Chapter 1 : The Girl Who Noticed

Harry stood outside Madam Malkin’s Robes for All Occasions with a bag of Galleons in his pocket and a sinking feeling in his stomach.

Hagrid had left him at the door. The cart ride through the vaults of Gringotts had turned the giant a delicate shade of green, and he had mumbled something about a quick pick-me-up in the Leaky Cauldron before lumbering away up the street, leaving Harry quite alone.

For ten years the Dursleys had told Harry that he was odd. Aunt Petunia said it with her lips pressed thin, Uncle Vernon said it at the top of his voice, and Dudley said it with his fists. Harry had always supposed there must be somewhere he would seem ordinary. Now he had found a whole street full of people like him, and he had never felt so peculiar in his life. Witches swept past in robes of emerald and plum. A small boy went by in a cloak with silver fastenings. Harry looked down at himself: Dudley’s old jeans, rolled four times at the ankle, and a grey jumper so stretched that the sleeves hung past his fingertips. There was a hole in the left elbow. He tucked that arm behind his back, flattened his fringe over his forehead, and went in.

A bell tinkled. The shop smelled of new cloth and warm irons, and bolts of black fabric were stacked to the ceiling on every side.

‘Hogwarts, dear?’ said a plump, cheerful witch with a mouthful of pins and a tape measure draped round her neck, before Harry had managed a word. ‘I thought so. We’ve got the lot through here. There’s a young lady being fitted this very minute.’

If Madam Malkin thought anything of his jumper, she was kind enough to keep it to herself. She steered him to the back of the shop, where a girl was standing on a footstool while a second witch pinned up the hem of her long black robes. Madam Malkin stood Harry on the stool next to her, dropped a robe over his head, and set to work.

Harry glanced sideways. The girl had a pale, pointed face, and hair so fair it was nearly white, falling perfectly straight to her waist as though it wouldn’t dare do otherwise. When she turned to look at him he saw that her eyes were grey, the colour of a new Sickle. She looked like the princesses in the picture books at school that Dudley had liked to scribble on, and Harry, who had never before given a moment’s thought to whether anybody was pretty, found that he had forgotten what to do with his hands.

‘Hello,’ said the girl. ‘Hogwarts as well?’

‘Yes,’ said Harry.

She studied him for a moment, her chin tilted up. Then she held out her hand, palm down, fingers drooping, in the manner of someone who had practised in front of a mirror.

‘Dracina Malfoy,’ she said grandly.

Harry stared at the hand. He had a feeling that shaking it was the wrong answer. The hand stayed where it was.

‘You are supposed to kiss it,’ said Dracina, with the weary patience of a person explaining soup to a baby. ‘It’s how one greets a witch of good family. Everybody knows that.’

‘Oh,’ said Harry. Then, because it was the only explanation he could think of, he asked, quite seriously, ‘Are you a princess?’

For a second Dracina’s mouth fell open. Two spots of pink appeared high on her pale cheeks. She snatched the hand back and became extremely busy with her sleeve.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. ‘Wizards haven’t got princesses.’ She sniffed. ‘Though I suppose I can see why you’d make the mistake.’

‘Sorry,’ said Harry. ‘I don’t know much about any of this. Greetings and things, I mean. Nobody ever taught me.’

Dracina looked at him as though he had told her he’d never been taught to breathe.

‘Nobody taught you? But what on earth were your family doing?’

Shouting, mostly, thought Harry, but he only shrugged. Madam Malkin tugged his shoulder straight again.

Dracina seemed to decide that the kindest thing was to move on. She had a slow, bored way of talking, as if each word had been kept waiting.

‘Father is next door fetching my books, and Mother has gone up the street to see about wands,’ she said. ‘Afterwards I shall march the pair of them off to look at racing brooms. It’s a perfectly stupid rule, first-years not being allowed their own. I expect I’ll nag Father until he buys me one, and then I’ll sneak it in somehow.’

Harry was reminded powerfully of Dudley. It was Dudley in a long blonde wig, and the thought was so horrible that he nearly laughed.

‘Have you got a broom?’ Dracina asked.

‘No,’ said Harry.

‘Do you play Quidditch, at least?’

‘No,’ said Harry again. He hadn’t the faintest idea what Quidditch was.

‘Well, I do. Father says it will be a scandal if I’m not chosen for my house team, and I happen to think he’s right. Do you know which house you’ll be in?’

‘No,’ said Harry. He was beginning to feel that it was the only word he knew.

‘Nobody can be certain until they arrive, of course, but I shall be in Slytherin. We always are, the whole family. Can you imagine being put in Hufflepuff? I’d go straight home. Wouldn’t you?’

‘Mmm,’ said Harry. He wished very much that he could think of something clever.

‘Goodness, look at him!’ said Dracina, pointing at the front window. Hagrid was standing on the other side of the glass, beaming at Harry and holding up two enormous ice-creams by way of explaining why he was staying outside.

‘That’s Hagrid,’ said Harry, delighted to know one thing that she didn’t. ‘He works at Hogwarts.’

‘Oh, him,’ said Dracina. ‘I know about him. He’s some kind of servant, I believe.’

‘He’s the gamekeeper,’ said Harry. The princess in the picture book was fading fast.

‘That’s what I said. Father told me he’s practically wild. He lives in a shack in the grounds, and now and then he drinks too much and tries a spell and sets his own bed alight.’

‘I think he’s brilliant,’ said Harry, and his voice came out cold.

‘Do you really?’ Dracina’s lip curled. ‘Why are you with him, anyway? Where are your parents?’

‘They’re dead,’ said Harry. He did not want to talk about it, least of all to her.

‘Oh. Sorry,’ she said, in a voice that wasn’t sorry in the least. Her grey eyes had gone sharp. ‘They were our sort, though? Your parents?’

‘They were a witch and a wizard, if that’s what you’re asking.’

‘Good. I honestly can’t see why the other kind are let in at all, can you? They aren’t like us. They haven’t grown up with any of it. Father says some of them have never so much as heard of Hogwarts until the owl turns up, which is too absurd. It ought to be kept for the old families. What’s your surname, by the way?’

Harry was spared from answering.

‘That’s you finished, my dear,’ said Madam Malkin, and Harry jumped down from the stool so quickly that he trod on his own hem.

‘I’ll see you at Hogwarts, then, I expect,’ Dracina called after him lazily.

Harry did not look round, so he never saw that she watched him the whole way to the door, or that she went on gazing at the place where he had been for some time after the bell had stopped ringing.

Outside, Hagrid pressed an ice-cream into his hand. It was chocolate and raspberry with chopped nuts, and it was the size of Harry’s head. He had only ever been given ice-cream when there was somebody watching whom the Dursleys wished to impress, and then it had been the cheapest lemon ice lolly on the van while Dudley had a Knickerbocker Glory. He ought to have been enjoying every mouthful.

He ate it in silence. He kept thinking of a pale hand held out to be kissed, and the pink in her cheeks when he had asked his stupid question, and then of everything she had said about Hagrid, who was at that moment humming happily beside him with raspberry sauce in his beard. Harry couldn’t make the two halves of her fit together. She was the rudest girl he had ever met, ruder even than Dudley, and it annoyed him a great deal that he was still wondering about her when they reached the end of the street.

Chapter 2 : The Wrong Sort

The scarlet engine gave a long whistle and the platform began to slide away. Harry watched the red-haired mother waving, and the little sister running to keep up until the train gathered speed and a bend in the track took them both from sight. Houses flickered past the window. Harry’s heart was thumping. He had no idea what was waiting for him at the other end of the line, but he was quite certain it could not be worse than Privet Drive.

The compartment door rattled open and the youngest of the red-haired boys put his head in.

‘Is that seat taken?’ he said, nodding at the one facing Harry. ‘There’s nowhere left.’

Harry shook his head, and the boy sat. He shot Harry a look, then became very interested in the window, as though he hadn’t looked at all. The smudge of soot his mother had been chasing was still on his nose.

‘Oi, Ron.’

The twins had reappeared in the doorway.

‘We’re off down the train. Lee Jordan’s brought a tarantula the size of a dinner plate.’

‘All right,’ Ron mumbled.

‘We never said who we were, Harry,’ said the second twin. ‘Fred and George Weasley. That’s our brother Ron. See you in a bit.’

‘Bye,’ said Harry and Ron together, and the door slid shut.

‘Are you honestly Harry Potter?’ said Ron, as though the question had been bursting to get out.

Harry nodded.

‘Oh. Good. Only I thought Fred and George might be having me on,’ said Ron. ‘And have you really got the... you know...’

He pointed at Harry’s forehead.

Harry lifted his fringe. Ron gazed at the lightning-shaped scar.

‘So that’s where You-Know-Who...?’

‘Yes,’ said Harry. ‘I can’t remember it, though.’

‘Nothing at all?’ said Ron eagerly.

‘A lot of green light. That’s all.’

‘Blimey,’ said Ron. He went on staring for a moment or two, then seemed to catch himself doing it and looked hastily back at the window.

‘Is everyone in your family a wizard?’ Harry asked. Ron was every bit as interesting to him as he was to Ron.

‘Er, yeah, I think so,’ said Ron. ‘Mum’s got a second cousin who’s an accountant, but nobody mentions him.’

‘Then you must know heaps of magic already.’

The Weasleys were plainly one of the old wizarding families that the pale girl in Diagon Alley had been so pleased about.

‘Someone told me you were brought up by Muggles,’ said Ron. ‘What are they like?’

‘Awful. Well, mine are. My aunt and uncle and my cousin. I don’t suppose they’re all like that. I’d have liked three wizard brothers.’

‘Five,’ said Ron, and his face fell. ‘I’m the sixth of us to go to Hogwarts. It’s a lot to live up to. Bill and Charlie have left now. Bill was Head Boy, and Charlie captained the Quidditch team. Percy’s just been made a Prefect. Fred and George muck about, but their marks are good and everybody likes them. So I’m expected to do as well as all of them, and if I manage it nobody will care, because it’s been done five times already. And nothing you get is ever new with five brothers. I’ve got Bill’s old robes and Charlie’s old wand and Percy’s old rat.’

He put a hand inside his jacket and brought out a fat grey rat, sound asleep.

‘This is Scabbers. He’s hopeless, he practically never wakes up. Dad bought Percy an owl for being made Prefect, but they couldn’t aff... I mean, I got Scabbers.’

Ron’s ears turned pink. He appeared to feel he had said too much, and went back to the window.

Harry couldn’t see anything shameful in not having the money for an owl. A month ago he had never had a penny of his own, and he said so. He told Ron about Dudley’s cast-off clothes, and about birthdays when his present had been a coat-hanger or a pair of Uncle Vernon’s old socks. Ron brightened considerably.

‘... and I didn’t know one thing about being a wizard until Hagrid turned up, or about my mum and dad, or Voldemort...’

Ron gasped.

‘What?’ said Harry.

‘You said his name!’ said Ron, who sounded horrified and deeply impressed at once. ‘I’d have thought that you, of everybody...’

‘I’m not showing off,’ said Harry. ‘Nobody ever told me you weren’t supposed to. That’s what I mean. There’s so much I don’t know.’ He hesitated, then said aloud the thing that had been nagging at him for weeks. ‘I’ll probably be bottom of the class.’

‘No, you won’t. Loads of people come from Muggle families, and they pick it up fast enough.’

London had fallen away behind them while they talked. Fields rolled by now, dotted with sheep and cows, and for a while the two of them sat without speaking and watched the hedges and lanes go past.

At about half past twelve something came clanking along the corridor, and a plump, smiling witch pulled back the door.

‘Fancy anything from the trolley, my loves?’

Harry, who had gone without breakfast, was on his feet at once. Ron went pink about the ears again and muttered that he had sandwiches.

Harry stepped out into the corridor. The Dursleys had never given him money for sweets, and with his pockets heavy with Galleons and Sickles he meant to buy every Mars Bar on the trolley. There were no Mars Bars. There were Bertie Bott’s Every-Flavour Beans and Drooble’s Best Blowing Gum, Chocolate Frogs, Pumpkin Pasties, Cauldron Cakes and Liquorice Wands, and a great many other things Harry had never laid eyes on. He couldn’t bear to miss any of them, so he bought some of each, and handed over eleven silver Sickles and seven bronze Knuts.

Ron’s eyes grew round as Harry carried the heap inside and tipped it over the empty seat.

‘Bit peckish?’

‘Famished,’ said Harry, and bit a pumpkin pasty in half.

Ron had produced a lumpy parcel and was unwrapping it. Four sandwiches lay inside. He peeled one open and sighed.

‘Corned beef. She never remembers I can’t stand it.’

‘I’ll swap you,’ said Harry, holding out a pasty. ‘Here.’

‘You won’t like it, it’s dry as anything,’ said Ron. ‘She hasn’t much time,’ he added quickly. ‘Not with five of us at home.’

‘Take it,’ said Harry. He had never had anything to share before, and never anybody to share it with. It was a wonderful feeling, sitting with Ron and working steadily through the pasties and cakes, while the sandwiches lay forgotten on the seat.

‘What are these?’ said Harry, picking up a packet of Chocolate Frogs. ‘They aren’t real frogs?’ He felt that very little would surprise him any more.

‘No,’ said Ron. ‘Tell me which card you’ve got, though. I need Agrippa.’

‘Card?’

‘Oh, right, you wouldn’t know. There’s a card in every one, Famous Witches and Wizards, for collecting. I’ve got five hundred or so, but I can’t get Agrippa or Ptolemy.’

Harry opened his frog and drew out the card. An old man looked up at him over half-moon spectacles. His nose was long and bent, and his hair and beard were silver and fell out of the picture altogether. The name beneath was Albus Dumbledore.

‘So that’s Dumbledore!’ said Harry.

‘You’re not telling me you’d never heard of Dumbledore?’ said Ron. ‘Can I have one? I might get Agrippa. Cheers.’

Harry turned the card over.

Albus Dumbledore, present Headmaster of Hogwarts. Widely held to be the greatest wizard of the age, Professor Dumbledore is best known for overcoming the Dark witch Grindelwald in 1945, for discovering the twelve uses of dragon’s blood, and for his alchemical work with his partner, Nicolas Flamel. The Professor is fond of chamber music and tenpin bowling.

He turned it back, and nearly dropped it. The picture was empty.

‘He’s gone!’

‘Well, he’s not going to stand about all day, is he?’ said Ron. ‘He’ll come back. Oh no, Morgana again, I’ve got six of her. D’you want it? You could start a collection.’

His gaze wandered to the pile of unopened frogs.

‘Have as many as you like,’ said Harry. ‘Only, with Muggles, people in photographs stay where they are.’

‘Do they? What, they never move?’ Ron was astonished. ‘That’s mental.’

Harry watched Dumbledore stroll back into his frame and give him the smallest of smiles.

There was a knock, and the round-faced boy Harry had passed on the platform came in looking close to tears.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘You haven’t seen a toad?’

They shook their heads.

‘I’ve lost him!’ the boy wailed. ‘He’s always escaping!’

‘He’ll turn up,’ said Harry.

‘Yes,’ said the boy miserably. ‘Well, if you do see him...’

He went out.

‘Can’t think why he minds,’ said Ron. ‘If I had a toad I’d lose it on purpose. Still, I brought Scabbers, so I’m one to talk.’

The rat slept on in his lap.

‘He could be dead and you’d never tell,’ said Ron with disgust. ‘I had a go at turning him yellow yesterday to liven him up. Didn’t work. Here, I’ll show you...’

He dug about in his trunk and came up with a wand that had seen better days. It was chipped along its length, and something white gleamed at the tip.

‘The unicorn hair’s nearly coming out. Anyway...’

He had only just raised it when the door opened again. The boy who had lost his toad was back, and he had brought a girl with him, already dressed in her Hogwarts robes.

‘Has anybody seen a toad? Neville’s lost one,’ she said. Her voice was brisk and rather commanding, her brown hair stuck out in a great thick bush, and her front teeth were a little too big for her.

‘We told him already, we haven’t,’ said Ron, but she was looking at his wand.

‘Oh, are you doing magic? Go on, then, let’s see.’

She sat down. Ron looked rather startled.

‘Er. All right.’

He cleared his throat.

‘Buttercup, custard, morning sun, make this lazy rat a yellow one.’

He flourished the wand. Scabbers remained grey and went on sleeping.

‘Are you certain that’s a proper spell?’ said the girl. ‘It isn’t a very good one, is it? I’ve tried a few easy ones for practice and they all worked. There’s no magic in my family whatsoever, so the letter was a tremendous surprise, but I was so pleased, because it’s the best school of witchcraft anywhere, everyone says so. I’ve memorised all our set books, naturally, and I only hope that’s enough. I’m Hermione Granger. Who are you?’

It all came out in a single breath.

Harry glanced at Ron and was comforted to see from his dazed expression that he hadn’t memorised the set books either.

‘Ron Weasley,’ Ron muttered.

‘Harry Potter,’ said Harry.

‘Are you actually?’ said Hermione. ‘I know all about you, of course. I bought some extra books for background, and you’re in Modern Magical History, and The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts, and Great Wizarding Events of the Twentieth Century.’

‘Am I?’ said Harry faintly.

‘Gracious, didn’t you know? I’d have looked up every word if it were me,’ said Hermione. ‘Do you two know which house you’ll be in? I’ve been asking people, and I’m hoping for Gryffindor. It sounds much the best, and they say Dumbledore was in it himself. I expect Ravenclaw would be all right too. Well, we ought to go and find Neville’s toad. And you should both get changed, I should think we’ll be arriving before long.’

She swept out, and the toadless boy trailed after her.

‘I don’t care which house I get, as long as she’s not in it,’ said Ron, flinging his wand back into the trunk. ‘Rubbish spell. George gave it to me. I bet he knew it was a dud.’

Harry was about to answer when something pale flashed past the glass of the compartment door. It was a head of white-blonde hair, moving briskly down the corridor. Then it stopped. It came back.

The door opened, and in walked the girl from Madam Malkin’s with a boy on either side of her. She was as pretty as he remembered, which irritated him. Her grey eyes went straight to Harry, and there was a great deal more interest in them than there had been in Diagon Alley.

‘So it’s true,’ she said. ‘The whole train is saying Harry Potter’s in this compartment. That’s you, then?’

‘Yes,’ said Harry. He was looking at the two boys. Both were broad and heavy and looked thoroughly unpleasant. Planted on either side of the slim, haughty girl, they might have been a pair of bodyguards.

‘Oh, that’s Crabbe, and that one’s Goyle,’ she said carelessly, seeing where his eyes had gone. ‘And me you know already. I did introduce myself. Dracina Malfoy.’

Ron coughed. It sounded very like a snigger.

Dracina Malfoy rounded on him.

‘Something funny about my name, is there?’ She huffed, and she puffed, and then she tossed her hair and put her nose in the air. ‘I needn’t ask for yours. Father says a Weasley is easy to spot. Red hair, freckles, and a good many more children than they’ve Galleons to feed.’

She turned her back on Ron.

‘Some wizarding families are a great deal better than others, Potter, as you’ll find out. You wouldn’t want to fall in with the wrong sort. I could show you who’s who.’

She held out her hand for Harry to take. It was the same pale hand she had offered him in the robe shop, and for the second time Harry left it hanging in the air.

‘I reckon I can work out the wrong sort for myself, thanks,’ he said coolly.

A faint pink crept into Dracina Malfoy’s pale cheeks. She huffed and puffed all over again.

‘I should watch my step if I were you, Potter,’ she said slowly. ‘Learn some manners, or you’ll end up exactly like your parents. They never knew what was good for them either. Keep company with rabble like the Weasleys and that Hagrid, and you’ll turn out no better.’

Harry and Ron were both on their feet. Ron’s face had gone as red as his hair.

‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Say it once more.’

‘Oh, are you going to fight us?’ sneered Malfoy.

‘I’ll hit a girl, I don’t mind,’ said Ron, ‘if she’s being a b...’

‘Get out,’ said Harry loudly, cutting across him. ‘Now.’ He sounded a good deal braver than he felt, for Crabbe and Goyle were much bigger than he or Ron.

‘But we’re so comfortable here. Aren’t we, boys? We’ve finished everything we brought, and you seem to have plenty to spare.’

Goyle reached for the Chocolate Frogs at Ron’s elbow. Ron sprang at him, but before he had laid a finger on Goyle, Goyle gave a dreadful howl.

Scabbers was dangling from his hand, small sharp teeth buried in his knuckle. Crabbe and Malfoy backed away as Goyle whirled the rat round and round, bellowing. At last Scabbers flew off, struck the window and dropped, and all three of them made for the door.

Malfoy went last. She looked back over her shoulder as she left, and her eyes stayed fixed on Harry until the door frame cut him from view. It was the look of someone who has seen a thing in a shop window and has already decided to have it.

Perhaps they feared more rats were hiding among the sweets, or perhaps they had heard somebody coming, for a moment later Hermione Granger was in the doorway.

‘What on earth has been happening?’ she said, surveying the sweets scattered across the floor and Ron, who was lifting Scabbers by the tail.

‘I think he’s knocked out,’ Ron said to Harry. He peered closer. ‘No. I don’t believe it. He’s gone back to sleep.’

So he had.

‘You’d met Malfoy already, then?’

Harry told him about Madam Malkin’s.

‘I know about her family,’ said Ron darkly. ‘They were among the first to come back over to our side when You-Know-Who vanished. Claimed they’d been bewitched. Dad doesn’t swallow it. He says Malfoy’s father never needed an excuse to join the Dark Side.’ He looked round at Hermione. ‘Did you want something?’

‘You need to get your robes on quickly. I’ve been up to the front to ask the driver, and he says we’re almost there. You haven’t been fighting? You’ll be in trouble before we’ve even arrived!’

‘Scabbers was fighting. We weren’t,’ said Ron, scowling. ‘D’you mind going away while we change?’

‘Fine. I only came in because everybody out there is being so childish, tearing up and down the corridor,’ said Hermione with a sniff. ‘And there’s dirt on your nose, in case you didn’t know.’

Ron glowered at her back as she went.

Harry looked out of the window. The light was going. Mountains and forests stood dark beneath a deep purple sky, and the train seemed to be slowing.

‘I hope she doesn’t end up in the same house as us,’ said Ron.

Harry wasn’t certain whether he meant Hermione or Malfoy, and he didn’t ask. He pulled his robes over his head, pressed his face to the cold glass, and wondered what Hogwarts would be like.

Chapter 3 : Silver Eyes

A voice rang down the length of the train.

‘Hogwarts in five minutes. Luggage is to stay on board. It will be brought up to the school for you.’

Harry’s stomach turned over, and Ron had gone white between his freckles. They stuffed what was left of the sweets into their pockets and squeezed out into the corridor, which was packed from end to end. Harry looked back once at Hedwig’s cage on the rack. He hoped whoever came for the trunks would be gentle with her, and would remember that she liked her water changed.

The train crawled, shuddered, and stopped. There was a great deal of shoving, and then Harry found himself on a small, unlit platform with the night air biting at his ears. A lantern came swaying over the heads of the crowd, and behind it a voice he knew.

‘Firs’-years! Firs’-years, this way! All right there, Harry?’

Hagrid’s enormous hairy face was grinning down at him across a sea of pointed hats.

‘C’mon, with me. Any more firs’-years? Watch yer feet, now! Firs’-years, follow me!’

A little way off, among the Slytherin-bound and the merely frightened, a head of white-blonde hair caught the lantern light. Dracina Malfoy was looking at him. Harry looked away, and when he looked again she was still at it. He knew that expression. It was the one Dudley wore whenever Uncle Vernon refused to buy him a new game for his Amiga: the lower lip, the narrowed eyes, the furious disbelief that something he wanted had not simply been handed over. Harry hated seeing it there. It had no business on a face like hers.

He was beginning to dislike her very much indeed. She was spoiled, that was plain, and she was a bully as well. She had sneered at Ron, who was the nicest person Harry had met since Hagrid, for no better reason than the colour of his hair and the size of his family. And still she kept on looking, which annoyed him most of all.

Slithering and tripping, they followed Hagrid down a steep and narrow path. The darkness pressed so close on either side that Harry supposed there must be thick trees. Hardly anybody spoke. Neville, the boy with the wandering toad, sniffed now and then.

‘Yeh’ll get yer firs’ look at Hogwarts in a moment,’ Hagrid called back. ‘Jus’ round this corner.’

‘Oooooh!’ said everybody at once.

The path had opened without warning on the shore of a vast black lake. High on a mountain on the far side stood a castle, enormous, bristling with towers and turrets, and every one of its windows glittered against the stars.

‘Four to a boat an’ no more!’ shouted Hagrid, waving at a cluster of small boats bobbing at the water’s edge. Harry and Ron climbed into one, and Neville and Hermione got in after them.

‘Everyone settled?’ bellowed Hagrid, who needed a boat all to himself. ‘Right, then. FORWARD!’

The little fleet set off together, sliding over water as flat and dark as a mirror. Nobody said a word. They were all gazing up at the castle, which seemed to grow taller and taller as they drew near the cliff beneath it.

‘Heads down!’ Hagrid roared, as the leading boats reached the rock. They ducked, and the boats passed through a hanging curtain of ivy into a wide opening that it had concealed. A dark tunnel carried them on, apparently right under the castle itself, and let them out at last in a sort of underground harbour, where they scrambled ashore over pebbles and wet rock.

‘Oi, you! This yer toad?’ said Hagrid, who was looking over the boats as they emptied.

‘Trevor!’ cried Neville in rapture, and held out both hands.

They climbed a passage in the rock behind Hagrid’s lantern and came out on smooth, dewy grass in the very shadow of the castle. A flight of stone steps led up to a huge oak door, and there they gathered.

‘All here? You, still got that toad?’

Hagrid lifted a fist the size of a football and knocked three times.

The door opened immediately. A tall witch with black hair and robes of emerald green stood on the threshold. Her face was extremely stern, and Harry knew at a glance that here was somebody it would be most unwise to annoy.

‘The firs’-years, Professor McGonagall,’ said Hagrid.

‘Thank you, Hagrid. I shall take them now.’

She drew the door wide. The Entrance Hall beyond could have swallowed the Dursleys’ house whole. Torches burned along the stone walls as they had at Gringotts, the ceiling was lost in shadow, and a splendid marble staircase swept up ahead of them to the floors above.

Professor McGonagall led them over the flagstones. From a doorway on the right came a steady hum of hundreds of voices, so the rest of the school had evidently arrived already, but she steered the first-years into a small bare room off the hall. They shuffled in and stood a good deal closer together than they normally would have, glancing about them.

Malfoy shouldered past Harry to get in front of him. She tutted as she did it, and up went her nose again. Harry glared at the back of her head. Who did she think she was?

‘Welcome to Hogwarts,’ said Professor McGonagall. ‘The start-of-term feast will begin shortly. Before you sit down to it, each of you will be sorted into a house. I ask you to take the Sorting seriously. For as long as you are here, your house will be your family. You will be taught alongside its members, you will sleep in its dormitory, and your free hours will be spent in its common room.

‘There are four houses: Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw and Slytherin. Every one of them has a proud history, and every one has turned out witches and wizards of great distinction. Your successes here will win points for your house. Break the rules, and you will lose them. The house with the most points when the year ends receives the House Cup, which is a considerable honour. I trust that each of you will do credit to the house you join.

‘The ceremony will take place before the whole school in a few minutes. You may wish to use the time to tidy yourselves.’

Her gaze rested briefly on Neville’s cloak, which he had fastened beneath his left ear, and on the smudge on Ron’s nose. Harry made a hopeless attempt to flatten his hair.

‘I shall come back for you when we are ready,’ said Professor McGonagall. ‘Wait quietly, please.’

She went out. Harry swallowed.

‘How do they sort us, exactly?’ he asked Ron.

‘A test of some kind, I think. Fred says it hurts like mad, but I expect he was joking.’

Harry’s heart gave a nasty thump. A test? With the entire school watching? He didn’t know a single spell. What could they possibly ask him to do? He had never imagined anything like this happening the moment they arrived. He looked round and saw that everyone else appeared just as frightened. Even Malfoy had forgotten to be haughty. She was chewing her lip and staring at the floor.

Nobody was saying much, apart from Hermione Granger, who was whispering at great speed about every spell she had learned and which of them was likeliest to be wanted. Harry did his best to shut her out. He had never been so nervous in his life, not even on the day he had carried home a note from school explaining that his teacher’s wig had somehow turned blue. He fixed his eyes on the door. At any second Professor McGonagall would walk back through it and march him off to his doom.

Then something happened that made him jump a foot in the air. Several people behind him screamed, and Malfoy screamed loudest of all. She leapt backwards, collided hard with Harry, and for one second clutched at his arm. Then she seemed to realise whose arm it was. She huffed, shoved him away with both hands as though he had bumped into her, and brushed at her sleeve.

Harry scarcely noticed. He was gaping, and so was everyone round him. Some twenty ghosts had come pouring through the back wall. They were pearl-white and faintly see-through, and they drifted across the room deep in conversation, paying the first-years almost no attention. They appeared to be having an argument.

‘I say let bygones be bygones,’ a plump little monk was saying. ‘He ought to have one more chance...’

‘My dear Friar, how many chances has Peeves had already? He disgraces the lot of us, and he isn’t even a proper ghost. Good gracious, what are all of you doing in here?’

A ghost in a ruff and tights had caught sight of them. No one replied.

‘New students!’ said the Fat Friar, beaming round at them. ‘Waiting to be sorted, I expect?’

One or two heads nodded dumbly.

‘I shall hope to see you in Hufflepuff!’ said the Friar. ‘I was there myself, you know.’

‘Along you go,’ said a crisp voice. ‘The Sorting is about to begin.’

Professor McGonagall was back. The ghosts floated off one after another through the opposite wall.

‘Form a line, please,’ she told the first-years, ‘and follow me.’

Harry’s legs seemed to have been filled with lead. He fell in behind a sandy-haired boy, with Ron at his back, and they filed out of the room, across the hall and through a pair of double doors.

He had never dreamed that such a place could exist. Thousands upon thousands of candles hung in the air above four long tables, where the rest of the school sat among glittering golden plates and goblets. A fifth table stood at the top of the Hall for the teachers. Professor McGonagall led the first-years up to it and turned them about, so that they stood in a row facing the students with the staff behind them. Hundreds of faces stared at them, pale as lanterns in the wavering light. Here and there among them a ghost glowed like silver mist. To escape all those eyes, Harry looked up, and saw a ceiling of velvety black, scattered with stars.

‘It’s enchanted to look like the sky outside,’ he heard Hermione whisper. ‘I read about it in Hogwarts: A History.’

It was hard to believe there was any ceiling at all, and that the Hall did not simply lie open to the heavens.

Harry looked down again quickly. Professor McGonagall had set a four-legged stool in front of them without a word, and on the stool she placed a pointed wizard’s hat. It was patched, frayed, and filthy. Aunt Petunia would have carried it to the dustbin with the fire tongs.

Perhaps they would have to pull a rabbit out of it, Harry thought wildly. Then he saw that the whole Hall was watching the hat, so he watched it too. For a few moments nothing stirred. The hat gave a twitch. A tear near the brim gaped open like a mouth, and the hat burst into song.

‘I may be patched, I may be plain,
My brim be past its best,
But show me any cleverer hat
And I shall eat my crest.

‘So sit you down and pull me on,
For there is nothing hid
In any head I’ve ever worn,
Whatever that head did.

‘To Gryffindor I send the bold,
The daring and the true;
To Hufflepuff the fair of heart
Who see a hard task through.

‘In Ravenclaw the quick of wit
Will find their kindred kind;
In Slytherin the cunning thrive,
Who leave no means behind.

‘So try me, do, and never fear,
I’ve not been wrong to date.
I am the Hogwarts Sorting Hat,
And I shall set you straight!’

The Hall broke into applause. The hat bowed to each table in turn and went still.

‘So all we do is put on a hat!’ Ron whispered. ‘I’m going to murder Fred. He kept on about wrestling a troll.’

Harry managed a feeble smile. A hat was certainly better than a spell, though he would have preferred to try it on without an audience. It seemed to want a great deal from people. Harry felt neither bold nor quick-witted nor anything else on its list at that moment. If the hat had mentioned a house for those who felt slightly sick, he would have known exactly where he belonged.

Professor McGonagall came forward with a long roll of parchment.

‘When I read out your name, you will sit on the stool and put on the hat,’ she said. ‘Abbott, Hannah!’

A girl with a pink face and fair pigtails stumbled forward. The hat dropped straight down over her eyes. There was a pause.

‘HUFFLEPUFF!’ cried the hat.

The table on the right clapped and cheered as Hannah went to join it, and the Fat Friar gave her a jolly wave.

‘Bones, Susan!’

‘HUFFLEPUFF!’ the hat called again, and Susan hurried away to sit by Hannah.

‘Boot, Terry!’

‘RAVENCLAW!’

This time the applause came from the second table on the left, and several Ravenclaws rose to shake Terry’s hand.

Mandy Brocklehurst was made a Ravenclaw as well, but Lavender Brown became the first Gryffindor of the night, and the table at the far left erupted. Harry could see Ron’s twin brothers whistling through their fingers.

Millicent Bulstrode went to Slytherin. Harry studied the table that received her. It might have been everything he had heard, but he thought they looked an unpleasant crowd. They had a well-fed, pleased-with-themselves air that he had lived with for ten years. They reminded him, every one, of Dudley.

He was feeling properly sick now. He remembered games lessons at his old school, and how he had always been picked last. He hadn’t been bad at games. Nobody had wanted Dudley to think they liked him.

When Hagrid had told him he was a wizard, Harry had believed he was leaving all of that behind: the Dursleys, their spotless house, their careful, comfortable, spiteful little world. Yet here it was again in green and silver, sitting at its own table. The thought took some of the shine off the candles. And this was the house Dracina Malfoy was so keen to join?

‘Finch-Fletchley, Justin!’

‘HUFFLEPUFF!’

Harry noticed that the hat sometimes answered at once and sometimes took its time. Seamus Finnigan, the sandy-haired boy ahead of him, sat for very nearly a minute before he was declared a Gryffindor.

‘Granger, Hermione!’

Hermione all but ran to the stool and rammed the hat on.

‘GRYFFINDOR!’ it shouted.

Ron groaned.

A dreadful idea came to Harry then, as dreadful ideas will when you are frightened enough. Suppose he wasn’t chosen? Suppose he sat with the hat over his eyes for minute after minute, until Professor McGonagall whipped it off and told him there had clearly been a mistake, and he had better go back to the train?

Neville Longbottom fell over on his way to the stool. The hat considered him for a long time, and when it finally shouted ‘GRYFFINDOR!’ he ran off with it still on his head, and had to trot back through howls of laughter to hand it to Morag MacDougal.

‘Malfoy, Dracina!’

She swaggered out of the line. As she passed Harry she gave him a mocking little look, lifted her nose, and trotted on. She had her wish in an instant. The hat had hardly brushed her white-blonde hair before it screamed, ‘SLYTHERIN!’

Malfoy went to sit with Crabbe and Goyle, looking tremendously pleased with herself, and Harry saw her tell Crabbe off sharply for looking gormless.

There were not many left. Moon. Nott. Parkinson. A pair of twin girls called Patil. Sally-Anne Perks. And then, at last:

‘Potter, Harry!’

As Harry stepped forward, whispers sprang up all over the Hall like small hissing fires.

‘Did she say Potter?’

‘The Harry Potter?’

The last thing he saw before the hat fell over his eyes was a Hall full of people craning their necks to look at him. Then there was only the black lining of the hat. He waited.

‘Hmm,’ said a small voice in his ear. ‘Tricky. Very tricky. A good deal of courage, I see. A sound mind as well. Talent, my word, yes. And a healthy wish to prove yourself. And so much pain, too, for one so young... now, that is interesting. Where am I to put you?’

Harry gripped the edge of the stool. Not Slytherin, he thought. Not Slytherin.

‘Not Slytherin, eh?’ said the voice. ‘Quite certain? You could be great, you know. It’s all in here, and Slytherin would set you well on the road. No? Well, if your mind’s made up, it had better be GRYFFINDOR!’

The last word was shouted to the whole Hall. Harry pulled off the hat and walked unsteadily to the Gryffindor table. He was so relieved to have been chosen at all, and to have escaped Slytherin, that he barely noticed he was getting the loudest cheer of the evening. Percy the Prefect leapt up and pumped his hand, and the Weasley twins were yelling, ‘We got Potter! We got Potter!’ Harry sat down opposite the ghost in the ruff, who patted his arm, and it felt exactly like plunging it into a bucket of icy water.

He could not have said why he looked across at the Slytherin table then. Malfoy was watching him. The smugness had gone from her face, and what was left looked oddly like disappointment. Then she saw that he had seen. Her nose went up, and she turned her back on him entirely.

What a strange girl, thought Harry.

He had a clear view of the High Table now. Hagrid sat at the nearest end, and caught his eye and gave him a thumbs-up. Harry grinned back. In the middle, in a tall golden chair, sat Albus Dumbledore. Harry knew him straight away from the Chocolate Frog card. His silver hair was the only thing in the Hall that shone as brightly as the ghosts. Professor Quirrell was there too, the jittery young man from the Leaky Cauldron, looking very odd in a large purple turban.

Only three remained to be sorted. Lisa Turpin went to Ravenclaw, and then it was Ron, who by this time was pale green. Harry crossed his fingers under the table, and a second later the hat had shouted, ‘GRYFFINDOR!’

Harry clapped as hard as anyone as Ron dropped into the next chair.

‘Well done, Ron, splendid,’ said Percy Weasley grandly across Harry, while Blaise Zabini was sent to Slytherin. Professor McGonagall rolled up her parchment and carried the hat away.

Harry looked at his empty golden plate and discovered that he was ravenous. The pumpkin pasties felt like a very long time ago.

Albus Dumbledore had risen. He was beaming down at them with his arms flung wide, as though nothing in the world could have delighted him more than the sight of them all.

‘Welcome!’ he said. ‘Welcome to a new year at Hogwarts! Before the feast, I have a few words to say to you. They are these: Flapdoodle! Gumboot! Nincompoop! Sprout!

‘Thank you!’

He sat down again. Everybody clapped and cheered. Harry wasn’t sure whether he was meant to laugh.

‘Is he a bit... mad?’ he asked Percy doubtfully.

‘Mad?’ said Percy lightly. ‘He’s brilliant! The greatest wizard alive! But yes, he is a little mad. Potatoes, Harry?’

Harry’s mouth fell open. The dishes along the table were heaped with food. He had never seen so many of his favourite things in one place: roast beef and roast chicken, chops, sausages, bacon and steak, potatoes boiled, roasted and chipped, Yorkshire pudding, peas, carrots, gravy, ketchup and, for some reason he could not fathom, a bowl of mint humbugs.

The Dursleys had never quite starved him, but he had never once been allowed to eat until he was full. Dudley had always taken whatever Harry really wanted, even when it made him ill. Harry put a little of everything on his plate, humbugs excepted, and started. It was all delicious.

‘That does look good,’ said the ghost in the ruff wistfully, watching Harry cut into his steak.

‘Can’t you...?’

‘I have not eaten in almost five hundred years,’ said the ghost. ‘There’s no need, naturally, but one misses it. I don’t believe I’ve introduced myself. Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington, at your service. Resident ghost of Gryffindor Tower.’

‘I know who you are!’ said Ron suddenly. ‘My brothers told me. You’re Nearly Headless Nick!’

‘I should much prefer Sir Nicholas de Mimsy...’ the ghost began stiffly, but Seamus Finnigan cut in.

‘Nearly Headless? How d’you manage to be nearly headless?’

Sir Nicholas looked exceedingly put out, as though the conversation were not going at all as he had planned.

‘Like so,’ he said testily. He took hold of his left ear and tugged. His whole head swung sideways off his neck and came to rest on his shoulder, as if on a hinge. Somebody had plainly tried to behead him and made a poor job of it. Pleased by their stunned faces, Nearly Headless Nick flipped his head back into place, coughed, and said, ‘So! New Gryffindors! You’ll help us win the House Championship this year, I hope? We have never gone so long without it. Slytherin have taken the Cup six years running! The Bloody Baron is becoming quite insufferable. He is the Slytherin ghost.’

Harry looked over at the Slytherin table and saw a horrible ghost with blank, staring eyes and a gaunt face, his robes stained with silver blood. He was seated right beside Malfoy, who, Harry was glad to see, did not care for the arrangement at all. She was sitting bolt upright with her chin raised, every inch the princess, while the Baron’s ghostly blood dripped steadily on to the bench beside her, and she edged away from him an inch at a time.

‘How did he get all bloody?’ asked Seamus with keen interest.

‘I have never asked,’ said Nearly Headless Nick delicately.

When everyone had eaten all they could, the leftovers melted away and the plates gleamed clean again. A moment later the puddings arrived. There was ice-cream in every flavour imaginable, apple pie, treacle tart, chocolate éclairs, jam doughnuts, trifle, strawberries, jelly, rice pudding...

Harry reached for the treacle tart. It was his favourite thing in the world, and at Privet Drive he had only ever been allowed to watch Dudley eat it. As he took a second slice, the talk turned to families.

‘I’m half and half,’ said Seamus. ‘Me da’s a Muggle. Mam never told him she was a witch till they were married. Gave him a fair old fright.’

The others laughed, and Harry laughed with them. Then he remembered some of the things Uncle Vernon liked to shout at the television about the Irish. He looked at Seamus, who was cheerfully passing Neville the custard, and decided that Uncle Vernon had been wrong about that as he was about most things.

‘What about you, Neville?’ said Ron.

‘Well, my gran brought me up, and she’s a witch,’ said Neville. ‘But for years the family thought I hadn’t any magic. My great-uncle Algie was always trying to startle some out of me. He pushed me off the end of Blackpool pier once, and I nearly drowned. Nothing happened till I was eight. Great-uncle Algie had come to tea, and he was dangling me out of an upstairs window by my ankles when Great-auntie Enid offered him a meringue, and he let go by accident. But I bounced. Right down the garden and out into the road. They were all so pleased. Gran cried. You should have seen them when I got my letter. They’d thought I mightn’t be magic enough to come. Great-uncle Algie bought me my toad, he was that happy.’

On Harry’s other side, Percy and Hermione were discussing lessons. Hermione hoped they would begin at once, and was particularly looking forward to Transfiguration. Percy told her she would be starting with small things, matches into needles and so forth.

Harry was warm and drowsy. He looked up at the High Table again. Hagrid was drinking deeply from his goblet. Professor McGonagall was talking to Dumbledore. Professor Quirrell, in his ridiculous turban, was speaking to a teacher with greasy black hair, a hooked nose and sallow skin.

It happened in an instant. The hook-nosed teacher looked past Quirrell’s turban straight into Harry’s eyes, and a sharp, hot pain shot through the scar on Harry’s forehead.

‘Ouch!’ Harry clapped a hand to his head.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Percy.

‘N-nothing.’

The pain had gone as fast as it had come. The feeling Harry had got from that look was harder to shake off. He was sure the teacher did not like him at all.

‘Who’s that talking to Professor Quirrell?’ he asked Percy.

‘Oh, you know Quirrell already? No wonder he’s so nervous. That’s Professor Snape. He teaches Potions, but everyone knows he’s after Quirrell’s job. He knows a frightful lot about the Dark Arts, Snape.’

Harry watched Snape for some time, but Snape did not look at him again.

At length the puddings vanished too, and Professor Dumbledore stood up. The Hall fell quiet.

‘A few more words, now that we are all fed and watered. First-years should note that the forest in the grounds is forbidden to every pupil. Some of our older students would do well to remember it too.’

His twinkling eyes flicked towards the Weasley twins.

‘Mr Filch, the caretaker, has asked me to remind you that no magic is to be used in the corridors between lessons. Quidditch trials will take place in the second week of term. Anyone wishing to play for their house should speak to Madam Hooch. And lastly, I must tell you that this year the third-floor corridor on the right-hand side is out of bounds to all who do not wish to die a most painful death.’

Harry laughed, but he was one of very few.

‘He doesn’t mean it?’ he muttered to Percy.

‘He must,’ said Percy, frowning up at Dumbledore. ‘Odd, though. He usually tells us why a place is forbidden. The forest is full of dangerous creatures, everybody knows that. I do think he might have told the Prefects, at any rate.’

‘And now, before bed, the school song!’ cried Dumbledore. Harry noticed that the other teachers’ smiles had gone rather stiff.

Dumbledore gave his wand a little flick, as though shaking a fly from the tip, and a long golden ribbon streamed out of it, rose above the tables and curled itself into words.

‘Each to his own favourite tune,’ said Dumbledore, ‘and away we go!’

And the school sang. It was the most tremendous noise Harry had ever heard. Some sang it as a jig and some as a hymn, Seamus was bawling it to something that sounded like a football chant, and Hermione was singing every word very precisely to a tune of her own. Harry, who did not know the words, followed the golden ribbon as best he could and found that it hardly mattered.

Everybody finished at a different moment. In the end only the Weasley twins were left, singing to a very slow funeral march. Dumbledore conducted their final lines with his wand, and when they stopped he clapped louder than anyone.

‘Ah, music,’ he said, dabbing at his eyes. ‘A magic beyond anything we teach here! And now, bed. Off you trot!’

The Gryffindor first-years followed Percy through the chattering crowd, out of the Great Hall and up the marble staircase. Harry’s legs were heavy again, though this time it was only weariness and far too much treacle tart. He was too sleepy to be surprised when the people in the portraits whispered and pointed as they went by, or when Percy twice took them through doorways hidden behind sliding panels and tapestries. They climbed staircase after staircase, yawning and dragging their feet, and Harry was just wondering how much further it could be when they stopped dead.

A bundle of walking sticks was hovering in mid-air in front of them. Percy took one step forward, and they began hurling themselves at him.

‘Peeves,’ Percy whispered. ‘A poltergeist.’ He raised his voice. ‘Peeves, show yourself.’

He was answered by a loud, rude noise, like air escaping from a balloon.

‘Shall I fetch the Bloody Baron?’

There was a pop, and a little man with wicked dark eyes and a wide mouth appeared, floating cross-legged and hugging the walking sticks.

‘Oooooh!’ he cackled. ‘Ickle firsties! What a treat!’

He dived at them. They all ducked.

‘Clear off, Peeves, or the Baron will hear of it, I mean it!’ barked Percy.

Peeves stuck out his tongue and vanished, letting the walking sticks fall on Neville’s head. They heard him whizzing away, rattling the suits of armour as he went.

‘You want to be careful of Peeves,’ said Percy as they moved on. ‘The Bloody Baron is the only one who can manage him. He won’t even listen to the Prefects. Here we are.’

At the very end of the corridor hung a portrait of an extremely fat lady in a pink silk dress.

‘Password?’ she said.

‘Caput Draconis,’ said Percy, and the portrait swung forward to show a round hole in the wall. They clambered through, Neville with a leg-up, and found themselves in the Gryffindor common room, a snug, circular room crowded with squashy armchairs.

Percy sent the girls through one door and the boys through another. At the top of a spiral staircase, for they were evidently in one of the towers, they came at last to their beds: five four-posters hung with curtains of deep red velvet. Their trunks had been brought up already, and Hedwig’s cage stood on Harry’s, with fresh water in the dish. Too tired for much talk, they dragged on their pyjamas and tumbled into bed.

‘Good food, eh?’ Ron mumbled through the hangings. ‘Get off, Scabbers! He’s eating my sheets.’

Harry meant to ask whether Ron had tried the treacle tart, but he was asleep before he could.

Perhaps he had eaten rather too much, for he had a very peculiar dream. He was wearing Professor Quirrell’s turban, and it kept talking to him, telling him he must move to Slytherin at once, because that was his destiny. Harry told the turban he did not want to be in Slytherin. It grew heavier and heavier. He tried to drag it off, and it tightened until it hurt. And there was Malfoy, with her nose in the air, laughing at him as he struggled. Why should he care what she thought of him? Yet he found that he did, and that made him angrier than ever. Then Malfoy became the hook-nosed teacher, Snape, and Snape’s laugh turned high and cold. There was a burst of green light, and Harry woke, sweating and shaking.

He rolled over and slept again. When he woke next morning the dream had gone, all except a pair of cruel silver eyes that would not let him go.

Chapter 4 : The Old Hogwarts Try

Harry did his best. That was the trouble. He did his best from the moment he woke on Monday to the moment he fell into his four-poster, and his best did not seem to get him very far.

The castle, for a start, would not stay still. There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts, by Hermione’s count, and Harry was prepared to believe that every one of them had it in for him. Some were wide and grand, some narrow and crumbling, and a surprising number had a step that vanished the moment you trusted your weight to it. Worse, they moved. You set off up a staircase to the fourth floor and arrived, after a slow and stately swing that nobody had warned you about, at a blank wall on the fifth. Doors were no better. Some would only open if you asked nicely, some would only open if you tickled them in the right place, and some were only pretending to be doors at all and were, on closer inspection, solid wall. The people in the portraits went visiting, so that you could never rely on the lady with the lute being where you had left her, and the suits of armour, Harry was almost sure, walked about at night.

Then there was Peeves. Harry had met bullies before. He had lived with one. Peeves was a bully with no body to hit, which made him a great deal worse. If you asked him the way he sent you the wrong way, delighted. He tipped wastepaper baskets on people from the gallery above the Entrance Hall, pulled rugs out from under first-years in full view of the fifth-years, and once, when Harry and Ron were already late for Transfiguration, pelted them the length of a corridor with pieces of chalk while singing a song about Harry’s hair. Ron called him a git, and worse. Harry thought Ron was being generous.

It took him most of the week to learn that the whole school was staring at him. They queued up outside classrooms on tiptoe to get a look, doubled back along corridors to pass him again, and whispered behind their hands. Harry wished they wouldn’t. He had enough to do finding his way to lessons, and when he got there the real difficulty began.

For it had turned out that there was a very great deal more to magic than pointing a wand and saying a few words in Latin. Latin was what it sounded like, anyway. Harry had never been any good at the little of it they’d had at his old school, and he had hoped nobody at Hogwarts would notice. It made no difference. Everything was new, everything was astonishing, and nearly all of it was strange in a way that would have made Uncle Vernon’s moustache stand on end and sent Aunt Petunia straight to the floor in a faint.

Take Astronomy. Harry had assumed, in so far as he had thought about it at all, that the stars were something little old ladies bothered with, the sort who read the horoscopes in the magazines Aunt Petunia bought at the newsagent. He said as much to Hermione on Wednesday night, as they climbed to the top of the tallest tower at midnight with their telescopes under their arms.

‘That’s Astrology,’ said Hermione at once. ‘This is Astronomy. They’re different.’

‘Right,’ said Harry.

‘Though of course they’re very closely linked. The old sorcerers thought the planets governed magic itself. Greek ones and Roman ones. Professor Sinistra says the phase of the moon affects almost everything, Divination, obviously, and Potions, and whole families of charms and curses that only work properly on a waxing moon, or only on a waning one. I’m a Virgo, so naturally I’ve read a lot about it.’

‘Naturally,’ said Harry, who had no idea what a Virgo was and did not want to find out at midnight.

Professor Sinistra was a tall, severe witch who said very little and expected her classes to say less. They lay on their backs on the cold stone of the tower top, and she walked among them and pointed with a long thin finger at the sky, and they drew what she pointed at. Harry drew the Plough three times before she accepted it, and by the end of the lesson he had learned the names of twenty-two stars, a chart of the moons of Jupiter, and the fact that Hermione Granger could whisper the Latin name of a constellation faster than he could find it.

Then there was History of Magic. This was the only lesson at Hogwarts taught by a ghost. Professor Binns had been very old and very dull when he had fallen asleep in front of the staff-room fire, and had got up next morning to teach, leaving his body behind him in the armchair, and in Ron’s opinion he hadn’t noticed yet. Nobody had told him. Harry suspected that nobody dared get close enough for fear they’d be bored to death. He drifted in through the blackboard, opened his notes, and read them aloud in a voice like a bath draining, and within five minutes the room had the glazed, far-off look of a congregation on a hot Sunday.

The notes were full of names and dates and the doings of what Professor Binns called the most ancient and noble houses. Wizards, it was becoming clear to Harry, set a great deal of store by their blood. There were lists of who had married whom going back nine hundred years, and whether the match had been pure on both sides, and Professor Binns gave these out in exactly the voice he used for goblin rebellions, which was to say no voice at all.

‘What does it even mean?’ Harry said to Ron afterwards, as they fought their way out into the corridor with the Slytherins, who had the same lesson, pushing out of the other door. ‘Pure?’

‘It’s how it’s always been with wizards,’ said Ron, shrugging. ‘Mum’s always on about it. She says we might not have much, but the Weasleys are still an old family and a proper one, and blood is power. Dunno what she means by it, really. Fred says it means we can’t afford new robes but we can trace them back to a goat.’

‘Blood is power because it still is,’ said Hermione, who had come up behind them with her bag over her shoulder and the look of somebody who has been waiting all lesson to say something. ‘The Celts used blood in their rites, and so did the Norse. Druidic magic was practically all blood, oaths and bindings and things. And then the Normans came over with William, and the big Norman wizarding families won him the Conquest with dark magic, mostly, and the old Anglo-Saxon families were light wizards, you see, much more pagan, and they lost, and the Normans have looked down on everyone else ever since. It’s all in A History of Magic, and in Blood and Bone by Bathilda Bagshot, which isn’t on the list but you really ought to...’

‘Hermione,’ said Ron. ‘You’re as boring as Binns. Shut up.’

‘My family goes back further than that,’ said a cool, drawling voice.

Dracina Malfoy had stopped a few feet away, with Crabbe and Goyle at her shoulders. She was not looking at Ron or Hermione. She was looking, as she always seemed to be looking, at Harry.

‘The Malfoys were in Britain before there was a Britain,’ she said. ‘Father has the family tree in the drawing room. It takes up the whole wall.’

‘That’s not right, though,’ said Hermione, before anybody could stop her. ‘The Malfoys came over from Normandy. With William the Conqueror. Armand Malfoy was given his land in Wiltshire by William himself. It says so in...’

‘I know what it says.’ Two spots of pink had appeared on Dracina’s cheeks. ‘I am a great deal more English than you are, Granger, with your great bushy hair, big nose, and your teeth. Father warned me about people like you.’

Harry wondered what Dracina was talking about. Aunt Petunia once warned Dudley and Harry about Uncle Vernon’s boss who also had a big nose and curly hair. The Goblins of Gringotts reminded Harry of that man which put him on edge around them. 

He spoke up

“Do you mean the J-”

But Dracina got there first.

‘Mudbloods,’ she said. ‘I mean.’ looking oddly terse at Harry.

Ron drew a sharp breath, as though somebody had trodden on his foot. Hermione looked at the floor. Her ears had gone red, and she said nothing at all, which Harry had never once known her to do.

‘What?’ said Harry. ‘What did she say?’

‘Hermione’s annoying,’ said Ron, and his voice had gone oddly tight. ‘But that’s no excuse. That’s a filthy word, Malfoy. You don’t say that.’

‘You’re a fine one to talk, Weasley,’ said Dracina. ‘I’ve heard the sort of language that comes out of you. I am a Malfoy. I don’t need to use lower class swear words like you. I was simply stating a fact about what Granger is.’ She turned her grey eyes on Harry, and her voice softened a shade. ‘I’ve said it before, Potter, and I’ll say it again, because you plainly weren’t brought up to know better. You ought to be keeping company with your own kind. The Potters are an old family, an ancient and pure family. There’s no need to go slumming it with the Weasleys. You’d do far better allied with us.’

Harry had not had a good week. He had been lost, laughed at, chalked, stared at, and told the names of twenty-two stars at one in the morning, and he found that he had no patience left for Dracina Malfoy.

‘I told you on the train,’ he said, very coldly. ‘I can tell who the wrong sort are. You’re not the sort of girl I’d want for a friend.’

For a moment she only stared at him. Then that same spoiled look from the train station came over her face. She said the first thing that came into her head, which was, ‘ Fine then, pottyhead!’

Harry felt a bubbling laugh force itself out of him. He couldn’t help it. It was the worst insult he had ever heard in his life, worse than anything Dudley had managed in ten years of trying, and it had come out of her so grandly. Ron snorted. Even Hermione looked up.

Dracina went scarlet to the roots of her white-blonde hair. She opened her mouth, shut it, and turned on her heel, and Crabbe and Goyle lumbered after her down the corridor.

‘You’ll see! Come along, boys!’ she snapped at Crabbe and Goyle like she was ordering the posh wine Aunt Petunia preferred. 

‘Pottyhead,’ said Ron, wiping his eyes. ‘Blimey.’

Harry looked at Hermione, who was still rather pink. ‘What did it mean? The word?’

‘It means somebody with Muggle parents,’ said Hermione quietly. ‘It means dirty blood. I read about it.’ And she walked off towards the library before he could say anything else.

Harry did his best in Charms, too. Professor Flitwick was a tiny wizard who had to stand on a stack of books to see over his desk, and who gave a squeak and toppled off them when he reached Harry’s name in the register. The lesson after that was all theory, and the theory was all wand movements, the swish and the flick and the difference between the two, and Harry’s wand would not swish in the least. He did his best in Transfiguration, which was taught by Professor McGonagall, who had turned her desk into a pig and back again before any of them had sat down, and who warned them that anybody messing about in her class would leave it and not come back. After that she had them trying to turn a matchstick into a needle. By the end of the lesson Hermione’s match had gone silver and pointed at one end, and Professor McGonagall had shown it to the class. Harry’s match was still a match, though he thought it looked slightly more tired than it had.

He was nearly giving up hope of ever being good at anything when Ron reminded him of Defence Against the Dark Arts.

‘That’s where they do the real spells,’ Ron said on Thursday, as they went down to the classroom. ‘The good ones. Hexes and jinxes and how to block them. Charlie says you learn a Shield Charm in the first year, if the teacher’s any good.’

Harry’s spirits lifted. A Shield Charm sounded exactly like the sort of thing he had come to Hogwarts for.

The classroom stank of garlic. It hung in the air so thickly that Dean Thomas, who sat at the back, spent the whole lesson with his sleeve over his nose. Professor Quirrell stood at the front in his purple turban and stammered. He stammered through the register, he stammered through what might have been an introduction to the subject if anyone could have followed it, and when Seamus asked him whether it was true he had fought a vampire in Romania, he went white and knocked over his inkwell. The turban, Ron said afterwards, was stuffed with garlic too, so the vampire couldn’t come for him in the night. Harry thought that was a very good story, and a great deal more interesting than the man who was supposed to be in it. They had learned nothing at all in an hour and a half, and he came out of the room feeling as flat as he had felt all week.

On Friday morning, for the first time, Harry and Ron found the Great Hall without getting lost once.

‘What’ve we got?’ said Harry, reaching for the porridge.

‘Double Potions. With the Slytherins,’ said Ron. ‘Snape’s Head of Slytherin. Everyone says he favours them. We’ll find out.’

‘Wish McGonagall favoured us,’ said Harry. She was Head of Gryffindor, and it had not stopped her setting them a foot and a half of parchment on the Transfiguration of inanimate objects the day before.

The post came in. Harry was used to it by now, though it had given him a fright on the first morning, when a hundred owls had come pouring through the high windows in the middle of breakfast and swooped the length of the tables, dropping letters and parcels into laps. So far Hedwig had brought him nothing. She sometimes came to nibble his ear and take a corner of toast before flying off to sleep in the Owlery with the school owls. This morning she landed between the marmalade and the sugar bowl and dropped a note on his plate.

Harry tore it open. The writing was large and untidy and leaned in several directions at once.

Harry,

I know you lot get Friday afternoons free. Fancy a cup of tea about three? Want to hear how your first week’s gone. Send Hedwig back with an answer.

Hagrid

Harry borrowed Ron’s quill and wrote Yes please, see you then on the back, and Hedwig took it and went.

It was as well he had Hagrid’s tea to look forward to, because Potions turned out to be the worst thing that had happened to him yet.

At the start-of-term feast Harry had got the idea that Professor Snape did not like him. By the end of the first Potions lesson he knew he had got it wrong. Snape did not dislike Harry. Snape hated him.

Potions was taught in a dungeon. It was colder than the castle above, and it would have been creepy enough without the pickled things that floated in jars along every wall. Snape took the register as Flitwick had, and like Flitwick he stopped at Harry’s name.

‘Ah,’ he said softly. ‘Harry Potter. How very... famous.’

Behind Snape’s back, Dracina Malfoy stuck out her tongue at Harry. Crabbe and Goyle sniggered.

Snape finished the names and looked up. His eyes were black, as Hagrid’s were, but there was no warmth in them at all. They were cold and flat and made Harry think of deep water in the dark.

‘Potion-making,’ said Snape, ‘is a precise art and a subtle thing.’ He spoke barely above a whisper, and they heard every word. He had the same gift as Professor McGonagall of holding a room silent without seeming to try. ‘There is very little foolish wand-waving in this room, and so a good many of you will doubt that it is magic at all. I do not suppose you will ever truly understand what can be done with a cauldron that simmers gently, with fumes that curl and glimmer, with liquids that slide through the veins and bewitch the mind and bind the senses. I can teach you to bottle renown, to brew glory, to put a stopper in death itself. Provided, of course, that you are not the usual collection of blockheads I am made to teach.’

Silence followed this. Harry and Ron raised their eyebrows at each other. Hermione was perched on the very edge of her stool and looked desperate to begin proving she was no blockhead.

‘Potter,’ said Snape suddenly. ‘Powdered root of asphodel, added to an infusion of wormwood. What do I get?’

Powdered root of what, in an infusion of what? Harry looked at Ron, who looked as blank as he felt. Hermione’s hand had shot into the air.

‘I don’t know, sir,’ said Harry.

Snape’s mouth curled.

‘Dear me. Fame, it seems, is not everything.’ He paid Hermione’s hand no attention whatever. ‘Let us try again. Where would you look, Potter, if I sent you to fetch me a bezoar?’

Hermione’s arm stretched as high as it would go without her leaving the stool. Harry had no idea what a bezoar was. He tried not to look at the Slytherin side of the room, where Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle were shaking with laughter and Malfoy was making a rude gesture at him behind her hand.

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘Didn’t think to open a book before you came, Potter?’

Harry made himself go on looking straight into the cold eyes. He had looked through his books at the Dursleys’, in the small hours with a torch, but did Snape really expect him to have the whole of One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi by heart when he could still scarcely believe he was a wizard at all?

Snape went on ignoring Hermione, whose hand was now trembling with effort.

‘Monkshood and wolfsbane, Potter. What is the difference?’

Hermione stood up. Her hand was pointing at the dungeon ceiling.

‘I don’t know,’ said Harry quietly. ‘I think Hermione does, though. Why don’t you ask her?’

Several people laughed, and Harry couldn’t think why. He had meant it. Hermione read everything; of course she would know. He caught Seamus’s eye across the room and Seamus winked at him, which was more puzzling still.

Snape was not laughing.

‘Sit down,’ he snapped at Hermione. ‘For your information, Potter, asphodel and wormwood together produce a sleeping draught so strong that it is called the Draught of Living Death. A bezoar is a stone from the stomach of a goat, and it will counter most poisons. Monkshood and wolfsbane are one and the same plant, which is also called aconite. Well? Why is nobody writing this down?’

There was a sudden scramble for quills and parchment. Over the noise, Snape said, ‘And Gryffindor will lose a point for your impertinence, Potter.’

Things did not get better for the Gryffindors as the lesson went on. Snape paired them off and set them to brewing a simple potion for curing boils, and swept among them in his long black robes while they weighed dried nettles and crushed snake fangs, finding fault with nearly everyone. The exception was Malfoy, whom he seemed to like. He was in the middle of telling the whole dungeon to come and admire the way Malfoy had stewed her horned slugs, and Malfoy was in the middle of turning to make quite sure Harry had heard him, when the room filled with clouds of acid-green smoke and a loud, furious hiss.

Neville had somehow melted Seamus’s cauldron into a twisted lump. Their potion was spreading across the flagstones and eating holes in people’s shoes. In seconds the whole class was standing on its stools, and Neville, who had been soaked when the cauldron gave way, was moaning as angry red boils bloomed up his arms and legs.

‘Idiot boy!’ snarled Snape, and vanished the mess with one sweep of his wand. ‘You added the porcupine quills before you took the cauldron off the fire, I suppose?’

Neville whimpered. Boils were coming up on his nose now.

‘Take him to the hospital wing,’ Snape spat at Seamus. Then he rounded on Harry and Ron, whose cauldron stood next to Neville’s.

‘You. Potter. Why didn’t you tell him to leave the quills out? Thought you’d look better if he got it wrong, did you? That is another point gone from Gryffindor.’

It was so unfair that Harry opened his mouth, but Ron kicked him hard behind the cauldron.

‘Leave it,’ he muttered. ‘I’ve heard Snape can turn really nasty.’

Across the dungeon, Malfoy gave a small, superior snigger, and looked at Harry as though she had just beaten him at something and wanted to be certain he knew it.

As they climbed the dungeon steps an hour later, Harry’s head was spinning and his spirits were somewhere round his shoes. Two points lost for Gryffindor in his very first week. What had he ever done to Snape?

‘Cheer up,’ said Ron. ‘Snape takes points off Fred and George all the time. Can I come to Hagrid’s with you?’

‘Course you can,’ said Harry, and found, as he said it, that he was already feeling better. At five to three they came out through the great oak door into a bright, cold afternoon, and set off across the grounds towards the little wooden house on the edge of the forest, and Harry walked faster with every step.

Chapter 5 : The Seeker

Harry had never expected to meet anyone he could hate more than Dudley. He had certainly never expected it to be a girl. Yet by the start of his second week at Hogwarts, Dracina Malfoy had overtaken Dudley with room to spare, and was drawing on every ounce of loathing an eleven-year-old boy had in him.

The one mercy was that he hardly had to see her. The Gryffindor first-years shared only Potions and History of Magic with the Slytherins, and in one of those lessons everybody was asleep and in the other nobody dared speak. Then, on Tuesday evening, Harry came down into the common room and found a knot of first-years round the notice board, and every one of them groaning.

Flying lessons were to begin on Thursday. That part was wonderful. Gryffindor would be learning alongside Slytherin. That part was dreadful.

‘Typical,’ said Harry darkly. ‘Exactly what I wanted. To fall off a broomstick in front of Malfoy.’

He had been looking forward to flying more than anything else at Hogwarts. Now he could see precisely how it would go. He would wobble, or slide off the end, or fly into a wall, and that prissy, haughty girl would be there to see it, with her nose in the air and some remark ready, and Crabbe and Goyle sniggering on cue.

‘You don’t know you’ll fall off,’ said Ron sensibly. ‘Anyway, Malfoy’s forever going on about how brilliant she is at Quidditch, and I bet it’s all talk.’

Malfoy certainly talked about flying a great deal. She complained loudly, within Harry’s hearing, that first-years were never picked for the house teams, and she, in particular, was never picked, which was a disgrace. She told long, boastful stories that always ended with her narrowly outflying a Muggle in a helicopter whilst stupid and adoring muggles with their giant muggle cameras begged her for interviews. She was far from the only one. To hear Seamus Finnigan tell it, he had spent his entire childhood zooming over the Irish countryside on a broomstick being chased by leprechauns who’s gold he’d stolen, and even Ron would tell anybody who stood still long enough about the time he had almost hit a hang-glider on Charlie’s old Shooting Star.

Everybody who came from a wizarding family talked about Quidditch all the time. They were mad for it the same way the normal people, sorry, the Muggles were about Football. Ron had already had a serious row with Dean Thomas, who shared their dormitory, over football. Ron could not see the attraction of a game with only one ball in which nobody was allowed to fly. Harry had caught him poking at Dean’s poster of the West Ham team, trying to make the players move.

‘They don’t even look hard, Dean,’ Ron had said. ‘A Chudley Cannons Beater would batter that bloke with the ball.’

Harry did not know what a Beater was, so he took Ron’s word for it.

Neville had never sat on a broomstick in his life, because his gran had never let him. From the little Harry had seen of Neville, he suspected there were a great many things his gran had never let him do, and he felt rather sorry for him. Then again, Neville had already fallen down two staircases and set fire to his own sleeve in Herbology, and Harry thought his gran might have a point.

Hermione Granger was nearly as nervous about flying as Neville. This was something you could not learn off by heart from a book, though she had tried. At breakfast on Thursday she bored the whole table rigid with tips she had found in a library book called Quidditch Through the Ages. Neville hung on every word, hoping for anything at all that might keep him on his broom that afternoon, but everybody else was glad when the post came in and cut her off.

Harry had not had a single letter since Hagrid’s note, which Malfoy had of course been quick to notice. Malfoy’s eagle owl was forever bringing her parcels of sweets from home, and she unwrapped them at the Slytherin table with a great deal of noise, looking over at Gryffindor as she did it. Announcing every sweet like she’d just been given a gift by a handsome prince. She kept staring at Harry whilst she did it. Like she always did.

A barn owl brought Neville a small package from his grandmother. He tore it open, bouncing in his seat in a way that made Harry nervous for the milk jug, and held up a glass ball the size of a large marble. White smoke swirled inside it.

‘It’s a Remembrall!’ said Neville. ‘Gran knows I forget things. It tells you if you’ve forgotten something. You hold it tight, like this, and if it goes red... oh.’

His face fell. The Remembrall had flushed a bright scarlet.

‘... you’ve forgotten something.’

Neville was still trying to work out what it was that he had forgotten when Dracina Malfoy, passing along the Gryffindor table, reached over his shoulder and plucked the Remembrall out of his hand.

Harry and Ron were on their feet at once. They had both been hoping for an excuse to fight, and Ron said, loudly, 

 ‘I got no objection whatsoever to punching a girl in the face.’ He had got no further than that when Professor McGonagall, who could smell trouble from the far end of the Hall, was standing over them.

‘What is going on here?’

‘Malfoy’s got my Remembrall, Professor.’

Scowling, Malfoy dropped the ball back on the table.

‘Only looking,’ she said. She snapped her fingers, and Crabbe and Goyle fell in behind her, and as she sloped off she stuck her tongue out at Harry over her shoulder.

What a nasty piece of work she was, Harry thought.

At half past three that afternoon, Harry, Ron and the rest of the Gryffindors hurried down the front steps and out into the grounds. It was a clear, blowy day. The grass rippled under their feet as they crossed the sloping lawns to a flat stretch on the far side of the grounds from the Forbidden Forest, whose trees swayed darkly in the distance.

The Slytherins were there before them, and so were twenty broomsticks lying in neat rows on the ground. Harry had heard Fred and George complaining about the school brooms, which were said to vibrate if you flew too high, or to pull steadily to the left, or in one or two cases to blow up without warning. He had a feeling that last part had been put in to frighten Ron and himself, and he was determined to ignore all of it, Malfoy included.

Their teacher, Madam Hooch, arrived. She had short grey hair and the yellow eyes of a hawk.

‘Well, what are you waiting for?’ she barked. ‘A broomstick each. Stand beside it. Quickly, now.’

Harry looked down at his. It was old, and several of the twigs stuck out at odd angles.

‘Right hand out over your broom,’ called Madam Hooch, ‘and say, "Up!"’

‘UP!’ shouted everybody.

Harry’s broom leapt straight into his hand, and the surprise of it was so pleasant that he nearly laughed out loud. His was one of the very few that did. Hermione’s rolled over once on the grass and lay still, and Neville’s did not stir at all. Perhaps brooms were like horses, Harry thought, and could tell when you were frightened; there was a wobble in Neville’s voice that said plainly he would rather have stayed indoors. Harry, for his part, could hardly believe it. For the first time since he had arrived at Hogwarts, here was a lesson in magic that seemed to want him in it.

Madam Hooch showed them how to mount without sliding off the end, and went up and down the rows correcting their grips. Malfoy wore the same smug expression she had worn when Snape praised her slugs, right up until Madam Hooch told her that she had been holding her broom wrong for years. Harry and Ron enjoyed that very much. Malfoy folded her arms and pouted.

‘When I blow my whistle,’ said Madam Hooch, ‘kick off from the ground. Hard. Keep the broom steady, rise a few feet, and come straight back down by leaning forward a little. On my whistle. Three... two...’

Neville, nervous, twitchy, and terrified of being left behind on the ground, pushed off before the whistle had reached her lips.

‘Come back, boy!’ she shouted, but Neville was going straight up like a cork out of a bottle. Twelve feet. Twenty. Harry saw his white, frightened face look down at the ground falling away beneath him, saw him gasp and slide sideways off the broom, and then there was a thud and a horrible crack, and Neville lay face down in a heap on the grass. His broomstick went on climbing without him, and drifted lazily away towards the Forbidden Forest and out of sight.

Madam Hooch was bending over him, her face as white as his.

‘Broken wrist,’ Harry heard her mutter. ‘Come on, boy. It’s all right. Up you get.’

Malfoy was laughing. She was making no attempt to hide it, and she said something to Pansy Parkinson about the way Neville had gone over that made Pansy shriek.A nasty laugh that belonged on a horse

Madam Hooch straightened up and turned on the class.

‘Nobody is to move while I take this boy to the hospital wing. You will leave those brooms exactly where they are, or you will be out of this school before you can say the word broomstick. Come on, dear. And Miss Malfoy, you will stop that this instant or I shall have you in detention.’

Neville, his face streaked with tears and his wrist clutched to his chest, hobbled away with Madam Hooch’s arm round his shoulders.

They were barely out of earshot before Malfoy was laughing again.

‘Did you see his face? The great lump!’

The other Slytherins joined in.

‘Shut up, Malfoy,’ snapped Parvati Patil.

‘Ooh, sticking up for Longbottom, are we?’ said Pansy Parkinson, a hard-faced Slytherin girl. ‘I never knew you went for fat little cry-babies, Parvati.’

‘Look at this!’ Malfoy had darted forward and snatched something out of the grass. ‘It’s that stupid thing Longbottom’s gran sent him.’

The Remembrall caught the sun in her fingers.

‘Give that here, Malfoy,’ said Harry quietly. Yet again she was reminding him of Dudley. And Harry hated bullies.

Everybody stopped talking.

Malfoy smiled an unpleasant smile.

‘I think I’ll leave it somewhere for Longbottom to find. Up a tree, perhaps?’

‘Give it here!’ Harry shouted, but Malfoy had thrown a leg over her broom and was gone. She had been telling the truth about one thing, at least. She could fly. She hung level with the top branches of an oak and called down, ‘Come and get it, Potter!’ and stuck her tongue out at him for good measure.

Harry’s blood was up. He had had enough of her. He seized his broom.

‘No!’ cried Hermione. ‘Madam Hooch said not to move! You’ll get us all in trouble!’

Harry did not hear her. There was a roaring in his ears. He could not stand one more snigger, one more lift of that nose. He was going to get Neville’s Remembrall back, and he was going to take Dracina Malfoy down a peg while he was about it. He mounted the broom, kicked hard at the ground, and rose.

Up and up he went. The wind tore through his hair and his robes streamed out behind him, and a fierce joy burst through him as he realised that here, at last, was something he could do without being taught. It was easy. It was glorious. He pulled the handle up a little to climb higher and heard the gasps and shrieks of the girls below, and one admiring whoop that could only have been Ron.

He wheeled the broom round hard to face Malfoy in mid-air. She looked stunned.

‘Give it here,’ Harry called, ‘or I’ll knock you off that broom!’

‘Oh, will you?’ said Malfoy, trying for a sneer and getting nowhere near it. There was something strange in that tone an eleven year old boy wouldn’t notice. 

Harry knew what to do. He didn't know how he knew it. He leaned forward, gripped the broom in both hands, and it shot at Malfoy like a javelin. She swerved out of the way only just in time.

‘Watch yourself, Potter!’ she shrieked. ‘You can’t afford to damage me or my robes!’

Harry turned sharply and brought the broom to a dead stop in the air. Far below, people had started to clap.

‘My father will be sending you the bill!’ she screamed.

‘No Crabbe and Goyle up here to look after you, Malfoy,’ Harry called.

The same thought seemed to have struck her. For a moment the vicious bully had gone, and what sat on the broomstick in front of him was a frightened little girl. Harry softened slightly. Then the sneer came back and spoiled her face again.

‘Catch it, then, if you’re so clever!’ she shouted. She flung the glass ball high into the air and dived away towards the ground.

Harry watched it go up as though time had slowed. It hung at the top of its arc, and began to fall. He leaned forward and pointed the broom handle at the ground, and a second later he was dropping in a steep dive, racing it down, the wind screaming past his ears and the shrieks from the lawn mixed in with it. He stretched out his hand. A foot from the grass his fingers closed on the ball, and he hauled the broom level just in time, and tumbled gently on to the turf with the Remembrall safe in his fist.

Malfoy had landed a little way off, and she was beside herself. Tantruming and screaming. She called him every name she could think of, and some that Harry suspected she had only ever heard through a door. 

‘My father will hear of this. How dare you. How dare you make a fool of me! Stupid pottyhead! You’ll regret this!’

 Harry had opened his mouth to answer with a few words of his own, the kind that would have made Dudley blush, when a voice cut across the lawn.

‘HARRY POTTER!’

His heart dropped faster than he had just dived. Professor McGonagall was running towards them. He stood up, and found that he was shaking.

‘Never, in all my years at this school...’ Professor McGonagall was nearly beyond speech. Her glasses flashed. ‘How dare you... you might have broken your neck...’

‘It wasn’t his fault, Professor...’

‘That will do, Miss Patil.’

‘But Malfoy...’

‘Enough, Mr Weasley. Potter, with me. Now.’

As he went, Harry caught sight of Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle. Crabbe and Goyle looked triumphant. Malfoy was cackling. She had got him into trouble at last, and the pleasure of it was all over her face.

He walked numbly in Professor McGonagall’s wake as she swept towards the castle. He was going to be expelled. He knew it. This was what always happened to him. Whenever Dudley had bullied him, the teachers had taken Dudley’s side, and whenever Harry had stood up for somebody else Dudley was bullying, it was Harry who ended up in trouble. Here it was again, exactly the same, in a castle instead of a playground. He wanted to say something in his own defence, but his voice had gone away and would not come back. Professor McGonagall did not so much as look at him. He had to jog to keep up.

He had done it now. He’d not lasted a fortnight. In ten minutes he would be packing his trunk. He imagined the look on Aunt Petunia’s face when he turned up on the doorstep, and Uncle Vernon’s voice saying that they had always known he would make a mess of it, since he made a mess of everything.

Up the front steps, up the marble staircase, and still she said nothing. She wrenched open doors and strode down corridors, Harry trotting wretchedly behind. Perhaps she was taking him to Dumbledore. He thought of Hagrid, expelled, kept on as gamekeeper. Perhaps he could be Hagrid’s assistant. His stomach turned over at the picture of it: Ron and the others learning to be wizards, while Harry stumped round the grounds behind Hagrid, carrying the bag.

Professor McGonagall stopped at a classroom door, opened it, and put her head in.

‘Forgive me, Professor Flitwick. Might I borrow Wood for a moment?’

Wood? thought Harry, bewildered. Was Wood something she meant to beat him with?

Wood turned out to be a person: a burly fifth-year who came out of the Charms classroom looking puzzled.

‘Follow me, both of you,’ said Professor McGonagall, and off they went again, Wood eyeing Harry with great curiosity.

‘In here.’

The classroom she showed them into was empty apart from Peeves, who was writing rude words across the blackboard.

‘Out, Peeves!’

Peeves flung his chalk into the bin with a clang and swooped out, swearing. Professor McGonagall shut the door on him and turned to face the two boys.

‘Potter, this is Oliver Wood. Wood, I have found you a Seeker.’

Wood’s face went from puzzlement to delight.

‘You’re serious, Professor?’

‘Perfectly,’ said Professor McGonagall crisply. ‘The boy is a natural. I have never seen anything like it. Was that the first time you had ever been on a broomstick, Potter?’

Harry felt himself swell. He was being praised. Properly praised, by a teacher, in front of somebody. Nobody ever praised him. He nodded, and said nothing, for fear that a word from him might somehow spoil it. He had no idea what was happening, but he did not appear to be being expelled, and some feeling was beginning to creep back into his legs.

‘He caught that thing in his hand after a fifty-foot dive,’ Professor McGonagall told Wood. ‘Didn’t scratch himself. Charlie Weasley couldn’t have done it.’

Wood looked like a boy whose every dream had come true in a single afternoon.

‘Ever seen a Quidditch match, Potter?’ he asked eagerly.

‘Wood is captain of the Gryffindor team,’ Professor McGonagall explained.

‘He’s the right build for a Seeker, too,’ said Wood, walking round Harry and looking him up and down. ‘Light. Quick. We’ll need to get him a proper broom, Professor. A Nimbus Two Thousand, or a Cleansweep Seven, I’d say.’

‘I shall speak to Professor Dumbledore about bending the first-year rule. Merlin knows we need a better side than last year’s. Flattened by Slytherin in that final match, I couldn’t look Severus Snape in the eye for weeks...’

She peered sternly at Harry over her spectacles.

‘I want to hear that you are training hard, Potter, or I may yet change my mind about punishing you.’

Then, quite suddenly, she smiled.

‘Your father would have been proud,’ she said. ‘He was a fine Quidditch player himself.’

‘M-my father?’ said Harry.

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Wood. ‘His dad was brilliant. Er. So I’ve heard.’

Until Hagrid, all Harry had ever been told about his parents was that they were drunken layabouts who had got themselves killed in a car crash. He wanted very badly to ask more, but Professor McGonagall was already waving him towards the door.

‘I can find you the old school paper reports of James Potter’s matches, if you would like them, but Wood has a lesson to return to and so have you.’

She said it sternly, though there was something almost kind underneath. Then she dismissed him.

Harry walked back out to the flying lesson wearing a grin so smug that it would have made Malfoy’s look cheap by comparison. He could hardly wait for that nasty little girl to find out.

‘You’re joking.’

It was dinner time. Harry had just finished telling Ron what had happened after Professor McGonagall marched him off the lawn. Ron had a forkful of steak-and-kidney pie halfway to his mouth, and had forgotten it entirely.

‘Seeker?’ he said. ‘But first-years never... you must be the youngest house player in about...’

‘A century,’ said Harry, shovelling pie into himself at a speed only Ron could have matched. The afternoon had left him ravenous. ‘Wood told me.’

Ron was too amazed and too impressed to do anything but gape at him.

‘I start training next week,’ said Harry. ‘Only don’t tell anybody. Wood wants to keep it quiet.’

Fred and George came into the Hall, saw Harry, and hurried over.

‘Well done,’ said George, keeping his voice down. ‘Wood told us. We’re on the team as well. Beaters.’

Fred and George were both tall and had broad shoulders. But certainly weren’t as hard as Ron hyped Beaters up to be. Whatever they were.

‘I’m telling you, we’re winning that Cup this year,’ said Fred. ‘We haven’t had it since Charlie left, but this side’s going to be brilliant. You must be good, Harry. Wood was practically skipping.’

‘Anyway, got to go. Lee Jordan reckons he’s found a new secret passage out of the school.’

‘Bet it’s the one behind Gregory the Smarmy we found in our first week. See you.’

The twins had scarcely gone when somebody a good deal less welcome arrived in their place: Malfoy, with Crabbe and Goyle at either shoulder. She sauntered up to the table. Her eyes sparkling with smug spite.

‘Enjoying your last meal, Potter? When’s your train back to the Muggles?’

‘You’re a lot braver now you’re on the ground with your little friends,’ said Harry coolly.

There was nothing little about Crabbe and Goyle. They were built as though somebody had bred them for a war. Harry had read Lord of The Rings once or twice and thought that if he didn’t know any better those two would’ve made for great and terrible Urak’ai. Harry wouldn’t put it past this strange wizarding world to have some real Urak’ai in some dismal hole or hollow. He was still trying to wrap his head around the fairies.  But the High Table was lined with teachers, and the two of them could do nothing but crack their knuckles and scowl, and Harry privately doubted they were equipped for very much more.

‘I’m a far better witch than you are a wizard, Potter,’ said Malfoy. ‘I’d take you on any time, alone. Tonight, if you like. A wizard’s duel. Wands only, no touching. What’s the matter? Never heard of a wizard’s duel, I suppose?’

Ron stuck out an arm across Harry’s chest.

‘I’ll handle this, mate,’ he said, and wheeled round. ‘Course he has. I’m his second. Who’s yours?’

Malfoy looked Crabbe and Goyle over as though choosing a pudding.

‘Crabbe,’ she said.

‘Midnight, then,’ said Ron. ‘The trophy room. It’s never locked.’

‘At last I’ll show you who’s the better of us, Potter, and you’ll beg me for mercy.’ said Malfoy, and she strolled out of the Hall with her nose in the air.

When she had gone, Ron and Harry looked at one another.

‘Ron, mate…’ said Harry, ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what a wizard’s duel is. And what did you mean, you’re my second?’

‘Oh, a second’s the one who takes over if you die,’ said Ron, as casually as if he had been passing on the football results, or Quidditch results at least,  and he started at last on his cold pie.

‘Thanks for signing me up, you’re too kind.’ said Harry. He said it drily, to hide the panic in his voice.

Ron caught the look on his face and added quickly, ‘ the only people who die in proper duels are real wizards.’

‘That’s very reassuring,’ said Harry.

‘The most you and Malfoy can manage is a few sparks at each other,’ Ron went on soothingly. ‘Neither of you knows enough magic to do real damage. I bet she thought you’d say no. We’ll show that prissy little pixie.’

‘And what if I wave my wand and nothing comes out?’ said Harry irritably.

‘Chuck it away and punch her on the nose,’ said Ron.

‘Ron. She’s a girl.’

‘Yeah, well, my mum always says if a girl hits you, you hit her back harder,’ said Ron proudly.

‘I really doubt she did, mate.’

‘Excuse me.’

They both looked up. It was Hermione Granger.

‘Can’t a person eat in peace in this place?’ said Ron.

Hermione ignored him and spoke to Harry.

‘I couldn’t help overhearing what you and Malfoy were saying...’

‘Bet you could,’ Ron muttered.

‘... and you mustn’t go wandering about the school at night. Think of the points you’ll lose Gryffindor if you’re caught, and you will be caught. It’s thoroughly selfish of you. And whatever anybody says, boys shouldn’t be going round hitting girls. You’ll be expelled, the pair of you, you barbaric fools.’

‘It’s none of your business,’ said Harry.

‘Goodbye,’ said Ron.

All the same, Harry thought, as he lay awake much later listening to Dean and Seamus drop off one after the other (Neville was still in the hospital wing), it had not been the ideal end to the day. Ron had spent the whole evening giving him advice of the kind that went, ‘If she tries to curse you, you’d better dodge, because I can’t remember how you block them.’ There was every chance they would run into Filch or Mrs Norris, and Harry had a strong feeling that he was pushing his luck, breaking a second school rule in a single day.

Against that there was Malfoy’s sneering face, which kept rising up out of the dark at him, and her silver eyes. Stupid Malfoy and her stupid pretty eyes. This was his chance to beat her, face to face, with nobody holding him back. Perhaps after that she would leave off the sneering and the smirking and the nose. He’d not miss it.

‘Half eleven,’ Ron muttered at last. ‘Better go.’

They pulled on their dressing-gowns, took their wands, and crept across the tower room, down the spiral stairs and into the common room. A few embers still glowed in the grate, turning the armchairs into hunched black shapes. They had nearly reached the portrait hole when a voice spoke from the chair beside it.

‘I can’t believe you’re really doing this, Harry.’

A lamp flickered into life. It was Hermione Granger, in a pink dressing-gown and a frown.

‘You!’ said Ron furiously. ‘Go back to bed!’

‘I nearly told your brother,’ Hermione snapped. ‘Percy. He’s a Prefect. He’d put a stop to this.’

‘My family don’t think much of a grass,’ said Ron, folding his arms and putting his nose in the air in a very fair imitation of Malfoy.

Harry could not believe anybody could be so interfering.

‘Come on,’ he said to Ron, and he pushed the Fat Lady’s portrait open and climbed through.

Hermione did not give up as easily as that. She came through the hole after Ron, hissing at them like an angry goose.

‘Don’t you care about Gryffindor at all? Do you only ever think of yourselves? I don’t want Slytherin winning the House Cup, and you’ll lose every point I earned off Professor McGonagall for knowing about Switching Spells.’

‘Go away, grass!’ hissed Ron.

‘Fine. But I warned you. You just remember what I said when you’re on the train home tomorrow, you’re so...’

What they were, they never found out. Hermione had turned to the portrait of the Fat Lady to let herself back in, and found herself looking at an empty painting. The Fat Lady had gone visiting, and Hermione was locked out of Gryffindor Tower.

‘Now what am I supposed to do?’ she said shrilly.

‘That’s your problem,’ said Ron. ‘We’ve got to go. We’ll be late.’

They’d not reached the end of the corridor before she caught them up.

‘I’m coming with you.’

‘You are not.’

‘D’you expect me to stand out here and wait for Filch? If he catches the three of us I’ll tell him the truth, that I was trying to stop you, and you can back me up.’

‘You’ve got some nerve...’ Ron began loudly.

‘Shut up, both of you!’ said Harry sharply. ‘I heard something.’

It was a snuffling sort of noise.

‘Mrs Norris?’ breathed Ron, peering into the dark.

It was Neville. He was curled on the floor fast asleep, and jerked awake as they crept up on him.

‘Thank goodness you found me! I’ve been out here for hours. I couldn’t remember the new password.’

‘Keep your voice down, Neville. It’s "Pig snout", but it won’t help you now, the Fat Lady’s gone off somewhere.’

‘How’s your arm?’ said Harry.

‘Fine,’ said Neville, showing them. ‘Madam Pomfrey did it in about a minute.’

‘Good. Look, Neville, we’ve got to be somewhere, we’ll see you later...’

‘Don’t leave me!’ said Neville, scrambling up. ‘I don’t want to be out here on my own. The Bloody Baron’s been past twice already.’

Ron looked at his watch, and then glared at Hermione and Neville.

‘If either of you gets us caught, I’ll never rest till I’ve learned that Curse of the Bogies Quirrell told us about, and I’ll use it on you.’

Hermione opened her mouth, very possibly to explain to Ron exactly how the Curse of the Bogies was done, but Harry hissed at her to be quiet and beckoned them all on.

They flitted down corridors striped with moonlight from the high windows. At every corner Harry expected Filch or Mrs Norris, but their luck held. They hurried up a staircase to the third floor and tiptoed into the trophy room.

Malfoy and Crabbe had not come. The crystal cases glimmered where the moon caught them, and cups and shields and plates and statues winked silver and gold in the dark. They edged along the walls, watching both doors. Harry drew his wand in case Malfoy came bursting in with a cackle and started at once. The minutes crawled past.

‘She’s late,’ Ron whispered. ‘Maybe she’s chickened out. She is a girl, after all.’

A sound from the next room made them all jump. Harry had only just lifted his wand when somebody spoke, and it was not Malfoy.

‘Have a sniff round, my sweet. They may be hiding in a corner.’

It was Filch, talking to Mrs Norris.

Horror-struck, Harry waved frantically at the others to follow, and they scurried for the far door. Neville’s dressing-gown had barely whipped round the corner when they heard Filch come into the trophy room.

‘They’re in here somewhere,’ he muttered. ‘Hiding, most like.’

‘This way!’ Harry mouthed, and they began to creep, stiff with fright, down a long gallery lined with suits of armour. Filch’s footsteps were getting closer. Neville gave a sudden terrified squeak and broke into a run, tripped, grabbed Ron round the middle, and the two of them went headlong into a suit of armour.

The crash was enough to wake the whole castle.

‘RUN!’ Harry yelled, and the four of them sprinted down the gallery without a backward glance, round the doorpost, along one corridor and then another, Harry leading with no idea at all where they were or where they were going. They tore through a tapestry into a hidden passage, pelted along it, and came out by the Charms classroom, which they knew to be miles from the trophy room.

‘I think we’ve lost him,’ Harry panted, leaning on the cold wall and wiping his forehead. Neville was bent double, wheezing.

‘I... told... you,’ Hermione gasped, clutching a stitch. ‘I... told... you.’

‘We’ve got to get back to the Tower,’ said Ron. ‘Quick as we can.’

‘Malfoy tricked you,’ Hermione said to Harry. ‘You do realise that? She was never going to turn up. She’s a girl, after all, and not some stupid knuckle-dragging boy, one of whom threatened to hit her several times, I might add. Filch knew somebody would be in the trophy room. Malfoy must have tipped him off.’

Harry thought she was very probably right, and he had no intention of saying so.

‘Calm down, Hermione. I was only joking about hitting her,’ said Ron. Then he mumbled, ‘I don’t actually hit girls.’

‘Let’s go,’ said Harry.

It was not to be that simple. They had gone barely a dozen paces when a doorknob rattled and something shot out of a classroom ahead of them.

It was Peeves. He saw them and squealed with delight.

‘Shut up, Peeves. Please. You’ll get us thrown out.’

Peeves cackled.

‘Wandering about at midnight, ickle firsties? Dear, dear. Out of bed, out of bed, Filchy’ll have your heads!’

‘Not if you don’t give us away, Peeves. Please.’

‘Ought to tell Filch, I ought,’ said Peeves, in a saintly voice, though his eyes glittered. ‘For your own good, you know.’

‘Get out of the way,’ snapped Ron, and swiped at him. This was a very bad mistake.

‘STUDENTS OUT OF BED!’ Peeves bellowed. ‘STUDENTS OUT OF BED IN THE CHARMS CORRIDOR!’

They ducked under him and ran for their lives to the end of the corridor, where they slammed into a door. It was locked.

‘That’s it!’ Ron moaned, as they shoved uselessly at it. ‘We’re finished! This is the end!’

They could hear footsteps. Filch, running flat out towards Peeves’s shouting.

‘Oh, get out of the way,’ Hermione snarled. She snatched Harry’s wand, tapped the lock, and whispered, ‘Alohomora!‘

The lock clicked. The door swung open, and they tumbled through, shut it, and pressed their ears to the wood.

‘Which way did they go, Peeves?’ Filch was saying. ‘Quick, tell me.’

‘Say "please".’

‘Don’t play games with me, Peeves. Where did they go?’

‘Shan’t tell you a thing without a "please",’ said Peeves in his maddening sing-song.

‘All right. Please.’

‘NOTHING! Ha haaa! I said I’d tell you nothing without a "please", and nothing’s what you get! Haaaa!’

They heard Peeves whoosh away, and Filch swearing in fury.

‘He thinks this door’s locked,’ Harry whispered. ‘I think we’re all right. Get off, Neville!’

Neville had been tugging at the sleeve of his dressing-gown for the last minute.

‘What?’

Harry turned round, and saw exactly what.

For a moment he was sure he had walked into a nightmare. After everything else that had happened that day, this was too much. They were in no room, as he had supposed. They were in a corridor. The forbidden corridor on the third floor. And now they knew why it was forbidden.

They were looking into the eyes of a monstrous dog. It filled the corridor from floor to ceiling, and it had three heads. Three pairs of rolling, mad eyes. Three noses, twitching and quivering in their direction. Three slavering mouths, with ropes of drool swinging from yellow fangs.

It was standing quite still, every one of its six eyes fixed on them, and Harry understood that the only reason they were still alive was that it had been as surprised as they were. It was getting over its surprise fast. There was no mistaking the growl that was building in all three throats.

Harry fumbled behind him for the doorknob. Between Filch and death, he would take Filch.

They fell back through the door. Harry wrenched it shut, and they ran, almost flew, down the corridor. Filch must have gone to search for them elsewhere, for they saw no sign of him, and they hardly cared. All any of them wanted was to put as much castle as possible between themselves and that thing. They did not stop until they reached the Fat Lady’s portrait on the seventh floor.

‘Where on earth have you all been?’ she said, taking in their dressing-gowns hanging off their shoulders and their red, sweating faces.

‘Never mind. Pig snout, pig snout,’ panted Harry, and the portrait swung open. They scrambled through and collapsed into armchairs, shaking.

It was some time before anybody spoke. Neville looked as though he might never speak again.

‘What do they think they’re playing at, keeping a thing like that in a school?’ said Ron at last. ‘If there’s a dog that needs walking, it’s that one.’

Hermione had got her breath back, and her temper with it.

‘Don’t any of you use your eyes?’ she snapped. ‘Didn’t you see what it was standing on?’

‘The floor?’ Harry offered. ‘I wasn’t looking at its feet. I was rather taken up with its heads.’

‘Not the floor. A trapdoor. It was standing on a trapdoor. It’s guarding something, obviously.’ She stood up and glared at them. ‘I hope you’re all proud of yourselves. We might have been killed. Or worse, expelled. Now, if nobody minds, I am going to bed.’

Ron stared after her with his mouth open.

‘No, we don’t mind,’ he said. ‘You’d think we’d dragged her along.’

But Hermione had given Harry something to think about as he climbed back into his four-poster. The dog was guarding something. What was it Hagrid had said, over tea, when Harry had asked him about that cutting from the Daily Prophet and the break-in at Gringotts? That there was nowhere safer in the world for something you wanted to hide. Except, perhaps, Hogwarts.

It looked as though Harry had just found out where the grubby little package from vault seven hundred and thirteen had gone.

He slept. And he tried very hard, as he went, not to think about a pair of cowardly silver eyes that had very nearly got him expelled.

Chapter 6 : The Yearning

Harry and Ron were halfway through breakfast the next morning when Dracina Malfoy came into the Great Hall.

She did not come in the way she usually did, which was with her nose up and Crabbe and Goyle trailing behind her like a pair of wardrobes. She came in slowly, on her own, and her shoulders drooped, and Harry, glancing up from his eggs, thought that she looked about as sad as he had ever seen anybody look. Then her eyes found the Gryffindor table, and found Harry at it, and something in her face lifted all at once, like a blind going up. Then she saw Ron beside him. Her eyes rolled towards the enchanted ceiling. And then, quite visibly, she remembered that she was supposed to be angry.

‘Why are you two idiots still here?’ she screeched.

Heads turned all along the Hufflepuff table.

‘We weren’t thrown out,’ said Harry. He buttered his toast with great care. ‘Don’t worry about it. You looked a bit upset there for a minute, Malfoy.’

He said it slyly, and it hit the mark. Malfoy huffed. Her cheeks went pink.

‘I was not upset! I was never upset! Why would I be upset about you?’ She stamped her foot on the flagstones. ‘Standards are slipping at this school if they let the pair of you stay after what you did to me. Assaulting me on a broomstick! My father will hear of this!’

And she stalked off to the Slytherin table, where she sat down with her back to them and did not turn round once, which Harry knew because he checked.

‘What was that about?’ said Ron.

‘No idea,’ said Harry, and went back to his eggs.

As far as Harry and Ron were concerned, meeting the three-headed dog had been an excellent adventure, and they were quite ready for another one. In the meantime Harry told Ron everything about the grubby little package Hagrid had taken from vault seven hundred and thirteen, and the two of them spent a great deal of time wondering what on earth could need that much guarding.

‘It’s either really valuable or really dangerous,’ said Ron.

‘Or both,’ said Harry.

But as all they knew for certain about the thing was that it was about two inches long, they did not get far without more to go on.

Neither Neville nor Hermione showed the least curiosity about what lay under the dog and the trapdoor. All Neville wanted was never to go near the dog again as long as he lived. Hermione, meanwhile, had stopped speaking to Harry and Ron altogether, and since she was such a bossy, interfering know-it-all, they regarded this as a treat.

What they really wanted now was a way of getting back at Malfoy, and to their great delight it arrived with the post about a week later.

The owls came pouring into the Great Hall as they did every morning, and everyone’s attention was caught at once by a long, thin parcel being carried between six large screech owls. Harry was as curious as anybody about what could be in it, and he was astonished when the owls wheeled and dropped it in front of him, knocking his bacon to the floor. Before Hagrid, nobody had ever sent Harry anything. Harry never felt he deserved anything. He found that his hands were trembling. The six owls had hardly fluttered clear when a seventh shouldered past them, grumbling, and dropped a letter on top of the parcel.

Harry opened the letter first, which was lucky, because it said:

Do not open the parcel at the table.

It contains your new Nimbus Two Thousand. I would rather the whole school didn't know you have a broomstick, or they will all want one. Oliver Wood will meet you on the Quidditch pitch at seven o’clock this evening for your first training session.

Professor M. McGonagall

Harry had a hard job keeping his face straight as he passed the note to Ron.

‘A Nimbus Two Thousand!’ Ron moaned. ‘I’ve never even touched one.’

They left the Hall quickly, meaning to unwrap it in private before their first lesson, but halfway across the Entrance Hall they found the stairs blocked by Crabbe and Goyle. Malfoy was between them. She nodded, and Crabbe wrenched the parcel out of Harry’s hands and passed it to her, then she felt it up and down through the paper.

‘That’s a broomstick!’ she said, and threw it back at Harry with a look that was half jealousy and half spite. ‘You’re for it now, Potter. First-years aren’t allowed them.’

Ron could not help himself.

‘It’s not any old broomstick,’ he said. ‘It’s a Nimbus Two Thousand. Top of the range. What did you say you had at home, Malfoy, a Comet Two Sixty?’ He grinned at Harry. ‘Comets look flashy, but they’re nowhere near a Nimbus. Only poor people have a Comet Two Sixty.’

Malfoy actually growled.

‘What would you know about it, Weasley? You couldn’t afford half the handle. I expect you and your brothers have to save up for one twig at a time.’

Before Ron could answer, Professor Flitwick had appeared at Malfoy’s elbow. He was so small that Harry privately wondered whether there was a goblin somewhere in his family.

‘Not quarrelling, I hope?’ he squeaked.

‘Potter’s had a broomstick sent to him, Professor,’ said Malfoy at once.

‘Yes, yes, quite right,’ said Professor Flitwick, beaming up at Harry. ‘Professor McGonagall explained the special circumstances to me, Potter. Which model is it?’

‘A Nimbus Two Thousand, sir,’ said Harry. He gave Malfoy his best imitation of the smug look she was so fond of giving him, and watched the horror spread over her face. ‘And I’ve really got Malfoy to thank for it. So, thanks, love.’

He and Ron went up the stairs with their hands over their mouths, while behind them Malfoy’s voice rose to a shriek.

‘I am not your love, Potter! I wouldn’t be seen dead with you and your ignoble bloodline! Father will hear about this miscarriage of justice!’

‘Well, it’s true,’ Harry chortled, as they reached the top of the marble staircase. He turned and called down over the banister, ‘If you hadn’t pinched Neville’s Remembrall, I wouldn’t be on the team. I’m very grateful, Malfoy. I owe you a favour.’

He turned away again before he could see what the word did to her: how her face went bright pink from chin to hairline, and how her lips shaped the word favour after him, silently, as though he had just handed her something precious.

Harry and Ron would have laughed all the way to the common room, but they were intercepted.

‘So I suppose you think that’s a reward for breaking the rules?’ said an angry voice behind them.

Hermione was stamping up the stairs, glaring at the parcel under Harry’s arm.

‘I thought you weren’t speaking to us,’ said Harry.

‘Yeah, don’t stop now,  Little Miss Grass,’ said Ron. ‘It’s doing us a world of good.’

Hermione marched away with her nose in the air. Harry watched her go. Was she trying to copy Malfoy? Girls were bizarre.

He found it very hard to keep his mind on lessons that day. It kept drifting up to the dormitory, where the broomstick lay under his bed, or off to the Quidditch pitch, where he would be learning the game that evening. He bolted his dinner without noticing what it was and rushed upstairs with Ron to unwrap the Nimbus Two Thousand at last.

‘Wow,’ Ron breathed, as it rolled out across Harry’s bedspread.

Even Harry, who knew nothing about brooms, could see that it was beautiful. It was sleek and glossy, with a handle of polished mahogany and a tail of neat, straight twigs, and Nimbus Two Thousand was written near the tip in gold.

As seven o’clock came round, Harry left the castle and walked down to the Quidditch pitch in the dusk. He had never been inside the stadium before. Hundreds of seats rose in tiers round the pitch so that the crowd could see everything, and at either end stood three golden poles with hoops at the top. They reminded Harry of the little plastic wands children blew bubbles through, if the wands had been fifty feet tall. He supposed wizards had never heard of bubble wands.

He was far too eager to wait for Wood. He mounted the Nimbus and kicked off, and if anyone was watching, he decided, he would give them something to watch. He was not good at many things, and he meant to enjoy this one.

It was wonderful. He swooped in and out of the goal hoops and tore up and down the length of the pitch, and the Nimbus Two Thousand went wherever he thought of going, at the lightest touch.

‘Oi, Potter! Come down!’

Oliver Wood had arrived with a large wooden crate under his arm. Harry landed beside him.

‘Very nice,’ said Wood, and his eyes were gleaming. Harry’s chest swelled. There was a small, mean voice in the back of his head, one the Dursleys had spent ten years training, that told him he was useless and never did anything right, and he noticed that it was getting fainter with every kind word the Quidditch team said to him. ‘I see what McGonagall meant. You’re a natural, all right.’

Yes, Harry allowed himself to think. I am.

‘I’m only going to teach you the rules tonight,’ said Wood. ‘After that you’ll be at team practice three evenings a week.’

He opened the crate. Inside lay four balls of different sizes.

‘Right,’ said Wood. ‘Quidditch is easy enough to follow, even if it’s not easy to play. Seven on a side. Three of them are Chasers.’

‘Three Chasers,’ Harry repeated, as Wood took out a bright red ball about the size of a football, though a good deal harder. Harry would have liked to see Dudley try his trick of heading a ball with this one. It would have knocked out whatever small portion of brain he had.

‘This is the Quaffle,’ said Wood. ‘The Chasers pass it between them and try to put it through one of the hoops. Ten points each time it goes through. With me so far?’

‘The Chasers put the Quaffle through the hoops to score,’ Harry recited. ‘So it’s a bit like basketball on broomsticks, with six hoops.’

‘What’s basketball?’ said Wood, interested.

‘Never mind,’ said Harry quickly.

‘Then there’s one player on each side called the Keeper. That’s me, for Gryffindor. I fly round our hoops and stop the other lot scoring.’

‘Three Chasers, one Keeper,’ said Harry, who was determined to get all of it. ‘And they use the Quaffle. Got it. What are those three for?’

‘I’ll show you. Take this.’

Wood handed him a short, heavy club, something like a rounders bat.

‘These two are the Bludgers,’ he said. He showed Harry a pair of identical balls, jet black and a little smaller than the Quaffle, and Harry noticed that both of them seemed to be straining against the straps that held them in the crate.

‘Stand back,’ said Wood.

He bent and loosed one of them. The black ball shot straight up into the air and then came rocketing at Harry’s face. Harry swung the bat to save his nose and sent it zigzagging away; it looped round their heads once and dived at Wood, who flung himself on top of it and pinned it to the grass.

‘See?’ Wood panted, wrestling it back into the crate and strapping it down. ‘They fly about trying to knock players off their brooms. That’s why there are two Beaters on a side. The Weasley twins are ours. Their job is to keep the Bludgers off our players and knock them at the other team. Got all that?’

‘Three Chasers score with the Quaffle, the Keeper guards the hoops, the Beaters keep the Bludgers off their own side,’ said Harry in one breath.

‘Very good,’ said Wood.

‘Er. Have the Bludgers ever killed anyone?’ said Harry, trying to sound as though it did not much matter to him.

‘Never at Hogwarts. A couple of broken jaws, nothing worse. Now, the last player is the Seeker. That’s you. You needn’t bother about the Quaffle or the Bludgers at all...’

‘Unless they crack my head open.’

‘Don’t worry, the Weasleys are more than a match for a Bludger. They’re a pair of human Bludgers themselves, if I’m honest.’

Wood reached into the crate for the fourth and last ball. Next to the others it was tiny, about the size of a large walnut, and it was bright gold, with small silver wings that fluttered.

‘This,’ said Wood, ‘is the Golden Snitch. It’s the most important ball of the lot. It’s so fast and so small that it’s very hard to see, and catching it is the Seeker’s whole job. You have to weave through the Chasers and the Beaters and the Bludgers and the Quaffle and get to it before the other side’s Seeker does, because whichever Seeker catches it wins their team an extra hundred and fifty points, and that nearly always means the match. That’s why Seekers get fouled so often. A game doesn’t end until the Snitch is caught, so it can go on for ages. I think the record is three months. They had to keep bringing on substitutes so the players could sleep.

‘So. That’s the lot. Any questions?’

Harry shook his head. He understood what he was supposed to do. Doing it would be the problem.

‘We won’t practise with the Snitch yet,’ said Wood, shutting it carefully back in the crate. ‘Too dark. We’d lose it. Let’s try you with a few of these.’

He pulled a bag of ordinary golf balls out of his pocket, and a few minutes later the two of them were in the air, Wood hurling golf balls as hard as he could in every direction and Harry catching them. He did not miss one. Wood was delighted. After half an hour it was fully dark, and they had to stop.

‘That Cup’s got our name on it this year,’ said Wood happily. ‘Hang on here while I get the kit back in, lad.’

As Wood walked off with the crate, Harry noticed somebody sitting in the stands. In the dark he would never have seen them at all, if it had not been for a head of silvery blonde hair.

‘Malfoy!’ he shouted, and went stamping up the steps towards her. ‘What are you doing here?’

Malfoy shot up out of her seat. She looked, for once, flustered, and she said nothing at all.

‘Have you been watching me?’ Harry demanded.

‘No!’

Harry looked at her. Her cloak was creased from the bench and she had grass on her shoes. He had a strong feeling she had been there the whole time.

‘Come off it, Malfoy. You have, haven’t you?’

Malfoy huffed and dusted herself down.

‘Fine. Yes. I was watching you, Potter. You, on a Quidditch team! It’s a disaster waiting to happen. You’re going to make a mistake, and I mean to be there when you do, so that I can tell Father and he can put a stop to this before Hogwarts is embarrassed any further. He’s a school governor, you know.’

‘Pack it in, Malfoy,’ said Harry wearily. ‘You sound like Hermione, only nastier. Practice is over. Just leave me alone.’

He could see that being compared to Granger stung her badly, and she fired straight back.

‘So that you can be a failure in private? How pathetic, Potter.’

‘Oh, wonderful. Very original. "You’re a failure, Potter," blah blah blah Clear off, Malfoy. This is Quidditch practice. It’s for Quidditch players, which I am and you’re not. You can’t even hold a broom properly, and yet you reckon you’ve dodged one of those enormous American Apache helicopters...’

‘I don’t know what an Apache is, Potter, but I was dodging those big black Muggle helicopters while you were still in nappies.’ She tried to laugh, and could not quite manage it. She knew she was losing ground, and that Harry had the whole conversation in his hands.

‘Good for you. But you’re still not on the team. Jog on, Malfoy.’

It did not have the effect he wanted. Instead of shooing her off, it seemed to go into the daft girl’s head as a challenge, and she wanted back whatever it was that this stupid boy kept taking from her so easily.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Make me, Pottyhead.’

She folded her arms and sat straight back down on the bench, daring him to move her.

The trouble was that Harry had had enough.

‘Pottyhead?’ he said. ‘Pottyhead. Is that it? Is that the best you’ve got?’ His voice was climbing with his temper. ‘Because my name’s Potter, is it? Has anybody ever properly slagged you off? No. I didn’t think so. You’re too posh for it. Nobody dares to insult the ancient and noble house of Smug Gits!’

And then the kettle that was Harry Potter boiled over. He was right in her face now, redder than Uncle Vernon when he saw an IRA attack on the news..

‘Sod you, Malfoy! My cousin Dudley used to hang me off the school roof by my ankles, and his mates made a game of kicking my head! Hard enough to make it ache for days, and all the while he’d be calling me a freak, a retard, and whatever else he’d learned in the playground that morning! Over and over again!’

The memories were ones Harry had thought he had left behind him when he came to Hogwarts, and dragging them up made him angrier still. He was so angry that he didn’t notice Malfoy shrinking back from him, though she was the taller of the two.

‘You want to insult me? Go and find some proper insults! What are you, five? I had to take whatever Dudley gave me and then go home to Aunt Petunia waving a frying pan and calling me a disgrace, from my cupb...’

Harry stopped.

The rage drained out of him all at once, and in its place came two cold thoughts. The first was that he had just shouted in a girl’s face, close enough to make her flinch, and she was frightened of him, and whatever she had done he felt ashamed. The second was that he had just handed Dracina Malfoy everything she could ever want. He had told her exactly which insults would hurt him, and she would use every one.

But she was not sneering. There was a strange look on her face, and her silver eyes had begun to shimmer. She was going to say something.

‘I’m...’

‘Pitch is booked,’ said a voice. ‘Move along.’

Wood had come up behind Harry without either of them hearing him. He put a hand on Harry’s shoulder and looked down at Malfoy, and he was very large in the dark.

Malfoy snarled up at him like a lioness cuffed aside by a bigger lion. Then she looked at Harry again, with that same odd look, and mumbled something he didn't catch, then she turned and ran, and Harry could have sworn she was nearly as fast as his Nimbus.

‘Well, at least she said sorry for coming on the pitch,’ Wood said

Harry sighed. That must have been it. He supposed she had only said it because Wood was tall and alarming, even for a fifth-year. He shook his head. What was Malfoy playing at? Harry never heard, and never would've guessed, that Dracina Malfoy had said sorry to him, and to him alone. 

Perhaps it was because he was so busy, with Quidditch practice three evenings a week on top of all his homework, but Harry could scarcely believe it when he realised that he had been at Hogwarts two whole months. The castle felt more like home than Privet Drive ever had. Nobody had so much as threatened him with a frying pan, which Harry found went a long way towards endearing a place to him. For the first time in his life he could sit in a room without listening for Dudley behind him with a fist or a water bomb. His lessons were getting more interesting, too, now that they had all got the basics.

On Hallowe’en morning they woke to the smell of baking pumpkin drifting through the corridors, and better still, Professor Flitwick announced in Charms that he thought they were ready to try making things fly, which they had all been longing to do since the day he had sent Neville’s toad whizzing round the classroom.

Professor Flitwick put them into pairs. Harry got Seamus Finnigan, which was a relief, because Neville had been trying to catch his eye and Harry had no wish for Neville’s luck to rub off on him; he suspected he was due a dose of bad luck after the coup of getting on to the team. Ron, however, was put with Hermione Granger. Ron scowled at Hermione. Hermione stared daggers at Ron. It was hard to say which of them was angrier about it. She had not spoken to either of them since the morning the broomstick arrived, and though Harry had rather softened over the whole business, Ron had not.

‘We don’t talk to grasses, mate,’ he had said only that morning, as they passed her on the second-floor corridor.

‘Don’t forget the wrist movement we’ve been practising!’ squeaked Professor Flitwick from his pile of books. ‘Swish and flick, swish and flick. And pronounce the words properly. Remember Wizard Baruffio, who said "s" when he meant "f" and found himself flat on the floor with a buffalo on his chest.’

It was very hard. Harry and Seamus swished and flicked until their arms ached, and the feather they were supposed to be sending to the ceiling lay on the desk and did nothing. Seamus got so impatient that he prodded it with his wand and set it alight. Harry nearly swore, caught himself just in time, and had to put the fire out with his hat. It was a very good thing there were charms for mending hats, or Seamus would have heard about it.

Ron, at the next desk, was doing no better.

‘Wingardium Leviosa!‘ he bellowed, waving his long arms like a windmill.

‘You’re saying it wrong,’ Harry heard Hermione snap. ‘It’s Win-gar-dium Levi-o-sa. Make the "gar" nice and long.’

‘You do it, then, if you’re so clever,’ Ron snarled.

Hermione pushed up the sleeves of her robes, flicked her wand, and said, ‘Wingardium Leviosa!‘

Their feather rose off the desk and hung in the air four feet above their heads.

‘Oh, well done!’ cried Professor Flitwick, clapping. ‘Look here, everyone, Miss Granger has done it!’

Ron was in a foul temper by the end of the lesson.

‘No wonder nobody can stand Little Miss Grass,’ he said to Harry as they shoved their way out into the crowded corridor. ‘She’s a nightmare. Honestly.’

Somebody knocked into Harry as they hurried past. It was Hermione, and Harry caught a glimpse of her face and was startled to see that she was crying.

‘I think she heard you.’

‘So?’ said Ron, though he looked uncomfortable. ‘She must’ve noticed she hasn’t got any friends.’

‘That still wasn’t right, Ron,’ said Harry. ‘I didn’t have any friends, once.’

He left it there. He did not know what to say to girls at the best of times, least of all a bossy know-it-all like Hermione, and he was afraid of saying the wrong thing, so he let her go.

But Hermione did not turn up for the next lesson, and nobody saw her all afternoon. On their way down to the Hallowe’en feast, Harry and Ron overheard Parvati Patil telling Lavender Brown that Hermione was crying in the girls’ toilets and wanted to be left alone. Ron looked more awkward still, but a moment later they walked into the Great Hall, and the decorations drove Hermione out of their heads.

A thousand live bats fluttered along the walls and ceiling, and a thousand more swooped low over the tables in black clouds that made the candles in the pumpkins gutter. The feast appeared on the golden plates all at once, as it had on the first night.

Harry noticed then that somebody else was missing. Dracina Malfoy, who was normally the loudest person at the Slytherin table, was nowhere to be seen. Then he saw the jacket potatoes, and forgot what he had been thinking about.

He was just reaching for one when Professor Quirrell came sprinting into the Hall with his turban askew and terror all over his face. The whole school watched him stagger up to Dumbledore’s chair, slump against the table, and gasp, ‘Troll. In the dungeons. Thought you ought to know.’

Then he slid to the floor in a dead faint.

What a thoroughly useless Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher he was turning out to be, Harry thought.

There was uproar. It took several purple firecrackers from the end of Dumbledore’s wand to bring the Hall to silence.

‘Prefects,’ he rumbled, ‘lead your houses back to the dormitories at once!’

Percy was in his element.

‘Follow me! First-years, stay together! No need to fear the troll if you do as I say! Keep close behind me, now. Make way! First-years coming through! Excuse me, I’m a Prefect!’

‘How does a troll get in?’ Harry asked, as they climbed the stairs.

‘Don’t ask me. They’re meant to be really thick,’ said Ron. ‘Maybe Peeves let it in for a Hallowe’en joke.’

They passed groups of students hurrying in every direction. As they pushed through a crowd of bewildered Hufflepuffs, Harry grabbed Ron’s arm.

‘I’ve just thought. Hermione.’

‘What about her?’

‘She doesn’t know about the troll.’

Ron bit his lip.

‘Oh, all right,’ he snapped. ‘But Percy had better not see us.’

They ducked down and joined the Hufflepuffs heading the other way, slipped into an empty side corridor, and hurried towards the girls’ toilets. They had just turned a corner when they heard quick footsteps behind them.

‘Percy!’ hissed Ron, pulling Harry behind a large stone griffin.

But when they peered round it, it was Snape they saw. He crossed the corridor and vanished.

‘What’s he doing?’ Harry whispered. ‘Why isn’t he in the dungeons with the rest of them?’

‘No bloody clue, mate.’

As quietly as they could, they crept along the next corridor after the fading footsteps.

‘He’s going up to the third floor,’ Harry said, but Ron held up a hand.

‘Can you smell something?’

Harry sniffed. A foul stench reached him, like old socks and the sort of public lavatory nobody ever cleans. And then they heard it: a low grunting, and the shuffling of enormous feet. Ron pointed. At the end of a passage to their left, something huge was coming towards them. They pressed themselves into the shadows and watched it shamble out into a patch of moonlight.

It was horrible. It was twelve feet tall, with skin the dull grey of granite, a great lumpy body like a boulder, and a small bald head perched on top like a coconut. Its legs were short and as thick as tree trunks, with flat, horny feet. The smell was beyond belief. It carried a vast wooden club that dragged along the floor, because its arms were so long.

The troll stopped at an open doorway and peered in. It waggled its long ears, making up what mind it had, and slouched slowly inside.

‘The key’s in the lock,’ Harry muttered. ‘We could shut it in.’

‘Good idea,’ said Ron nervously.

They edged towards the door with their mouths dry, praying the troll would not choose that moment to come back out. With one long leap Harry seized the key, slammed the door and turned the lock.

‘Yes!’

Flushed with triumph, they set off back up the passage, but as they reached the corner they heard a sound that stopped their hearts: a high, terrified scream. Two screams. And they were coming from the room they had just locked.

‘Oh, no,’ said Ron, as pale as the Bloody Baron.

‘It’s the girls’ toilets!’ Harry gasped.

‘Hermione!’ they said together.

It was the very last thing either of them wanted to do, but what choice was there? They wheeled round and sprinted back, fumbling the key in their panic. Harry wrenched the door open and they ran inside.

Hermione Granger was shrinking against the far wall, looking as though she might faint at any moment. Then Harry saw that she was not alone. Dracina Malfoy was flattened against the wall opposite, and she looked as if she couldn’t decide whether to stare daggers at Hermione or at the troll. The troll was lumbering towards Malfoy, knocking the sinks off the wall as it went.

‘Confuse it!’ Harry shouted to Ron, and he snatched up a tap and hurled it against the wall as hard as he could.

The troll stopped a few feet from Malfoy. It turned round, blinking stupidly, to see what had made the noise. Its mean little eyes found Harry. It hesitated, and then came for him instead, lifting the club.

‘Oi! Gormless prat!’ Ron yelled from the other side of the room, and threw a length of pipe. The troll did not seem to feel it strike its shoulder, but it heard the yell, and paused again, and swung its ugly snout round towards Ron, who swore so fluently that a sailor would have asked him to mind his language. It bought Harry the time to run round the troll to Malfoy, and to Hermione too, if he was careful.

‘Come on! Run! Run!’ he yelled at both of them, and tried to drag Malfoy towards the door, but she could not move. She was still flat against the wall with her mouth open in terror.

The shouting and the echoes seemed to be driving the troll mad. It roared and started for Ron, who was nearest and had nowhere to run.

Harry then did something that was both very brave and very stupid. He took a long run-up, jumped, and got both arms round the troll’s neck from behind, and found himself competing with Ron for the number of filthy words a boy could say while in mortal danger. The troll could not feel Harry hanging there, but even a troll notices when a long piece of wood goes up its nose, and Harry’s wand had still been in his hand when he jumped. It had gone straight up one nostril.

The troll howled and twisted and flailed its club, with Harry clinging on for his life. At any second it was going to tear him off, or catch him a blow that would finish him. Hermione had sunk to the floor in fright. Dracina had her arms wrapped round herself, and her eyes never once left Harry. Ron pulled out his own wand, and with no idea what he meant to do with it, he heard himself cry the first spell that came into his head.

‘Wingardium Leviosa!‘

The club leapt out of the troll’s fist, rose high into the air, turned over slowly, and came down on its owner’s head with a sickening crack. The troll swayed, and fell on its face with a thud that shook the whole room.

Harry got up. He was shaking and out of breath. Ron stood with his wand still raised, staring at what he had done.

Harry looked at the two girls. Malfoy seemed on the point of saying something, or doing something. But it was Hermione who moved first. She flew across the room and into Harry’s arms, trembling from head to foot.

‘Is it... dead?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Harry.

‘Of course it’s not dead, Granger, you idiot, it’s knocked out. Honestly...’

Malfoy sounded fed up. If Harry had not been so taken up with the troll, he would have seen that she was staring at Hermione with pure murder in her face as Hermione clung to him, and that Hermione, over his shoulder, was giving Malfoy a small, smug, triumphant look, as though she had won something. Ron saw the whole thing. It puzzled him for years before he finally understood it.

Harry let go of Hermione and went to see to Malfoy.

‘Ugh. I’m fine. No thanks to you, Potter.’ She waved him off as though he were a servant.

He’d just saved her life, and she was still being foul about it. Harry failed to notice the softness that came over Dracina then despite her words. Or how her eyes lingered on him.

Harry bent down and pulled his wand out of the troll’s nose. It was coated in something that looked like lumpy grey glue, and Dracina very nearly brought up her dinner on the spot.

‘Urgh. Troll bogies.’

He wiped it on the troll’s trousers.

‘You barbarian!’ Dracina cried. ‘I’ve met centaurs with better manners than you, Potter!’

A sudden slamming of doors and a thunder of footsteps made the four of them look up. They had not realised how much noise they had been making, but of course somebody downstairs must have heard the crashing and the troll’s roars. A moment later Professor McGonagall burst into the room with Snape close behind her and Quirrell bringing up the rear. Quirrell took one look at the troll, gave a faint whimper, and sat down quickly on a toilet with a hand pressed to his heart.

Snape bent over the troll, and then spared one quick look for Malfoy. Professor McGonagall was looking at Harry and Ron. Harry had never seen her so angry. Her lips were white. Any hope of fifty points for Gryffindor went straight out of his head.

‘What on earth did you think you were doing?’ she said, and her voice was cold with fury.

Harry had been thinking of saving Hermione, and then Dracina, from a troll, but he had a feeling that was not the answer she wanted, so he said nothing. He looked at Ron, who was still standing with his wand in the air.

‘You’re lucky you weren’t killed. Why aren’t you in your dormitory?’

Snape gave Harry a swift, piercing look. Harry looked at the floor. He wished very much that Ron would lower his wand.

Then a small voice spoke out of the shadows.

‘Please, Professor McGonagall. They were looking for me.’

‘Miss Granger!’

Hermione had got to her feet at last.

‘I came looking for the troll. Because I... I thought I could manage it on my own...’

‘I came with Granger!’ Malfoy cut across her. ‘I wanted to fight the troll as well. Er. To impress my father.’

Ron dropped his wand. Harry could see Malfoy lying from a mile off, but Hermione Granger, telling a barefaced lie to a teacher?

‘If they hadn’t found me, I’d be dead. Harry stuck his wand up its nose and Ron knocked it out with its own club. There wasn’t time to fetch anybody. It was about to finish me when they got here.’

Harry and Ron did their best to look as though none of this was news to them.

‘Well. In that case...’ said Professor McGonagall, looking from one to the other of them. ‘Miss Granger. Miss Malfoy. You foolish girls. How could either of you think of tackling a mountain troll alone?’

Hermione hung her head. Malfoy did her best to look sheepish, which was something she had never practised and did not suit her in the least.

Harry was speechless. Hermione was the last person alive to break a rule, and here she was pretending she had, to get them out of trouble. It was as though Snape had started awarding points to Gryffindor.

‘Miss Granger, five points will be taken from Gryffindor for this,’ said Professor McGonagall.

‘And five from Slytherin, Miss Malfoy,’ said Snape quietly. ‘I expect rather more cunning from you in future.’

Malfoy gave him a look, and Harry saw that she was wounded to the quick at having disappointed him.

‘I am very disappointed in you, Miss Granger. If you’re not hurt, you had better go up to Gryffindor Tower. The students are finishing the feast in their houses.’

Hermione went. On her way to the door she gave Malfoy a look Harry could not read at all, and Malfoy returned a far more familiar one, haughty and cold, as though she were goading her. Or was it Hermione goading Malfoy? What had gone on between the two of them in the girls’ toilets, Harry wondered.

Professor McGonagall turned to Harry and Ron.

‘Well. I still say you were lucky, but not many first-years could’ve taken on a fully grown mountain troll. You each win Gryffindor five points. Professor Dumbledore will hear of this. You may go.’

They hurried out and did not say a word until they were two floors up. It was a relief to be out of range of the smell, apart from anything else.

‘We should’ve got more than ten points,’ Ron grumbled.

‘Five, you mean, once she’s taken off Hermione’s.’

‘Good of her to get us out of it like that,’ Ron admitted. ‘Mind you, we did save her.’

‘Malfoy did it too,’ said Harry. ‘I just don’t know why.’

‘My dad always used to say, "Women..."’ Ron held up both hands and shrugged.

‘Women what?’

‘Dunno,’ said Ron. ‘That’s all he’d say.’

‘Weird,’ said Harry.

They had reached the Fat Lady.

‘Pig snout,’ they said, and went in.

The common room was packed and noisy. Everybody was eating the food that had been sent up. Hermione, though, stood alone by the door, waiting for them. There was a very awkward pause. Then, none of them looking at the others, they all said, ‘Thanks,’ and hurried off to find plates.

But from that moment, Hermione Granger was their friend. There are some things you cannot go through together without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them.

And a little way down the corridor, where the shadows were thickest, unseen by any of the three of them, Dracina Malfoy watched the portrait hole swing shut on the three friends. she seethed with jealousy, and thought about her brave knight

Chapter 7 : Secret Weapon

November came in hard. The mountains round the school turned the grey of old ice, the lake lay flat and dull as a sheet of cold steel, and every morning the lawns were white with frost. From the upstairs windows you could see Hagrid out on the Quidditch pitch at first light, thawing the school brooms one by one, wrapped to the ears in a long moleskin overcoat, rabbit-fur gloves and a pair of beaverskin boots the size of coal scuttles.

The Quidditch season had begun. On Saturday, after weeks of practice, Harry would play his first match: Gryffindor against Slytherin. If Gryffindor won, they would move up into second place in the House Championship.

Hardly anybody had seen Harry play. Wood had decided that, as Gryffindor’s secret weapon, Harry ought to be kept, in Wood’s own words, a bloody good secret, and he had made the point to the rest of the team with some force.

‘Anyone grasses about this,’ Wood had said, slapping a Beater’s bat into his palm, ‘and I will personally bash their head in with this. You think that’s funny, Fred?’

The news that Harry was playing Seeker had leaked out anyway. Since nobody had turned up to practice with a bat-shaped dent in their skull, Harry supposed it hadn’t been the team. He couldn’t decide which was worse: the people who told him he was bound to be brilliant, or the people who told him they would be running about underneath him with a mattress.

It was a very good thing that Harry now had Hermione for a friend, though what a fussy, anxious, hovering friend she was turning out to be. He could not have got through his homework without her, with all the extra practices Wood kept calling, and she had made quite sure he never had to try. She was doing it for him. All of it.

‘You’re my friend now, Harry,’ she said, when he protested, ‘and I owe you, after the troll.’

It seemed to make sense to Harry, so he let her.

She had also lent him Quidditch Through the Ages, which turned out to be a far more interesting book than its cover suggested. Harry learned that there were seven hundred ways of committing a foul in Quidditch, every one of which had been committed in a single World Cup match in 1473; that Seekers were generally the smallest and fastest players on a team, and that most of the game’s serious accidents happened to them; and that although people very rarely died playing Quidditch, referees had been known to vanish in the middle of a match and turn up months later in the Sahara Desert. The book mentioned, in a footnote, that every one of these referees had been having trouble at home with his wife, and then said no more about it, as being unsuitable talk for respectable witches and wizards.

He also learned that the English and the French had argued over the rules for more than a thousand years, and that the argument had been settled, now and then, with wands. In 1877, a dispute over the proper weight of a Quaffle between the England manager, Francis Grail, and the French manager, Juste Valmond, had ended in a duel, and the duel had ended with two hundred witches and wizards dead in the crossfire. The book gave a casualty list that ran to three pages.

‘Wizards are mad, sometimes,’ Harry told Ron and Hermione, reading it. The matter had finally been settled when every national team agreed, from 1901 onwards, to play by the Austrian rules. Harry thought privately that the Austrians would have had rather more on their plate about thirteen years after that, but he had no idea whether the wizarding world had even noticed the First World War going on around it. He must remember to ask Hermione. She would know.

Hermione had grown a little more relaxed about rules since the night Harry and Ron pulled her out from under the troll, and she was a great deal nicer for it. She was nicest of all to Harry, and she was at her very nicest to Harry whenever Malfoy happened to be in sight, which Malfoy repaid with exactly as much hostility as Hermione put out warmth.

‘Look at wee Pottyhead and his little Mudblood friend,’ Malfoy would say to Pansy Parkinson, as the three of them passed in a corridor. ‘And here comes the Weasel.’

Pansy had a laugh like a horse, and it could have stripped paint.

‘I told you,’ said Harry. ‘Learn some better insults, you absolute five-year-old.’

Malfoy only rolled her eyes. But it struck Harry, afterwards, as odd. She had every one of the insults he had given her that night on the Quidditch pitch, the ones that would really have hurt, and she had never used a single one. Not once. It was always just Pottyhead.

As Ron’s dad would say: women. No, Harry still had no idea what it meant.

The day before Harry’s first match, the three of them were out in the courtyard at break, with the frost crunching underfoot, and Hermione, eager as ever to be useful, had conjured up a bright blue fire that could be carried about in a jam jar. They were standing with their backs to it, warming themselves, when Snape crossed the courtyard.

Harry saw at once that he was limping. He could not have thought of a nastier git for it to happen to. He, Ron and Hermione shuffled closer together to hide the fire, since they were fairly sure it would not be allowed, but something in their faces caught Snape’s eye, and he limped over. He had not seen the fire. He seemed to be looking for an excuse anyway.

‘What is that you have there, Potter?’

It was Quidditch Through the Ages. Harry held it up.

‘Library books are not to be taken out of the school,’ said Snape. ‘Give it to me. Five points from Gryffindor.’

‘He’s just made that rule up,’ Harry muttered, as Snape limped off. ‘I wonder what he’s done to his leg.’

‘Dunno,’ said Ron bitterly. ‘But I hope it really hurts.’

The Gryffindor common room was very loud that evening. Harry, Ron and Hermione had a table by the window. Hermione was going through Ron’s Charms homework and marking it. She would never let Ron copy from her (‘How will you learn?’), but she had already written a complete, separate version of the essay for Harry, and had it ready before he had so much as found his quill. Harry told her, several times, that he was really all right now, and could manage his own homework. Hermione insisted. He was beginning to feel that he was taking advantage of her. She must still be feeling strange about the troll, he decided, and let it go.

He was restless. He wanted Quidditch Through the Ages back, to take his mind off the match, and the more he thought about it the less he saw why he should be afraid of Snape. He got up and told the others he was going to ask for it.

‘Rather you than me,’ they said together.

Harry had an idea that Snape would not refuse him with other teachers listening. He went down to the staff room and knocked. Nobody answered. He knocked again. Nothing. Perhaps Snape had left the book in there? It was worth a look. He pushed the door open a crack and peered in, and a horrible sight met his eyes.

Snape and Filch were inside, alone. Snape had his robes hitched up above his knees. One of his legs was torn and bloody, and Filch was handing him bandages.

‘Wretched thing,’ Snape was saying. ‘How is anyone supposed to watch all three heads at once?’

Harry tried to ease the door shut, but...

‘POTTER!’

Snape dropped his robes to hide the leg, his face twisted with rage. Harry gulped.

‘I only wondered if I could have my book back.’

‘GET OUT! OUT!’

Harry went, before Snape could take any more points off Gryffindor, and ran all the way back upstairs.

‘Did you get it?’ said Ron, as Harry dropped into his chair. ‘What’s the matter?’

In a low whisper, Harry told them what he had seen.

‘You know what this means?’ he finished, out of breath. ‘He tried to get past that three-headed dog at Hallowe’en! That’s where he was going when we saw him. He’s after whatever it’s guarding! And I’d bet my broomstick he let that troll in on purpose, to clear everybody out of the way!’

Hermione’s eyes were very wide.

‘No. He wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘I know he’s horrible, but he wouldn’t try to steal something Dumbledore was keeping safe.’

‘Honestly, Hermione, you think all teachers are saints or something,’ snapped Ron. ‘I’m with Harry. I wouldn’t put anything past Snape. He’s a right git. But what’s he after? What’s that dog guarding?’

Harry went to bed with the same question buzzing round his head. Neville was snoring, and Harry lay awake. He tried to clear his mind. He needed to sleep. He had to sleep. His first Quidditch match was hours away. But the look on Snape’s face when he had seen Harry looking at his leg was not a thing you forgot easily.

The next morning was bright and bitterly cold. The Great Hall smelled gloriously of fried sausages, and everybody was chattering about the match.

‘You’ve got to eat something.’

‘I don’t want anything, mate.’

‘Just a crumpet?,’ wheedled Hermione.

‘I’m not hungry.’

Harry felt the way the troll must have felt after Ron dropped the club on it. In an hour he would be walking out on to the pitch.

‘You need your strength, Harry,’ said Seamus Finnigan. ‘The Seeker’s always the one who gets nobbled by the other side.’

‘Thanks, Seamus,’ said Harry, watching him pour ketchup over his sausages.

By eleven the whole school seemed to be out in the stands, and a good many of them had binoculars. The seats were high above the pitch, but even so it could be hard to follow what was happening. Ron and Hermione went up to the top row to join Neville, Seamus, and Dean, the West Ham supporter.

Dean had his West Ham scarf on. Harry knew from Dudley that at some football grounds you could get flattened for wearing the wrong scarf. Dudley might have been exaggerating. And that was football, a game that had never, so far as Harry knew, drowned two whole countries in blood over the weight of a ball. Perhaps Dean was in more danger than he thought. Harry hoped somebody would tell him to swap it for a Gryffindor one.

As a surprise for Harry, the five of them had painted a banner on one of the sheets Scabbers had chewed through. It said POTTER FOR PRESIDENT, and Dean, who could draw like Harry could fly, had done a big Gryffindor lion underneath. Hermione had put a tricky little charm on it so that the paint flashed from colour to colour.

Down in the changing rooms, Harry and the rest of the team were pulling on their scarlet Quidditch robes. Slytherin would be in green. Wood cleared his throat.

‘Right, men,’ he said.

‘And women,’ said Angelina Johnson, who was a Chaser.

‘And women,’ Wood agreed. ‘This is it.’

‘The big one,’ said Fred Weasley.

‘The one we’ve been waiting for,’ said George.

‘We know Oliver’s speech off by heart,’ Fred told Harry. ‘We were on the team last year.’

‘Shut up, the pair of you,’ said Wood. ‘This is the best side Gryffindor’s had in years. We’re going to win. I know it.’ He looked round at all of them as though to add, or else. ‘Right. Time to go. Good luck.’

Harry followed Fred and George out of the changing room and, hoping that his knees would hold, walked out on to the pitch to a roar of cheering.

Madam Hooch was refereeing. She stood at the centre of the pitch with her broom in her hand, waiting for the two teams.

‘I want a good, clean game from all of you,’ she said, once they had gathered round, and Harry had the impression she was addressing the Slytherin captain in particular. His name was Marcus Flint, he was a fifth-year, and he had a single black eyebrow that ran right across his face like a hedge. Harry thought there was a fair chance of troll somewhere in his family.

Out of the corner of his eye, high above the crowd, he saw the banner ripple and flash. POTTER FOR PRESIDENT. His heart jumped, and he felt braver. Yes. He could do this.

‘Mount your brooms, please.’

Harry swung himself on to the Nimbus Two Thousand. Madam Hooch blew a long blast on her silver whistle, and fifteen brooms rose into the air, higher and higher, and they were off.

As he climbed, he saw her. Dracina Malfoy, in the Slytherin stand, her silver eyes fixed on him. There was no hate in them, and no malice. What was in them, to his astonishment, looked very like worry. Then she seemed to notice that he was looking back, and scowled. The wretched girl was putting him off before the match had properly started. He tore his eyes away and made himself concentrate.

‘And the Quaffle goes straight to Angelina Johnson of Gryffindor, what a Chaser that girl is, and easy on the eye as well...’

‘JORDAN!’

‘Sorry, Professor.’

Lee Jordan, the Weasley twins’ friend, was commentating, with Professor McGonagall sitting beside him and watching him like a hawk.

‘And she’s really motoring up there, neat pass to Alicia Spinnet, good find of Oliver Wood’s, that one, only a reserve last year, back to Johnson and... no, Slytherin have it, Slytherin captain Marcus Flint with the Quaffle and away he goes, like an eagle, he’s going to sc... no, brilliant save by Gryffindor Keeper Wood and Gryffindor have it back, that’s Katie Bell of Gryffindor, lovely dive round Flint, off up the pitch and... OUCH, that’ll have hurt, Bludger to the back of the head, Quaffle to Slytherin, that’s Adrian Pucey tearing off towards the hoops, but a second Bludger cuts him off, courtesy of Fred or George Weasley, couldn’t tell you which, nice work from the Gryffindor Beater either way, and Johnson has the Quaffle again, open pitch ahead of her, off she goes, she’s flying, swerves a Bludger, hoops coming up, come on Angelina, Keeper Bletchley dives, misses... GRYFFINDOR SCORE!’

Gryffindor cheers rang out across the frozen air, with groans and howls from the Slytherin end.

‘Budge up there. Shift along.’

‘Hagrid!’

Ron and Hermione squashed together to make room for him.

‘Bin watchin’ from me hut,’ said Hagrid, patting the enormous pair of binoculars round his neck, ‘but it’s not the same as bein’ in the crowd. No sign o’ the Snitch yet?’

‘Nope,’ said Ron. ‘Harry hasn’t had much to do.’

‘Kept out o’ trouble, though, that’s somethin’,’ said Hagrid. ‘Oh, an’ Dean, I brought yeh a Gryffindor scarf. Best not go startin’ anythin’.’

He wound it round Dean’s neck himself, over the top of the West Ham one, and glanced warily round the stand as he did it. He had seen a few dark deeds from these benches over the years, and had no wish to see another. Quidditch crowds could be nutters. Then he patted Dean on the shoulder, raised the binoculars, and squinted up at the speck that was Harry.

High above the game, Harry was gliding in slow circles, squinting about for any sign of the Snitch. This was his part of the plan he and Wood had made. ‘Stay out of it until you see the Snitch,’ Wood had said. ‘No sense getting attacked before you have to be.’

When Angelina scored he had done a couple of loop-the-loops to let the feeling out. Now he was back to searching. Once he thought he saw a flash of gold, but it was only the glint of one of the Weasleys’ watches, and once a Bludger decided to come straight at him like a cannonball.

‘Bugger!’ Harry yelled, and swerved, and Fred Weasley came thundering after it.

‘You alright there, Harry?’ Fred had time to shout, as he belted the Bludger furiously in the direction of Marcus Flint and his car bumper of a forehead.

‘Slytherin in possession,’ Lee Jordan was saying. ‘Chaser Pucey ducks two Bludgers, two Weasleys and Chaser Bell, and he’s racing towards the... hang on. Was that the Snitch?’

A murmur went round the stands as Adrian Pucey dropped the Quaffle, too busy staring over his shoulder at the streak of gold that had just gone past his ear. It had gone past the Slytherin stand, in fact. Just by where Malfoy was sitting. Of course it had.

Harry saw it. In a rush of excitement he dived after it. Terence Higgs, the Slytherin Seeker, had seen it too. Neck and neck they hurtled down towards the Snitch, and every Chaser in the match seemed to have forgotten what they were there for, hanging in the air to watch. Harry was faster than Higgs. He could see the little ball ahead of him, wings whirring, darting about. He put on another burst of speed...

WHAM!

A roar of fury went up from the Gryffindors below. Marcus Flint had blocked Harry deliberately, and Harry’s broom spun off course with Harry hanging on for dear life.

‘Foul!’ screamed the Gryffindor stand.

Madam Hooch gave Flint a piece of her mind and awarded Gryffindor a free shot at the hoops. But in the confusion, of course, the Snitch had vanished again.

Down in the stands, Dean Thomas was on his feet. ‘Oi, Get him out, ref! Red thumpin card!’

‘This isn’t football, Dean,’ said Ron, glancing round. A couple of older students were eyeing Dean up, and Ron thought it best to get him sat down quickly. ‘You can’t send people off in Quidditch. And what’s a red card?’

Hagrid, however, was on Dean’s side.

‘They oughta change the rules. Flint coulda knocked Harry clean out o’ the air.’

Lee Jordan was finding it hard to stay neutral.

‘So, after that dark and disgusting piece of cheating...’

‘Jordan!’ growled Professor McGonagall.

‘I mean, after that naked and transparent foul...’

‘Jordan, I’m warning you...’

‘All right, all right. Flint nearly murders the Gryffindor Seeker, could happen to anyone, I’m sure, so it’s a penalty to Gryffindor, taken by Spinnet, who puts it away, no bother, and play goes on, Gryffindor in possession.’

It was as Harry dodged another Bludger, which went whistling past his head, that it happened. In the Slytherin stand, he noticed, Malfoy was on the very edge of her seat. For the Slytherin Seeker, no doubt. So why did she keep looking at him?

Then his broom gave a lurch.

It felt like the lurch of a horse that’s had enough. For a second Harry thought he was going to fall. Then something in him set hard. No. He’d been thrown about by Dudley for ten years without crying once. A length of wood with twigs on the end was nothing to that, and he was not going to let it, whatever it was, beat him. He clung on with a stubbornness that, in one of the old Greek stories, would have been taken as a dare by some spiteful god.

It happened again. And again. And again. It was exactly as though the broom were trying to buck him off. Sod that. Not happening. But a Nimbus Two Thousand did not simply decide to throw its rider. Harry tried to turn back towards the Gryffindor hoops, half thinking of asking Wood to call time out, and found that he had no control over the broom at all. He could not turn it. He could not steer it. It was zigzagging through the air and giving sudden violent swishes that all but had him off, and the thought that went through his head, absurdly, was that he was about to make a fool of himself in front of Malfoy, and he would never hear the end of it from her.

Lee was still commentating.

‘Slytherin in possession, Flint with the Quaffle, past Spinnet, past Bell, Bludger straight in the face, hope it broke his nose, only joking, Professor, Slytherin score, oh no...’

The Slytherins were cheering. Nobody seemed to have noticed that Harry’s broom was behaving very oddly. It was carrying him slowly higher, away from the game, jerking and twitching as it went.

‘Stop it,’ Harry told it. ‘No, you bloody well don’t.’ He felt extremely stupid, talking to a broom.

‘Dunno what Harry thinks he’s playin’ at,’ Hagrid mumbled, staring through the binoculars. ‘If I didn’ know better I’d say he’d lost control of his broom... but he can’t have...’

All over the stands, people had started to point. The broom had begun to roll over and over, with Harry barely hanging on. Then the whole crowd gasped. The broom had given a wild jerk, and Harry had swung clean off it. He was dangling from it by one hand.

‘Did something happen to it when Flint hit him?’ Seamus whispered.

‘Can’t have,’ said Hagrid, and his voice shook. ‘Can’t nothin’ interfere with a broomstick but powerful Dark magic. No kid could do that to a Nimbus Two Thousand.’

At that, Hermione snatched the binoculars from round Hagrid’s neck. But instead of looking up at Harry, she began raking the crowd. She looked at Malfoy first. It had to be Malfoy, trying to humiliate him. Yet to her great annoyance Malfoy was white as paper, half out of her seat, with both hands over her mouth, and looked as frightened as anyone in the stadium. Hermione felt a stab of irritation at that, which she did not stop to examine. She swung the binoculars on.

‘What are you doing?’ moaned Ron, grey in the face.

‘I knew it,’ Hermione breathed. ‘Snape. Look.’

Ron grabbed the binoculars. Snape was in the middle of the stand opposite, his eyes locked on Harry, muttering under his breath without a pause.

‘He’s doing something. He’s jinxing the broom,’ said Hermione.

‘That greasy git,’ said Ron. ‘What do we do?’

‘Leave it to me.’

Hermione nodded once, and before Ron could say another word she had gone.

Ron turned the binoculars back on Harry. He was frightened for his best mate’s life. When had Harry become his best mate? It didn’t matter. He was, and he was in danger. The broom was shaking so hard now that it seemed impossible for anyone to hold on to it, and yet Harry was holding on. Ron would have called it a miracle if he hadn’t watched Harry fly.

The whole crowd was on its feet, watching in terror as the Weasleys flew up to try to drag Harry on to one of their brooms, but it was no use. Each time they got near, the broom jumped higher. They dropped lower and circled underneath him instead, plainly hoping to catch him if he fell. Marcus Flint, meanwhile, picked up the Quaffle and scored five times without a soul noticing.

‘Come on, Hermione,’ Ron muttered.

Hermione had fought her way round to the stand where Snape stood and was racing along the row behind him. She was so angry with Snape for trying to hurt Harry that she didn’tt even stop to apologise when she knocked Professor Quirrell head first into the row in front. She reached Snape, crouched down, pulled out her wand, and whispered a few carefully chosen words. Bright blue flames leapt from the wand to the hem of Snape’s robes.

It took Snape perhaps thirty seconds to realise he was on fire. A sudden yelp told her she had done her job. She scooped the flames off him into a little jar in her pocket and scrambled back along the row. Snape would never know what had happened.

Serve him right, Hermione thought. Ronald had been correct. He was a greasy git. But Harry was safe now, and that was what mattered. Harry was her friend. Harry would keep her safe. So she had to be very sure that Harry was kept safe.

It was enough. Up in the air, Harry was suddenly able to haul himself back on to his broom. It was fortunate that most of the crowd was out of earshot, because he was describing the broom, as he did it, in language that would’ve got him thrown out of a dockside

 pub. One of the few people who did hear him was Lee Jordan.

‘Harry, mate, you’ve been spending too much time with Ron. Pack it in.’

‘For once, Mr Jordan, I agree with you,’ said Professor McGonagall.

‘Neville, you can look now!’ said Ron. Neville had spent the last five minutes sobbing into Hagrid’s coat.

Harry was speeding towards the ground when the crowd saw him clap a hand over his mouth, as though he was about to be sick. He hit the pitch on all fours, coughed, and something gold dropped into his hand.

‘I’ve got the bloody Snitch!’ he shouted. What a faff that had been.

He waved it above his head, and the match ended in complete confusion. It was certainly confusing to Harry, because across in the Slytherin stand, despite Slytherin having just lost, Dracina Malfoy was on her feet and cheering. Why, he had no idea at all. Malfoy was a very odd girl.

‘He never caught it, he nearly swallowed it,’ Flint was still howling twenty minutes later, but it made no difference. Harry had broken no rule, and Lee Jordan was still joyfully shouting the result. Gryffindor had won, a hundred and seventy points to sixty.

Harry heard none of it. He was in Hagrid’s hut, with Ron and Hermione, being made a cup of very strong tea. Hagrid’s tea was exactly as good as his baking was bad, and it was an excellent cup.

‘It was Snape, that dodgy git,’ Ron was explaining. ‘Hermione and I saw him. He was cursing your broom. Muttering. He never took his eyes off you.’

‘Rubbish,’ said Hagrid, who had not heard a word of what had gone on beside him in the stands. ‘Why would Snape do a thing like that?’

Harry, Ron and Hermione looked at each other, wondering how much to tell him. Harry decided on the truth.

‘I found something out about him,’ he said. ‘He tried to get past that three-headed dog at Hallowe’en. It bit him. We think he’s trying to steal whatever it’s guarding.’

Hagrid dropped the teapot.

‘How do you know about Fluffy?’

‘Fluffy?’

‘Yeah. He’s mine. Bought him off a Greek chappie I met down the pub las’ year. Well, I think he was Greek. He had the caravan and funny voice the greeks have.’

Harry had a growing suspicion that Hagrid was not in fact describing a Greek man.

 ‘I Lent him to Dumbledore to guard the...’

‘Yes?’ said Harry eagerly.

‘Now, don’ ask me no more,’ said Hagrid gruffly. ‘That’s top secret, that is.’

‘But Snape’s trying to steal it.’

‘Rubbish,’ said Hagrid again. ‘Snape’s a Hogwarts teacher. He’d do nothin’ o’ the sort.’

‘Then why did he just try to kill Harry?’ cried Hermione. The afternoon had clearly changed her mind about Snape. ‘I know a jinx when I see one, Hagrid, I’ve read all about them! You have to keep your eyes on the target, and Snape never blinked once, I saw him!’

‘I’m tellin’ yeh, yer wrong!’ said Hagrid hotly. ‘I don’ know why Harry’s broom did what it did, but Snape wouldn’ try an’ kill a student! Now, you listen to me, all three of yeh. Yer meddlin’ an’ consortin’ an’ philanderin’ in things that don’ concern yeh. Not at all! It’s dangerous. You forget that dog, an’ you forget what it’s guardin’. That’s between Professor Dumbledore an’ Nicolas Flamel...’

‘Oh!’ said Harry. ‘So there’s someone called Nicolas Flamel in it, is there?’

Hagrid looked like he wanted to and hadn't shut his big fat mouth.

Chapter 8 : Desire Behind Glass

Christmas was coming. Slowly, but it was coming.

One morning in the middle of December, colder than any morning had a right to be even in that part of Scotland, Hogwarts woke up buried in snow. It lay in thick white blankets over the roofs and the grounds, and it went on falling, and to Harry it looked like something out of one of the American Christmas films he’d never been allowed to watch, which he’d only ever glimpsed over the top of the sofa before Aunt Petunia noticed him and sent him to his cupboard. The lake had frozen into one solid slab, and the Weasley twins were at it again. They had only just been punished for bewitching a set of snowballs to follow Professor Quirrell about the grounds, bouncing off the back of his turban, and they’d gone straight on to a new line in Christmas baubles, which hung on the trees looking perfectly ordinary until somebody touched one, when they burst into a shower of live slugs.

Hardly any owls could get through the storms. The few that did were the old ones, grumpy and battered and hard as nails, and every one of them had to be nursed back to health by Hagrid before it could fly again. He was surprisingly gentle about it, cooing at them as he wrapped them in blankets by his fire.

‘Look at the state o’ them,’ he said to anyone who’d listen. ‘Poor little beggars.’

Nobody could wait for the holidays to begin. The Gryffindor common room and the Great Hall had fires roaring in them, but the corridors were as draughty as ever, and had become about as icy as Snape on one of his better days. A bitter wind rattled the old windows in every classroom.

It was in one of those freezing corridors, on the way down to Potions, that Harry was ambushed.

‘Potter!’

A hand came down on his shoulder from behind and gripped it, and for a second Harry wasn’t in a corridor at all. He was in the garden at Privet Drive with Dudley’s hand on his shoulder, being spun round so that Dudley could shove a water bomb into his face. He didn’t decide to do anything. He simply found that he had both hands locked round somebody’s arm, hard, and that his heart was going like a drum.

The corridor came back. The arm belonged to Dracina Malfoy, and she was looking at him with her mouth slightly open.

Harry let go.

‘Personal space, Malfoy,’ he said, and his voice came out rougher than he’d meant it to. ‘I’d have thought you of all people would know about that.’

Malfoy tutted at him and smoothed her sleeve where he’d gripped it. But there was something odd in her face as she did it, something that came and went too fast for Harry to put a name to, and she didn’t say anything cutting, which was unlike her.

‘What do you want?’ said Harry.

‘Nothing I want,’ said Malfoy. She lifted her chin. ‘My mother has asked me to extend an invitation to you. To Malfoy Manor. For the Christmas holidays.’ She said it as though she were reading out somebody else’s shopping list. ‘I’ve no idea why. I expect she’s taken leave of her senses.’

Harry stared at her, and then he laughed. He couldn’t help it. It was so obviously a joke, or the first move in some prank, that he was almost impressed she’d managed to say it with a straight face.

The laugh did something to Malfoy. Her shoulders went back and her nose went up, and she was suddenly every inch the girl from Madam Malkin’s.

‘You’re too stupid to see a good thing when it’s handed to you, Potter,’ she said. ‘It’s a wonder you can tie your own shoes.’

‘Yeah, all right,’ said Harry, still laughing, and he walked off down the corridor towards the dungeons, shaking his head, not believing a word of it, and not aware in the least of the pair of silver eyes that followed him all the way to the corner and bored into the back of his robes as he went.

Potions, down in the dungeons, had become a lesson in staying alive. Their breath hung in the air in front of them and they huddled as close to their cauldrons as they could get without setting fire to their robes.

‘Just imagine,’ Dracina Malfoy said one afternoon, to nobody in particular and the whole room in general, ‘all those poor sad people who have to stay at Hogwarts for Christmas because nobody wants them at home. Unless, of course, they have friends to invite them somewhere. Not that they do.’

She leaned on the word friends in a way that sailed clean over Harry’s head. Crabbe and Goyle sniggered, as Crabbe and Goyle always did when Malfoy said anything with Harry’s name in it or near it.

Harry, who was measuring out powdered spine of lionfish, ignored her. As far as he could see, Malfoy had been even more unpleasant since the Quidditch match than before it, and he couldn’t make head or tail of that. He’d seen her cheering when he caught the Snitch. He’d seen it with his own eyes. Then something seemed to have reset inside her, like a robot that had been switched off and on again, and the bully had come straight back.

She’d tried, the week before, to get the whole class laughing at the idea of a wide-mouthed tree frog taking over from Harry as Seeker, since the frog would at least stay on its broom. Nobody had laughed. Harry had simply said, without looking up, that he’d stayed on a broom that was doing its level best to throw him off from fifty feet up, and he’d like to see a tree frog manage that, and several people had said, yes, that had been brilliant, how had he done it? And Malfoy had gone quiet and sour and sat with her arms folded for the rest of the lesson. She hated it, Harry thought, when the attention went to anybody but her.

And yet she still went funny whenever he looked at her. He’d catch her watching him and she’d look away so fast it was a wonder she didn’t crick her neck.

So now she’d glanced at Crabbe and Goyle for an audience and gone back to her favourite subject, which was Harry having no proper family to go home to. He regretted very much what he’d shouted at her that night on the Quidditch pitch. He’d known at the time that she’d use it against him, and here she was, using it.

It was true that Harry wasn’t going back to Privet Drive for Christmas. He wouldn’t have gone if they’d begged him, and they hadn’t. Professor McGonagall had come round the week before with a list of students staying at school for the holidays, and Harry had signed it before she’d finished asking. He didn’t feel sorry for himself in the least. This was going to be the best Christmas he’d ever had, and that was before Ron had come to find him with the news that he and his brothers were staying too, because Mr and Mrs Weasley were off to Romania to visit Charlie. So Harry wasn’t going to be alone after all, whatever Malfoy liked to suggest.

When they came up out of the dungeons at the end of the lesson they found the corridor blocked by an enormous fir tree. Two huge feet stuck out at the bottom of it, and a loud puffing from somewhere inside the branches told them Hagrid was behind it.

‘Hi, Hagrid, want a hand?’ said Ron, pushing his head in among the needles.

‘Nah, I’m all right, thanks, Ron.’

‘Would you mind getting out of the way?’ said a cold drawl behind them.

Malfoy was there with Crabbe and Goyle, and she was looking at Ron with a dislike that seemed, even for her, to have come from nowhere.

‘Trying to earn a bit of pocket money, Weasley? Hoping to be gamekeeper yourself when you leave, I suppose. I expect Hagrid’s hut looks like a palace next to what your family’s used to.’

Ron went for her. He had the front of her robes in both fists before Harry could move, and that was the moment Snape came up the stairs. Harry had the strangest impression, in the half second before Snape spoke, that Malfoy had smiled.

‘WEASLEY!’

Ron let go. Harry had been reaching to pull him off, and found himself with nothing to pull.

‘He was provoked, Professor Snape,’ said Hagrid, poking his great hairy face out from behind the tree. ‘Malfoy was insultin’ his family.’

‘Be that as it may, Hagrid, fighting is against school rules,’ said Snape silkily, ‘and laying hands on a young lady’s robes is contemptible. Five points from Gryffindor, Weasley, and think yourself lucky it’s no more. Move along. All of you.’

Malfoy looked, for a moment, furious, and it seemed to Harry that she was furious with Snape, which made no sense at all. Then she clicked her fingers at Crabbe and Goyle and shoved past the tree, scattering needles everywhere, smirking as she went.

‘I’ll get her,’ said Ron, grinding his teeth at her back. ‘One of these days, I’ll get her...’

‘I hate them both,’ said Harry. ‘Malfoy and Snape.’

‘She’s still a girl, though, mate,’ said Ron, as if he’d only just remembered it himself. ‘I can’t hit a girl. What was I thinking?. I’d drive Mum spare. That bloomin’ Malfoy though.’

‘Oh, cheer up, it’s nearly Christmas,’ said Hagrid. ‘Tell yeh what, come an’ have a look at the Great Hall with me. Looks a treat.’

So Harry and Ron, and Hermione, who had heard about the business with Malfoy from somebody on the stairs and had come to find Harry as fast as her legs would carry her, followed Hagrid and his tree into the Great Hall, where Professor McGonagall and Professor Flitwick were putting up the Christmas decorations.

‘Ah, Hagrid, the last tree. Far corner, if you would.’

The Hall was a wonder. Garlands of holly and mistletoe hung round every wall, and no fewer than twelve enormous Christmas trees stood about the room, some glittering with tiny icicles, some blazing with hundreds of candles.

Across the Hall, Harry noticed Malfoy. She was on her own for once, with no sign of Crabbe or Goyle, standing under one of the bunches of mistletoe and looking up at it with the most peculiar expression on her face, as if it had asked her a question she couldn’t answer. Harry watched her for a moment, baffled, and then decided it was none of his business and left her to it.

‘How many days yeh got left till the holidays?’ Hagrid asked.

‘Just one,’ said Hermione. She wasn’t looking at Hagrid. She was looking at Malfoy, who had turned and was looking straight back at her, and the two of them were glaring at each other across the whole length of the Hall as though there were nobody else in it. ‘Which reminds me. Harry, Ron, we’ve got half an hour before lunch. We ought to be in the library.’

‘Oh, yeah, you’re right,’ said Ron, tearing his eyes away from Professor Flitwick, who had golden bubbles pouring out of his wand and was draping them over the branches of the new tree.

‘The library?’ said Hagrid, following them out. ‘Day before the holidays? Bit keen, aren’t yeh?’

‘Oh, we’re not working,’ said Harry brightly. ‘Ever since you mentioned Nicolas Flamel we’ve been trying to find out who he is.’

‘You what?’ Hagrid looked shocked. ‘Now, listen here. I’ve told yeh. Drop it. What that dog’s guardin’ is nothin’ to do with you.’

‘We only want to know who Nicolas Flamel is, that’s all,’ said Hermione. She had given up glaring at Malfoy and had moved rather closer to Harry’s side, and Harry, glancing back, saw Malfoy scowl and turn away, sticking her tongue out at him as she went, as though to make it quite clear she hadn’t been looking.

‘Unless you’d like to tell us and save us the bother?’ Harry added, turning back to Hagrid. ‘We must have been through hundreds of books, and he’s not in any of them. Give us a hint. I know I’ve seen his name somewhere.’

‘I’m not sayin’ a word. Not one,’ said Hagrid flatly.

‘Then we’ll just have to find out for ourselves,’ said Ron, with the exact look he’d worn the week before while he took Harry’s king apart at chess, and they left Hagrid looking thoroughly put out and hurried off to the library.

They had been hunting for Flamel’s name ever since Hagrid let it slip, because how else were they going to find out what Snape was after? The trouble was knowing where to start, when they had no idea what Flamel might have done to get himself into a book. He wasn’t in Great Wizards of the Twentieth Century, or Notable Magical Names of Our Time. He wasn’t in Important Modern Magical Discoveries, or A Study of Recent Developments in Wizardry. And then there was the sheer size of the place: tens of thousands of books, thousands of shelves, hundreds of narrow aisles.

Hermione took out a list of titles and subjects she had decided to work through, while Ron strode off down a row and started hauling books off the shelves at random. Harry wandered over to the Restricted Section. He’d been wondering for a while whether Flamel might be in there. Unfortunately you needed a signed note from a teacher to read any of those books, and he knew he’d never get one. They were the books of powerful Dark magic that was never taught at Hogwarts, and only the older students studying advanced Defence Against the Dark Arts were allowed near them.

‘What are you looking for, Potter?’

Malfoy was behind him.

‘Nothing,’ mumbled Harry, trying not to look suspicous.

‘That’s the Restricted Section.’ She said it in the voice of someone showing a visitor round. ‘Full of all sorts of nastiness. You need special permission to read any of it. Even Father can’t get in there without asking. But if you want some help...’

Harry had opened his mouth to ask how, exactly, Malfoy thought she could help, when Hermione came round the end of the shelf at something close to a run.

‘We don’t need your help, Malfoy,’ she said, and took Harry by the sleeve and towed him away.

He looked back once. Malfoy was still standing by the rope, on her own, and he supposed she was sulking, though it didn’t quite look like sulking. It looked, if anything, like someone who’d been left out of something. Then she turned her back, and he stopped thinking about it.

Harry went out into the corridor. He, Ron and Hermione had already agreed that they couldn’t ask Madam Pince where to find Flamel. She would almost certainly know, but they couldn’t risk Snape hearing what they were up to. He waited to see whether the other two had turned anything up, without much hope. They’d been looking for a fortnight, after all, but only in the odd minutes between lessons, and it was no great surprise that they’d found nothing. What they needed was a good long search without Madam Pince breathing down their necks.

Five minutes later Ron and Hermione came out shaking their heads, and they went off to lunch.

‘You’ll keep looking while I’m away, won’t you?’ said Hermione. ‘And send me an owl if you find anything.’

‘And you could ask your parents if they know who Flamel is,’ said Ron. ‘That’d be safe enough.’

‘Very safe,’ said Hermione dryly. ‘They’re both dentists.’

Harry privately thought that a bit of distance might do Hermione good. He was very fond of her, and he was sympathetic about the troll, which had plainly rattled her more than she let on; she still had a way of appearing at his elbow the moment he turned round. But he needed some space, and some time with Ron, doing lad things. Hermione had never approved of the Farting Game, for instance, which Harry and Ron had invented one wet afternoon. You cupped your hands over your mouth and made the biggest, wettest noise you could, and the echoier the corridor, the better. Hermione thought it was disgusting, and said so, so they’d stopped playing it in front of her, to spare her feelings. It would be nice to have the corridors to themselves.

Once the holidays began, Harry and Ron were having far too good a time to think much about Flamel. They had the dormitory to themselves and the common room was nearly empty, so they could take the best armchairs by the fire. They sat there by the hour, toasting anything that would go on a fork, bread and crumpets and marshmallows, and plotting ways of getting Malfoy expelled, which were a pleasure to discuss even though none of them would ever work.

Ron also went back to teaching Harry wizard chess. It was just like Muggle chess, except that the pieces were alive, which made it feel a good deal like commanding an army. Ron’s set was very old and battered. As battered as Harry felt anytime he played against Ron. Like everything else he owned, it had belonged to somebody in the family first, in this case his grandfather, but old chessmen were no handicap at all. Ron knew them so well that they did whatever he told them. Harry was playing with a set Seamus Finnigan had lent him, and the pieces didn’t trust him an inch. He wasn’t much of a player yet, and they kept shouting different advice at him, which didn’t help.

‘Don’t send me there, can’t you see his knight? Send him, we can spare him.’

On Christmas Eve Harry went to bed looking forward to the food and the fun of the next day, and expecting no presents at all. When he woke early the next morning, the first thing he saw was a small heap of parcels at the foot of his bed.

‘Happy Christmas,’ said Ron sleepily, as Harry scrambled out and pulled on his dressing-gown.

Harry had never once been given a Christmas present. He’d never even asked for one. He stood looking at the pile and didn’t know what to do with himself. Somewhere in the back of his head the Dursleys’ voice, quieter these days but never quite gone, told him he didn’t deserve them and they must have been left at the wrong bed. He shoved the voice away.

‘Happy Christmas, mate,’ he said. ‘Look at this. I’ve got presents!’

‘What did you expect, turnips?’ said Ron, turning to his own pile, which was a good deal bigger.

Harry picked up the top parcel. It was wrapped in thick brown paper with To Harry, from Hagrid scrawled across it, and inside was a roughly whittled wooden flute. Hagrid had obviously carved it himself. Harry blew it, and it sounded a bit like an owl. Harry loved it all the same because it came from Hagrid.

A second, very small parcel held a note.

We received your message and enclose your Christmas present. From Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia.

Sellotaped to the note was a fifty-pence piece.

Ron gave Harry an odd look, and Harry could see him wondering why anybody’s relatives would send Muggle money instead of a jumper, or sweets, or anything at all.

‘That’s friendly,’ said Harry.

Ron, though, was fascinated by the coin.

‘Weird!’ he said. ‘Look at the shape of it! This is money?’

‘Keep it,’ said Harry, laughing at how pleased he was. ‘So that’s Hagrid and my aunt and uncle. Who sent these?’

‘I think I know who that one’s from,’ said Ron, going rather pink and pointing at a very lumpy parcel. ‘My mum. I did tell her you weren’t expecting anything, honestly, but she likes to fuss and... oh, no.’ He groaned. ‘She’s made you a Weasley jumper.’

Harry had already torn it open. Inside was a thick, hand-knitted jumper in emerald green, and a large box of home-made fudge.

‘She makes us one every year,’ said Ron, unwrapping his own, ‘and mine’s always maroon.’

‘That’s really kind of her,’ said Harry, who had never owned a knitted jumper or tasted home-made fudge in his life.

And for just a moment, holding it, he felt a hot little stab of something at Ron, who had a mum, a real mum, who knitted him jumpers and made him fudge and didn’t hit him round the head with a frying pan when he overcooked the eggs, and who was moaning about it as if it were some kind of insult. Then Harry caught the thought and held it still. Ron didn’t know about the Dursleys. Ron had never been without a family, and Harry had given up trying to explain what the Dursleys were like a long time ago. Teachers hadn’t understood, and neither had other children, however hard he’d tried, and he’d accepted that it was simply his lot until the day Hagrid knocked the door down. None of it was Ron’s fault. Ron was his best mate. Harry tried the fudge, which was very good indeed, and the stab went away.

The next present was sweets as well, a big box of Chocolate Frogs from Hermione. That left one parcel. Harry picked it up. It was very light. He unwrapped it, and something fluid and silvery grey slid out of the paper and down to the floor, where it lay in shining folds.

Ron gasped.

‘I’ve heard of those,’ he said, in a hushed voice, dropping the box of Every-Flavour Beans Hermione had sent him. ‘If that’s what I think it is... they’re really rare. And really valuable.’

‘What is it?’

Harry picked the shining stuff up off the floor. It felt strange, like water somebody had managed to weave.

‘It’s an Invisibility Cloak,’ said Ron, in awe. ‘I’m sure it is. Try it on.’

Harry swung it round his shoulders, and Ron yelled.

‘It is! Look down!’

Harry looked down. His feet had gone. He ran to the mirror, and there was his head, floating in mid-air with no body under it. He pulled the Cloak up over his head and his reflection vanished altogether.

‘There’s a note!’ said Ron suddenly. ‘A note fell out of it!’

Harry pulled the Cloak off and snatched up the letter. It was written in a narrow, loopy hand he had never seen before.

Your father left this in my keeping before he died. It’s time it came back to you. Use it well. A very merry Christmas to you.

There was no signature.

Harry stared at it. Ron was stroking the Cloak.

‘I’d give anything for one of these,’ he said. ‘Anything. What’s up?’

‘Nothing,’ said Harry.

He felt very strange. Who had sent it? Had it really been his father’s? He thought of Professor McGonagall and the old school reports of his father’s matches she’d promised him. She still hadn’t brought them. He supposed she’d forgotten, and he hadn’t liked to remind her in case it annoyed her. He’d love to know more about his father. Anything at all.

Before he could think any further, the dormitory door banged open and Fred and George Weasley bounded in. Harry stuffed the Cloak under the bed. He wasn’t ready to share it with anyone yet.

‘Merry Christmas!’

‘Hey, look, Harry’s got a Weasley jumper too!’

Fred and George were wearing blue jumpers, one with a big yellow F on it and the other with a big yellow G.

‘Harry’s is better than ours,’ said Fred, holding it up. ‘She obviously tries harder when you’re not family.’

‘Why aren’t you wearing yours, Ron?’ George demanded. ‘Come on, get it on, they’re lovely and warm.’

‘I hate maroon,’ Ron moaned, without much conviction, as he pulled it over his head.

‘You haven’t got a letter on yours,’ George observed. ‘I suppose she reckons you don’t forget your own name. But we’re not daft. We know perfectly well we’re called Gred and Forge.’

‘What’s all this racket?’

Percy Weasley had put his head round the door, looking disapproving. He had plainly got halfway through his own presents, because he had a lumpy jumper over his arm, and Fred seized it.

‘P for Prefect! Get it on, Percy, come on, we’re all wearing ours, even Harry’s got one.’

‘I... don’t... want...’ said Percy thickly, as the twins forced it over his head and knocked his glasses sideways.

‘And you’re not sitting with the Prefects today either,’ said George. ‘Christmas is for family.’

They frog-marched him out of the room with his arms pinned to his sides by his own jumper.

Harry had never seen a Christmas dinner like it, and he’d never dreamed one existed. A hundred fat roast turkeys. Topside of beef and rib of beef, legs and shoulders of lamb, sides of smoked salmon, mountains of roast and boiled potatoes, platters of fat chipolatas, tureens of buttered peas, silver boats of thick gravy and cranberry sauce, and stacks of wizard crackers every few feet along the table. These were nothing like the feeble Muggle crackers the Dursleys bought, with their little plastic toys and their flimsy paper hats. Harry pulled one with Fred and it didn’t just bang. It went off like a cannon and swallowed them both in blue smoke, and out of it burst a rear admiral’s hat and several live white mice.

He never, ever wanted to go back to the Dursleys. And there, right on cue, was the little voice, reminding him that whatever he wanted, he’d be on the train back to them in the summer, and it laughed at him. It had all three of their voices at once. It spoilt the moment, the way it always did, the way they always had. They’d never once let him be happy, and it seemed they could do it even from four hundred miles away.

Up at the High Table, Dumbledore had traded his pointed hat for a flowered bonnet and was chuckling at a joke Professor Flitwick had just read him. Flaming Christmas puddings followed the turkey. Percy nearly broke a tooth on a silver Sickle buried in his slice. Harry watched Hagrid go redder and redder as he called for more wine, until at last he kissed Professor McGonagall on the cheek, and to Harry’s astonishment she giggled and blushed under her lopsided top hat.

When Harry finally left the table, with the voice louder than it had been all day, he felt more alone than he had any right to feel at the end of a meal like that. He went to find Ron, hoping for something to take his mind off it, and it worked, because Harry and the Weasleys spent the afternoon in a furious snowball fight in the grounds. Then, soaked and frozen and out of breath, they came back to the fire in the common room, where Harry lost spectacularly to Ron at chess, and suspected he’d have lost less badly if Percy hadn’t tried so hard to help him.

After a tea of turkey sandwiches and crumpets and trifle and Christmas cake, everyone was too full and too sleepy to do much before bed except watch Percy chase Fred and George round Gryffindor Tower because they’d pinched his Prefect badge.

It was the best Christmas Day Harry had ever had. And yet something had been nagging at the back of his mind all day, and it was only when he climbed into bed that he was free to think about it: the Invisibility Cloak, and whoever had sent it.

Ron, full of turkey and cake, with no mysteries to keep him awake, was asleep almost as soon as he’d drawn the curtains of his four-poster. Harry leaned over the side of his bed and pulled the Cloak out from under it.

His father’s. This had been his father’s. It was the only thing he had ever owned that had belonged to the father he’d never known. He let it run through his hands, smoother than silk and lighter than air. Use it well, the note had said.

He had to try it. Now. He slid out of bed and wrapped it round himself, and looked down, and saw nothing of his own legs at all, only moonlight and shadow. It was the strangest feeling.

Use it well.

All at once Harry was wide awake. The whole of Hogwarts lay open to him in this Cloak. He could go anywhere. Anywhere at all, and Filch would never know.

Ron grunted in his sleep. Should Harry wake him? Something held him back. It was his father’s Cloak, and this first time he wanted it to himself. He crept out of the dormitory, down the stairs, across the common room and out through the portrait hole.

‘Who’s there?’ squawked the Fat Lady.

Harry said nothing, and hurried off down the corridor. Where should he go? He stopped, heart racing, and thought, and then it came to him. The Restricted Section. He could read for as long as he liked, for as long as it took to find Flamel. He set off, pulling the Cloak tight around him.

The library was pitch dark and very eerie. Harry lit a lamp to find his way along the rows, and the lamp seemed to drift along in mid-air on its own, and though he could feel his arm holding it, the sight of it gave him the creeps.

The Restricted Section was at the very back. He stepped carefully over the rope that cut it off from the rest of the library and held up the lamp to read the spines. They told him very little. The peeling gold letters spelled out words in languages he didn’t know, and some books had no title at all. One had a dark stain down its cover that looked horribly like blood. The hairs rose on the back of his neck. He might have been imagining it, but he thought he could hear a faint whispering coming from the books, as though they knew somebody was there who shouldn’t be.

He had to start somewhere. He set the lamp down on the floor and ran his eye along the bottom shelf for something promising. A large black and silver book caught his eye. He worked it out with some difficulty, because it was very heavy, balanced it on his knee, and let it fall open.

A piercing, blood-curdling shriek split the silence. The book was screaming.

Harry slammed it shut, but the shriek went on and on, one high, unbroken, ear-splitting note. He stumbled back and knocked over the lamp, which went out at once. He heard footsteps in the corridor outside, and in a panic he rammed the shrieking book back on to its shelf and ran for it. He passed Filch almost in the doorway. Filch’s pale, wild eyes looked straight through him, and Harry ducked under his outstretched arm and tore off up the corridor with the book’s screams still ringing in his ears.

He came to a sudden halt in front of a tall suit of armour. He’d been so busy getting away from the library that he’d paid no attention to where he was going, and perhaps because of the dark, he didn’t recognise the place at all. There was a suit of armour near the kitchens, he knew, but he must be five floors above that.

‘You told me to come straight to you, Professor, if anyone was out of bed at night, and somebody’s been in the library. Restricted Section.’

Harry felt the blood leave his face. Wherever he was, Filch must know a short cut, because that soft, greasy voice was getting closer, and to his horror, it was Snape who answered.

‘The Restricted Section? Well, they can’t have got far. We’ll have them.’

Harry stood frozen as Filch and Snape came round the corner ahead of him. They couldn’t see him, of course, but it was a narrow corridor, and if they came much closer they’d walk straight into him. The Cloak didn’t stop him being solid. He backed away as quietly as he could. A door stood ajar to his left. It was his only chance. He squeezed through it, holding his breath, trying not to move it, and to his relief he got inside without their noticing a thing. They went straight past, and Harry leaned against the wall and breathed, and listened to their footsteps die away.

That had been close. Very close.

It was a few seconds before he noticed anything about the room. It looked like a disused classroom. Desks and chairs stood in dark heaps against the walls, and there was an upturned wastepaper basket, but propped against the wall facing him was something that didn’t belong there at all, something that looked as though it had simply been put there to be out of the way.

It was a magnificent mirror, as tall as the ceiling, in an ornate gold frame, standing on two clawed feet. A line of carved words ran round the top, and however he read them, they made no sense.

Now that there was no sound of Filch or Snape, his panic was fading, and Harry moved closer, wanting to look at himself and see no reflection again. He stepped in front of it.

He had to clap both hands over his mouth to stop himself screaming. He spun round. His heart was hammering far harder than it had when the book shrieked.

There was nobody behind him. But in the mirror, there were people all round him.

A man who looked like Harry, only taller and older, with untidy black hair. A woman with dark red hair and eyes exactly like Harry’s own. An old man with Harry’s knobbly knees, and beside him an old woman with the sort of kind, lined smile that spoke of old recipes and warm kitchens. Another old couple behind them. A small boy, and a smaller girl, holding hands and gazing up at him.

His mother. His father. Two sets of grandparents. A little brother. A sister. He could see it, all of it, as though he’d always known. They were waving at him, every one of them, beckoning him to come and meet them, and their faces were so warm, so glad to see him.

The voice in his head was silent. For the first time in Harry’s life, it had nothing to say at all.And that felt so sweet

Here was everything he had ever wanted. No Dursleys. No cupboard, no fists, no frying pan. People who wanted him as much as he wanted them. He put out his hand to touch his mother’s, and his fingers met cold glass.

Everything he had ever wanted, behind glass. Just out of reach. 

The voice found that funny. It started to laugh, No one ever really wanted him. So Harry looked at the mirror again and tried to drown out the voice. Perhaps he could pretend. Perhaps he could imagine what they’d really have been like. A dad who taught him Quidditch in the garden. A mum who gave him cuddles and sat with him when he was sad. Little ones who looked up to their big brother. Why couldn’t he have it? It wasn’t fair. Everyone else got a mother and father, brothers, sisters. People who wanted them. All Harry wanted is a family, people who wanted him. And it wasn’t real. The real thing was Privet Drive, and the shouting, and the cold. He never knew anything else so he never felt anything else. Now Harry felt anger bubble within him like a cauldron as he sat, stared and pretended the image was real.

He looked, and looked, and went on looking, until a distant noise somewhere in the castle brought him back to himself. He couldn’t stay here. He had to find his way back to bed. He dragged his eyes away from his mother’s face, whispered, ‘I’ll come back,’ and hurried out of the room.

For the first time he could remember, Harry Potter felt so lost and he wanted his mother and father back.

‘You could’ve woken me up,’ said Ron crossly, at breakfast.

‘You can come tonight. I’m going back. I want to show you the mirror.’

‘I’d like to see your mum and dad,’ said Ron eagerly.

‘And I want to see your lot, all the Weasleys, you can show me your other brothers and everyone.’

‘You can see them any old time,’ said Ron. ‘Just come round ours in the summer. Anyway, maybe it only shows dead people. Shame about Flamel, though. Here, have some bacon. Why aren’t you eating?’

Harry couldn’t eat. He’d seen his parents, and he was going to see them again tonight. He’d almost forgotten about Flamel. It didn’t seem to matter much any more. Who cared what the three-headed dog was guarding? What did it matter, really, if Snape stole it?

‘You all right?’ said Ron. ‘You look odd.’

What Harry was most afraid of was that he wouldn’t be able to find the room again. With Ron under the Cloak as well, they had to go much more slowly the next night. They tried to retrace Harry’s route from the library and wandered the dark passages for the best part of an hour.

‘I’m freezing,’ said Ron. ‘Let’s forget it and go back.’

‘No!’ Harry hissed. ‘I know it’s here somewhere.’

They passed the ghost of a tall witch gliding the other way, and nobody else. Just as Ron started moaning that his feet had died of cold, Harry saw the suit of armour.

‘It’s here. Just here. Yes!’

They pushed the door open. Harry let the Cloak fall from his shoulders and ran to the mirror. There they were. His mother and father beamed at the sight of him.

‘See?’ Harry whispered.

‘I can’t see anything.’

‘Look! Look at them all. There are loads of them.’

‘I can only see you.’

‘Look properly. Go on, stand where I am.’

Harry stepped aside, and with Ron in front of the glass, he couldn’t see his family any more. Only Ron in his paisley pyjamas. Ron, though, was staring at himself as if he’d been turned to stone.

‘Look at me!’ he said.

‘Can you see your family all round you?’

‘No. I’m on my own. But I’m different. I look older. And I’m Head Boy!’

‘What?’

‘I am! I’ve got the badge on, like Bill used to, and I’m holding the House Cup, and the Quidditch Cup. I’m Quidditch captain as well!’

Ron tore his eyes away from this splendid vision to look excitedly at Harry.

‘D’you reckon this mirror shows the future?’

‘How can it? My whole family’s dead. Let me have another look.’

‘You had it all last night. Give me a bit longer.’

‘You’re only holding the Quidditch Cup, what’s so interesting about that? I want to see my parents.’

Harry pushed him. He hadn’t meant to push so hard. Ron had a family. Ron had everything, a mum to knit him jumpers and make him fudge, and he was standing in front of a mirror admiring a badge, and Harry had nothing at all except what was in that glass. He shoved him again.

‘Don’t push me...’

A sudden noise in the corridor outside put an end to it. They hadn’t realised how loud they were being.

‘Quick!’

Ron flung the Cloak back over them both as the lamp-like eyes of Mrs Norris came round the door. Ron and Harry stood stock still, both wondering the same thing: did the Cloak work on cats? After what felt like an age, she turned and went.

‘This isn’t safe. She might’ve gone for Filch. I bet she heard us. Come on.’

And Ron pulled Harry out of the room.

The snow still hadn’t melted the next morning.

‘Fancy a game of chess, Harry?’ said Ron.

‘No.’

‘Why don’t we go and see Hagrid?’

‘No... you go...’

‘I know what you’re thinking about, Harry. That mirror. Don’t go back tonight.’

‘Why not?’

And what did Ron know about it, anyway, with his big family and everything he could ever want? All the things Harry wanted. Ron had never had to look at them through glass.

That third night he found his way faster than before. He was walking so quickly that he knew he was making more noise than was sensible, but he met nobody. And there they were again, his mother and father smiling at him, and one of his grandfathers nodding away. Harry sank down to sit on the floor in front of the mirror. There was nothing to stop him staying here all night with his family. Nothing at all. Except...

‘So. Back again, Harry?’

Harry’s insides turned to ice. He looked round. Sitting on one of the desks by the wall, as comfortable as if he’d been there all evening, was Albus Dumbledore. Harry must have walked straight past him, so desperate to reach the mirror that he hadn’t noticed him at all.

‘I... I didn’t see you, sir.’

‘Strange, how short-sighted being invisible can make you,’ said Dumbledore, and Harry was relieved to see that he was smiling. ‘So,’ he went on, slipping down off the desk to sit on the floor beside Harry, ‘you’ve found your way, like hundreds before you, to the Mirror of Erised.’

‘I didn’t know it had a name, sir.’

‘But I expect you’ve worked out by now what it does?’

‘It... well... it shows me my family...’

‘And it showed your friend Ron as Head Boy.’

‘How did you know...?’

‘I don’t need a cloak to be invisible,’ said Dumbledore gently. ‘Now. Can you think what the Mirror of Erised shows us all?’

Harry shook his head.

‘Let me put it this way. The happiest man alive could use this mirror like any other. He’d look into it and see himself exactly as he is. Does that help?’

Harry thought about it.

‘It shows us what we want,’ he said slowly. ‘Whatever we want.’

‘Yes and no,’ said Dumbledore quietly. ‘It shows us nothing more and nothing less than the deepest, most desperate wish of our hearts. You, who have never known your family, see them standing round you. Ronald Weasley, who has spent his whole life in his brothers’ shadow, sees himself standing alone, the best of all of them. But the mirror gives us neither knowledge nor truth. Men have wasted away in front of it, lost in what they saw, or been driven mad by it, never knowing whether what it showed them was real or even possible.

‘Children’s wishes are generally simpler things. The mirror didn’t draw young Mr Weasley back the way it would draw a grown man with a lifetime of regrets. And yet it has taken a powerful hold on you, Mr Potter. Your wish burns very brightly. It is one of the simplest things a human being can need, and one that was never given to you. Love. A family.’

Dumbledore sighed.

‘I am sorry, Mr Potter,’ he said.

And for a moment Harry had the odd impression that something very heavy was resting on the old man’s shoulders, something that had been there a long time. Then it was gone, and Dumbledore was himself again.

‘The mirror will be moved to a new home tomorrow, Harry, and I am going to ask you not to go looking for it. If you ever do come across it again, you will be ready for it now. People like you and me, Harry, we go on living, burdened by destiny. We have our regrets, The things we wished we didn’t do and wished weren’t done to us. It is so easy for one such as yourself to look at this mirror and feel robbed by the world. To seethe at those who take for granted that which has been denied you. This mirror is a danger to people like us. It lets us dream of something better without lifting a finger to make it real, or it shows us a better world than there could ever be. And one can’t live on dreams, however sweet the dreaming. Living can be joy, suffering, love, and sadness. And the pain comes with all the love that no dream will ever match. Remember that. Now. Why don’t you put that admirable Cloak back on and go to bed?’

Harry stood up.

‘Sir? Professor Dumbledore? Can I ask you something?’

‘Plainly you can, since you’ve just done it,’ Dumbledore smiled. ‘You may ask me one thing more, however.’

‘What do you see, when you look in the mirror?’

‘I?’ Dumbledore turned and looked into the glass, and smiled at what he saw there. ‘I see myself holding a thick pair of woollen socks.’

Harry stared at him.

‘One can never have too many socks,’ said Dumbledore. ‘Another Christmas come and gone, and not a single pair. People will insist on giving me books.’

It was only when he was back in bed that it occurred to Harry that Dumbledore might not have been entirely truthful. But then, he thought, as he pushed Scabbers off his pillow, it had been rather a personal question.

Chapter 9 : Five Minutes

Five Minutes

Harry longed to see the mirror again. Just once more. Just long enough to look at his mother’s face, and his father’s, and fix them properly in his memory, which was a thing he’d never had the chance to do.

But Dumbledore’s words had stuck.

A great many things had happened to Harry in his life that he’d had no say in, and until very recently he hadn’t thought much about any of them. That was simply how things were. He’d never expected anything better, so he’d never missed it. Then Hagrid had knocked the door down, and Harry had been swept off into this wonderful, mad world of witches and wizards, where strangers in the Leaky Cauldron had queued up to shake his hand, and where nobody, not one single person, not even that dreadful Malfoy girl, had ever hit him, or thrown him about, or locked him in a cupboard. There was something in that kind of happiness that you could get hooked on. That was the trick of the mirror, Harry thought, and the danger of it. It fed on exactly that hunger, the wanting of something better that everyone else seemed to have been born with and that had only lately woken up in him, and now burned so brightly that it frightened him a little.

So he did as Dumbledore asked and stayed away. He didn’t want to disappoint Dumbledore, anyway.

The trouble was that now he was having nightmares. The same one, over and over. A flash of green light so bright it hurt, and a woman screaming.

Term had started again and everyone was back. Harry was sitting alone at the Gryffindor table eating what he hoped were Cheerios. You could never be entirely sure, with wizards. His mind drifted while he ate. He found himself wondering what it would be like for somebody to want him the way the people in the mirror had seemed to. To be looked at like that by someone who was real.

‘All on your own, Potter?’

Dracina Malfoy had stopped beside him, with no Crabbe or Goyle in sight. ‘Have your stupid friends finally ditched you? I suppose it was only a matter of time.’

‘Go away, Malfoy,’ said Harry.

‘Make me, Pottyhead.’

Harry sighed and went back to his Cheerios. He’d found that this worked better than anything else he’d tried. Malfoy stood there. She went on standing there. Then, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, she sat down on the bench beside him and arranged her robes, and reached across him for the toast rack.

‘He asked you to leave him alone, Malfoy.’

Ron had arrived, with Hermione at his shoulder, and the pair of them sat down on Harry’s other side. Hermione had been back for days, and had already told Harry a great deal about her Christmas, her parents, her grandmother’s house, and the dentistry conference in Harrogate, most of it twice.

Malfoy’s nose went up.

‘Fine,’ she said, standing. ‘Enjoy your dirty, poor little Weasel, Potter.’

And she stamped back to the Slytherin table, where she sat down between Crabbe and Goyle and began at once to instruct them, loudly, on the correct way to hold a knife, which went over their heads like the owls bringing the post.

Harry was glad his friends had come to find him, and he lost himself in talking to them, even as Malfoy went on announcing to the whole Slytherin table how marvellous her friends were and how terribly important all their fathers were. Why on earth did she do that? he thought. It was so obnoxious. He turned his back on it and listened to Ron instead.

They had nearly given up on ever finding Flamel in a library book, though Harry was still certain he’d read the name somewhere. Once term began they were back to skimming through books for ten minutes at a time during breaks. Harry had even less time than the other two, because Quidditch practice had started again.

Harry loved Quidditch. But he was beginning to dislike Quidditch practice very much. Wood was working the team harder than ever, and even the endless rain that had replaced the snow couldn’t dampen him. The Weasleys complained that he’d turned into a Quidditch fanatic, but Harry understood why, even if he hated how back-breaking the sessions had become. If they beat Hufflepuff in their next match, they would overtake Slytherin in the House Championship for the first time in seven years.

Quite apart from wanting to win, Harry found that he had fewer nightmares on the nights he came in worn out from training. So he never complained. He got on with it. And for some reason this seemed to make Wood extraordinarily happy. He took to clapping Harry on the back and praising him exactly as hard as he shouted at everybody else, though he never spared Harry a proper telling-off when Harry earned one. It was the praise, more than anything, that drove Harry on. He found he was thinking about the mirror less and less.

One afternoon, with the rain coming down in sheets, Wood had some very bad news for them. He’d just finished giving the twins a roasting for dive-bombing each other and pretending to fall off their brooms in a way that would have stripped the paint off Hagrid’s hut.

‘Will you two stop messing about, you complete and utter plonkers!’ he bellowed. ‘We’ll lose this match if you keep that up, you pair of idiots! Snape’s refereeing this time, and he’ll be looking for any excuse he can find to knock points off Gryffindor, so you’d better pack it in before I get the Bludgers out and make you run from them!’

George Weasley really did fall off his broom at that.

‘Snape’s refereeing?’ he spluttered, through a mouthful of mud. ‘When’s he ever refereed a Quidditch match? That greasy pillock will fix the whole thing so we can’t overtake Slytherin!’

The rest of the team landed round George to complain too.

‘It’s not my fault,’ said Wood, pinching the bridge of his nose. ‘We’ve got to play a clean game. Absolutely clean. So Snape hasn’t got an excuse to pick on us.’

Which was all very well, Harry thought, but he had a reason of his own for not wanting Snape anywhere near him while he was fifty feet up on a broomstick.

The rest of the team hung back in the changing rooms to talk, as they usually did after practice, but Harry went straight up to the Gryffindor common room, where he found Ron and Hermione playing chess. Chess was the only thing Hermione ever lost at, which Harry and Ron agreed was very good for her.

‘Don’t talk to me for a minute,’ said Ron, as Harry sat down beside him. ‘I need to concen...’ He caught sight of Harry’s face and let his knight go. ‘What’s the matter, mate? You look terrible.’

Keeping his voice down so nobody else could hear, Harry told them about Snape’s sudden and sinister interest in refereeing Quidditch.

‘Don’t play,’ said Hermione at once. She’d moved a little closer to Harry as she said it, and there was something oddly fierce in her face.

‘Say you’re ill,’ said Ron.

‘Pretend to break your leg,’ said Hermione.

‘Really break your leg,’ said Ron.

‘Bloody hell, Ron,’ said Harry. ‘I’m not breaking my own leg.’

‘Or say you’ve got a cold,’ Ron pressed on, warming to it. ‘A sneezing slug cold. Or, oh, a crackle-cough fit! I had one of those once. It was horrible. You cough and these little sparks come out...’

‘I can’t, anyway,’ said Harry. ‘There isn’t a reserve Seeker. If I back out, Gryffindor can’t play at all.’

And he didn’t want to let the team down. He wanted to win.

At that moment Neville toppled through the portrait hole into the common room. How he’d got through it at all was anybody’s guess, because his legs were stuck fast together, and everyone recognised the Leg-Locker Curse at once. He must have bunny-hopped the whole way up to Gryffindor Tower.

Everybody fell about laughing, except Hermione, who jumped up and did the counter-curse. Neville’s legs sprang apart and he got up, shaking all over.

‘What happened?’ said Hermione, steering him to a chair beside Harry and Ron.

‘Malfoy,’ said Neville shakily. ‘I met her outside the library. She said she’d been looking for someone in particular to practise that on. But that I’d do.’

What a nasty bully she was, Harry thought. And he had a cold, uncomfortable feeling that he knew exactly who the someone in particular had been.

‘Go to Professor McGonagall!’ Hermione urged. ‘Report her!’

Neville shook his head.

‘I don’t want any more trouble,’ he mumbled.

‘You’ve got to stand up to her, Neville!’ said Ron.  ‘She’s a spoilt brat used to getting her own way, but that’s no reason to lie down in front of her and make it easy.’

‘There’s no need to tell me I’m not brave enough for Gryffindor,’ Neville choked. ‘Malfoy’s already done that.’

Harry looked at him, and saw himself, at nine years old, after Dudley and his gang had finished with him. He knew exactly how alone Neville felt at this moment, and he didn’t want anyone to feel like that. He felt in the pocket of his robes and found a Chocolate Frog, the last one left from the box Hermione had given him at Christmas, and held it out. Neville looked as if he might cry.

‘You’re worth twelve of Malfoy,’ said Harry. ‘The Sorting Hat knows what it’s doing. It put you in Gryffindor, didn’t it? And where did it put Malfoy? Slimy old Slytherin.’

Neville’s mouth twitched into a weak smile as he unwrapped the Frog.

‘Thanks, Harry... I think I’ll go to bed... d’you want the card? You collect them, don’t you?’

Harry watched him go up the stairs, worrying about him, and then glanced down at the card in his hand.

‘Dumbledore again,’ he said. ‘He was the first one I ever...’

He stopped. He stared at the back of the card. Then he looked up at Ron and Hermione.

‘Ha! Result!‘ he shouted, so loudly that two second-years looked round. ‘I’ve found Flamel! I told you I’d seen the name somewhere. It was on the train! Listen to this: "Professor Dumbledore is best known for overcoming the Dark wizard Grindelwald in 1945, for discovering the twelve uses of dragon’s blood, and for his alchemical work with his partner, Nicolas Flamel"!’

Hermione leapt to her feet. She hadn’t looked so excited since the day they’d got the marks back for their first ever piece of homework.

‘Stay there!’ she said, and she sprinted up the stairs to the girls’ dormitories.

Harry and Ron looked at each other, baffled, but she was back before they could say anything, with an enormous old book clutched to her chest.

‘I never thought to look in here!’ she whispered. ‘I got it out of the library weeks ago, for a bit of light reading.’

‘Light?’ said Ron, but Hermione told him to be quiet until she’d found what she wanted, and began flicking frantically through the pages, muttering under her breath.

At last she stopped.

‘I knew it! I knew it!’

‘Great,’ said Ron. ‘Are we allowed to speak yet?’

Hermione waved a hand at him without looking up, and for a second she looked remarkably like Malfoy.

‘Nicolas Flamel,’ she whispered, with great drama, ‘is the only known maker of the Philosopher’s Stone!’

Harry and Ron stared at her and waited for elaboration.

‘You what?’ said Ron.

Hermione gave him a withering look.

‘Oh, honestly. Don’t either of you ever read? Look. Read that. There.’

She shoved the book across to them, and Harry and Ron read.

The ancient art of alchemy has one great object: the making of the Philosopher’s Stone, a legendary substance of extraordinary power. The Stone will turn any metal into pure gold, and it yields the Elixir of Life, which renders the drinker immortal. Many claims to the Stone have been made down the centuries, but the only one known to exist today belongs to Mr Nicolas Flamel, the celebrated alchemist and lover of opera. Mr Flamel, who marked his six hundred and sixty-fifth birthday last year, lives quietly in Devon with his wife Perenelle (six hundred and fifty-eight).

‘See?’ said Hermione, when they’d finished. ‘The dog must be guarding Flamel’s Philosopher’s Stone! I bet he asked Dumbledore to look after it for him, because they’re friends and he knew somebody was after it. That’s why he wanted it moved out of Gringotts!’

‘A stone that makes gold and stops you dying,’ said Harry. ‘No wonder Snape wants it. Anyone would.’

‘And no wonder we couldn’t find Flamel in A Study of Recent Developments in Wizardry,’ said Ron. ‘He’s not exactly recent, is he, if he’s six hundred and sixty-five.’

The next morning in Defence Against the Dark Arts, while they copied down the different ways of treating a werewolf bite, Harry and Ron were still arguing about what they’d do with a Philosopher’s Stone of their own.

‘I’d buy the Chudley Cannons,’ said Ron. ‘And sort them right out. You watch. I’d have them top of the Prime league inside a year. ’

Then Harry remembered Snape, and the match, and his stomach dropped.

‘I’m going to play,’ he told Ron and Hermione, and he felt the same resolve settle in him that he’d felt on the broom, when it had done its best to throw him off and he’d simply refused to go. Let the world try to move him. Let the gods try, if there were any. ‘If I don’t, every Slytherin in the school will think I was too scared to face Snape. I’ll show them. It’ll really wipe the smiles off their faces if we win. Especially Malfoy’s.’

‘Just as long as we’re not scraping you off the pitch,’ said Hermione.

‘Don’t worry about me, Hermione,’ said Harry. ‘I won’t let Slytherin win.’

Hermione looked away from him then, rather quickly, and went very pink, and Harry couldn’t think why. He decided it was odd, and left it.

As the match drew nearer, though, and whatever he said to Ron and Hermione, Harry grew more and more nervous. The rest of the team weren’t exactly calm either. The thought of overtaking Slytherin in the Championship was wonderful. Nobody had managed it in nearly seven years. But would they be allowed to, with a referee like that?

Harry didn’t know whether he was imagining it, but he seemed to run into Snape wherever he went. He even began to wonder whether Snape was following him, trying to catch him alone, probably so that he could punish him for breaking some rule nobody had ever heard of. Potions had turned into a weekly torture, Snape was so horrible to him. Could Snape possibly know they’d found out about the Stone? Harry couldn’t see how. Yet he sometimes had the horrible feeling that Snape could read minds.

Malfoy was no better. She was giving him grief every minute of every lesson they shared.

‘You’re stirring it the wrong way, Potter,’ she said, in Potions, over her cauldron. ‘Anticlockwise. Honestly. Were you raised in a barn?’

‘It says clockwise.’

‘It says clockwise for that stage. You’re on the next one. Look, give it here.’ And she’d reached over, taken his ladle out of his hand, stirred his potion three times the other way, and dropped the ladle back in the cauldron with a splash. ‘There. Now it won’t explode. You’re welcome.’

Harry’s potion had been, admittedly, a much better colour after that, which only made it worse. He had to get her back for Neville. He just hadn’t worked out how.

When Ron and Hermione wished him luck outside the changing rooms the next afternoon, Harry could see that they were wondering whether they’d ever see him alive again, which wasn’t what you’d call comforting. He hardly heard a word of Wood’s pep talk, which was very loud and contained a great deal of swearing, as he pulled on his Quidditch robes and picked up his Nimbus Two Thousand.

Ron and Hermione, meanwhile, had found seats in the stands beside Neville, who couldn’t understand why they both looked so grim, or why they’d both brought their wands to a Quidditch match. What Harry didn’t know was that the two of them had been secretly practising the Leg-Locker Curse. They’d got the idea from Malfoy using it on Neville, and they were ready to use it on Snape the moment he showed any sign of wanting to hurt Harry.

‘Don’t forget, it’s Locomotor Mortis,’ Hermione muttered, as Ron slid his wand up his sleeve.

‘I know,’ Ron snapped. ‘Stop nagging. And stop giving Harry those funny looks, it’s putting me off.’

Back in the changing room, Wood had taken Harry aside.

‘I don’t want to put any pressure on you, Potter,’ he said, ‘but, mate, we are in the shit right now. If we ever needed an early Snitch it’s today. Right bloody now. Get it caught before Snape can mess us about too much, yeah?’

‘The whole school’s out there!’ said Fred Weasley, peering round the door. ‘Even... blimey. Dumbledore’s come to watch!’

Harry’s heart turned a somersault.

‘Dumbledore?’ he said, dashing to the door to see for himself.

Fred was right. There was no mistaking that silver beard. Harry could have laughed out loud with relief. He was safe. Snape would never dare try anything with Dumbledore watching.

Perhaps that was why Snape looked so furious as the teams marched out on to the pitch, which Ron noticed too.

‘I’ve never seen Snape look so mean,’ he told Hermione. ‘Look, they’re off...’

But the rest of what he said was drowned out, because the Gryffindor stand had started to sing.

It was Dean Thomas’s doing. He’d grown up on the terraces at Upton Park, and he’d been saying all week that it was a disgrace, a proper disgrace, that a school with a stadium that size had never once had a decent chant in it. He’d spent three evenings in the common room with a quill and a stack of parchment, and now he was on his feet on the front bench with his Gryffindor scarf stretched between his fists, bellowing out the first line while fifty Gryffindors roared it back at him.

‘Yellow and black, yellow and black,

You’ve the colours of a wasp and the sting of a slug!

Loyal and true, loyal and true,

Loyal to losing, that’s all that you do!’

The Hufflepuff stand opposite looked thoroughly bewildered. Hufflepuffs did not, as a rule, get sung at.

‘What’s a badger good for? Digging a hole!

What’s a Hufflepuff good for? Guarding the coal!

Patience and hard work, that’s what they say,

You’ll need a lot of patience watching Hufflepuff play!’

‘Dean,’ said Hermione, very pale. ‘That’s horrible.’

‘That’s the point,’ said Dean happily, and launched into the third one, which was about the Hufflepuff Seeker, and rhymed his name with something Hermione pretended not to hear. Percy was working his way along the row towards Dean with his Prefect badge polished and his mouth set, and from the far end of the stand Hagrid could be heard saying, ‘Steady on, lads, steady on, it’s only Hufflepuff,’ and not being listened to.

‘OUCH!’

Somebody had poked Ron hard in the back of the head. It was Malfoy, sniggering.

‘Oh, sorry, Weasley. Didn’t see you there.’

She had come down from the Slytherin end, Ron noticed, with Crabbe and Goyle in tow, and she’d put herself in the row directly behind him. Crabbe and Goyle had settled on either side of her, and she looked, for a second, like somebody checking that the furniture was where she’d left it. Then she grinned at the pair of them.

‘Wonder how long Potter will stay on his broom this time?’ she said, and if anyone had been listening who didn’t know her, they’d have said she sounded worried. Then she glanced at Crabbe and Goyle, and her voice slid back to its usual smugness. ‘Anyone want to bet? What about you, Weasley?’

Ron didn’t answer. Malfoy had it in for his best mate, and she was only trying to bait him. Snape had just awarded Hufflepuff a penalty because George Weasley had hit a Bludger at him. Hermione, who had all her fingers crossed in her lap, was squinting fixedly at Harry, who was circling high above the game like a hawk, looking for the Snitch.

‘You know how I think they pick people for the Gryffindor team?’ said Malfoy loudly a few minutes later, checking first that Crabbe and Goyle were looking at her, as Snape gave Hufflepuff another penalty for nothing at all. ‘It’s people they feel sorry for. See, there’s Potter, who’s got no parents. Then there’s the Weasleys, who’ve got no money. You ought to be on the team, Longbottom. You’ve got no brains.’

Neville went scarlet, but he turned round in his seat to face her.

‘I’m worth twelve of you, Malfoy,’ he stammered.

Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle howled with laughter, but Ron, still not daring to look away from the game, said, ‘You tell her, Neville.’

‘Longbottom, if brains were Galleons you’d be poorer than Weasley, and that’s saying something.’

Ron’s nerves were already stretched to snapping with worry about Harry.

‘Those are my mates you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘I’m warning you, Malfoy. One more word...’

‘Ronald!’ said Hermione suddenly. ‘Harry...!’

‘What? Where?’

Harry had gone into a spectacular dive that drew gasps and cheers from the whole crowd. Hermione was on her feet with her crossed fingers in her mouth as he streaked towards the ground like a bullet.

Malfoy leaned forward until her chin was almost on Ron’s shoulder. She took one quick look to her left, where Crabbe was, and one to her right, where Goyle was, as though counting them, and then she said, very clearly, right into Ron’s ear:

‘You’re in luck, Weasley! Potter’s obviously spotted some money on the ground!’

Ron snapped.

Before Malfoy knew what was happening, he had twisted round and launched himself at her, and the pair of them went backwards over the bench in a tangle, Ron saying things that muggles would’ve said were very unchristian.

‘Crabbe! Goyle! Now!‘ Malfoy shrieked, and there was something in the way she said it, something almost bored, as if she’d been expecting this and was only waiting for it to be dealt with.

Nothing happened. Neville had hesitated for about half a second, then clambered over the back of the seat to pull Ron off before he got himself expelled for hitting a girl, and Crabbe and Goyle, who were already lumbering to their feet, found Neville Longbottom in their way, and Neville, to the astonishment of everybody including Neville, hit Goyle in the stomach.

‘Crabbe!‘ Malfoy screamed again, and this time there was nothing bored about it at all.

And then, since nobody was coming, she stopped screaming and fought.

‘Come on, Harry!’ Hermione shrieked, jumping up on to her seat to watch as Harry sped straight at Snape. She was so taken up with Harry that she never noticed Malfoy and Ron rolling about beneath her feet, or the scuffles and yelps from the whirl of fists that was Neville, who was taking on Crabbe and Goyle single-handed and making a surprisingly good job of it. Nor did she see what the people in the next row saw, and talked about for a week afterwards: that once Dracina Malfoy had stopped waiting to be rescued, it was Ron Weasley who was in trouble. She went for his face with both hands. She got a fistful of red hair and pulled until he yelled. She raked four lines down his cheek with her nails, and when he grabbed her wrists she sank her teeth into his ear, and the whole time she was screaming at him. When Ron tried to remember it afterwards, he couldn’t recall a word about money, or his family, or any of the usual things. As far as he could make out, it had all been about Harry, and about who Harry spent his time with, and he couldn’t make head or tail of that at all.

Up in the air, Snape wheeled his broom round just in time to see a streak of scarlet shoot past him, missing him by inches, and the next second Harry had pulled out of the dive with his arm raised, the Snitch clenched in his fist.

The stands went mad. It had to be a record. Nobody could remember the Snitch ever being caught so fast.

Dean Thomas was on the front bench again before the cheering had even peaked, both arms in the air, and the whole Gryffindor stand came in behind him on the first word.

‘Five minutes! Five minutes!

You lasted five minutes!

We’ve had longer waits for the stairs to come round,

You lasted five minutes!’

And then, as the Hufflepuff team drifted down to the grass looking as though they weren’t quite sure what had happened to them, the stand took up a new one, slower and crueller, which Dean conducted with his scarf.

‘Can we play you every week?

Can we play you every week?

Go home to your badger sett,

Can we play you every week?’

‘DEAN THOMAS!’ Professor McGonagall’s voice carried over the whole stadium. ‘That will DO!’

‘Yes, Professor,’ said Dean, and did one more verse.

‘Ron! Ron! Where are you? The game’s over! Harry’s won! We’ve won! Gryffindor are in the lead!’ shrieked Hermione, dancing up and down on her seat and hugging Parvati Patil in the row in front.

Harry jumped off his broom a foot above the ground. He couldn’t believe it. He’d done it. The game was over, and it had lasted barely five minutes. As the Gryffindors came pouring on to the pitch he saw Snape land nearby, white-faced and thin-lipped, and then he felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up into Dumbledore’s smiling face.

‘Well done,’ said Dumbledore quietly, so that only Harry could hear. ‘Good to see you haven’t been brooding over that mirror. Keeping busy. Excellent.’

Snape spat bitterly on the grass.

Harry felt a glow of pride he’d never felt before in his life. He’d impressed Dumbledore. And he wanted to impress him more.

Some time later, Harry left the changing room alone to take his Nimbus Two Thousand back to the broomshed. He couldn’t remember ever feeling so happy. He’d really done something to be proud of now. Nobody could say he was just a famous name any more. He’d impressed Dumbledore. The evening air felt full of triumph. His triumph.

He walked across the damp grass reliving the last hour, which was a happy blur: Gryffindors rushing to hoist him on to their shoulders; Ron and Hermione in the distance, jumping up and down, Ron cheering through a heavy nosebleed; and then Ron and Malfoy being marched off by Professor McGonagall, Ron with blood down his collar and one side of his face scratched to ribbons, Malfoy with a swelling eye and her hair all over the place, screaming and crying and trying to get a last swipe in at Ron while Professor McGonagall held them firmly apart by the collars. Harry had seen a good many fights at his old school. He’d never seen a girl fight like that, and he’d never seen anyone come out of a fight with Ron looking as though they’d won it.

Malfoy had noticed Harry looking. She’d given him the strangest look, a sad one, and then she’d sighed, and stopped shouting, and let Professor McGonagall take her and Ron away without another word. It was very odd. But at least Malfoy was finally in trouble for something, and Harry was sure Ron would be able to tell Professor McGonagall that he’d been provoked.

He reached the shed, leaned on the wooden door, and looked up at Hogwarts, its windows glowing red in the setting sun. Gryffindor in the lead. He’d done it. He’d shown Snape.

And speaking of Snape.

A hooded figure came swiftly down the front steps of the castle. It plainly didn’t want to be seen, and it walked as fast as it could towards the Forbidden Forest. Harry’s victory went clean out of his head as he watched. He knew that prowling walk. Snape, sneaking into the Forest while everyone else was at dinner. What was going on?

Harry jumped back on to his broom and took off. Gliding silently over the castle, he saw Snape break into a run and vanish among the trees. He followed. The trees were so thick that he couldn’t see where Snape had gone. He flew in circles, lower and lower, brushing the topmost branches, until he heard voices. He glided towards them and landed without a sound in a towering beech tree, and worked his way carefully along a branch with his broom held tight, trying to see through the leaves.

Below, in a shadowy clearing, stood Snape. He wasn’t alone. Quirrell was with him. Harry couldn’t make out the look on his face, but he was stammering worse than ever. Harry strained to hear.

‘... d-don’t know why you w-wanted to m-meet here, of all p-places, Severus...’

‘Oh, I thought we’d keep this private,’ said Snape, and his voice was like ice. ‘Students aren’t supposed to know about the Philosopher’s Stone, after all.’

Harry leaned forward. Quirrell was mumbling something. Snape cut across him.

‘Have you worked out how to get past that beast of Hagrid’s yet?’

‘B-b-but, Severus, I...’

‘You don’t want me for an enemy, Quirrell,’ said Snape, and took a step towards him.

‘I... I d-don’t know what you...’

‘You know perfectly well what I mean.’

An owl hooted, loud and close, and Harry nearly fell out of the tree. He got his balance back in time to hear Snape say, ‘... your little bit of hocus-pocus. I’m waiting.’

‘B-but I d-d-don’t...’

‘Very well,’ said Snape. ‘We’ll have another little talk soon, when you’ve had time to think things over and decide where your loyalties lie.’

He threw his cloak up over his head and strode out of the clearing. It was nearly dark now, but Harry could still see Quirrell, standing quite still, as though somebody had turned him to stone.

‘Harry! Where’ve you been?’ Hermione squeaked.

‘We won! You won! We won!’ shouted Ron, who was back from wherever Professor McGonagall had taken him, and he thumped Harry on the back. ‘And I gave Malfoy a black eye. Didn’t mean to, exactly, she sort of ran into it. Look what she did to me, though!’ He turned his head. There was a crescent of tooth marks on his ear, and four raw red lines down his cheek, and a bald patch above one temple where a handful of hair had been. ‘She bit me. She’s mental, Harry. Properly mental. And Neville tried to take on Crabbe and Goyle on his own! Mate, he battered them! He’s still out cold, but Madam Pomfrey says he’ll be fine. Talk about showing Slytherin! Everyone’s waiting for you in the common room, we’re having a party, Fred and George nicked some cakes and stuff from the kitchens.’

‘Never mind that now,’ said Harry breathlessly. ‘Let’s find an empty room. You wait till you hear this...’

He checked that Peeves wasn’t lurking inside before he shut the door behind them, and then he told them what he’d seen and heard.

‘So we were right. It is the Philosopher’s Stone, and Snape’s trying to force Quirrell to help him get it. He asked him if he knew how to get past Fluffy, and he said something about Quirrell’s "hocus-pocus". I reckon there are other things guarding the Stone, apart from Fluffy. Loads of enchantments, probably, and Quirrell must have done some anti-Dark Arts spell that Snape needs to break through...’

‘So you mean the Stone’s only safe as long as Quirrell stands up to Snape?’ said Hermione in alarm.

‘It’ll be gone by next Tuesday,’ said Ron.

Chapter 10 : The Egg in the Fire

Somehow, and against every expectation, Quirrell turned out to be braver than Harry, Ron and Hermione had given him credit for. This came as a surprise, when you remembered that the man in question had once fainted in front of the whole school at the mere mention of a troll.

In the weeks that followed, every time they passed the third-floor corridor, the three of them would creep up to the door and press their ears to it, to make sure Fluffy was still growling away on the other side. He always was. And Snape went on sweeping about the castle in his usual foul temper, which surely meant the Stone was still where it ought to be. Whenever Harry passed Quirrell in a corridor these days he gave him an encouraging sort of smile, and Ron had taken to telling people off for laughing at Quirrell’s stutter.

Hermione, though, had more on her mind than the Philosopher’s Stone. She had begun drawing up revision timetables and colour-coding all her notes. Harry and Ron wouldn’t have minded that in the least, if she hadn’t kept nagging them to do the same.

‘Hermione, the exams are ages away.’

‘Ten weeks,’ Hermione snapped. There was something slightly unhinged in her eyes. ‘That isn’t ages. That’s about a second, to Nicolas Flamel.’

‘Yeah, but we’re not six hundred years old,’ Ron pointed out. ‘And what are you revising for, anyway? You know it all already.’

‘What am I revising for? Are you mad? Do you realise we have to pass these exams to get into second year? They’re enormously important, I ought to have started a month ago, I don’t know what’s got into me...’

Unfortunately, the teachers seemed to share Hermione’s view. They piled on so much homework that the Easter holidays were looking more like the German defense of Normandy in World War 2. Absolutely merciless. And the bodies were piling up. It was hard to relax with Hermione beside you reciting the twelve uses of dragon’s blood, or practising wand movements in the air, or finding some reason to be in whatever room Harry happened to be in. He’d given up asking how she always knew where he was.

Then there was Malfoy. She’d spent the weeks since the Hufflepuff match telling anyone who’d hold still what a violent, dangerous animal Ron Weasley was, and that nobody but a werewolf would attack a lady so savagely, and that her father was looking into it. Most people had been in the stands and had seen perfectly well who’d started it. Ron, for his part, simply kept out of her way.

‘She bit my ear, Harry,’ he said, more than once, touching it. ‘She’s mental.’

Moaning and yawning, Harry and Ron spent most of their free time in the library with Hermione, trying to get through all their extra work.

‘I’ll never remember this,’ Ron burst out one afternoon, flinging his quill down and gazing longingly out of the window. It was the first properly fine day they’d had in months. The sky was a clear forget-me-not blue, and there was a feeling in the air of summer on its way.

Harry, who was looking up dittany in One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi, didn’t look up until he heard Ron say, ‘Hagrid! What are you doing in the library?’

Hagrid shuffled into view with something held behind his back. He looked very out of place in his moleskin overcoat among the bookshelves.

‘Jus’ lookin’,’ he said, in a shifty sort of voice that got all three of them interested at once. ‘An’ what’re you lot up ter?’ He peered at them with sudden suspicion. ‘Yer not still huntin’ fer Nicolas Flamel, are yeh?’

‘Oh, we worked out who he was ages ago,’ said Ron grandly. ‘And we know what that dog’s guarding, too, it’s a Philosopher’s St...’

‘Shhhh!‘ Hagrid looked round wildly to see whether anyone had heard. ‘Don’ go shoutin’ it about! What’s the matter with yeh?’

‘There were a few things we wanted to ask you, actually,’ said Harry. ‘About what’s guarding the Stone, apart from Fluffy...’

‘SHHHH!‘ said Hagrid again. ‘Listen. Come an’ see me later. I’m not promisin’ I’ll tell yeh anythin’, mind, but don’ go rabbitin’ on about it in here. Students aren’ s’posed ter know. They’ll think I’ve been tellin’ yeh...’

‘See you later, then,’ said Harry.

Hagrid shuffled off.

‘What was he hiding behind his back?’ said Hermione thoughtfully. ‘Do you think it’s got anything to do with the Stone?’

‘I’m going to see what section he was in,’ said Ron, who’d had quite enough of homework.

He came back a minute later with an armful of books and dropped them on the table with a bang.

‘Dragons!’ he whispered. ‘Hagrid’s been looking up dragons! Look at these. Dragon Species of Great Britain and Ireland. From Egg to Inferno: A Dragon Keeper’s Guide.’

‘Hagrid’s always wanted a dragon,’ said Harry. ‘He told me so the first time I ever met him.’

‘But it’s against the law, mate’ said Ron. ‘Dragon breeding was banned by the Warlocks’ Convention of 1709. Everybody knows that. It’s hard enough stopping Muggles noticing us without people keeping dragons in the back garden. And you can’t tame them anyway, they’re dangerous. You should see the burns Charlie’s got off the wild ones in Romania.’

‘There aren’t wild dragons in Britain, though?’ said Harry.

‘Course there are,’ said Ron. ‘Common Welsh Greens and Hebridean Blacks. The Ministry of Magic has a job hushing them up, I can tell you. Our lot are forever having to put spells on Muggles who’ve spotted one, so they forget.’

‘So what on earth is Hagrid playing at?’ said Hermione.

When they knocked on the door of the gamekeeper’s hut an hour later, they were surprised to find every curtain drawn. Hagrid called, ‘Who is it?’ before he’d let them in, and shut the door fast behind them.

It was stiflingly hot inside. Warm as the day was, there was a fire blazing in the grate. Hagrid made them tea and offered round stoat sandwiches, which they declined.

‘So. Yeh wanted ter ask me somethin’?’

‘Yes,’ said Harry. There was no point going round the houses. ‘We were wondering if you could tell us what’s guarding the Philosopher’s Stone. Apart from Fluffy.’

Hagrid frowned at him.

‘Course I can’t,’ he said. ‘Fer one thing, I don’ know meself. Fer another, yeh already know far too much, so I wouldn’ tell yeh even if I did. That Stone’s here fer a good reason. Somebody nearly had it out o’ Gringotts. I s’pose yeh’ve worked that out an’ all? Beats me how yeh even know about Fluffy.’

‘Oh, come on, Hagrid,’ said Hermione, in a warm, coaxing voice that Harry had never heard her use before. ‘You might not want to tell us, but you do know. You know everything that goes on round here.’

Hagrid’s beard twitched, and they could tell he was smiling.

‘We only wondered who’d done the guarding, really,’ Hermione went on. She was smiling too, and the smile was doing something to Hagrid, and Harry found himself thinking, for no reason he could put his finger on, of Malfoy. ‘We wondered who Dumbledore trusted enough to help him. Apart from you.’

Hagrid’s chest swelled. Harry and Ron grinned at Hermione.

‘Well... I don’ s’pose it’d do any harm ter tell yeh that much... let’s see... he borrowed Fluffy off me... then some o’ the teachers did enchantments... Professor Sprout... Professor Flitwick... Professor McGonagall...’ He ticked them off on his fingers. ‘Professor Quirrell... an’ Dumbledore did somethin’ himself, o’ course. Hang on. I’ve missed one. Oh, yeah. Professor Snape.’

‘Snape?‘

‘Yeah. Yer not still on about that, are yeh? Look, Snape helped protect the Stone. He’s not about ter go stealin’ it.’

Harry knew the other two were thinking exactly what he was. If Snape had been part of guarding the Stone, it would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to find out how the other teachers had done their bit. He probably knew everything. Everything except Quirrell’s spell, by the sound of it, and how to get past Fluffy.

‘You’re the only one who knows how to get past Fluffy, aren’t you, Hagrid?’ said Harry anxiously. ‘And you wouldn’t tell anybody, would you? Not even a teacher?’

‘Not a soul knows but me an’ Dumbledore,’ said Hagrid proudly.

‘Well, that’s something,’ Harry muttered to the others. ‘Hagrid, could we open a window? I’m boiling.’

‘Can’t, Harry. Sorry,’ said Hagrid.

Harry saw him glance at the fire. He looked at it himself.

‘Hagrid. What’s that?’

But he knew what it was already. Right in the heart of the flames, under the kettle, sat an enormous black egg.

‘Ah,’ said Hagrid, fidgeting with his beard. ‘That’s... er...’

‘Where did you get it?’ said Ron, crouching down by the fire for a closer look. ‘It must’ve cost a fortune.’

‘Won it,’ said Hagrid. ‘Las’ night. I was down in the village havin’ a few, an’ got into a game o’ cards with a stranger. Think he was glad ter be shot of it, ter be honest.’

‘But what are you going to do with it once it’s hatched?’ said Hermione.

‘Well, I’ve bin doin’ some readin’,’ said Hagrid, and he pulled a big book out from under his pillow. ‘Got this outta the library. Dragon Breeding for Pleasure and Profit. It’s a bit out o’ date, o’ course, but it’s all in here. Keep the egg in the fire, ‘cause their mothers breathe on ‘em, see, an’ when it hatches, feed it a bucket o’ brandy mixed with chicken blood every half hour. An’ look here, how ter tell the diff’rent eggs apart. What I got there’s a Norwegian Ridgeback. They’re rare, them.’

He looked extremely pleased with himself. Hermione didn’t.

‘Hagrid,’ she said. ‘You live in a wooden house.’

But Hagrid wasn’t listening. He was humming to himself as he stoked the fire.

So now they had something new to worry about: what would happen to Hagrid if anybody found out he was keeping an illegal dragon in his hut.

‘Wonder what it’s like to have a quiet life,’ Ron sighed, as evening after evening they battled through the extra homework. Hermione had started making revision timetables for Harry and Ron now, too. It was driving them round the bend.

Then one morning at breakfast Hedwig brought Harry another note from Hagrid. It said only two words.

It’s hatching.

Ron wanted to skip Herbology and go straight down to the hut. He’d been on about dragons without a pause since the day they’d found the egg, and now there was one about to come out of its shell. Hermione wouldn’t hear of it.

‘Hermione, how many times in our lives are we going to see a dragon hatching?’

‘We’ve got lessons. We’ll get into trouble. And that’s nothing to the trouble Hagrid’s going to be in when somebody finds out what he’s...’

‘Shut up!’ Harry hissed.

A head of silver-blonde hair had come into view. Malfoy was a few feet away, and she’d stopped dead to listen. How much had the mad girl heard? Harry didn’t like the look on her face at all. It was the look of somebody doing maths in her head.

Ron and Hermione argued all the way to Herbology, and in the end Hermione agreed to run down to Hagrid’s with them at morning break. When the bell rang out from the castle at the end of the lesson, the three of them dropped their trowels and hurried off across the grounds to the edge of the Forest.

Hagrid met them at the door looking flushed and excited.

‘It’s nearly out.’

He bundled them inside. The egg lay on the table, deeply cracked, with something moving about in it and a strange clicking coming from within. They pulled their chairs up and watched with their breath held.

All at once there was a scraping sound and the egg split in two. The baby dragon flopped out on to the table. It wasn’t what you’d call pretty. Harry thought it looked like a crumpled black umbrella. Its spiny wings were enormous next to its thin jet-black body, and it had a long snout with wide nostrils, two stubs where horns would be, and bulging orange eyes.

It sneezed. A couple of sparks shot out of its nose.

‘Isn’t he beautiful?’ Hagrid murmured.

He reached out to stroke the dragon’s head. It snapped at his fingers, showing a mouthful of pointed fangs.

‘Bless him. Look! He knows his mummy!’

‘Hagrid,’ said Hermione, ‘how fast do Norwegian Ridgebacks grow? Exactly?’

Hagrid was opening his mouth to answer when every scrap of colour left his face. He leapt up and ran to the window.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Someone was lookin’ through the gap in the curtains. It’s a kid. She’s runnin’ back up ter the school.’

‘Stupid bloody girl!’ Harry shouted.

Harry bolted to the door and looked out. Even at a distance there was no mistaking that hair. Malfoy had seen the dragon.

Something hot and furious came up in Harry’s chest. He was out of the door and after her before he’d decided to be. She was fast, but Harry was angry, and halfway up the lawn he threw himself at her legs and brought her down in the grass.

‘Unhand me, Potter!’ Malfoy shrieked. ‘Assault! Assault! I’m being assaulted!’

It was the word that did it. Harry hesitated, for half a second, and half a second was all she needed. She shoved him off her with both hands and scrambled up.

‘I hate you, Pottyhead!’ she screamed, and then she was off again, faster than before, and through the oak doors ahead of him. Harry pounded up the marble staircase after her, took the first flight two steps at a time, and felt it shudder and swing beneath him. By the time it had finished moving he was on the fourth floor, facing a tapestry of trolls in tutus, and she was gone.

He trudged back down to Hagrid’s with nothing to show for it but grass stains, wondering what Malfoy would do next.

Something about the smile that lurked round Malfoy’s mouth all the following week made Harry, Ron and Hermione very uneasy. They spent most of their spare time in Hagrid’s darkened hut, trying to make him see sense.

‘Just let him go,’ Harry urged. ‘Set him free.’

‘I can’t,’ said Hagrid. ‘He’s too little. He’d die.’

They looked at the dragon. In a week it had grown to three times its length. Smoke kept curling out of its nostrils. Hagrid had let his gamekeeping slide entirely, the dragon kept him so busy, and the floor was strewn with empty brandy bottles and chicken feathers.

‘I’ve decided ter call him Norbert,’ said Hagrid, gazing at the dragon with misty eyes. ‘He really knows me now. Watch. Norbert! Norbert! Where’s Mummy?’

‘He’s lost his marbles,’ Ron muttered to Harry. ‘Hagrid, you’re a bloke. Blokes can’t be mums.’

‘Hagrid,’ said Harry loudly, ‘in a fortnight Norbert’s going to be as long as your house. And Malfoy could grass on you to Dumbledore any minute.’

Hagrid bit his lip.

‘I... I know I can’t keep him fer ever, but I can’t jus’ dump him. I can’t.’

Harry turned suddenly to Ron.

‘Charlie,’ he said.

‘You’ve gone funny too, mate,’ said Ron. ‘I’m Ron. Remember?’

‘No. Charlie. Your brother Charlie. In Romania. Studying dragons. We could send Norbert to him! Charlie can look after him, and then put him back in the wild!’

‘Brilliant!’ said Ron. ‘How about it, Hagrid?’

And in the end Hagrid agreed that they could send an owl to Charlie and ask.

The following week crawled by. Wednesday night found Harry and Hermione sitting alone in the common room long after everybody else had gone up to bed. The clock on the wall had just struck midnight when the portrait hole burst open and Ron appeared out of nowhere, dragging off Harry’s Invisibility Cloak. He’d been down at Hagrid’s, helping to feed Norbert, who was now eating dead rats by the crate.

‘It bit me!’ he said, holding out his hand, which was wrapped in a bloody handkerchief. ‘I won’t be able to hold a quill for a week. I’m telling you, that dragon’s the most horrible animal I’ve ever met, but to hear Hagrid talk you’d think it was a fluffy little bunny. When it bit me he told me off for frightening it. And when I left he was singing it a lullaby.’

There was a tap at the dark window.

‘Hedwig!’ said Harry, hurrying to let her in. ‘She’ll have Charlie’s answer!’

The three of them put their heads together over the letter.

Dear Ron,

How are you? Thanks for the letter. I’d be glad to take the Norwegian Ridgeback, but getting him out here won’t be easy. I think the best thing is to send him over with some friends of mine who are coming to visit next week. The trouble is, they can’t be seen carrying an illegal dragon about. Could you get the Ridgeback up the tallest tower at midnight on Saturday? They can meet you there and take him away while it’s still dark. Send me an answer as soon as you can.

Love, Charlie

They looked at one another.

‘We’ve got the Invisibility Cloak,’ said Harry. ‘It shouldn’t be too hard. I think the Cloak’s big enough to cover two of us and Norbert.’

It was a mark of how bad the last week had been that the other two agreed with him at once. Anything to be rid of Norbert. Anything to be rid of Malfoy, and her stupid, smug, very pretty silver eyes.

There was a hitch. By the next morning Ron’s bitten hand had swollen to twice its size. He didn’t know whether it was safe to go to Madam Pomfrey. Would she recognise a dragon bite? By the afternoon he had no choice. The cut had turned a nasty shade of green. It seemed Norbert’s fangs were poisonous.

Harry and Hermione rushed up to the hospital wing at the end of lessons and found Ron in bed in a terrible state.

‘It’s not only my hand,’ he whispered, ‘though that feels like it’s about to drop off. Malfoy told Madam Pomfrey she wanted to borrow one of my books, so she could come up here and have a good laugh at me. She kept saying she’d tell Pomfrey what really bit me unless...’ He stopped, and went red, and Harry had the impression he was changing what he’d been about to say. ‘Unless I packed in being your friend, Harry. That’s what she said. Kept saying it. I’ve told Pomfrey it was a dog, but I don’t think she believes me. I shouldn’t have hit Malfoy at the Quidditch match. That’s why she’s doing this. Mum was right. You shouldn’t hit girls. Oh, Merlin, I’m in so much pain.’

Hermione did their best to calm Ron down as Harry thought of Malfoy. She just wanted to take away his friends and leave him on his own. Just so she could bully him. She was so much like Dudley. They’d probably get on with each other.

‘It’ll all be over at midnight on Saturday,’ said Hermione.

This didn’t soothe Ron in the least. He sat bolt upright and broke out in a sweat.

‘Midnight on Saturday!’ he croaked. ‘Oh, no. Oh, no. I’ve just remembered. Charlie’s letter was in that book Malfoy took. She’s going to know we’re getting rid of Norbert.’

Harry and Hermione got no chance to answer. Madam Pomfrey came bustling over at that moment and shooed them out, saying Ron needed his sleep.

‘It’s too late to change the plan now,’ Harry told Hermione on the way down. ‘There isn’t time to send Charlie another owl, and this might be our only chance to get rid of Norbert. We’ll have to risk it. And we’ve got the Invisibility Cloak. Malfoy doesn’t know about that.’

When they went down to tell Hagrid, they found Fang the boarhound sitting outside the hut with his tail in a bandage, and Hagrid would only open a window to talk to them.

‘I can’t let yeh in,’ he puffed. ‘Norbert’s at a tricky stage. Nothin’ I can’t handle.’

When they told him what Charlie had said, his eyes filled with tears, though that might have been because Norbert had just bitten him on the leg.

‘Aargh! It’s all right, he only got me boot. Jus’ playin’. He’s only a baby, after all.’

The baby thumped its tail against the wall and set the windows rattling.

Harry and Hermione walked back up to the castle feeling that Saturday couldn’t come soon enough. They’d have felt sorry for Hagrid, when the time came for him to say goodbye to Norbert, if they hadn’t been so frightened of what they had to do.

It was a very dark, cloudy night, and they were a little late getting down to Hagrid’s because they’d had to wait for Peeves to clear out of the Entrance Hall, where he was playing tennis against the wall. Hagrid had Norbert packed and ready in a large crate.

‘He’s got plenty o’ rats an’ some brandy fer the journey,’ said Hagrid thickly. ‘An’ I’ve put his teddy bear in, in case he gets lonely.’

From inside the crate came a ripping noise that sounded, to Harry, very much like teddy having his head pulled off.

‘Bye-bye, Norbert!’ Hagrid sobbed, as Harry and Hermione threw the Invisibility Cloak over the crate and ducked underneath it themselves. ‘Mummy will never forget you!’

How they got the crate up to the castle, they never knew. Midnight crept nearer as they heaved Norbert up the marble staircase and along the dark corridors, up another staircase and then another, and even one of Harry’s short cuts didn’t make it much easier.

‘Nearly there!’ Harry panted, as they reached the corridor beneath the tallest tower.

Then a sudden movement ahead made them nearly drop the crate. Forgetting that they were already invisible, they shrank into the shadows and stared at the dark shapes of two people struggling together ten feet away.

A lamp flared.

Professor McGonagall, in a tartan dressing-gown and a hairnet, had Dracina Malfoy by the ear, and Malfoy was hissing at her like an angry cobra.

‘Detention!’ Professor McGonagall shouted. ‘And twenty points from Slytherin! Wandering about the castle in the middle of the night. How dare you...’

‘You don’t understand, Professor! Harry Potter’s coming! He’s got a dragon!’

‘What utter rubbish! How dare you tell me such lies! Come along. I shall be speaking to Professor Snape about you, Miss Malfoy!’

Malfoy was dragged off down the corridor, screaming into the dark, and what she screamed, over and over, was, ‘I hate you, Pottyhead! I hate you!’ until the sound of it faded round the corner. Harry stood very still under the Cloak and thanked his stars she had no idea how close she’d been standing to him.

The steep spiral staircase to the top of the tower seemed the easiest thing in the world after that. It wasn’t until they’d stepped out into the cold night air that they threw off the Cloak, glad to be able to breathe properly again. Hermione did a sort of jig.

‘Malfoy’s got detention! I could sing!’

‘Don’t,’ Harry advised.

Chuckling about Malfoy, they waited, with Norbert thrashing about in his crate. Ten minutes later four broomsticks came swooping down out of the darkness. Charlie’s friends were a cheerful lot. They showed Harry and Hermione the harness they’d rigged up so that Norbert could hang between them, and everybody helped buckle him safely in, and then Harry and Hermione shook hands all round and thanked them very much.

And at last Norbert was going... going... gone.

They slipped back down the spiral staircase with their hearts as light as their hands, now that Norbert was off them. No more dragon. Malfoy in detention. What could possibly spoil it?

The answer was waiting for them at the foot of the stairs. As they stepped out into the corridor, Filch’s face loomed up out of the dark.

‘Well, well, well,’ he whispered. ‘We are in trouble.’

They’d left the Invisibility Cloak on top of the tower.

Chapter 11 : The Death of Beauty

Filch marched them down through the castle with a lamp in one hand and the back of Harry’s collar in the other, and he hummed as he went, which was worse than anything he could have said.

Harry tried anyway.

‘We were sleepwalking,’ he said. ‘Both of us. It’s a condition.’

‘Course you were.’

‘We heard a noise. We thought it might be Peeves, and we went to...’

‘Course you did.’

‘Hermione dropped her... her hairbrush. Out of the window. Of the tower. And we were...’

‘Mr Potter,’ said Filch, with enormous satisfaction, ‘I’ve been catching filthy, nasty, students out of bed for forty years. I have heard sleepwalking. I have heard noises. I have heard sick owls, lost toads, lucky socks and a boy who swore blind he’d been Confunded by a suit of armour. You’re not even trying. Shut it.’

Harry shut it.

Filch left them in Professor McGonagall’s study on the first floor with the single word ‘Wait’, and went off to fetch her, and the door closed behind him with a click that sounded very final.

Hermione was trembling. Excuses, alibis and wild cover stories chased one another round Harry’s head, each one feebler than the last, and none of them any use at all. He couldn’t see how they were going to get out of this one. They were cornered. How could they have been so stupid as to leave the Cloak behind? There was no reason on earth that Professor McGonagall would accept for their being out of bed and creeping about the castle in the dead of night, let alone for being up the tallest tower, which was out of bounds to everyone except for Astronomy. Add Norbert and the Invisibility Cloak to that, and they might as well have been packing their trunks already.

The door opened. Professor McGonagall came in, still in her tartan dressing-gown, with her hairnet gone and her grey hair in a tight plait down her back. She looked at the two of them and shook her head slowly.

‘I believe,’ she said, ‘that I have worked out what has happened here.’

Then Harry saw who was trailing in behind her.

‘Harry!’ Neville burst out the moment he saw them. ‘I was trying to find you, to warn you! I heard Malfoy saying she was going to catch you, she said you had a drag...’

Harry shook his head at him so violently that it hurt, and Neville stopped with his mouth open.

Harry turned back to Professor McGonagall and tried his best innocent face, which had never once worked on Aunt Petunia.

‘What have you worked out, Professor?’

‘That you, Potter, and no doubt Mr Weasley, who I notice is conveniently in the hospital wing, fed the Malfoy girl a perfectly ridiculous story about a dragon in order to lure her out of bed and get her into trouble. Which you have done. And that you then dragged Miss Granger and poor Mr Longbottom into it as well.’ Her nostrils flared. ‘Honestly, Potter. I’ve had more convincing lies out of feral mujahideen who were... oh, bother. Never you mind that. You’re far too young.’

Harry had no idea what a mujahideen was, feral or otherwise, and no idea what Professor McGonagall could possibly have had to do with one, and the question went into a drawer in his head marked later and stayed there, because he had started stammering exactly as he’d stammered at Filch.

‘Malfoy’s the one lying about dragons, Professor, it wasn’t anything to do with us, it was all her idea, she’s mad, you saw her, you saw her bite Ron at the Quidditch match and scratch his face to...’

‘Enough.’ Professor McGonagall’s voice came down like a lid. ‘It’s bad enough that you’ve got the Malfoy girl into trouble. Lying to poor Mr Longbottom as well is shameful.’

Hermione came suddenly alive, as though somebody had wound her up.

‘You can’t trust Malfoy, Professor,’ she said, very fast and very high. ‘You can’t. She’s evil. She bullies poor Harry every single day, and she’d do it ten times more if I weren’t there keeping that horrible harpy away from him. He doesn’t deserve her. He doesn’t deserve any of it, and she...’

Professor McGonagall looked at her, and for a moment something odd passed over the stern face, a flicker of some memory that had nothing to do with Hogwarts, and had teeth. It was gone almost before Harry saw it.

‘Miss Granger,’ she said. ‘I will remind you that you are speaking of a fellow Hogwarts student. You will treat Miss Malfoy with respect, and I shall see to it that she does the same for you.’

While this was going on, Harry was looking at Neville. He wanted to say sorry. He wanted to explain all of it, but Hermione and Professor McGonagall were talking over each other, and there wasn’t a gap to say anything into.

‘I am disgusted,’ said Professor McGonagall. ‘Four students out of bed in a single night! I have never heard of such a thing. You, Miss Granger, I thought had more sense. And as for you, Potter, I thought Gryffindor meant rather more to you than this. All three of you will have detentions. Yes, you as well, Mr Longbottom, nothing gives you the right to wander the school at night, especially at the moment, it is very dangerous. And fifty points will be taken from Gryffindor.’

‘Fifty?’ Harry gasped. They’d lose the lead. The lead he’d won them in the last match.

‘Fifty points each,’ said Professor McGonagall, breathing hard through her long nose.

‘Professor, please...’

‘You can’t...’

‘Do not tell me what I can and cannot do, Potter. Bed, all of you. I have never been so ashamed of Gryffindor students.’ She paused. ‘Potter. Stay behind a moment.’

Hermione and Neville shuffled out, Neville sniffing, and the door shut.

Professor McGonagall sat down behind her desk. She took something from the pocket of her dressing-gown and laid it flat on the desk between them, and smoothed it out with one finger.

It was Charlie’s letter. The one that had been in Ron’s book. The one Malfoy had taken.

She tapped it, once, and looked at him.

‘Mr Potter,’ she said. ‘I have lived a very long time, and I have done things the wizarding world would not believe if I told them. So. A word of advice.’

‘I... what do you mean, Professor?’

Professor McGonagall sighed.

‘Just like your father. I had only just started teaching when he was up to no good, and I had this conversation with him too.’

Up to no good? Harry thought. The little he’d heard of his father made him sound well liked, a fine Quidditch player, a credit to the school. Nobody had said anything about no good.

‘I’ll tell you what I told him.’ She leaned forward over the desk, and lowered her voice, and for a moment she didn’t look like a teacher at all. ‘I learned the hard way, Potter, that one is only ever punished for what one is caught doing. Please bear that in mind. I am very disappointed in you. You have a great deal to learn, it seems. I hope a hundred and fifty points is enough to make the lesson stick. Go on. Off you go.’

Harry went, wondering what on earth she’d meant.

It wasn’t until he was safely in his four-poster, with Ron’s empty bed beside him and Neville’s muffled crying coming through the hangings, that it came to him. Professor McGonagall hadn’t been angry about what he’d done. She knew about all of it. She’d read Charlie’s letter. She knew about the dragon and the tower and very probably the Cloak, and she had stood in front of Malfoy and called the whole thing a ridiculous lie. She’d covered for him. If she was angry about anything at all, it was that he’d got caught.

That wasn’t how teachers were supposed to behave, Harry thought. He lay awake over it for a long time.

A hundred and fifty points, though. That put Gryffindor last. In one night they’d wrecked any chance Gryffindor had of the House Cup. Harry felt as if the bottom had dropped out of his stomach. How could they ever make that up?

He didn’t sleep. He could hear Neville sobbing into his pillow for what seemed like hours, and he couldn’t think of a single thing to say that would help. He knew Neville was dreading the morning as much as he was. What would happen when the rest of Gryffindor found out? He was still dwelling on that when sleep finally got him anyway.

At first the Gryffindors who passed the giant hour-glasses in the Entrance Hall the next morning simply assumed there’d been a mistake. Harry saw the whole thing from the stairs, and it was like the beginning of one of the horror films Dudley watched with the sound up, the part where the characters start to notice that something has gone very wrong. The rubies in the Gryffindor glass were much, much lower than they had been. How could they possibly have lost a hundred and fifty points overnight?

And then the story began to go round. Harry Potter. The famous Harry Potter. The hero of two Quidditch matches. He’d lost them all those points, him and a couple of other stupid first-years.

There was no more admiration for the Boy Who Lived, or for the Seeker who’d won two games on the trot. In a single morning Harry had become the most hated boy in the school. Even the Hufflepuffs hated him, though they were still sore about Dean’s singing, and so did the Ravenclaws, because everyone had wanted to see Slytherin lose the Cup for once. Everywhere he went, people pointed, and nobody bothered to lower their voice. The Slytherins, on the other hand, clapped as he passed, and whistled, and called, ‘Cheers, Potter! We owe you one!’

Only Ron stood by him. Ron, out of the hospital wing with his hand bandaged and his ear still bruised, walked beside him down every corridor and glared at anybody who so much as muttered. Harry had never known anyone so loyal, and he felt very lucky to have him, and very guilty, all over again, for shoving him away from the mirror at Christmas and for the mean, hot thing he’d felt about Ron’s mum and the jumper.

‘Nothing to worry about, mate,’ Ron said at lunch. ‘You heard about the stuff Fred and George have got up to? They’ve lost Gryffindor loads of points over the years, and people always calm down in the end.’

‘I wonder why Gryffindor keeps losing the Cup,’ said Harry drily. ‘And they never lost a hundred and fifty bloomin’ points in one go, did they?’

‘No. No, you’re right.’ Ron looked dejected for a moment, and then perked up. ‘But cheer up. We’ll sort it out somehow.’

And oddly, that did make Harry feel better, for a while.

It was a bit late to mend the damage, but Harry swore to himself that from now on he would keep his nose out of things that didn’t concern him. He’d had enough of sneaking about and spying. He was so ashamed of himself that he went to Wood and offered to resign from the team.

‘Resign?‘ Wood thundered. ‘No, you’re not allowed to. I won’t let you.  How are we meant to win any points back if we can’t win at Quidditch?’

But even Quidditch had stopped being fun. The rest of the team wouldn’t speak to Harry at practice, and when they had to speak about him, they called him ‘the Seeker’.

Hermione and Neville were suffering too. They had it less badly than Harry, because they weren’t as well known, but nobody spoke to them either. Hermione had stopped putting her hand up in lessons and sat with her head down, working in silence.

Harry was almost glad the exams were so close. All the revision kept his mind off his misery. He, Ron and Hermione kept to themselves, working late into the night, trying to remember the ingredients of complicated potions, learning charms and spells by heart, memorising the dates of magical discoveries and goblin rebellions.

Then, about a week before the exams began, Harry’s new resolution to keep out of things that didn’t concern him was put to a test he hadn’t expected.

Walking back from the library alone one afternoon, he heard somebody whimpering in a classroom up ahead. As he came closer, he recognised Quirrell’s voice.

‘No... no... not again, please...’

It sounded as though somebody was threatening him. Harry edged closer.

‘All right... all right...’ he heard Quirrell sob.

Next second Quirrell came hurrying out of the classroom, straightening his turban. He was white, and looked as though he was about to cry, and he strode off out of sight without seeming to notice Harry at all. Harry waited until the footsteps had died away, then put his head round the door. The classroom was empty, but a door at the far end stood ajar. Harry was halfway across the room towards it before he remembered what he’d promised himself about meddling.

All the same, he’d have bet twelve Philosopher’s Stones that Snape had just left by that door, and from what Harry had heard, Snape would be walking with a new spring in his step. Quirrell had given in at last.

Harry went back to the library, where Hermione was testing Ron on Astronomy, and told them what he’d heard.

‘Snape’s done it, then!’ said Ron. ‘If Quirrell’s told him how to break his Anti-Dark Force spell...’

‘There’s still Fluffy,’ said Hermione.

‘Maybe Snape’s found out how to get past him without asking Hagrid,’ said Ron, looking up at the thousands of books around them. ‘I bet there’s a book in here somewhere that tells you how to get past a giant three-headed dog. So what do we do, Harry?’

The light of adventure was kindling in Ron’s eyes again, but Hermione got in before Harry could answer.

‘We go to Dumbledore. That’s what we should’ve done ages ago. If we try anything ourselves we’ll be thrown out for certain.’

‘But we’ve got no proof!’ said Harry. ‘Quirrell’s too frightened to back us up. Snape only has to say he doesn’t know how the troll got in at Hallowe’en and that he was nowhere near the third floor. Who d’you think they’ll believe, him or us? It’s not exactly a secret we hate him, Dumbledore will think we made it up to get him sacked. Filch wouldn’t help us if his life depended on it, he’s far too pally with Snape, and the more students get thrown out, the happier he’ll be. And don’t forget, we’re not supposed to know about the Stone or Fluffy at all. That’d take some explaining.’

Hermione looked convinced. Ron didn’t.

‘If we just did a bit of poking about...’

‘No,’ said Harry flatly. ‘We’ve done enough poking about.’

He pulled a map of Jupiter towards him and started learning the names of its moons. Professor McGonagall had been right. He had a great deal to learn, and the first lesson was that he didn’t want to be caught again, so he’d bloody well do nothing that could get him caught. Sod the Stone. Snape could have it, and live for ever with his greasy hair and his hooked nose. Was Snape one of those people Aunt Petunia... no. They didn’t seem to have those at Hogwarts, or in the wizarding world at all, so far as Harry could tell. He went back to Jupiter.

The next morning, notes were delivered to Harry, Hermione and Neville at breakfast. They were all the same.

Your detention will take place at eleven o’clock tonight. Meet Professor Quirrell in the Entrance Hall.

Prof. M. McGonagall

In the darkness over the points, Harry had completely forgotten they still had detentions to do. He half expected Hermione to complain about a whole evening of revision lost, but she didn’t say a word. Like Harry, she felt they deserved whatever they got.

At eleven o’clock that night Harry and Hermione went down to the Entrance Hall with Neville. Quirrell was already there, holding a lamp. So was Malfoy.

Harry had forgotten that Malfoy had got a detention too. She barely glanced at him. She lifted her nose, turned her back on him, and stood there with her own lamp glowing, and that was that.

‘F-f-follow m-me,’ said Quirrell. ‘I n-need to c-collect s-s-samples for our less-ssons. Y-you can h-help.’

Harry noticed that Quirrell, stutter or no stutter, seemed agitated. He kept looking over his shoulder, and then over the other one, and his lamp shook. Why was he such a strange man?

‘B-be assured I shall b-be a f-firm hand!’ Quirrell added, in a tone that would have been firm from anyone who wasn’t such a wreck.

Harry doubted very much that Quirrell’s hand was anything but shaky and liable to faint, like the rest of him.

They set off across the dark grounds. Quirrell had done a charm to light the path ahead. Neville kept sniffing. The moon was bright, but the clouds racing across it kept plunging them into darkness, and as they went on past the greenhouses and the pumpkin patch, Harry saw that they were heading straight for the Forbidden Forest.

‘Professor,’ said Hermione. ‘Aren’t we forbidden to go into the Forbidden Forest? It’s rather in the name.’

Quirrell blinked and made a face. If it had been lighter, Harry would have seen that the face was irritation, but it was gone before his eyes could adjust.

‘I have special permission to take you,’ said Quirrell.

He said it without a single stutter. Harry noticed. It was odd.

‘Sh-shouldn’t be long. Just n-need a f-few things. M-mushrooms. Sp-spotted fire mushrooms. Herbs. Th-things of that n-nature.’

‘We need rather more information than that, Professor!’ said Malfoy. ‘I understood we’d be writing lines, not going into the Forbidden Forest, which is dangerous, I might add. This is work for servants. For house-elves. I’ve got one myself, and if you’d simply...’

‘I’ll tell you when I’m damn well ready!’ said Quirrell.

Again, no stutter at all. Malfoy seemed a good deal more put out at being shouted at than at anything else. She pouted.

‘My father will hear of this,’ she muttered.

They went in under the trees, and the darkness closed over them like water. Quirrell’s light bobbed ahead. The path wound and narrowed, and roots caught at their feet, and somewhere off to the left something large moved through the undergrowth and then stopped.

‘A-ah. There we are,’ said Quirrell.

He’d stopped and was pointing his lamp at the ground. Something silvery lay on the path in a long thin smear, catching the light.

‘The, er, m-mushrooms excrete a l-liquid. Silver. L-like this.’

‘I haven’t read about any mushroom that does that, Professor,’ said Hermione.

‘You’re only a f-first-year, M-miss Granger.’

Hermione pouted, and Malfoy laughed.

‘Looks like the Mudblood doesn’t know as much as she thinks she does,’ she said.

The look Hermione gave her would have killed a lesser girl where she stood. It didn’t seem to touch Dracina Malfoy, who sauntered on after Quirrell with her lamp held high.

For a while everything went well enough. Quirrell followed the silver trail, which went from a smear to a line of splashes, and then to great dark blotches that gleamed where the light caught them. Malfoy and Hermione traded insults over Harry’s head as if he weren’t there. Quirrell didn’t seem to hear them. He’d gone very quiet, and his eyes never left the trail, and he walked faster and faster until the three of them were almost trotting to keep up.

Then he stopped dead and his head came up.

‘D-do you hear that?’

Harry listened. He couldn’t hear a thing except the ordinary noises of the Forest: leaves, a far-off owl, the creak of a branch.

Quirrell screamed. It was a high, theatrical scream, and before any of them could speak he had bolted off the path into the trees with his lamp swinging wildly, and the light went with him.

‘Professor!’

‘Professor Quirrell! Come back!’

They crashed after him. Branches whipped at Harry’s face, and brambles snatched at his robes, and the light ahead got smaller and jumped about and then went out altogether, and he ran into a tree trunk, and when he pushed himself off it and turned round there was nobody there. No Hermione. No Neville. No lamp. Only the Forest, and the dark.

‘Potter!’

A light came swinging round a tree. It was Malfoy. She was holding the only lamp left in the Forest, and her face above it was as smug as ever.

‘Oh, you’re speaking to me now, Malfoy?’

‘What do you care, Potter?’

‘I don’t, actually.’

‘Fine, then!’

She huffed, and folded her arms, and then looked round at the trees, and Harry watched the smugness drain out of her face.

‘We’re lost,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said Harry, trying not to sound as worried as he felt. ‘We’ll have to find our own way out.’

‘Escort me!’

She held out her hand.

‘What? No. Not after everything I’ve had to put up with from you all year.’

‘You will escort me, Potter. It’s your duty as a wizard to escort a young witch.’

‘No, you’re alright.’

The ugly look came over her face, the Dudley look, the one he’d seen on Christmas mornings at Privet Drive when the present wasn’t the right present. Then it slid away, and in its place came a smug little grin, and something else, something in her eyes that Harry couldn’t put a name to.

‘You owe me a favour. Don’t you remember, Potter? You said so.’

Harry snorted.

‘Malfoy, I was taking the p...’

‘No, you weren’t!’ She came right up close, and her face was red in the lamplight. ‘You owe me. If it’s not for the Remembrall, then it’s for the toilets. After what Granger said to me in those toilets I’d have been within my rights to tell every teacher in the school everything, and I didn’t.’

‘What did Hermione say to you?’

‘Is that all you care about, Potter? It doesn’t matter. She was wrong.’

‘Fine. Whatever. Why did you lie for us, then?’

Malfoy opened her mouth to answer. Then both of them heard it: a snap in the trees behind her, close, and heavy. Malfoy screamed and jumped forward, and before Harry had moved a muscle her hand was in his, gripping hard, and she was staring up at him with a look he had never seen on her face before, nothing like her usual look at all.

He was going to let go. He’d meant to. But in that second he saw her, Dracina Malfoy, without the nose in the air and the sneer, and all that was left was a frightened girl in a dark wood, and the part of every boy that has ever read a story about a girl in trouble woke up in Harry and would not let him leave her there.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Come on, then. Hold the light up so we can see where we’re going.’

‘All right, Harry,’ said Malfoy.

Harry was so cross with the whole situation that he didn’t notice she said his first name, or that in the dark,  the smile that had broken out across Dracina Malfoy’s face, as wide and bright as any smile had ever been, or that her eyes were shining, or that she wasn’t looking at the path at all. She was looking at him, and she went on looking at him, and she didn’t let go. Because her Knight was finally protecting his Princess. Just like in the stories her mother used to read to her as a little girl.

Then red sparks went up over the trees ahead of them.

‘That’ll be Hermione and Neville,’ said Harry. ‘And Quirrell, I hope.’

‘Of course,’ said Malfoy.

Harry took it for her usual haughtiness, and didn’t see her face darken, or wonder why her hand tightened on his.

They walked towards the place where the sparks had gone up. It took some time, and the whole way there Malfoy would not let go of his hand.

‘I must be escorted,’ she said, when he tried. ‘You owe me, Harry.’

His first name again. What a strange girl she was.

The trees thinned, and they came out into a small clearing. It was dark, and very still, and there was a smell to it Harry didn’t like. He realised that Malfoy had gone from holding his hand to pressing against his side, and he tried to ease her off, but her grip was harder than Ron’s on the last slice of steak-and-kidney pie. She was plainly terrified, so he let her stay. Perhaps if he let her, she’d be a bit less cruel to him afterwards. And there was a part of Harry, which he would never have admitted to anyone, that quite liked having her cling to him like that. It made him feel -

Something moved at the edge of the clearing.

A unicorn stepped out of the trees.

It shimmered. There was no other word for it. Light seemed to come off it in soft waves, and as it walked, small pale flowers opened in the grass round its hooves and glowed, hundreds of them, until the whole clearing was lit up as if by moonlight, and it was the most beautiful thing Harry had ever seen in his life.

Then he realised that Malfoy had let go of him.

She was walking towards it. And the unicorn was walking towards her, with its head lowered,  it came right up to her and stood there, and Dracina Malfoy, who was spoilt and cruel and had bitten Ron’s ear, put out her hand and laid it on the white neck as gently as if it might break.

That was when Harry saw the wound. It was on the far side of the neck, low down, and it was bleeding slowly, and the blood was silver. The same silver as the trail Quirrell had followed through the trees.

Why would Quirrell lie about a thing like that?

A shape came out of the trees on the other side of the clearing.

It was hooded and cloaked and black, and it moved wrong, too low and too quick, and it raised an arm, and a jet of green light hit the unicorn in the side.

Pain went through Harry’s head like a nail. It came from his scar. His scar was on fire. He doubled over, clutching at it, and through streaming eyes he saw the light go out of the unicorn, all at once, as though somebody had thrown a switch. The shimmer, the glow, the flowers, the strength and the pride and the beauty of it, gone in an instant, and the unicorn folded up, fell over on its side, and was dead.

A great wave of sadness went through Harry, so heavy that for a moment he couldn’t breathe, as if the whole world had felt it and was grieving.

The black shape dropped to all fours and crawled towards the body, low and fast, like some ugly beast stalking.

Harry stumbled forward and grabbed Malfoy, who hadn’t moved, who was standing with her hand still out where the unicorn’s neck had been, and dragged her back. She looked at the thing in the clearing. She looked at Harry. Then she screamed, and tore herself out of his grip, then she ran, and the trees swallowed her and the lamp with her.

Harry was alone with it.

It had its hood bent over the wound in the unicorn’s side. He could hear it. Then it lifted its head, and silver blood ran down the front of the cloak, and it began to come towards him.

Harry’s scar flared again and he went down on his knees in the grass with his hands over his face. He couldn’t see. He could barely think. And then, through the pain, he heard hooves. Something was galloping, fast, across the clearing, and there was a snarl and a sound of something being struck, and the hooves wheeled and went past him, and the pain began, slowly, to let go.

It was a full minute before Harry could lift his head. The black shape was gone. Standing over him, with his flanks heaving, was a centaur.

He had white-blond hair, a palomino body, and eyes of an astonishing pale blue, like sapphires held up to the light.

‘Are you hurt?’ he said, and pulled Harry to his feet.

‘No. Thank you. What was that?’

The centaur didn’t answer. He looked closely at Harry, and his eyes rested on the scar, which stood out livid on Harry’s forehead.

‘You are the Potter boy,’ he said. ‘You had better get back to Hagrid. The Forest isn’t safe tonight. Least of all for you. Can you ride? It will be quicker.’

Hagrid? thought Harry. Was Hagrid in the Forest too?

‘My name is Firenze,’ the centaur added, and he lowered himself on to his front legs so that Harry could scramble on to his back.

There was a thunder of more hooves from the far side of the clearing, and two more centaurs burst out of the trees, sweating and blowing.

‘Firenze!’ roared the bigger of them, who was black-haired and black-bodied. ‘What is this? You have a human on your back! Have you no shame? Are you some common mule?’

‘Do you know who this is, Bane?’ said Firenze. ‘This is the Potter boy. The sooner he’s out of the Forest, the better.’

‘What have you been telling him?’ Bane growled. ‘Remember, Firenze. We have sworn not to set ourselves against the heavens. Have we not read what is coming in the movements of the planets?’

The other centaur, who was red-haired and had a mournful face, pawed the ground.

‘I’m sure Firenze meant it for the best,’ he said gloomily.

Bane lashed out with his hind legs in fury.

‘For the best! What’s that to us? Centaurs concern themselves with what has been foretold! It is no business of ours to go trotting about after stray humans like donkeys!’

Firenze reared up on his hind legs so suddenly that Harry had to clutch at his shoulders to stay on.

‘Do you not see that unicorn?’ Firenze bellowed. ‘Do you not understand why it was killed? Or have the planets kept that from you too? I set myself against what is lurking in this Forest, Bane. Yes. With humans beside me if I must.’

And he wheeled round and plunged off into the trees with Harry hanging on as best he could, leaving Bane and the other centaur behind.

Harry hadn’t the faintest idea what any of it meant.

‘Why’s Bane so angry?’ he said. ‘And what was that thing you saved me from?’

Firenze slowed to a walk and told Harry to keep his head down for the low branches, and didn’t answer. They went through the trees in silence for so long that Harry decided the centaur didn’t want to talk to him any more. But in a particularly dense part of the Forest, Firenze suddenly stopped.

‘Harry Potter. Do you know what unicorn blood is used for?’

‘No,’ said Harry, startled. ‘We’ve only used the horn and the tail hair in Potions.’

‘That is because it is a monstrous thing to kill a unicorn,’ said Firenze. ‘Only one with nothing to lose and everything to gain would do it. The blood of a unicorn will keep you alive when you are an inch from death. But at a terrible price. You have slain something pure and defenceless to save yourself, and from the moment the blood touches your lips you will have only half a life. A cursed life.’

Harry stared at the back of Firenze’s head, silver where the moonlight dappled it.

‘But who’d be that desperate?’ he said aloud. ‘If you’re going to be cursed for ever, you’d be better off dead, wouldn’t you?’

‘You would,’ Firenze agreed. ‘Unless all you needed was to stay alive long enough to drink something else. Something that would give you back your strength and your power. Something that would mean you could never die at all. Mr Potter. Do you know what is hidden in the school at this very moment?’

‘The Philosopher’s Stone! Of course. The Elixir of Life. But I don’t understand who...’

‘Can you think of no one who has waited years to come back to power? Who has clung to life, and waited for his chance?’

It was as though an iron fist had closed round Harry’s heart. Over the rustle of the leaves he seemed to hear Hagrid again, on the night they’d met: Some say he died. Codswallop, in my opinion. Dunno if he had enough human left in him to die.

‘Do you mean,’ Harry croaked, ‘that was Vol...’

‘Harry! Harry, are you all right?’

Hermione was running down the path towards them, with Hagrid puffing along behind her.

‘I’m fine,’ said Harry, hardly knowing what he was saying. ‘The unicorn’s dead, Hagrid. It’s in a clearing back there.’

‘This is where I leave you,’ Firenze murmured, as Hagrid hurried past to see. ‘You are safe now.’

Harry slid off his back.

‘Good luck, Harry Potter,’ said Firenze. ‘The planets have been read wrongly before now. Even by centaurs. I hope this is one of those times.’

He turned and cantered away into the trees, and Harry stood shivering where he’d left him.

‘There yeh are, Harry!’ Hagrid’s voice boomed out behind him. He was coming back along the path with his crossbow over his shoulder and Fang at his heels, and walking in front of him, with her lamp, was Dracina Malfoy.

Something in Harry’s chest let go at the sight of her, which he wouldn’t have admitted under torture. She wouldn’t look at him. She kept trying to put on the smug, haughty face, the one he knew so well, and it kept slipping, and even somebody as slow about these things as Harry could see there was something underneath it. Fear? Shame? Did she actually care that she’d run off and left him? No. Of course not. She was a Malfoy.

‘Come on, Harry. I’ve already found Hermione an’ Neville, they’re jus’ through them trees. I dunno what Quirrell was thinkin’ of, bringin’ you lot out here. We’d best find him.’

Harry was reunited with Hermione and Neville, and the five of them, with Hagrid and Fang, searched for two whole hours and found neither hide nor hair of Professor Quirrell. In the end Hagrid said he’d look for the man himself, and that he was taking the four of them back up to the castle first and no arguments.

Harry was so far away inside his own head that he never noticed Dracina Malfoy fall into step beside him three separate times on the way back, and open her mouth, and say something that began with ‘I’ and never got any further. By the time they reached the oak doors she’d given up.

‘Potter, you’re such an idiot!’ she said, and stamped off towards the dungeons in a huff.

Hermione, for her part, had hissed and tutted at Malfoy every time she came within six feet of Harry, which Harry understood even less than Malfoy’s hot and cold. As the three of them climbed wearily up towards Gryffindor Tower, Harry found that he was beginning to understand, as every boy does eventually, exactly what Ron’s dad had meant.

‘Women...’ he whispered to himself, and hoped Hermione hadn’t heard.

Ron had fallen asleep in the dark common room waiting for them. He shouted something about Quidditch fouls when Harry shook him roughly awake, but within seconds he was wide-eyed, as Harry began to tell him and Hermione what had happened in the Forest.

Harry couldn’t sit down. He paced up and down in front of the fire. He was still shaking.

‘Snape wants the Stone for Voldemort... and Voldemort’s waiting in the Forest... and all this time we thought Snape just wanted to be rich...’

‘Stop saying the bloody name!’ Ron whispered, terrified, as though Voldemort might hear them.

Harry wasn’t listening.

‘Firenze saved me, but he shouldn’t have. Bane was furious. He kept going on about interfering with what the planets say is going to happen. They must show that Voldemort’s coming back. Bane thinks Firenze should have let Voldemort kill me. I suppose that’s written in the stars too.’

‘Will you stop saying the name!’ Ron hissed.

‘So all I’ve got to do now is wait for Snape to steal the Stone,’ Harry went on feverishly, ‘and then Voldemort can come and finish me off. Well. I suppose that’ll make Bane happy.’

Hermione looked very frightened, but she had a word of comfort, and as she said it she took hold of Harry’s arm, rather as Dracina had held his hand in the Forest, and with as hard a grip.

‘Harry, everyone says Dumbledore’s the only one You-Know-Who was ever afraid of. With Dumbledore here, You-Know-Who won’t touch you. And anyway, who says the centaurs are right? It sounds like fortune-telling to me, and Professor McGonagall says that’s a very imprecise branch of magic.’

The sky had gone light before they stopped talking. They went up to bed exhausted, with their throats sore.

But the night’s surprises weren’t quite over.

When Harry pulled back his sheets, he found his Invisibility Cloak folded neatly underneath them. There was a note pinned to it.

Just in case.

Chapter 12 : Seven Bottles

Professor Quirrell was found just after dawn, at the edge of the Forest, covered in cuts and scratches and howling in tongues. By breakfast the whole school had the story.

‘Centaurs,’ said Seamus, through a mouthful of toast, as Harry sat down. ‘Got him right at the edge of the trees. Fifty of them, Lavender says.’

‘Lavender wasn’t there,’ said Dean.

‘Well, it was centaurs, anyway. You know what they’re like.’

Everybody seemed to accept it without a second thought. Centaurs were violent. Everyone knew that.

Harry didn’t accept it. Whatever had happened to Quirrell, it didn’t make up for his running off and leaving four first-years alone in the Forbidden Forest in the dark, and the way the whole school simply nodded and went back to its porridge made Harry angrier than he could have explained. He kept thinking about the mushrooms, which Hermione had never read about and which didn’t bleed silver. He kept thinking about the stutter, and the two times it had vanished clean away. Something wasn’t right. But he was already on thin ice with most of the school for the points, and he didn’t want to make it worse, so he kept his mouth shut and seethed, with all the indignation an eleven-year-old can hold, which is a great deal.

The days went by fast after that, and before he knew it the exams were on him.

Years afterwards, Harry would wonder how he’d ever got through a single exam at Hogwarts, when some part of him was always waiting for Voldemort or some other Dark wizard to burst through the door, generally at the least convenient moment. Yet the days crept past, and there could be no doubt that Fluffy was still alive and well behind the locked door on the third floor.

It was the sweltering hot summer of 1992, and it was hottest of all in the big classroom where they sat their written papers. They’d been given special new quills for the exams, bewitched with an Anti-Cheating spell. There were practical exams too. Professor Flitwick called them one by one into his classroom to see whether they could make a pineapple tap-dance across a desk. Professor McGonagall watched them turn a mouse into a snuffbox, and gave marks for how handsome the snuffbox was, and took them away again if it still had whiskers.

‘Keep your wrist firm, Potter,’ she said, bending to look at the hinge while Harry’s mouse was still halfway through turning. ‘Firm. That’s better. I learned this one on rather larger targets, you know, during a holiday in Kosovo.’

‘A holiday, Professor?’

‘Yes. A holiday..,’ said Professor McGonagall, and she made a note on her parchment.

She seemed to have enjoyed her time there, so Harry didn’t ask any more. Snape made them all nervous, breathing down their necks while they tried to remember how to make a Forgetfulness Potion, and Harry wondered more than once whether Snape was slipping a drop of it into their cauldrons, so that they’d forget on purpose.

Harry did the best he could, with the stabbing pains in his forehead that had bothered him ever since the Forest. He couldn’t sleep, either.

‘It’s nerves,’ said Neville, who found him sitting up in bed at three in the morning with a hand pressed to his scar. ‘Gran says I get them something terrible. Try counting backwards from a hundred.’

Harry tried it, to be kind. The truth was that his old nightmare kept waking him, and it was worse than ever now, because there was a hooded figure in it, dripping blood.

Then there was Malfoy, who was more wearing than any exam.

‘Three stirs anticlockwise, Professor, and then I let it settle,’ she announced across the Potions dungeon, loudly enough for the back row, which was where Harry sat. ‘Just like you said. It’s gone exactly the right shade of blue. Not like some people’s.’

‘Very good, Miss Malfoy,’ said Snape, who was standing over Harry’s cauldron, as he had been for a full minute. ‘Potter. Is that supposed to be blue?’

‘It’s getting there, sir.’

‘It’s getting somewhere,’ said Snape.

Malfoy laughed so hard she had to put her ladle down. Snape let it all go, of course, so Harry was at her mercy. He knew that if he so much as grunted at her, he’d be the one punished for it, and Gryffindor couldn’t afford another point.

Perhaps it was because they hadn’t seen what Harry had seen in the Forest, or because their scars weren’t burning, but Ron and Hermione didn’t seem nearly as worried about the Stone as Harry was. The idea of Voldemort frightened them, certainly, but he didn’t visit them in their dreams, and they were so buried in revision that they had no time left over to fret about what Snape or anybody else might be up to.

Their very last exam was History of Magic. One hour on the wizarding war between the Norse völvas of Jorvik and the last Hellenic sorcerers out of London, which had ended with the Anglo-Saxons taking Jorvik in 954 (Harry was rather proud of having got that date to stay in his head), and then they’d be free. Free for a whole glorious week, until the results came out. When the ghost of Professor Binns told them to put down their quills and roll up their parchment, Harry cheered as loudly as anyone, mostly out of relief at not having died of boredom.

‘That was far easier than I thought,’ said Hermione, as they joined the crowd pouring out into the sunny grounds. ‘I needn’t have bothered learning the 1637 Werewolf Code of Conduct, or the uprising of Elfric the Eager.’

‘Nobody needs to know about that, and especially not from you,’ hissed a voice behind them.

It was Malfoy, and she plainly hadn’t done as well on her History of Magic paper as Hermione had . Hermione’s hand went to her wand, and her mouth opened on what Harry suspected was the first of several curses she’d read about and been waiting for an excuse to try. Malfoy seemed to realise it too. She made herself scarce at speed, though not before shrieking back over her shoulder, ‘Look at her, Potter! Look how violent the Mudblood is!’

Why did Malfoy have to be so hateful to his friend? What an unbelievably spiteful girl she was. The word had plainly upset Hermione, who was standing with her wand still half out and her face blotchy, so Harry went over.

‘Whatever she thinks of you is wrong,’ he said. ‘And you’re a better witch than Malfoy could ever be.’

Hermione smiled, and then hugged him, suddenly, hard, and for a good deal longer than was comfortable.

Hermione always liked to go through the exam papers afterwards, but Ron said it made him feel ill, so they wandered down to the lake and flopped under a tree. The Weasley twins and Lee Jordan were tickling the tentacles of the giant squid, which was basking in the warm shallows.

‘No more revision,’ Ron sighed happily, stretching out on the grass. ‘Cheer up, Harry. We’ve got a week before we find out how badly we’ve done. No point worrying yet.’

Harry had a feeling that Ron was coping with what he thought his marks were by assuming Harry’s were just as bad. Ron was a lot cleverer than he gave himself credit for, and Harry privately reckoned Ron had done better than he thought.

Harry was rubbing his forehead.

‘I wish I knew what this meant!’ he burst out. ‘My scar keeps flaring up. It’s happened before, but never this often.’

‘Go to Madam Pomfrey,’ said Hermione.

‘I’m not ill, bloody hell,’ said Harry. ‘I think it’s a warning. It means danger’s coming.’

Ron couldn’t get worked up. It was far too hot.

‘Harry, relax. Hermione’s right, the Stone’s safe as long as Dumbledore’s about. And we’ve never had any proof that Snape found out how to get past Fluffy. He nearly had his leg ripped off once, he’s not going to try it again in a hurry. Neville will play Quidditch for England before Hagrid lets Dumbledore down.’

Harry nodded, but he couldn’t shake off a nagging feeling that there was something he’d forgotten to do, something important.

‘It’s like...’ he said. ‘You know when you’ve gone out and you’ve definitely forgotten something, but you can’t think what?’

‘That’s just the exams,’ said Hermione. ‘I woke up last night and was halfway through my Transfiguration notes before I remembered we’d already sat it.’

Harry was quite sure the feeling had nothing to do with work. He watched an owl flap across the bright blue sky towards the castle with a note in its beak. Hagrid was the only person who ever sent him letters. Hagrid would never let Dumbledore down. Hagrid would never tell anybody how to get past Fluffy. Never. But...

Harry leapt to his feet. A horrible thought had just arrived, fully formed. A man who thought a dragon made a nice pet, who could mistake a Pikey for a Greek, however kind and well-meaning he was, could be fooled in a great many different ways.

‘Where’re you going?’ said Ron sleepily.

‘I’ve just thought of something,’ said Harry. He’d gone white. ‘We’ve got to go and see Hagrid. Now.’

‘Why?’ panted Hermione, hurrying after him.

‘Don’t you think it’s a bit odd,’ said Harry, scrambling up the grassy slope, ‘that what Hagrid wants more than anything in the world is a dragon, and a stranger turns up who just happens to have an egg in his pocket? How many people go about with dragon eggs on them, when it’s against the law? Lucky for him he ran into Hagrid, wasn’t it? Why didn’t I see it before?’

‘What’re you on about?’ said Ron, but Harry, sprinting across the grounds towards the Forest, didn’t answer.

Hagrid was sitting in an armchair outside his hut with his trousers and sleeves rolled up, shelling peas into a bowl.

‘Hullo,’ he said, beaming. ‘Finished yer exams? Got time fer a drink?’

‘Yes please,’ said Ron, but Harry cut across him.

‘No, we’re in a hurry. Hagrid, I’ve got to ask you something. That night you won Norbert. What did the stranger you played cards with look like?’

‘Dunno,’ said Hagrid easily. ‘He never took his cloak off.’

He saw the three of them staring and raised his eyebrows.

‘It’s not that odd. Yeh get all sorts in the Hog’s Head. That’s one o’ the pubs in the village. Mighta bin a dragon dealer, mightn’ he? I never saw his face. Kept his hood up the whole time.’

Harry sank down beside the bowl of peas.

‘What did you talk about, Hagrid? Did Hogwarts come up at all?’

‘Mighta done,’ said Hagrid, frowning with the effort of remembering. ‘Yeah. He asked what I did, an’ I told him I was gamekeeper here. He asked a bit about the creatures I look after, so I told him. An’ I said what I’d always really wanted was a dragon. An’ then... I can’ remember too well, ‘cause he kept buyin’ me drinks. Let’s see. Yeah, then he said he had this dragon egg, an’ we could play cards fer it if I liked, only he had ter be sure I could handle it, he didn’ want it goin’ ter any old home. So I told him, after Fluffy, a dragon’d be easy...’

‘And did he... did he seem interested in Fluffy?’ Harry asked, keeping his voice as level as he could.

‘Well, yeah. How many three-headed dogs d’yeh meet, even round Hogwarts? So I told him, Fluffy’s a piece o’ cake if yeh know how ter calm him down. Jus’ play him a bit o’ music an’ he goes straight off ter sleep...’

Hagrid’s face changed.

‘I shouldn’ta told yeh that!’ he blurted. ‘Forget I said it! Hey! Where’re yeh goin’?’

Harry, Ron and Hermione didn’t say a word to one another until they came to a stop in the Entrance Hall, which seemed very cold and dim after the grounds.

‘Hagrid, you bloody idiot,’ Harry said quietly, to nobody, and it came out sad rather than angry.

‘We’ve got to go to Dumbledore,’ he said. ‘Hagrid told that stranger how to get past Fluffy, and it was Snape or Voldemort under that cloak. It must have been the easiest thing in the world, once he’d got Hagrid drunk. I love the bloke, but it turns out he’s pretty easy to rumble, which does us no good at all. We’ve got to sort it out now. I just hope Dumbledore believes us. Firenze might back us up, if that black one doesn’t stop him. Where’s Dumbledore’s office?’

They looked about, as though a sign might appear with an arrow on it. Nobody had ever told them where Dumbledore lived, and they didn’t know anyone who’d been sent to see him.

‘We’ll just have to...’ Harry began, when a voice rang across the hall.

‘What are you three doing indoors?’

It was Professor McGonagall, carrying a tall stack of books.

‘We want to see Professor Dumbledore,’ said Hermione, rather bravely, Harry and Ron thought.

‘See Professor Dumbledore?’ Professor McGonagall repeated, as though this were a very suspicious thing to want. ‘Why?’

Harry swallowed. There wasn’t time for this.

‘It’s sort of secret,’ he said, and wished at once that he hadn’t, because Professor McGonagall’s nostrils flared.

‘Professor Dumbledore left ten minutes ago,’ she said coldly. ‘He received an urgent owl from the Ministry of Magic and flew straight off for London.’

‘He’s gone?’ said Harry frantically. ‘Now?’

‘Professor Dumbledore is a very great wizard, Potter. He has many demands on his time...’

‘But this is important!’

‘Something you have to say is more important than the Ministry of Magic, Potter?’

‘Look,’ said Harry, throwing caution to the winds. ‘Professor. It’s about the Philosopher’s Stone...’

For a moment Professor McGonagall looked simply surprised. Then something in her hardened, and when she spoke again she was firmer than Harry had ever heard her, which was saying a great deal.

‘How did you find out about that?’

It came out less like a question than a demand. Harry was taken aback, and more than a little frightened, but he’d come this far.

‘Professor, I think... I know... that Sn... that somebody’s going to try to steal it. I’ve got to talk to Professor Dumbledore.’

She looked at him for a long moment, with shock and suspicion mixed in her face.

‘Professor Dumbledore will be back tomorrow,’ she said at last. ‘I don’t know how you came to hear of the Stone, but rest assured, nobody can possibly steal it. It is far too well protected.’

‘But Professor...’

‘Potter, I know what I’m talking about. I once spent a very long night in the dark outside Kandahar making certain our camp was properly warded against the... well. You’ll learn about those in your third year.’ She drew herself up. ‘The Stone is secure. I saw to part of it myself. I suggest the three of you go back outside and enjoy the sunshine.’

They didn’t.

Harry knew exactly what was happening here. He’d seen it a hundred times at his old school. The grown-ups weren’t listening to the children, even when the children were right.

‘It’s tonight,’ he said, once he was sure Professor McGonagall was out of earshot. ‘Snape’s going through the trapdoor tonight. He’s found out everything he needs, and now he’s got Dumbledore out of the way. I bet he sent that owl. The Ministry’s going to get a real shock when Dumbledore turns up.’

‘But what can we...’

Hermione gasped. Harry and Ron spun round.

Snape was standing behind them.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said smoothly.

They stared at him.

‘You shouldn’t be indoors on a day like this,’ he said, with an odd, twisted smile.

‘We were...’ Harry began, with no idea at all how the sentence was going to end.

‘You want to be more careful,’ said Snape. ‘Loitering like this. People will think you’re up to something. And Gryffindor really can’t afford to lose any more points, can it?’

Harry went red. They turned to go, but Snape called them back.

‘Be warned, Potter. Any more night-time wanderings and I shall personally see to it that you are expelled. Good day.’

He strode off towards the staff room.

Out on the stone steps, Harry turned to the other two. If that greasy, hook-nosed git wanted to make a fight of it, Harry would give him one. He’d just been challenged, and he was done with being bullied by the man.

‘Right, here’s what we do,’ he whispered. ‘One of us has to keep an eye on Snape. Wait outside the staff room and follow him if he leaves. Hermione, you’d better do that.’

‘Why me?’

‘Obvious, isn’t it?’ said Ron. ‘You can pretend you’re waiting for Flitwick. You know what you’re like.’ He put on a high voice. ‘Oh, Professor Flitwick, I’m ever so worried, I think I got question fourteen b wrong...’

‘Oh, shut up,’ said Hermione, and she gave Ron the look she usually saved for Malfoy, and Harry wondered briefly whether Ron’s life was in danger. Then she sighed.

‘Fine. I’ll do it. But if Flitwick actually comes out and asks me about fourteen b, I’m blaming you.’

‘And we’d better stay near the third-floor corridor,’ Harry told Ron. ‘Come on.’

That part of the plan didn’t work. They had barely reached the door that stood between Fluffy and the rest of the school when Professor McGonagall appeared behind them, out of nowhere, without a sound, in a way that Harry would later learn she’d picked up from an old friend she’d once met in a place called Zanzibar Land, and this time she lost her temper properly.

‘I suppose you think you’re hard men, the pair of you, who can defy authority!’ she stormed. ‘Enough of this nonsense! If I hear you’ve been within sight of this corridor again, I’ll take another fifty points from Gryffindor! Yes, Weasley, from my own house! It’s for your own good. Now get going!’

Harry and Ron went back to the common room. Harry had just said, ‘Well, at least Hermione’s on Snape’s tail,’ when the Fat Lady swung open and Hermione came through.

‘I’m sorry, Harry!’ she wailed. ‘Snape came out and asked what I was doing, so I said I was waiting for Flitwick, and Snape went and got him, and I’ve only just got away. I don’t know where Snape went.’

No. Harry wasn’t going to let it all fall apart because of a couple of thick teachers who wouldn’t listen. He felt his resolve set like concrete.

‘Well, that’s it then, isn’t it?’ he said.

The other two stared at him. He was pale, and his eyes were glittering.

‘I’m going out tonight, and I’m going to try to get to the Stone first.’

‘You’re mad!’ said Ron.

‘You can’t!’ said Hermione. ‘After what McGonagall and Snape said? You’ll be expelled!’

‘I don’t bloody well care any more!’ Harry shouted. ‘Don’t you understand? If Snape gets the Stone, Voldemort comes back! Haven’t you heard what it was like when he was trying to take over? There won’t be any Hogwarts left to be expelled from! He’ll smash it all up, or turn it into a school for the Dark Arts! Losing points doesn’t matter now. This is survival. This is what’s right, and I don’t care what anybody else thinks of me. I’m off to do what’s right. D’you think he’ll leave you and your families alone if Gryffindor win the House Cup? If I get caught before I reach the Stone, fine, I’ll go back to the Dursleys and wait for Voldemort to find me there. It’s only dying a bit later than I would have done, because I am never going over to the Dark Side! I’m going through that trapdoor tonight, and nothing you two say is going to stop me! Voldemort killed my parents. He took everything from me. Remember?’

For a moment Harry thought of the mirror, and the family he might have had. But that had been an illusion. He had to stop Voldemort, and if he couldn’t do it for himself, then he’d do it for his friends, who had families, who had the real thing, the thing that had only ever been glass to him. He wouldn’t stand by and watch anyone else robbed of that. He glared at Ron and Hermione.

‘You’re right, Harry,’ said Hermione, in a small voice.

‘I’ll use the Invisibility Cloak,’ said Harry. ‘It’s lucky I got it back.’

‘But will it cover all three of us?’ said Ron.

‘All... all three of us?’

‘Oh, come off it. You didn’t think we’d let you go on your own?’

‘Of course not,’ said Hermione briskly. ‘How do you think you’d get to the Stone without us? I’d better go through my books. There might be something useful...’

‘But if we’re caught, you two will be expelled as well.’

‘Not if I can help it,’ said Hermione grimly. ‘Flitwick told me in secret I got a hundred and twelve per cent on his exam. They’re not throwing me out after that.’

After dinner the three of them sat apart in the common room, nervous and quiet. Nobody bothered them. None of the Gryffindors had anything to say to Harry these days, after all, and tonight was the first night it hadn’t hurt. Hermione skimmed through her notes, hoping to find one of the enchantments they were about to try to break. Harry and Ron said very little. Both of them were thinking about what they were going to do.

Slowly the room emptied as people drifted off to bed.

‘Better fetch the Cloak,’ Ron muttered, as Lee Jordan finally went up, stretching and yawning.

Harry ran up to the dark dormitory. He pulled out the Cloak, and then his eye fell on the flute Hagrid had carved him for Christmas. He pocketed it, for Fluffy. He didn’t feel much like singing. He ran back down.

‘We’d better put the Cloak on here, and make sure it covers all three of us. If Filch spots one of our feet going along by itself...’

‘What are you doing?’

The voice came from the corner of the room.

It was Malfoy. Somehow, she was in the Gryffindor common room.

‘Nothing, Malfoy. Clear off. You shouldn’t even be in our common room,’ said Harry.

‘Longbottom told me the password,’ said Malfoy.

‘Why would Neville do that, Malfoy?’ asked Ron.

‘Because I asked him,’ said Malfoy, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.

Before anyone could ask why Neville would give Dracina Malfoy the password simply because she’d asked for it, she saw the guilty looks on all three faces, and Harry watched her put it together.

‘Oh. You’re going out again, aren’t you? Haven’t you learned, stupid Potter?’

‘This is important, Malfoy. You don’t understand,’ said Harry, and it came out angrier than he’d meant.

‘Unlike you, I’m not stupid, Potter!’

‘Of course you aren’t,’ said Harry drily, meaning the opposite. ‘What are you even doing here?’

‘I came to...’ Malfoy began, and her face had softened somehow, as though she were working herself up to something that was hard for her. Then Hermione stepped in front of Harry.

‘She’s Snape’s favourite,’ Hermione said firmly. ‘She’s probably here to stop us for him.’

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ Ron agreed.

It all made sense to Harry. What else would somebody as mean and spiteful as Malfoy be up to? Why else would she go to the trouble of finding out the Gryffindor password?

Why else, though? Harry thought, for just a second.

‘That’s not it at all, you filthy little Mudblood! I came to Harry to...’

Oh. Harry’s stomach dropped. She was going to apologise. For running off and leaving him in the Forest. She’d tried on the way back, three times. He’d been too far inside his own head to hear any of it. How could he have been so thick?

He never finished the thought. Hermione was quicker than his thinking. She growled, and her wand came up.

‘Petrificus Totalus!‘

Malfoy’s arms snapped flat to her sides. Her legs sprang together. Her whole body went rigid, she swayed on the spot, and then she toppled forward and hit the floor face first, stiff as a plank. Hermione ran and rolled her over. Malfoy’s jaws were locked shut. Only her eyes could move, and they were fixed on Hermione, and they were pure fury.

‘What’ve you done to her?’ Harry whispered.

‘It’s the full Body-Bind,’ said Hermione, with something like triumph. ‘She deserves it, Harry. After what she did to Neville. She was going to stop us for Snape. I won’t let her do anything else to hurt you!’

‘Hermione!‘ Harry shouted, and he was properly angry with her now. ‘She came to apologise to me! For running away in the Forest. She’s sorry for it. She only wanted to say sorry to me.’

‘No. That’s not right. She’s evil, Harry. Don’t trust her,’ said Hermione, in exactly the voice she used to correct Ron’s wand movements.

Hermione and Malfoy exchanged a look of such mutual loathing that for a moment Harry found it hard to tell the two girls apart.

‘Never mind all that, we’ve got to go!’ said Ron, which sobered all of them.

Ron was right. They had to stop Snape. Harry looked down at Malfoy once more. She was looking back up at him, and it was murder in her eyes, for him as much as Hermione.

‘I accept your apology,’ Harry said, sadly, ‘and I’m sorry for what Hermione did to you. We’ll come back for you. All right?’

Malfoy couldn’t do much. But Harry saw a twinkle come into her eyes, suddenly, that was aimed at him and nobody else, and he felt something he had no words for at eleven, and wouldn’t have for a long while yet. He would think about that twinkle in her silver eyes, and how to get it back and pointed at him again, for years afterwards.

‘Harry!’ Ron called.

Harry went to join Ron and Hermione, and so he didn’t see Malfoy turn her eyes on Hermione, and give her, with the only part of her face that still worked, a look of glittering triumph. Knowing that Hermione made herself look violent and cruel. He didn’t see Hermione see it either. He only heard Hermione say, ‘We’ve got to move on!’ in a voice so high and so plainly furious that both boys looked round at her in surprise.

As the three of them climbed out through the portrait hole and pulled the Cloak over themselves, Harry and Ron caught each other’s eye and understood one another perfectly, without a word.

‘Women...’ Ron whispered.

Harry nodded. He understood everything.

All the same, leaving Malfoy lying stiff on the floor didn’t feel like a good omen.

In their nervous state every statue’s shadow was Filch, and every breath of wind down a corridor was Peeves swooping. At the foot of the first staircase they saw Mrs Norris skulking near the top.

‘Oi, let’s kick her, just this once,’ Ron whispered in Harry’s ear, but Harry shook his head. As they climbed carefully round her, Mrs Norris turned her lamp-like eyes on them, and did nothing.

They met nobody else until they reached the stairs to the third floor. Peeves was bobbing about halfway up, loosening the carpet so that people would trip.

‘Who’s there?’ he said suddenly, as they climbed towards him. He narrowed his wicked black eyes. ‘Know you’re there, even if I can’t see you. Ghoulie or ghostie or wee student beastie?’

He rose into the air and hung there, squinting at them.

‘Ought to call Filch, I ought, if something’s a-creeping about unseen.’

Harry had a sudden idea.

‘Peeves,’ he said, in a hoarse whisper. ‘The Bloody Baron has his own reasons for going unseen.’

Peeves nearly fell out of the air. He caught himself a foot above the stairs. It had worked. Ron, Seamus and Dean always said Harry did a cracking Bloody Baron, and it seemed Peeves agreed.

‘So sorry, your bloodiness, Mr Baron, sir,’ he said greasily. ‘My mistake, my mistake. Didn’t see you. Course I didn’t, you’re invisible. Forgive old Peevsie his little joke, sir.’

‘I have business here, Peeves,’ Harry croaked. ‘Stay away from this place tonight.’

‘I will, sir. I most certainly will,’ said Peeves, rising again. ‘Hope your business goes well, Baron, I’ll not trouble you.’

And he shot off.

‘Harry, you legend,’ Ron whispered. ‘I always said you did a good Baron!’

A few seconds later they were there, outside the third-floor corridor, and the door was already open a crack.

‘Well, there you are,’ Harry said quietly. ‘Snape’s already got past Fluffy.’

Somehow the open door brought home to all three of them what they were facing. Under the Cloak, Harry turned to the other two.

‘If you want to go back, I won’t blame you,’ he said. ‘Take the Cloak. I won’t need it now.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Ron.

‘We’re coming,’ said Hermione.

Harry pushed the door. It creaked, and low, rumbling growls answered it. All three of the dog’s noses swung towards them and sniffed madly, though it couldn’t see them.

‘What’s that by its feet?’ Hermione whispered.

‘Looks like a harp,’ said Ron. ‘Snape must’ve left it.’

‘It must wake the moment the music stops,’ said Harry. ‘Well. Here goes.’

He put Hagrid’s flute to his lips and blew. It wasn’t a tune, exactly, but from the very first note the beast’s eyes began to droop. Harry hardly dared draw breath. Slowly the growls died, and the dog tottered on its paws, sank to its knees, and slumped over on to its side, fast asleep.

‘Keep playing,’ Ron warned him, as they slid out from under the Cloak and crept towards the trapdoor. They could feel the dog’s hot, stinking breath as they passed the three enormous heads.

‘I reckon we can pull the door open,’ said Ron, peering over the dog’s back. ‘Want to go first, Hermione?’

‘No, I do not!’

‘All right.’

Ron gritted his teeth and stepped over the dog’s legs. He bent down and pulled the ring, and the trapdoor swung up.

‘What can you see?’ Hermione whispered.

‘Nothing. Just black. There’s no way of climbing down, we’ll have to drop.’

Harry, still playing, waved at Ron until Ron looked round, and pointed at himself.

‘You want to go first? You sure?’ said Ron. ‘I don’t know how deep it goes. Give the flute to Hermione, she can keep him under.’

Harry passed it over. In the few seconds of silence the dog growled and twitched, but the moment Hermione began to play, it sank back into sleep. Harry climbed over it and looked down through the trapdoor. There was no sign of a bottom. He lowered himself through until he hung by his fingertips, and looked up at Ron.

‘If anything happens to me, don’t follow. Go straight to the Owlery and send Hedwig to Dumbledore. Right?’

‘Right,’ said Ron.

‘See you in a minute. I hope.’

And Harry let go.

Cold, damp air rushed past him as he fell, down, and down, and down, and then, FLUMP. With a soft, muffled thud, he landed on something yielding. He sat up and felt about, his eyes not yet used to the gloom. He seemed to be sitting on some sort of plant.

‘It’s okay!’ he called up to the postage stamp of light that was the trapdoor. ‘Soft landing! You can jump!’

Ron came at once, and landed sprawled beside him.

‘What’s this stuff?’ were his first words.

‘Dunno. Some kind of plant. I suppose it’s here to break the fall. Come on, Hermione!’

The distant music stopped. The dog barked, loud, but Hermione had already jumped, and she landed on Harry’s other side.

‘We must be miles under the school,’ she said.

‘Lucky this plant thing’s here, really,’ said Ron.

‘Lucky!‘ Hermione shrieked. ‘Look at you both!’

She leapt up and fought her way to a damp wall, and she had to fight, because the moment she’d landed the plant had begun winding snaky tendrils round her ankles. Harry’s and Ron’s legs, meanwhile, had been bound tight in long creepers without either of them noticing. Hermione had got free before it had a proper grip on her. Now she watched in horror as the two boys struggled, and the harder they fought, the faster and tighter the plant wound round them.

‘Stop moving!’ she ordered. ‘I know what this is. It’s Devil’s Snare!’

‘Oh, good, I’m so glad we know what it’s called, that’s a huge help,’ snarled Ron, leaning back to keep it off his throat.

‘I feel so educated, despite the mortal danger,’ Harry muttered.

‘Shut up, I’m trying to remember how to kill it!’ said Hermione.

‘Well, hurry up, it’s choking me!’ Harry gasped, as it coiled round his chest.

‘Devil’s Snare, Devil’s Snare. What did Professor Sprout say? It likes the dark and the damp...’

‘So light a fire!’ Harry choked.

‘Yes! Of course! But there’s no wood!’ Hermione cried, wringing her hands.

‘HAVE YOU GONE MAD?’ Ron bellowed. ‘ARE YOU A WITCH OR NOT?’

‘Oh! Right!’ said Hermione, and she whipped out her wand, waved it, muttered, and sent a jet of the same bluebell flames she’d used on Snape at the plant. In seconds the two boys felt it loosen as it cringed away from the light and warmth, and it writhed and unwound itself from their bodies, and they pulled free.

‘Lucky you pay attention in Herbology, Hermione,’ said Harry, joining her by the wall and wiping the sweat off his face.

‘Yeah,’ said Ron. ‘And lucky Harry doesn’t lose his head in a crisis. "There’s no wood." Honestly.’

‘This way,’ said Harry, pointing down a stone passage, which was the only way on.

All they could hear besides their own footsteps was the slow drip of water down the walls. The passage sloped downwards, and it put Harry in mind of Gringotts, and then, with an unpleasant lurch of the heart, of the dragons that were said to guard the deepest vaults there. If they met a dragon, a grown one... Norbert had been bad enough.

‘Can you hear something?’ Ron whispered.

Harry listened. A soft rustling and clinking was coming from somewhere ahead.

‘D’you think it’s a ghost?’

‘Dunno. Sounds like wings.’

‘There’s light ahead. I can see something moving.’

They came to the end of the passage and found themselves at the entrance to a brilliantly lit chamber whose ceiling arched high above them. It was full of small, jewel-bright birds, fluttering and tumbling through the air. On the far side stood a heavy wooden door.

‘Reckon they’ll attack us if we cross?’ said Ron.

‘Probably,’ said Harry. ‘They don’t look vicious, but if they all came at once... well, there’s nothing for it. I’ll run.’

He took a breath, covered his face with his arms and sprinted. He expected beaks and claws any second, but nothing came. He reached the door untouched, and tried the handle. Locked.

The other two followed him. They heaved and tugged at the door, and it wouldn’t give, not even when Hermione tried her Alohomora.

‘Now what?’ said Ron.

‘Those birds,’ said Hermione. ‘They can’t just be here for decoration.’

They watched the birds soaring overhead, glittering. Glittering?

‘They’re not birds!’ Harry said suddenly. ‘They’re keys! Winged keys, look!’ He looked round the chamber while the other two squinted up at the flock. ‘And that means... yes! Look! Broomsticks! We’ve got to catch the key to the door!’

‘But there are hundreds of them!’

Ron peered at the lock.

‘We want a big, old-fashioned one. Silver, probably, to match the handle.’

They took a broomstick each and kicked off.

It was like flying into a snowstorm, if the snow had been made of metal and had opinions. The keys swirled round them in their hundreds, brass and iron and copper and tin, each one on a pair of whirring wings, and they moved as a flock moves, pouring away from the brooms in a glittering wave and then closing in again behind. Ron grabbed at a fat gold key and it twisted out of his fingers like a fish. Hermione snatched at a slender black one and three others swooped in and knocked her hand away. The noise was tremendous, a thousand tiny wings and a thousand tiny clinks, and under it the keys made a sound Harry had never heard from anything before, a high, mocking chatter, like a room full of people laughing behind their hands.

Then the voice came. The old one, the one that had followed him up from the cupboard under the stairs. You’ll never do it. You’ve never been good at anything. You’ll fail at this like you fail at everything, and then they’ll all know.

No, thought Harry. Not tonight.

Because it wasn’t for nothing that he was the youngest Seeker in a century. This was the one thing he knew he was good at, properly good at, better than Malfoy and better than anybody, and he wasn’t going to let a cupboard full of keys beat him. He stopped grabbing. He let the broom drift up above the flock, the way he did above a Quidditch match, and he looked.

Seekers see things other people don’t. Harry hung there and let the flock wheel beneath him, and watched the way it turned, and the way certain keys flew differently from the others, and there, low on the far side of the chamber, one of them was flying wrong. It was big, and silver, and it had bright blue wings, and the feathers on one wing were crushed and bent, as if somebody had already caught it once and rammed it roughly into a lock.

‘That one!’ he yelled. ‘The big one, there, no, there, the one with the blue wings, the feathers are all crumpled on one side!’

Ron went speeding in the direction Harry was pointing, crashed into the ceiling, and nearly fell off his broom.

The key had seen them. It dropped like a stone, straight through the heart of the flock, and the flock closed behind it, and for a sick second Harry lost it. Then he saw the blue flash again, higher, darting for the vaulted roof.

‘We’ve got to box it in!’ he shouted, never taking his eyes off the crumpled wing. ‘Ron, come at it from above! Hermione, stay underneath, don’t let it go down! I’ll take it. Right. NOW!’

Ron dived. Hermione rocketed up. The key jinked between them, clipped Hermione’s ear with a wing, and shot for the wall, and Harry was already moving, flat along the handle, the way he’d gone after the Snitch with Flint on his tail. The key flew for the stones. It flew for a crack in the mortar it would never have fitted through. Harry leaned forward, and with a nasty crunch of metal on stone, pinned it to the wall with one hand.

Ron’s and Hermione’s cheers went ringing round the chamber.

They landed in a hurry and Harry ran to the door with the key struggling and buzzing in his fist. He rammed it into the lock and turned. It worked. The instant the lock clicked, the key tore free and flew off, looking very much the worse for having been caught twice.

‘Ready?’ Harry asked the others, with his hand on the handle.

They nodded. He pulled the door open.

The next chamber was so dark that they could see nothing at all. But as they stepped into it, light flooded the room, and they saw an astonishing sight.

They were standing at the edge of a huge chessboard, behind the black pieces, every one of which was taller than they were and carved from what looked like black stone. Across the chamber stood the white pieces, and Harry, Ron and Hermione all shivered, because the towering white chessmen had no faces.

‘Now what?’ Harry whispered.

‘It’s obvious, isn’t it?’ said Ron. ‘We’ve got to play our way across.’

Beyond the white pieces they could see another door.

‘How?’ said Hermione nervously.

‘I think,’ said Ron, ‘we’re going to have to be chessmen.’

He walked up to a black knight and put a hand out to the knight’s horse. At once the stone came to life. The horse pawed the ground, and the knight turned its helmeted head to look down at Ron.

‘Do we... er... have to join you to get across?’

The knight nodded.

Ron turned to the other two.

‘This wants thinking about,’ he said. ‘I suppose we’ve got to take the places of three of the black pieces.’

Harry and Hermione kept quiet and let Ron think. At last he said, ‘Now, don’t be offended or anything, but neither of you is that good at chess...’

‘I’m not offended at all, mate. You’re the best chess player I’ve ever seen,’ said Harry quickly. ‘Just tell us what to do. You’ve got this well in order.’

Ron’s chest puffed out at that. It was true praise, and he knew it. He wasn’t good at many things, but he was brilliant at chess, and Harry’s faith in him seemed to do something to him. He stood straighter. His voice came out steadier.

‘Right. Harry, you take that bishop’s place. Hermione, you go there, instead of that castle.’

‘What about you?’

‘I’m going to be a knight,’ said Ron.

The chessmen seemed to have been listening, because at his words a knight, a bishop and a castle turned their backs on the white side and walked off the board, leaving three empty squares, which Harry, Ron and Hermione took.

‘White always moves first,’ said Ron, peering across the board. ‘Yes. Look.’

A white pawn had slid forward two squares.

Ron began to direct the black pieces. They went silently wherever he sent them. Harry’s knees were shaking. What if they lost?

‘Pawn. That one. Two forward,’ said Ron. ‘Right. Harry, diagonally, four squares to the right.’

Harry went. The stone was cold through his trainers.

Their first real shock came when their other knight was taken. The white queen smashed him to the floor and dragged him off the board, where he lay quite still, face down.

‘Had to let that happen,’ said Ron, shaken. ‘Leaves you free to take that bishop, Hermione. Go on.’

‘You’ve got this, mate,’ Harry said, and Ron nodded without looking round.

Every time one of their pieces fell, the white side showed no mercy, and soon a heap of limp black figures lay slumped along the wall.

‘Hermione, don’t move!’ Ron shouted suddenly, when she’d already lifted a foot. ‘No. Stay there. That bishop’s got you if you go. Harry, back one. Back one, now!’

Harry stepped back, and a white knight clattered on to the square he’d just left and stood there, faceless, as though it were disappointed.

‘Thanks,’ said Harry weakly.

‘Don’t thank me, don’t talk to me, I’m thinking,’ said Ron.

He himself darted about the board taking almost as many white pieces as they’d lost black ones.

‘We’re nearly there,’ he muttered suddenly. ‘Let me think. Let me think...’

The white queen turned her blank face towards him.

‘Yes,’ said Ron softly. ‘It’s the only way. I’ve got to be taken.’

‘NO! I’ll do it, Ron!’ Harry shouted.

‘That’s chess!’ snapped Ron. ‘You’ve got to make sacrifices! I make my move, she takes me, and that leaves you free to checkmate the king, Harry!’

‘But...’

‘D’you want to stop Snape or not?’

‘Ron...’

‘Look, if you don’t hurry up he’ll have the Stone already!’

There was nothing else for it.

‘Ready?’ Ron called. His face was white, and set. ‘Here I go. Now, don’t hang about once you’ve won. Promise me you’ll get that greasy git?’

Harry nodded, and hoped with everything in him that Ron would be all right.

Ron stepped forward, and the white queen pounced. She struck him hard round the head with her stone arm and he crashed to the floor. Hermione screamed, but she stayed on her square. The white queen dragged Ron to one side. He looked as though he’d been knocked cold.

Shaking, Harry moved three squares to the left.

The white king took off his crown and threw it down at Harry’s feet. They’d won. The chessmen parted and bowed, and the door ahead stood clear.

With one last desperate look back at Ron, Harry and Hermione charged through the door and up the passage beyond.

‘What if he’s...?’

‘He’ll be fine,’ said Harry, trying to believe it. ‘What d’you reckon’s next?’

‘We’ve had Sprout’s, that was the Devil’s Snare. Flitwick must’ve charmed the keys. McGonagall transfigured the chessmen to bring them alive. That leaves Quirrell’s spell, and Snape’s.’

They’d come to another door.

‘All right?’ Harry whispered.

‘Go on.’

Harry pushed it open.

A foul smell hit them, so thick that both of them pulled their robes up over their noses. With their eyes streaming, they saw, flat on the floor in front of them, a troll even bigger than the one they’d fought at Hallowe’en, out cold, with a bloody lump on its head.

‘I’m glad we didn’t have to tackle that one,’ Harry whispered, as they picked their way over one of its enormous legs. ‘Come on. I can’t breathe.’

He pulled open the next door, and neither of them quite dared look at what was coming. But there was nothing frightening in here. Only a table, with seven bottles of different shapes standing in a row.

‘Snape’s,’ said Harry. ‘What do we do?’

They stepped over the threshold, and at once a fire sprang up behind them in the doorway. It was no ordinary fire. It was purple. In the same instant, black flames leapt up in the doorway ahead. They were trapped.

‘Look!’

Hermione had snatched up a roll of paper from beside the bottles. Harry read it over her shoulder.

Before you, danger; safety at your back.

Two of us will help you, whichever path you lack.

One of seven lets you onward through the black,

One of seven turns you round and sends you back,

Two of us are nothing more than nettle wine,

And three of us are death, and keep our place in line.

Choose, or stay among us till the end of time,

And to help you in your choosing, take these clues of mine:

First: however cleverly the poison plays its part,

There’s always some of it to nettle wine’s left-hand.

Second: the two that stand at either end are not alike,

But neither one will help you if it’s onward that you strike.

Third: as you can plainly see, no two of us are matched in size,

And neither smallest nor the tallest holds a death inside.

Fourth: the second from the left and second from the right

Are twins beneath the glass, however different to the sight.

Hermione let out a great sigh, and Harry saw, with amazement, that she was smiling, which was the last thing in the world he felt like doing.

‘Brilliant,’ said Hermione. ‘This isn’t magic. It’s logic. It’s a puzzle. Loads of the greatest wizards haven’t got an ounce of logic, they’d be stuck in here for ever.’

‘But so will we, won’t we?’

‘Of course not,’ said Hermione. ‘Everything we need is on this paper. Seven bottles. Three are poison, two are wine, one gets us safely through the black fire, and one gets us back through the purple.’

‘But how do we know which is which?’

‘Give me a minute.’

Hermione read the paper through several times. Then she walked up and down the row of bottles, pointing at each in turn.

‘Poison’s always on the left of wine,’ she murmured. ‘So the one at the far left can’t be wine, there’s nothing beside it to be poison. The two on the ends are different, and neither of them’s the way forward, so one’s poison and one’s the way back. The smallest and the biggest aren’t poison. And these two are the same...’ She tapped the second bottle from each end. ‘There are only two of wine. So if that’s wine, that’s wine, which makes that poison, and that poison, which means...’

There was something very bright in her face as she did it, something that had nothing to do with being trapped between two fires, and Harry would not have been able to say what it was. At last she clapped her hands.

‘Got it,’ she said. ‘The smallest bottle gets us through the black fire. Towards the Stone.’

Harry looked at the tiny bottle.

‘There’s only enough for one of us,’ he said. ‘That’s barely a swallow.’

They looked at each other.

‘Which one gets you back through the purple?’

Hermione pointed to a round bottle at the right-hand end of the row.

Harry didn’t hesitate. He wasn’t going to let anybody else put themselves in danger on his account.

‘You drink that,’ he said. ‘No, listen. Go back and get Ron. Grab brooms from the key room, they’ll get you out through the trapdoor and past Fluffy. Go straight to the Owlery and send Hedwig to Dumbledore. We need him. I might be able to hold Snape off for a bit, but I’m no match for him, not really.’

‘But Harry... what if You-Know-Who’s with him?’

‘Well. I was lucky once, wasn’t I?’ said Harry, pointing at his scar. ‘Might get lucky again.’

Hermione’s lip trembled. She rushed at him and flung her arms round him.

‘Hermione!’

‘Harry. You’re a great wizard, you know.’

‘I’m not as good as you,’ said Harry, deeply embarrassed, as she let go.

‘Me!’ said Hermione. ‘Books! And cleverness! There are more important things. Friendship, and bravery, and... oh, Harry, be careful!’

‘You drink first,’ said Harry. ‘You are sure which is which?’

‘Positive,’ said Hermione.

She took a long drink from the round bottle at the end, and shuddered.

‘It’s not poison?’ said Harry anxiously.

‘No. But it’s like ice.’

‘Quick. Go, before it wears off.’

‘Good luck. Take care...’

‘GO!’

Hermione turned and walked straight into the purple fire, and was gone.

Harry took a deep breath and picked up the smallest bottle. He turned to face the black flames.

‘Here I come,’ he said, and he drained it in one gulp.

It was as though ice had flooded his body. He set the bottle down and walked forward, braced himself, saw the black flames licking at his body and couldn’t feel them at all. For a moment there was nothing but dark fire. Then he was through, on the other side, in the last chamber.

There was already somebody there.

But it wasn’t Snape.

It wasn’t even Voldemort.

Chapter 13 : Rage Against Evil

It was Quirrell.

He was standing in the middle of the chamber with his back to the door, quite still, and there was no sign of the twitching, flinching, apologetic man who’d spent the whole year jumping at his own shadow. He stood straight. His hands were folded behind him. When he turned, his face was perfectly calm, and that was somehow worse than anything.

‘You!’ gasped Harry.

Quirrell smiled.

‘Me,’ he said. ‘I did wonder whether it’d be you I met down here, Potter.’

‘I knew there was something funny about you,’ said Harry, and his voice shook, though not with fear, not yet. ‘But I honestly reckoned you didn’t have the will to sort this out compared to Snape.’

‘Snape? Severus Snape?’ Quirrell laughed, and it wasn’t the nervous bleat Harry had heard across a hundred lessons. It was low and dry and cold. ‘Don’t be so silly. Whilst dear Severus does like to sit on the fence, he does look the part, doesn’t he? It’s been wonderfully convenient, having him sweep about the place like a great bat in a bad mood. Stand him next to me, and who’d ever look twice at p-p-poor, st-stammering P-Professor Quirrell?’

He said the last part in the old voice, the one from the classroom, and then dropped it like a coat he’d finished with.

Things were starting to come clear for Harry, horribly clear. The mushrooms. The two times the stutter had vanished. The stranger in the hood at the Hog’s Head who’d wanted to know all about Fluffy. But there was one thing that didn’t fit.

‘Snape tried to knock me off my broom,’ he said. ‘He wanted me dead.’

‘No, you foolish boy. I wanted you dead! Your rather obsessive friend Miss Granger accidentally knocked me over as she rushed to set fire to Snape at that Quidditch match. She broke my eye contact with you. Another few seconds and you’d have been on the ground in pieces. I’d have had you long before that, as it happens, if Severus hadn’t been sitting there mumbling a counter-curse under his breath, keeping you on.’

‘I was not getting off that broom no matter what you would’ve tried,’ said Harry firmly.

Quirrell laughed at that, as though Harry had said something charming.

‘You really thought it was Severus? Why d’you suppose he wanted to referee the next match? To make sure I didn’t have another go. He needn’t have troubled himself. I couldn’t do a thing with Dumbledore sitting in the stands. The rest of the staff were convinced he was trying to cheat Gryffindor out of the Cup, and he’s never been so unpopular. And all for nothing, when I’m going to kill you tonight anyway.’

Quirrell snapped his fingers.

Chains came out of the empty air with a sound like a portcullis dropping and wound themselves round Harry, round his chest and his arms and his ankles, and pulled tight.

‘You’re too nosy to live, Potter. Rather like your father in that regard. He was a few years ahead of me but my oh my did he like to stick his nose in our business. Even then.’

Harry struggled. The chains didn’t give an inch.

‘Whose business?’ he said. when suddenly he had a thought. 'Oh no, don't tell me you're j-' 

‘Silence!’ Quirrell’s calm cracked for the first time, and he turned away from Harry towards the thing that stood in the middle of the chamber. ‘It’s funny, Potter. For all I knew you’d seen me coming to look at what was guarding the Stone.’

‘You let the troll in?’

‘Naturally. Trolls and I have an understanding. You saw what I did to the one in the chamber back there, I take it? The pity of it was that while the rest of them were running round the castle hunting for it, Severus, who’d had his eye on me from the start, went straight up to the third floor to cut me off. So my troll didn’t manage to beat you to death, and that wretched dog didn’t even take Severus’s leg off properly.’ He drew a breath. ‘Now, be quiet, Potter. I need to examine this interesting mirror.’

And it was then that Harry saw what Quirrell was standing in front of.

It was the Mirror of Erised. The gold frame, the clawed feet, the words along the top that he’d never managed to read. He hadn’t seen it since Dumbledore had sent him away from it, and here it was, deep under the school, and Quirrell was gazing into it with a hunger that made his face look thin.

Harry laughed. He couldn’t help it. It was exactly what Dumbledore had said. Men had wasted away in front of that glass.

‘Quiet, Potter. This mirror. It’s the key to finding the stone for my master.’ Quirrell gave the frame a few experimental taps with his wand, then with his knuckles, as though it might be hollow. ‘Of course, that mad Dumbledore had to come up with something so esoteric. Lucius made sure he’s in London though. I’ll be far gone by the time that senile old fool is back.’

Lucius. Harry turned the name over. He’d heard it before, in a shop full of robes, a hundred years ago.

All Harry could think of doing was to keep Quirrell talking. Every second the man spent answering him was a second he wasn’t giving to the Mirror.

‘Why did you leave us alone in the forest?’ Harry said. ‘What really happened?’

Quirrell laughed at that. A cruel, sickening laugh, that went on too long.

‘I had to have children pure of heart and body, you see. Unicorns don’t appear to men like me. Oh no. I had to make sure it would come to you without me around. I’d wounded the damn thing earlier in the day but it’s just too fast when it senses impurity.’

Harry felt sick. He thought of Dracina’s face in the dark, white as the unicorn’s, and of the hooded thing crawling across the clearing, and of the four of them left standing there like bait on a hook, which was exactly what they’d been.

Quirrell went round the back of the Mirror, and came out again, and stared into it so hungrily that Harry could see the glass reflected in his eyes.

‘I see it,’ he breathed. ‘I see the Stone. I’m holding it up to my master. But where is it?’

Harry worked his wrists against the chains. Nothing. He had to keep going.

‘But Snape always seemed to hate me so much.’

‘Oh, he does,’ said Quirrell, without looking round. ‘Make no mistake about that. He was at school with your father, didn’t you know? They couldn’t stand the sight of each other. But he never wanted you dead.’

‘But I heard you,’ Harry said. ‘A few days ago. You were crying, and I thought it was Snape, threatening you.’

For the first time something passed across Quirrell’s face, quick as a bird’s shadow. Fear.

‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘I find my master’s instructions hard to carry out. He is a very great wizard, and I am weak.’

‘You mean he was there? In the classroom with you?’

‘He is with me wherever I go,’ said Quirrell quietly.

The chamber seemed to get colder.

‘I met him on my travels. I was a foolish young man then, full of silly notions about good and evil. Lord Voldemort showed me the truth of it. There’s no good and evil, Potter. There’s power, and there are those too weak to reach for it. I’ve served him faithfully since then, though I’ve failed him more often than I’d like. He’s had to be hard on me.’ Quirrell gave a sudden shiver, from his shoulders to his knees. ‘He doesn’t forgive easily. When I failed to get the Stone out of Gringotts he was... most displeased. He punished me. He decided he’d have to keep a closer watch on me after that.’

His voice trailed off, and he went back to the Mirror.

Gringotts. Harry’s mind went back to Diagon Alley, to the day Hagrid had emptied vault seven hundred and thirteen, and to the Leaky Cauldron, where a nervous young man in a turban had shaken his hand and wouldn’t quite meet his eye. He’d been there. He’d been there that very day. How could Harry have been so stupid?

Quirrell swore under his breath.

‘I don’t understand it. Is the Stone inside the glass? Should I break it?’

Harry’s mind was racing now.

He knew what the Mirror showed. It showed what you wanted most. And he knew what he’d wanted most, the three nights he’d sat in front of it: his mother’s green eyes, his father’s untidy hair, the whole crowd of them smiling and waving. His family. People who wanted him.

But that wasn’t what he wanted now. Not at this moment, chained up in a cold room with Voldemort’s servant two feet away. What he wanted now, more than anything in the world, was to find the Stone before Quirrell did. To stop Voldemort. If he wanted that badly enough, and he did, he wanted it so badly it hurt, then the Mirror ought to show him finding it.

A plan began to put itself together in his head. He only had to look. But Quirrell was standing right in front of the glass. How could Harry get there without Quirrell seeing what he was up to?

He tried shuffling to the left, an inch at a time, to work round the edge of the frame. The chains round his ankles were too tight. He tripped, and went down hard on the stone floor.

Quirrell didn’t even look at him. He was muttering to the glass.

‘What does it do? How does it work? Help me, Master!’

And then a voice answered.

It was high and thin and cold, and the worst of it was where it came from. It didn’t come from the Mirror, or from the shadows. It came from Quirrell himself.

‘Use the boy... use the boy...’

Quirrell wheeled round.

‘Yes. Potter. Come here.’

He clapped his hands once and the chains fell off Harry with a crash. Harry got up slowly. His legs felt as though they belonged to somebody else.

‘Come here,’ Quirrell said again. ‘Look in the Mirror, and tell me what you see.’

Harry walked towards him.

He had to fight his own face to keep it straight. Quirrell was giving him exactly what he’d wanted. Handing it over. But he had to be clever about this. Whatever he saw in the glass, he’d have to lie about it, and he’d have to lie well, and hope that Quirrell believed him.

Quirrell stepped round behind him, close, and Harry caught the strange smell that always seemed to hang about the man’s turban, like something gone bad in a cupboard. He shut his eyes, stepped in front of the Mirror, and opened them.

There he was. Pale and small and frightened-looking. Then the reflection smiled.

It put its hand in its pocket, and drew out a stone the colour of blood, and winked at him, and put the Stone back in its pocket. And as it did, Harry felt something heavy drop into his own real pocket, against his leg.

Somehow, impossibly, he had the Stone.

‘Well?’ said Quirrell, right behind his ear. ‘What do you see?’

Harry screwed his courage together.

‘I see you, you’re crying and snivelling because that’s what you always do. You’re huddling in a ball. Wow this is very true to life, Professor.’

‘Cursed child! Get out of the way, I’ll see for myself!’

Quirrell shoved him aside, and Harry stumbled away from the glass. He’d made Quirrell furious, which had been the idea, because a furious man believes what he’s told. What Harry hadn’t got was a plan for the part after that.

‘He lies... he lies...’

‘Potter, come back here!’ Quirrell shouted. ‘The truth! What did you see?’

The high voice spoke again, and this time Harry heard the words very clearly.

‘Let me speak to him... face to face...’

‘Master, you’re not strong enough!’

‘I have strength enough... for this...’

Harry couldn’t move. It was as though the Devil’s Snare had come up through the floor and taken him by the ankles. He stood and watched as Quirrell reached up and started to unwind his turban.

The cloth came away in loops. Quirrell’s head looked oddly small without it, and oddly pale. Then he turned, slowly, on the spot, and Harry would have screamed, if he’d had any sound left in him.

On the back of Quirrell’s head, pushing out of the skull like a parasite, was the face from every nightmare Harry had ever had.

It was chalk white. It had red eyes, red and glaring, and where a nose should have been there were two slits, like a snake’s. It was the most terrible and the most unnatural thing Harry had ever seen.

‘Harry Potter...’ it whispered.

Harry tried to step back and his legs wouldn’t do it.

‘See what I’ve become?’ said the face. ‘Mere shadow. Mere vapour. I have a shape only when I can borrow another’s... but there have always been those willing to let me in... Unicorn blood has strengthened me these past weeks... you saw my faithful Quirrell drinking it for me in the Forest... and once I have the Elixir of Life, I shall make a body of my own... Now... why don’t you give me that Stone in your pocket?’

Bugger. He knew.

Feeling came back into Harry’s legs all at once, and he stumbled backwards.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ said the face, and it didn’t whisper now, it snarled. ‘Save your own life and join me... or you’ll go the same way as your parents... They died begging me for mercy...’

‘LIAR!’ Harry shouted.

Quirrell came at him backwards, step by step, so that the face could keep him in view. It was smiling.

‘How touching,’ it hissed. ‘I always did value courage... Yes, boy, your parents were brave... I killed your father first, and he fought me well... but your mother needn’t have died... she was trying to protect you... Now give me the Stone, unless you want her to have died for nothing.’

Harry had never been so frightened in his life.

Here it was. Here was the thing, the Dark wizard who’d killed his parents, the foul thing that had taken everything from him before he was old enough to know he had it. His scar split open with pain as Quirrell came closer. He was done for. He was going to die down here in the dark, and nobody would ever know. And the voice was there, the old voice, the Dursley voice. Useless. Failure. Of course you’re going to die, you’ve never done one thing right in your life.

But beyond the pain, underneath the voice, Harry felt something else.

It was the thing that had kept him on his broom when it bucked and rolled and tried to throw him. The thing that had made him jump on a troll’s back. The thing that had made him want to protect his friends, so that they’d never have to look into a mirror to see their families. But it was fed by something else, too, something he’d never let himself feel this much of before.

Hatred. It went through him like lava. Hatred for the Dark wizard who’d taken everything, who’d killed his parents and then, crucially, had failed to kill him. And this wasn’t even Voldemort. This was a scrap. A pathetic, parasitic leftover, hanging off the back of a coward’s head.

Harry surged forward.

He wasn’t going to die here. He didn’t want to die! And he was not going to let Voldemort kill him!

‘SEIZE HIM!’ Voldemort screamed, and Quirrell’s hand closed on Harry’s wrist.

Harry was going to claw at it. Bite it. Do anything at all to get that hand off him. But before he could do any of it, a pain like a needle went straight through his scar, and his head felt as though it were coming apart down the middle, and he roared, in pain and in rage, right into Quirrell’s face.

‘Aaaaagh!’

And Quirrell let go.

Harry couldn’t believe it. Was the man so pathetic that he’d been frightened off by an angry eleven-year-old? The pain in his head ebbed. He looked wildly round for Quirrell and found him bent double, staring at his own fingers.

They were blistering as Harry watched.

‘Seize him! SEIZE HIM!’ Voldemort shrieked, and Quirrell lunged and took Harry clean off his feet. They went down together, Quirrell on top, and both his hands were round Harry’s throat, and Harry’s scar was so bright with pain he could barely see. But he could see Quirrell. Quirrell was howling.

‘Master, I can’t hold him! My hands! My hands!‘

Quirrell was still kneeling on him, pinning him to the floor, but he’d let go of Harry’s neck and was staring at his own palms, baffled. They were raw and red and shining, as if he’d held them in a fire.

Good, Harry thought. He wanted them both to hurt.

‘Then kill him, fool, and have done with it!’ screeched Voldemort.

Quirrell raised his hand, and his lips began to shape a curse, and Harry, through sheer will and blistering hate, reached up and grabbed Quirrell’s face with both hands.

‘AAAARGH!’

Quirrell rolled off him, clutching at his cheeks, and they were blistering too, and Harry understood. Quirrell couldn’t touch him. Not his bare skin. Not without agony. And the only chance Harry had was to keep hold of him, keep him hurting, keep him in too much pain to get a curse out.

Harry scrambled up, caught Quirrell by the arm, and hung on with everything he had.

Quirrell screamed and tried to shake him off. The pain in Harry’s head was climbing and climbing. He could see the other face too now, the white face, twisting round on the back of Quirrell’s head to look at him, and for one moment, just one, Harry saw that Voldemort was afraid. Terrified. For his own life.

It was like blood in the water.

Harry held on. He howled with the pain of it and he didn’t let go, and Voldemort screamed too, and it was a sound that might once have come out of a human being but had long ago become something else, something with no humanity left in it at all. A beast’s noise. Or a snake’s.

Somewhere far off, Harry thought he could hear other voices. They were calling his name.

He turned his head, and there was the Mirror, and in the Mirror were his parents. His mother and his father, and they were looking straight at him, and there was such pride in their faces that Harry’s heart turned over. He hoped it was real. He hoped so much that it was real.

The pain was everything now. He couldn’t see. He felt Quirrell wrench and tear himself free. The voices were louder, and they were still calling him, and his parents were calling him too. Maybe it was time. Maybe it was finally time to step through the glass and be with them.

Harry felt very heavy.

He sank, and everything went black.

Something gold was glinting just above him.

The Snitch! Harry reached for it, but his arms weighed a ton each. He blinked. It wasn’t the Snitch. It was a pair of spectacles, half-moon ones, catching the light. How odd. He blinked again, and the face of Albus Dumbledore swam into place above the spectacles, and it was smiling.

‘Good afternoon, Harry,’ said Dumbledore.

Harry stared at him. Then it all came back in a rush.

‘Sir! The Stone! It was Quirrell! He’s got the Stone! Sir, quick...’

‘Calm yourself, dear boy. You’re a little behind the times,’ said Dumbledore. ‘Quirrell does not have the Stone.’

Harry tried to throw himself out of bed. He got about two inches. Dumbledore’s hand was flat on his chest, holding him down with a strength that didn’t belong to an old man at all.

‘Then who does? Sir, I...’

‘Harry, please lie still, or Madam Pomfrey will have me thrown out, and I should like to finish our conversation.’

Harry swallowed and looked about him. He was in the hospital wing. The sheets were white and smelled of starch, and on the table beside the bed was what looked like the entire stock of Honeydukes.

‘Tokens from your friends and admirers,’ said Dumbledore, beaming at the pile. ‘What passed between you and Professor Quirrell in the dungeons is, of course, a complete secret, and so, naturally, the entire school knows every word of it. I believe your friends Messrs Fred and George Weasley attempted to send you a lavatory seat. No doubt they felt it would cheer you up. Madam Pomfrey took the view that it was unhygienic, and confiscated it.’

‘How long have I been in here?’

‘Three days. Mr Ronald Weasley and Miss Granger will be very glad you’ve come round. They’ve been beside themselves.’

‘But sir, the Stone...’

Dumbledore sighed.

‘So young to be so brave, heroic, determined,’ he said, and he said it sadly, and Harry couldn’t think why.

‘I see you won’t be put off. Very well. The Stone. Professor Quirrell didn’t manage to take it from you. I got there in time to stop him, though I must say you were managing remarkably well on your own.’

‘You got there? You got Hermione’s owl?’

‘We must have passed each other in the air. I’d no sooner landed in London than I understood that the one place I ought to be was the one I’d just left. I arrived just in time to pull Quirrell off you.’

‘It was you.’

‘I was afraid I’d be too late.’

‘You nearly were. I couldn’t have kept him off the Stone much longer...’

‘Not the Stone, Harry. You. The effort of it very nearly killed you. For one dreadful moment I thought it had.’ He folded his hands. ‘As for the Stone, it has been destroyed.’

‘Destroyed?’ said Harry blankly. ‘But your friend. Nicolas Flamel...’

‘Oh, you know about Nicolas?’ said Dumbledore, and he looked delighted. ‘You really did do the thing thoroughly, didn’t you? Well, Nicolas and I have had a little talk, and we’ve agreed that it’s all for the best.’

‘But that means he’ll die, won’t he? Him and his wife?’

‘They have enough Elixir put by to set their affairs in order. And then, yes, they will die.’

He smiled at the look on Harry’s face.

‘To someone as young as you, I know it sounds like madness. But to Nicolas and Perenelle it really is rather like going to bed after a very, very long day. To the well-organised mind, Harry, death is only the next great adventure.’

There was something in Dumbledore’s face as he said it, and in his voice, that was between happiness and sadness and wasn’t quite either, and Harry couldn’t have put a name to it then. He’d come to know it very well in the years ahead.

‘The Stone was never such a wonderful thing, you know,’ Dumbledore went on. ‘All the money and all the life you could want. The two things most people would pick over anything else. The trouble is that people do have a knack for picking exactly what’s worst for them.’

Harry lay there without a word to say. Dumbledore hummed a little tune under his breath and smiled at the ceiling.

‘Sir?’ said Harry at last. ‘I’ve been thinking. Even if the Stone’s gone... Vol... I mean, You-Know-Who...’

‘Call him Voldemort, Harry. Always use the proper name for a thing. Being afraid of a name only makes you more afraid of the thing itself.’

‘Yes, sir. Well. Voldemort’s going to try other ways of coming back, isn’t he? I mean, he’s not gone, is he?’

‘No, Harry, he is not. He’s out there somewhere still, looking for another body to share, perhaps. Not being properly alive, he can’t be killed. The things keeping him anchored to this mortal plane will not let him die. He left Quirrell to die, you know. He’s no kinder to his servants than to his enemies. All the same, Harry, you may only have put off his return, but it needs only someone else willing to stand against him next time, in what looks like a hopeless fight, and if he’s put off again, and again, why, he may never come back at all.’

Harry nodded, and stopped at once, because it made his head ring like a bell.

‘Sir, respectfully,’ he said. ‘I would very much like to know the truth about a great many things.’

‘The truth.’ Dumbledore sighed.

And Harry saw it again, the thing he’d seen in Dumbledore’s face in the empty classroom by the Mirror. A weight. It was sad, very sad, and Harry wondered what on earth could make a wizard as great as Dumbledore look like that. Then it lifted, and was gone, as though it had never been there at all.

‘It’s a beautiful and terrible thing, the truth, and it ought to be handled with care. But I’ll answer your questions, unless I’ve a very good reason not to, and in that case I’ll ask you to forgive me. I shan’t lie to you. That I promise.’

‘Well,’ said Harry. ‘Voldemort said he only killed my mother because she tried to stop him killing me. But why did he want to kill me in the first place?’

Dumbledore sighed, and this time it went all the way down.

‘I said I cannot lie. But in this matter, a first year wizard would not understand the full truth. It’s something even a wizard as experienced as I can’t quite understand but I’ll do my best to explain the bits you may understand. And when you’re older I’ll tell you the rest, when you can truly understand it all. Is that acceptable to you, Harry?’

Harry nodded. He’d have accepted anything from Dumbledore just then. He didn’t notice the way Dumbledore looked at him when he did it, or the small movement of the old man’s hands on the coverlet, as though he’d been about to say something else and had put it away again.

‘Your mother was a Muggleborn, Harry, that much is not in dispute. However, some have held to the belief that Muggleborn witches and wizards are simply recessive magical power from some magical ancestor in that Muggleborn’s line. There are many reasons that could be, and we’d be here all day explaining all the theories. It’s very controversial so not much research has ever been done into it. But suffice to say, I have reason to believe your mother was descended from a very powerful line of magic indeed.’

‘What line, Professor?’

Dumbledore sighed once more.

‘I promised I wouldn’t lie to you. Therefore I cannot tell you yet, Harry. I may well be wrong. And the knowledge would put you and your friends’ lives in danger. And we wouldn’t want that, would we?’

Harry nodded. He trusted Dumbledore completely.

‘I will tell you in the fullness of time. I can say this much, Harry. Whatever power lay in your mother was activated the night Voldemort came to kill you. I’ve regrettably seen many mothers die to save their children. And not one unleashed the power that your mother unleashed that night. It was a power fuelled by love. And it protected you, Harry.’

‘How?’ asked Harry.

‘As I said, I only understand portions of it myself and can only tell you so much at this juncture. I believe there were several factors at play, Harry. The power of your dying mother’s spell, the evil power that keeps Voldemort chained to this plane, the love and will of a mother. Magic is chaotic and alive, Mr Potter. Not so easily categorised and controlled as our Ministry and countless witches and wizards would want and would have you believe. It was all of these factors mixing in and out of each other. That resulted in a very powerful force being laid upon you. Though your mother and father may be gone, their life, and their power, and most importantly their love, live on within you, Harry. There’s no scar for it. Nothing you could see. But to have been loved that deeply, even once the person who loved us has gone, leaves a kind of protection on us for good. It’s in your very skin. Quirrell, so full of hatred and greed and ambition, with Voldemort sharing his soul, couldn’t lay a hand on you for that reason. It was agony to touch a person marked by something so good.’

Harry couldn’t help it. He cried.

To know that some part of his parents was still alive, in him. That they’d wanted him so much that even dead, even gone, they were still looking after him. He put his hands over his face and his shoulders shook, and he didn’t care.

Dumbledore looked away, out of the window, where a pair of jackdaws were squabbling on the sill, and seemed to find them very interesting.

When Harry had wiped his eyes on the sheet, Dumbledore was still looking at the window, and there was something far off in his face. Harry wouldn’t understand it for years. It would take a great deal of context, and most of it hard-won, before he’d look back on this moment and know just how ashamed of himself Albus Dumbledore had been.

When he’d found his voice again, Harry said, ‘And the Invisibility Cloak. D’you know who sent it me?’

‘Ah. Your father happened to leave it with me, and I thought you might like to have it.’ Dumbledore’s eyes twinkled. ‘Useful things, Cloaks. Your father used his mainly for sneaking down to the kitchens for food, as I recall.’

‘And there’s something else.’

‘Fire away.’

‘Quirrell said Snape...’

‘Professor Snape, Harry.’

‘Yes. Him. Quirrell said he hates me because he hated my dad. Is that true?’

‘Well, they did rather detest each other. Not unlike what you believe lies between yourself and Ms Malfoy.’

Dumbledore chuckled, as if he’d just made a very good joke that only he could hear. Harry had no idea what he was on about. Of course he detested Malfoy.

‘And then,’ Dumbledore went on, ‘your father did a thing that Professor Snape has never been able to forgive.’

‘What?’

‘He saved his life.’

‘What?‘

‘Yes,’ said Dumbledore dreamily. ‘Funny, isn’t it, how people’s minds work? Professor Snape couldn’t bear to be in your father’s debt. I rather think he worked so hard to keep you alive this year because it would make him and your father even. Then he could go back to hating your father’s memory in peace. But I’m afraid nothing Severus can ever do will make up for what he did.’

He winced, as though he’d said something he hadn’t meant to say.

Harry tried to make sense of it, and it made his head pound, so he gave up.

‘And sir. There’s one more thing.’

‘Only one?’

‘How did I get the Stone out of the Mirror?’

‘Ah, now, I’m glad you asked me that. It was one of my better ideas, and between you and me, that’s saying something. Seeing as they don’t call me the most brilliant wizard of this age for no reason if I do say so myself. You see, only somebody who wanted to find the Stone, find it but not use it, would be able to get it out. Anyone else would just see themselves turning out gold, or drinking the Elixir. I do surprise myself, sometimes.’ He clapped his hands together. ‘Now, no more questions. I suggest you make a start on these sweets. Ah! Bertie Bott’s Every-Flavour Beans! I had the misfortune in my youth to come across one that tasted of vomit, and I’m afraid I’ve never quite trusted them since. But I think I’ll be safe with a nice toffee, don’t you?’

He smiled, picked a golden-brown bean out of the box, and popped it in his mouth. Then he choked.

‘Alas!’ he said. ‘Earwax!’

Madam Pomfrey, the matron, was a kind woman, but she ran the hospital wing like a fortress.

‘Just five minutes,’ Harry pleaded.

‘Absolutely not.’

‘You let Professor Dumbledore in.’

‘That was the Headmaster. That’s entirely different. You need rest.’

‘I am resting. Look. Lying down and everything. Oh, go on, Madam Pomfrey...’

‘Oh, very well,’ she said. ‘But five minutes. Not a second more.’

And she let Ron and Hermione in.

‘Harry!‘

Hermione looked ready to throw herself across the bed, and Ron stepped in front of her, quite casually, as though he just happened to want to be there. He’d been getting the measure of Hermione lately, Harry thought. The way she was with him, and how much of it he could take. Ron gave Harry a small nod over his shoulder, and Harry nodded back, and they understood each other.

It didn’t stop Hermione talking.

‘Oh, Harry, we thought you were going to... Dumbledore was so worried...’

‘The whole school’s talking about it,’ said Ron. ‘Malfoy’s been apoplectic. She’s sworn revenge on all of us. Keeps saying she’ll get us back to anyone who’ll listen. That this is war. And of course her father will hear about this.’

Harry sighed. What was he supposed to do about that? He’d said sorry to her. He’d meant it.

‘What really happened?’ said Ron.

It was one of those rare times when the real story was stranger than anything the rumours had come up with. Harry told them. Quirrell, calm as a pond. The Mirror, and the Stone dropping into his pocket. The chains.

‘And then he started unwinding his turban,’ said Harry.

‘His turban?’ said Ron. ‘What for?’

‘Because there was a face on the back of his head.’

Hermione screamed. Madam Pomfrey’s door banged open at the far end of the ward and banged shut again.

‘A face?’

‘His. Voldemort’s.’ Harry had to look at the sweets while he said it. ‘White. With red eyes. He talked to me. He said my parents died begging.’

‘They never,’ said Ron at once, fiercely.

‘No,’ said Harry. ‘They didn’t.’

He told them the rest, the burning hands, the voices, and the Mirror. Ron and Hermione were a very good audience. They gasped in the right places, and Hermione held on to the bedpost as if she might fall over.

‘So the Stone’s gone?’ Ron said at last. ‘Flamel’s just going to die?’

‘That’s what I said. But Dumbledore reckons... what was it... "to the well-organised mind, death is only the next great adventure".’

‘I always said he was as mental as a soup sandwich,’ said Ron, looking rather impressed at how mad his hero was.

‘So what happened to you two?’ said Harry.

‘Well, I got back all right,’ said Hermione. ‘And I brought Ron round, which took a while...’

‘She slapped me,’ said Ron.

‘I did not, I patted you...’

‘She slapped me. Twice.’

‘...and we were running up to the Owlery to get a message to Dumbledore when we met him in the Entrance Hall. He already knew. He just said, "Harry’s gone after him, hasn’t he?" and went tearing off to the third floor.’

‘D’you reckon he meant you to do it?’ said Ron. ‘Sending you your dad’s Cloak and all that?’

‘Well,’ said Hermione, and she went off like a firework, ‘if he did, I mean to say, that’s terrible, you could have been killed...’

‘No, it isn’t,’ said Harry slowly. ‘He’s a great man, Dumbledore. I think he wanted to give me a chance. I think he knows more or less everything that goes on in this place, you know. I reckon he had a good idea we were going to try it, and instead of stopping us he just taught us enough to help. I don’t think it was an accident he let me find out how the Mirror worked. It’s almost like he thought I had the right to face Voldemort, if I could.’ Harry looked at the ceiling. ‘He’s so wise.’

Ron gave him a funny look. It was the look he gave Percy when Percy got going about the Ministry. Harry had heard the story about the idol Charlie had sent Percy from Romania the year before, the one Mrs Weasley had had to take off him. Too many tentacles for her liking.

‘Yeah,’ said Ron. ‘Dumbledore’s barking, all right.’ He said it proudly. ‘Listen. You’ve got to be up for the end-of-year feast tomorrow. The points are all in and Slytherin won, of course. You missed the last Quidditch match. We were steamrollered by Ravenclaw without you.’

Ron sounded absolutely defeated.

‘But the food’ll be good,’ he finished.

And Harry appreciated that.

Madam Pomfrey came bustling down the ward.

‘You’ve had nearly fifteen minutes. Now OUT,’ she said firmly.

After a good night’s sleep Harry felt almost himself again.

‘I want to go to the feast,’ he told Madam Pomfrey, as she straightened the towers of sweet boxes on his table. ‘I can, can’t I?’

‘Professor Dumbledore says you’re to be allowed,’ she said, with a sniff, as though Professor Dumbledore had no idea how dangerous a feast could be in the wrong hands. ‘And you’ve another visitor.’

‘Oh, good,’ said Harry. ‘Who?’

Hagrid came sideways through the door as she said it. Indoors, as usual, he looked too big to be allowed. He sat down on the chair by the bed, which complained, took one look at Harry, and burst into tears.

‘It’s all my ruddy fault!’ he sobbed, into his hands. ‘I told the evil git how ter get past Fluffy! I told him! It was the one thing he didn’ know an’ I told him! Yeh could’ve died! All fer a dragon egg! I’ll never touch a drop again! I should be chucked out an’ made ter live as a Muggle!’

‘Hagrid!’ said Harry. He’d never seen Hagrid like this, shaking all over, great tears running down into his beard. ‘Hagrid, he’d have found out somehow. This is Voldemort we’re talking about. He’d have got it out of someone even if you’d never said a word.’

‘Yeh could’ve died!‘ sobbed Hagrid. ‘An’ don’ say the name!’

‘VOLDEMORT!’ Harry bellowed, and Hagrid was so startled that he stopped crying. ‘I’ve met him, and I’m calling him by his name. Please cheer up, Hagrid. We saved the Stone. It’s gone, he can’t use it. Have a Chocolate Frog, I’ve got loads...’

Hagrid wiped his nose on the back of his hand.

‘That reminds me,’ he said thickly. ‘I’ve got yeh a present.’

‘It’s not a stoat sandwich, is it?’ said Harry nervously, and at last Hagrid gave a weak sort of chuckle.

‘Nah. Dumbledore gave me the day off yesterday ter sort it out. ‘Course, he shoulda sacked me instead. Anyway. Got yeh this.’

It was a book, bound in handsome leather. Harry opened it.

It was full of wizard photographs. On every page, smiling and waving up at him, were his mother and his father. Here they were by a lake. Here they were in a garden, with his father’s arm round his mother and his mother laughing at something out of the picture. Here was his mother holding a baby with black hair who kept trying to grab her nose.

‘Sent owls off ter all yer mum an’ dad’s old school friends, askin’ fer photos,’ said Hagrid. ‘Knew yeh didn’ have any. D’yeh like it?’

Harry couldn’t speak. Hagrid understood that well enough.

Hagrid was a wonderful man, Harry thought, holding the book against his chest, and he loved him. But he hoped Dumbledore would never, ever trust him with anything dangerous again.

Harry went down to the end-of-year feast on his own that night. Madam Pomfrey had kept him back for one last look at his throat and one last dose of something that tasted of pepper, so by the time she let him go the whole school was already in the Great Hall, and the corridors were empty.

Almost empty. Somebody was sitting on the bottom step of the marble staircase with his head in his hands, and it was Neville.

‘Aren’t you going in?’ said Harry.

Neville looked up. His face was pink and miserable.

‘In a minute,’ he said. ‘Harry, I’ve got to tell you something, and you’re going to hate me.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘I gave Malfoy the password.’ It came out in a rush. ‘To the common room. I know I shouldn’t have. She came and found me in the library, and she sat down right next to me, and she was... she was nice, Harry. She said she needed to see you and it was important and she’d never ask me for anything again. And she looked like she meant it. Nobody ever...’ He stopped. ‘Nobody asks me for things. Not like that. And then I heard what she did, getting in, and I thought, what if she’d been there to hurt you? What if she’d...’

‘She wasn’t,’ said Harry.

‘But I didn’t know that.’

‘Neville.’ Harry sat down on the step beside him. ‘She wasn’t there to hurt anyone. She was there to say sorry to me, if you want to know, and she never got the chance, because Hermione put her in a Body-Bind before she could get it out.’

Neville’s mouth fell open.

‘Hermione did?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Blimey.’ Neville thought about this for a bit. ‘Was Malfoy all right?’

‘She was furious,’ said Harry, and found, to his surprise, that he was grinning. ‘Come on. Ron says the food’ll be good.’

But as they went in through the great doors, Harry thought about Dracina Malfoy sitting down next to Neville Longbottom in the library, and being nice, and he thought that of all the strange things that had happened this year, that might have been the strangest.

The Hall was done out in green and silver for Slytherin’s seventh House Cup in a row. An enormous banner hung behind the High Table with the Slytherin serpent on it, and the Slytherin table looked like a nest of very pleased snakes.

When Harry walked in there was a sudden hush, and then everybody started talking at once, loudly. He slid into a seat between Ron and Hermione and did his best not to notice that people were standing up to get a look at him. Luckily Dumbledore came in a moment later, and the noise died away.

‘Another year gone!’ said Dumbledore cheerfully. ‘And before we fall on this excellent feast, I’m afraid you must put up with an old man’s wittering for a minute or two. What a year it’s been! I hope your heads are all a little fuller than they were in September. You’ve the whole summer to get them nice and empty again before next year.

‘Now. The House Cup wants awarding, and the points stand like this. In fourth place, Gryffindor, with three hundred and twelve. In third, Hufflepuff, with three hundred and fifty-two. Ravenclaw have four hundred and twenty-six. And Slytherin, four hundred and seventy-two.’

A storm of cheering and stamping went up from the Slytherin table. Harry could see Malfoy cackling with Pansy Parkinson and a gaggle of other horse-faced Slytherin girls. And still, every so often, she looked across at him, and when she did her face went blank and unreadable, like a door shutting. It was very frustrating.

‘Yes, yes, well done, Slytherin,’ said Dumbledore. ‘However, recent events have to be taken into account.’

The room went very still. The smiles along the Slytherin table faded, just slightly.

‘Ahem,’ said Dumbledore. ‘I have a few last-minute points to give out. Let me see. Yes.

‘First. To Mr Ronald Weasley...’

Ron went purple. He looked like a radish that had caught the sun.

‘...for the best-played game of chess this school has seen in many years, I award Gryffindor house fifty points.’

The Gryffindor cheers nearly lifted the enchanted ceiling off its beams. The stars overhead seemed to wobble. Percy could be heard telling the other prefects, ‘My brother, you know! My youngest brother! Got past McGonagall’s giant chess set!’

Eventually there was quiet again.

‘Second. To Miss Hermione Granger. For the use of cool logic in the face of fire, I award Gryffindor house fifty points.’

Hermione buried her face in her arms. Harry strongly suspected she was crying. All along the table Gryffindors were beside themselves. A hundred points up.

‘Third. To Mr Harry Potter,’ said Dumbledore, and the Hall went deadly quiet. ‘For pure nerve, outstanding courage and the will to destroy evil, I award Gryffindor house sixty points.’

The din was deafening. Anyone who could add up while yelling themselves hoarse had worked it out: Gryffindor now had four hundred and seventy-two points. Dead level with Slytherin. They’d tied for the Cup. If only Dumbledore had given Harry one more point.

Dumbledore raised a hand, and the Hall settled, slowly.

‘There are all kinds of courage,’ he said, smiling. ‘And that is to be praised. However. Courage can also lead to foolishness and rule breaking.’

Harry saw Dracina go suddenly, dreadfully quiet. So did the rest of the Slytherin table.

‘It has unfortunately come to my attention that young Ms Malfoy found her way into the Gryffindor common room. I shouldn’t but seemingly have to remind you all that this is very much against the rules. In fact, entering another house’s common room without permission from a member of staff is an expellable offence.’

Malfoy gasped. Then she started to cry, right there at the table, weeping on the spot. Nobody seemed to care except Pansy Parkinson, who put both arms round her and held on.

‘However,’ said Dumbledore, ‘I do understand and even sympathise with Ms Malfoy’s reasoning. In trying to make amends for a mistake she made. Therefore, I have elected to take one hundred points from Slytherin. In the hopes that Ms Malfoy and Slytherin students learn this lesson that trespassing is a grave offence. And do not repeat it.’

Anyone standing outside the Great Hall might have thought something had exploded, the noise from the Gryffindor table was so loud. Harry, Ron and Hermione were on their feet, yelling. Harry, still cheering, dug Ron in the ribs and pointed down the Hall at Malfoy, who couldn’t have looked more stunned or more horrified if somebody had put the Body-Bind on her all over again.

She looked up and found Harry, and gave him a look of pure murder.

Harry stuck his tongue out at her.

Then she went oddly pink, and turned back to Pansy Parkinson, whose front was still wet from Malfoy’s crying, and didn’t look round again.

‘Which means,’ Dumbledore called over the applause, for even Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff were cheering, because everybody enjoys watching Slytherin lose, ‘we need a small change of decoration.’

He clapped his hands.

In an instant the green hangings turned scarlet and the silver turned gold. The great serpent vanished, and a towering Gryffindor lion stood in its place. Snape was shaking Professor McGonagall’s hand with a dreadful, fixed smile. His eye met Harry’s, and Harry knew at once that nothing Snape felt about him had changed by so much as a hair.

Harry found he didn’t mind. Next year, it seemed, things would be back to normal, or as normal as Hogwarts ever got.

It was the best night of his life. Better than winning at Quidditch, better than Christmas, better than knocking out mountain trolls. He’d never forget it, as long as he lived.

Harry had almost forgotten about the exam results, but they came all the same. To Ron’s but not Harry’s surprise,  Ron passed with good marks. Harry always knew that Ron had a keen mind. And was as smart as Hermione when he put his mind to it. Harry did well too to his own surprise. Hermione, of course, came top of the year.

‘A hundred and twelve on Charms,’ said Ron, reading over her shoulder. ‘How is that even possible? What did you do, answer the questions he didn’t ask?’

‘Flitwick sets a bonus question,’ said Hermione, pink with pleasure. ‘Nobody ever reads to the end of the paper.’

Even Neville scraped through, his Herbology mark making up for a Potions mark that Snape had written in red ink and underlined. They’d hoped that Goyle, who was nearly as stupid as he was nasty, might be thrown out, but he’d passed too.

‘Shame,’ said Ron. ‘Still. You can’t have everything.’

And suddenly their wardrobes were empty and their trunks were full. Neville’s toad was found lurking in a corner of the boys’ toilets. Notes went round warning everyone not to use magic over the holidays.

‘I always hope they’ll forget to hand these out,’ said Fred Weasley sadly.

Hagrid took them down to the fleet of little boats that sailed across the lake, and then they were on the Hogwarts Express, talking and laughing as the countryside outside went greener and tidier, and eating Bertie Bott’s Every-Flavour Beans as the train tore past Muggle towns.

‘Grass,’ said Ron, chewing. ‘That’s definitely grass.’

‘Give me one,’ said Hermione. She took a green one, considered it, and put it in her mouth, and her face went very still. ‘Sprouts,’ she said.

Harry laughed, and for a while, in the hot compartment with the sun coming in and Ron’s feet up on the seat, he forgot where the train was going.

Hermione had shifted along the seat until her shoulder was against his, and when he reached for the beans her hand was already there, and it stayed on his a moment longer than it needed to.

‘Sorry,’ she said, not moving it.

‘It’s fine,’ said Harry, and took a bean, and didn’t think any more about it.

Ron looked out of the window.

Then they were pulling off their robes and putting on jackets and coats, and then they were sliding in to platform nine and three-quarters at King’s Cross.

It took a long time to get everyone off. A wizened old guard stood up by the barrier and let them through in twos and threes, so that they wouldn’t all burst out of a solid wall at once and give the Muggles a fright.

‘You’ve got to come and stay this summer,’ said Ron. ‘Both of you. I’ll send an owl.’

‘Thanks,’ said Harry. ‘I’ll need something to look forward to.’

The crowd pushed them along towards the gateway back to the Muggle world. People kept calling out as they passed.

‘Bye, Harry!’

‘See you, Potter!’

‘Still famous,’ said Ron, grinning.

‘Not where I’m going,’ said Harry. ‘I promise you that.’

‘Potter!’

It was Malfoy. She came stamping through the crowd with her trunk bumping behind her and planted herself in front of him.

‘You need to watch out, next year,’ she said.

They were the words he’d have expected from Malfoy. It was the tone that was wrong. She sounded, very nearly, worried.

‘Worry about yourself, Malfoy,’ said Harry. He’d meant it to come out diplomatic. It came out a good deal sharper than he’d intended.

Malfoy’s mouth opened and shut. She huffed, and turned on her heel, and went through the gateway with her luggage, and Harry had the odd impression, from the set of her shoulders as she went, that she’d meant to say something else entirely and hadn’t been able to find it.

He, Ron and Hermione went through together.

‘There he is, Mum! There he is, look!’

It was Ginny Weasley, Ron’s little sister, but it wasn’t Ron she was pointing at.

‘Harry Potter!’ she squealed. ‘Look, Mum! I can see...’

‘Be quiet, Ginny. And it’s rude to point.’

Mrs Weasley beamed down at the three of them.

‘Busy year?’

‘Very,’ said Harry. ‘Thanks for the fudge and the jumper, Mrs Weasley. I was so grateful.’

Something went across Mrs Weasley’s face at that, the way it does when a grown-up hears more in a thank-you than the child meant to put there, and she looked at him a moment longer than she needed to.

‘Oh, it was nothing, dear.’

‘Ready, are you?’

It was Uncle Vernon. Still purple in the face, still moustached, still outraged by the sheer cheek of Harry, standing there with an owl in a cage in a station full of ordinary people. Aunt Petunia and Dudley stood behind him, and Dudley looked as though Harry might bite.

Harry’s face went dark. The year was over. The voice had been right about that much. It was time to go back to the Dursleys, and he wished, with his whole heart, that he didn’t have to.

‘You must be Harry’s family!’ said Mrs Weasley. Her eyes had gone from Harry to Uncle Vernon and back, and they’d got rather sharp.

‘In a manner of speaking,’ said Uncle Vernon. ‘Hurry up, boy, we haven’t got all day.’

And he walked off.

Mrs Weasley watched him go. She didn’t say anything. But her mouth had gone thin, and she put a hand on Ginny’s shoulder without seeming to notice she’d done it.

Harry hung back for a last word.

‘See you over the summer, then,’ he said, and kept his voice light.

‘Hope you have... er... a good holiday,’ said Hermione, looking after Uncle Vernon as though she couldn’t quite believe anybody could be so unpleasant.

‘Oh, I will,’ said Harry, and the other two were surprised to see a grin spreading over his face.

It was completely fake. He wasn’t going to give the Dursleys the satisfaction of knowing they’d spoiled anything, and he wasn’t going to send his friends home worried.

‘They don’t know we’re not allowed to use magic at home,’ he said. ‘I’m going to have a lot of fun with Dudley this summer.’

He nodded to them, and walked off after his uncle, and he made very sure not to look back at Ron and Hermione and the whole row of Weasleys, because he knew exactly what their faces would be doing.

But there was something in him now that hadn’t been there in September. He’d found it down in the dark, with Quirrell’s hands round his throat, and it wasn’t going anywhere. If he could stand up to Voldemort, Harry thought, as the owl cage swung in his hand and the Dursleys’ car came into view, then he could put up with anything the Dursleys could throw at him.

Anything at all.