen, the darkest of all omens. It is the omen of death!”

Harry’s stomach turned over. He thought of the gap between two garages in Magnolia Crescent, and of a pair of eyes that had caught the light of a street-lamp.

He said nothing about it. Lavender Brown had both hands over her mouth now. Everybody was looking at Harry, except Hermione, who had gone round behind Professor Trelawney’s chair and was examining the cup with her head on one side.

“I don’t think it looks like a Grim,” she said.

Professor Trelawney regarded her with very little warmth. “Forgive me, my dear, but I perceive almost no aura around you. Almost no receptivity to the resonances of the future.”

Seamus Finnigan was tilting his head from one shoulder to the other. “It’s a Grim from here,” he said, screwing up his eyes, “but if you lean over this way, it’s more of a donkey.”

“When you’ve all quite finished deciding whether I’m going to die,” said Harry, more loudly than he had meant to, and after that nobody seemed to want to look at him at all.

“I think,” said Professor Trelawney faintly, “we will leave the lesson there for today.”

✦ ✦ ✦

At Transfiguration Professor McGonagall turned herself into a tabby cat with spectacle-markings round its eyes, and back again, in front of the whole class, which in the ordinary way would have brought down the house. It brought down nothing. She looked round at them with her lips thinning.

“Well. That is the first time in thirty-seven years that a transformation of mine has been received in total silence. Is something the matter with you all?”

Every head turned towards Harry. Hermione put up her hand.

“Please, Professor, we’ve just had our first Divination lesson, and we were doing tea leaves, and —”

“Ah,” said Professor McGonagall, and her face changed. “Say no more, Miss Granger. Which of you is to die this year?”

The class stared at her.

“Me,” said Harry, after a moment.

“I see.” Professor McGonagall fixed him with an eye like a gimlet. “Then you may as well know, Potter, that Sybill Trelawney has foretold the death of one pupil in every new class since she joined this staff. Her record of accuracy is, to date, perfect, in that not one of them has died. If it were not my settled practice never to speak ill of a colleague —” She stopped. Her nostrils had gone white. When she went on, it was in a perfectly ordinary voice. “Divination is among the most imprecise branches of our art, and I will not pretend to you that I have much patience with it. You look to me to be in excellent health, Potter, and I shall therefore not be excusing you from homework. Should you die before Thursday, you may consider the deadline extended.”

Hermione laughed. Harry felt better.

Ron still looked haunted at lunch.

“Cheer up, Ron,” said Hermione, pushing a dish of stew towards him. “You heard what Professor McGonagall said.”

“Harry,” said Ron, very low, “you haven’t seen a big black dog anywhere, have you?”

“Yeah,” said Harry. “The night I left the Dursleys’.”

Ron’s fork went down with a clatter.

“A stray,” said Hermione calmly.

“Hermione, if he’s seen a Grim, that’s bad. My uncle Bilius saw one, and he was dead inside a day!”

“Coincidence,” said Hermione, helping herself to pumpkin juice.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about! Wizards are terrified of Grims —”

“Well, there you are, then,” said Hermione, with maddening reasonableness. “They see one and die of fright. The Grim doesn’t predict anything. It just frightens people to death.”

They argued about it all through the pudding. Harry ate his treacle tart and let them. It was a mild, gold September afternoon, and after lunch came Care of Magical Creatures, and Care of Magical Creatures was Hagrid.

✦ ✦ ✦

Hagrid was waiting for them outside his hut in his moleskin overcoat, with Fang at his heels, rocking a little on the balls of his feet like a man who has been waiting since dawn for a train that is bringing him something wonderful.

“C’mon, now, look sharp!” he called, while they were still half the lawn away. “Got a real treat fer yeh today! Everyone here? Righ’, follow me!”

The lesson was shared with the Slytherins, which was a pity, but could not be helped. They came down the slope in a body a little behind the Gryffindors: Pansy Parkinson and Millicent Bulstrode arm in arm; Crabbe and Goyle bringing up the rear like a pair of removal vans; and Malfoy in the middle of them, walking with that straight-backed composure of hers, as though the lawn had been rolled for her that morning and she was prepared to overlook the dew. Her eyes were going steadily from the trees to Hagrid to the long fence beyond his hut, the way Aunt Petunia’s went round a room she was about to clean.

Hagrid led them along the edge of the Forest to a paddock. It was empty.

“Everyone gather round the fence!” he called. “That’s it — make sure yeh can all see. Now, firs’ thing yeh’ll want ter do is open yer books —”

“How?” said Malfoy.

It was a fair question, and several people glanced at her gratefully. The Monster Book of Monsters had been the scourge of everybody’s summer. Each copy had arrived snapping and lunging like a terrier with a grievance, and the class now kept them shut by every method known to science: Harry’s with a belt, Ron’s with Spellotape, Neville’s with several yards of garden twine and a prayer. Malfoy’s was buckled into a neat leather strap that had plainly been made for the purpose by somebody who charged for it.

“Eh?” said Hagrid.

“How do we open our books?” Malfoy held hers up. It growled through the strap.

“Hasn’ — hasn’ anyone bin able ter open ’em?” said Hagrid, his face falling.

Everybody shook their heads.

“Yeh’ve got ter stroke ’em,” said Hagrid, as if this were the plainest thing in the world. “Look —”

He took Hermione’s copy and tore off the Spellotape. The book reared to bite, but Hagrid ran one huge forefinger down its spine, and it shivered and fell open and lay quiet in his palm like a dog having its ears scratched.

“Stroke the spine,” said Malfoy. She considered her own copy. “Of course. One ought to have guessed. It was so obvious.”

Pansy giggled. Hagrid’s face fell further, and Harry felt a hot prickle of temper on his behalf.

“I — I thought they was funny,” said Hagrid uncertainly, to Hermione.

“Oh, killingly,” said Malfoy. “Books that try to take our hands off. What a tremendous joke.”

“Shut up, Malfoy,” said Harry quietly.

She looked at him. He looked back. Then she unbuckled the strap and drew one finger down the spine of her book, deliberately, and it fell open in her hands as meek as a lamb, and she gave it her whole attention and did not look at him again.

“Righ’,” said Hagrid, who seemed to have deflated and lost his thread. “So — so yeh’ve got yer books, an’ — an’ now yeh need the creatures. Yeah. I’ll go an’ fetch ’em. Hang on.”

He strode off into the trees.

✦ ✦ ✦

They came trotting out of the Forest a few minutes later, a dozen of them on a fistful of chains, and the whole class drew breath together.

From the shoulders back they were horses, sleek and long-legged and swishing their tails. From the shoulders forward they were eagles, and very large ones: great hooked beaks the grey of gunmetal, fierce round eyes the colour of marigolds, and forelegs that ended not in hooves but in talons as long as a man’s hand and wickedly curved. Their wings lay folded along their flanks. They were storm-grey and bronze and strawberry roan and glossy chestnut and an inky black that had blue in it where the light caught, and the feathers ran into hair along their shoulders so smoothly that you could not have put your finger on the place where one became the other. Each wore a thick leather collar, and every chain ended in Hagrid’s fist.

“Gee up, there!” roared Hagrid, and brought them to the fence, and tethered them along it in a row. The class drew back as one.

“Hippogriffs!” said Hagrid, flinging out an arm. “Beau’iful, aren’ they?”

Once the first shock had worn off, Harry could see what he meant. They tossed their heads and stamped, and the sun ran along their backs in a ripple of colour, and there was something in the way they carried themselves that made you want to stand up straighter.

“So,” said Hagrid, rubbing his hands together and beaming round at them, “if yeh’d all like ter come a bit nearer —”

Nobody seemed to want to.

“Now, firs’ thing yeh’ve gotta understand abou’ hippogriffs,” said Hagrid, “is that they’re proud. Touchy. Yeh don’ never insult a hippogriff, ’cause it might be the las’ thing yeh ever do.” He raised one finger like a bolster. “An’ yeh always let him make the firs’ move. That’s manners, see? Yeh walk up, an’ yeh bow, an’ then yeh wait. If he bows back, yeh can go up an’ touch him. If he don’, yeh get away from him sharpish, ’cause them talons hurt.”

“Professor Hagrid.”

It was Malfoy again, and this time there was no drawl in her voice at all. She had shut her book. She was looking past Hagrid at the long row of chains and collars and orange eyes.

“Yeh, Malfoy?” said Hagrid, a little warily.

“What happens if someone does it wrong?”

Ron made a noise through his nose. Hagrid looked down at her, puzzled.

“Well — yeh don’ do it wrong. That’s why I’m tellin’ yeh how ter do it right.”

“Yes, but if somebody does,” said Malfoy.

There was a short pause, during which several people looked at their own feet, as if trying to work out which of them was going to be the somebody.

“Then yeh back off, nice an’ slow,” said Hagrid, “an’ yeh don’ make any sudden moves, an’ I’ll be there quick as yeh like. Don’ you worry abou’ that.” He smiled down at her kindly. “Nothin’s goin’ ter happen. Good as gold, they are, if yeh treat ’em right.”

“I see,” said Malfoy.

“Trust her,” muttered Ron. “Five minutes into his first lesson.”

“Righ’!” said Hagrid. “Who wants ter go firs’?”

Most of the class answered by taking another step back. The hippogriffs were tossing their heads and flexing their great wings against the chains; they did not look as though they enjoyed being tethered.

“No one?” said Hagrid, with a pleading look.

“I’ll do it,” said Harry.

There was a hiss of breath behind him, and Lavender and Parvati both whispered, “Oh, Harry, remember your tea leaves!”

Harry climbed over the fence.

“Good man, Harry!” Hagrid beamed. “Righ’, then. Let’s see how yeh get on with Buckbeak.”

He unhooked one of the chains, led the storm-grey hippogriff a little way from the others, and slipped off its collar. On the far side of the fence the class held its breath.

“Easy now, Harry,” said Hagrid, low. “Yeh’ve got his eye. Keep it. Don’ blink if yeh can help it. They don’ trust a feller who blinks.”

Harry’s eyes began to water at once. He kept them open. Buckbeak had turned his great head, and was regarding him down the length of that terrible beak with one fierce orange eye.

“Tha’s it,” breathed Hagrid. “Now bow.”

Harry had no particular wish to show the back of his neck to Buckbeak, but he bowed, briefly, and straightened, and looked up.

Buckbeak went on looking at him. He did not move.

“Ah,” said Hagrid, sounding worried. “Righ’ — back away now, Harry, nice an’ easy —”

And then, to Harry’s enormous surprise, the hippogriff bent his scaly forelegs and sank, slowly and unmistakably, into a bow.

“Well done, Harry!” cried Hagrid. “Yeh can touch him now! Pat his beak, go on!”

Harry, who felt that the proper reward would have been to back away, went forward and put out his hand and patted the beak. It was warm, and hard as polished stone. Buckbeak half-closed his eyes like a cat in the sun.

The class broke into applause.

“Righ’ then, Harry,” said Hagrid, “I reckon he migh’ let yeh ride him!”

This was more than Harry had bargained for; but Hagrid was already showing him where to put his foot, just behind the wing-joint, and telling him on no account to pull out any feathers, and before Harry had worked out where he was meant to hold on, Hagrid had slapped the grey hindquarters and Buckbeak had opened his wings.

They were twelve feet across, and they went up on either side of Harry like a pair of sails, and the ground fell away.

It was a great deal less comfortable than a broomstick. The wings beat right under Harry’s knees and threatened at every stroke to lift him off; the feathers were glossy and slid under his fingers, and he did not dare grip them; and where his Nimbus ran through the air as smooth as a skate on ice, Buckbeak rose and fell with every wingbeat, so that Harry went up and down and backward and forward like a man in a small boat in a heavy sea. And yet: they went once round the paddock, and out over the lawn and the bright edge of the lake, and back; and for those few minutes the Grim and the Dementor and the screaming woman were nowhere at all, and there was nothing in the world but wind and wings and the beat of a great heart under him, and the ground a long way down, which was where it belonged.

The landing was the worst of it. Buckbeak came down with his head low, so that Harry felt he must slide straight off over the beak, and hit the turf with a jolt that rattled his teeth; but he stayed on, and pushed himself upright, and slid down with his knees shaking and his face split in a grin he could not have stopped if he had tried.

“Good work, Harry!” bellowed Hagrid, while everyone except the Slytherins cheered. “Righ’ — who else wants a go?”

Heartened, the rest of the class came over the fence in twos and threes, and Hagrid unchained the hippogriffs one at a time, and presently the whole paddock was dotted with people bowing at large birds with expressions of the deepest anxiety. Neville’s roan would not bend its knees for him however low he went, and Neville kept retreating from it at speed. Ron and Hermione set to work on the chestnut.

Malfoy had come over to Buckbeak.

“If Potter can manage it,” she said, to nobody in particular, “I expect I shall survive.”

She stopped at the proper distance. She did not hurry. She stood very straight, and met the orange eye, and held it without a blink; and then she bowed.

It was a remarkable bow. Harry, who had made his own on the general principle of bending in the middle and hoping for the best, saw at once that this was a different article altogether. It went down to precisely the right depth and stopped there, and paused, and came up again by degrees, and it had in it the whole of an education which Harry suspected had been conducted over a number of years by somebody standing over it with a ruler. Buckbeak considered it. Then he folded his forelegs and sank into a bow so deep and so prompt that his beak brushed the grass, with the air of a duke at a garden party who has unexpectedly recognised a duchess.

“Now tha’s a bow!” Hagrid boomed. “Did yeh all see that? Textbook, Malfoy! Absolutely textbook! Better than, even!”

Malfoy straightened. A faint pink had come into her face. She put out her hand and stroked the grey beak, and Buckbeak leaned his great head into her palm and half-shut his eyes in a positively soppy way; and she looked over her shoulder at Harry with an expression of pure, mild, unanswerable triumph.

Hagrid, still smiling, went lumbering across to the far side of the paddock to sort out Neville, who was having an experience as distant from Malfoy’s as it was possible to get.

Harry, who five minutes ago had been made to stand there with his eyes watering while the hippogriff decided whether or not he was worth bowing to, felt that hippogriffs were extremely vain and unfair creatures. It was exactly the sort of creature, he thought sourly, that would be bowled over by Malfoy manners.

“Your turn, Gregory,” said Malfoy.

Goyle had been standing a little behind her with the face of a large boy who has been hoping, on dwindling evidence, that his turn would not come. He shuffled forward.

“Exactly as he said,” Malfoy told him, low and quick. “Exactly what I did. Don’t get clever. Do you hear?”

“Yeah,” said Goyle.

She stepped aside to give him room. Harry, who had drifted a few yards off towards Ron and Hermione and the chestnut, turned back to watch, partly from curiosity and partly from a private and not very creditable hope.

Goyle nodded. He wiped his palms on his robes and lumbered forward, and for a moment Harry thought he was going to manage it. He stopped in roughly the right place. He looked at Buckbeak. Buckbeak looked at him.

But Goyle was sweating. Harry could see it shining on his forehead from the fence, and his little eyes kept flicking from the hippogriff’s beak to its talons and back again. He blinked. He blinked again. Buckbeak’s head tilted, and the feathers along his neck began, very slowly, to rise.

“Easy,” called Hagrid, from across the paddock, where he was helping Neville. “Easy, now, Goyle — back off a bit an’ —”

Goyle saw the feathers rise and flinched. He took a sharp step backwards, stumbled, and caught himself — from somewhere in the paddock, somebody sniggered. Goyle’s face went a dull, blotchy red.

“Stupid great bird,” he blurted, and flung up his arm as though to shove the hippogriff’s head away.

The talons moved faster than Harry’s eye could follow. There was a flash of grey and a sound like canvas tearing, and Goyle screamed, a high thin scream that did not sound as if it could have come out of anything so large; and then he was on the ground, and there was blood on the grass, and on Goyle, and a great deal more of it than Harry had known a person kept in him.

Buckbeak reared up again, wings half-spread, screeching. Then Hagrid was there, having come across the paddock at a sprint, flinging his whole weight on the hippogriff’s neck, wrestling the collar back over the great head while Buckbeak strained and struck at the air towards the figure on the grass; and all over the paddock people were screaming, and hippogriffs were shying and stamping, and Neville had fallen over.

Harry hadn’t seen Malfoy move, but she was somehow already on her knees beside Goyle in the trampled grass, with her own cloak off and wadded into a pad, pressing it against his shoulder with both hands and the whole of her weight.

“Vincent!” Her voice, high, panicked, and sharp, screamed through the noise. “Vincent!”

Crabbe, grey-faced, came running over from where he had been frozen watching his friend.

“Run to the hospital wing. Tell Madam Pomfrey a hippogriff. Tell her it’s deep. Run!”

Crabbe ran. Harry had not known Crabbe could run like that; he went up the slope towards the castle like a startled bullock.

“Gregory. Gregory. Look at me. You need to look at me — at me.” Her voice cracked and her chest was heaving. “You’re all right. You’re going to be all right — No, stop trying to sit up.”

Goyle made a whimpering sound and tried to sit up. Malfoy leant on him.

“I said stop.” She looked around, eyes dilated with adrenalin, and then hissed at the crowd. “Back. All of you. Get back. Give him air. Pansy, take them to the fence. Don’t stand there, do it.”

Pansy, white to the lips, began flapping her hands at the crowd, and the crowd went back. Harry did not. He found that he had come across the grass without deciding to and was standing over them, and he could see what was under the cloak. The talons had gone in at the top of Goyle’s left shoulder and come out a long way down across the front of his chest, and the cloak in Malfoy’s hands was already dark and soaking.

Malfoy glanced up and saw him.

“Potter. I need — I need your cloak. Mine’s through.”

Harry had it off immediately and handed it over. She took it, folded it one-handed into a thick square, laid it over her own, and pressed down harder, so that Goyle groaned.

Harry could see Malfoy fighting intensely for control over herself, working to master her breathing and the pounding that must have been in her ears.

“I know,” said Malfoy. “I know it hurts. Keep looking at me. You need to stay with me. You need — tell me — tell me the Slytherin team. Gregory. Tell me who’s on the team.”

“Fl — Flint,” said Goyle, through chattering teeth. “Pucey … Bole … Derrick …”

“Right. Good. Yeah. Who else?”

“… you …”

Hagrid came lumbering up, white as paper above the beard. He had got Buckbeak back to the fence and chained him there, and the hippogriff stood with his feathers still raised, watching them all with his fierce, indifferent eye.

“Let me — I’ll carry him up —” Hagrid bent, his great hands held out.

Malfoy looked up at him.

It lasted only a second, and she did not say a word. But Harry, who had been on the receiving end of a great many of Malfoy’s looks over two years, had never seen one like it. The panic vanished from her face, and it was replaced with murder; and Hagrid, who was three times her size, actually took a step back.

Then it was gone, and Malfoy was looking back down at Goyle, and her voice was a little more level than before.

“No.” Malfoy did not take her hands off the cloak. “I don’t think we should move him. Pomfrey’s coming. Vincent’s gone for her. And if I take my hands off him, he could lose — lose too much blood.”

Hagrid stopped where he was, his hands still half held out, and Harry saw him look at her, and then down at Goyle and the dark wet cloaks and the grass; and then he straightened slowly, and his huge hands hung at his sides.

It felt like an hour. It could not have been more than a few minutes before Madam Pomfrey came down the slope at a pace Harry would not have believed her capable of, with her wand out and a stretcher floating before her, and Crabbe, purple and gasping, toiling in her wake.

“Out of my way — out of my way —”

She dropped to her knees on Goyle’s other side.

“Hippogriff talon,” said Malfoy at once. “He was hit bad. Started at the left shoulder, then down across the chest. I think — maybe five minutes ago. I’ve kept him talking and awake so he doesn’t faint. I’ve kept pressure on it the whole time too.”

Madam Pomfrey nodded briskly.

“Thank you, Miss Malfoy. Keep your hands exactly where they are until I tell you.” Her wand was moving over Goyle’s chest, and she was murmuring. “There. Now. Lift — gently.”

Goyle went up onto the stretcher with the two cloaks still pressed to his chest and Malfoy’s hands still resting on them. She walked beside it as it floated up the slope, one hand never leaving the sodden pad, bending every few steps to say something to the face on the stretcher; Crabbe walked on the other side, and Madam Pomfrey went ahead; and the rest of the class stood in the paddock and watched them go until they had passed out of sight beyond the greenhouses.

Hagrid turned round to the rest of them. His face had no colour in it at all.

“Class dismissed,” he said.

✦ ✦ ✦

The Slytherins talked of nothing else at dinner, and they did not trouble to lower their voices.

“— sacked by Friday, my father says, the minute the governors hear —”

“— should never have been let near a class, a man who can’t even do proper magic —”

“— nearly had his arm off, Pansy says, she was right there —”

Malfoy was not at the Slytherin table. Neither were Crabbe and Goyle.

“D’you think he’ll be all right?” said Hermione nervously. “Goyle?”

“Course he will,” said Ron. “Madam Pomfrey can mend a cut in about a second.” But he did not sound sure, and he did not eat much.

Harry did not eat much either. He kept seeing the grass.

They had decided, without exactly deciding it, that they would go down to see Hagrid when dinner was over, and they were crossing the Entrance Hall towards the oak front doors when somebody came down the marble staircase behind them, and Harry turned round.

It was Malfoy. She had washed and changed her robes, but there was still a faint brownish line under the nails of several fingers, as though she had scrubbed and scrubbed and not quite got to the end of it. She had a bundle of black cloth over her arm. She came down the last few stairs and held it out to Harry.

“Your cloak, Potter.” She held it out at arm’s length, as one holds out something retrieved from a drain. “I had it cleaned. It needed it before, frankly.”

Harry took it. It was perfectly clean and perfectly dry and folded into exact quarters.

“How is he?” he said.

Malfoy looked at him for a moment as though she had been expecting a different question, and then answered this one.

“Madam Pomfrey says he’ll mend.” Some tight thing in her shoulders let go a little as she said it. “Not tonight. Hippogriff talons don’t close like an ordinary cut, she says; there’s something in them that fights the charms. He’ll be in bandages for a fortnight at least, and stiff, and it’s going to hurt, and he is going to complain about it the entire time.”

“Good,” said Harry, and found that he meant it. “That he’ll mend, I mean.”

“Yes, Potter,” said Malfoy. “I did follow.”

Ron, who had been holding himself in with visible effort, came forward.

“And I suppose you’ve already written to your dad,” he said. “Haven’t you? About Hagrid?”

“Naturally.”

“So that’s it. Your lot are going to get him sacked.”

Harry had been waiting for it, and here it was. He turned the folded cloak over in his hands and felt his temper rise up to meet it.

“Goyle did it to himself,” he said. “You were there. You heard Hagrid. Don’t ever insult one. He was the one who panicked, and he was the one who went at it waving his arms, and he was the one who called it a stupid —”

“Yes,” said Malfoy.

Harry stopped.

“He did,” said Malfoy. “Gregory was stupid. He was told exactly what not to do, by Hagrid and then by me, and he did it. He’ll say so himself, once he’s finished feeling sorry for himself.” She looked at Harry steadily. “Is that what you wanted me to say?”

Harry had had a good deal more ready. He had had the whole argument laid out, from Goyle’s stupidity at one end to Hagrid’s innocence at the other, and he had expected to have to fight for every inch of it. It is a disconcerting thing to set one’s shoulder to a heavy door and have it swing open at a touch. He stood in the Entrance Hall with his mouth slightly open and his cloak in his hands, and could not, for a moment, think of anything to do with either.

“Then —” said Ron.

“Then nothing, Weasley. Gregory’s stupidity and Professor Hagrid’s competence are two separate questions. Do try to keep them apart; it will save us all a great deal of time.”

“What do you mean, separate?” said Hermione. It was the first thing she had said, and she said it with a frown, in the voice she used in class when she suspected the answer was going to be unsatisfactory.

Malfoy turned to her.

“There were thirty of us in that paddock, Granger. We are thirteen years old. In any class of thirty thirteen-year-olds, somebody is going to do something stupid; it is the single most certain fact in the world. Hagrid knew it — he must have known it — and he put a dozen animals that can open a boy like a letter into a field with us, and went off to the far end of it with Longbottom, and when I asked him what would happen if somebody got it wrong, he only said not to worry.”

“He said he’d be there,” said Harry.

“He was there,” said Malfoy. “Afterwards.”

There was a silence in the Entrance Hall. Somewhere above them a staircase groaned as it swung round to a new landing.

“It was his first lesson,” said Harry at last. “The first lesson he’s ever taught.”

“Then it ought to have been the safest one,” said Malfoy, and went back up the stairs.

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Vol. 1: The Prisoner of Azkaban - Ch. 4

Hagrid’s hut had a single lamp lit in the window, but Harry had to bang on the door for a while before anybody answered.

“Oh,” said Hagrid, looking down at them. “It’s you lot.” He stood back to let them in, and went to sit down at his scrubbed table, with a pewter tankard the size of a bucket in front of him, and Fang putting his head down on Hagrid’s boot.

“Shouldn’ be out after dark,” said Hagrid, but without conviction, and sat down again.

They sat down too. Nobody seemed to know how to begin. Hermione looked at Ron, and Ron looked at the tankard, and Harry laid his clean folded cloak across his knees and looked at that.

“How’s the lad?” said Hagrid at last.

“Madam Pomfrey says he’ll mend,” said Harry. “It’ll take a while. A fortnight, maybe.”

Hagrid let out a long breath that stirred his beard.

“Thank goodness fer that.” He turned the tankard round on the table. “Firs’ day. Firs’ lesson.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Hagrid,” said Hermione at once.

“Goyle insulted it,” said Ron. “Everybody heard. You told us not to, and he went and did it. They can’t sack you for that.”

“Can’t they?” said Hagrid. He drank. “Lucius Malfoy’s already sent his complaint up ter the governors. Dumbledore had it off him this afternoon by owl. Actin’ fer the Goyle family, he says. As if they couldn’ write their own letters.” He set the tankard down. “An’ there’ll be one ter the Ministry an’ all, you mark my words. The Committee fer the Disposal o’ Dangerous Creatures.” He said the name as though it tasted of something. “That’s what they’ll want. Buckbeak.”

“They wouldn’t,” said Hermione.

Hagrid did not answer. Harry watched him look out of the dark window towards the paddock, where something large and grey was just visible standing at the end of its chain.

“Dumbledore says sit tight,” said Hagrid. “Says the governors’ll meet an’ nothin’s settled an’ I’m not ter go doin’ anythin’ daft. So I’m sittin’ tight.” He looked down at his own hands on the table, which were the size of dustbin lids. “She kep’ her head, that girl. I’ll say that fer her. Kep’ it better’n I did.”

There was a pause.

“She asked you,” said Harry. He had not known he was going to say it. “Before. What would happen if somebody got it wrong.”

“I know she did,” said Hagrid.

He did not say anything else. Ron gave Harry a look of indignant astonishment, and Hermione’s eyes went from one to the other of them, and Fang whined and shifted his head on Hagrid’s boot.

Hagrid looked at his tankard.

“I think you’ve had enough to drink, Hagrid,” said Hermione firmly. She took the tankard from the table and went outside to empty it.

“Ar, maybe she’s right,” said Hagrid. He tottered outside, and then there was a violent splash.

Ron and Harry ran to the door, and saw that Hagrid had plunged his head into a water barrel.

Hagrid then came back inside, his long hair and beard sopping wet, wiping the water out of his eyes.

“Tha’s better,” he said, shaking his head like a dog and drenching them all. He sat back down. “Listen, it was good of yeh ter come an’ see me, I really —”

Then Hagrid seemed to come to himself. He looked at the three of them, and at the black window, and stared at Harry as though he’d just realised who he was.

“What’re yeh doin’ here?” he said, standing up all in a rush. “After dark! Harry! With Black on the loose! Up ter the castle, the lot o’ yeh, an’ I’m walkin’ yeh there. An’ don’ let me catch yeh comin’ down here after dark again, I’m not worth it!”

✦ ✦ ✦

There was no Care of Magical Creatures for the rest of that week, nor for the first days of the next. A notice in Professor McGonagall’s handwriting went up on the common-room board to say that the subject was suspended until further notice, and Hagrid was to be seen about the grounds doing gamekeeper’s work with a sort of dumb ferocity, mending fences that did not need mending and splitting a great deal more firewood than the castle could burn. The governors’ letter came to him on the Wednesday, and he read it aloud to them at his kitchen table that evening, with his finger moving along under the lines and his voice going up and down over the long words like a cart over a ploughed field.

“‘… having considered the representations of Mr Lucius Malfoy on behalf of Mr and Mrs Goyle, an’ of the Headmaster, Professor Dumbledore … the Board does not at this time consider dismissal warranted …’” Hagrid lowered the parchment and looked at them over it, and his beetle-black eyes were wet. “I’m stayin’. Hear that? I’m stayin’.”

“Hagrid, that’s wonderful,” said Hermione.

“There’s more,” said Harry, who was sitting beside Hagrid and could see the rest of the page. There was a great deal more.

Hagrid put his finger back on the line, and his face slowly fell as he went down it. The Board, it appeared, reserved its final decision on the conditions of Professor Hagrid’s future teaching until a fuller review could be held. In the meantime, and with immediate effect: no creature bearing a Ministry classification above a certain grade was to be brought before any class; every lesson involving live creatures was to be approved in writing in advance by the Deputy Headmistress; and any lesson involving a creature capable of serious injury was to have a second member of staff present.

“Interim restrictions,” said Hermione, reading upside down. “That means temporary. Until they decide properly.”

“I know what it means,” said Hagrid heavily. He folded the letter up very small, smaller and smaller, as though he could fold it out of existence. “It means I’m on a lead.”

He sat for a while with the little folded square of parchment in his fist. Then he put it into his waistcoat pocket.

“S’pose it means I can teach again, anyhow,” he said. “Next week. On a lead, but teachin’.”

✦ ✦ ✦

Goyle came back to lessons a week to the day after the accident, and the first lesson he came back to was double Potions.

He came in last, behind Malfoy and Crabbe, moving very slowly and very carefully, like a man carrying a full tray across a ship’s deck. His left arm was strapped across his chest inside his robes, and the shoulder above it was so thickly bandaged that the robe would not lie flat over it, and whenever he forgot himself and moved it his whole face screwed up like a fist. He lowered himself onto the Slytherin bench by stages. Pansy Parkinson made a great show of helping him with his bag, and went on, as she unpacked it, to tell everyone within hearing that he had very nearly lost the arm, that his mother had written to the Prophet, and that the oaf would be gone by Christmas.

“Shrinking Solution,” said Professor Snape, sweeping in. “Instructions on the board. Begin.”

Harry set to work on his daisy roots. Across the aisle, at the Slytherin bench, Malfoy had laid out two sets of ingredients, her own and Goyle’s, side by side on the board in front of her, and was working through both of them without any appearance of hurry. She cut her roots, and then she cut his. She skinned her shrivelfig, and then she skinned his, and dropped the pieces into his cauldron, and said, “Stir. Clockwise. Seven times, and then stop,” and Goyle, one-handed, stirred.

“Look at that,” said Ron, under his breath, in tones of the deepest disgust. “She’s doing his roots for him.”

“Yeah,” said Harry, finding he couldn’t dredge up the same sense of disgust in himself.

Professor Snape came prowling down between the benches. He stopped behind Malfoy, and looked at the two neat piles of chopped root, and at Goyle’s cauldron, and at Goyle.

“I trust,” he said silkily, “that Mr Goyle intends to submit a potion of his own making, Miss Malfoy.”

“He’ll stir it himself, sir,” said Malfoy, without looking up from her knife. “And bottle it. But he’s injured and down a hand. Madam Pomfrey said not for five days yet. I’m just helping the injured.”

Snape regarded her for a moment longer. “Very kind,” he said. “Five points to Slytherin for your magnanimity.”

Harry heard Ron hiss with displeasure behind him.

Then Snape moved on down the aisle, and Harry’s stomach sank, because Snape had stopped behind Neville.

Neville was trembling in anticipation before Snape had even opened his mouth; for his Shrinking Solution, which by this stage ought to have been a clear, bright, acid green, was a thick and cheerful orange, like soup.

“Orange,” said Snape softly. He dipped a ladle into it and let it pour back in a long, slow, glutinous rope, so that the whole room could see. “Orange, Longbottom. Tell me: does anything I say ever penetrate that skull, or does it strike the bone and drop off? One rat spleen, I said. One. A dash of leech juice. I wrote it on the board. I said it aloud. What, precisely, must be done to you before you understand?”

Neville had gone a mottled pink, and his chin was trembling.

“Please, sir,” said Hermione, “I could help Neville put it right —”

“I do not recall inviting you to show off, Miss Granger,” said Snape, without turning his head, and Hermione went as pink as Neville. “Longbottom. At the end of this lesson we will feed a few drops of your potion to your toad, and see what it does to him. Perhaps that will concentrate your mind.”

He swept away. Neville stared after him, rigid with terror, and then turned a face of the most abject appeal on Hermione.

“Help me,” he whispered.

For the rest of the lesson Hermione worked at her own cauldron with her head bent and her lips barely moving, and fed Neville instructions out of the side of her mouth like a prisoner passing notes through a wall, while Neville followed them with shaking hands and Snape prowled the far end of the dungeon. Across the aisle Pansy Parkinson leaned over to watch, and nudged Millicent, and they both giggled.

When the bell had nearly gone, Snape came back. He lifted Trevor the toad out of Neville’s pocket by one leg, held him dangling over the cauldron, took a teaspoon of the potion, which was now green, and poured it down Trevor’s throat.

There was a hushed pause. Then there was a small pop, and Trevor was gone, and in Snape’s palm there wriggled a tadpole.

The Gryffindors burst into applause. Snape, looking sour, pulled a small bottle from his robes, poured a few drops onto the tadpole, and it was a toad again, rather surprised.

“Five points from Gryffindor,” said Snape, and the smiles went off the Gryffindor faces at once. “I told you not to help him, Miss Granger. Class dismissed.”

At the end of the class Goyle got up from the bench the way he had sat down on it, in stages. Malfoy picked up his bag before Pansy could, and slung it over her own shoulder with her own, and walked out beside him at his pace, which was very slow, and did not once tell him to hurry.

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Vol. 1: The Prisoner of Azkaban - Ch. 5

Later that morning, Professor Lupin arrived at their first Defence Against the Dark Arts lesson some minutes after the class had, in robes no less shabby than those he had slept in on the train, and found a dozen Gryffindors sitting behind their textbooks with the resigned expressions of people who have had two Defence teachers already and expect the worst of the third.

“Put those away,” he said pleasantly, setting his battered case down on the desk. “You won’t want them today. Wands only. Follow me.”

This was so far outside the experience of the class that for a moment nobody moved. Then there was a great scraping of chairs, and they followed him out into the corridor in a body, exchanging looks.

The first thing they met was Peeves. The poltergeist was hanging upside down in the air outside the third-floor classroom, cramming a wad of chewing gum into the keyhole of the door with both thumbs and singing to himself as he did it. When he saw Professor Lupin he stopped singing and began instead to chant a little rhyme about him, of which the operative word was loony and the remaining words were chosen chiefly to rhyme with it.

“That keyhole is Mr Filch’s, Peeves,” said Lupin mildly, “and his mops are on the other side of it. I would leave it alone.”

Peeves blew a long and wet raspberry by way of reply.

Professor Lupin sighed, as a man sighs who has been handed a tiresome errand and means to do it properly. He took out his wand, pointed it at the keyhole, and said, “Waddiwasi.”

The wad of gum came out of the keyhole like a bullet and shot straight up Peeves’ left nostril. Peeves whirled over in the air and zoomed away, cursing thickly through his nose, and the class, which had come out of the classroom expecting very little, began to look at its new teacher with interest.

“Wicked,” breathed Dean Thomas.

“Effective, at any rate,” said Professor Lupin, putting his wand away. “This way.”

He led them to the staff room, a long panelled room full of mismatched old chairs. It was empty except for Professor Snape, who was sitting in a low armchair by the fire and who looked round as they filed in with the air of a man who has found mice in the larder.

He rose. He did not leave at once. He stood in the doorway with one hand on the door and surveyed the class as they arranged themselves, and his eye came to rest on Neville.

“A word of warning, Lupin,” he said. “I don’t know whether anyone has told you. You have Longbottom in this group. I should give him nothing complicated to do, if I were you. Not unless Miss Granger is standing beside him to whisper him through it.”

Neville went a dark and painful red. Harry glared at Snape’s back.

“I was rather hoping,” said Professor Lupin, raising his eyebrows, “that Neville would help me with the first part of the lesson, actually. I am sure he will do it admirably.”

Snape’s lip curled. He went out, and closed the door behind him with a small, final click.

Professor Lupin led them down to the far end of the room, where an old wardrobe for spare robes stood against the panelling. As they came up to it, it gave a lurch, and thumped against the wall, and everybody jumped back.

“Don’t be alarmed,” said Lupin, as the wardrobe rocked again. “There is a Boggart inside.”

The class appeared to feel that this was a sound reason for alarm. Neville looked at the door behind them with the deepest longing.

“Boggarts are fond of small dark places,” Lupin went on, “cupboards and wardrobes and the space under the stairs; I have even known one take up residence in a coal scuttle. This gentleman moved in yesterday, and I asked whether he might be left where he was for the benefit of the third years. Now, who can tell me what a Boggart is?”

Hermione’s hand went up so fast her sleeve cracked like a flag.

“It changes its shape,” she said. “Into whatever the person looking at it is most frightened of.”

“Exactly right. And at present, shut up in the dark, it has no shape at all, because nobody is looking at it and it does not yet know what will frighten us. When it comes out, it will try to become the worst thing any of us can imagine.” Lupin looked round at them pleasantly. “Which means that we begin with an advantage over it. Harry, can you see what it is?”

Harry could feel Hermione vibrating beside him like a kettle about to boil. He thought fast.

“There are a dozen of us,” he said. “It won’t know who to be first.”

“That is it precisely.” Hermione subsided. “A Boggart likes to catch people alone. In a crowd it cannot decide, and a Boggart that cannot decide is a ridiculous object. I watched one once trying to frighten a married couple at the same time. It got halfway to a vampire and halfway to a slug, and ended up as neither, and they laughed at it till it went back under the floorboards.” He raised his wand. “That is the whole secret. Laughter. The spell helps you force it into a shape you find funny, and the laughter finishes it. Say the word with me, without wands first. Riddikulus!”

“Riddikulus!” said the class.

“Good. Rather good. That, I’m afraid, was the easy part. Neville.”

The wardrobe shook again. Neville walked forward towards it as if towards a gallows.

“Neville,” said Professor Lupin, “what are you most frightened of in the world?”

Neville’s lips moved, but nothing came out of them.

“I didn’t catch that, I’m afraid.”

Neville looked round, as if somebody might rescue him, and then said, barely audibly, “Professor Snape.”

Almost everyone laughed. Even Neville grinned in a sickly, apologetic sort of way. Professor Lupin, however, did not laugh. He looked thoughtful.

“Professor Snape. Hm. Neville, I think you live with your grandmother?”

“Er — yes,” said Neville, startled. “But I don’t want the Boggart to turn into her, either.”

“No, no, you misunderstand me. I’m only wondering what she generally wears.”

Neville stared at him. Then, haltingly, he began to describe it: a tall hat, with a stuffed bird on top of it, a vulture; a long dress, usually green; a fox-fur scarf; and a large red handbag which she was never without.

“Good,” said Professor Lupin. “Can you see those clothes clearly in your mind’s eye? Every detail? Then when the Boggart comes out of that wardrobe and becomes Professor Snape, you will raise your wand and say the word and think as hard as you possibly can about those clothes. And if it all goes well, our friend the Boggart will be obliged to try them on.”

There was a great shout of laughter. The wardrobe wobbled more violently than ever.

“If Neville succeeds, the Boggart will very likely come to each of you in turn,” said Professor Lupin. “So I want you all to take a moment to think what frightens you most, and how you might make it ridiculous.”

The room went quiet. Harry thought.

What did he fear most in the world? His first thought was of Voldemort, as Voldemort had been at full strength, and he began to plan what he might do to him; but before he had got very far, another picture rose in his mind uninvited and pushed the first aside. A tall, hooded figure in a doorway. A hand like something drowned. A long, rattling breath, and a cold that went in through the ribs.

He could not think how anybody was supposed to make that funny.

“Everyone ready?” said Professor Lupin.

Harry was not, but he did not like to say so. The others were rolling up their sleeves.

“Neville, we’re going to stand back and give you a clear field. Then I’ll call the next person forward. Right — on the count of three. One, two, three —”

Sparks leapt from the end of Lupin’s wand to the brass knob of the wardrobe. The door swung open.

Snape came out of it. He came out exactly as he came into a dungeon, sweeping, his black eyes already fixed and glittering, his long hooked nose pointed at Neville like the beak of a bird of prey; and he took one long stride forward.

Neville went back a step. His wand was shaking so violently that the end of it described small circles in the air.

“R-r-riddikulus!” he squeaked.

There was a crack. The figure of Snape staggered, as though somebody had trodden on its robes; and when it recovered itself it was dressed in a long green dress with lace at the throat and wrists, a mangy fox-fur round its shoulders, and on its head a very tall hat surmounted by a stuffed vulture with glass eyes, and it had in one hand a vast red handbag, which it swung in a puzzled manner, as if wondering what it was for.

The class howled with laughter. The Boggart stood there looking down at itself in bewilderment, and Professor Lupin called, “Parvati! Forward!”

Parvati stepped up, pale and determined. The Boggart wheeled on her, and there was a crack, and the vulture hat was gone: in its place stood a tall wrapped figure with a face of grubby linen, its arms stretched out stiffly in front of it, coming towards her one dragging step at a time.

Parvati shouted the word. The wrappings round its ankles came undone all at once, and it pitched forward on its face, and its head came off and bowled away under a chair.

“Seamus!”

The thing that rose up in front of Seamus was a woman, or the wreck of one, grey-skinned and hollow-eyed, with black hair that hung to the floor; and she opened her mouth to a size no mouth should reach and began a long, rising wail that set Harry’s teeth on edge — and Seamus yelled, and the wail winked out, and the creature stood there clutching at its throat with its mouth working and no sound coming out of it at all.

After that the Boggart lost its nerve, if a Boggart may be said to have one. It went from shape to shape with the frantic haste of a man trying on hats in a burning shop: a rat that ended chasing its own tail; a coiled snake that found itself tied in a bow; an eyeball the size of a football, which was made to roll away across the floor into the coal scuttle.

“We have it on the run!” called Professor Lupin. “Keep going. Dean!”

Dean stepped up. The thing on the floor became a hand, grey and severed at the wrist, and set off towards him across the floorboards on its fingertips with a horrible, busy scuttle.

Dean shouted, “Riddikulus!” and a mousetrap closed on it with a snap.

“Very good! Ron!”

Ron jumped forward, and there was a crack, and several people shrieked.

It was a spider, and it was taller than Ron, and it came towards him on its jointed hairy legs with its pincers working; and for one dreadful second Ron stood there with his wand up and his whole face drained of colour. Then he got the word out, in something closer to a yelp than a spell, and every one of the spider’s eight legs vanished at once. Its great black body rolled over and over across the floor, scattering the class, and came to rest at Harry’s feet.

Harry lifted his wand. He was ready; he had his breath drawn and the spell on his tongue. And before he could use either, Professor Lupin had stepped quickly across in front of him.

There was a crack.

The spider was gone. In the air in front of Professor Lupin, a little above the height of his head, there hung a pale silvery sphere, glowing faintly, like a lamp seen through mist. Lupin regarded it for a moment with an expression Harry could not read. Then he said the word quite quietly, almost wearily, and the sphere dropped with a soft plop to the floor, and was a cockroach.

“Neville!” said Lupin. “Come and finish it.”

The cockroach became Snape once more. But this time Neville did not back away. He came forward with his jaw set and his wand out, and shouted Riddikulus! so loudly that it rang off the panelling; and for one glorious moment the whole class saw the Potions master standing in the middle of the staff room in green lace and a fox fur and a vulture, before Neville burst out laughing, and the Boggart burst too, into a puff of grey smoke that drifted up to the ceiling and was gone.

The class cheered. Professor Lupin was beaming.

“Well done,” he said. “Very well done, all of you. Five points to Gryffindor for everyone who faced it, and ten for Neville, who faced it twice. And five each for Hermione and Harry.”

“I didn’t do anything,” said Harry.

“You both answered my questions at the start,” said Lupin, without quite meeting his eye. “Read the chapter on Boggarts, please, and write me a summary of it for Monday. Off you go.”

The class went out into the corridor in a state of high excitement. Harry went with them, and he did not feel excited at all. Lupin had seen him standing there with his wand up, ready, and had stepped in front of him all the same, as though he had looked at Harry and decided, before Harry had so much as opened his mouth, that Harry was the one person in the room who could not be trusted to manage.

Around him the lesson was being played over again at the top of everyone’s voice. Seamus was doing his banshee. Dean was doing his hand, with his own hand, along the top of Lavender’s bag, until she hit him.

“A crystal ball,” Lavender said, rubbing her arm. “Professor Lupin’s frightened of a crystal ball. Isn’t that funny? Perhaps he’s been to Divination.”

“Best Defence lesson we have ever had,” said Ron, with deep conviction. “Easily. By miles. Did you see me do the legs?”

“We all saw you do the legs, Ron,” said Hermione. “He’s very good. I only wish he’d let me have a go.”

“What would yours have been? A test you didn’t get full marks on?”

Hermione did not trouble to answer. She was looking at her watch, and then at the corridor, and then at her watch again.

“I’ve got to go,” she said. “Arithmancy. I’ll see you at lunch.”

She went off at a fast walk round the corner by the suit of armour. Ron looked after her.

“Arithmancy’s upstairs,” he said. “That way’s the Muggle Studies corridor.” He frowned. “And Lavender says she was in Muggle Studies this morning. This morning, when she was in Divination with us. How does she do that?”

“I don’t know,” said Harry, who was not really listening, and they went down to lunch.

✦ ✦ ✦

It was the following afternoon that Malfoy came to find Harry.

He was sitting in the courtyard with his back against a pillar and his Transfiguration homework on his knees, while Ron and Hermione argued on the next bench about Crookshanks, who had been found the night before sitting on the end of Ron’s bed and looking at Ron’s pillow. A shadow fell across the parchment for the second time in a month, and Harry looked up, and there she was, with a notebook in one hand and a pencil in the other and an expression of brisk and businesslike purpose.

“Potter. I need ten minutes.”

On the next bench the argument stopped immediately.

“What for?”

“To ask you what happened at the hippogriff lesson.”

“Why? Did your dad send you?”

“Father is acting for the Goyles,” said Malfoy. “But he has made gathering the evidence wholly my responsibility.”

Harry put his quill down. “I’m not helping you get Hagrid sacked.”

“I haven’t asked you to help me,” said Malfoy. “I’ve asked you what happened. They aren’t the same thing.” She sat down, without being invited, on the stone ledge at the foot of the next pillar, and opened the notebook on her knee. “You were nearer than anybody except me. And you’re the only person in that class, apart from me, who won’t tell lies about it.”

“How do you know I won’t?”

“Because you’re you,” said Malfoy. “You wouldn’t lie.”

“Is that a compliment about my honesty?”

“Are you going to answer my questions or not?” she said, with a sudden tension in her shoulders.

“Fine,” said Harry. “What?”

She asked him things he had never thought to ask himself. She asked him where Hagrid had been standing when Gregory went up to Buckbeak, and Harry said at the far end, with Neville, and she asked how far that was, and Harry said he didn’t know, fifty yards, and she asked whether that was fifty of Harry’s yards or fifty real ones, and he said he did not know the difference, and she wrote down 40–60 and underlined it. She asked how long it had been between the moment Buckbeak’s feathers went up and the moment he struck. Harry tried to remember, and found that the whole thing had gone into his memory at a peculiar speed, at once very fast and very slow, like a dropped plate.

“A couple of seconds,” he said. “More, maybe. I wasn’t counting.”

“Nobody was counting,” said Malfoy, writing. “That’s the trouble.” She looked up. “Did Professor Hagrid tell us, before we went in, what it looks like when a hippogriff is going to strike? The feathers, or the foot, or anything?”

Harry thought about it. He went back to the fence, and the row of chains, and Hagrid’s finger held up like a bolster.

“He said if it didn’t bow back,” he said slowly, “to get away from it sharpish.”

“Yes,” said Malfoy. “That’s what I have too.”

She wrote it down. Harry watched the pencil move, and felt a strong desire to take the notebook and throw it into the fountain.

“And he did tell us never to insult them,” he said.

“I know. I was there.” She did not look up. “I am not disputing what Professor Hagrid said, Potter. I’m writing down what he didn’t.”

There were a few more questions after that: where Crabbe had been, where Pansy had been, whether Buckbeak had struck once or twice, which Harry did not know, and whether Hagrid had got to the hippogriff before or after it reared the second time, which Harry did. Then she closed the notebook and put the pencil inside it and stood up.

“Thank you, Potter,” she said. “That was very nearly useful.”

“Why do you even care?” said Harry. “He’s going to be fine. You said so.”

Malfoy looked down at him, and there was real surprise on her face, as though he had asked her why she bothered to breathe.

“Because he’s one of mine,” she said, and went.

Harry sat looking at the place where she had been. On the next bench, Ron let his breath out in a long hiss.

“One of mine,” he said. “Like Goyle’s a — a house-elf, or a cupboard or something.”

Hermione was not listening. She was staring at the archway Malfoy had gone out through, with her quill halfway to her mouth.

“She’s building a case,” she said in dawning horror.

“She’s what?”

“That’s what that was. Didn’t you hear her? Distances. Timings. What Hagrid said and what he didn’t say. She’s taking witness statements, Harry. She’s collecting evidence for her father.” Hermione had begun stuffing books into her bag with great energy and very little care. “And nobody’s doing it for Hagrid. Nobody at all. He’s just sitting in that hut waiting for them to decide.”

“Where are you going?” said Ron.

“The library,” said Hermione, as though there could be no other answer, and went.

✦ ✦ ✦

The story of the Boggart in the vulture hat went round the castle in less than a day, and it went round the Slytherin common room, as far as Harry could judge, in rather less than an hour. When the Gryffindors next came down to Potions, the Slytherins were already in their seats, and Pansy Parkinson was holding a handkerchief over her mouth with one hand.

Snape came in. He knew. Everybody could see that he knew. He swept down the aisle between the benches without a glance at anyone, and his black robes billowed behind him with something more than their usual force.

It was a bad lesson. Snape found fault with everything Neville did, and with several things Neville had not yet done but was plainly about to. He took ten points from Gryffindor because Neville’s cauldron was a quarter of an inch out of line with the edge of the bench. By the end of the hour Neville was so frightened of him that his hands shook too much to hold a ladle, and he spilled a quantity of his Wit-Sharpening Potion down his front and had to be sent to the hospital wing to have the burns seen to.

At the Slytherin bench, Pansy had at last put down the handkerchief to whisper something to Malfoy. Harry caught the words vulture and handbag.

“Professor Snape is our Head of House, Pansy,” said Malfoy, not looking up from her own board, where she was cutting ginger roots into neat and even slices. “Do try to show a little loyalty.”

Pansy subsided. But there was something wrong with the corner of Malfoy’s mouth, and it went on being wrong for some time, and once, when Snape’s back was turned, she bent her head very low over the ginger roots and her shoulders shook.

✦ ✦ ✦

By the Saturday after that, Hermione had been living in the library for eight days.

She came out of it for meals and lessons and sleep, and for very little else; and when Harry and Ron went in search of her after lunch on Saturday they found her at a table near the back, behind a rampart of books so high that only the top of her bushy head showed above it.

“Hagrid’s going to need a defence,” she said, before they had sat down. “And nobody else is going to do it. Look.”

They looked. The books had titles like Hippogriffs: Their Customs and Courtesies, Beasts at Law, and A Casebook of Creature Liability, 1750–1950, and Hermione had already filled eleven feet of parchment from them in her smallest writing.

“The whole thing turns on one question,” she said, in the voice of a general unrolling a map. “Was Buckbeak behaving normally? Because if he was — if every book on hippogriffs says that’s exactly what a hippogriff does when it’s insulted — then it wasn’t Buckbeak’s fault, it was Goyle’s, and if it wasn’t Buckbeak’s fault then it wasn’t Hagrid’s either. So all we have to do is prove the one thing, and then they’ll have to drop it all. Buckbeak and Hagrid. Look, here’s a case from 1822, a hippogriff in Shropshire —”

“You’re going to lose, Granger.”

The voice came from the other side of the nearest bookcase. A moment later Malfoy came round the end of it, with a book of her own under her arm and the expression of a person who has been listening for some time against her own better judgement and has finally given up the struggle.

“Nobody asked you,” said Ron.

“No,” Malfoy agreed. “I’m telling you anyway. Under orders.” She put her book down on the end of Hermione’s table, and Hermione’s rampart trembled. “You’ve got it all in one heap. It isn’t one heap. It’s two cases, and they go to two different places.”

“What do you mean?” said Hermione sharply.

“There’s the hippogriff, and there’s Hagrid. The hippogriff goes to the Ministry. The Committee for the Disposal of Dangerous Creatures decides whether an animal that’s badly hurt somebody is a danger to the people who have to go near it, in the place where it’s kept; and if it is, the animal’s destroyed. That’s all it decides. It doesn’t care whether Hagrid keeps his job; it hasn’t any say over that. Hagrid’s job goes to the governors. They decide whether a teacher here is fit to teach, and on what terms, and that’s all they decide. Father has written to both of them. Separately.” She lifted up two fingers. “Same afternoon. Two different questions. Two different offices.”

Hermione was staring at her.

“And if you go to the governors,” Malfoy went on, “and spend an hour proving that the hippogriff did exactly what hippogriffs always do whenever anybody gets it wrong, what you will have proved, Granger, is that Professor Hagrid put thirty thirteen-year-olds into a field with an animal that always does that. You’ll be helping Buckbeak in one room and hanging Hagrid in the other.”

There was a silence at the table. Ron had his mouth open, but nothing seemed to be coming out of it. Hermione had gone rather pink, and Harry could see her running back over the whole of her eleven feet of parchment in her head, at high speed, looking for the hole in what she had just been told, and not finding one.

“Why are you telling me this?” she said at last.

“I told you. Orders.” Malfoy picked her book back up. “You’ve been in here since last Friday, Granger, and you haven’t exactly been quiet about it; half the library knows your theory by heart. On Monday I wrote and told Father you’d put the whole thing into one heap. I thought it would amuse him.” She paused. “It didn’t. He wrote back by return and told me to come and put you right.”

“Why would your dad want to help Hagrid?” said Ron, finding his voice.

“He doesn’t, Weasley. He wants Hagrid out.” Malfoy said it as one might say that the sun rose in the east. “But he says if I’m to protect my people, I must learn. He’s having me prepare the case; he will present whatever I give him. And he says there’s no point in my learning how to win by watching somebody put the right argument in the wrong office. He says if Granger loses because she grew up among Muggles and nobody ever told her how a Committee works, I shan’t have learned anything except how to beat a child who didn’t know the rules. So I’m to tell you the rules.” She tucked the book under her arm. “And then I’m to beat you properly.”

Hermione looked at her for a long moment.

“Thank you,” she said, rather stiffly.

“Don’t thank me,” said Malfoy. “I’m going to win.”

She went back round the bookcase. They heard her footsteps go away down the aisle, and the library door open and close.

“Well,” said Ron. “That was the most Malfoy thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”

Hermione did not answer him. She only sighed, and pulled two clean sheets of parchment towards her across the table; at the top of one, she wrote THE COMMITTEE and at the top of the other she wrote THE GOVERNORS; and then she sat looking at the two headings, with her quill in her teeth, while the afternoon light moved slowly across the table and the rampart of books.

✦ ✦ ✦

When Care of Magical Creatures began again, the first lesson was devoted to flobberworms.

A flobberworm is a thick brown worm about ten inches long which lives in damp ditches and eats lettuce and does nothing else at any point in its life, and the third-years spent an hour and a half in a row along a wet trench feeding shredded lettuce to a box of them and observing what followed, which was nothing.

“We’ll be doin’ a bit o’ work with these,” Hagrid told them at the end of it, not quite meeting anybody’s eye. “Good, steady creatures, flobberworms. Teach yeh a lot, if yeh’re patient.”

They were patient. The lesson after that was devoted to flobberworms, and so was the one after that. By the end of September the third-years had fed flobberworms, measured flobberworms, weighed flobberworms, drawn flobberworms from three angles, and written two essays on the flobberworm’s diet, which was lettuce; and at every lesson Hagrid stood at the end of the trench with Professor McGonagall’s written approval folded in his waistcoat pocket and a look on his face that Harry did not like to see there.

“Why,” said Ron, at the fourth of these lessons, holding a strand of lettuce over his box with the air of a man offering a coin to a statue, “would anyone want to look after flobberworms?”

Nobody answered him.

At the other end of the trench, Malfoy was dropping lettuce into her own box with precise and economical movements, one strand at a time. Malfoy looked down the length of the trench, at the wet brown worms and the lettuce and the thirty bored faces and Hagrid standing at the end of it all with his hands in his pockets; and then she went back to her worms, humming.

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Vol. 1: The Prisoner of Azkaban - Ch. 6

Defence Against the Dark Arts became everybody’s favourite lesson almost immediately. Only Malfoy and her friends found anything to say against Professor Lupin, and what they found was chiefly about his robes.

“Look at the state of them,” said Pansy loudly, as he passed the Slytherin table at breakfast one morning. “He dresses like our old house-elf.”

Nobody else cared. Professor Lupin’s lessons went on being as good as his first. After the Boggart he brought them Red Caps, small vicious goblinish things that haunted old battlefields and dungeons and could be dealt with, he explained, by a firm hand and a little pepper; and after the Red Caps, a tankful of Kappas, which looked like monkeys that had been left too long in the bath and which tried to drown anybody who leaned over the glass. Harry found that he looked forward to every one.

The only thing he did not look forward to was Care of Magical Creatures.

The flobberworms had not improved on further acquaintance. Hagrid seemed to have lost all his confidence. There was no more talk of treats, or of anything at all except flobberworms, and he said very little, and the little he said was said at the trench and to the worms. Once, after a lesson, Harry looked back from halfway up the lawn and saw him standing alone at the paddock fence, with his huge hands in his pockets and his shoulders bowed, looking at the far end of it, where a single grey hippogriff stood tethered by a long chain apart from the others.

“He’s not allowed to take Buckbeak out with the rest of them,” said Hermione quietly. She had gone down to the hut the evening before, alone, with a list of questions. “Not even for exercise. Not until it’s decided. He has to feed him on his own, and Buckbeak doesn’t understand why.” She hitched her bag higher on her shoulder. It was very heavy; it was always very heavy now. “I’ve written to the Committee for the procedural rules. They said they’d send them. They haven’t.”

Malfoy, for her part, received letters. A great eagle owl came down to the Slytherin table nearly every morning now, and dropped a long envelope in front of her, and sometimes a second one; and she would read them at once, all the way through, before she touched her breakfast, and then sit for a moment with the letter flat on the table and her chin on her hand, looking at nothing. Then she would fold it, and put it into the inner pocket of her robes, and eat. Harry definitely did not watch her do it. He just happened to be facing that way most mornings.

✦ ✦ ✦

Oliver Wood had been captain of the Gryffindor Quidditch team for three years, and this was his last; and he called his team together in the common room one evening at the beginning of October and told them so, in a low and terrible voice, as a general might tell his officers that the fortress would fall at dawn.

“Seven years,” he said, walking up and down in front of the fire with his hands clasped behind him. “Seven years since Gryffindor won the Cup. Two of them I’ve been captain of the best side this school has seen in a generation, and what have we got for it? Harry in the hospital wing. The whole tournament cancelled because of a basilisk.” He stopped and looked at them, and his voice dropped. “I leave in June. There isn’t another year. This one is the last.”

There was a respectful silence. Fred broke it.

“Cheer up, Oliver,” he said. “We might all die first.”

“Look at what we have,” said Wood, ignoring him, and began to count on his fingers with a terrible intensity. “Three Chasers who could play for England. Two Beaters who are frankly a danger to the public —”

“Thank you, Oliver.”

“Very kind.”

“— and a Seeker,” said Wood, rounding on Harry, “who has never once failed to catch the Snitch when he was on a broom to do it.” He paused. “And a Keeper.”

“A very fine Keeper,” said George.

“The finest,” said Fred. “We often say so.”

“So there’s no excuse,” said Wood. “None. None at all. If we don’t win it this year, it will be because we didn’t want it enough.”

He looked at each of them in turn, and he looked so wretched about it, and so fierce, that even the twins stopped smiling.

“We want it, Oliver,” said Angelina.

“We’ll get it,” said Harry, and found he meant it.

Practice began in earnest after that, three evenings a week, and the weather turned against them almost at once. The evenings drew in and the rain set in with them, and Wood, who regarded weather as a moral failing in other people, refused to acknowledge either, and drove them round the darkening pitch through mud and wind and sleet with his whole mind fixed on the great silver Cup.

Harry had always loved flying. But this autumn he discovered something about it he had never had occasion to notice before: that it was quiet. On the ground there was Black, and the Dementors at the gates, and the Grim at the bottom of a teacup, and the screaming woman, and Hagrid standing alone at the fence, and Hermione’s bag growing heavier every week. In the air there was the Snitch, and the wind, and the next turn. Every problem up there had rules, and the rules were known, and if you solved it you knew at once that you had solved it. He came down from every practice with his hands numb and his robes soaked through and his head, for an hour or so afterwards, perfectly and wonderfully empty.

So he began volunteering for more.

“Extra session Thursday?” said Wood, staring at him in the changing room as though a long-lost brother had walked through the door. “You want one? Harry, you —” He seized Harry by both shoulders. “That’s the attitude. That’s exactly the attitude. Did you all hear that?”

“We heard,” said Angelina, wringing out her hair. “We’re all very proud.”

Ron thought it was brilliant. Ron understood it perfectly: Harry wanted the Cup, and Harry was going to get it, and Malfoy was going to be ground into the mud of the pitch in front of the whole school, and these were all excellent things. Hermione said less. But one evening, when Harry came in late from a solitary hour in the air after the rest of the team had gone, and dropped dripping into the chair by the fire, she looked at him over the top of a pile of books for a long moment.

“You were out there in the dark,” she said.

“Wood says I need to work on catching in bad light.”

“Wood wasn’t there. Wood went in at six. Ron saw him.”

Harry held his hands out to the fire.

“It helps,” he said.

✦ ✦ ✦

The Slytherin team had the pitch after the Gryffindors on Tuesdays, and on the second Tuesday of October Wood ran his practice ten minutes over, as he always did and as everybody had always known he would, and the Slytherins came out of the changing rooms in their green robes and stood on the grass and waited, with steadily mounting feeling.

Harry was the last up. He was high over the far goalposts, chasing the Snitch round and round them in the failing light, when he became aware of something green rising towards him from below, very fast and very straight, and pulled up.

Malfoy came up level with him and stopped, hovering, with her broom held quite steady and her pale hair whipping round her face in the wind. She rode the way she bowed, Harry thought irritably: exactly. Her Nimbus Two Thousand and One sat under her as quietly as a well-trained horse.

“Your time was up,” she said, “at six.”

“Tell Wood.”

“Flint is telling Wood. Flint has been telling Wood for some minutes.” She jerked her chin downward, and Harry glanced down and saw that Flint and Wood were indeed standing nose to nose on the grass in the middle of the pitch, both talking at once. “I came up to tell you.”

“And you volunteered,” said Harry.

“I was sent. One doesn’t argue with Flint when he has that vein going in his forehead.” She watched the Snitch flick past them both and away towards the stands. Neither of them went after it. “You drop your left shoulder going into the turn.”

“I do not.”

“Four times. I counted.” She seemed to hear herself. “One could hardly help counting. It’s like watching a cow attempt the waltz.”

“You were watching me?”

“Flint makes us scout the opposition. It’s tedious and I loathe it. But I do my duty. Your Beaters, by the way, can’t count to two.” Her broom had begun to drift away from him. “Not that it matters. You won’t do anything about it. You never listen to anybody.”

“I might.”

“You won’t.” She turned the broom. “Go down, Potter. Some of us want the pitch.”

She dropped away from him towards her own team. Harry hung in the cold air over the goalposts for a moment, and then, because he suddenly needed to know, he put the broom into a turn to the left, and felt his left shoulder go down into it, and swore under his breath.

✦ ✦ ✦

It was quite dark by the time he had changed and come out of the changing rooms. The others had gone up ahead of him. Harry walked up the long slope towards the castle by himself, his broom over his shoulder, the wet grass soaking through his trainers and the lit windows of the castle hanging high above him in the black like the portholes of a ship.

Halfway up, without knowing why, he looked round.

The lawns ran away behind him, grey and empty, down to the dark line of the Forest. Beside the trees, a long way off, he could just make out the lump of Hagrid’s hut, with a single window lit. And at the very edge of the trees, a little beyond the hut, something was standing where nothing had been standing a moment before: something low and black and broad, the size of a bear or of a very large dog, quite motionless, as if it were looking up the slope at him.

Harry blinked. The window of Hagrid’s hut went dark, and when he looked again the edge of the Forest was only the edge of the Forest, and there was nothing beside it at all.

He stood there in the wet grass for several seconds with his heart hammering. Then he turned and went on up the slope towards the castle, rather faster than before, and he did not look back again until the oak doors had closed behind him.

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Vol. 1: The Prisoner of Azkaban - Ch. 7

The notice went up on the common-room board in the middle of October, and by breakfast the next morning the whole of the third year had read it several times and was talking of nothing else. The first Hogsmeade weekend would fall on Halloween.

“Excellent,” said Fred, who had squeezed through the crowd to read it over Harry’s shoulder. “I need a refill at Zonko’s. I’m almost out of Stink Pellets.”

Harry sat down heavily in an armchair. Ron looked at him, and then at Hermione, and they both arrived at the same place by the same road.

“Ask McGonagall,” said Ron. “Go on. What’s the worst she can do? Say no?”

So Harry stayed behind after Transfiguration on Friday, hovering by the door while the class filed out, and when the last of them had gone he went up to the front of the room with the sensation of a man approaching a cliff edge in a high wind.

Professor McGonagall was writing in a ledger. She did not look up.

“Yes, Potter?”

“It’s about Hogsmeade, Professor. My — the form. My uncle didn’t sign it.” He swallowed. “I wondered if you could. Instead. Or if I could just go anyway, if I —”

The pen stopped.

“A parent or a guardian, Potter,” said Professor McGonagall, still looking at the ledger. “That is the rule, and it is not my rule to bend. If I sign for you, I sign for every third-year whose father has mislaid his spectacles.” She laid down the pen, and looked at him at last, over the tops of her own; and for a moment the line of her mouth was less severe than he had ever seen it. “I am sorry. I am truly sorry. But no.”

Harry said, “Right,” and went.

His friends did their best for him over the next few days, and their best was very nearly worse than nothing. Ron swore he would bring back the whole of Honeydukes in a sack. Dean, who could do anybody’s handwriting, offered to do Uncle Vernon’s, until it was pointed out that McGonagall already knew the form had not been signed. Hermione said, very carefully, that perhaps with Black about it was no bad thing, and looked at Harry’s face, and changed the subject to Arithmancy. Percy, passing him on the stairs, laid a kindly hand on his shoulder and assured him that Hogsmeade was very much overrated, that he himself had found Zonko’s merchandise frankly hazardous, and that there was a great deal to be said for a quiet Sunday with a good book — and walked on, plainly warmed by a sense of duty done.

✦ ✦ ✦

It was the Thursday before the visit that Harry went to the library after dinner to fetch the notes Hermione had left there for him, and found Malfoy at the next table.

She was sitting behind a leather folder and a stack of books on wizarding law, writing a letter in green ink, and she looked up when he came round the end of the shelves with every appearance of being as surprised to see him as he was to see her. She watched him sit down before Hermione’s neatly labelled pile of parchment.

“Doing Granger’s homework now, Potter? Or is she doing yours?”

“They’re notes on the case,” said Harry, and sat down with his back to her. “She’s left them for me to read.”

“Ah. Before Sunday? You’ll want to have them by heart before you go down to the village and get distracted by the Three Broomsticks.”

Harry uncapped his ink and said nothing.

“You are going to the village on Sunday?”

“No.”

“Why ever not?”

He thought of lying, and could not think of a lie that she would not see through in under a minute, so he told the truth with as little of it as he could manage.

“I’m not allowed. My aunt and uncle didn’t sign the form.”

There was a silence behind him of a peculiarly pregnant kind. Then he heard her put down her quill, quite carefully, and when he looked round she had one hand over her mouth and her eyes were brimming, and she was laughing — not her usual cool laugh, but a real one, very warm, and which she was trying to smother in her sleeve while Madam Pince glared at her from the end of the aisle.

“You —” she said, when she could speak, which was not for some time. “Potter. You killed a basilisk. With a sword. You flew a car into a tree. You have broken, at a conservative estimate, more school rules than the Weasley twins, and they work at it. And you can’t go and buy a sugar quill because your aunt didn’t sign a bit of parchment?”

“Uncle,” said Harry through his teeth.

“Your uncle, then. Why on earth didn’t he?”

“They hate magic.”

Malfoy waved this away with her quill. “Lots of people hate things, Potter. Mother loathes Quidditch. She thinks it’s a game for farm boys. She still signed my form for the team. She just made a face about it.”

She was still laughing a little; it was there round her eyes. And something in the casual wave of the quill — lots of people hate things — got under Harry’s guard before he had time to put it up.

“They tried to stop me coming to Hogwarts at all,” he said.

The last of the laughter went out of Malfoy’s face.

“What do you mean, stop you?”

Harry already wished he had not said it. “Nothing. Doesn’t matter.” He turned round again, pulled Hermione’s notes towards him, and bent over them, and began to write.

He had got as far as 2.10 — Hagrid goes into Forest for hippogriffs when a voice behind him said, “That’s wrong.”

Harry turned round to see that Malfoy had got up and was peering at the papers over his shoulder with some distaste.

“What’s wrong?”

“He didn’t go at ten past. He spent five minutes on the books first. The stroking business. It was a quarter past, and I’ve got three people who say so. Now what else has she got?”

“None of your business.”

“It’s entirely my business. It’s my case.”

“It’s Hagrid’s case —”

“It’s the same case,” said Malfoy, “from the other end.”

This was the kind of remark Harry could neither answer nor let pass. He said, “Fine. A quarter past,” and crossed out the ten, and wrote fifteen above it so hard that the nib went through.

It ought to have taken twenty minutes.

Somewhere near the start of it, Malfoy dragged her chair round to his table, on the grounds that he was plainly going to get every single thing wrong without supervision, and after that they were bent over the same sheet of parchment, jabbing at it with their quills, and the candles burned down an inch, and then another inch.

They argued about where Hagrid had been standing when Goyle went up, and got as far as agreeing that he had been at the far end of the paddock helping Neville, and no further; Malfoy said fifty yards, and Harry said thirty, and they fought over every yard in between as though it were contested ground in a war. They argued about the books, and Malfoy said third-year students ought not to have books that could take off their hands. They argued about how many students had been working with loose hippogriffs at the same moment, and Malfoy counted them off on her fingers, by name, barely looking at her notes at all.

“Anyway, he had Buckbeak back in his collar in about three seconds,” said Harry. “You can’t say he didn’t do anything.”

Malfoy put down her quill.

“Is that the best you’ve got?”

“What?”

“That’s your worst argument, Potter.” She looked at him with real exasperation. “It’s the one I want you to make. ‘He got there very fast, afterwards.’ Every time you say it you remind them where he was before. It’s like playing chess against somebody who keeps pushing his queen at me.” She jabbed the parchment with her quill. “If I were you — which, thank heaven — I should say that twenty-nine of us did it right. If it’s so dangerous, why did it only go wrong once? That’s the one I have to answer.”

“Why are you telling me?”

“Because there’s no credit in beating you at your worst. It would be like beating Longbottom at Potions.”

Harry stared at her. Then, slowly, with the air of a man producing a card he has been keeping up his sleeve, he said:

“Your best one is that you asked him.”

It was Malfoy’s turn to stare.

“Before. You asked him what would happen if somebody got it wrong, in front of everyone, and he said not to worry.” Harry was suddenly and obscurely furious with her. “And instead you keep going on about the books. ‘He gave us books that bite.’ Nobody cares about the books! The books didn’t hurt anyone. Every time you bring up the books you make it sound like you just don’t like him.”

There was a long pause.

“I don’t like him,” said Malfoy.

“I know you don’t. That’s not the point. You sound like it.”

Malfoy looked at him for a long moment with an odd expression. Then she picked up her quill, drew a quick line through something on her own notes, and wrote something else in its place, very small.

“What did you write?”

“Nothing that concerns you.” She blotted it with great care. “It was a lucky guess, Potter. Don’t let it go to your head. There’s so little room in there already.”

“The library,” said Madam Pince, who had materialised at the end of the table like a vulture alighting on a fence-post, “is closing. It closed five minutes ago.”

Harry looked at the window and saw with astonishment that it was black. Malfoy was already sweeping her papers into the leather folder.

“Granger’s timeline,” she said, nodding at the parchment in front of him, “is wrong in four more places. I shan’t tell you which.” She tucked the folder under her arm and stood up. Then she hesitated.

“Potter. What did they do? To stop you coming?”

“Why do you care?”

“I don’t,” she said, flicking a speck of nothing off her sleeve. “I like my facts complete. It’s a habit. You wouldn’t understand it.”

Madam Pince was bearing down on them. Malfoy turned and went, and Harry gathered Hermione’s notes together and found that the candle at his elbow had burned all the way down into its socket.

✦ ✦ ✦

On the morning of Halloween Harry walked down to the Entrance Hall with Ron and Hermione, and saw them off.

Filch was standing just inside the front doors, ticking off names on a list as long as his arm and examining each face that went past him as though it were a forged banknote. The Slytherins went past in a cluster, and Malfoy, in a dark green cloak with a silver clasp at the throat, glanced once at Harry where he stood on the stairs, and looked away.

“Not coming, Potter?” called Pansy Parkinson. “Is it past your bedtime, or are you frightened you’ll fall over at the gates?”

Harry ignored her. Ron and Hermione, both looking guilty, promised to bring him back half of Honeydukes, and went out into the cold bright morning; and Harry turned and climbed the marble staircase alone through the deserted castle, with no very clear idea of where he was going.

He had got as far as the third-floor corridor when a door opened beside him and Professor Lupin put his head out.

“Harry. I thought I heard somebody. No village?”

“No form,” said Harry.

“Ah.” Lupin looked at him a moment longer, and then stood back and held the door. “Then come and meet the newest member of the department. He arrived this morning in a bucket and he is in a very bad temper about it.”

The newest member of the department lived in a glass tank in the corner of the office. He was about the length of Harry’s forearm, pale green, with two stubby horns and a mouthful of needle teeth, and he was pressed flat against the glass with his long fingers spread out on it, glaring.

“Grindylow,” said Lupin. “They live in weed, at the bottom of lakes, and they pull things down to join them. Ours has a great many relations at the bottom of the one outside. The grip is the thing. Very strong, those fingers, and very brittle. Remember that, and you have nothing to fear from him.” He was filling a kettle with a tap of his wand. “Tea? I warn you, it’s bags. I gather you’ve had your fill of leaves.”

Harry turned round. Lupin’s face was perfectly grave, but his eyes were not.

“Who told you?”

“Professor McGonagall. In the staff room, with some feeling.” He handed Harry a mug with a chip out of the rim. “You aren’t worrying about it, are you?”

“No.”

It was very nearly true. He thought of the dog at the edge of the Forest, and of the shape in Magnolia Crescent, and decided that he would rather not be thought a fool by one of his favourite teachers. He watched the grindylow instead. It made a rude gesture at him with all of its fingers at once.

“Something else, then,” said Lupin, who had sat down behind his desk and was watching him with a certain mild attention.

Harry put the mug down.

“The Boggart,” he said. “In the staff room. Everybody got a go except me and Hermione, and Hermione wasn’t even near the front. You stepped in front of me. On purpose.”

“I did,” said Lupin.

Harry had prepared himself for a denial, and the admission took the wind out of him.

“Why?”

“Because I thought I knew what you would see.” Lupin turned his own mug slowly round on the blotter. “I thought it would be Voldemort. And a room full of thirteen-year-olds is not, I felt, the place for Voldemort, even a pretend one. Somebody would have had hysterics. Probably me.”

Harry stared at him. It was not only the reason; it was the name. He had heard exactly one other person at Hogwarts say it aloud.

“It wouldn’t have been him,” he said. “I thought about it. I was going to — I thought of him first. But then I thought of the Dementor. On the train.”

Lupin was quiet for a moment.

“Were you,” he said. “Well. That tells me something about you, Harry, and it is something good, though I don’t suppose it feels like it.” He smiled slightly. “The thing you were most afraid of was the thing that makes everything else frightening. There are a great many grown wizards who never work that out.”

Harry did not know what to do with this, so he drank his tea. But a weight he had been carrying about for a month without noticing came off him, and he felt it go.

“So you thought I thought you couldn’t handle it,” said Lupin.

“Sort of. Yes.” Harry grinned, in spite of himself. “Professor, the Dementors — when it came into the carriage —”

There was a knock at the door.

“Come in,” said Lupin.

It was Snape. He was carrying a goblet in one hand, from which a thin grey smoke was rising, and he stopped short on the threshold when he saw who was in the visitor’s chair.

“Severus,” said Lupin. “That’s very good of you. On the desk, would you?”

Snape set the goblet down. His eyes went from Harry to Lupin and back again, and stayed on Harry a fraction too long.

“Drink it now,” he said. “It loses its effect if it stands.”

“I will.”

“There is more. The whole cauldron. Should it be required.”

“Tomorrow, I expect, and perhaps the day after. Thank you, Severus.”

Snape inclined his head by something less than an inch, gave Harry a last, flat, measuring look, and went out, and did not quite close the door behind him.

Harry looked at the goblet. Lupin picked it up and sniffed it and made the face of a man who has been offered a dead fish.

“Professor Snape makes it for me,” he said. “It’s a fiendish brew and I could never manage it myself; I was hopeless at Potions. I’ve not been entirely well lately, and this is the only thing that helps.” He took a mouthful and shuddered from head to foot. “One cannot even put sugar in it. Sugar spoils it, apparently. That is the cruellest part.”

Harry watched him drink, and could not keep it in.

“Professor Snape knows a lot about the Dark Arts, you know.”

“Does he?” said Lupin, without much interest, and drank again.

“People say — some people say he’s always wanted your job. Defence. They say he’d do a lot to get it.”

Lupin finished the goblet, set it down, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Revolting,” he said, with feeling. “Thank you for the company, Harry. I must get on. I shall see you at the feast.”

Harry went out. At the turn of the corridor he looked back, and saw that the door was still a little open, and that a thread of grey smoke was still curling up out of the empty goblet on the desk.

✦ ✦ ✦

Ron and Hermione came back at dusk, pink-cheeked from the cold and looking as though they had had the time of their lives, and emptied a shower of brightly coloured sweets into Harry’s lap: Pepper Imps, Jelly Slugs, Fizzing Whizzbees, a box of Chocoballs, and a large bar of Honeydukes’ best chocolate. They talked all the way down to the feast — about Zonko’s and the Shrieking Shack, about the butterbeer at the Three Broomsticks, which Ron said had warmed him right down to his boots — and Harry, who had spent the afternoon resolving to be gracious about it, found that it did not require very much effort after all.

The Great Hall had been given over to pumpkins. They grinned from every window ledge and every corner of the tables, hollowed and lit, by the hundred; live bats wheeled in clouds under the enchanted ceiling, where the evening clouds were going over dark and heavy; and long ribbons of orange flame went swimming lazily through the air between them, like eels in a tank. Ron and Hermione, who had each eaten their own weight in Honeydukes on the walk back, ate two dinners apiece and then looked thoughtfully at the puddings.

Harry kept looking at the staff table. Lupin was laughing at something Professor Flitwick had said, and looked as well as Harry had ever seen him. Three places along, Snape was eating nothing. He was looking down the table at Lupin; and then at his plate; and then at Lupin again.

When the plates had been cleared the ghosts came up out of the floor and through the walls and gave an exhibition of formation gliding, and Nearly Headless Nick performed his own execution, with the axe-man played by the Fat Friar, to tremendous applause. It was an excellent evening. It was such an excellent evening that when Pansy Parkinson called out across the Hall, as the Houses rose to leave, that the Dementors had asked to be remembered to Potter, Harry only laughed.

The Gryffindors went up together through the castle in a cheerful, overfed crowd, and turned into the corridor that led to the portrait of the Fat Lady, and stopped.

The corridor was full of people, all of them standing still.

“What’s the hold-up?” said Ron, on his toes.

The crowd was quiet at the front and noisy at the back, which is the way of crowds that have seen something. Percy came shouldering through from behind, announcing his office as he came, and reached the front, and stood mute for a moment. Then he said, in a voice none of them had heard him use before, “Somebody fetch Professor Dumbledore. Now.”

The news went back down the corridor faster than the messenger. By the time Dumbledore came, walking quickly and without any appearance of hurry, the crowd had pressed itself flat against the walls to let him through, and Harry, Ron and Hermione had wormed their way far enough forward to see.

Hermione’s hand closed on Harry’s arm.

The portrait had been cut to ribbons. Long strips of canvas hung from the frame and lay curled on the flagstones, like the peelings of some enormous fruit; whole pieces of the picture were simply gone, and through the holes they could see the bare stone behind it. The Fat Lady was nowhere in it.

Dumbledore looked at the ruin for perhaps two seconds. Then he turned, and McGonagall and Lupin and Snape were coming up the corridor behind him, and he spoke to them in a low, unhurried voice that nevertheless carried to every corner of the passage.

“She must be found. Minerva, ask Mr Filch to go through every picture in the castle. Every one.”

“Good luck to him!”

Peeves was overhead, upside down, turning slowly like a joint on a spit, his face lit with the purest joy.

“What do you know, Peeves?” said Dumbledore, in exactly the same quiet voice; and the poltergeist, who was afraid of almost nothing in the world, rearranged his face into a pantomime of respectful sorrow.

“Gone and hidden herself, Headmaster, sir. Couldn’t bear to be seen. All cut about, she is, all in tatters. Saw her running off through the landscapes up by the fourth floor, sobbing her heart out among the trees.” He sighed with great relish. “Shocking.”

“And did she say who had done this to her?”

Peeves turned the right way up, slowly, so as to enjoy the moment to the full.

“Oh, I don’t know if I can remember!”

“Peeves,” Dumbledore spoke, making his name a commanded.

“Oh, well, I suppose I do recall. She said a man wanted to come in, and she wouldn’t open, so he took a knife to her.” He beamed down upon the packed and silent corridor. “Sirius Black, she said. Ever such a temper on him.”

✦ ✦ ✦

They slept that night in the Great Hall, all of them, every House together.

Dumbledore sent the Gryffindors back downstairs before Peeves had half finished his enjoyment, and in less than an hour the whole school had been gathered into the Hall again: Hufflepuffs in dressing-gowns, Ravenclaws with their fingers still in their books, Slytherins with the air of a club whose members have been turned out into the street by a fire alarm. The tables went up against the walls. Then Dumbledore lifted his wand once, and the bare floor was covered from wall to wall with fat purple sleeping bags, laid out in rows like loaves on a baker’s shelf.

“The staff and I will search the castle,” he said, as McGonagall and Flitwick went round shutting the doors. “The prefects will keep the doors, and the Head Boy and Head Girl have charge of the Hall. If anything at all happens, I am to be told of it at once.” He looked round at them, and the half-moon spectacles caught the candlelight. “I suggest you sleep. There is nothing else useful to be done tonight, and lessons will be held tomorrow as usual.”

Nobody went to sleep for a long time. The whole Hall was full of the hum of whispering, like a hive that has been knocked, and the whisper was the same everywhere: how had Black got in? Had he come over the walls? Had he Apparated? Had he dressed up as a pumpkin?

“Honestly, am I the only person who’s ever bothered to read Hogwarts: A History?” said Hermione crossly to Harry and Ron.

“Probably,” said Ron. “Why?”

“Because the castle’s protected by more than walls, you know,” said Hermione. “There are all sorts of enchantments on it, to stop people entering by stealth. You can’t just Apparate in here. And I’d like to see the disguise that could fool those Dementors. They’re guarding every single entrance to the grounds. They’d have seen him fly in, too. And Filch knows all the secret passages, they’ll have them covered.”

“Then how did he do it?” said Ron.

Nobody knew.

Harry lay on his back in the purple bag and looked up at the stars through the bewitched ceiling. Black had been in the castle. He had come up all those stairs and along that corridor and stood in front of the Fat Lady, at the door of Gryffindor Tower, while the whole of Gryffindor House was downstairs eating pumpkin tart. He had wanted to be let in. He had known where to come.

A few sleeping bags along, in the part of the floor that had filled up with Slytherins, somebody was sitting up, whispering to a small knot of Slytherins. In the dim light Harry could make out a fall of pale hair.

Then Percy came picking his way through the bags hissing that it was lights out and all talking was to stop immediately, and the figure lay down, and Harry could not see her any more.

The candles burned down and went out, one by one. Somewhere near three in the morning, by Harry’s reckoning, the door at the end of the Hall opened, and a tall figure came picking its way between the rows. Harry, who had not slept, shut his eyes and kept his breathing slow.

Percy met it halfway, whispering.

“Nothing, I’m afraid,” said Dumbledore’s voice, very low. “Has it been quiet here?”

“Perfectly quiet, Headmaster. Nobody’s stirred.”

“Then we will leave them where they are until morning. The portrait hole will have a guardian by breakfast; I have found a volunteer, though I am not sure the House will thank me for him. And the Fat Lady has been run to earth in a seascape on the second floor, among some extremely surprised fishermen. She refused him the password, it seems, and that is what he did to her for it. Mr Filch will mend her when she can bear to be mended.”

The door opened again. Harry heard a sweep of robes, and a voice like a cold draught.

“Headmaster.” Snape. “The third floor is clear. Filch has been through the dungeons. Nothing.”

“The towers? The Owlery? Sybill’s rooms?”

“Every one.”

“Then he is gone. I hardly expected him to wait for us.”

There was a pause. Harry turned his head a quarter of an inch on his arm, so as to have an ear clear of the sleeping bag.

“You have formed some view, I imagine,” said Snape, “as to how he came in.”

“I have formed several, Severus. I believe none of them.”

Harry let his eyes open a crack. Dumbledore had his back to him. Beyond him he could see Percy, drinking in every syllable, and Snape’s hooked profile, white and rigid with some feeling that had been held down for a long time.

“Before term,” said Snape, very quietly, and he turned his shoulder a little to Percy as he said it, “we spoke of a certain matter. You will recall it.”

“I recall it.” There was something in the old man’s voice that had not been there before.

“I find it hard to see how he could have got so far without assistance. From within. I said at the time, when the appointment was —”

“Nobody in this castle helped Sirius Black inside it, Severus.” Dumbledore did not raise his voice in the least; it closed the subject as a lid closes a box. Snape said nothing more. “I must go and tell the Dementors that our search is done. I promised them that much.”

“Did they not want to come in and help, sir?” whispered Percy.

“Oh, they wanted to,” said Dumbledore, and his voice had gone very cold indeed. “They shall not. Not while this school is mine.”

He went out, quick and quiet. Snape stood looking after him for a long moment, and then he went too, and the door swung shut behind him.

Harry turned his head. Ron was lying on one side of him and Hermione on the other, and both of them had their eyes wide open in the dark.

“What,” Ron mouthed, “was that?”

Harry shook his head. Over them the false sky turned slowly on its axis, full of cold stars; and somewhere beyond the walls, past the dark lawns and the gates and the hooded shapes that kept them, Sirius Black was still at liberty, and he knew the way to Gryffindor Tower.

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